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SPEECH BY MR. PETER BLAKER, MINISTER OF STATE FOR FOREIGN AND
REGIOTYY NO.
COMMONWEALTH AFFAIRS, TO THE HONG KONG GENERALS OCT 1979
CHAMBER OF COMMERCE LUNCHEON. 25.9.29
DESK OPRCLA
INDEX
Mr. Chairman, Your Excellency, ladies and gentlemen.
سلام
N. I This
ม.
1
ISTAY
It is a real pleasure for me to speak to the Hong Kong General
Chamber of Commerce of which, at one time, my father had the honour to
be Chairman. When Sir Winston Churchill was a young man he was on terms
of friendly rivalry with George Bernard Shaw, the playwright, and on one
occasion Shaw wrote to Churchill and said 'Dear Mr. Churchill, I enclose
two tickets for the first performance of my new play. I hope you will
come and bring a friend if you have one.' To which Mr. Churchill replied,
'Dear Mr. Shaw, unfortunately I cannot attend the first performance of
your play but if you will send a ticket I will attend the second perform-
ance if you have one.'
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And it is very good fortune for me to have this second perform-
ance of the role of Foreign Minister in the Foreign Office responsible for
Hong Kong. I had a very brief tenure of the role in January 1964 but unfortunately in February 1974 when a Mr. Heath called an election, the
result of which you are familiar with, I didn't even establish a record
for brevity. They found in the Foreign Office library that somebody in
1790 had only lasted a week.
Now one of the first memories I have of Hong Kong is of a
typhoon which blew a hole in the roof of my parents' house on Barker Road, That sort of makes the place stick in one's memory.
Those were
the days when the punka fulfilled the role of the air-conditioner and the
ice-box, a very unhygenic thing it must have been that took the place of
the refrigerator. And when the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank building was the tallest building in Hong Kong. I am not complaining that I had a
deprived childhood but in fact I think that at the age of seven I rather
looked forward to the next typhoon. But I mentioned these facts just to
show you that I am very well aware myself of the speed at which things
in Hong Kong have developed.
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