Beyond Lion Rock

by Gavin Young

  The reason why B&S lack esprit de corps is because (a) London are not sufficiently human or sufficiently acquainted with local colour. (b) Too many deadheads at the top out East. (c) Heads of Departments’ posts should be made real plums, and no one kept after fifty. (d) No Taipan should be kept after fifty. (e) London and Eastern Taipans must say ‘Thank you’ more often. (f) The staff don’t know their Directors personally.

  We recognize the tone of voice of a recently ‘demobbed’ officer accustomed to looking after his men. It is a tone, robust, sensible and kind, that sounds again and again.

  Any requests must always be acted on at once. It is not only what you give, but the way that you give it…. Men should always be told to look for another job the very instant it appears certain that they cannot get to the top. Don’t breed deadheads deliberately.

  B&S’s female employees to a large extent owed their ‘liberation’ to Jock. He inspired a new company rule, giving managers

  discretion to appoint any of the outstanding women clerks, who are qualified, to desks for which regular staff members only have been considered; that is to put them on the footing of permanent members of the staff and to pay them accordingly….

  The idea of promoting women was a revolutionary one in the buttoned-up, commercial world of colonial Hong Kong, and Taikoo boxwallahs might have been a little startled by a communication from London: ‘A shorthand-typist ought to be attached to each of the big departments.’ The Senior himself had once ruled against the use of female clerical staff and his words on the subject (as on many others) had achieved the status of holy writ. At the turn of the century a Hong Kong Taipan had had the temerity to urge London headquarters to allow him to employ a stenographer, preferably a woman. He received a rap on the knuckles. ‘Remember how our late Senior discouraged the immoderate use of pens, ink and paper. Business is not built up that way.’ Such a sententious retort has a Dickensian ring; it might have come from the mouth of some pompous character in Dombey and Son. Certainly Jock Swire, the Deepwater Bay Hussar, would never have offered it. Twenty-seven years old and back from the first modern war with his already experienced wits about him, Jock was going to make some changes.

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  In his capacity as director in charge of Overseas Staff, Jock probably had the best opportunity of any man in John Swire & Sons to explore the remotest nooks and crannies of the company’s Far Eastern ramifications. Luckily he was intensely inquisitive by nature and an obsessive recorder of events and impressions. Throughout his adult life he not only dictated countless letters and memoranda in the normal course of business, but he also kept a diary. The earlier entries give a fair idea not only of Jock Swire’s mentality but also of how things were Out East in those remote pre-Second World War days: what it was like to travel in China and Hong Kong through foreign eyes; his private view of people working there and how things should be done. Entries are frequently pepped up with Jock’s ‘Thoughts Along the Way’. As a former cavalry officer and army riding instructor, he was given to the odd equestrian phrase: he would say of some bombastic bore ‘Terrible old blow-hard’, and throughout his long life he earnestly advised younger members of John Swire & Sons ‘Never, never buck.’ A favourite word was ‘flat catcher’, meaning an undesirable, part-bounder, part-conman. His bitterest commercial rival couldn’t accuse Jock Swire, sometimes acerbic but never devious, of being a flat catcher.

  Jock made private notes of a six-month working journey to and from the Far East in 1930. The result is a ragbag of observations, snatches from which – endearing, dated, even trivial – I hope will do something to recapture a distant era and the character of Jock who lived it.

  Friday January 10 Left Victoria 11.20 by Blue Train to Marseilles.

  Saturday January 11 Embarked at 8.30 on SS Aeneas at Marseilles and sailed at noon. At table with Mr and Mrs Holt, Miss Severs, Mr Dudley Ward and Mrs Leonard. Capt. Wallace in command.

  Monday January 13 Really quite cold & I have a nasty little chill on my tummy. Wearing summer suit and thick underclothes. Passed through Straits of Messina in the morning.

  Thursday January 16 Arrived Port Said 10 a.m. Cold and showery. Miss Severs left and going to Cairo…. Still wearing thick underclothes. Fur coat at night….

  In the Arabian Sea, Jock sized up his fellow travellers like Hercule Poirot musing over a group of suspects in an Agatha Christie mystery.

  Thursday January 23 Great humidity and very hot in the cabins. The nice people on the ship are Lt Comm. Havers, Davidson, Mrs Leonard; Moss, quite a nice Tientsin padre called Scott, and Dudley Ward is passable. A Mrs Strong seems all right but her husband is awful. A boy called Chaplin going out to Borneo seems a good lad….

  Thursday January 30 Fancy dress dinner and dance. Everyone played up & it was the greatest fun. I went in a Dutchman’s costume that I had bought at Simon Artz, Port Said. Mrs Leonard, Havers, Davidson and Chaplin dined with me & we all thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.

  Penang was a disappointment: ‘A very poor imitation of Hong Kong … I was very much impressed by the way the Chinese have completely swallowed up the place. It is purely and simply a Chinese colony.’ The call at Singapore brought a request from the manager of the Singapore Cold Storage for an exciting commodity called ‘dry ice’, and with the British commanding general Jock discussed the question – a serious one, then as now – of piracy. Mr Jenkins, in charge of CNCo in Singapore, supported Jock in pressing for British soldiers to be posted on ships at anchor in the Roads. The general was cool to the idea and poor Jenkins proved, in this instance, a broken reed. He collapsed, Jock noted, ‘with a bad go of Denpers [diarrhoea]’. On Sunday, 9 February, Jock arrived in Hong Kong to find the B&S Taipan half crippled by lumbago but still able to discuss piracy. To Jock’s way of thinking the whole problem was due to the fact that ‘the Army, Navy and Government are shirking their responsibility entirely’. The sympathetic British admiral on the China Station agreed. ‘The piracy menace is as bad today as ever,’ he said and told Jock he had so informed the Admiralty, though without much luck. But for Jock and other shipowners, the worry over piracy was obsessive.

  The diaries, again at random, give a good idea of his attitudes to employees, the recruitment of Far Eastern staff, and more.

  To Canton: Met by Webb and went back to the Hong for breakfast and then motored straight to call on the Governor of Canton, General Chan Ming Shu. Had ½ hour talk with him through his secretary Leung. Getting him down to launch Tsinan [a Swire ship] was a stroke of genius & I am sure it has done inestimable good…. Went over Newchwang [another CNCo vessel]. Capt. Green, a sour rather bolshie young fellow…. On Szechuen [yet another ship]: Atkins C/O; Appleton 2/Engineer, a ginger fellow with a chief’s ticket who is desperately keen to get married … a nice fellow but rather unbalanced. Pollard the 3rd Engineer struck me as touched but is said to be quite a good engineer…. Shaw suggests Knight should go to Hankow and Fisher, who is better with men, to Shanghai….

  Shaw does not think anyone should retire on less than £300 after 20 years & thinks £500 more like it. I like C. C. Roberts [later to become Cathay Pacific’s first chairman] more than ever; he has a grand jaw on him….

  Went all over Antung [a CNCo ship] with a view to deciding how we can protect against pirates. A very difficult job. Expanded metal all round the officers’ deck and turn the music room into a guardroom with the NCO in a first class cabin seems the cheapest and best way….

  I believe we ought to get six university candidates every year, send them all for three months to the School of Oriental Languages in London and those that are passed as likely to do well in China should be sent to Nanking four at a time to learn Chinese and study China until they are wanted on the staff. I believe under modern conditions that this would produce the sort of fellow we want for the future far better than the London probationary staff does.

  This last entry pointed the way to one of Jock’s most enduring staff innovations – the hand-picking of undergraduate
recruits from the universities, specifically for service in the Far East. He expanded the idea on board the SS President Madison en route to Shanghai:

  [In the past] foreigners made no effort to understand the Chinese, their language, or their customs. No foreigner can continue to trade in China for the future without doing so…. Our foreign staff must be good linguists & thoroughly understand the Chinese. We must therefore change our method of recruiting and training and adapt for the future. We must err if anything on the side of being in advance of the times & not be afraid of taking risks…. Only the very best will be recruited & a good man should never be missed, vacancy or no vacancy. While at Nanking they would study the Chinese language at the College & absorb Chinese manners and atmosphere. They would work part-time in the office & come into B&S after not less than 6 months or more than 18 months. The London probationary staff should be cut down to 3 or 4 who should be public school men recruited from Glasgow shipping offices etc….

  This idea – which underlies Swires’ recruiting practice even today – carried over into its logical corollary: that hand-picked Chinese, too, should be taken into top jobs at high salaries.

  In Shanghai, Jock acted on his new idea at once.

  Proceeded straight to Hazelwood [the Taikoo mansion] where I found Brown, Lamb, Yu Ya Ching, & Wang [all Swire employees] just sitting down to dinner. Our relations with China, the Nanking Government, & important individuals is quite excellent. Yu says there will be no war, Nanking is stronger than ever…. While we were talking yesterday, the most attractive young Chinese I have ever met called Chow came to ask Brown for a job. He is a BA Cantab & has been practising at the English Bar. He speaks and writes perfect English. Brown and I enormously impressed but in view of his age 36, his education and experience he could want a bigger job than we had to offer, Brown turned him down. I am convinced there is a place in our organisation somewhere for this man & when discussing the Wuhu agency this morning, I said to Brown, ‘Let’s send Chow.’ He has not stopped bubbling with enthusiasm since!! …

  Later, there was politics:

  Dined at the Cathay – the Keswicks [owners of Jardine Matheson], Porter, Kent, Brown [B&S executives], Shun, Hu Hsueh, one of China’s greatest intellectuals, and George Sokolsky. The latter is a pure-bred Polish Jew educated in America aged 55 with a Chinese wife. Was with Borodin in Canton & now lives in TV Soong’s pocket [Soong was Chiang’s powerful Minister of Finance] & writes amazingly good articles for the press…. I should not be at all surprised if he is not Russia’s chief spy in China. He was a communist but claims to have changed his outlook. I listened to him for two hours & very interesting it was. He considers that the real Chinese revolution is still to come & will come soon…. The heads of Government are governing the country by cash, murder, prison & repression & the young men must sooner or later push through the crust & push them out. There will be a very ugly stage before a proper modern government is set up. As regards the armies [of the warlords] they are all hard at work making gas & mechanising themselves … but it is all on the surface & will have no bearing on fundamentals. The Germans surrounding Chiang are the worst he has ever met & are forever preaching the domination of the country by force…. There was an interesting discussion on the Russian Revolution, on Lenin, on Gandhi. On the complete impossibility of any but a penniless man leading the masses…. In fact a throughly high-brow evening.

  Jock’s six months’ safari round the Swire offices and ships on station reveals a resilient mind and a constitution rather prone to chills and colds. Despite them, the tour took him hither and yon and high and low, frequently snuffling or sprinting for the nearest lavatory. It included Ningpo and Shanghai, many isolated riverine ports dotted along the length of the Yangtze – Lower, Middle and Upper – among them Nanking, Wuhu, Kiukiang, Hankow, Changsha and Siangtan, Chengling, Ichang, Chungking. In unreliable trains or on the quivering decks of overcrowded steamers and long-funnelled river boats he crisscrossed southern China (Swatow and Amoy), northern China and Manchuria (Tsingtao, Tientsin, Peking, Newchwang, Dairen, Fusan, Antung), and Japan (Kobe, Yokohama), dossing down on the tumbledown verandahs or – less often – luxuriating in the comfortable living rooms of the company’s staff houses.

  Thoughts and impressions went down in note form. On future promotions, for example: ‘The order for the Management is Mitchell, Masson, Lock, C. C. Roberts. T. is departmental-minded and not a leader. We must have leaders in future….’ Notes on staff housing: ‘The Taikoo house, Hankow, is in an awful state, the carpets are worn out, the curtains the most ghastly Victorian things … just like a dentist’s waiting room. Impossible for a woman. The kitchen range doesn’t work. The coolie carries all the bath water through the dining room.’ In the far-flung outposts of B&S problems of temperament abounded. At Nanking X’s sarcasm and Y’s inhuman execution of London’s policy were having a disastrous effect on the morale of the Chinese staff. The manager at Wuhu was ‘completely insensitive and devoid of imagination’, and had been the cause of a spate of resignations. Genially breezing and sneezing in and out of offices up and down the coast, Jock brought comfort and reassurance.

  Much time was given to the question of how best to use the Taikoo fleet on the Yangtze – a wonderful collection of craft with stovepipe funnels, bulldog noses and tight canvas sun-awnings, but also with serious shortcomings. Take, for instance, the Shengking: ‘Engines broke down at midnight between Nanking and Wuhu, 4 a.m. and 7 a.m. This ship is a public disgrace. There is only one bathroom & wc for all the men on the ship. As we now have so many saloon Chinese, the wc’s should be labelled in Chinese so as to keep them out of the ladies. The galley is like a furnace and the unfortunate cook is almost melted….’ As for the officers: ‘Mr McArthur [Chief Engineer] is quite charming; Johnston, the 2nd Officer, a good lad. Captain E. is the nastiest man I ever met & a menace on the river. T. is mad….’

  The river could be a dangerous place; the civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists raged up and down its banks. ‘The Peterel [a British gunboat] was at Shasi, as there are a lot of communists in the neighbourhood. We saw nationalist troops rounding up a village. Three steamer loads of troops left Shasi with us…. Saw Admiral McLean who has the wind up about the Upper and Middle River’ – and the lawlessness could get on people’s nerves. ‘Shasi is a dreadful place for a young fellow to live entirely alone for eight months. Tippin was very shaken there and should leave the river.’

  Fortunately with Jock, humour was never far away – even in one blackly comic incident almost too terrifying to be funny. In later years Jock must have smiled over it more than once from a First Class seat in one of his own Boeing 747 jumbo jets, but at the time….

  On 15 March 1930, Jock Swire and John Scott caught an aeroplane from Shanghai to Nanking. Jock’s notes on what happened are brief and decorous:

  John & I left the Bund at 7 a.m. & caught the 8 o/c aeroplane from Lungwha aerodrome. It was very foggy & rough & after a very eventful voyage landed at Nanking 10.30. It was our first flight for both of us. We had two American pilots, one of whom had his wife (?) on board who sat on his knee & drove the machine a great part of the way. Very terrifying. The car was full to overflowing with six passengers; the president of the company’s wife, Mrs Price, was very sick into a newspaper & in trying to throw it out of the window, the wind caught it & blew it over John & me; very unpleasant!! I think it will be some time before J.S. flies again!!

  Luckily, there are more explicit accounts. Arriving in Hankow a few days later, Jock was shown the following extract from the Chung Shan Daily News:

  When aeroplane ‘Wuchang’ started its return trip from Shanghai to Hankow (via Nanking) on the 15th instant, there were three foreign lady passengers. Among them was one American who was an acquaintance of the American pilot. While the plane was flying up in the air, the couple began flirting with each other, then sitting together and embracing each other and then, while piloting the ’plane, they practically carried out thei
r love affair. Consequently, the machine became very unsteady and was much shaken and the passengers felt vomiting and dizzy. This aroused the wrath of the China Aviation Co. to report the matter to the authorities, asking that such obscene conduct of the pilot be stopped and the safety of the passengers carefully looked after. But the staff said that they did not dare interfere with the pilot. After much consultation, it was permitted to have the assistant pilot changed and the No. 1 pilot was thus allowed to fly on to Hankow with his lady friend. When the plane was coming down at Hankow, the pilot still held her close, kissing her all the time and the spectators in the Airdrome were amazed to see them doing so.

  Jock revelled in recounting the incident. In 1979 he told an interviewer:

  I do not think John Scott had ever flown in his life before and I do not think I had. But we got on board an amphibian aircraft to Lung Wa Lake with a very drunk American pilot and his girlfriend on board and there was thick fog. It was an awful old ramshackle aircraft. We did not begin to know what we were doing. And we took off into the fog. Then to our horror, the pilot had his girlfriend through in the cockpit on his knee. And John Scott, I remember, leapt to his feet – he was about six-foot-eight – and shouted, ‘Fetch that woman in.’ And he cracked his head on the top of the thing and went down with a wallop to the bottom…. There was a wonderful report of the thing in the papers. No one dared report the pilot.

  An experience like that might have put a lesser man off flying for life. Jock gulped, laughed and not only went on flying but created an airline of his own as well.

  The last entry in a diary of an exhausting and exhaustive four-month Far Eastern tour is typically spry:

  July 2 1930. Arrived Liverpool Street Station 8.38 after a perfectly delightful journey.