Read Online Beyond Lion Rock: The Story of Cathay Pacific Airways by Gavin Young - Free Book Online

then, when we have established our markets, we will do most of our hauling by our own ships and fly in only urgently needed medical equipment and supplies.’ So the ghosts of that long-dead entrepreneur of the Spanish–American War days and his long-dead ships still hovered.
    On 28 February, Farrell and Russell set off for the first time from Sydney to Shanghai. A Sunday Telegraph journalist along for the trip enthusiastically reported at the end of it: ‘Thirty-three hours flying time out from Sydney, Australia’s first overseas air freight service delivered three-and- a-half tons of Australian goods for Shanghai – and sold them all in six hours!’ The flight up to China covered a span of the recent Pacific War: Cloncurry, then bomb-battered, fly-blown Darwin; on to tropical Morotai in the Dutch Halamaheras, where jungle had recaptured an American wartime base save for a single red mud and gravel strip; to Leyte in the Philippines, then on to Manila (almost completely destroyed by American bombing) and thence to a Hong Kong still recovering from the shock of occupation, dilapidated but British once more, and desperate for trade.
    ‘The American ex-Army fliers were offered high prices,’ the Sunday Telegraph man wrote, ‘to unload their freight at Manila and Hong Kong, but they had already contracted for Shanghai deliveries.’ In Shanghai itself, he reported, there had so far been American and British deliveries of UN refugee relief aid and petrol, but little else. The market therefore seemed wide open for Farrell’s woollens. ‘Old traders are tipping that China will probably be divided into three main trading spheres – Russia will dominate Manchuria, America will control the rich Yangtze Valley with Shanghai and Hangkow as entry ports, while Britain will control the south through Hong Kong….’ In these predictions Mao Tse-tung was not mentioned. Although the proclamation that henceforth China would be known as the People’s Republic was only three and a half years away, the wise ‘old traders’ of Shanghai had nothing to tell the Sunday Telegraph about a communist threat.
    One photograph in particular of Roy Farrell taken at that time reflects his realization of the region’s commercial possibilities. It is the one from which I recognized him at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport forty years later, the spirit of ‘up, up and away’ personified. And Betsy is shining brightly, no longer a drab little army work-horse anonymous behind her military number NC58093: a newly painted logo on her aluminium fuselage – a big circle enclosing the flags of Australia, America and Chiang’s China with a kangaroo bounding in the top left-hand corner and a laughing green dragon bottom right – boasts of her new civilian identity. ‘Bound for China,’ the caption proclaimed. At that moment did Farrell remember the casual suggestion of the old friend in New York’s Lexington Hotel – ‘Pappy, why don’t you buy an aeroplane?’. If so, those words must have seemed to him like something spoken in heaven.
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    Cash flowed in. The air cargoes of woollen goods from Australia sold out in Shanghai in no time. It was like throwing fish to hungry seals and, as Farrell pointed out to his suddenly prosperous partners, ‘$70,000 clear for seven or eight days’ flying is not bad.’ Indeed, in those days it was very big money – so big that after only a couple of deliveries it was possible to expand the organization. More aircraft, more managers – and more pilots to free Farrell and Russell to cope with burgeoning paperwork. When Millard Nasholds, another old American comrade-in-arms from CNAC days, asked Farrell if he could come in, Farrell said ‘Sure’, and put ‘Nash’ in charge of a rented staff house and a new branch office in Manila. The air shuttle of passengers (largely Chinese) between Manila and Hong Kong had become another money-spinner.
    Then something of the greatest importance happened. Syd de Kantzow