Beyond Lion Rock: The Story of Cathay Pacific Airways (7 page)

Quite soon Roy Farrell, as Texan as Texans come, found to his discomfiture that he was the wrong nationality for Hong Kong. At that meeting with Neil Buchanan, Mr A. J. R. Moss, the Colony’s Director of Civil Aviation, let it be known that to qualify for registration there any aviation company was going to have to be two-thirds British-owned. Up to now, Farrell had shuttled nothing but freight between Australia, Manila, Hong Kong and Shanghai, but he and Syd – particularly Syd – now had regular passenger services much in mind, and Moss was saying that the predominantly American ownership of Farrell’s company was a major – indeed an insuperable – stumbling block to any such thing.

Luckily, Mr Moss was a cheery sort of man, known affectionately as ‘Uncle Moe’. In spite of his grand title of DCA he was, in fact, notably unpretentious, quite content to work out of an equally unpretentious Quonset hut in Statue Square. As it happened, Moss had very much taken to Syd de Kantzow and that was no end of a help. ‘It is now definite,’ de Kantzow exulted in a letter to Russell dated 30 August 1946. ‘We have rights to carry passengers from here to anywhere in the British Empire, also being registered here the British Government will support our application to fly to China, the Philippines, and anywhere we desire in the world.’ He reassured Russell, ‘This is not baloney, but a damn good opportunity to get
a small profitable airline operating from Hong Kong
. The company is in the process of being registered now.’ What about the American angle? Well, ‘The local company laws require two-thirds British directors; so Roy, Neil and myself are the present directors.’ The new aviation company – distancing itself from Farrell’s indubitably all-American-directed freight trading company – was now British, above board and ready to operate.

Good old Uncle Moe, having given permission for both Betsy and Nikki to carry Hong Kong registration letters, directed them to be entered in the
records of the Colony’s Civil Aviation Department as VR-HDB and
VR-HDA
respectively. Overjoyed, Syd de Kantzow urged Russell, ‘Please, have those letters painted on our two ships.’ With this, Betsy suffered a strange injustice. Anyone can see that the pioneer from Bush Field, Georgia, should have become VR-HDA, but by a quirk of fate she was pipped at the post. For some obscure administrative reason Nikki got into the DCA’s register first and Betsy, for better or worse, became VR-HDB. Nevertheless the glory was hers: because of her veteran’s status, those five letters became – and remain – the most famous in the history of aviation in the Crown Colony of Hong Kong.

The articles of association of Cathay Pacific Airways, drawn up by Johnson, Stokes and Masters, Solicitors, of Hong Kong, were dated 24 September 1946, having been duly signed the day before by ‘Roy Farrell, Peninsula Hotel, Kowloon., Hong Kong, Merchant’ and ‘S. H. de Kantzow, Merchant’, of the same address.

Syd himself flew Betsy to Sydney to be repainted and then, on 25 September, the day after the official registration of the new company in Hong Kong, he flew her back on her maiden flight as VR-HDB. Another Australian pilot, Peter Hoskins, was with Syd on that historic flight and he remembers that they were carrying a cargo of 2,000 day-old chicks in cartons. It was terribly hot and steamy in Morotai, the stop before Manila, and some mechanical trouble kept them on the ground longer than expected; there was a danger that the chicks would stifle to death. ‘We let them out of their boxes,’ Hoskins says, ‘and immediately the cabin was crawling with little birds. It took us ages to collect them after take-off.’

The partners’ dreams, however, were not of chicks; they were of passengers … of more and frequent charter flights … of a scheduled airline. Syd had written to Russell of a need for ’a profitable airline … a company….’ That company was about to be created, and it was to be called Cathay Pacific Airways.

How did such a uniquely imaginative name for an airline come to be chosen – a name whispering of magical landscapes and mythical
destinations
, of Tartary, Xanadu and Shangri-La, a name to enchant the most jaded traveller with its promise of airborne romance. There are two slightly divergent accounts of how and where the choice was made. Chic Eather has it that Roy and his partners, racking their brains for a suitable name over drinks in the Cathay Hotel on the Shanghai Bund, decided at once to avoid any name with the word ‘China’ in it; nobody wanted to risk even an implied association with the land of Mao Tse-tung. This, it seems to me, smacks of hindsight. Though it would be perfectly plausible if the naming had come a few years later, few people in Shanghai in 1946 were aware that the Communists would soon be the new masters of all China.

In Roy Farrell’s account, as relayed to me, the get-together was not in Shanghai but in Manila – to be precise, in the semicircular Tropicana Bar of the very grand Manila Hotel, formerly the harbourside headquarters of General Douglas MacArthur. Roy’s story continues as follows:

‘There were several foreign correspondents in Manila, and one afternoon I called three or four who were with
Time-Life
and
Newsweek
, and I told them to meet me in the bar. We got together and I said, “Look, boys, I want your help in picking a name for an airline I’m getting ready to incorporate in Hong Kong.” There was only one prerequisite, I said. The name was to have “Cathay” in it. As we all know, Cathay has a kind of magic, doesn’t it?’

‘Marco Polo and all that.’

‘Right.’

‘The Silk Road, the Great Wall, Genghis Khan….’

‘Sure. All that. Well, after several drinks and much conversation we agreed on the name: Air Cathay. But, of course, that was not the end of it. The horseshoe-shaped Tropicana saw a good deal more of our
hard-drinking
little group before a
final
name was approved. You see, for me there was a fatal drawback to “Air Cathay”. At that time, Milt Caniff was writing a strip cartoon series for several hundred papers in the United States. The strip was “Terry and the Pirates”; today it is called “Steve Canyon”. Anyway, the setting of “Terry and the Pirates” was the Orient and Milt Caniff’s drawings and his dialogue were exceptionally good and accurate. I kept up with the strip because my aunt back in the States would send me eight days’ of “Terry and the Pirates” at a time. So I knew that Milt Caniff had just named Terry’s airline “Air Cathay”.’

A typical day’s issue of the Terry and the Pirates strip of 1949 (drawn in this case not by Milt Caniff but by one George Wunder) shows in its first frame a DC-3 boldly labelled ‘Air Cathay’ ploughing through stormy skies somewhere in Asia.

‘Good thing Terry kicked this kite upstairs just before the flood washed out the airstrip,’ someone is saying in the passenger cabin, to which, ‘Ah, phooey!’ is another passenger’s ungracious (and unexplained) reply. Up for’ard, Terry himself is granite-calm, unperturbed by floods or anything else. Blond, his fresh face as unmarked by fear or doubt as a nineteen-
year-old’s
(he is already a veteran flier and the possessor of a peaked cap decorated with enough scrambled egg for an air marshal), he murmurs coolly to his co-pilot through tight lips, ‘If our gas supply holds out, we’ll make for Hong Kong.’ But wait! –

‘Sorry, chaps,’ crackles the spoilsport voice of a pipe-smoking British air controller at Hong Kong [next frame]. ‘Fog’s just lifted here and we have traffic stacked up like the weekend’s dishes. We won’t be able to bring you in for some time.’

We see Terry struggling with the controls and his temper. His lips grow even tighter. His voice comes back, calm and firm: ‘No dice. Fuel supply’s running low. Air Cathay will take its business next door.’

A beautiful girl has been reading a newspaper at the Hong Kong controller’s side. At the words ‘Air Cathay’ her head snaps up; she springs to her feet, flinging away her newspaper. ‘Hey! That pilot mentioned Air Cathay!’ she cries. ‘That’s the crowd Spray O’Hara disappeared with. Oh, lucky day!’

‘Friends of yours, eh?’ the pipe-smoker drawls, quick on the uptake, adding, with a smirk, ‘Well, I gather they’ll be landing across the bay in Macao.’ He couldn’t be more right, and the final frame is a happy one. It shows a Chinese rickshaw-driver in traditional wide straw hat and baggy pants cantering at breakneck speed across Macao’s muddy airstrip [we know it’s Macao because a sign says ‘Adios’], urged on by the excited English beauty in the seat behind him. They make it on the dot – for at that moment, propellers whirling, the pride of Air Cathay taxies to a halt….

‘It was a good comic strip all right,’ Roy said. ‘More of a documentary really, but even so I didn’t like the idea that my airline should have the same name as an airline in a comic strip. So that night we all stuck together drinking and discussing, and when the evening was over we had agreed on “Cathay Pacific Airways”. You see, Pacific is another kind of romantic name, and anyway we thought we might be flying the ocean one day. That was it. We had a name. With that decided, Syd and I signed the corporate papers on 23 September 1946.’

In La Quinta Motor Inn with me all those years later, Roy summed it up. ‘A new phase was beginning. We’d done extremely well. We had four planes flying and money in the bank. We hoped a new form of success lay ahead.’ I could see him reliving that time as he thought about it, enjoying once more the memory of that early success. The glass of Coca-Cola raised to me now might have been one of those Cuba Libres at the bar of the Manila Hotel he had raised to Sydney de Kantzow, Bob Russell, Millard Nasholds and Bill Geddes Brown way back in 1946, toasting the future of a baby airline, newly baptized; toasting the unforeseeable empire of the air to which he and Syd were godparents: ‘To Cathay Pacific Airways!’

*

Cathay Pacific was born – long live CPA! ‘CPA. That’s what it was then,’ Farrell told me. ‘In the beginning we always called it CPA.’ In fact, CPA came to be regularly called by its full name only when those three initials ran the risk of confusion with the C, Ρ and A of Canadian Pacific Airlines. These days, if someone refers to Cathay Pacific Airways as ‘CPA’ you can tell he is an old Hong Kong hand, betraying his generation as much as an Englishman does who refers to the radio as ‘the wireless’.

Hong Kong, Australia and a good segment of the Orient were very soon hearing and reading about the new airline with the exciting name. ‘Wing Your Way By CPA’ said an early advertisement in the
China Mail
. ‘Fly to
Singapore … Fare $880; Bangkok … Fare $528; Manila … Fare $600; Sydney … Fare $2,200. Baggage allowance 55lb. Freight and passenger bookings to be made at the office of CPA’s new agent, P. J. Lobo & Co. at 4 Chater Road.’ [In 1946 five Hong Kong dollars were worth one American dollar.] On 23 October Neville Hems worth piloted VR-HDA (alias Nikki) with seventeen Chinese students aboard in the first of CPA’s charter flights from Hong Kong to Gatwick Airport outside London: a thirty-day round trip on what was a pretty long haul for a twin 1200hp-engined ‘crate’. He described the flight as ‘very tough’, but that charter was a milestone. And one month into the official life of Cathay Pacific the Roy Farrell
Export-Import
Co. (Hong Kong) Ltd. had chartered one of Cathay’s two DC-3s for Hemsworth to inaugurate the first Roy Farrell ‘airmerchandising’ service to the United Kingdom.

The partial derivation of CPA’s name from Terry and his Pirates must have struck a good many observers as apt, however much Roy would have liked to think otherwise. The new company
did
have a swashbuckling air about it. Chic Eather remembers hazardous flights along the coast of China to Lungwah field at Shanghai, relying on the eccentricities of unpleasantly low-powered radio beacons at Swatow, Amoy, Foochow, Wenchow and Ningpo – flights that on more than one occasion might have cost him his life in that storm-ridden region. Even so, Shanghai remained a popular destination with Syd’s pilots – or Syd’s ‘pirates’. According to Chic, Lyell Louttit, the Radio Officer, found the Arcadia nightclub particularly bewitching when he was in the grip of the grape – and probably in the equally powerful grip of one or other of the club’s blonde White Russian hostesses who, incidentally, very much fancied the skimpy Scamp
swimsuits
imported by Farrell.

Apart from Shanghai there were charters to Bangkok, Manila, Saigon and Singapore, and they were no less adventurous. On one occasion – it was certainly worthy of Terry and the Pirates – Eather’s DC-3 from Bangkok was suddenly diverted, in full flight for Hong Kong, to Tourane in central Vietnam (later to be renamed Da Nang and become a major American base) by mysterious orders cryptically radioed to the aircraft’s Captain, Dick Hunt, a former squadron leader in the Royal Australian Air Force. The war between the French and the Viet Minh nationalists was at its height, and it was a very bloody one in which anti-French guerrilla forces were becoming increasingly bold. Hunt and Eather spent a sleepless night in the villa the French Air Force general in Tourane had allotted them, listening to bursts of machine gun fire nearby; the shutters were tightly closed for fear of a Viet Minh grenade attack. At dawn next day they stumbled out to the airfield,
hoping to discover why they were there. A few minutes later the Emperor Bao Dai of Annam and his entourage were driven up and escorted aboard their plane, and Hunt and Eather, stifling their yawns, flew the lot of them to Hong Kong and into exile. The French had decided that Indo-China was to have an independent, democratic government – though the exclusion from it of a certain Ho Chi Minh was to prove a costly omission.

Similar CPA escapades – one could say they were literally ‘fly-by-night’ – ensued during a three-week charter by Indonesian nationalists. The Dutch had thrown up an air blockade to isolate the forces of Dr Ahmad Sukarno’s pro-independence government in central Java. Lyell Louttit, for one, was involved in surreptitious flights, often after dark, between Jogjakarta and Bukit Tinggi in western Sumatra before the whole devious adventure ended in the ignominious impounding of a CPA DC-3 in Singapore. Dutch officials there suspected the aircraft had been sold illegally by CPA to Sukarno, and it took Harry de Leuil, Syd’s general manager, some time to convince the Directors of Civil Aviation in Singapore and Hong Kong of the company’s innocence. It was a salutary experience, showing in those days of national independence movements how extremely unwise it was to mix commercial aviation with the violent imponderables of other people’s politics. Far less risky were the chartered air shipments of refugees from Eastern Europe to Australia, and the series of two-month charters that Roy Farrell arranged to fly plane-loads of fresh fish from Kuantan in East Malaya to Singapore. True, the stink of fish permeated the aircraft from stem to stern and almost put the CPA crews off fish for the rest of their lives, but at least they weren’t in danger of being shot down by British or Dutch fighters.