PERSONAL & CONFIDENTIAL 2.
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to the availability of staff, to the requirements of industry and above all to the part which industry itself is prepared to play.
Secondly as a gesture in the context of the Defence Contribution the proposal was I am afraid, for your personal information, rather a flop. Indeed it is possible that it was actually counter-productive, being interpreted as a mere manoeuvre which displayed an under-estimate of both the acumen and depth of feeling of the Unofficial Members. This is
unfortunate, and perhaps I should have foreseen this reaction more clearly and gone a bit slow in disclosing the offer: but I felt at the time I could not very well do this.
Finally, even after the receipt of your telegram No. 183 we considered again asking you to vary the proposals, even at the risk of the loss of the grant. However I fully realise that this might well be very embarrassing to you, and we now propose to reply formally (purely in the context of technical education of course) asking if the grant could be announced simply as one towards equipment for technical institutes in Hong Kong, without specifying the four, and asking for your agreement for us to apply it, over an indefinite period, at £100,000 per institution as and when decisions to go ahead with a particular project are approved.
ever
Kouro
David.
PERSONAL & CONFIDENTIAL