Posted by John Wilson on September 14, 2000 at 13:49:00 from wakefield-cacheflow.itnet.co.nz:
In Reply to: Re: Arthur Ransome and Thailand (Siam)- shipping services and the elephant flag posted by Andrew Craig-Bennett on September 11, 2000 at 07:57:45:
When the Wild Cat sinks the S & A’s are “plumb in the track of steamers” and could expect to be “picked up by a liner” - until the storm (ML ch 2,3)! They were going from the hundredth port (in the Philipines?) to the Treaty port of Swatow, now Shantou.
World travel by ship was the norm until the sixties, but (relatively) fast luxury flying boats were in regular service from the late thirties (although the British and German luxury airships R101 and Hindenburg crashed).
In 1940 New Zealand got two new air services to Britain: by Short flying boats across the Tasman then by Quantas and Imperial Airways via Australia and the Far East; or by the 40 ton Boeing “Clipper” flying boats of Pan American via Honululu and San Francisco. The Pan Am trans-Pacific service to China started c1936, as dramatised in the 1936 Humphrey Bogart film “China Clipper”.
Nöel Coward gave several New Zealand concerts in January 1941 (see his “Future Indefinite”), then left Auckland by the weekly Pan Am “Clipper” for Hawaii, with stops at New Caledonia and Canton Island. The Pan Am hotel on Canton was not the ramshackle bamboo guest-house he expected but a luxury hotel with private showers and a chromium cocktail bar! He wrote a short story "Mr and Mrs Edgehill" based on the British couple who kept the British flag flying there.