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Mr Bennett (Research Department G 81/3)
COLONIAL DEFENCE CONTRIBUTIONS
Reference..........
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id
1.
After further minuting within the Department, we asked Hong Kong in our telegram No 179 whether they had any particular deadline in mind. They have replied that they had hoped for this information (first requested in Davies's letter to me of 8 February) by early April.
2.
We appreciate that there are important competing pressures on your time which would make it impossible, even if we agreed that it was desirable, to send Hong Kong a full reply within, say, the next three weeks. Nevertheless, we should like to appear to be giving them what help we can; and we should be very grateful if you could, at least, provide a little more detailed information on the Gold Coast contribution in the early 1950's (see para 8 of your minute of 19 February, and Hong Kong Telegram No 214).
CODE 18-77
&.༥ ཨི་ད་ ཅགས་ཅིག་ཅིག་
BH Dinwiddy
Hong Kong and Indian Ocean Department
12 March 1975
B) 19/3
Mr Tamms (HKIOD)
I attach a draft letter to Hong Kong on the Gold Coast point. This is the best I can do without further research, which as already explained my other commitments do not yet permit.
2. Without prejudice to what may emerge in the course of further work later, and at the risk of seeming tedious, I should like once more to sound a note of reserve if not warning. The underlying implication of this correspondence so far
is that the Hong Kong Government has a right of access to old Whitehall files, and that the only problem is the practical one of someone finding time to look them up and post out the result to Hong Kong. To admit any such right on the part of a Colonial Government would, in my view, be an important new departure of policy. And if widely exercised, it could call in question the whole ¤¤ÌEXR®XN✰ discharge of the Secretary of State's responsibilities vis-a-vis dependent territories. Disguise it how we may, that relationship is in essence a tutorial one; and a tutor's position could become impossible if the pupil were entitled as of righttex to see anything he cared to ask for!
Research Dept.
G 81/3 (ex 391)
14 March 1975
J.J. Besi
Bent
(JS Bennett
(Please forgive busty do-it-yourself typing)
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