226
prints available from the first survey, some 85 photographs, with accompanying text, were included in Hong Kong: Going and Gone, published by the Branch in 1980. A reprint, using enhanced negatives from the first edition, is now being contemplated. The prints from Yaumatei helped identify locations of interest when a second photographic survey with the help of the Cathay Camera Club resulted in a later RAS publication, The Heart of the Metropolis: Yaumatei and its People which appeared in the late 1990s.
Ian's article on the new Hong Kong PRO (The Paper Chase Archives and the Public Records Office of Hong Kong) was published in Vol. 14 of the Journal (1974), and is both informative and entertaining. Another useful essay, Facilities for Research in the Public Records Office of Hong Kong (Alan Birch, Y.C. Jao and Elizabeth Sinn [eds.]) appeared between pages 153-192 of Research Materials for Hong Kong Studies, published by the Centre of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong in 1984. Ian also produced an interesting Note on Lieutenant T.B. Collinson, Royal Engineers (later Major-General) who served in Hong Kong in the 1840s and was responsible for the early mapping and accurate sketching of the area. Some of Collinson's letters had survived through the philatelic interest of their covers, and Ian had somehow spotted them, but I am unclear as to whether the Note was published, or where.
A humorous man, dry and contained in the Australian way, Ian was quick to see the funny side of any situation, and was a good raconteur. He made full use of these attributes in his article on the PRO, when he described what he styled 'the classic delusions about us [archivists].' One was that he 'should look like a cross between Charles Darwin and Karl Marx in their old age, and that when not poring over old papers all day, he should be scouring cellars or attics for more documents, and 'making delighted chuckling sounds in my [his] throat like Ben Gunn discovering a cheese' when he lit upon a choice specimen. And I shall always recall his unbounded glee when he found (I think in the Far Eastern Economic Review, or else in a leading English daily) a reference to ‘a Sawn-off Damocles' instead of the famed 'Sword of'!
Ian was a skilful, extraordinarily patient worker in wood and metal, as well as a collector of Peking and also Afghan glass, the latter being Roman-like glass work found in the bazaars of Kabul (he had gone to Afghanistan in 1974 on a UNESCO consultancy).