Read Beyond Lion Rock: The Story of Cathay Pacific Airways Online
Authors: Gavin Young
Beyond Lion Rock: The Story of Cathay Pacific Airways (12 page)
Jock returned to Hong Kong at the end of 1919, and this time he arrived as a director of the firm with ‘special responsibilities for Overseas Staff’. It was a job perfectly designed to bring out the extraordinary warmth, straighforwardness and simple humanity behind the tall, moustached, unmistakably military appearance he presented to the world. By now he had strong ideas on man management. ‘Money is not everything by a long chalk,’ he noted in his diary shortly after arrival. Improved terms of service were long overdue for employees below management level – home leave on full pay with a free passage for man and wife, a wage of
£
400 to
£
1,800, and a profit-sharing scheme based on salary and service. He went on:
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.
*
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.
