The activities of the Hongkong Benevolent Society which functioned for many years in the Colony prior to the Pacific war, have been suspended.
This decision was reached at a meeting held in the offices of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, yesterday. It was decided to suggest to all Life Members still in Hongkong that the Society should be disbanded. Such members will be asked to indicate whether they agree with this suggestion and to proposals which will be submitted to them for the distribution of the Society's funds.
There was only a small attendance yesterday which, however, included officers of the Society in 1941.
Those present were of the opinion that the Society could not resume its operations on the pre-war scale when it undertook extensive beneficent work in rendering assistance in cases of sickness, want, poverty or distress arising among members of the Colony's communities for whose benefit it had been formed.
The meeting felt that the Society could not now function effectively on the former lines in the changed social conditions arising from the war, and that it could no longer expect the financial support which it had formerly received.
HONGKONG BENEVOLENT SOCIETY.
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Among the charitable bodies in the Colony, the Benevolent Society can claim an unbroken history going back for Forty-five years. Unfortunately, little of that history is available to-day and even the newspaper files - a prolific source of contemporary records - fail us in this case. It is not until nineteen years later that we find a reference to the founding in 1889; the files for that year do not contain a word about the Society, which appears to have been formed by a body of well-to-do and charitably minded people who for a considerable period hid their light under a bushel.
Such early references as we can trace to-day give the name of the institution as the Hongkong Ladies' Benevolent Society, thus indicating the original sponsors of this charitable work - mainly a group of local ladies, though from the outset they had the co-operation of prominent men in the Colony, particularly the clergy. The old name is used in 1908, but not two years earlier in 1906; presumably about that period, the general designation of "Hongkong Benevolent Society" was finding favour.
However, the 1906 meeting held on February 4 that year - it was the sixteenth annual meeting – refers to the work of a Ladies' Committee of the Society.
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