by Gavin Young
Considering the illness, the human problems and the mental and physical fatigue that such a long working journey entailed, there is a good deal of the indomitable Jock Swire even in that.
CHAPTER 10
An interest in aviation – or in ‘going into Air’ as the phrase was – crops up in Swire company correspondence at least as early as 1933 (‘Air’ in office letters was usually spelled with a capital A). A letter from John Swire & Sons’ London office to B&S in Hong Kong and Shanghai at the end of that year reported with some excitement: ‘We have had a talk with the General Manager of Imperial Airways … and eventual extension to China clearly forms part of their plans.’
Imperial Airways were the forerunners of BOAC; their passenger–cargo services even then ran to Singapore via Bangkok, and Butterfield & Swire already had an eagle eye open for any chance to become the IA agents in Hong Kong if it expanded in that direction. The Imperial Airways regional representative in Singapore, Captain Barnard, was already pointing out to residents of Hong Kong and China how useful the weekly IA services operating from Singapore to England would be, ‘particularly as the Siberian Railway route is liable to interruption’ – i.e. the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. Moreover, newspaper reports from Nanking predicted a link-up of CNAC’s China air network with the Imperial Airways service connecting Britain, India, British Malaya and Hong Kong.
In due course, B&S formally applied for the direct agency for Imperial Airways in Hong Kong, China and Japan, ‘confident that our experience as shipping agents and the widespread nature of our organisation will enable us to give Imperial Airways Ltd. satisfactory service’. B&S suggested that the Taikoo Dockyard, an extensive repair and engineering facility, might be put to use as an aircraft maintenance unit too. ‘A major factor, that,’ Captain Barnard agreed.
But was IA’s hoped-for extension to the Colony and beyond feasible? China in the midst of war was volatile and violent. Aviation of any kind was bound to be subject to a tangle of military controls and political priorities as long as the hostilities with Japan continued, and hostilities showed no sign of ending – on the contrary. Good policy, B&S thought, to use this uncertain period to make friends with Imperial Airways, to demonstrate Swires’ unique fitness to act as their active advisers when the time came. Unfortunately that time never came. Soon all local Chinese air services were out of commission and most aerodromes in military hands because of the danger of Japanese aerial bombardment. It would be madness, B&S’s Shanghai office reported, to risk any neutral planes in the region until further notice.
What of Hong Kong? Swires’ Taipan there tried to look ahead. ’We consider [he wrote to London in September 1937] that, as air-travel between the Far East and Europe is only in its infancy and is capable of tremendous expansion, there may be possible developments in the future which may make a close B&S/Imperial Airways connection a valuable one for us.’ Hong Kong, he added, despite a somewhat inadequate airfield, was certain to be a nexus for commercial aviation. But he was not dreaming of a Swire air fleet. His thinking was based on the still prevailing idea of Swires as nothing more than agents for somebody with planes of his own.
The Second World War stopped most speculation dead. Who could tell what would happen after the war? When would ‘after the war’ turn out to be? Hitler had overrun Europe. The Japanese army was approaching Hong Kong; some Europeans of the Colony were being evacuated and others called up. Yet at that distracting time, Walter Lock, a director of Butterfield & Swire, wrote his London directors a letter of startling foresight, based on a conversation he had just had with a Commander Murray of Imperial Airways who was busy closing down his company’s Hong Kong office in anticipation of Japanese occupation. Part of it read:
In discussing the future Commander Murray tells us that it is practically certain that they [Imperial Airways] will wish to re-open their own office when their machines come here again, and he also tells us that as a matter of policy after the war they will be operating main lines only….
Intended main lines for the Far East are the present from London to Sydney, which will probably omit Bangkok, and a second line from London to Vancouver, via Calcutta, Rangoon, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Japan. This means that there should be a real opening for private British aviation, both between British possessions in the Far East and from British to other territories, and there is at present a possibility of opening a line from Hong Kong to Singapore via the Philippines and Borneo, which was until recently a project of Imperial Airways….
It seemed to Walter Lock that a Swire air service from Hong Kong to Manila, Sarawak and Singapore should be a wonderful idea. With it B&S would acquire two priceless benefits: a start in the air and a working knowledge of the air business. Lock’s train of thought went further. It would be advisable, he wrote, to start with three machines – not flying boats, but DC-2s which he understood to be entirely suitable and cheaper to run. He had heard that the American airlines were switching over to DC-3s and selling off their DC-2s; one might be picked up for about £15,000. Perhaps three machines and ‘a good lot’ of spare parts might be bought for £50,000, although American pilots would probably be needed and they might be expensive. As for maintenance, CNAC had an engineer in Hong Kong who might help out; otherwise, of course, there was the Taikoo Dockyard and B&S might have to get their own man…. ‘You may think this rather a wildcat suggestion,’ Lock ended, a touch defensively.
It was certainly a bold one for 1941. Pearl Harbor was attacked in early December that year, Hong Kong fell to the Japanese on Christmas Day, Singapore surrendered the following 15 February and Burma was overrun (Roy Farrell and Syd de Kantzow would soon be in India running the gauntlet of Japanese Zeros over the Hump). It must have seemed like the end of everything. And Walter Lock, at his desk as the shutters went up around him, was calmly proposing a Swire-owned airline from Hong Kong to Manila, Borneo and Singapore. He had sown the seed. A few years later Swires would have such a thing, and much more, but Walter Lock would not see it. He died with the Polish leader, General Sikorski, in the Gibraltar air crash of 1943.
*
With the war and the nightmare of Japanese occupation over at last in 1946, it was time to pick up the pieces – if the pieces were to be found.
Jock Swire had spent the war in London, not only as a director of Swires but also as Chairman of the London Port Employers and as the representative of the Minister of Shipping at the Ministry of Economic Warfare. He survived the Blitz and watched with a kind of miserable fascination as disaster after disaster overtook British military and naval forces in the East, disasters that meant the destruction of the commercial and shipping empire built by The Senior and his successors, and the internment of many Swire staff in the soul-destroying rigours of Japanese prisoner-of-war camps. On the night of 10 May 1941 John Swire & Sons’ offices at 8 Billiter Square in the City of London had been totally destroyed. Jock and the staff were at first offered temporary refuge in the offices of their Hong Kong rivals Jardine Matheson, but before the move was made accommodation was found at Cornhill, in the ‘palatial’ offices of the Scottish Widows Fund, whose staff had been evacuated to Scotland. The firm remained at Cornhill for twelve months before taking up residence on the first floor of 22 Billiter Street until the end of the war.
The morning after the bombing Jock wrote to his mother:
… The office was completely gutted by fire on Saturday night, which is rather a bore, as all our records have gone. So now we have nothing and must start from scratch.
I’ve been walking the City all day looking for accommodation, but all our friends are burnt out too. I never saw such a shambles in my life. A large part of the City is just in ruins and that’s all about it. However, we will get in somewhere. At present Jardine Matheson have taken us in.
And on 13 May 1941—
… We got into Billiter Square today and found most of the things that really matter still intact – if only we could get at them. The whole area (a good 400 yard
s square) has been roped off as dangerous, as some of the buildings are falling down as they cool and no-one is allowed in. Also we could not open the safes for a week or two until they cool off and there may be another blitz by then. I have never seen such ruins outside Ypres.
We got a lovely new temporary office today, at 28 Cornhill, and moved in this afternoon. I am now hard at work collecting such things as typewriters, which are unobtainable, I got 4 from Windolite this evening.
When the German bombing of London reached its full height, Jock, with typical generosity, moved his entire staff into his mother’s house at Harlow in Essex, and he and they commuted to the City together. When Jock referred to his employees as ‘his family’ it was no empty phrase.
By the time the war ended, Swires’ Hong Kong industries, like the Billiter Square offices, were little more than rubble, most of CNCo’s ships had disappeared and the very future of the Colony as a viable port was in considerable doubt, threatened as it was by turmoil in China. The embryo British administration that had moved in after the Japanese faced monstrous problems, including among much else a breakdown of law and order and a lack of public services, of food and of hospitals. It was going to cost a very large fortune indeed to put commercial Hong Kong together again. Would the Hongs, Swires and Jardines be able to raise the money? Yes – thanks largely to the unstinted support of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, whose directors came across with loans on almost imaginatively generous terms. But even so, it is fortunate that Jock Swire had a talisman to hand for use when things looked bleak. Kipling’s poem ‘If’ had been dinned into all British public school boys of his generation to stiffen their upper lips in times of trouble, and an uplifting line or two from it seemed very appropriate for Jock’s situation at the war’s end:
[If you can] watch the things you gave your life to broken
And stoop and build ’em up with worn out tools….
In January Jock Swire was out East again to face the worst, a familiar soldier-like figure in a crumpled trilby stepping from a BOAC Sunderland flying boat at the Kai Tak seadrome. One thing he was prepared for – the Taikoo Dockyard at Quarry Bay had been smashed to bits by American bombing raids towards the end of the war. To this day in John Swire & Sons’ office in London there is an excellent US Air Force photograph of the bombs actually exploding; the reconstruction of the dockyard was able to go ahead at once, thanks to such photographs and the foresight of Warren Swire, who studied them in London and assessed the damage. Two hangars from Dorman Long and one each of the essential machines were rushed out to Hong Kong, and a new caisson for the dry dock had already reached Colombo by the time peace was declared. Quick thinking. By the time Jock arrived the yard was in operation again.
Inspecting Butterfield & Swire’s property, Jock discovered an unexpected problem. ‘Peak House [a Swire house] has now been practically stripped of everything as also Mt Kellett [another Swire house]. They are now taking away the bricks from Mt Kellett servants’ quarters. It really is the limit in a British Colony.’ Overworked British officials were unhelpful. ‘Called on MacDougall [Colonial Secretary] and complained about looting…. His only answer was that it is up to us to install watchmen. I think the only thing to do is to find out what it would cost to loot the houses ourselves and, if not too dear, do it and wait….’
Personnel and ships were other problems. Some members of the prewar staff could be brought back at once, but those who had been prisoners of the Japanese needed long rehabilitation leave. Jock met them: ‘Saw T. S. Marshall, looking bad. John’s bursting with health. Cheverst aged and tired. Trueman O.K. Lindsay aged but tough. Tippin O.K. physically, tired mentally’ – and so on. Eric Price and C. C. Roberts, both prewar China hands, were invaluable in pulling things together. As for CNCo, its ships had been dispersed, requisitioned by the Japanese or sunk. On his way to Hong Kong, Jock had found two CNCo vessels stuck in Calcutta, their officers impatient to get back to sea, and he was comforted to learn that British Naval Intelligence knew where all CNCo’s Japanese-captured ships had gone to, their Japanese names and where they were now.
Jock’s diary provides useful vignettes of the postwar scene at about the time that Roy Farrell and Betsy were flying into Shanghai.
Dined with Price. Most depressing account of Shanghai where lawlessness appears to be unbelievable…. John Keswick [of Jardine Matheson] thinks Chiang Kai-shek will be out by the end of March…. Very gloomy about Russia in Manchuria….
Japan: Lot depends on what MacArthur has in mind for Japan and it may well be five years before Japan has any trade with the outside world except what may be necessary to pay her debt. Japan is a mess. Yokohama completely flat and full to the brim with American shipping. Tokyo and Kobe also flat….
Revisiting China with John Scott, Jock found one or two CNCo ships to take them to Canton, Amoy, Shanghai and Tientsin. Both well over six foot, the two middle-aged Englishmen must have seemed to the Chinese an imposing couple of ‘red barbarians’ as they moved around that battered coast. Sailing up to Tientsin in Swires’ old Shantung, they somehow managed to tuck themselves into the wireless operator’s cabin, and the old tub rather bore out Scott’s opinion that Swires’ existing ships should be replaced; she was thirty-one years old and pretty far gone, leaking everywhere. ‘Cost someone a packet to put straight,’ Jock sighed to his diary. And the Shantung was not the only thing out of date. Both men were soon obliged to agree that the former glorious days of CNCo’s Yangtze River fleet and China coasters were past reviving.
Wednesday, 10 April. There is no hope of our getting back onto the river under the British flag…. Went to Tsu Yee Pei, the Governor of the Central Bank, and had my hat stolen. He thinks labour troubles have reached their worst…. Lunched with Cheng of Nat. Egg Products at Sun Ya Restaurant. Poisoned at lunch and on the run all night. Feeling frightful. Dr. Burton gave me sulfaquanadine….
Shanghai: Very depressing talk on CNCo’s future. John would sell such ships as we have; I am not so sure. The industrialisation of Hong Kong may well make HK a base port not dependent for cargoes from China.
A fair prediction. And Jock added an important suggestion:
We are proposing Shanghai/Amoy/HK/S’pore/Batavia [Jakarta]…. Our new ships should be 4,500 tons dead weight, 16 knots. They should carry 40 cabin passengers and a quantity of refrigerated space.
A concentration by CNCo on the China–Hong Kong–Straits passenger and cargo trade – that was to be the big idea now. As if nothing much had happened in the last five years, Chinese were once more shuttling busily between South East Asia and the Fukien coast of China. Family links, holiday visits and trade had revived immediately after the Japanese collapse. And this had a great significance for the future of Swires in the East, for it made them think seriously again of ‘going into Air’.
‘We must protect the Air over our ships’ – whoever first uttered it, that phrase began to sound round Swire boardroom meetings and in memoranda like a bugle-call to rally jaded soldiers to fresh glory and adventure. Perhaps someone had thought it up during a long night’s German Blitz during the war, and it sounded like Jock. At any rate it concentrated the Swire mind on the wonderful idea of themselves ‘going into Air’ at last, of carrying on from the day when the shutters came down on the Imperial Airways office as the Japanese approached, and Walter Lock’s thoughts turned to a B&S air service from Hong Kong to Singapore via Manila and Borneo.
Jock returned to Hong Kong from China and on 11 May made a most significant, if laconic, entry in his diary: ‘Morton gives a very good account of Holyman of A.N.A.’
R. W. Morton, from CNCo’s agent Colyer Watson Pty Ltd of Australia, was visiting Hong Kong, and Holyman was Captain Ivan Holyman, Managing Director of Australian National Airways, a great man of Australian flying and an outstanding personality among airline pioneers. It was to be with Holyman’s expert advice and cooperation that Swires would be able to get off to a good start in Air, a new area of activity of which – canny
traders and veteran shippers though they were – they knew nothing.
In June Jock and John Scott were in Melbourne dining with Ivan Holyman and discussing with rising excitement the ANA air service to Hong Kong on which Holyman had set his heart, despite strong opposition from the leader of the ruling Labour Party, Mr Ben Chifley, to the very existence of privately owned and independent airlines like ANA. Jock enthusiastically supported Holyman: ‘Agreed [he wrote] we must get HK Government to ask for Air Service at once as ANA are at present the only people who can put on a service. Holyman is obviously a fighter,’ he added approvingly. The very next day things went a stage further: ‘Spent the afternoon with Ivan Holyman fixing up [for B&S to have] the ANA agency for HK, China and Japan.’ Jock’s liking for Holyman knew no bounds, and that evening he noted, ‘This is quite the most outstanding man we have yet met.’
Ivan Holyman and ANA had been brought to Jock Swire’s attention by R. A. Colyer, who in a letter to Warren Swire the previous year had urged a getting together of B&S and ANA – ‘a dovetailing’ was the way he had put it. Colyer pointed out that Holyman not only had experience in air transportation stretching back to the early 1930s, but he ‘was also unflinchingly straight’. ANA had initially been keen to operate a service to China on their own, but Colyer had assured Holyman that Swires’ experience of the region would serve a very useful purpose. To this Warren Swire replied that ‘we are seriously interested in these kind of projects in your direction’. He went on to visualize a possible ANA air service: ‘I should think Australia/Java/Indo-China/New Guinea/Borneo/Hong Kong.’ Furthermore, B&S had the engineering background of the Taikoo Dockyard, which should be available to ANA. And he echoed Walter Lock: ‘Another possibility is a Hong Kong company in which we might take an interest.’ (My italics.)
