Beyond Lion Rock

by Gavin Young

  Skyways was a British air transport company newly formed in the aftermath of the war by a trio of accomplished aviators. Brigadier General A. C. Critchley, its chairman, had been the wartime Director General of BOAC (the new name for Imperial Airways); Captain R. J. Ashley, the Managing Director, had been his personal pilot; and Sir Alan Cobham was a famous aviation pioneer. Skyways owned Avro Yorks and Lancastrians, and had a lucrative contract with the giant Anglo–Iranian Oil Company to fly their employees and freight between the United Kingdom and the Persian Gulf. It also flew charters to Europe, Palestine and Africa, and operated an embryo Hong Kong–Singapore service.

  Critchley disliked Roy and Syd almost on sight; and decidedly the antipathy was mutual. The Brigadier was less than diplomatic. He and Skyways seemed to think they were God’s gift to Far Eastern aviation, coming to save a tinpot organization from instant dissolution and penury, but they were alone in this belief – certainly as far as Roy and Syd were concerned. No doubt serious discussions of a purely technical nature relating to a possible Skyways takeover of CPA did take place between the two parties, but what emerges from the Skyways episode as a whole, before the inevitable collapse of serious negotiations, was pure slapstick.

  ‘After our first meeting,’ Roy says flatly, ‘I realized Critchley was trying to steal our airline.’ Syd concurred, and in next to no time Critchley found himself in a kind of hellzapoppin’ scenario for which nothing in his past experience had prepared him.

  For a start, Syd turned up at their first meeting smoking a monstrous cigar which filled the room with dense clouds of smoke and considerably upset the Brigadier – he had come to deal with a cringing suppliant, not Ronald Colman playing the part of Lord Beaverbrook, blowing arrogant smoke rings at him with a Corona-Corona. At that first meeting Roy and Syd learned that Critchley hated to be kept waiting, so for the second meeting they contrived to turn up twenty minutes late.

  ‘This meeting accomplished nothing,’ Roy told me, ‘but we agreed to a third.’ For Critchley this was a mistake. They all met, Roy recollects, in a suite of rooms at the old Hong Kong Hotel. This time Roy and Syd were thirty minutes late.

  Roy says: ‘When the General’s blood pressure got back to acceptable limits, I told him I had three propositions for him.

  ‘The first proposition was that he should pay our price. This he violently refused.

  ‘My second proposal was to let me keep the airline for eighteen months with all landing rights and at the end of the eighteen months I would give him the airline. His reply was “Don’t be a bloody fool.”

  ‘My third offer was that I would play him eighteen holes of golf to see if he would double my price or nothing. The General was an excellent golfer and he immediately shouted that I was a bloody fool and that he would beat me, to which I replied that I knew his handicap and I knew mine and he wouldn’t have a chance – after all, I’d played barefoot with the caddies in Calcutta. With this he exploded and said he would have me run out of Hong Kong.’ The meeting, not surprisingly, was at an end.

  Roy and Syd consulted Uncle Moe Moss at Civil Aviation, anxious about Critchley’s threat to have them run out of the Colony. Uncle Moe had a word with the Governor, and no more was heard of that.

  ‘And so,’ Roy says, ‘some months later we started negotiations with Jock Swire, and about eighteen months after Critchley we sold 80 per cent to Swires and their associates.’

  That was in June 1948. How this momentous change of life came about for Roy, Syd and everyone else connected with CPA I shall try to explain a little later. But meanwhile I must introduce the great and noble Hong Kong house that John Swire built.

  PART TWO

  ‘JOCK’

  CHAPTER 9

  The Times of London of 25 February 1983 carried the following obituary notice.

  Mr J. K. Swire

  Mr John Kidston Swire, head of the £1000m Swire Group in Hong Kong from 1946 to 1966, died on February 22 at the age of 90.

  It was Swire who, with typical courage and resolution, led the old-established family shipping and trading business after the war into large-scale air transport and property activities, so that its Cathay Pacific subsidiary is now the largest regional air carrier in that part of the world. Son of John Swire of Hubbard’s Hall, Harlow, Essex, he was educated at Eton and University College, Oxford, and served with the Essex Yeomanry in the 1914–1918 war. He became a director of John Swire and Sons in 1920 and chairman in 1946.

  A handsome man of strong character and great integrity, he played a leading part in building up what is now one of the leading British companies operating in the Far East.

  He married in 1923 Juliet Richenda, daughter of Theodore Barclay of Fanshaws, Hertford, by whom he had two sons – John, now chairman of the Swire Group, and Sir Adrian, deputy chairman – and two daughters.

  How far is it from the house where postmaster Clint Farrell’s son was born in Vernon, Texas, to John Kidston Swire’s home at Hubbard’s Hall, Harlow, Essex? Cathay Pacific, the regional airline that grew up to span continents, links both men and both places. Yet to J. K. Swire – universally known as ‘Jock’ – parts of the Far East had become as familiar as his own backyard long before Roy Farrell flew Betsy into Shanghai. How did he come to be there?

  We need to go back two generations to find out. His grandfather, John Samuel Swire, born in 1825, was the initiator, later to be known to all who worked for him as ‘The Senior’. In 1847 he had inherited his father’s Liverpool business, John Swire & Sons, which imported cotton from America until the Civil War disrupted that trade. Thereafter he turned instead to China and Japan, taking on a Bradford wool mill owner named Richard Butterfield as partner. The partnership was short-lived for Butterfield resigned after only a few years, yet the company remained Butterfield & Swire for nearly a century, a much respected trading name in the East. When word came that Fletcher & Co., the partner’s Shanghai agents, had gone broke, Swire sailed out East to see things for himself. The oriental die was cast.

  Swire was not a man to waste time. He stepped ashore in Shanghai on 28 November 1866; he rented an office in Fletcher’s Building on the Bund; he staffed it with five Europeans; and on 4 December he announced in the North China Daily News that Butterfield & Swire would open for business on 1 January 1867. The announcement read:

  NOTICE

  We have established ourselves as Merchants under the Firm of Butterfield & Swire.

  Richard Shackleton Butterfield

  John Samuel Swire

  William Hudson Swire

  Corner of Foochow & Szechuen Roads

  formerly occupied by Messrs. Fletcher & Co.

  Next, according to local custom, he needed a House (or ‘Hong’) name for the new company, and with the help of a sinologist of repute and imagination chose the ambitious name ‘Taikoo’, a combination of two Chinese words meaning ‘Great’ and ‘Ancient’. He himself, also in keeping with local practice, would, as head of the new Hong, be referred to as its Taipan (‘the main plank in its roof’). The Taipan of Taikoo…. In next to no time, John Samuel Swire had become a leading performer in the Far Eastern commercial arena. It was a turbulent region.

  In the quarter-century since Shanghai had been opened up to Western trade there had been frequent rebellions and wars on a large scale, even for China. The Chinese City of Shanghai had been attacked and captured, and on one occasion occupied by rebels for as much as eighteen months. Luckily for him, John Samuel Swire happened to arrive there in a period of lull and had time to look around in peace. The three-quarters of a mile stretch along the curve of the Whangpoo River now known as the Bund was, he saw, already occupied by a number of fine two-storeyed European buildings belonging to the Hongs, the big commercial houses; there were churches, a Customs House, a club and a racecourse, and broad streets running inland beyond the four-mile-long walls of the Chinese City. Gracious living was possible – among hazards: disease, for example. One of his staff, invalided home in the spring, died h
alfway there at Aden; his replacement died the same autumn. A newly admitted partner survived only eighteen months. There were other deaths, but no time to waste in mourning if you were, like Swire, struggling for a foothold on the China coast. He began trading at once in tea, silk, cotton and sugar. He opened a Yokohama branch and three years later an office in Hong Kong, too. At this point William Hudson Swire retired and John Samuel took in a partner, J. H. Scott; Swires and Scotts have been closely associated in the direction of the firm ever since.

  In 1872 – a major milestone – Swire established a shipping outfit, the China Navigation Company, known as CNCo; its purpose was to run steamers up the Yangtze River. At first two vessels, the Tunsin and a paddle steamer, the Glengyle, plied twice weekly the 600 miles between Shanghai and Hankow, and later vessels reached Ichang in Hupeh Province near the Yangtze Gorges. ‘We are going to run the River,’ John Swire declared, and the hitherto dominant American company, Russell & Co., sold out quite soon, leaving B&S by far the biggest foreign operator on the Yangtze. Presently Butterfield & Swire expanded CNCo’s operations to the coastal trade, running profitable north-south grain charters carrying soya beancake from Newchwang and Dairen in Manchuria to Swatow, Hong Kong and Formosa, where farmers used it as fertilizer. By 1883 CNCo operated fifteen coasters for the beancake trade, reinforcing this success by building the Taikoo Sugar Refinery in Hong Kong and later the Taikoo Dockyard there. By 1905 the Taikoo fleet had expanded to no fewer than fifty-four vessels, some of which carried passengers from Shanghai to Tientsin, and from Amoy to Hong Kong and Manila.

  If you examine The Senior’s portrait, the hard jaw and the confident eyes, it is difficult to imagine John Samuel Swire reduced to a ‘state of fear and trembling’, but that is the state he liked to claim he was in when he took the plunge into passenger transport. In 1886 he had ordered four large passenger ships to provide a regular liner service between Foochow, Hong Kong and Australia – and the immediate result was the magical appearance in the South China Sea of the Changsha, a beautiful yacht-like steamer with two tall masts and one tall slim funnel: a ship to dream of; a ship almost worth building even if she lost money from the moment of launching, which was not the case. There were to be three more Changshas in the years to come, but none more beautiful than the first.

  The steamers all made money, though it was not an era when circumstances conspired to make every shipowner rich. A Sino–French war in the south of China, a Sino–Japanese war in the north and the alarums and disruptions of the Boxer Rebellion at the turn of the century – despite these horrendous events Swire’s activities prospered in a number of directions, particularly after The Senior, with extreme patience and diplomatic skill, had evolved a modus vivendi with an imperial Chinese government notoriously given to periodic bouts of xenophobia. ‘In future, we must share the same bed, celestials and terrestrials,’ John Swire murmured soothingly. And he insisted that terrestrials, too, had to bunk down together from time to time. A live-and-let-live agreement to keep competition more or less within gentlemanly bounds was arrived at with Swire’s rival Hong, the oldest and most powerful commercial house, Jardine Matheson, supreme in the region since the Emperor of China had been obliged at the end of the First Opium War to cede Hong Kong to Great Britain by the terms of the Treaty of Nanking of 1842.

  Daily sailings by Swire vessels became the rule on the Lower Yangtze and on the Middle River from Hankow to Ichang, while on the Upper River Swire ran a passenger and freight service up to Chungking, 1,310 miles from the sea. Yet another service opened from Hankow to the lake port of Changsha and Siangtan, and small motor vessels even penetrated up to Kiating, little more than two hundred miles from Burma. Thus the Taikoo flag reached far into the heart of China.

  After 1918 there were important changes in favour of passengers. CNCo sold the beancake fleet and moved over completely to scheduled berth services up and down the coast, and to Hong Kong and Manila as well. The move coincided with a major development that would greatly influence decisions when B&S came to give serious thought to aviation as a complement to their shipping. This was the sharp growth in importance of the southern sea routes from Swatow and Amoy to the Straits Settlements (Singapore, Malacca and Penang), and from Swatow to Bangkok because of a dramatic escalation in the number of emigrants from China. To sustain these new and immensely profitable routes between the two world wars, Swires commissioned from Scott & Co. of Greenock, or built in their own Taikoo Dockyard, at least a dozen good-sized passenger ships. And so, despite the Depression, strikes, earth-shaking political developments and the appalling disruptions of modern warfare, Taikoo and CNCo prospered.

  *

  By the time John Samuel Swire, The Senior, died in 1898, aged seventy-three, Butterfield & Swire Ltd was solidly set. With its offices up and down China, its ships, its sugar refinery and its Hong Kong dockyard, it could now stand beside the older Hong, Jardine Matheson Ltd, as one of the two great commercial houses of the Far East. John Samuel was succeeded by his two sons, John and Warren, and it was Warren, something of a martinet, who introduced his nephew Jock to the Swire organization in the Far East with a personal letter to their No. 2 man in Hong Kong:

  Dear Edkins

  I hope you will make that young nephew of mine work, as he has had a very good time for the last three years and hasn’t done a stroke of work. He may therefore be tempted to think that there is no need to work. I don’t think for a moment he will, when he is given a definite job which he has to carry out or else add to another man’s work, as he is a very good fellow and has an uncommonly square head; but any way he is not in China for his own amusement, but to learn as much as he can of the China end of the business as soon as he can. We have lots of work for him here as soon as he has enough experience to do it, which I hope he will acquire in the course of the next five years….

  As it happened, the First World War broke out five months later and immediately most of young Jock’s energies were devoted to getting into it. In a sense Jock Swire was as much made for the army as for a life in high commerce; at any rate he seems to have been a born cavalry officer. After Eton he had gone to University College, Oxford, to read Law, and there attracted his contemporaries’ attention both as a horseman and as a star of the University’s Officer Training Corps. In the University magazine he was singled out as Isis Idol number CCCCLXXXVI, and the profile’s undergraduate author refers to Jock’s great height (‘growing like a tree’), to his horsemanship (‘learning to stick like a limpet to the saddle’), and to his ‘immense enthusiasm for life’. His football and his cricket ‘are marvels of gymnastic skill. Did he not once trundle out the City Police?’ As for his performance in the OTC: ‘As a trooper he was adequate, as a lance corporal he competed favourably, but when he came to adorn the dizzy rank of a subaltern his true métier was found. He set a fitting seal on his military and equestrian career’, the profile added, ‘by captaining the winning Oxford team in the inter-Varsity jumping competitions at Olympia’. Isis’s last words were: ‘We hear that he is bound for the Far East….’ Bound for it – and to be bound most intimately to it for the rest of his life – that is, for the next seventy years.

  Jock joined the family firm in the autumn of 1913, aged twenty, and next year sailed for Hong Kong on a ship of the Blue Funnel Line, a Swire associate. War broke out on 4 August 1914 and he had to wait until Christmas to rejoin his regiment, the Essex Yeomanry. He filled in the time in fine military manner attached to the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry, patrolling from Deepwater Bay to the fishing village of Aberdeen, mostly at night, on his pony Shanghai, and so earning the affectionate description ‘Deepwater Bay Hussar’ among his friends. (He was, he said, on the lookout for the German sea raider Emden, then at large in Far Eastern and Pacific waters.) Circumstances took a grim turn. Almost as soon as Jock returned to Europe, his brother Glen was killed in action at Ypres. His Oxford contemporaries died in droves. Jock himself was wounded twice in France, the second time at the battle
of Loos where a close call from a mortar bomb resulted in permanent partial deafness. His directness of character made him popular with his men; they seem to have taken to his sense of humour, too. After the war he liked to tell of the occasion when, on leave from the trenches, he called at a London chemist and ordered a thousand condoms for his battalion – he was worried about the ill-effect that fraternization with the French filles de joie was having on his men’s health. ‘A thousand? Certainly, sir,’ said the chemist, handing them over. Then, as Jock made for the door with the package under his arm, he called after him, ‘Enjoy your weekend, sir.’

  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: