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Recreation
Certainly man cannot live by rice alone and provision had to be made for recreation and welfare. What facilities were there? One imagines in the early 20th century a limited amount. But in the years leading up to Waglan becoming automated, in the 1980s, colour television, stereo music, radio, a small library, darts, ping-pong and mah-jong, all accommodated in the air-conditioned recreation room, were available (Port Services Division; 1987).
Let us now turn to the actual men who manned the lighthouses.
Lighthouse personalities
In 1838, Grace Horsley Darling (1815-1842) became the heroine of Britain when she and her lighthouse keeper father rescued nine of the crew of the good ship Forfarshire. It was wrecked near the Longstone Lighthouse on one of the Farne Islands off the Northumberland coast, England. It is fitting that Darling's name is still recorded in English dictionaries and encyclopaedias although today people are more likely to hero-worship figures like astronauts, film stars and footballers.
What about Hong Kong's keepers and others associated with lighthouses? What sort of men were they? Let us look at some of them.
James Arthur William Deakin's father was a British soldier who married his Chinese wife in 1935.42 He served as a gunner on Mount Davis when the Japanese attacked in December 1941. Later, as a child, James was called upon by his mother to put food parcels through the wire fence of the Shum Shui Po Prison Camp where his father was incarcerated.
When he grew up, after attending the then Government King George the Fifth Secondary School, Jimmy Deakin went into government service. In the late 1950s he was posted to the Marine Department from the Electrical and Mechanical Engineering Division of the Public Works Department.
Allen Lack informed the author that he had known Deakin earlier, as