No, the first block in the fork needed to be > 1MB. But it also changed the format, so they dropped all pending transactions from the mempool. ViaBTC did mine

No, the first block in the fork needed to be > 1MB. But it also changed the format, so they dropped all pending transactions from the mempool. ViaBTC did mine the first bcash block, but it was rejected because it was too small! Someone had to figure out the problem and stuff a block so it could make progress.