The Origin of the Noel Croucher Foundation
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oel Victor Amor Croucher, founder of the charitable foundation which bears his name, was a colourful figure in the life of Hong Kong for some seventy years. Unfortunately no biography of him has yet been written and it is to be hoped that this deficiency will be remedied in the near future. The preparation of such a biography will not be easy, for information about his life and career is scrappy and incomplete; little is in writing, and practically all is held in the memories of his contemporaries who are, by that very fact, a fast dwindling band. Born at Eastleigh, Southampton, on Christmas Eve 1891, Noel Croucher seems to have had little in the way of home life, much of his childhood being spent with relatives. In 1910, not long after leaving school in England, he arrived in Hong Kong as a junior clerk in a trading company, where he settled down and remained a resident of the colony until his death on March 6th, 1980 at the age of 89. After the first World War in which, as he used to recount with glee, he commanded a Chinese labour battalion in France - he returned to Hong Kong as a clerk in a stockbroker's office. In this capacity he encountered Sir Paul Chater, one of the great Hong Kong entrepreneurs of this century, who was so impressed by the acumen of the young Croucher that he made him his personal financial adviser. This enabled Noel to set up his own business as a stockbroker and as such he throve exceedingly with interests both in Hong Kong and Shanghai; he remained a close friend and associate of Sir Paul Chater until the latter's death in 1926. A keen golfer and an enthusiastic yachtsman, he and his French wife were, in the early days of their marriage very prominent in the social life of the colony. Indeed, in his later years Noel was Commodore of the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club and he gave the club substantial financial support. He had strong philanthropic leanings and, although he shunned publicity, he gave, in his later days, much support to the Sandy Bay Hospital for Crippled Children and to a number of other charities as well as to St. John's Cathedral; in all cases he sought to remain, as far as possible, an anonymous benefactor.
In his later years he gradually retired from social activities save with a few old friends and, although always a dapper figure sporting a camelia in his buttonhole, he became something of a recluse and an éminence grise in the financial world of Hong Kong. By the time I came to know him he had been separated for many years from his French wife who was living in Europe, and also from his only child - a son (also living in Europe) with whom he had little contact. Living thus alone in his house on the Peak in Hong Kong he was, despite his great wealth, a lonely and, I suspect, a rather unhappy man. He was a veritable mine of infor- mation on the development of Hong Kong and the doings of the business and trading fraternity of the South China Trade from the early part of the century up to the Second World War, during which he was a prisoner of the Japanese in Hong Kong. His recollections of the post-war period including the Communist takeover in China and the meteoric rise of Hong Kong were equally fascinating. It is greatly to be regretted that all efforts to have him commit his recollections to paper or to have them recorded, failed. I often pressed him to do so, but he used to say that he hated writing and that, although he delighted in recounting his experiences in congenial company, he would not tolerate a "ghost writer" nor could he bring himself to do anything so cold-blooded as talking to a tape-recorder. It is my hope that one day soon a biographer will collect and put on record some at least of the material transmitted by word of mouth to his friends. Here in this essay it is not my purpose to attempt such a biographical memoir. What I have so far written is meant simply to give the reader a bare outline sketch of a remarkable man as a background to an account of the actual origin of the Croucher Foundation and its early development.
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