by Gavin Young
Then there was an interruption. On 8 December 1941, out of a clear sky, planes were seen approaching Kai Tak. The Second World War was well under way, of course, but people cheered and waved, thinking they were the long-awaited reinforcement of RAF planes coming to help defend the Colony against the Japanese. Help was certainly needed; the existing defence was laughable. Wing Commander ‘Ginger’ Sullivan, in charge of Hong Kong’s RAF station, had at his disposal nothing more impressive than four Vickers Wildebeeste torpedo-bombers and a trio of ungainly Super-marine Walrus amphibians, which could just about make 100mph with luck and a strong tail wind. Unfortunately, the planes everyone was applauding were not RAF reinforcements but Japanese bombers. Their bombs soon began to fall on Kai Tak’s single runway, and among the Wildebeestes that Sullivan had assembled near the seadrome so recently used by the Imperial Airways flying boats. For Hong Kong it was clearly all up. A few intrepid British pilots were skilful enough to land between the bomb craters at night to pick up a handful of British evacuees, but everyone else (and the Colony itself) went ‘into the bag’ on Christmas Day 1941. The Colony died, and nearly four years of Japanese occupation went by before anything in it came to life again. Roy and Syd arrived a year after the Japanese surrender. What did they find?
Needless to say, what they saw had very little in common with what one sees now. The bankers’ playground of today, with its ultra-modern gold and ivory skyscrapers, its high-rise luxury housing, the urban sprawl that seeks to contain a relentlessly growing population that at present easily tops six million – everything that so impresses us today lay hidden in the unforeseeable future. At the time of the Japanese surrender in August 1945 Hong Kong was a disaster area. During their occupation the damage through looting and neglect – not to mention American bombing – had been immense. Roy Farrell took his first look at post-Japanese Hong Kong and saw a sad, end-of-the-road sort of place that seemed to have slipped halfway back to the nineteenth century. Its people had a depressing shabbiness about them. ‘The Chinese looked like destitute coolies,’ he wrote.
Furthermore, the Colony had been isolated from the world to a degree almost impossible to grasp in these days of jet travel. Shipping had been terribly disrupted, passenger and cargo ships scattered, wrecked or sunk. Hong Kong’s harbour – formerly one of the busiest in the world – was still an abandoned and stagnating pool, its anchorage cluttered with the wrecks of eleven big ships and seventy-two smaller ones, some of them deliberately scuttled by the British as the Japanese came in, some victims of General Claire Chennault’s China-based bombers, which the supplies flown over the Hump by the likes of Roy and Syd had kept flying. Kowloon’s port facilities were in an atrocious state; shipping was at a standstill. Air services, of course, were virtually non-existent. There was no international telephone service. Public transport was so sketchy that it was a problem to get around the Colony at all – it was a bright thought of Farrell’s to have imported two jeeps from Okinawa. On top of everything, the Japanese had made off with whatever they could lay hands on. Across the harbour in Kowloon the imposing and conveniently situated Peninsula Hotel (known to everyone as ‘the Pen’), the centre of a slowly reviving social life, needed a lot of reviving itself. In spite of its busy lobby and rowdy bar furnished with heavy, hide-backed oriental chairs and huge blue Chinese jars, it was, Farrell thought, little more than an upholstered slum.
Little by little, a makeshift British military administration, overworked and desperately improvising, put together a few basic pieces of the Colony’s disjointed life before the returning civilians took over once more in May 1946. Of course, Hong Kong’s eventual rehabilitation was assured by the mere fact that it is uniquely situated at the centre of one of the world’s most densely populated regions – something that is a good deal easier to see now than it was in 1946. Then, nothing was clear, nothing predictable. The entire Eastern world was a shambles: Imperial Japan a defeated cripple under American occupation; the spirit of China broken by war, its people and land fragmented between the Nationalists and Communists. In the colonial territories of South East Asia – Indochina, Malaya, the Dutch East Indies – the upheaval of war had exposed the essential weakness of the imperial powers, Britain, France and the Netherlands. The spirit of national independence was abroad, and nationalist leaders were planning violent confrontation with colonial governments from Burma to Vietnam, from Laos, Malaya and Singapore to the remotest islands of the Dutch East Indies. Only a born optimist like Roy Farrell could have been quite so confident in the future, quite so sure of making his fortune. ‘Oh, things will pick up,’ he told his associates. Of course things had to improve. But how long any serious improvement would be in coming no one could foretell.
Meanwhile, for expatriates at least, Hong Kong was an easy-going place and rather fun to be in. ‘Syd and Angela were in a Peninsula Hotel suite for a while with her temple dog, Butch,’ Roy remembers, ‘and actually, we had the darnedest time. It was relaxed, you know. Syd and I used to roll in there from the Star ferry from Hong Kong Island late at night bawling out “San Antonio Rose”. I guess you’d be thrown out for doing that today.’
The immediate postwar shortage of ships in the Far East greatly inspired and benefited the rebirth of civil aviation in Hong Kong. For one thing, the task of dragging China back onto its feet, of coping with its millions of ragged, barefoot and half-starved refugees, required every available form of transport and, given the distances involved in this huge country, aircraft played a most important role. Kai Tak soon became relatively busy again with civilian aircraft, most of them belonging to CNAC, flying to and from China. At the same time British Overseas Airways (BOAC), the postwar successor to Imperial Airways, restored its flying boat service from Britain, once more delivering passengers, mostly senior government officials and businessmen, in just under a week.
A year later, British aircraft of companies to be nominated by His Majesty’s Government were granted rights of setting down and taking up passengers at four Chinese airports, Kunming, Canton, Shanghai and Tientsin, and a BOAC subsidiary, Hong Kong Airways, began operating from the Colony under this Sino–British agreement. By 1948 aircraft from the United Kingdom, China, the Philippines, Siam (now Thailand), the USA and France were arriving at Kai Tak at a rate of about twenty-five a day, and in a twelve-month period the number of passengers amounted to nearly a quarter of a million, the majority still passing to and from China. The commonest civilian aircraft were recently demobilized DC-3 Dakotas and DC-4 Skymasters, but a new pride of the skies appeared, too – the ‘Connies’, the sleek, three-tailed Lockheed Constellations.
This was satisfactory for the time being, but Hong Kong’s postwar bugbear was that by modern standards Kai Tak Airport left much to be desired. Aircraft had grown heavier. They needed more space in which to land and take off. Kai Tak itself huddled uneasily under an escarpment of forbidding rocks. The Japanese had increased the little airport’s dimensions by ruthlessly demolishing acres of Chinese housing, and they had pulled down the ramparts surrounding Kowloon’s ancient Walled City to use its massive stones in the construction of two longer runways. Even so, Chic Eather’s first impression of Kai Tak in late 1946 was one of a muddy swamp. Duckboards led to immigration and customs ‘offices’ located in a cluster of old army tents near the seadrome, and Chic felt his spirits plummeting with every squelching step. Syd de Kantzow did little to raise them by walking him to the centre of the field and jabbing a finger at the enveloping escarpments to the east and north. ‘Never,’ he said, fixing young Eather with a hard eye, ‘never let yourself be a party to a take-off on Runway 31.’ You only had to look at Runway 31 to see what he meant: it pointed straight as an arrow at Lion Rock, a 1,500-foot-high knuckle of vaguely leonine appearance into which a departing RAF DC-3 had ploughed not long before, with the loss of nineteen lives. Runway 31 was only to be used for landings, Syd commanded. A government report issued that year went so far as to state that ‘Kai Tak, close under a range of steep
hills of up to 1,800 feet, remains inadequate for heavy aircraft.’ Furthermore, foreign airline operators were coming to the same conclusion, the report warned: ‘There is a serious danger that international aircraft may start overflying the Colony.’
The thought of such a boycott struck panic into the minds of Hong Kong’s officials and businessmen. In the event, Kai Tak was not boycotted, but the mere possibility of such a thing started agitated talk of building a new, better airport. Where? Anywhere … somewhere in the New Territories…. It was a debate begun in urgency that was to drag on for over a decade, find temporary solution in a compromise at Kai Tak – and then drag on again to this very day. Cathay’s early inter-office letters and memos reverberate hopefully with excited chatter of the imminent construction of a big new airport fit for the twenty-first century. It would be, the memos promised each other, out at Deepwater Bay. But nothing happened. At last, in the early sixties, came compromise at the old Kai Tak site. Obstructive hills were levelled, their rubble dumped into Kowloon Bay, and where all had been water a new giant runway sprang out across the waves, aimed at the Lei Yue Mun Gap. The debris of those hills, suitably surfaced, is what you land on today.
CHAPTER 6
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.’