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H. J. LETHBRIDGE
Superintendent of Prisons. In the 1920s a larger number of cadets were recruited—22 in all—but the number dropped to 12 in the 1930s. Three more were appointed in 1941, just before the Japanese occupation.
This increase, particularly in the 1920s, must be related to a general expansion of services and a growth in the functions undertaken by government, and to the near cessation of recruitment during the war years 1914–18. In 1901, the total number of employees in all grades of the government service was 715; and in 1938 the figure was 2,886.55 Another trend, which was to radically reshape the cadet service after the 1939–45 war and change its composition, was a growing demand for the appointment of local people to more senior posts. In the 1935 budget debate the Acting Colonial Secretary, echoing the views of the Governor, Sir Andrew Caldecott, declared that the ‘Government has fully and frankly accepted the policy of replacing wherever possible European by Asiatic employees’.56 But the pace of localisation was exceedingly slow and the policy was hardly implemented, outside the Medical and Health Department, before the Governorship of Sir Alexander Grantham, 1947–1957.
Colonial officials have been caricatured as stiff, arrogant and snobbish, bemused by questions of precedence and protocol.57 They have been accused by Americans in particular of ‘spirited amateurism towards administration and technological illiteracy in relation to the problems of economic development’.58 But these characteristics in a milder form are a reflection of the values held by the English upper middle class, from whom the cadets were recruited. The cadets did not suffer a sea change on their way out by P. and O. to Hong Kong. They were gentlemen trained in the ideology of the pre-war English public schools and older residential universities. In Hong Kong they went on launch picnics; they swam, played polo, golf and tennis, walked in the New Territories, and played bridge in the evenings. A substantial number, however, did not allow their curiosity and intelligence to slumber in a sub-tropical climate: they wrote books and scholarly articles about the East. And one cadet—Geoffrey Sayer, an historian of early Hong Kong—claims that the bridge between East and West has been bridged ‘in so far as it has been bridged, by "linguist", "comprador", "missionary", "interpreter", and "cadet"’.59