154
JAMES HAYES
account which is intended to provide a factual background to, and trace the major influences on, local volunteering over this long period.
DEVELOPMENT AND ORGANISATION
(a) 1854-1914
The different motivations, needs and attitudes of changing times provide some of the most interesting aspects of the history of the Hong Kong Volunteer Force. Danger is always a stimulus to volunteer efforts and the first Volunteers owed their origin to a foreign 'scare' occurring at a time of war with Russia and imagined insecurity in Hong Kong. This led the colonial authorities in June 1854 to take the initiative in calling for a corps of Volunteers for the defence of the lives and properties of themselves and their families in the temporary absence of a naval force sufficient to deal with an emergency. (It is interesting that Government called for an Auxiliary Police Force at the same time.) This call lost its magic when the emergency did not materialise and naval protection was restored, and for a few years there were no Volunteers in being.7
Attempts to form a new Corps in 1857 proved an utter failure, the subject was mooted in the press in 1860 without result, and the eventual establishment of a new body of Volunteers on 7 April 1862 can be traced to an enthusiast, Captain Frederick Brine, Royal Engineers, a regular officer who had formed the Shanghai Volunteers in 1861 and went on to form other corps at Hankow and Yokohama. This second Hong Kong corps was disbanded in May 1866.
A third Volunteer Corps was formed in May 1878, arising out of the danger of war with Russia the previous year. It was entitled the Hong Kong Artillery and Rifle Volunteer Corps. Endacott gives a succinct account of this body:
It numbered 150 by the end of the year, but when the crisis passed interest waned; there were quarrels, and all
7 See Vol, 1954, pp. 17-23 and Endacott, A History of Hong Kong, (Oxford University Press, 1958) pp. 90, 119.
8 Endacott, pp. 119-120. The Hong Kong Volunteers were organised as a battery of artillery with a band and rifle company added within a year see Major Arthur Chapman's article in Twentieth Century Impressions of Hong Kong, Shanghai, etc. (1908) p. 274.