-ME ROSE L.5 Tons. Eny.
CONFISH
TA1/240/1
N
Foreign Office/Commonwealth Office,
King Charles Street,
#.W.1.
10 February, 1967
I am writing with reference to the permitimate paragraph of your letter 2/4:03 of 21 January, about Mr. Maxwell's vinit, in which you raise the question of the establishment and financing of a U.K. Information effort in Hong Kong.
2. Before passing on to detailed points I should like to express our gratitude for what you did for #r, Harwell in the face of obvious difficulties, You may care to have the enclosed copy of the message which he addressed to the Commonwealth Secretary from Singapore.
3. We bad in fact already been giving sympathetie consideration to the proposals contained in the annex to your letter (8/5/1) to John Heath of 15 Tecember on the British Information effort in Hong Kong. We can approve thead in principle. The D.S.A.0. will be writing to give you authority to engage a Commercial Assistant (Information) from the begining of the next financial
year.
b. We should be grateful if you would obtain three competitive tenders for the printing or the proposed bulletin, as is required by the regulations of the stationery Office on whose Vote this expenditure will have to be borne, and would send us a firm estimate of the cost of its production and distribution during the next financial year, in order that we my arrange for this to be fitted into E.. .O's budget.
E,
One suggestion made here was that instead of produsing your own bulletin you should rely on distribution of copies of the Singapore "Industrial Fritain”. We assume that you have thought of this and concluded that such an arrangement would be either unsatisfactory, *.g. beamuse its contents would not always be appropriate to Hong Kong or because of a time lag, or else that there would be no real saving as against production of your own publication. Another suggestion was that it would really be preferable to produce a scries of individual items for distribution to the individuals or firma interested in these particular items rather than a general bulletin. No doubt you will cover these points in your reply.
V. P. Hannam, F'sq.,
issioner
British rade Commissioner,
KONG KONG.
../3.
RECEIVED IN ARCHIVES NO.63
16 FEDO
Hina 13/2