Beyond Lion Rock

by Gavin Young

  Pointing at the smudge, Martin Willing said, ‘That’s where the Hung Horn beacon was. See how close – how quickly a plane would reach here.’ Descending to land over Stonecutters Island, Johnnie Paish had been cautioned by the Kai Tak Air Controller, Roy Downing, that the moment he could not see at least three miles in front of him he was to turn to the right, swing over to Hung Horn beacon and climb away to a safe height in order to try again. This instruction Paish acknowledged. And then, as Eric Price had reported, he suddenly asked for (and received) permission to divert from his present approach, to circle and try another runway – a manoeuvre that would bring him over the Hung Hom beacon on the Kowloon side of the harbour: evidently he had lost the three-mile forward visibility. From the Hung Hom beacon to where we stood on Hong Kong Island was close, as Martin Willing had just pointed out. ‘You see, over the beacon he should have turned east-south-east and headed for the Lei Yue Mun Gap, then turned left again for the other runway. But he crossed the beacon – and turned south. Into the hill behind us.’

  We drove up a twisting but well tarmaced road to the site of the former reservoir. It is under development now, like almost everywhere else in the Territory of Hong Kong, but beside a narrow ravine full of rubble you can still see part of the reservoir’s walls. Behind and to the left is a brand-new supermarket and beside that white high-rise apartments. The hillside lifts sharply here, a grim rock-face of granite slabs and yellowish sandstone, scrub-covered. It was towards this rising hillside that an eyewitness had seen the DC-3 VR-HDG heading, dangerously low, bursting out of one cloud bank over Kowloon and roaring into another, the one which masked the all too solid hills of the island.

  We stood there, ‘seeing’ the plane coming. Martin Willing said, ‘Paish has got the wheels down; a little flap, too. Now, instead of the Lei Yue Mun Gap he sees this bloody great fog patch and he’s heading at 90mph straight into the reservoir – “Oh shit! Gear up!” he yells and eases sharply back. Maybe banks a bit. But he’s already at 300 feet over the coast. Too late.’ The plane clipped the leading edge of the reservoir wall at 452 feet with a terrible metallic bang – screamed upside down over the water – and disintegrated against the granite hill-face. As it would be today, by the car park of the new supermarket.

  The official report, signed ‘A. J. R. Moss, Inspector of Accidents’, attributed the disaster to ‘an error of judgment by the pilot in that he flew into conditions of poor visibility and low cloud when requested specifically on several occasions not to proceed unless three miles visibility could be maintained’. Second, he should not have kept going over Hung Horn beacon but swung left, as was the normal practice. Of course, there remained that unanswered question. Why did such an experienced pilot – one who knew Kai Tak so well in all its moods – make such a mistake?

  Many people have puzzled over that. One of them was Chic Eather, who knew Johnnie Paish well. He is inclined to think that Paish was misled, or at least confused, by the fact that a Hong Kong Airways aircraft had landed just in front of him without apparent difficulty. Admittedly the HKA crew might have made use of their unorthodox but frequent method of approach, which relied on downward rather than forward visibility. Even so, according to Eather, Paish erred in direction: ‘As he crossed the coast near the Ritz nightclub the ground was rising faster than his labouring aircraft could climb. For many seconds the crew on that flight deck must have known that they were about to be dashed to pieces.’

  I felt a tremendous unease as I stood on the broken lip of that crumbling reservoir. It was easy to imagine the scene, nearly forty years before, of an inferno of burning fuel and torn metal, of police cordons, of frantic groups of firemen, investigators and doctors, reporters and press photographers; details of the disaster had filled the front page of every newspaper in the Colony. Now where we wandered gloomily about there was nothing to show that such a thing had ever happened. A few workmen were busy on the edge of the ravine at the site of what a hoarding promised would eventually become the St Joan of Arc School for Girls. A stiffish breeze was whipping the slope where we stood, 400 feet up. The hillside was impassive; too impassive. With the visions we carried in our heads suddenly both of us wanted to leave it. As we walked to the car I glanced towards the bay. Below, the evil grey mist still crept low across the water hiding the runway at Kai Tak.

  *

  Ten years long, the ‘Battle of Hong Kong Airways’ left different casualties. Indeed it almost did for Cathay Pacific itself. It certainly led to Sydney de Kantzow’s early retirement from the company. Despite Jock Swire and Ivan Holyman’s best efforts to make him feel at home under the management of Butterfield & Swire, de Kantzow, the free flier, found it impossible to adapt to the Hong style of operation. Big companies, like large animals, move slowly and cautiously. Men like Roy and Syd live on calculated risks, on decisions taken in a single telephone call – snap! like that. It’s what keeps their adrenalin flowing.

  Syd was impatient – in his view the company should get on and spend money on expansion, or pack up. Even in 1948 the DC-3s were no longer enough, and with Swires’ approval he had flown to Europe and bought a four-engined DC-4 Skymaster which entered service in September 1949 – but only after arguing in vain that Cathay needed not one, but three. His widow Angela remembers Syd groaning to her, ‘How do they expect to keep the show going with one four-engined plane that keeps breaking down?’ And he let all within earshot know his view that too much money was going in management costs, and that his was too small a holding for all the work he had to do as Flight Operations Manager. He and Angela lived well – at first in a suite in the Peninsula, then in a two-storeyed house over Deepwater Bay with an impressive garden and a fine view over the South China Sea. But it wasn’t comfort he was after – he was after a stiff challenge and the independence to lick it in his own way. Syd was an original, an explorer. With B&S in overall charge, he felt dominated, sidetracked, frustrated. He wasn’t used to that. His impatience wasn’t anyone’s fault. But there it was.

  Inevitably the split came. In the letter he wrote to Jock announcing his retirement from the company he had helped to create, Syd spoke of ‘our very pleasant association during the past three pioneering years in CPA’. He felt sure, he added, of an extremely brilliant future for the company. But to a friend in another trading firm, the Borneo Company, he still complained of how much B&S’s management and maintenance were costing ‘above any sum one would normally expect an airline to spend on such services. I myself am suffering financially, so rather than continue with an arrangement which ultimately will leave me with nothing I am taking the preferable alternative of disposing of my stock while I may….’

  It was agreed that Syd would retire from the Board and managership of CPA on 30 April 1951; the company would pay him three months’ salary, and ANA and John Swire & Sons would buy his 1,500 CPA shares. There was no public falling out; everybody behaved in the most gentlemanly manner. The local press, reporting his departure from Hong Kong, quoted Syd: ‘Now that Cathay Pacific is fully established on its routes in the Orient, there appears to be little likelihood of it being able to develop further in the predictable future, owing to the political situation. China is the logical sphere of expansion for operations in the Far East, but we know that is not possible. As a pioneer I now find there is little scope for me in the Far East.’ The handsome Ronald Colman face in the accompanying photographs wore a cheerless expression.

  Before returning to Australia, Syd and Angela leased a villa in Cap Ferrat on the south coast of France for six months. After that Syd went on to investigate a new flying career in East Africa (where he found his newly arrived friend Dick Hunt), but it was the beginning of the bloody Mau Mau uprising and there was no future to be found in East Africa. Soon he was back in Australia again. He put money into a wholly admirable building scheme for ex-servicemen in Sydney; and next he talked of opening a ski lodge. Then, when he was still only forty-three, on 16 November 1957, a car in which he was a passenger left the
road in the Snowy Mountains near Cooma, outside Canberra. Two friends were with him, one of them Pinky Wawn, his old flying mate, when the car somersaulted through a fence at 60mph. A surgeon told Angela there was a chance that an operation might save Syd, so somehow she found an old Avro Anson and flew with him to St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney. But Pinky Wawn was the only survivor.

  When we talked about it in her flat outside Sydney, under an old wall map of the Indian state of Cooch Behar where she’d first met Syd, Angela told me, ‘You see, I flew over the Hump, too. I flew CNAC with Syd from Calcutta to Shanghai. We lost an engine taking off from Kunming on the Shanghai leg. Great fun. Did you know we were married in the Anglican Cathedral in Shanghai? Honeymooned there for ten days in the Grand Hotel.’ She considered a short while. ‘I’ll tell you something. Syd always said he’d been born a hundred years too late, there were too many restrictions now. He’d have been an empire-builder. So much energy. So much “go”.’

  Later, Syd’s sister Eve said, ‘Of course, he should have stayed with Cathay. Of course.’

  I don’t know. I don’t think they could have held him. I see Sydney de Kantzow as Saint-Exupéry’s Rivière, but I see him too as F. Scott Fitzgerald saw Munroe Stahr in The Last Tycoon: ‘He had flown up very high to see, on strong wings, when he was young. And while he was up there he had looked on all the kingdoms, with the kind of eyes that can stare straight into the sun. Beating his wings tenaciously … he had stayed up there longer than most of us, and then, remembering all he had seen from his great height of how things were, he had settled gradually to earth again.’

  Syd was not a tycoon like Stahr. He was an expert flier and a pretty good organizer. He was liked and respected by most people who knew him well, disliked for a certain aloofness by others. Above all, he was an adventurer who, like the fictional Stahr, had the courage and vision to breathe life into a great enterprise. He lost that vision when others took on, with the best will in the world, the job of guiding it – it was not something a man like him could share. Perhaps in time those eyes that could stare straight into the Himalayan sun would have found a new path to follow, preferably in the air. But there was nothing for him in Africa, a housing project in Sydney, and then everything ended on that misjudged curve on the way to a ski lodge in the Snowy Mountains.

  CHAPTER 13

  In time Jock came to agree with Syd that to survive Cathay needed three DC-4s, not one. Later still he preferred the larger DC-6: ‘We really ought to have an aircraft that can do HK–Bangkok–Singapore–HK in twenty-two hours.’ The trouble was there was not enough money: all through the early and mid-fifties, a shortage of capital tormented him and threatened the existence of the airline. A diary entry for January 1951 said, ‘I am terribly worried and depressed about Air but cannot see daylight.’

  Despite the gloom, Cathay’s air operations, now depending on two DC-3s and the DC-4 (VR-HEU), continued apace. The single DC-4 Skymaster could take forty-three passengers and seemed to be everywhere at once, never out of the air. Her arrival had aroused considerable interest. When Captains John Presgrave and Dick Hunt inaugurated the Singapore flight, a reporter from the South China Morning Post who was aboard could barely contain himself: ‘The blue of the Gulf of Tonkin appeared to outshine the Mediterranean when I passed over it at 8,000 feet in the new Cathay Pacific Airways Skymaster….’ And in a gooey advertisement for the Saigon service, an unctuously smiling salesman announced, ‘That’s right, Sir – You get SKYMASTER COMFORT’. Vera Rosario hadn’t recalled much Skymaster comfort, but it turned out to be a popular plane with Chinese passengers: they felt safer with four engines than they had with two. Η. Η. Lee, Cathay’s (ex-CNAC) man in Singapore, a most important destination for Chinese businessmen, recalls: ‘The DC-4 called three times a week. HEU – How Easy Uncle. Everyone knew her – she was the only one we’d got! She’d leave Hong Kong in the early morning, touch down at Bangkok, and reach Singapore in the evening. Kai Tak had no night landing lights then, so the plane would take off from Singapore at 8 p.m., reach Bangkok at midnight, then leave at dawn for Hong Kong. We had a DC-3 from Rangoon and Calcutta, too. Our allies in ANA were running a scheduled service from Sydney to Singapore and Colombo, so Cathay from Hong Kong and ANA from Colombo met in Singapore and complemented each other.’

  That the use to which the Skymaster was put was extremely high no one knew better than the Cathay representative in the midway stopover, Bangkok. He was an unusual man with an unusual name, Duncan Bluck, and had come across to Air from Swires’ shipping offices in Tokyo, Kobe and Yokohama. He was to be decisively involved with Cathay for more than thirty years and end up as its Chairman.

  From an office in the Trocadero Hotel Bluck went out to meet VR-HEU, often in the middle of the night, marvelling that Cathay’s only Skymaster was in such hectic use. In such use, indeed, that a puzzled Chinese businessman who flew in her regularly once asked Duncan quite innocently how it was that Cathay Pacific seemed to be the only airline to give all their DC-4s the same registration letters. He would have asked the same question had he visited Borneo and seen VR-HEU on the strip at Jesselton, surrounded by Dusun chiefs in loincloths and hornbill feather headdresses. The China Mail described her as ‘overflying the world’s most exotic orchids, the home of the tapir, rhinos, the orang-utan. Such delicacies as birds’ nests can now be flown to Hong Kong in forty-eight hours.’ She certainly got about.

  Captain Laurie King saw a less romantic side of VR-HEU: ‘On the Singapore–Hong Kong run, the refuelling was done at Bangkok by the co-pilots themselves and usually at 2 a.m. and in pouring rain. Filling eight tanks in pouring rain was a feat requiring effort. You had to strain the fuel through a funnel with a chamois leather filter to keep the water out. It would take at least an hour in the rain. I had joined Cathay from BOAC where you always had ground staff to do such things. I was quite indignant!’ (At Saigon coolies would take the passengers’ dirty plates and wash them under the aircraft in an old tin bath. The toilets were emptied, too – on the grass.)

  The worry to Management in all this, of course, was pilot and metal fatigue – the wear and tear on men and machines all involved in trying to get the last ounce of employment out of a very modest fleet of aircraft. Some of it was self-induced. Granted that the first of the two days’ flying time on the Labuan run took nine hours fifty-three minutes, there was, according to Chic Eather, a purely frivolous reason for crew-fatigue after the overnight stop at the Shellbourne Hotel in Manila. This drab building was reputedly haunted by the ghosts of victims of the Kempeitai, the Japanese Gestapo. Any new and impressionable hostess would be fed this story ‘with the well-based expectation that she, after checking into her room, would soon appear at the door of the bravest member of the flight deck to be protected and comforted through the long dark night’.

  Captain Dave Smith, who would follow Laurie King as Operations Manager, recalls a ‘bad story’ – the case of Cathay’s Chief Pilot, Pat Moore, an old wartime flier, ‘having an engine fail during take-off from Singapore, another failure as he turned back, and on the final approach a third engine coughing and spluttering…. This was an overhaul problem.’ There were a good many examples of engine trouble in those days. Too many….

  In 1952 Dave Smith’s work hours read as follows:

  February 119 hours

  March 118 hours

  April 111 hours

  May 127 hours

  and so on until

  November 143 hours

  December 149 hours

  Sixty to seventy hours might be the average today.

  ‘I was single at the time,’ Dave says, ‘and we didn’t think of exhaustion. We had to have a medical, of course, after every hundred hours, so we’d call the doctor up:

  ‘“I’ve done over my time, doc.”

  ‘“Well, do you feel all right?”

  ‘“Oh, yes, doctor.”

  ‘“Very well, then.”’

  Jock’s diary at this period sounds a note of
despair:

  HEU’s engines are worn out and we can never hope to make CPA pay without another Skymaster…. Discussed CPA with Bill Knowles. The pilots are being grossly overdriven…. The engine trouble losses last month were staggering and a few more like it will bust us…. Very unsatisfactory telephone talk to Walsh [Holyman’s No. 2] in Melbourne. He clearly wants to pack up and won’t hire us engines to go on with. If we pack up we lose all….

  Oh, the headaches, the imponderables, the expense of Air! A man might lose his shirt.

  Cathay Pacific’s losses for 1951 were HK$1,492,381; three years later they added up to well over HK$2 million. ‘If this is not as good as we hoped for,’ B&S’s then-Chairman J. A. Blackwood blandly told his Annual General Meeting, with commendable restraint, ‘blame the severe restrictions which all countries in SE Asia place on the movement of Chinese.’ (The communist takeover in China was indeed a major reason for a drastic fall in passengers.) Jock could find comfort in a single positive factor: Cathay’s aircraft had acquired – and retained – an excellent reputation for punctuality.

  What was to be done? The future offered two options. Either Swires could wash their hands of Cathay Pacific entirely and shrink back with relief from the hurly-burly of Air to the calm, familiar world of shipping. Or they could continue in Air – acknowledging that to be able to do so depended on finding new capital, on improving flying conditions, on improving the company’s engineering and maintenance facilities at Kai Tak, and on buying bigger and better aircraft. It was all put succinctly by John Scott, Jock’s old friend and travelling companion: ‘We have now reached the point at which we must decide whether we are going to raise a pretty large sum of fresh capital for CPA or pack it in and get out while we still can get our money back.’ Scott admitted he was torn in two on this question, but thought that the purchase of a DC-6, larger than the DC-4 and pressurized, would give Cathay a lot of face in the whole Far Eastern world. And above all, he hated the idea of dropping the enterprise to which they had put their hands. To start something and then run away from it had not been The Senior’s way. Nor was it Jock’s.