by Gavin Young
‘We could give lots of help to Chinese – some had no passports, only Certificates of Identity. There were forms to be filled in, permits, landing cards, customs forms, immigration forms – all in English. We helped with the language. I was always out at the airport helping our passengers. BOAC made people handle all these strange, unfamiliar matters themselves, and in a foreign language. BOAC’s air hostesses were all English and English-speaking. We slowly built up our reputation as Asians. We had oriental food, hostesses speaking every Asian language. So even when BOAC introduced faster planes than us – they had Britannias when we had the DC-6, and later they had 707s when we had Electras – Chinese and other Asian passengers were happy to take a longer time flying with us. We were better known to them. We flew the merchants whose goods travelled in our ships all through the region. Then in 1960 tourism began in quite a big way, too.’
Beavering away in the Ocean Building office or speeding back and forth to Singapore Airport, Lee was often encouraged, as so many other Cathay employees were, by the sight of the formidable though avuncular figure of Jock Swire dropping in for a visit. ‘His suitcase was always tied up with string,’ he told me.
This airline appealed to Asian governments and national airlines for an even more basic reason than those which Η. Η. Lee mentioned. Paul Jurgensen, a Danish ex-fighter pilot, a hard-headed veteran of the Biafran war and a down-to-earth character who became Cathay’s South East Asian Regional Manager in the 1980s, believes that because of Jock’s strict and perhaps old-fashioned standards of straight dealing, the airline became particularly well respected in Singapore from the word go. ‘We were considered upright and honest – and in Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew’s rather puritanical “rugged society” state that is appreciated.’ At first even Jurgensen, before he joined Cathay, thought ‘the Swire business was weird’. He found it hard to grasp that, with them, a handshake really was final. ‘Such a thing,’ he believes, ‘is not only honest, it is unique. Particularly,’ he glowers, ‘when you consider that the airline industry is a bunch of pirates!’ After Lee’s technically go-ahead little island split with Malaysia in 1965, Singapore created its own excellent airline; relations with Cathay, which might have been strained by competition, remained extremely cordial.
Meanwhile, Captain Bob Howell (with Lyell Louttit) took the first DC-6 charter to London, flying into Gatwick on a drizzly Saturday in November and expecting to be met by Jock Swire in person. Instead, in the freezing wind, a Cathay secretary sweetly handed him a note that read, ‘Welcome, Captain Howell – You should know better than to arrive at 3.30 on a Saturday during the fox-hunting season!’
The DC-6B that joined the Cathay fleet soon after was a sort of milestone – the first brand-new aircraft bought direct from the manufacturer. It was equipped with radar, and both planes usefully filled a gap and attracted passengers. The DC-6B did more – it pioneered the Hong Kong–Taipei–Tokyo route newly acquired after HKA’s absorption into Cathay. But the DC-6s were already something of an anachronism – the new Kai Tak runway and the symbolic presence of the Comet showed that. A Brave New World had arrived, and with Pan Am’s transatlantic crossing by 707 jet the time had come to switch to something more up-to-date than piston engines.
That did not mean that little Cathay should rush headlong into the world of pure jets. Propjets were quite a new phenomenon and modern enough for now. But which ones? Dave Smith said later, ‘There was always a patriotic compulsion to buy British aircraft. But the fact was British aircraft didn’t suit us. We had to have a plane that could hold fuel in case of emergency – say, flying Bangkok to Hong Kong, there had to be the possibility of diverting to Manila. We looked at the British Comet 4, but it still hadn’t been cleared for civilian flying, and it had a record then that the public rather shied away from (though, of course, BOAC flew them again quite successfully). So we chose the Lockheed Electras – American planes. Two of them, in fact.’
Don Delaney, an experienced engineer, was quite sure the Electras were a much better choice than the British alternative, the short-range Vickers Viscounts and Vanguards. ‘Electras flew like dreams,’ he said, ‘and handled like fighters.’
Dave Smith who was later to become the company’s Operations Manager, brought Cathay’s first Electra into a perfect landing at Kai Tak on 14 April 1959 after the 8,500-mile flight from Burbank, California, in under twenty-six hours. ‘A most forgiving aircraft,’ he thought. The Electra entered service ten days later. With her spacious interior arranged to accommodate sixty-six Economy and twelve First Class passengers on the Hong Kong–Bangkok–Singapore route, her turbines smooth and quiet with a top speed of 450mph, she gave Far Eastern passengers their first taste of a fast, luxurious flight and became an immediate favourite. The second Electra flew into Kai Tak three months later with Phil Blown, hero of Hainan Island, at the controls. They were the first two such planes built at Burbank, and all at once the Cathay fleet had reached an impressive level both in quality and numbers of aircraft: one DC-3, one DC-4, one DC-6, one DC-6B, and two Electras.
In quick succession, and with much flourish and fanfare from the press of the entire region, Cathay opened up three more major routes with their smart new planes – one of the Electras inaugurated a regular weekly service to Tokyo; the DC-6B started a bi-weekly service to Calcutta; and, most thrilling of all, the second Electra kicked off a new service to Sydney – the fastest of any airline by more than seven hours. Each of these inaugural flights was a wonderful party. Cathay Pacific’s Chairman, Bill Knowles, and Duncan Bluck, now Cathay’s young and dynamic Commercial Manager, scattered invitations to as many important people from the countries involved – politicians, show business stars, journalists and big businessmen – as they could safely load aboard, and with the collaboration of Jo Cheng, the company’s Hostess Supervisor, made sure they were pampered unmercifully.
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In spite of these successes, on 18 February 1960 Jock Swire was moved to write a deeply troubled appraisal of Cathay’s situation. To have achieved Cathay’s first regular scheduled service Down South in the footsteps of Syd and Roy by breaking a record added a spectacular feather in the Company’s cap, but it also represented a break out from the regional image Jock was convinced was the right one and which Cathay had created for itself and adhered to up to now, and from this sprang trouble.
Australia had its own national airline, Qantas, one of the giant international flag-carriers, and its directors were a very suspicious bunch who looked askance at ambitious upstarts like Cathay if they began to show signs of getting too big for their boots. Even though, as everyone knew, Cathay Pacific was the British-owned airline designated by Her Majesty’s Government to fly the Hong Kong–Sydney route and therefore fully entitled to do so, it looked to some people in Qantas almost like a marauding raid into private territory. Australian hostility was further increased by the fact that a project to charter a Qantas Super Constellation aircraft to Malayan Airways for use on their Singapore–Hong Kong run was being bitterly opposed by Cathay, on the grounds that once Qantas had its foot in that door with its own Superconnie – no matter in whose name the plane was flying – it would never withdraw it. The Hong Kong–Singapore service was Cathay’s bread and butter: no one at Butterfield & Swire was prepared to sit back and watch the crafty Aussies worm their way by stealth into a trade that, though a mere sideshow to an intercontinental airline like Qantas, was of vital importance to the existence of Cathay.
This time Jock’s sudden anxiety for the future was unlike earlier bursts of soul-searching. Now the question was not ‘To be or not to be?’ but ‘Where are we going – and why?’ No one, since the influx of new capital and the modernization of the fleet, had talked any more of ‘liquidation’, of packing up Air and fleeing back to shipping. As Don Delaney put it later, ‘Cathay took off with the Electras. It was sink or swim after that.’ And to continue swimming two new elements had, all of a sudden, to be taken into account. These were, first, the hostility
of Qantas and, second, the arrival in the Far East of the age of the pure jet, a good deal quicker than expected. These two elements combined to discomfort a Cathay Pacific still lacking somewhat in self-confidence.
Cathay had proudly started their swift, smooth Electra service to Sydney on 23 July 1959. Five months later Duncan Bluck reported to Jock that Qantas had responded with their Sydney–Hong Kong Electra service – and Qantas flew three times a week to Cathay’s once.
‘We must now compete,’ Bluck warned, ‘with a well-established operator with three times our frequency and with identical equipment.’ That was one development. Bluck signalled sombre indications of another: ‘I understand Jardines have been asked to prepare for the handling of Qantas’s Boeing 707s in Hong Kong by June 1960.’ Duncan Bluck had already reported that Pan-American was starting to fly 707s four times a week to Europe via Bangkok and Tokyo, two important Cathay ‘ports’, and Jock had pencilled his comment in the report’s margin: ‘This might hurt us quite a lot.’ Now if Qantas was to introduce pure jet Boeing 707s – planes much bigger and faster than Cathay’s propjet Electras – between Sydney and Hong Kong….
With more than its new Australian route gravely at risk, Cathay now launched a strenuous diplomatic effort to woo Qantas into a much more friendly frame of mind. There wasn’t much time – Qantas was the first to get American jets, and was already crossing the Pacific in 707s and flying them to London on the ‘Kangaroo Route’ too. In a meeting in Sydney with Qantas’s Vice-Chairman Bill Taylor, its Chief Executive C. O. Turner, and Commercial Manager A. F. Foster, John Browne, CPA’s Managing Director in Hong Kong, spelled out Cathay’s ideas on cooperation rather than confrontation. He said that a Qantas jet service to Hong Kong would have serious consequences on Cathay’s business and that, as Qantas and Cathay were the only operators on the Hong Kong–Sydney route, the continued use of Electras would result in a sounder economic return than to have a race for speed.
Cedric Turner replied for Qantas. According to John Browne, he was both ‘offensive and evasive’. He had already publicly stated that Qantas would do its damnedest to ‘run Cathay off the Sydney route’, a remark that got back to Jock Swire who told friends that Qantas’s hatred for Cathay appeared to be ‘quite psychotic’. All Turner would say to Browne was that Qantas must have jets in the Far East, but that for technical reasons they were unlikely to be operational to Hong Kong until 1962. However, he added that if equipment became available Qantas would certainly introduce the 707s earlier than that. He carelessly brushed away Browne’s suggestion that Qantas and Cathay should agree on pooling, or sharing, the Hong Kong–Sydney route.
Turner certainly seemed to have set his mind on the destruction of Cathay’s attempts to expand southwards, even though Cathay had every legal right to be there. Turner was an odd bird. A clever, even brilliant, operator, he treated Qantas’s founder-President Hudson Fysh, at this late period in Fysh’s life, as if he were a superannuated fuddy-duddy who should have retired a decade before. He could be outrageously outspoken, after a few drinks too many. ‘He had extraordinary habits,’ says someone who worked with him in Qantas. ‘He’d slump at dinner, his head half an inch from his plate. The drill was to ignore this if you could, because after an hour or so, he’d look up, rub his nose and go on as if nothing had happened.’
The task of interpreting whether or not Qantas was really ready to come to terms with Cathay was complicated by conflicting reassurances from Turner’s colleagues on the Qantas Board, who spent a good deal of time trying to cover up for this ‘ruthless and egotistical individual’, as one Cathay director described Turner. Bill Taylor might soothe John Browne by telling him that Turner had no business to express publicly a desire to ‘run Cathay out’, that it was not the policy of the Qantas Board to do any such thing. A Qantas director who was also a well-known aviator, Robert Law-Smith, confirmed this, privately assuring another Cathay emissary that ‘the Board tells Cedric Turner what to do’, not vice versa. Yet what was one to make of another statement by Taylor that such a view was ‘strictly for the birds’. Or of the strongly expressed opinion of yet another senior Qantas man who insisted with startling conviction, ‘Turner is the real power. Qantas is spelt T-U-R-N-E-R.’ Significantly, whatever they thought of Cedric Turner, none of these Qantas directors would go so far as to agree to a pooling arrangement for the Hong Kong–Sydney route; nor did they promise that Qantas would keep its 707 jets off that route.
Law-Smith, intentionally or not, probably put his finger on one important cause of Turner’s rooted antagonism for Cathay when he told Browne that he wouldn’t trust Reg Ansett of ANA ‘across the room’ – Ansett who had succeeded Ivan Holyman on the Board of Cathay. When he was not upcountry shooting crocodiles, Ansett was formidably ambitious, regarded by everyone in Qantas as all set to take any opportunity to spread abroad at Qantas’s expense. Because of the ANA shareholding in Cathay, Law-Smith confessed that no one much trusted Cathay either. When Browne protested that Butterfield & Swire ran its own business even if people like Ansett and BOAC had money in Cathay, Law-Smith shrugged, almost pityingly, that air business was getting ‘too big and tough for shipping people’ – a thought that had worried Jock in the past.
Ambitious or not, Ansett for his part told Browne that he considered Bill Taylor and Robert Law-Smith ‘straight and fair’. The hope persisted in Hong Kong and London that Qantas would restrict its use of Boeing 707s to their Sydney–Manila–Tokyo run (on which it was fighting off over-the-Pole competition from a KLM pure jet service) and leave the Electras, with which Cathay could compete, flying between Sydney and Hong Kong.
But Cedric Turner got his way. It was not his habit to announce his intentions in advance – Duncan Bluck had complained bitterly that, whereas Cathay always had the courtesy to inform Qantas of its intentions (for example, to add a second flight each week to Sydney), it only learned of any new Qantas move after the event and from press reports. As late as 29 August 1961, after lunching with Bluck at the Hong Kong Club, Jock noted in his diary, ‘I am disturbed to discover how nebulous and unsubstantiated the rumour that Qantas are putting Boeings on HK–Sydney apparently is. We must know definitely what their intention is.’ He didn’t have to wait long.
In November Qantas replaced its Electras on the Hong Kong run with the far superior Boeing 707s. That was the end of Cathay. The same month Chic Eather flew the last Cathay Electra out of Sydney. Des Cooper, who moved to Cathay in Sydney from Qantas, thinks ‘It was a terrible blow when Qantas’s 707s drove us off the route. But we actually made a very small effort in Sydney – although most of the Hong Kong to Sydney trade was generated from there. We had one little office – me and a secretary. Chester Yen, Cathay’s Sales Manager and Bluck’s No. 2, tried to talk that delightful chap Bill Knowles into having a full-time ticketing office in Sydney. But no.’ Cathay Pacific leased their rights to the route to BOAC, and the Company was not to return to the Australian route for thirteen years.
The Qantas–Cathay bitterness did not last. Jock even envisaged a possible association with the Australian airline and contemplated giving a seat on Cathay’s Board to Bob Law-Smith, whom he found ‘a really delightful chap. Pleasant and interesting.’
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With the experience of the tussle with Qantas in mind, Jock thought it was high time for Cathay to clear its head and take a cool, steady look at the future. ‘We have now reached yet another crossroads in the history of Cathay,’ he wrote. As he saw it, Cathay had two choices. It could go on expanding and keeping pace with the equipment used by the major trunk lines with all their subsidies and government support. Alternatively it could get back to ‘our proper regional function’ of giving the best possible service with the best possible aircraft – plus, when aircraft were available, long-range chartering.
The first choice was the path that Jock personally mistrusted, and he thought he saw Cathay drifting down it. He had warned constantly against expansion and would continue to do so for many yea
rs to come, believing that trying to keep up with the Big Boys of aviation would undoubtedly require capital far beyond Swires’ means and would eventually lead to losing control of the company – to (say) BOAC, Qantas or ANA – in the search for that capital. He rejected the argument that the whole trend of modern life was for combines to get bigger and bigger and that the little man could never survive this irreversible trend. ‘We are not the “little man”,’ he snorted. ‘And we have got powerful friends.’ Even so, it would be no good just barging blindly ahead and increasing the number of flights on the Sydney and Tokyo runs, for instance, with all the necessary groundwork, unless Cathay was prepared to face up to the natural consequences of doing so.
The second, however, was comfortably within Cathay’s own limited but slightly increased resources. It would enable Swires to retain the Company’s independence and the family’s control of it. It might conceivably avoid the need to switch to those expensive pure jets: if Cathay could hold on for four or five years, the big trunk lines with their superjets would to some extent be overflying Cathay’s area, and for that reason would be only too pleased to have Cathay keeping the regional pot boiling below them.
Jock had thought about how Cathay’s regional routes might be pruned and improved. ‘We might sacrifice Hong Kong/Sydney and Hong Kong/Tokyo. We might abandon Calcutta and exploit Borneo a good deal more, as also perhaps Jakarta. The stopping service Taipeh/Okinawa/Korea and Japan is regional and perhaps worth retaining. Hong Kong/Singapore must at all costs be maintained.’ For all this it would be essential for the next four or five years to have the best equipment in the region – though not in the world. The two Electras should be able to hold their own for that long.
Whither Cathay Pacific? Small, regional, cosy – or big-time, intercontinental, de luxe? Who in the early sixties would have enjoyed making that decision?
‘It seems to me,’ Jock ended, ‘that no time should be lost in making up our minds which of these two roads our long-range policy should follow.’