Beyond Lion Rock

by Gavin Young

  As we approached the shoreline numerous natives could be seen running for their junk-type fishing boats which were tied up at anchor. We approached within a hundred yards to take full advantage of all the possible smoother water and the shoreline effect upon the sea. Take-off was made without incident, turning approximately 110 degrees to port during the initial run. This allowed full effective power on both engines by the time the aircraft straightened out on heading. Control and altitude response was obtained before firing the jato units. During the final run the aircraft was nursed over three major crests and then stayed airborne. The approaching formation was identified as USN Skyraiders and as we completed our take-off two of them broke formation and flew beside us. Needless to say we were greatly relieved. We set course for Hong Kong.

  There had been some anxiety that the Chinese might send yet more aircraft to disrupt the rescue, but Canton air control said that civilian aircraft could help with survivors, while warning that all military planes should leave the area immediately. To the last part of that message Captain Woodyard in his Grumman Albatross returned the most perfunctory of acknowledgements. Later in the day he landed with the survivors at Kai Tak and taxied in watched by a great throng of people, some of whom had had relatives aboard HEU but as yet had no firm news of who had survived and who had not. In fact a passenger from Bangkok, Miss Rita Cheong, who was badly hurt in the crash, died on the rescue plane. A great cry of anguish went up when only eight survivors were taken off; next day newspaper reports of the outrage and pictures of Valerie Parrish, aged six, being carried down the steps of Captain Wood yard’s plane started a furore that was not confined to the Colony, but spread to Westminster and Washington DC as well. ‘C.P.A. Airliner Outrage. Wanton Attack Made Without Slightest Warning’ was the South China Morning Post’s front page headline above Captain Phil Blown’s account of what had happened. The United States denounced the ‘brutal’ Chinese attack on VR-HEU that had killed three Americans and wounded three others, and almost at once two American Skyraiders and one Corsair from the aircraft carrier Philippine Sea shot down two Chinese fighters off the China coast, Admiral Felix B. Stump, the Commander-in-Chief of the US Pacific Fleet having warned everybody that the crews of his ships and aircraft had orders to be ‘quick on the trigger’. In London, Mr Anthony Eden told the House of Commons that the attack was ‘savage and inexcusable’ and the Opposition leader, Mr Clement Attlee, who most embarrassingly was to visit China the following month, repeated that it was ‘absolutely inexcusable’. However, the heat was taken out of the situation somewhat by prompt expressions of regret from Peking and an immediate promise to pay compensation and damages. It was a handsome apology, contained in a letter to the British Government from the Chinese Vice-Foreign Minister, and it read:

  According to the report received by our military authorities from Hainan Island, patrol aircraft of the People’s Republic of China, while carrying out patrol duties over Port Yulin on Hainan Island, encountered an aircraft of the Chiang Kai-shek gang in that area and fighting took place. Upon receiving this report, the Government of the People’s Republic of China undertook an investigation through various channels which revealed that the aircraft involved was actually a British-owned transport aircraft, mistaken by our patrol aircraft as an aircraft of the Kuomintang gang on a mission to raid our military base at Port Yulin. The occurrence of this unfortunate incident was indeed entirely accidental.

  The Central People’s government of the People’s Republic of China expresses its regret, and is taking appropriate measures in dealing with it; it extends its sympathy, concern and condolences to the dead and injured and to their relatives.

  The letter also made reference to the ‘easing of the international situation – through the recent Geneva Conference’ which had restored peace (temporarily) to Indo-China; and that perhaps is the reason why the Chinese were so quick off the mark with their regrets. Another aspect of the international scene at that time may well have contributed to the ‘unfortunate incident’. The Chinese letter referred to landings by Chiang’s secret agents on the coast of China, including Hainan, to the dropping of subversive pamphlets, in fact to a general campaign of harassment ‘to create tension in Asia’. Nerves were very much on edge. Remembrance of those half-forgotten times came back like a book read long ago as Phil Blown sat thirty years later under the blue gums near the sign saying ‘Road’s End’. Yes, the Chinese had reason to be nervous, he said—

  ‘The Americans used to run up and down the China coast, you know, looking. And the Chinese sent up planes to watch ’em. A hornets’ nest was being stirred up then from Taiwan, Swatow, all the way down to Haiphong nearly. The Yanks were dropping pamphlets in Chinese over southern China. General ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, the founder of OSS, America’s wartime spy outfit, was around there as ambassador in Bangkok and used to fly about in Curtiss Commandos of Civil Air Transport – CAT – the Nationalist Chinese line. The Chinese didn’t like all that. They were irritated, bloody irritated, and had been for some time.’

  I asked, ‘Were you and VR-HEU a little bit too close to Hainan for safety?’

  ‘Not really. We were well inside the international corridor. So it was they who encroached. And they thought, probably, that Cathay Pacific was CAT. And then they thought – “Ah, Donovan – there he is, the bastard.”’

  Mrs Blown came into the room with two more cans of beer. ‘They wanted to kill us all,’ Phil said. ‘If there’d been no survivors the Chinese pilots would never have admitted to their action. But compensation was paid. What happened to the pilots, God knows!’

  The morning of the attack, Bunty Blown had gone to work as usual at the Butterfield & Swire passenger department. ‘I thought that’s funny, no one’s talking to me. So I asked Marie Bok, “What’s up?” and she said, “Well, there’s been a plane lost. The flight from Bangkok.” Of course I knew Phil was on that flight.’

  ‘What did you do?’ I asked.

  ‘I went to the insurance office,’ she laughed. ‘No, not really. We weren’t insured for that sort of thing. But you know what Phil did later? He sent his watch to Switzerland, to the makers, complaining it had stopped at the time of the accident. Meant to be waterproof, after all. And he got a new one back!’

  In a letter to London, J. A. Blackwood, then Chairman of Cathay in Hong Kong wrote, ‘The behaviour of all concerned seems to have been in the highest tradition. Captain Blown’s effort in the manner of ditching and the saving of personnel has aroused the admiration of the flying world here.’ Blown was out and about, he added, with apparently only a cracked rib and a bruised nose. Cedric Carlton was not so mobile, with a sprained ankle and more serious bruising. Neither of them wanted special leave, and indeed they were both soon flying again.

  When it came to handing out rewards, a pleasant element of humour crept into the exchange between Swires’ senior executives. In the margin of Blackwood’s letter someone in the London office has pencilled: ‘Should we give them a memento?’ and a note from Jock adds: ‘I would like to but who to? A gold watch to Woodyear?’ Replying, Black wood suggested: ‘I think it would be a good gesture if CPA gave Captain Woodyard (not Woodyear) some tangible recognition of their appreciation. I doubt if a conventional watch would be of use to a member of the services. I should have thought that a salver, suitably inscribed, could find a place in his home now, although Captain woodyard personally might not see a great deal of it until he retires. I certainly cannot think of anything that an Air Force man would carry around with him.’

  In the event, Captain Woodyard received the Distinguished Flying Cross from the US Air Force and the salver proposed by Blackwood. It was engraved:

  To Captain Jack Thompson Woodyard, USAF

  In grateful recognition of his gallantry in AS-16,

  No. AF 1009 off Hainan Island, 23/7/54.

  Jock felt that instead of a company award, Blown and Carlton deserved something rather grander. Sure enough, dressed in their smartest shirt-sleeve or
der, the two heroes paraded about a year later before Hong Kong’s Governor, Sir Alexander Grantham, and before numerous distinguished guests he presented them with the Queen’s Commendation for Valuable Service in the Air.

  ‘It was a little bit of paper signed by Winston Churchill,’ Phil explained. ‘Not a gong, more a sort of shield you can stick on your lapel.’

  ‘Do you wear it?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, no, never,’ he said smiling.

  Bunty laughed. ‘And you can’t put QC after your name, can you?’

  ‘What did you get, Bunty? A kiss on the cheek from Sir Alexander?’

  ‘Oh, just a handshake. He was a dear old man, Grantham.’ She went into the bedroom to find the commendation.

  Phil Blown, stocky and dependable, looking more Cagney than ever, and as if nothing more exciting had occurred in his life than a sprained wrist playing croquet, told me, ‘I had one kidney torn away in that ditching. Yes, Ced and I were thrown forward very hard and then the deceleration tore the kidney away from its moorings. It took about a year to find out about it. They sewed it back eventually and I’ve been fine ever since.’ But I was wondering why he wasn’t dead.

  Bunty couldn’t find the Queen’s Commendation badge after all. We walked out to the short drive that led to the Road’s End sign. Jays and mynah birds screeched and whistled.

  ‘We’ve got foxes out here,’ Phil said, ‘and wombats.’

  ‘And six-foot snakes, parrots, cockatoos and nasty spiders,’ Bunty added. ‘I was relieved,’ she went on, ‘when Phil “swallowed the prop” [pilots’ slang for ‘retire’] in 1961. Flying took him away so much. We had a son to educate here.’ We looked at the countryside beyond the trees. ‘There’ll be a four-lane highway here some day, but not for twenty years. That’s how slowly things work in Australia.’ Light rain was beginning to fall and Bunty held out a hand to catch the drops.

  *

  Strange to relate, the Hainan tragedy had a silver lining as far as Cathay Pacific’s future was concerned. Dave Smith believes it was a ‘turning point’, that the tremendous publicity had the effect of a particularly good advertisement. The reason for that, of course, was the heroism. For a time Phil Blown’s performance was one of the smaller wonders of the world.

  As for the compensation promised by the Government of China, Cathay handed in a bill for £251,400 which the Chinese promptly paid to the British Government. Inexplicably, Cathay got only £175,000 on account, and the Foreign Office took until the following year to make the final payment. The ‘brutal’ Chinese had moved faster.

  In operational terms, however, the loss of HEU came as a staggering blow. Fresh capital might be in the offing, but how could Cathay continue to operate for the next few weeks without planes – that was the urgent question. At this late hour, could the airline carry on with only two DC-3s? Clearly not. A replacement for HEU had to be found without delay.

  Luckily Jock, as we have seen, had found a new friend on his trip to Canada. ‘HEU was shot down 24.7.54,’ he noted in his diary, ‘and we cabled Grant McConachie in Vancouver “We have no aeroplanes can you help us”. He leased us a DC-4 Skymaster VH-HFF at once.’ Jock Swire, Grant McConachie, Ivan Holyman and Sydney de Kantzow – as Jock had pondered earlier, they all fell for each other at first sight: adventurers in the same mould. Jock’s character once more had saved a dangerous situation from deteriorating into a fatal one.

  The new DC-4 arrived three weeks after the loss of HEU. Cathay first leased it, then bought it from McConachie’s Canadian Pacific Airlines. It was not the most immaculate Skymaster in the world. Initial trouble caused grave concern to Jack Gething, Cathay’s Chief Engineer, when one after the other three of its engines had to be replaced by HEU’s spares. But soon it was standing up well to the eighty hours a week required of it.

  But that was not enough; VH-HFF only took Cathay back to where things had been just before HEU’s shooting down: on the point of acquiring a DC-6. Accordingly Ivan Holyman, passing through the United States in November, succeeded in buying from Pan American–Grace Airways in Miami the DC-6 on which Jock had set his sights. The price of US$1,225,000 included all spares, two spare Double Wasp engines and the training costs for two crews. Holyman was assisted in this purchase by Jack Gething and Captain Kenneth Steele. Steele flew the new DC-6 to Hong Kong with Phil Blown, now an international hero, as co-pilot. Also aboard were Engineer Jack Williams and Flight Hostess Vera Rosario, whom we saw earlier bouncing about serving tea and sandwiches over the Australian outback in the DC-3s flown by Syd’s ‘pirates’ in CPA’s earliest days. Jack and Vera had recently married.

  CHAPTER 15

  Even after the agonizing decision to acquire a DC-6 had been taken, Cathay still had to run very fast to keep up with the Joneses of aviation. While the heart-searching over Hong Kong Airways, the doubts of future profitability, the debate over whether to pack up or be bold and risk money on a bigger aircraft had been dragging on, the jet age had been approaching Hong Kong like a meandering but relentless typhoon – and suddenly it arrived.

  On 12 September 1958, before an applauding audience of VIPs, Sir Robert Black, the Governor of Hong Kong, bundled his wife and daughters into a helicopter that promptly took off and ceremoniously severed a ribbon stretched across the impressive new runway at Kai Tak. It was 8,350 feet in length, long enough to accommodate any aeroplane flying or likely to fly in the foreseeable future. Chinese firecrackers sparked and fizzed in celebration of a new era and, as if to demonstrate the sort of future the new runway heralded, a four-engined BOAC Comet 4 jet took the Governor’s party up for a bird’s-eye view of the Colony. Cathay for its part could only launch an old DC-3 and the new DC-6. But thank heavens for the DC-6.

  Perhaps past adventures, Burma, the takeover of HKA and the recital of other events in Cathay’s young life have obscured its still puny size. Even by 1955 Captain Pat Moore, the Company’s flamboyant Irish Operations Manager, was sending directives intended for his senior flying staff to no more than fifteen pilots, including his Flight Superintendent, Captain Ken Steele. They were: Captains Phil Blown, Pat Armstrong, Dave Smith, Geoff Leslie, John Carrington, Laurie King, G. D. A. Rignall, G. V. Renwick (he retired in 1956), John Warne, Chic Eather, Cedric Carlton, B. G. Hargreaves (who joined Qantas in 1965), L. J. Kloster (ditto) and Norman Marsh.

  Even if you add eight or nine First Officers and a small handful of Radio Officers, Moore’s Merry Men were still a relatively cosy band. Change was in the offing.

  At the severing of that ceremonial ribbon by Sir Robert Black, the knell sounded for days like the one on which Ken Steele, piloting a DC-6 into Kai Tak in pelting rain and with no windscreen wipers, skidded blindly with brakes full on to stop against the fence round the RAF compound and heard his co-pilot murmur, ‘Go through the fence, Ken. There’s a hospital there.’* And for moments like the one when grand old Captain Pat Moore replied to someone’s grouse that he was barely skimming the rocky hills between the Kowloon Police Station and the old Kai Tak runway: ‘Well, I’m not hitting ’em, am I?’ It seemed that a more grown-up world had suddenly arrived. A good thing in its way, but sad, like the loss of childhood. Actually the new runway had been opened prematurely, fifteen days before the formal ceremony, because a USAF Skymaster had gone up in smoke (no casualties) on the old one. So the first pilot to touch down on the 8.350-foot innovation was a Philippine Airlines captain called Manuel Conde, who burbled excitedly to reporters that it was ‘beautiful, smooth and straight’. (It would have been strange if it had been anything else.) A year later Kai Tak took another step into the modern world. Cathay’s DC-3 Nikki flew in after dark: Hong Kong’s airport was declared open for night operations at last.

  *

  Cathay’s DC-6 had attracted favourable attention when the company added it to its all-Douglas fleet. The Hong Kong press called the new aircraft ‘sleek’ and ‘extremely smooth’, and when, like the Skymaster, it began a direct, non-stop service between Hong Kong and Singapore, lea
ving the Colony at sunset and taking off from Singapore at around midnight, businessmen were delighted by its greater speed and the newly installed sleeping berths. An advertising slogan – ‘Be specific … fly Cathay Pacific’ – was invented (inspired no doubt by the ‘Don’t be vague … ask for Haig’ ads) to promote the all-night service. It was nicknamed the ‘Midnight Special’ – although flight crews swiftly dubbed it the ‘Midnight Horror’ owning to the absence aboard of even elementary navigational aids, coupled with the exhausting all-night flying and the prevalence of thunderstorms.

  Since the early days of the DC-4 the Cathay flights had caught the imagination of the itinerant Overseas Chinese – and for this Η. Η. Lee in Singapore can take much credit. ‘Luckily,’ he said later, ‘with my CNAC experience in China I had very good connections. Before 1947 CNAC had connected South China and Hong Kong. CPA had flown second-generation Chinese from the Straits Settlements to Hong Kong, and from there they visited their native villages. They were energetic in Malaya, and some got rich and went home to show off their nice suits or to get a bride, to build a house or a temple and then return to the Straits. For a time from 1949, Overseas Chinese still harboured the idea that China would be much the same – only a change of government, even if it is Communist. Well, of course, they were disappointed. But in the early days we tried to develop the Overseas Chinese trade.