STATE OF THE ARTS
9
The Nutcracker and Les Sylphides found expression in the pitter patter of tiny feet across the floorboards of the Royal. For variety's sake the classes of teenage girls were taught tap-dancing, and Scottish dancing for St Andrew's day was one of the notable occasions when the girls could display their talent, sure of an audience of patriotic Scots waiting to drown their nostalgia in the hooch and haggis that followed. One year even the great Harry Lauder consented to make a visit.
Another form of art beginning to creep out of the shadows at that time was a new school of local painters who, under the guidance of 31-year-old Luis Chen, set up the Hong Kong Art Club. Chen, though working in Chinese ink, was an innovator in the use of Western ideas and influences which were to lead him and his fellow artists to expression in oil, water-colour and eventually acrylic. By 1953, Chen was not only a painter but a teacher whose enthusiasm would be widely felt in the sphere of art.
The teaching of music, again the preserve of an educated and prosperous minority, received a boost in the 1920s and 1930s with the arrival of an increasing number of Russian and Jewish emigrés from Europe and Russia. These arrivals would also bolster the ranks of the fledgling orchestra, some of whom persevered to become leading figures in music and the arts. The most notable is the violinist and conductor Dr Solomon Bard, who went on to distinguish himself as an associate conductor of the Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra in the 1980s, after earlier associations with the Sino-British and the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestras. Two other valuable 'imports' were ballet teachers George Goncharov and Vera Volkova. They achieved fame through their star pupil, Margot Fonteyn, whom they trained in Shanghai when she was known as Peggy Hookham.
It cannot truthfully be said that the Japanese invasion in 1941 nipped Hong Kong's artistic development in the bud. Many of the pre-war celebrities such as tenor Gaston D'Aquino, musician and teacher Elizio Gualdi, and the Woods sisters, Doris and Aileen had their careers cut short and others were scattered, interned or made prisoners of war during the 31-year occupation, but the cultural desert showed little sign of intensive cultivation in the pre-war years. The Japanese Army, however, left its mark in two striking edifices one a memorial on top of Magazine Gap, which the returning British promptly blew up (no loss, that) and the other, the distinctively Japanese tower on Government House which survives to this day as a permanent and not unattractive reminder of those years.
The reoccupation was again a discouraging time for the arts, with the priorities on post-war reconstruction and bread today. Tomorrow's jam would have to wait ... and wait ... and wait. One small concession was the launching of the Garrison Players by the Commander British Forces to build closer relations between the public and the large number of men in the forces at that time. It survives to this day, depending on gifted amateurs as does its older rival, the Hong Kong Stage Club, to strut and fret their hour upon the stage.
So little progress was made in other areas that in 1952, the author Harold Ingrams, whose book 'Hong Kong' was sponsored by the Colonial Office, wrote: "The deplorable fact that a city of the size and wealth of Hong Kong has no concert hall shows the lack of interest taken in Western cultural activities. Nevertheless, there are the Stage Club, the Hong Kong Chamber Music Club, the Hong Kong Singers (the oldest musical society), and the Sino-British Orchestra, and various other dramatic and musical societies, to all of which Hong Kong owes a great deal, for they endeavour to foster music and drama in spite of difficulties such as finding places in which to practise and perform. Indeed the community is not yet sufficiently alive to the importance of supporting them. It is hardly conceivable that a colony of any power except Britain could show such indifference to culture.'