Free Beyond Lion Rock: The Story of Cathay Pacific Airways by Gavin Young Page A

selling price Australia’. Something of the haywire element of the whole venture comes into focus in a long, peppy letter from Roy Farrell himself during a recce of the China market. Typed in slapdash fashion on the (second-hand) Shanghai office Remington and addressed to ‘Dear Bob and Syd’, it reveals the warmth of Roy’s easy-going character that was itself vital to the success of the enterprise. The letter reads, in part:
    Here is some of the latest ‘gen’ in Shanghai.
1. We have purchased another C-47, price $ 11,000. It has 2 good motors, full radio equipment, good instruments etc….
2. Our Chinese (maintenance) crew is more on the ball than ever….
4. Vickie is married. The reason I know is that Ged Brown says she hasn’t called him the last few days so she must be married.
5. We have submitted a letter to UNRRA [United Nations Refugee Relief Agency] offering our willingness to charter a C-47 to them …
10. The sun refuses to shine …
11. Customs stopped us from going in or out…. But this afternoon decided to let us leave. Coming back is discussed in the next chapter …
13. Business here is still OK, but the market on woollens (women’s) is beginning to fall off …
19. I think Ged Brown has worms …
20. Angie is missing Syd an awful lot.
     
    It ends: ‘Love and kisses, Roy.’
    *
    Syd had already rented office space in Chater Road, and the company also opened a passenger ticket office (it was a desk opening on to the lobby) at the Peninsula Hotel – visible signs of the mutually agreed division of powers in the Farrell–de Kantzow partnership.
    The separation of the almost wholly American-owned Roy Farrell Export-Import Company from its aviation department was first foresshadowed in a most significant report from Neil Buchanan in Hong Kong. The report refers to a ‘successful’ meeting he had had with Mr A. J. R. Moss, Hong Kong’s Director of Civil Aviation, ‘over a cup of tea and abottle of whisky’. The subject of the meeting was one of critical importance – namely, the immediate necessity for the company’s air operations to be registered in British Hong Kong if they were to be allowed to continue using it as a base.
    Buchanan wrote:
    As regards air ops. into and out of the Colony, that is very definitely on the up and up…. I have been given full approval for as many flights as we can make – subject to British registration of aircraft, the only basis on which we would be allowed to operate . When Betsy is due for re-registration, Moss is going to let me know if we may continue with a US registration.
     
    The italics are mine: the crisis was Farrell’s.
    Betsy, as much as Farrell, Russell, Nasholds and Geddes Brown, was, in her inanimate way, an American citizen. But Hong Kong was most emphatically British, and this insistence on the plane’s British registration by the British Civil Aviation Authority in British Hong Kong was a decisive element in the emergence of an independent Farrell–de Kantzow aviation venture in the Far East and, later, of the much bigger and wholly British version of it.
    Both men saw quite plainly how desirable an operating base in Hong Kong rather than Shanghai would be. You had only to look at a map and it stood out a mile: Hong Kong was the region’s very heart. It was a bit of a wreck, but it was also delightfully free of the political torment that so racked mainland China. And there was another pressing reason for giving up Shanghai as a principal base for air operations. The question of forming a Chinese airline was much in the minds of Chinese businessmen in Shanghai, and one in particular looked enviously at Roy Farrell’s success: his name was T. C. Loong, a most powerful man in Chiang Kai-shek’s China who was later to found another airline, Civil Air Transport (CAT), in Taipeh. Loong offered to buy Farrell’s air operation and when Farrell demurred he turned nasty in retaliation. Farrell’s planes faced arrest each time they landed in