many of whom had fled the disturbances caused by the Taiping Rebellion. On the
occasion of the visit of Prince Alfred with HMS Galatea, at least one day of the duke��s visit was devoted to Chinese receptions and entertainments denoting that a measure of recognition was now accorded to the respectable and prosperous portion of the Chinese community.1
Among this band of men who now lie in the cemeteries of Hong Kong are the giants of Hong Kong history, the Armenian Sir Catchick Paul Chater, the Parsees, Sir Hormusjee Mody and Dorabjee Nowrojee buried in the Parsee Cemetery, and the Jews, Emanuel Raphael Belilios and members of the Sassoon
family in the Jewish Cemetery. During the years 1861�V75, they were waiting
in the wings, learning skills, and gaining experience and wealth as a series of reforms made Hong Kong into the kind of place where they could succeed. As young men, they became Freemasons, played cricket, and did those things
that would give them the contacts and the influence they would need to further their careers. For example, they took part in horticultural shows. In the 1874
show, Nowrojee took prizes for his camellias and dahlias and J.H. Noronha, the
Portuguese printer and publisher, won first prize for his group of six vegetables and Belilios won third prize for presenting three plants in flower. The long list of
prize winners shows that they were among the best company and making their names known. These men were businessmen rather than merchants. They helped propel the colony to new economic heights, becoming an ever-present force that changed the balance of power in the colony. They were to act as make-weight against the British merchants whose wider interests connected to the treaty ports often left them with less time or energy to tackle the problems of the long-term governance of Hong Kong.
The pages of the jury lists in the Government Gazette show clearly the changing composition of the ��respectable�� part of Hong Kong��s population and the way these changes were producing a more cosmopolitan society.2 In 1855,
there were no Parsees in the jury list. By 1865, there were thirteen of whom five
had been honoured with the title of special juror. Besides these were now nine Jews, three of whom were favoured with the higher title. There were also seven Armenians listed, including the two Chater brothers, Catchick Paul and Joseph Theophilus, and their nephews, Paul Jordan, a broker, and Dr. Gregory Jordan. The nine Portuguese of the 1855 list had grown to forty-two by 1865. Besides these, five Chinese were now listed, one trader, one comprador, one linguist and two masters of shops. But the biggest change of all was in the number of Germans on the jury list. In 1855, there had been just twelve Germans. By 1865, this number had risen to seventy-five, seven of whom were special jurors. This influx of foreign traders with different outlooks and agendas was not always welcome. In a letter to the China Mail dated 23 June 1869, O.P.Q. complained that the present system of empanelling juries was: ��unfair, unsafe and unjust�K. It makes a mockery of public justice, and seriously retards the spread of civilization in the interior of the country by the results to which it gives rise��. He disliked the multinational make-up of the juries.
Anyone who attended the Court this morning might have seen among the Jurymen who crowded around the door of the Court Room, ten Portuguese, five Germans, three Americans, one Armenian, sundry Parsees and Chinese and two Englishmen. Only five persons speaking the English language to administer the laws of England, and three of those, foreigners in blood and feeling; for this talk of sympathy, brotherly feeling, common ancestors and such
stuff between Americans and Englishmen is all balderdash and moonshine.
The older British merchant houses found that they were being challenged in their
own fields by these assiduous outsiders whose lifestyle was simpler and therefore
whose costs were lower.
Most significant in terms of numbers and influence of the new influx of non-British expatriates were the Germans, many of whom are buried in the Cemetery. When the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank held an extraordinary meeting of shareholders in March 1866, only seventeen or 46 percent of those named shareholders were British. Much the largest minority group were German with 30 percent or eleven members. They were followed by the Parsees and the Portuguese with four members each. Among the remaining names were two Americans, Heard and Purdom, one Jew, David Sassoon, and one Belgian, Charles Henry Bosman, who is credited with being the father of Sir Robert Ho Tung [11B/13/2]. 3
The Armenians
The Christian Armenians had been subject to persecution at the hands of their Muslim Ottoman overlords in the nineteenth century, causing their merchants to disperse often via India to Singapore and the Far East. Two of the better-known Armenian merchants to arrive in Hong Kong came from Canton at a time when the Second Opium War was looming. Peter Aviet Seth [8/16/2] was born in Madras and became one of the earliest Armenian merchants to settle in Singapore. He left for Canton in 1845 but after the death of his wife, Dishkoone, in Macau
in 1857, he moved to Hong Kong which he thought offered better prospects. By 1861, he was described on the jury list as a broker living in Wellington Street. He continued to live and work in Hong Kong until his death in 1876.4 Avietick Lazar Agabeg [8/19/4] was a prominent merchant in Canton, having been among the first members of the Canton Chamber of Commerce. On coming to Hong Kong in 1858, he was listed for two years as the publisher of the Daily Press in
Wellington Street after which he was described as agent and merchant. He died in 1876 at the then impressive age of sixty-five.
But by far the most powerful Armenian in the history of Hong Kong was undoubtedly Sir Catchick Paul Chater [11B/10/1] who was born in Calcutta in 1846, and followed his brother, Joseph Theophilus Chater [11B/9/4], to Hong
Kong in 1864 at the age of eighteen. He was at first employed as an assistant in
the Bank of Hindoostan, China and Japan, resigning after two years in order to become an independent broker. The mother of the Chater brothers had been the granddaughter of the famous Armenian merchant, Agah Catchick Arrakiel, who had been honoured by George III. Catchick Paul was one of fourteen children and was orphaned at the age of seven. He was brought up by relations, who sent him to a British college in Calcutta where he learnt to play cricket, a very useful skill in Hong Kong, where membership of the cricket
team gave automatic entry to the Hong Kong
Club. When Chater first arrived, he stayed
with the Jordan family into which his sister had married. It was probably a member of this family, very possibly Dr. Gregory Jordan, who gave his name to Jordan Road in Kowloon.
In 1867, Chater left the bank and set up as an exchange and bullion broker in Wyndham
Street and within ten years had laid the foundations of his fortune. In 1884 he started a godown business in Kowloon, purchasing the beach front from the government, reclaiming land and erecting wharves and godowns. In this way he became the instigator of
17.1. Monuments in memory of Sir Catchick Paul Chater, d. 27.5.1926.
development in Kowloon. He underlined his interest there by building himself a bungalow on Nathan Road and later building St. Andrew ��s, the first Anglican Church in Kowloon, on a plot cut out from the grounds of his house and garden. By 1886, when Joseph died leaving his brother heir to
his not inconsiderable fortune, Catchick had become the most powerful financier in Hong Kong. He initiated the Praya Reclamation in 1887, a huge reclamation scheme comprising the entire waterfront from Central to Western including
Connaught Road, Statue Square and the land on which the present Legislative Assembly building now stands. This vast project was only made possible by Chater negotiating the acceptance of his plans by all the marine lot holders. Then,
when these were submitted to the secretary of state in Whitehall, he accompanied
the plans to England in order to explain the plans in person and he defended the enterprise so successfully that he won the acceptance that he had hoped for.
From then until his death in 1926, Sir Paul Chater had a hand in almost every new
enterprise in the colony. He served on the Executive or Legislative Council for nearly forty years from
1887 to 1926 and was created a knight in 1902. He was the ever-generous colossus
who, from Marble Hall, his mansion in Mid-Levels, oversaw the growth of Hong Kong��s prosperity and of his own fortune.
The Parsees
In 1860, out of a total of seventy-six merchants in the Hong Kong Directory, thirty-one were Parsees. Among the most influential of the later arrivals, one must include two who are buried in the Parsee Cemetery at Happy Valley. Dorabjee Nowrojee is said to have stowed away on a ship bound for China. He was discovered by a kindly Portuguese captain who allowed him to stay on as the
ship��s cook. On arriving in the colony in 1857, he seized the opportunity to open a bakery in the colony in January 1857, after the
bread-poisoning incident at Ah-lum��s bakery
at the beginning of the Second Opium War.
Nowrojee then became a prosperous hotelier, owning the very respectable Victoria Hotel and later King Edward Hotel and was the
founder in 1872 of Star Ferry. He acquired his first vessel in order to transport the bread
from his bakery to Kowloon and himself back to his family home in Kowloon, after a hard
day��s work. Nowrojee��s generosity in offering
friends and hotel guests lifts across the strait in his boat gradually led to the regular passenger service being set up. In this way the Star Ferry
was born in 1872 when Nowrojee ordered the eighty-five-foot Evening Star followed by the Rising Star, the inspiration for the name being said to come from two lines of Tennyson��s poem: ��Sunset and evening star / And one clear call to me��.5
A figure of more importance, Sir Hormusjee Mody arrived in Hong Kong aged nineteen in 1860 and worked as a clerk for a firm of Indian bankers who dealt in opium. At the age of twenty-one, he opened his own opium auction firm but, realizing that the Sassoon family dominated the opium trade, he turned his abilities to exchange and broking. Mody and Chater went into business together. Both men firmly believed in the future importance of Kowloon and worked
together to fulfil their dream. It is fitting
that Mody Road in Tsim Tsa Tsui should be named after this self-made man. Mody and Chater remained firm friends and amicable rivals on the racecourse where they raced under the respective names of Mr. Buxey and Mr. Paul. Both men built houses nearby each other on Conduit Road and in their wills donated their mansions to the government. Two blocks of government quarters built on their sites, Chater Gardens and Buxey Lodge, still stand in memory of the donations. Mody was invited to become director of so many firms that he earned the nickname ��the Napoleon of the Rialto��. 6 He undertook the entire expense for the erection of Loke Yew Hall, the oldest
building in the University of Hong Kong. In 1912, he laid the foundation stone and
used to visit the site as a frail old man. As he sat surveying the wilderness of bricks and puddles, he would repeatedly say that he wanted the very best regardless of
expense. Sadly, he did not live to see the building finished.
The Jews
David Sassoon, the first of his family to settle in the East, came in the 1840s from
Baghdad via Bombay and Canton. As early as 1862, Sassoon was wealthy enough
to donate $1,000 to the Lancashire Operatives Relief Fund, the fifth largest
donation in the colony. It seems unlikely that he felt strongly about the plight of the cotton spinners and stocking knitters in Lancashire, so his donation must
rather have been a way to impress the merchant community. By 1869, the Jewish
community in Hong Kong was numerous and wealthy enough for the stewards of the racecourse to solicit from them a ��Hebrew Cup��, though some disappointment was felt when it was awarded on a walkover, all other horses having been withdrawn for various reasons. 7 In 1871 Sassoon presented the Ashley Cup to the winner of the Yacht Club Race. Money spent this way gained ready acceptance to Hong Kong��s society. Although some members of the family remained in Hong Kong, the Sassoons later moved the centre of their empire to Shanghai where they put down deeper roots.
In the Jewish Cemetery, beside various members of the Sassoon family, we
also find Emanuel Raphael Belilios, who became a special juror in 1870. He was
a member of a Venetian Jewish family that had immigrated to India in the early
years of the nineteenth century. He was born in Calcutta in 1837 and came to
Hong Kong in 1862. Belilios was connected to the Sassoon family through his wife. His business, which centred around Indian cotton and opium, flourished.
Following Granville and Matilda Sharp up the hill, he was among the first to take
the insidiously socially divisive step of living on the Peak. Belilios is said to have bought a dromedary in Peking in 1888 and kept it among his menagerie on the Peak to carry his goods up and down the steep tracks. According to a story in the China Mail, the dromedary was chased over a steep dip on the Pokfulam side of the Peak where it fell, breaking its leg. The poor animal was too heavy to move and had to be buried where it lay. Belilios was a generous donor to good causes
in his adopted home. In 1881 he contributed $12,000 to build a new reformatory at Causeway Bay. Then in 1890 he provided a new building to house a sister school
to Queen��s College for the daughters of Indian, European or Chinese residents. Opening with just thirty-four girls, the Belilios Public School for Girls quickly grew in size and importance. Belilios was also a member of the Court of the College of Medicine and endowed scholarships and indirectly contributed to the cost of clinical teaching at Alice Memorial Hospital with great generosity.8
The Germans
John Thompson, the photographer, described the success and high standing of the Germans in Hong Kong as ��being spoken of with feelings not unmingled with bitterness��. He continued:
Next to the English and Americans, the German merchants hold the
foremost place. They have just built a splendid new club [1866] and they are
our close and successful competitors in almost every avenue of trade�K. They manage their business more cheaply than we do. They are, many of them, less expensive in their mode of living. Their assistants are not so numerous �K and often they are masters of more than one European language.9
According to Bert Becker, another difference between the British and the German merchants was that the German merchants did not use the comprador system favoured by the British firms, thus cutting out an area of middleman expense and keeping a firmer control over their budgets.10 One of the first German graves
found in the Cemetery belongs to Johann Jacob Funfgeld [16Cii/7/14] from Baden who was a merchant and commission agent from Stanley Street.
The oldest of the leading German firms was Carlowitz & Co., founded in 1840 by Richard Carlowitz. The importance of the firm in the colony was indicated by the fact that successive partners served on the board of the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank from 1879 to 1914. Second in age, and perhaps of equal importance, was Pustau & Co. which was founded in 1846 and acted as agent to the Austrian Lloyd Steam Navigation Company which ran a steam ship line between Trieste and Alexandria from which port the passengers would cross overland to the Red Sea and board a P. & O. steamer.11 Charles Brodersen, a partner of the firm, who in 1858 and 1859 respectively was made consul for Oldenburg and Hanover, lost his twelve-year-old daughter Eliza Brodersen [9/4/1] in 1868. At least two German members of Pustau��s staff, Ernest Franke [32/2/11], clerk and Freemason, and Hermann Bonne [16Ci/1/15], an assistant, are buried in the Cemetery. Perhaps the third most important firm, Siemssen moved to Hong Kong in 1855 and was managed from 1859 by Woldemar Nissen who was probably the most influential German in Hong Kong during this period. Dr. Carl Nissen [8/21/2] may well have been a relation of his. Woldemar, a partner from 1855 to his death in Hamburg in 1896, was a member of the Provisional Committee for the organization of the Hongkong & Shanghai Banking Corporation, deputy chairman in 1866 and chairman in 1867. He was also consul for the Hanseatic towns of Bremen, Hamburg and Lubeck as well as for Sweden and Norway. Woldemar left Hong Kong in 1867 and his place was ably filled by his assistant, Heinrich Hoppius [7/12/3], who had arrived in Hong Kong aged twenty-one in 1862 and became a partner in January 1869. He served the company in Hong Kong for twenty-five years until he died in 1894. Hoppius was an influential figure and served on the governing board of the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank from 1869 to 1894. He was also president of the Club Germania from its beginning up to his death.
The Club Germania was started in 1859 and rebuilt twice, in 1865 and again in 1872, to accommodate the growing number of members. By 1866, a Gymnastic Society had also been organized by Dr. Schetelig who acted as steward to the Club. It was much appreciated by British seekers after fitness. The 1872 building (on the east side of Wyndham Street) was a monument to the increased opulence of its members with a concert hall seating 275 people, library, billiard room and four bowling alleys. The Germans also organized a liedertafel, which put
on concerts of choral music superior to anything the British of the time could produce. Sunday services were held in German at the Berlin Foundling Home chapel by its superintendent, Ernst Klitzke [8/12/3], pastor to the German
community from 1867 to his death in 1881. The entire population of Germans
attended his funeral, the liedertafel sang hymns and all the German vessels in
port flew their flags at half-mast.
The Germans penetrated all the different layers of Hong Kong��s society. The doyen of the German community in terms of the years spent in China was Frederick Schwarzkopf, or Blackhead as he was called by the British. He had
been active in Whampoa since the mid-1840s where he was an assistant to the firm
of Murrow & Stephenson. In 1853, he married an English girl, Sarah Bullen, from
Hackney, London, in St. John��s Cathedral. Schwarzkopf was first mentioned on the list of jurors as early as 1855 as living in West Point. Perhaps his wife had a house there and he commuted between Hong Kong and Whampoa. Two of his
children are buried in the Cemetery. William Murrow Schwarzkopf [7/26/2] who died in 1854 was followed by Charlotte [7/26/1] who died in June 1857 aged just eighteen months. In 1856, Schwarzkopf opened his own ships�� chandlery on a hulk, the Hornet, at the Whampoa anchorage.
During the Second Opium War, he moved the chandlery, sail-making and auctioneer businesses to new buildings erected on Queen��s Road West. In 1860,
he took on a partner, John Warden Morriss [10/8/5], who held a third share in the business and perhaps helped to finance the new buildings. Morriss died just one year later in 1861 and his impressive square vault topped by a pyramid is an eye-catching feature of Section 10 of the Cemetery. Schwarzkopf
retired to Germany in 1872, at which time he
was described as perhaps the oldest resident in the colony.
A number of Germans held licences to dispense liquor in taverns and hotels. Among the earlier licence holders was Peter Ketels [16Cii/7/12] who died in 1867, aged thirty-three
years. He held the licences for the El Dorado Inn and then for the Hamburg Tavern. At
17.6. Headstone in memory of Peter Ketels, d. 28.12.1867. the licensing meeting in December 1867 the
justices complained that the cheaper brandy which he sold at 50 cents a shot
contained vitriol or in scientific terms, sulphuric acid. Colonial surgeon Dr. Ivor
Murray observed that adding a touch of sulphuric acid gave the drink a proper nip and Scotsman would not drink it without. However Ketels was ordered to throw the remaining vitriol-laced bottles into the harbour.
Two other Germans, William Gardner [43/1/13] from Strassburg and his friend, Wilhelm von der Bussche [38/1/10], had married two Macanese sisters and kept hotels in Macau. Gardner had run the Oriental Hotel and, according to an advertisement, had at great expense established two bathing machines in 1868 on the end of the Praya Grande charging $20 for a monthly family ticket or 25 cents per bathe.12 But, in August 1869, his hotel was totally destroyed by fire:
Mrs. Gardner and her children were asleep in the upper storey; a rush was at once made for their rescue. On going upstairs the whole place was found under a cloud of smoke and it was with difficulty that the lady and her children were brought to safety.
They then left Macau and acquired a licence for the Hamburg Tavern and
also a boarding house. On his death in February 1875, William Gardner left the respectable sum of $3,724. Another German, Otten, whose wife, Louise Otten [13/1/2], was taken in by Basel missionaries when she was dying, changed the name of the tavern he had acquired from the ��Russian Eagle�� to the ��Prussian Eagle��.
Hong Kong at the Crossroads of the Far East
As the treaty ports expanded and flourished, a further category of persons included
visitors and passers through Hong Kong on their way to or from their place of
business. Hong Kong had become a transport hub and a stopping off place from
where steamers to Singapore, Manila, India, Europe or America could be booked. Five lines now served Hong Kong. They included the French line Messageries
Maritimes, the American Pacific Line and the Holt Line of Glen Steamers that
docked in Liverpool, as well as the P. & O. and the Austrian Trieste Line. Men struck down by illnesses would leave the treaty port where they were working to seek medical help in Hong Kong or to recuperate on the long sea voyage back to Europe. Inevitably some succumbed on the way to or in Hong Kong and their headstones or monuments are found in the Cemetery. R.S.R. Fussell [5/3/1] and Henry Hudson [37/6/15] were both described on their inscriptions as ��of
Foochow��. From Shanghai, we find the graves belonging to Herbert Hancock [13/5/1] and Ludovic Dunlop [13/4/4], a banker.
Among the lesser men who died in Hong Kong were James Simpson [38/4/1], a Shanghai ship��s pilot who was staying in the Hotel d��Europe
when he collapsed and died, and the Welshman,
Robert Jones [38/6/3]. His inscription states that he was a diver from Shanghai and Hong Kong.
He had amassed enough savings by 1870 to obtain
a licence for a tavern named the Diver��s Arms. Jones is said to have been paralyzed when diving to recover property from the sunken ship, Dunmail. He must have been considered respectable because, the year after being awarded his licence to sell liquors, he was named in
the jury list. He died in 1872 aged fifty leaving all his assets including the tavern to his friend, William Bristow, who had cared for him as well as helped to run his
tavern. He must have been tough to survive as a diver in China into his fiftieth year.
Another new category of men to find a last resting place in the Hong Kong
Cemetery were members of the Imperial Customs Service. One of the earliest is
Herbert K. Lane [42/1/8], who died suddenly at sea in 1874 aged twenty-nine
years when in command of the Chinese gun boat, Chen Jui. It is ironic that at a time when the Hong Kong community was railing against the Chinese use of gun boats to blockade the port, an English commander of a Chinese gunboat should be buried in the Cemetery.
Henry Hance: An Example of a Member of the Consular Corps in China with Close Links to Hong Kong
Consuls were appointed in all the treaty ports to look after British interests and deal with British miscreants of various kinds, but most commonly drunken sailors. Many of these men had links with Hong Kong. For example, the sons of
three of the best known of the early civil servants, William Pedder, the harbour master, Major William Caine and Charles Hillier, magistrates, were all given
posts in the consular service in acknowledgement of their fathers�� work in the colony. Henry Fletcher Hance [4/1/1] is a particularly interesting example of this class of men and his career in the East was
a long one. He spent his first ten years in the East
working for the Hong Kong civil service and then, having failed to gain promotion, joined the consular service. He came back to Hong Kong in
1897, presumably in search of medical treatment on
falling ill and died there. His long career in the East
spans three periods from 1845 to 1897. In the world
of botany, he was a very important figure and as such deserves a special mention.
Hance was born in London in 1827 and was educated in London and Belgium. History does not relate how he came to be recruited as a member of the crew of the Laird by Nicholas de St. Croix, a former East India Company captain, who had made and lost a fortune in the Far East. In order to recoup his losses, he had used the last of his fortune to buy and fit out the Laird for a trading venture to China. Captain de St. Croix manned the ship with the younger sons of good families from Devonshire who wanted to go to sea. Sixteen-year-old Hance was joined on board by William Tarrant, later to become the anti-establishment owner and editor of the Friend of China. The two teenagers arrived in Hong Kong in 1845 and both found employment in the government, Hance as third clerk in the Colonial Office.
While employed as a clerk in Hong Kong, Hance used his spare time to study the flora of Hong Kong. This interest probably became more important to him than his duties in the office. Thus began his life��s work in the field of botany. In the ten years he spent in the civil service he never achieved promotion. By 1849, his work had impressed the University of Giessen in Germany to such an extent that they made him an honorary doctor of philosophy. He was constantly mentioned by John Wright as a member of the group of civil servant clerks, doctors and solicitors who met for botanizing, walks across the hills, picnics, dinners and boating expeditions. He had a deep and lasting friendship with Dr. W. Aurelius Harland, calling one of his sons Theodore Aurelius and another Arthur Harland. In 1852, Hance went on leave to England bringing back a bride, Anne Edith Baylis. This was the last time in his life that Hance could afford home leave. His
increasingly large family put the cost of the fares beyond his reach.
With little hope of promotion and the added responsibility of a wife and
children, Hance asked his patron, Captain de St. Croix, who was now consul
in Whampoa, to recommend him to the Consular Service. He was appointed
in 1854, as fourth assistant superintendent in Canton. There, in 1856, when the factories were burnt down by the Canton mob, the family lost everything they possessed including Hance��s prized botanical collection. The itemized claim for compensation that he subsequently put in gives an insight into his standard of
living. The biggest items, two pianos, one a grand and sheet music reflected his
wife��s musical taste and the solid library of books, his taste. They included the 1481 Parma edition of Pliny, illustrated by hand and a number of classics in English, French, Latin and Greek. The rest of the furnishings did not suggest luxury. The
drawing room had four chairs, two with cushions, four lamps, two flower-stands
and two rugs. In the bedroom were a four-poster and wardrobe from Calcutta, two children��s beds and a bidet. The bedroom and the dressing room both boasted a Shanghai porcelain bath, commode and washstand. This suggests that there was no separate bathroom and no plumbing. In the spare room, Mrs. Hance kept her side-saddle, embroidery frame, a black lacquered pram and a sedan chair. Visitors would have been put up on a camp bed.13
In 1861, Hance seized the opportunity to become vice consul in Whampoa because it offered him free accommodation on board the ex-hospital ship, HMS
Alligator. Perhaps he also thought it would give him more opportunities to replace his lost botanical specimens. A house was built for him in 1865 and he was able to
move ashore. Hance stayed in Whampoa for the next twenty-five years, adding to his collections of flora and of children. Anne Edith presented him with babies in 1853, 1854, 1855, 1856, 1858, 1859, 1860 and 1862, dying some time after that. Her
death left him with six surviving children to be educated at home since he could
not afford to send them to England.14 In 1875, Hance married an Anglo-Chinese
girl, Charlotte Page Kneebone, who brought him another daughter followed by twins. Hance never learned Chinese and this ignorance later became a bar to
promotion. The Whampoa consulate was closed in 1876 and he was considered for
the promotion to consul in Canton, but the post was refused on the grounds that he was in bad health, had married a half-caste who led him a hard life and that he drank ��though not enough to be of consequence at a small port��.15 Finally, in 1876, he was promoted to be acting consul in Amoy. He died there soon after his arrival.
His herbarium, which on his death amounted to 22,437 specimens, was left in his will to the British Museum. Over the thirty-two years he spent in China, Hance wrote 222 papers on botanical subjects.16 At a rough count over seventy species of flora growing in Hong Kong still bear his name. He died in June 1886 aged fifty-nine, the epitaph on his red marble headstone stating that he was ��A world renowned botanist��. He is the only Hong Kong civil servant to have won for himself an entry in the British Dictionary of National Biography. But his life also demonstrates that the British government had few concerns at that time about the welfare of its servants and their families and that honesty and length of service won few rewards.
Chapter 18
Government Measures
and Their Effect
on Society
The Augmented Power of the Governor
As a direct result of the difficulties of the previous governors and the perceived quarrelsome nature of the Hong Kong civil servants, it was decided that Hong Kong needed a strong governor with wide powers and the backing of the colonial office. The governor was seen as the strong arm through which colonial office administered the Crown colony. An able, energetic, ambitious governor who was looking for speedy promotion up the ladder of governorships was needed. One
such was Sir Hercules Robinson. When Sir Hercules obtained permission from
the home authorities to build a mint in Hong Kong while on a visit to England, the Daily Press railed against the unilateral action of the governor who had ��disregarded all law and precedent��. It asked: ��whether the Governor of this Colony whilst absent on sick leave can pledge its revenues and prostrate its welfare �K in consideration of promotion��.1
The governors of this period sometimes seemed more interested in pleasing Downing Street than in solving the problems of Hong Kong, such as supplying the clean water and adequate drainage that Hong Kong so badly needed. As the China Mail succinctly expressed it: ��Democracy in Government was sacrificed for the outward appearance of smoothness in the eyes of the world��. There were numerous articles in both papers decrying the lack of public representation in the colony. The editor of the China Mail wrote vehemently on the subject in February 1867:
There is scarcely any limit to the ruin and destruction which a Governor of Hong Kong, if he were malignantly disposed, might not bring about legally and by the mere exercise of the power and authority which is undoubtedly his. It is urgently desirable that there should be a body in existence, no matter how called into existence, which should represent the community and have real influence on the local legislation, more especially local taxation and local expenditure. It is monstrous and ridiculous, when the colony contains numerous men of mature experience in business and Anglo-Eastern life who have lived for ten or twenty in the town, that they should be powerless to say
a word which may influence the mode in which their income and property is
to be taxed.2
But in spite of wearying the public ��with a subject to which it is of the utmost importance that their attention should continuously directed��, the editors failed to galvanize public opinion where it mattered. The merchant elite chosen to serve on the Legislative Council almost always sided with the governor. In August
1867 Sir Richard MacDonnell was shown in a cartoon by the Hong Kong Punch
inducting the new members of the Legislative Council. He was shown as a
headmaster saying: ��Now my boys, you��ll no doubt be a little nervous at first but
you��ll soon get over that and will pull very well together as long as you do exactly what I tell you and make no noise��. This was a far cry from the state of affairs during the governorship of Sir John Bowring. Civil servants, who were in the majority on the council, were bound to vote with the governor who had little
difficulty overcoming any opposition.
The newspapers gave as the main reason for the general lack of opposition, the fact that those men, with the power to influence the future, did not regard Hong Kong as their place of permanent residence:
The desire to inaugurate improvements which will only bear fruit after many years �K is not so strong among us as it would be were Hong Kong to be our permanent abode where our children if not ourselves were to reap the fruits of what we had sown.
The disappearance of a number of the more powerful merchant houses by the
early 1870s also helped to enhance the governor��s power. One editorial decried the
loss of the merchant princes:
We hear a good deal, now-a-days, about ��the merchant princes�� of former
times who acted as if they were indeed ��rulers among men.�� There is much congratulation that that monopoly has ceased, and that it is possible to be considered a gentleman in China without being a millionaire or a millionaire��s clerk. But we are tempted to wish for a few months of the old regime, when a British merchant had an opinion and a will of his own and made them felt. ��A Merchant�� of today is politically but a degenerate type of his predecessor!3
The governors were also making use of new methods to evade criticism. They would suppress or delay the publication of unpalatable facts when it suited them.
In March 1870, the Daily Press asked why it had taken the governor five months
to publish the minutes of the Legislative Council of the previous 30 September. It continued:
The length of time which these minutes have taken to prepare, has apparently aided their being placed in a peculiarly succinct and condensed form; the lengthy debate and objections made to the estimates being summarised into
a mere statement of ��debate ensued�� or ��discussion followed�� �X the non-official remarks being considered of too little importance to be recorded officially.4
Sir Hercules Robinson suppressed the colonial surgeon��s report for 1860 and again
in 1873, Sir Arthur Kennedy suppressed the first report of his colonial surgeon, Dr.
Phineas Ayres. The report was not passed on to London for six years and then it was a matter of chance that it was unearthed and sent. An extract from that report shows that the facts contained in it were a damming indictment of the sanitary
state of the town of Victoria and would have reflected badly on the governor:
My first series of inspections discovered that pigs were kept in houses all over the town by hundreds, and that pigsties were to be found under the beds and in the kitchens of first, second and third floors. I visited many houses in which over a hundred pigs were kept, every bed in the house had large pigs in a sty constructed underneath it �K Imagine houses whose upper
floors are constructed of thin boards with wide interstices between them and whose lower floors are inhabited, and the state they would be in under these circumstances, with pigs�� urine etc. dropping through from floor to floor.5
Ayres went on to describe the lack of any kind of proper drainage with broken or half-choked pipes leading to the open gullies outside, which were clogged with stinking detritus.6 Such houses, crowded with poor coolie tenants, were often
owned by well-off Europeans including, for example, Granville Sharp.
Sir Hercules Robinson relied on various initiatives to help leave a legacy of action to mark his time in the territory. The Botanical Gardens earlier proposed by Karl Gutzlaff, the missionary, began to take shape. The cadet scheme was inaugurated, the mint was built, the all important Companies and Bankruptcy Acts were passed and significant steps were taken to improve the education services for the Chinese and Eurasians.
The Botanical Gardens
The Parsee community donated a bandstand which still stands in the gardens with a small plaque to show its origins. The services
of Thomas Donaldson [5/3/32] were engaged to design the gardens and enrich the bare earth with plants and flowers. As his obituary put it: ��Donaldson was the gentleman to whose patient and unobtrusive skill and industry the Colony was indebted for
one of the prettiest gardens in the Far East��. Donaldson died in November 1870
leaving a widow and child.
In 1861, convicts of the chain gangs similar to the one pictured were used to clear and level the ground above the Government House in preparation for a public garden.7
18.2. Policemen with a chain gang, c. 1890. (By courtesy of the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank).
The Civil Service and the Cadet Scheme
Hong Kong had become more closely integrated into the official imperial
organization in Downing Street, U.K. and experienced and tested officers were
being sent out to fill the civil service posts. One such, for example, was Chief Justice Adams who it was said always had ��the best interests of this Colony at heart��. The editor of China Mail contrasted former practices with the increased sense of responsibility and public awareness of the chief justice:
He declined to stand tamely by and see legislation conducted in a slovenly,
careless manner. When his state of health was little able to bear the fatigue,
he has attended meetings of Council, rather than see measures carried
through in a style of legislation which would have reflected discredit on the
whole Council, himself included.8
Besides this, an experiment was being carried out in an attempt to bring to Hong Kong men who could communicate in Chinese and would have a better knowledge of the Chinese culture and customs. As early as 1854, while still superintendent of trade, Sir John Bowring had devised a cadet scheme which he had persuaded the Earl of Clarendon to adopt to supply the consular service in China with student interpreters who would spend their first years in China learning the language and acquainting themselves with the routine of consular business. This scheme was adapted to suit the needs of the civil service and launched by Sir Hercules Robinson. In March 1861 the first three cadets, Charles C. Smith, William Deane and Malcolm Struan Tonnochy [8/6/2], were appointed. Such was the usefulness to the government of knowing Chinese that
not one of them was allowed to finish their language course. The careers of these
early cadets were meteoric. Smith acted as registrar general with responsibility for
the Chinese population in his first post in October 1864. In 1865, when still only twenty-five, Tonnochy held the posts of sheriff, coroner and marshal of the Vice-Admiralty Court. He was from Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1867, he became
assistant harbour master and superintendent of the gaol. Tonnochy died extremely suddenly in 1882. The day before, he had been in good spirits, playing tennis and dining with a friend. The next morning, when the Chinese barber came to shave him, he found Tonnochy dead in bed.9
Alfred Lister, whose wife, Fanny Elizabeth Lister and baby son, Arthur Lister [16Ci/4/16] are commemorated in the Cemetery, was recruited in 1867
as a cadet and rose while still in his twenties to become postmaster general and
colonial treasurer (1883�V90). He died on board ship near Yokohama while on sick leave. For the first time, with the exception of Daniel Caldwell, there were men
in the key positions in the government who could liaise with the Chinese and understand their needs and grievances.
The Mint
Sir John Bowring had before his retirement suggested the establishment of a
mint to remedy the embarrassing fluctuations in the value of Mexican dollars and
complaints of the insufficiency of small silver coins which led to the chopping of dollars into smaller pieces. Bowring��s suggestion had been turned down by the home authorities but the question was again raised in 1861 and this time the scheme was agreed. Plans for the mint went ahead with additional land reclaimed
costing $9,000, a water supply costing $3,500 and the new buildings priced at $25,000. Six men were brought from England to run the mint led by Major Thomas Kinder of the West Yorkshire Militia whose daughter Ada Kinder [40/3/2] died in 1865? (inscription unclear) aged fourteen. Kinder had worked as a mechanical engineer inspecting engines and rolling stock at the Railway Carriage
18.3. The mint and its garden. (By courtesy of the Hong Kong Museum of Art.)
Company near Birmingham but had retired in 1856 and joined the militia. He had had no experience of anything to do with metallurgy or minting.10 Kinder left England in July 1865 accompanied by his family and a governess. He must at times come to have regretted his decision to accept the post as the mounting problems included mechanical failures, staff sickness and the negative attitude of the new governor, Sir Richard MacDonnell.
When the mint opened in May 1866, so great was the influx of inquisitive
visitors demanding to be taken round that the governor had to issue an order that the public would not be admitted. An accident to the rolling stock and illness
among the mint staff made it impossible to coin dollars as rapidly as expected. The
frequent occurrence of often fatal illnesses demonstrated the problems connected
with bringing skilled technicians to such a remote place. The first family member
to die was Ann Morris [16Cii/8/8], wife of John Morris, on 10 July 1865, followed closely by the forty-one-year-old wife of John Inglis, superintendent of the mint, at their home on Morrison Hill.11 On 12 August, the engineer, William White [16Cii/9/7], died aged only twenty-seven.
Barely a fortnight after that, another Ann Morris [16Cii/6/14], the wife of James Morris, the foreman of the rolling stock, died. Then again in 1865, little Susan Maria, daughter of John Pritchett, the foreman of the coin department, died in Spring Gardens
Lane, Wan Chai, followed in June
1866 by his wife, Elizabeth Pritchett [16Ci/5/10]. Poor John Pritchett had to put his remaining daughter into the Diocesan Orphanage where she too
died in February 1867 aged one year and
ten months. In a little over a year seven family members of the small team had met their deaths.
The timing of the opening of the mint could not have been worse, coinciding as it did with a slump in the price of silver and a downturn in the
economy. Seeing no hope of a profit, the
18.4. Headstone in memory of William governor closed the plant and sold the White of the Royal Mint, d. 12.8.1865.
site to Jardine, Matheson & Co. who opened a sugar refinery.12 The machinery was sold to Japan, where it was used with such success that businessmen later on regretted the short time of only three years that the experiment had been allowed to operate in Hong Kong. Major Kinder accompanied the mint to Japan and continued to successfully direct operations there.
Some of the men who had worked at the mint added to a growing class of technically skilled craftsmen who were to be invaluable in the colony in the establishment of new enterprises such as the docks. Inglis, for example, married for the second time to a local girl, Caroline Matilda Smithers [9/5/13], in 1868 became acting secretary of the Union Dock Company. In 1870, he took over the Victoria Foundry in Spring Garden from Samuel Speechley who had been responsible for building the Parsee bandstand in the Botanical Gardens and whose infant daughter, Maria Webster Speechley [7/22/12], died in 1867. Inglis built the steam-launch, Sergio, for the Macau government. The success of this order brought eleven more orders for steam launches to his shipyard.
Education in Hong Kong
The sixties decade saw a big change take place in the education of Hong Kong��s youth. A new board of education was formed in January 1860 for the management of the government schools. A plan was formulated by Rev. James Legge and Bishop George Smith to amalgamate three of the government schools into one government school whose headmaster would double as inspector of the schools. In 1862, the Central School, later known as Queen��s College, was opened to boys of all nationalities. This new school would become the central pillar of a secular education freed from the old ties to the Protestant Church.
An able young Scottish dissenter from Rev. Legge��s hometown of Aberdeen, who was studying to be a Presbyterian minister, applied for the job. Frederick Stewart [23/5/7] was born into the family of a poor crafting tailor who struggled to find the money for his education until, while at Aberdeen University, he won a bursary. He was interviewed by Bishop Smith, found to be eminently suitable and almost at once embarked for Hong Kong and an illustrious career in education and government. Stewart arrived in Hong Kong in 1862 aged twenty-eight to find that little had been done to organize the new school. There was no timetable, no curriculum, and just three Chinese masters teaching the Confucian classics to three hundred boys by the noisy system of rote learning practised out loud. Just one year later, the new school eclipsed St. Andrew��s School so far in popularity that the latter had to close. Stewart went on to become the colonial secretary
before he died of pneumonia in September 1889. His obituary in the China Mail
stressed how much all who knew the man felt his loss:
As a man he combined all the qualities which call forth not merely respect and esteem but something akin to reverence. He was looked up to as a model man, and all the more so because from his modesty and absence of assumption he was unconscious of the high estimate which his friends placed upon his moral worth.
However, by 1868, even after the new school had been operating for six years, the maximum attendance at all the government schools stood at only 664 pupils,
while the number of children not in any form of education was put at 10,697.13
Stewart in his annual report made a plea for compulsory education for all, but he was too far ahead of his time for this to be seriously considered. Nevertheless, under Rev. Legge��s influence and guidance, Stewart created the foundations on which Hong Kong��s secular education system could be built.14 For the first
time Chinese boys were able to benefit from the kind of quality education at an affordable price that enabled them to compete in the expatriate world of business and finance. The school was the cradle for future generations of clever, influential
and far-sighted Chinese whose influence was to grow in the twentieth century.
Included among the old boys of Central School are many well-known figures such as Sir Kai Ho Kai, Sir Robert Ho Tung, Sir Boshan Wei Yuk and Dr. Sun Yat
Sen, the founding father of modern China.
The Education of Chinese Girls
An early attempt to tackle the education of Chinese girls came through the wife of Bishop George Smith. She opened a school for girls known as the Diocesan Native Female Training School, run by a committee composed of the wives of civil servants who were in charge of raising funds and who functioned as school governors. One of the most active was Emma Maria Irwin [16Cii/4/10], the second wife of the colonial chaplain, James J. Irwin. The Diocesan Native Female
Training School opened formally in November 1859 with twenty girls in the charge of Miss Wilson. When she retired in 1863, Mary Ann Eaton, aged twenty-
three, was sent out from England by the Female Education Society to take her place. However she lost her nerve after what was described as a ��murderous attack made on her by six Chinese thieves�� on her way home from church. Mary Ann was stoutly defended by her chair coolies who were duly rewarded by the committee with a sum of money. After the event, she received much support from Rev. E.J. Eitel who had come out with the Basel Mission in 1862. The two fell in love and, in May 1865, Mary Ann wrote to the Female Education Society saying that she
planned to get married but not until she had fulfilled her five-year contract with
the society. However six months later she wrote again to say that her nerves had not recovered from the shock of the previous December and she was no longer equal to her duties and begged to be released from the contract. Permission was given for her to resign.
The Diocesan Native Female Training School was not entirely successful. As early as 1865, it was noted that ��The teaching of English [was] not to be compulsory as several cases of girls being offered for sale at high prices (A. Wong $500) on the recommendation of speaking English had occurred��. 15 A further mention of this problem was made by Frederick Stewart when he spoke guardedly in his report of 1867: ��To the melancholy results which in nearly every instance followed from teaching Chinese girls English, I need not more particularly allude��. A case that reached the court illustrates the dilemma of the school. Rev.
C.F. Warren, a member of the Diocesan Female School Committee, appeared
before the magistrate to enter a complaint against the mother of a sixteen-year-old Chinese girl who had attended the school for three years. The mother had created a disturbance at the school when told that the school wished to keep her daughter
longer in school. A Mr. W., a European police inspector, wanted to marry the
girl. Her mother, with an eye to the money she could make from the deal, wished to remove her from the school in order to further the union. The magistrate told the mother that, although the girl refused to marry at present, ��She might later
change her mind and get married, as every woman ought��. Rev. Warren was
permitted to keep the girl in the school whereupon the mother became ��somewhat demonstrative outside the court��.16 This problem resulted in the Diocesan Female School, as it was now called, taking an unexpected turn in its development. A circular was issued by Bishop Alford inviting support for the establishment of an orphanage for destitute European and Eurasian children:
Many children of European and half-caste parentage are to be found living under very deplorable circumstances in Hong Kong, China and Japan�K.
One of the objects of the Female Diocesan School in Hong Kong is to offer
a permanent home for a limited number of orphans and other children in necessitous circumstances. The education of Chinese girls in Hong Kong on Anglo-Chinese principles having been found undesirable, it is proposed
to extend the benefits of the education given �K to a few such children of both
sexes �K reserving one wing for the boys and the other for the girls.17
Thus in 1869 the Diocesan Female School changed into the Diocesan Home and Orphanage with the Diocesan Boys�� School as part of it. Its efforts were largely
directed to the care and education of Eurasian children.
An earlier step in education had been made with the help of Susan Harriet Sophia Baxter [20/5/3], who arrived in Hong Kong in July 1860. Her father was a wealthy banker with houses in Doncaster and London. Mrs. Smith, the wife of the bishop of Hong Kong, had visited him to discuss school projects. Sophia was present at the meeting and her interest was captured. She decided to go to Hong Kong as an independent missionary paying her own way. Finding that the
Diocesan Female School was well supplied with staff, Miss Baxter struck out on
her own, founding schools where she saw a need and funding them herself through her family. She founded among others an independent Chinese girls�� boarding school, a school for European orphans and children of mixed race, and a boys�� day school. E.J. Eitel said of her: ��She made her home in Hong Kong, the home of
every friendless, fatherless, motherless suffering, outcast woman or child, without
distinction of nationality, creed or social rank��. 18 Bishop George Smith wrote:
Among the European community she had many friends who valued her uncompromising honesty, her Christian boldness, her willingness to risk offence when sense of duty compelled her to utter words of rebuke, her determination to call all things by their right names, her courageous resistance to worldly compliance with fashionable customs injurious in their
influence on Christian character and her willingness to reprove others under the promptings of real affection and interest in their spiritual well-being.19
She sounds like a very formidable woman. On 30 June 1865, Susan Baxter died of Hong Kong fever. Matilda Sharp was at her bedside till near the end: ��Dear Miss Baxter has gone to her rest after being ill only ten days. I was with her ten minutes before her death and was with her all the day before��. 20 The Baxter Schools continued with the support of the Female Education Society and Susan��s sister, Nona, back in England. In 1876 the Hong Kong Telegraph reported that four Baxter Schools were still in existence, namely the Tai Ping Shan School, the Sai Ying Poon School, the Staunton Street School and the Girl��s School.21
Roman Catholic Schools
The important role played by the Catholic Church in the field of education should
not be forgotten. In particular, the Italian Bishop Raimondi and the Catholic nuns, many of whom are buried in the Roman Catholic Cemetery, played a major part in expanding the scope of Catholic education. The French order, the Sisters
of St. Paul with their headquarters in Wan Chai and the Italian Cannossian
Order, the Daughters of Charity in Caine Road both provided education in particular to the daughters of the Portuguese minority. The Sisters of St. Paul also ran an orphanage. Both orders have large monuments in the Roman Catholic Cemetery on which the names and ages of all the nuns are inscribed. The life span of the nuns illustrates dramatically the way in which medical advances have made
Hong Kong a more healthy place. The first ten Cannossian sisters to die in Hong Kong from 1867 to 1891 had an average life span of thirty-seven years while the last ten listed averaged eighty years. The difference for the Sisters of St. Paul de Chatres is even more startling. The first ten to die from 1850 to 1889 only averaged
thirty-one years, while the last ten averaged eighty-three years. Bishop Raimondi founded St. Saviour��s School in Pottinger Street, which
advertised in 1867 that it was running seven sections. In the English School,
European boys were taught a limited syllabus of English, maths, book keeping, mensuration and geography. The Anglo Chinese School for Chinese boys who wanted to learn English was ��quite separated from the European boys��.22 Even the Catholics, who showed the least amount of racial discrimination in their churches, could not break the taboos of that era that separated races. A Portuguese school for the Portuguese boys ran alongside the other two. There was also according to the advertisement a noteworthy experimental school for European boys who wished to learn Chinese which lasted one hour a day in the afternoon. Besides these, included in the advertisements were a French school, a drawing school and a music school. Besides St. Saviour��s college Bishop Raimondi opened a reformatory in March 1864 for twelve boys in two or three small houses near the
West Point Slaughter House. The bishop depended for its support on ��the ever
open-handed merchants and they did not let him down��. This establishment was
essential if boys picked up for petty offences or vagrancy were not to be herded in
an indiscriminate manner into Victoria Gaol alongside the hardened criminals, as had previously happened.
The Legalization of Gambling
Sir Richard MacDonnell came to Hong Kong as governor in 1865, and by then he had already done the rounds as governor of Gambia, St. Lucia and St. Vincent, South Australia and Nova Scotia. At the end of his career and less dependent
than others on the good report of the colonial office in England, he embarked on an ambitious experiment to legalize gambling and confine it to clearly authorized
and controllable houses whose owners paid large sums for the privilege of running the establishment. Fifteen gambling houses were to be authorized, twelve in the district of Victoria and three in the outlying villages. The registered keeper of each
house was to pay a fee to the government amounting to $1,450 a month.23 It was an experiment fraught with difficulties. In September 1867, eleven
public gaming houses were licensed and opened to the public to the outrage particularly of the missionaries. Daniel Caldwell [19/1/1] proved, yet again,
how indispensable he was to the government. In 1867, he was employed by the
proprietors of the licensed public gaming houses to keep their houses on the right side of the law. Caldwell recruited and ran a number of Chinese informers who became an informal detective force under Caldwell supplementary to the police
force. When a survey was made of the arrests of ��Illegal Gamblers and Dangerous
Characters��, it was found that twenty-one of the twenty-four subsequently jailed had been apprehended by ��Mr. Caldwell��s detectives��. 24 Sir Richard MacDonnell had realized that Caldwell was the one person who could make his scheme to license gambling in the colony workable and recalled him to the government ��at
the monstrous salary�� of $2,500. As late as 1870, Chief Justice John Smale was able
to state frankly that Caldwell was still the only person the authorities could rely on in the detection of crime and the apprehension of criminals. Until his death
in October 1875, Caldwell continued to be trusted and held in high esteem by
the Chinese businessmen to whom he acted as agent and general adviser. The monument, raised in his honour by the Freemasons, is one of the most striking in the Cemetery. Daniel Caldwell, the adventurer who made good, is the only man of that era who can be said to have truly bridged the gulf that separated the European settlers from the Chinese.
Legalized gambling attracted so much controversy and bad publicity and was so unpopular with the Europeans and Chinese alike that the experiment was stopped in 1870 on orders of the colonial office in London.
The Police Force
The years 1871 to 1872 were watershed years for the Hong Kong Police Force
and this watershed is echoed in the Hong Kong Cemetery. In the ten years from
1861 to 1871, the headstones of only three policemen have survived. The first two
include an inspector of nuisances, Samuel Cook London [32/1/4] and Sergeant Luke Bright from Norfolk, whose headstone has become separated from the footstone so that he now appears to have two graves [Headstone 21A/2/7, Footstone 16/8/1]. The third headstone belongs to the only police constable to be commemorated during those ten years. This unfortunate American, George William West [38/6/6], had been sent to search the slopes of the Peak in the hot August sun for bands of robbers. He keeled over and died, probably of heatstroke,
though the records give the cause of death as apoplexy. West was a rather
overweight twenty-one-year old. ��He was thought to have over-exerted himself
because of the chaffing of his fellow constables��. Perhaps the fact that he had died
in the execution of his duty made him worthy of the honour of a headstone.
In the first ten years, 1861�V71, pay was low and morale was even lower. Those
who served in the force occupied the bottom ranks among the expatriates. It is
not surprising that their efforts to maintain law and order fell below expectations.
The police, for example, were helpless when, in 1865, a gang tunnelled for several weeks right under the treasury of the Central Bank of India and carried off upwards of $100,000 in gold bullion and notes.25 A song entitled Guardians of the Peace by a Mr. Small published in the Daily Press in 1871 gives a good idea of the composition and reputation of the force as popularly perceived:
A pretty motley group of roughs I swear,
A riff-raff pick��d up heav��n alone knows where.
Drunken Europeans and the lanky Sikh,
Who cannot understand a word we speak;
Lazy Indians too, from various tribes, Chinese detectives who are fond of bribes-In league �X if all I hear is true �X
With gamblers, thieves, and even murderers too.
Shame on the Government, shame I say,
To keep such barefac��d robbers in their pay��.26
The force was blamed for being inept, drunken and corrupt. One example from the China Mail will suffice. In March 1870, William Smith, P.C. No. 25, was charged by the assistant superintendent:
On the 13th inst., he had been brought to the Station visibly suffering from
the effects of heavy drinking and was then sent to the hospital, suffering from delirium tremens�K. There were fourteen previous reports against the defendant, and another most aggravating circumstance �K was that he
had received $127 to pay the mess-man of the European force and when apprehended only $90 were found upon him.
More columns were written in the pages of the press on this subject than on any
other. At the root of the problem was the level of pay the government offered. It
was too small to attract or keep the kind of men needed to raise the standard of the force. In July 1867, the editor of the China Mail asked what could be done and answered his question as follows:
Why sir, if we want an honest servant, we must pay him a fair amount of wages. We must not only give him enough to find the bare necessities of life
but we must leave a fair margin besides. One thing is certain: if we do not supply the wants of our servants, they will supply their own wants if they get the chance.27
The police of this period suffered from what would now be seen as a lack
of the bare necessities of life. It was not until February 1867 that the policemen
at the central barracks could take a bath. It was then announced in the China Mail that just one bath tub had been provided for the use of all the Europeans. The paper asked what the Indian contingent did for a bath.28 Again the China Mail complained that the Wan Chai Police Station had more the appearance
of a stable than a house for the habitation of one inspector, three sergeants and four policemen: ��There is little or no preparation for the comfort of the staff.
The Europeans have to cook their victuals in apertures in the wall and generally follow a real life closely resembling gipsy life��.29 William Deane, head of the police, wrote in his report dated June 1871: ��At the Central Station, the want of proper
cook-houses, latrines, lavatories and stables complained of for so long a time, still
continues��. The first police mess was only set up in 1870 at the Central Barracks
but the cutlery and crockery needed had to be paid for by each European constable ��as best he could��.30
It is not surprising that the policemen were unable to find European women willing to marry them. In May 1871, of the 115 policemen in government employ,
only 11 had wives.31 The taverns and brothels gave many policemen their only relaxation but also brought them into contact with the worst elements among the Europeans, as well as the dangers arising from excessive drinking and visiting the
lowest class of brothels. Up until 1873, policemen had to undergo the indignity of a
compulsory monthly inspection for venereal disease.
Many policemen set out to amass a competency that would propel them to better things. At this time, all Chinese venturing out after eight p.m. at night needed a pass from the registrar general��s office. The China Mail wrote in 1861:
By overlooking the want of a pass a policeman can easily make $2 a night �K while getting a good beat in the line of the well-filled godowns and counting houses, a little careful blindness would often be cheap at $20 or $30 �X
overpowering to a man who has the wolf continually at the door�K. The policeman has neither education nor a high sense of integrity. The probability is that he sees nothing accursed in bribery but quadrupling his salary.32
The discovery of the Wan Chai Squeezing Club in 1867 shows the extent of
the corruption:
Wanchai is notoriously the district of Victoria where congregate the vilest
thieves and the most ��cute and hardened criminals which this island and the
mainland can furnish�K. The fact is simply that the Police Station in Wanchai
has been for months so completely the centre of bribery and corruption that not one honest constable could be found in the lot.33
The police in Wan Chai had specialized in watching over illegal gambling dens and
giving the alarm when necessary. For this service the station cook helped by the interpreter had collected weekly fees which were then divided out according to rank.
The work the police constables were expected to do for a pittance was hard and often dangerous. They did not understand Chinese and had no way of communicating with or understanding the Chinese majority. In 1865, the editor of China Mail asked:
What do we actually know of the ten or dozen inmates that each house
shelters �X Nothing whatsoever. A shepherd may no more control his flock with a Manila poodle than we can the Chinese in this city with the
present legal and executive machinery. Were it not that the Chinese govern
themselves and are free from riotous habits (clan fights exempted) a much stricter municipal code would have to be in force.34
In any case cooperation was made difficult and dangerous, because the secret triad societies who were at the bottom of many piracies and robberies had
their own method of dealing with the Chinese who told on them. When Wilmot Wadeson Holworthy was brutally murdered on the Peak, it was only through the detective work of Daniel Caldwell��s force that two men were found in Macau who could be accused of the crime.35 They finally had to be released through lack of evidence. It is hardly surprising that the Chinese looked down on the police force with loathing as drunken scum and refused to cooperate with them.
Besides their efforts to curb crime in the colony, the police force also had great difficulty in attempting to control the antics of seamen, both Europeans and Lascars, in their jaunts ashore. Drunken seamen, often armed with knives, violently resisted being taken to the police cells and were aided in their resistance by their companions. In 1868, Inspector Henry Stroud [43/2/2], for example, was assaulted by six seamen on a Sunday afternoon and had his uniform torn to
rags. Later, in 1875, Stroud collapsed and died while on patrol in Western aged
only twenty-eight years. Inspector Grimes was on special duties in plain clothes in
West Point when he tried to break up a fight between two Malays in Lascar Row.
He was attacked by forty Malays with bamboos and sticks. They only stopped beating him because the huge crowd of men were getting in each other��s way. Grimes, bleeding from his head and hand, was compelled to beat a quick retreat:
and while doing so was assailed by a shower of bottles, pots and other missiles. He then said that had he not managed to escape the crowd, he would have been killed. Eighteen Malays were rounded up and appeared in
court next day where they were fined heavily.36
Earlier attempts to solve the problems of the police force only seemed to make matters worse. One of the new initiatives instituted by the governor, Sir
Richard MacDonnell, in 1867 was the substitution of a force of Sikhs for the
sepoys previously recruited from Bombay. These men were cheap to hire yet tall and powerful when compared to the Chinese. They also had the advantage that they could be used to control the Chinese without the British being seen to be involved. They took coercive policing one step further, particularly as they too lacked the language skills to explain themselves to the local Chinese:
Another element of confusion has been introduced by the increase in the number of Hindustani-speaking police between whom and the Chinese there exists a hopeless and unbridgeable gulf of non-comprehension�K. There is not a single competent interpreter who can communicate directly between the Sikhs and Chinese.37
They had to resort to more violent methods of enforcing the law:
Beat a man over the head and face from a Northerly direction and the probability is he will retreat backwards to the southward and this is the ultima ratio adopted by the enlightened Sikh �X arising from utter incapacity of the chair coolie to understand what the black is saying.38
The Sikhs were found to be taking into custody many more Chinese than ever came to court and some of those appearing in the dock were in a dreadfully battered state. The Hong Kong Punch published a poem on the subject in August
1867, one verse of which went as follows:
Don��t you see the hawkers Beneath the high verandahs,
Where they get a little shade
From the sun.
They must be dreadful ruffians With crimes upon their conscience,
For when a Sikh approaches How they run! There��s no mistake, they scuttle from the giant,
Who rushes with the rattan to the fray.39
One Chinese lamplighter was shot at by a Sikh while up a ladder lighting the gas lamp; another Hindu constable:
was peering into the mysteries of a small revolver within the confines of the
Police Court ��seeing how the trigger would work�� we suppose �X when one of the chambers exploded, and the ball passed through the head of a Chinese woman who was in attendance as a witness.40
Another European constable shot and killed a frightened fleeing Chinese whose only crime was not being gainfully employed. This kind of reckless use of firearms
was encouraged by some jurors who, in the subsequent trials, found the policemen not guilty of manslaughter in the face of clear evidence and the judge��s summing up. ��There is a bloodthirsty sort of instinct abroad that the deceased being only a Chinaman no particular harm is done by shooting him��.41
The system of policing during these years seems to have been increasingly discriminatory against the Chinese. This trend was highlighted by the Hong Kong Punch, in the December number of 1872, when it described a mock action before Choker White Esq. (nom de plume for the magistrate, C.H. Whyte, whose wife is
buried in the Roman Catholic Cemetery):
Mr. Unfairman of Messrs. Crane Lawford & Co. charged a coolie with walking on Queen��s Road and carrying a bundle of bamboos while he, Mr.
U. was driving there. Mr. U. was just turning the corner from the Parade Ground on to Queen��s Road when the defendant had the audacity to be in this public thoroughfare. In order to avoid being run over, he actually jumped out of the way and in doing so dropped the bamboos which damaged Mr. U��s carriage slightly and frightened him greatly. Mr. U. did not think that the coolie had tried to save his life ��from any malicious motive�� and he did not wish to press the charge. His worship said that in that case he should deal
leniently with the man. He would fine him FIVE DOLLARS or seven days
imprisonment and hoped this would be a warning to him next time not to jump out of the way when any European nearly drove over him. The roads were intended exclusively for Europeans driving, not for coolies carrying
burthens�K. The unfortunate delinquent was carried off to prison.
The Indian police had even more trouble than the European police when they tried to control the riotous and drunken soldiers and seamen who nightly poured out of the many taverns worse for wear. The editor of the China Mail railed against the uselessness of Sikhs and Bengalis:
trying to preserve the peace when drunken sailors are concerned. We
ourselves witnessed a case a few days since in which it took five Sikhs and two Bengalis all they could do to manage one drunken man �X to the great delight of a chuckling crowd of Chinese.42
So by this time an element of farce was creeping in to compound the lack of
police success and the many different agencies involved in peace-keeping. Because
of the inadequacy of the police, every godown and every European household
had their own watchman. Among the Chinese, the District Watch was born
in 1866 out of a meeting of the Kaifong leaders, the Chinese merchants and the more prosperous shopkeepers. They asked the government for permission to elect members to act as watchmen paid for by themselves from money collected by men appointed by them from among the Chinese. This self-help organization was readily accepted by Sir Richard MacDonnell and placed under the registrar general��s department. The licensed gambling houses had their own policing system of Chinese runners or informers under Daniel Caldwell since policemen were not allowed to enter a gambling house in case they become addicted or
corrupted. West Indians, Irishmen and even the best Scotland Yard in London could produce had been brought to Hong Kong in the effort to find an efficient
and incorruptible source of manpower for the police and each in turn had shown themselves to be corruptible and prone to drink to excess. No-one was able to
effectively penetrate the criminal elements.
Under Sir Richard MacDonnell a start was made in reforming the police. More police stations were established and they were connected by telegraph. A separate naval yard police was established under the control of the Admiralty and a number of the better policemen were seconded to this branch of operations. A police school was opened so that Indians and Europeans could learn Chinese, and allowances were paid out for good conduct. Forty additional policemen were sought from Scotland, it being thought that those coming from the homeland of Calvinism and the Presbyterian church would be better able to withstand the temptation to earn extra money on the side. In 1872, a commission was called for by the justices of the peace backed by a petition signed by over four hundred residents. Its recommendations were acted on by the new governor, Sir Arthur Kennedy. Police pay was increased, their living conditions improved, a better pension scheme was provided and those policemen who died on government service were given the right to funerals and headstones at government expense.
The police force, in spite of a few later hiccups, never looked back. From 1872,
almost every policeman who died in Hong Kong can be accounted for somewhere
in the Cemetery. Between 1873 and 1875, the burial places of eight policemen, five of whom were from Aberdeenshire were marked by the first of the solid, properly
inscribed and well-carved granite testaments to the newfound respectability of the police. It seems sad that four of those men were under thirty and that they had travelled so far only to die within a couple of years of their arrival in Hong Kong.
The effects of the new aura of respectability accorded to the police and the
better type of police recruited from Scotland shine through the diary kept by Sergeant James Dodds [42/1/11/]43 from Roxburghshire. He was stationed at
Stanley up to 1 June 1875 and then, on promotion to inspector, at the Central Police
Station. Both Dodds and Inspector James Youngson [42/1/12] had previously been policemen in Scotland and both were serious, upright men. Dodds in his diary made clear his disapproval of the fast living, drinking life-style of many Hong
Kong men. On 5 November 1876, he recorded his reading matter as The Elements of Social Science. His hobby was rifle shooting which he practised with his friend,
Youngson. The newfound respectability of the police force was demonstrated to all when it was arranged that Dodds would entertain the governor, Sir Arthur
Kennedy, and his daughter for lunch at Stanley police station. The financial status
of policemen had also changed for the better. Dodds had a bank account in the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank and invested money in
shares. In 1875, he sold the six shares that he
owned jointly with Youngson for just over
$363.00. He had enough ready cash in July to
buy himself an ��English lever, hunting watch and a gold locket from G. Falconer��s shop��. In November he was able to buy Youngson a dozen bottles of port wine. He also sent money home to Scotland to his sister and father. He enjoyed attending the races and, when he became ill with a chest infection, could afford to go to Macau to recuperate. Dodds also became a member of the United Services Lodge of Freemasons. He recorded with obvious satisfaction his passage
through the first and second degrees. On 17 November 1876, Dodds went into the
government civil hospital where he was twice visited by Sir Arthur Kennedy, and
soon after that, on 20 November 1876, he died aged thirty-four. The report in the
Gazette stated that both he and Youngson displayed great trustworthiness and ability throughout their service in the colony.
Victoria Gaol
The decade 1861�V71 was a difficult one also for the prison governors. Escapes
were numerous and discipline difficult to enforce. In 1863 twenty-two prisoners made their escape by tunnelling into a drain. Not long after Rev. James Legge, the missionary, claimed that he ��did the service to the government of disconcerting a scheme on a larger scale, by which within a few hours, eighty-nine men would have got away��. 44 In 1859 Joseph Scott [16Cii/7/7], an ex-colour sergeant and drill master of the 95th Regiment, was placed in charge of Victoria Gaol. He had been
an overseer of the works for the surveyor general in 1855. In 1856, he became acting sexton and clerk to the colonial chaplain on whose recommendation he was elevated to the post of governor of the prison. Two factors made it almost inevitable that discipline in the prison would be enforced by means of the stick. Firstly, prison governors who were mostly ex-soldiers had become inured to brutality in the army. Secondly, the poorly paid, poorly educated men put in charge of the prisoners could not communicate with the majority of their charges as they spoke no Chinese. A prison riot in March 1860 was caused, according to Colin Crisswell, by ��overcrowding, lack of proper supervision and sheer unimaginative inhumanity augmented by downright cruelty��. 45
While William Tarrant was serving a sentence for libel in 1860, he accused Scott of cruel practices and listed a number of European prisoners whose health had broken down in prison due to their treatment. In 1861, Scott undertook the public flogging
18.6. Headstone in memory of
of a British escapee himself and was again
Joseph Scott, governor of Victoria reported for cruelty. He punished with Gaol, d. 17.5.1863.
dismissal the turnkeys who had made the report. Treatment of the Chinese would
doubtless have been worse. When a Chinese, Lye Mooey Chie, died in suspicious
circumstances and was subsequently exhumed, it was found that although sick
with dysentery, he had been flogged twice, dosed with aperients, placed in solitary confinement and put on half rations. The jury voiced their opinion: ��There is great
carelessness in conveying to the Gaol Governor the reports on prisoners made by
the Surgeon��. They added a note that: ��The punishment of flogging within the gaol
appears to be much too common��. 46 Scott remained in his post until his death in May 1863. He and his wife Elizabeth Scott [16Cii/8/5] are buried near each other in the Cemetery. Though Scott came in for his share of the blame for the state of the prison and the number of escapes that were made from it, the government was mainly held responsible because of the class of men it employed as turnkeys and the miserable level of pay allowed them. The drains through which so many escapes were made were eventually filled up and constructed of iron pipes not large enough for a man to crawl through.47
Scott was replaced on the cheap by Charles Ryall, an ex-ship��s mate who, because of his inexperience, took a cut in salary. Inevitably, a scandal erupted
when a friend of his, William Kent Stanford, was sentenced to eight years in gaol
for his part in the opium fraud perpetrated on board the Circassia. Stanford was married to Isabella Morriss, the widowed daughter of the Cornishman, Captain Curnow. Her former husband, John Warden Morriss [10/8/5], an assistant to Frederick Blackhead, had died after only two months of marriage. In 1858, Stanford was made a partner by Captain Charles Jamieson and given command of the Circassia. In 1862, the failure of a Parsee firm brought to light a huge and systematic swindle. Hormusjee & Rustomjee collapsed owing over $1 million
dollars. The firm had been receiving large amounts in loans on the security of non-existent opium which was supposed to have been stored in the holds of two ships, the Circassia and the Tropic, both jointly owned by Stanford and Jamieson.
Investigators found only fifty chests of opium aboard the ships where, according
to the receipts signed by Stanford, there should have been fifteen hundred chests. Both Stanford and Rustomjee were sent to gaol. It is interesting to note how readily opium was accepted as security for loans. It seems to have played a
significant part in financing the commercial development of Hong Kong.
Ryall had also recently married a widow from Cornwall and Stanford��s Cornish-born wife was a good friend of Ryall��s new wife. So, it came about that he organized a dinner party to include the prisoner, Stanford, and his wife, Isabella. Put on notice by the turnkey, Frederick Bowen [32/2/17] from Portsmouth, Charles May, superintendent of the police, paid a surprise visit to Ryall��s quarters that night. He found Ryall, his wife and a drunken Johnson, the chief executioner, in one room. Proceeding on to the second room, he found Stanford and his wife in evening dress sitting on a sofa together. These irregular proceedings brought Ryall��s career in the prison to an ignominious close. He was sentenced to six months in prison. Stanford was found guilty of escaping from prison, which seems unfair considering his cell door had been opened by a warder, and sentenced to three months�� extension of sentence.
On 26 November 1862 Francis Douglas [8/17/5] arrived from England to take over as governor of the prison. He had probably served previously in the army but his last post had been as assistant overseer of convicts at Bermuda.48 Victoria Gaol became known as Douglas Hotel, but bore few of the hallmarks of a hotel as the old brutalities seem to have continued largely unabated. Douglas�� task was not easy. He presided over three sections in the prison, a debtors�� section, a European section filled mostly with recalcitrant, drunken seamen and a Chinese section. He had to deal with the bad, the mad and the destitute, since there was no other provision in the colony for these people. The turnkeys came from the lowest class of Europeans and were in general little better than the prisoners they guarded.
Things did not improve when one hundred of the worst offenders were put on board a hulk, the Royal Saxon, under the supervision of G.L. Tomlin whose infant son, Ernest Harry Tomlin [20/14/3], is buried in the Cemetery. Thirty-nine prisoners drowned when a barge ferrying them upset. Then, in May 1868 a stampede on Stonecutters Island was orchestrated and one hundred men managed to escape. Questions were asked as to why the convicts had been supplied with bamboos and why a barge had been conveniently anchored nearby making the prisoners�� escape so much easier. Following that, in July 1868, an Indian prisoner, Abdool Khan, was kicked and beaten to death by three turnkeys in so outrageous a manner that they were charged with manslaughter, found guilty and sentenced to six months�� hard labour. The China Mail talked of ��the degradation to which the lowest classes of British subjects descend��.49
The hatreds and resentments caused by bad treatment sometimes boiled over into murderous attacks. In September 1868, one such caused the death of John Stinson [5/1/27], a Scottish turnkey from Banff. Stinson
who bears a good character was ordered for duty in that part of the prison called the lower yard, where the stone masons, blacksmiths etc. work, and while standing amidst the convicts under his charge, a Chinaman came up to him and knocked him down with a hammer.50
He was hit on the head with such force that he was dead by sundown. Perhaps
Douglas tried to stem the endemic violence in the gaol. He dismissed William
Jackson, a coloured chain gang guard and charged him with assault. Jackson had broken the arm of a Chinese prisoner under his care. 51 Douglas stayed in Hong
Kong eleven years until his death from dysentery in June 1874 and enjoyed a high
reputation. The chief justice said on hearing of his death: ��I have recently felt that the two great institutions in this Colony to show to strangers are our public school and our gaol��. 52 Douglas�� funeral was numerously attended by leading
officials, residents and members of the Masonic lodges of which he was a member. The Legislative Council voted an honorarium of $1920 to Mrs. Douglas and her children. Mary Douglas, who died in 1879, is buried in the Roman Catholic
Cemetery. The graves of four turnkeys from the Douglas Hotel era of the prison still exist in the Cemetery. Robert Sharp [11B/2/11] was head turnkey. James Beasley��s headstone [43/2/7] was erected by his friend, John Williams, who proclaimed himself on the inscription to be in charge of the Protestant Cemetery.
George Marshall [43/3/5], who died in 1875, had his stone erected by a Japanese friend. William Higgins [32/1/8] was accidentally drowned.
Chapter 19 Changes Taking Place outside the Government
The Professionals
By this time fewer professionals died in Hong Kong. Lawyers and doctors were well paid and could afford to take a ship to Britain. But by now some professionals also saw Hong Kong as their home and not just a temporary place of residence. Among them particular mention must be made of three lawyers, Francis Innes Hazeland, whose wife, Margaretta [13/3/9], and son, John Innes Hazeland [12/5/9], are to be found in the Hong Kong Cemetery, and John Joseph Francis. These two followed in the footsteps of that indomitable survivor William Gaskell [16Cii/7/14], mentioned earlier, who was one of the
first solicitors to work in Hong Kong, having arrived in the colony in November
1846 and stayed up to 1868, when he died aged fifty-seven.1 Francis Hazeland
arrived in the colony around the beginning of the Second Opium War. Soon after his arrival, in February 1857, he was attacked when returning from Stanley by
the Military Road. He met three or four Chinese who accosted him in English. Turning to reply, he was surprised by a blow to his head and
in attempting to ward off this, Mr. Hazeland��s thumb was nearly severed from his hand. Another stroke laid open his skull and stretched him senseless
on the ground. Other wounds were inflicted, and his gold watch and chain
were taken.2
In spite of the doubts expressed as to his survival, Hazeland recovered without any lasting effects and resumed his work as a solicitor. He was an enthusiastic Freemason and was one of the very few to keep his sons in the colony and educate them at the Diocesan School at a time when to do so was almost unheard of. He
died in January 1871 aged just thirty-six years: ��Mr. Hazeland was much respected
and the announcement of his death in the prime of his manhood caused general sorrow��.3 The Legislative Council voted $3,000 as a gratuity to his family. He was buried in Happy Valley but the site of his grave has been lost.4 Two of his sons, Ernest and Francis Arthur, distinguished themselves in the course of long careers in the colony. Ernest became an architect and civil engineer and Francis worked in the legal departments of the government where he rose to the positions of deputy registrar and acting chief clerk.5
John Joseph Francis, who is buried in the Roman Catholic Cemetery, and
was from Dublin, Ireland, is the third of the trio. He had become an army officer
in his early twenties and was serving in the Royal Artillery when he was posted
to China. In 1859, he made the momentous decision to buy himself out of the
army and remain in Hong Kong. He worked as a clerk living in Mosque Street
until 1865, when he became articled to William Gaskell. Francis later decided to become a barrister and in 1874 he left Hong Kong to become a student of Gray��s Inn, returning on qualification to be admitted to the Hong Kong bar in 1877. He quickly became influential in many spheres of his life. He was elected captain of the Volunteers Corps, revived for the third time in 1878, was a faithful adherent
of the Roman Catholic Church in Hong Kong, and was one of the supporters
of the Chinese in the colony. He signed an affidavit in support of the application of Ng Choy, the first Chinese to be admitted to practise at the bar. He was also
an outspoken supporter of his fellow Irishman, the governor Sir John Pope Hennessy, whose pro-Chinese stance so upset the expatriate community. In 1886, when he was candidate for the justices of peace seat on the Legislative Assembly, Francis showed his feelings for his adopted home: ��It is my home, my life��s work is here and I rise or fall with its fortunes��.6
The Utilities
Gas
The first utility to reach Hong Kong, in November 1864, was gas lighting, to the
delight of the Europeans who could then do away with the smoky, smelly lamps
which used peanut oil and whose wicks needed constant trimming. Gas fitters for
the new utility had to be sent out from England and again illness and death took their toll. The first to die in 1860 was Frederick Augustus Autey [7/29/6], the small son of the superintendent gas fitter, William Autey [4/11/4], who managed to continue for another thirteen years and become the indispensable chief
manager of the Gas Works before following his son to the grave in 1873. Edward Richard Handley [5/2/27] came out to Hong Kong as foreman gas fitter and left the company in 1867 to start his own business with John Paterson, advertising themselves as house and ship plumbers, copper and zinc workers and gas fitters. Paterson died in Hong Kong in 1869 and Handley carried on the business. He attained the respectable position of being on the jury list by 1872. His wife, Louisa, died in 1871 aged thirty-three; he followed in 1875.
The Telegraph
Work on two telegraph services began in Hong Kong when the Danish Great
Northern Telegraph Company began to connect Hong Kong to Shanghai
and work started at Deep Water Bay. Then the China Submarine Telegraphic cable came ashore in 1871 at a small inlet at Pokfulam Bay which became known
as Telegraph Bay. This was done under the superintendency of John Squier whose baby daughter, Mary Douglas Squier [7/25/6] died in 1874 aged sixteen months. On 5 July of that year a congratulatory message, sent by the chairman in
London to the Hong Kong Chamber of Commerce, took just fifty-three minutes
to reach Hong Kong. Communication with the outside world and in particular with the authorities in London had been revolutionized. But once again, the stresses and strains on the technicians brought half way round the world to work
on difficult projects in the outlying areas of Hong Kong were enormous: ��To go unarmed at all beyond the outskirts [of Victoria] by day as well as by night was a
risky sort of pleasure, through the footpads who abound in all these locations��. 7 The China Mail in the same article reported in 1871 that one of the European employees of the Great Northern Telegraph Company had been attacked by highwaymen near the Gap at Happy Valley but had managed to escape. Two employees of the Great Northern committed
suicide. In January 1871 a Dane,
Anton Christensen [38/7/4], took an overdose of laudanum and in the following December Charles Donovan [38/7/5] shot himself at
Deep Water Bay.
The importance of the telegraph service to Hong Kong cannot be overstated. No longer was it an isolated backwater where any sort of communication to Europe took six weeks. Distance had ceased to matter as much when a telegraph could be sent and replied to within the course of the same day.
Developments in the Ship Repairing Business
A number of men, mainly from the north of Britain and Scotland, laid the foundations for technology in Hong Kong by their enterprise in the ship building and repairing business. One of the earlier men to establish a yard in Hong Kong was Alexander Ross [43/1/4] of Glasgow who worked as foreman in Stephen Prentis Hall��s yard. Hall is said to be the father of Sin Tak Fan who in his turn fathered generations of Eurasians, many of whom now lie at rest in the Cemetery.
In 1865, Ross established a yard in Wan Chai together with a Mr. Thompson and by 1867 he was in sole charge of it. His son, James Gordon Ross [20/10/1], died in 1864 and shares a monument with his sister, Jane, who died in 1865. Then in 1867 his wife, Mary Ross, joined her children in the family tomb aged thirty-two after a long and painful illness. Thomas James Record [40/3/3] from Woolwich, whose inscription describes him as a moulder in the Royal Navy Yard, must have been a close friend of David Illingworth.
19.2. Headstone in memory of David Illingworth, Iron and Brass Foundry worker and owner, d. 14.7.1871.
When he died at West Point Foundry in 1869, he left Illingworth $900 and made
him his executor. David Illingworth [5/1/32] from Bradford, Yorkshire began work as foreman at Russell & Co.��s Iron and Brass Foundry and then went on to
start his own foundry at West Point. He auctioned off his stock in 1870 when he became ill. Illingworth died in July 1871.
J.W. Croker [20/6/2] was another technician who worked his way up to become foreman and then, in 1876, managing engineer of the Novelty Iron Works, finally moving into the docks as engineer in 1880.
The Beginning of Hong Kong��s Dockyards
By the end of this period, Hong Kong possessed five docks, three slipways and
everything needed to repair the ships of that period and to build medium-sized
vessels. The loss of the use of the Whampoa docks during the Second Opium War had hastened this development. Furthermore, the depth of the water in the
Pearl River would no longer allow the bigger Royal Navy vessels to be docked there. Docking facilities for larger vessels were needed in Hong Kong. John Lamont, the ships�� carpenter from Aberdeen in Scotland, teamed up with a fellow Scot, Douglas Lapraik, to purchase a suitable site for a dock in Aberdeen.
In June 1860, Lamont opened the first dock in Hong Kong that was capable of rivalling the docks built by the Coupers at Whampoa. Such was its success that,
in January 1863, he embarked on a second, even larger dock. In mid-1865, with this dock half built, Lamont decided to return with his two Eurasian sons to his native Aberdeen, perhaps foreseeing his impending death there. However, first he managed to sell his share of the Aberdeen Docks to Jardine, Matheson & Co. After his death, the two boys were seen through school in Scotland and generally looked after by members of the Jardine and Matheson families in Aberdeen. Thomas Lamont [23/9/6] came back to Hong Kong to assume his father��s mantle
as superintendent of the Aberdeen Docks, dying in 1890 aged forty years.
Meanwhile, in July 1863, with the full support of his partners, Jardine Matheson and the P. & O., and within a few weeks of the passing of the Companies Ordinance, Lapraik set up the Hong Kong & Whampoa Dock Company with Thomas Sutherland as its chairman. So in this way, the dock company became the first listed company in Hong Kong, literally the No. 1 Hong Kong Company.
Reactions from Dent & Co. followed swiftly. The directors put together a consortium of companies which included Dent��s and the two American companies, Heard and Hunt, and set up the rival Union Dock Company of Hong Kong and Whampoa. In November 1864, the newly formed Union Dock Company bought a piece of land on the Kowloon peninsula near the village of Hung Hom and proceeded to dig a large mud hole. This was the first time a professional architect, John Studd, had been brought in to supervise the dock construction. Some of the more old-fashioned members of the board were convinced that the old-style ships�� carpenters like Couper and Lamont could do a better job. Captain Henry de Castilla announced: ��All the docks in China and Singapore have been built by Scottish carpenters and there are no better docks in the world��. A series of disputes convulsed the boardroom and interrupted progress. Dr. Ivor Murray, the colonial surgeon, whose little daughter, Edith Mary Murray [7/24/4], died aged two years, insisted on calling in Robert Duncan from the Aberdeen Docks to advise. He was another Scottish carpenter who had taken over as superintendent when Lamont returned to Scotland. Disputes erupted over the design of the Hung Hom docks, and in particular over the kind of concrete to be used on the floor of the dock. The deputy surveyor, John Clark [20/12/1], who died suddenly in the following year (October 1868) while at work in his office, was called in to
adjudicate and sided against the architect, Studd. The entire board of directors took ship to Hung Hom and solemnly stared at the mud hole. Victor Kressner, the chairman, resigned twice during the altercations, leaving Captain James Bridges Endicott [11B/1/1] in the chair. Finally Studd won his battle, the dock
was successfully finished, and the Chinese concrete mix proved, over many years
to come, its ability to stay waterproof.
Robert Duncan and the Great Dock Swindle
Meanwhile at Aberdeen a second dock was finished by Robert Duncan whose wife, Catherine Duncan [5/3/27], died in September 1867 aged twenty-nine soon after the docks were opened.
There now began a period of intense competition between the two dock companies. Union Dock did such tremendous business that a second dock was
called for. Then in 1869, the main partner, Dent & Co., folded and went out of
business. In the meantime Jardine Matheson met the competition by lowering their prices to uneconomic levels and deliberately operating at a loss. In less than a
year Union Dock went into voluntary liquidation. Jardines, led by James Whittall,
whose probable relative Charlton Whittall of Smyrna [32/2/15] lies in a distant corner of the Cemetery, raised a mortgage to buy up the entire Union Dock
property both in Kowloon and Whampoa. The Hong Kong & Whampoa Dock
Company name went up over the Hung Hom gateway to the docks and was to remain there for one hundred years.
However this was not the end of the troubles for the docks. Duncan, now promoted to secretary of Union Dock, had the complete trust of the busy directors. He proceeded with the help of his accounts clerk, Manuel Joaquim Rozario, to abuse this trust in a number of cleverly hidden frauds varying from ghost workers drawing salaries to hugely inflated prices recorded as having been paid for teak logs, which could then be
skimmed. When William Keswick, the
new head of Jardine Matheson, brought in auditors, Duncan took to his bed. It took a whole year of intense detective work to uncover enough of the frauds to bring the matter to the court. Robert Addyman, the head office clerk, whose wife, Anne Addyman [9/12/13], is buried in the Cemetery, was a very nervous man and terrified of losing his job. He made a very poor witness and was so upset by the case that he tried to commit suicide. However the evidence was strong enough to send the case up to the Supreme Court. In an unprecedented move, Duncan was refused bail. The hearing was before Justice Francis Snowden [11B/5/5] and
bail was set at $40,000, the highest ever in Hong Kong, on personal recognizance with two sureties of $20,000. So began the trial of the century before Chief Justice Sir John Smale. The Crown solicitor and William Brereton, whose twelve-year-old daughter, Laura Frances Brereton [13/4/2], had died in 1871, prosecuted and the defence was ably conducted to the admiration of all by Henry Kingsmill, whose wife, Frances Elizabeth Kingsmill [40/5/4], was buried in 1865 aged thirty-three years. Sir John Smale summed up:
Your crime is great without any parallel in my large experience. You, a ship��s carpenter, were raised from that humble establishment to a position in which the most implicit trust was placed in you. You almost immediately lost all notion of honesty.
Smale went on to trace the crime ��to the temptations arising from the want of due supervision by directors and auditors��. 8 Duncan was sentenced to nine years in prison and Rozario to six years. Jardine Matheson never worked out the true extent of their losses, so involved and subtle was Duncan��s system. Thus ended the era of talented ships�� carpenters from Scotland, who had built and run the docks
at Hong Kong, Whampoa and elsewhere in the Far East. The precarious health
of wives and children in Hong Kong through the 1860s can be ascertained by the number of those associated with the dock scandal that died during these years.
In the early days of steam, boilers were still prone to explode. Perhaps SS Yesso, of the Douglas Line, was a dangerous ship. She had already been the cause of the death of one foreman boilermaker of the Hong Kong Dock Company, Thomas Welsby [38/4/18], in an accident at the Aberdeen Docks. Then on 30
October 1874, the ship was involved in another accident of horrifying proportions.
The SS Yesso had just arrived from Swatow and was being moored alongside Lapraik��s wharf at the Aberdeen Docks when one of her boilers exploded. The force of the steam was such that a plate from the boiler, weighing over two hundred pounds, broke through the bulkhead separating the boilers from the fore-hold. Steam poured into the hold, burning the Chinese passengers who were
getting ready to leave the ship. When the Civil Hospital was filled to capacity, Victoria Gaol was opened up for victims, some of whom felt even more terrified
and unhappy when they found themselves in prison rather than in hospital. Eighty-seven people died from scalding, loss of skin, shock and internal injuries caused by the steam burning their throats and lungs. There was only one European casualty: the second engineer, a Scotsman called John Haggart [27/2/11], died of his burns the next night. Very few of those scalded by the escaping steam seem to have survived.
The Merchant Navy
Helped by the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the rise in the number of vessels
visiting the port of Hong Kong in this period was startling. The authors of The Treaty Ports of China and Japan, published in 1867, give an idea of the multiplicity
of vessels in the harbour and also of the importance of the sea and the sea routes in providing Hong Kong with its livelihood during this period:
Every variety of floating conveyance finds its way to this safe and commodious
harbour. The English and American clipper, the clumsy junk �X the awkward looking sampan and the fast gig �X the P. & O. steamer and American river boat with its tiers of cabins and its massive looking engine beam, each and all in countless variety are scattered over the surface of the water while the Chinese ��fast boats�� presenting to the English eyes the queerest combination of ugliness and speed they have ever beheld �K are crossing, leaving and entering the harbour.9
In 1878, only three years outside this period, Isabella Bird summed up the
importance to Hong Kong of the harbour as follows:
Will it be believed that the amount of British and foreign tonnage annually
entering and leaving the port averages two million tons? And that the
number of native vessels trading to it is about fifty-two thousand, raising the
ascertained tonnage to upwards of three millions and a half, or half a million in excess of Singapore? To this must be added thousands of smaller native boats of every build and rig trading to Hong Kong not only from the Chinese coasts and rivers, but from Siam, Japan and Cochin China. Besides the P.
& O., the Messageries Maritimes, the Pacific Mail Company, the Japanese
��Mitsu Bichi�� Mail Companies, all regular mail lines, it has a number of lines of steamers trading to England, America and Germany, with local lines
both English and Chinese, and lines of fine sailing clippers, which however
are gradually falling into disuse, owing to the dangerous navigation of the Chinese seas and the increasing demand for speed.10
Men in Hong Kong still looked outwards to the sea for their living. After Queen��s Road, the Praya with its piers jutting out into the sea was the most important road in the town and along its length clustered ships�� chandlers, repair
yards, sail makers and hotels for merchant navy officers.
The commanders and officers of merchant ships continued in this period to provide the largest group of civilians in the Cemetery. Eighty-three
merchantmen can be identified, fourteen of whom worked for the P. & O. Thirty-
nine headstones commemorate captains, commanders or master mariners from
Scandinavia, Germany, U.S.A., Holland, New South Wales, and Nova Scotia
as well as Great Britain including the Channel Islands. Crew members include
three officers, ten engineers, one boilermaker, three stewards, one carpenter, three
seamen and two gunners. Twenty-nine men buried in the Cemetery are listed as belonging to ships, barques, brigs or schooners as opposed to the nineteen who sailed in steam ships or were described as engineers. Many of these ships belonged to the local coastal and river lines such as those run by Douglas Lapraik, the Apcar family or the Hong Kong, Canton & Macau Steamboat Company. In the ports and narrow windy rivers, the steamers had great advantages over sail.
Life as a merchant seaman was hard and accidents happened easily. For example, in December 1867, Philip Gandin [37/4/1, from Jersey, the chief mate of the Adeline, went aloft to sight a local landmark, the Pedro Branca rock. He was
French and Spanish ships in the harbour, 1854, by a Chinese artist. (By courtesy of Martyn Gregory from his booklet entitled The Perry Landings.)
standing on the main top-sail when the tie gave away and the poor fellow fell to the deck, broke his neck and died instantaneously aged twenty-six.11 The stress of the long sea voyage seems too often to have been relieved by sprees ashore where too much drink and visits to brothels helped the sailors forget their hardships. These methods of relaxation were not confined to the lower ranks. Captain William Shiels [37/5/20], master of a local vessel, Lark, fell down in a fit in the Commercial Billiard Rooms and died soon after. The poor man was put into an open chair at midday and conveyed under the full sun to the police station instead of the hospital, which may have hastened his death. However, it was admitted at the coroner��s inquest that he had long been a hard drinker and the cause of his death was delirium tremens combined with syphilis. His friends protested against this verdict and felt that, had he been given brandy and water, he might have recovered.12 The unfortunate ex-captain Charles Stewart, who had missed his passage on the Arratoon Apcar, appeared again and again in court on charges of being drunk and incapable. ��There seems to be nothing under the sun capable of restraining this besotted individual from getting helplessly drunk��. The ��poor wrecked gentleman�� was sent to gaol again for seven days.13 Officers of the merchant navy ranged in age from Robert Charles Needham [32/2/16], the very young master of Light of Ages, who was killed falling from aloft at the young age of nineteen years, to Captain Jabez Clarke [38/4/3] from New York who died in Hong Kong
in 1866 at the hoary old age of fifty-six.
Captains still sailed with their wives and families. Included among those who died during
these years are five wives and two babies. Captain
James Boyd must have felt the loss of his twenty-five-year-old wife, Jane Boyd [38/3/1], very keenly. On arriving back in Liverpool, he went to Colquitt Street to arrange for a large marble headstone to be cut and inscribed. He brought it back on his next visit to be set up in the Cemetery. One��s sympathies must also be with James Sangster, master of the Menandrina, whose thirty-year-old wife, Margaret Sangster [38/4/9], died of typhus just two hours before
entering port in March 1869.
The P. & O. Steam Navigation Company
The P. & O. was still the most important line linking the Far East with Europe though its reputation was now somewhat diminished. By this time the number of complaints from passengers were mounting.
During this period, a new and handsome design of headstone was in use for its officers. A marble shield was set into a spectacular eight-foot granite mount. This pattern of headstone was used, for example, for Alexander Smith [32/2/9], engineer of the SS Pekin, James Hamilton [37/7/17], engineer of the SS Ganges and William Hamilton [37/1/2], second officer
of SS Ottawa. It is significant that women were now also employed on
the line as stewardesses. One woman is included among the fourteen P. & O. employees from this period: Nancy Spickernell [37/6/31] of the Travancore died
in Hong Kong in 1869 aged thirty-nine.
Seamen
Life was still tough on board ships and ordinary seamen were at risk of death from disease, from drowning or from falling from aloft. Seamen from the naval ships and those from the merchant ships of all nationalities, when they arrived in Hong Kong, still looked on it as the place for a spree and some fun involving drinking, singing, dancing and brothels. Streams of sailors passed through the courts for offences involving alcohol and disorderly behaviour, and a number seem to have ended up destitute and sleeping rough or in the gaol. The fact that during this period the headstones of only two seamen have survived suggests that the status of ordinary seamen in the port had not changed much over the years. One of those seamen whose headstones have survived was Joseph Laverance [43/3/4], aged eighteen years, of the British barque Tansy. He accidentally tumbled down the fore-hold and died from the effects of the fall. One headstone commemorating Theodore Glawson [40/3/4], of the Rajah of Goghin, was paid for by his shipmates who
commissioned it in 1869 after his death in hospital.
In January 1865, a sailors�� home was opened in Hong Kong built with money contributed mainly by the merchant community, with an
added $45,000 and the first three years of running
costs being given by those generous merchants, Joseph and Robert Jardine. The handsome building contained a canteen which served grog and tobacco, a skittle alley, a reading room and library of ��instructive and amusing works��. The
first superintendent was William Punchard,
probably the brother of Captain John Elgood Punchard [8/13/4] who had for many years been in the employ of Douglas Lapraik as commander of the SS Kwantung and was described at the opening as ��a man in a hundred and well suited by temperament��.
In spite of the fact that the sailor��s home had opened and was being run
for the benefit of seamen, Hong Kong was still a hotbed of crimps in the form
of grasping boarding-house keepers and their runners. Sailors who had been lured ashore were rendered incapable with bad liquor in the adjacent tavern also
owned by the keeper of the house, and then, in that stupefied state, they were all
too frequently deprived of their money without any means of ascertaining where it had gone. They lived on the credit which the landlord of the house granted
them until they were finally compelled to either live rough on the streets or ship
out on the first craft available. Their ship was often also arranged by the same landlord who took a cut from the captain of the ship for providing him with crew. To give an example of the current practices, R. Gorman, an illiterate runner, sued E. Blackwood, proprietor of the Empire Tavern and boarding house, in
July 1869 for his wages. Gorman declared in court that he had enticed 207 men
to the boarding house during the period in question with an average of twenty to
twenty-two men a day for whom the going rate of pay due to him was $1 per head.
As there were no records and Gorman had had free board, lodging and drink throughout the period, he lost his case. 14 As this case shows, boarding houses were still providing a ready-made clientele to the adjacent taverns:
Jack on shore is to a great extent a helpless creature, and if once in the hands of a set of harpies known as ��boarding house keepers��, he is not only kept in the most wretched dens of iniquity that ever existed and plundered to his last penny, but he is sold like a piece of merchandize to the first shipping master who will take him. The next thing Jack knows is that he finds himself on board a ship with an empty pocket, an empty chest and three months debt.15
The Lower Classes
Boarding-House and Tavern Keepers and Their Barmen and Runners
All sorts of men gravitated towards the lucrative trade of tavern keeping. James S. Williams [8/21/5] from Devonshire came by a common ex-police route. By 1860,
he was paying the rates for Britain��s Boast Tavern at 62 Queen��s Road West and two years later was also running the Land We Live In with the assistance of T.E.
Hawkins. By the end of the second period, it was becoming more common for proprietors to hire bar-keepers. A new layer of underdogs was being added to the
social scale. Williams went on to acquire a horse repository in 1875 and died in 1878 aged forty-four years, leaving by the standards of the time a large estate of $7,000
to his wife Jessie. Some men descended from higher social spheres into tavern
keeping. In February 1871, John Baynes [23/6/6] lately of the P.W.D. and now
landlord of the Angel Inn appeared before the licensing justices. Although given a good character, Superinterdent Charles May expressed regret that he had come down in the world and that a man of good repute should be compelled to adopt such a doubtful line of business.16
Among the foreign contingent were the three Olson brothers, John [16B/7/3], Olaf [38/3/7] and Anders [42/1/3], natives of Carlshamn in Sweden. They were probably ex-merchant seamen who left Sweden in the late 1850s due to poverty.
Anders was the first to die, of smallpox in 1872. He has an anchor and chain on
his headstone which was erected by his brother, John. From the early 1860s, the brothers ran the National Tavern in a not altogether approved-of fashion. According to the police, there were complaints that John Olson allowed or even encouraged prostitutes to hang around the door where they attracted the sailors.17 However he achieved the respectability of
having his name on the jury list from 1867 onwards and continued to flourish. By 1877
he was in a position to take over the Stag
Hotel which he ran up to 1912. John stayed
in Hong Kong and had relationships with
two Chinese women, the first of whom died
of laryngitis. His second relationship with Ching Ah Fung, also known as Ellen Olson [16B/6/11], lasted for thirty-four years. Ellen was christened by the London Missionary
Society. She died in 1915 aged 61 and is
buried near her husband. The four Olson children attended the Diocesan Schools. John��s daughter, Hannah, married Charles
Warren, a plumber and self-styled architect. He and John Olson junior combined
in business as building contractors, sanitary engineers and tile manufacturers. They later added the title of granite and marble merchants and monumentalists.
By 1921 the family had built a large, castellated mansion on Broadwood Ridge overlooking the racecourse and Charles Warren was racing horses under the name ��Mr. Towers��. Thus, a mixed marriage family rose from tavern to castle, from seaman to racehorse owner and member of the Jockey Club in two generations. The rise of the Olson family shows clearly that tavern keeping was profitable and could lead to better things. Another tavern keeper with a lasting relationship with a Chinese ��protected girl�� was George Wilkins [20/18/5]. He was first granted a licence for a billiard table at the Commercial Hotel in 1859 and by 1861 had opened the Magnet Tavern in Stanley Street. He had previously been working as an assistant to De Silva & Co. When Wilkins died in 1867, he left $500 and the household furniture to Ngan Achoey and his remaining money to their two daughters and three sons. He left his gold watch to his executor, Samuel Speechley, the engineer.
Destitute Europeans
More destitutes than ever were buried in plots marked by numbered granite
markers and their lot was if anything worse than in the first period. The problem
of what to do with these men whose plight shamed the ��respectable�� portion of society seemed insoluble since neither the government nor the community was willing to take responsibility for them. The Society for the Relief of the Destitute Sick started by Dr. Francis Dill had disappeared. European destitutes were ruthlessly ousted from their makeshift huts and hiding places by the police and sent to prison for being rogues and vagabonds. In August 1868, Sergeant Hawes ��who persists in the most praiseworthy manner in hunting out disreputable Europeans in the colony�� produced four such men in one day.18 The downward path to joblessness and destitution was all too often caused by alcohol.
The case of James Murphy, an unemployed seaman, seems typical. He had been a soldier in the 31st Regiment and his discharge had originally been purchased by the Shanghai Municipal Council. Mr. Gray, warden of Victoria
Gaol, first knew the prisoner as a policeman:
He was taken into the gaol as a turnkey in 1868. He was discharged for drunkenness. He then came back as a rogue and vagabond; he then paid a visit as a destitute. After this he came back as a prisoner for stealing a
watch from Sergeant Wassenius. He was then again in gaol as a rogue and
vagabond and was discharged on 20 May.19
Then in desperation he gave himself in charge as a destitute. The story of David Brown who appeared before the court in December 1868 rounds out the picture:
He says he is a clerk and hies from Edinburgh. He admitted to having
been in the 74th Regiment and came from Liverpool in the American
ship, ��Bunker Hill��.�K Inspector Horspool said Brown had been living for the last six weeks at the Black Soldiers�� barracks, and had been over and over again warned for roaming about in a vagabondish manner: �K He had been dismissed from the police force for drunkenness three months ago�K. Prisoner was an inveterate drunkard, and would never work so long as he could get food and drink for nothing.20
When it came to sentencing the man, the magistrate Mr. Goodlake commented
that he was sorry to hear such bad accounts of the prisoner and did not suppose any ship captain would have anything to do with him. There were no poor rates in Hong Kong and neither could he be allowed to roam the streets without a place
of abode. He would send him to gaol for a month and C.H. Whyte would speak
to Francis Douglas, the gaol governor.
An article in China Mail in September 1866 on ��Houseless Europeans�� drew attention ��to an evil which exists to a greater extent in Hong Kong than most are willing to believe��.21 The kind of person the editor seems to have had in mind was the American ex-sailor Thomas Reynolds, ��a miserable looking object, filthy and half clad who had been found sleeping on the pavements of Tai Ping Shan under some mats��. He also was sent to gaol for one month. The editor suggested that there was a need for a new aid society to at least pay the fares home for the hopeless cases. Later that year, when wishing the readers of the China Mail a merry Christmas, the editor begged help for the many in Hong Kong, chiefly seamen, who were almost if not utterly destitute. Unfit sailors and other men without work or money were passed from one treaty port to another and Hong Kong stood at the end of the receiving line. Sherk Grassman from Holland was picked up in the street as a destitute. The ex-sailor said he had arrived in Hong Kong eighteen months earlier and been discharged at Nagasaki and sent to hospital to get cured of his rheumatism. He was discharged uncured and was shipped to Shanghai with a letter to the German consul who sent him to gaol for twenty-four hours after which he was taken to the Dutch consul who packed him back to Hong Kong. He had no papers to substantiate his story and was sent back to gaol for two weeks.22
If the European community and its government were so uncaring about the fate of the European unfortunates, it is hardly surprising that little attention was paid to the problems of the Chinese community. As a result of a petition for relief by a lady left destitute with two children, Sir John Pope Hennessy commissioned
E.J. Eitel, ex-Basel missionary, to write a report in 1880 on the treatment of paupers in Hong Kong. He divided the class into two categories, non-resident foreigners and Chinese. According to him, the destitute of the first group consisted of a
small fluctuating residue of non-descript seamen, deserters, or men discharged from Hospital, who are beyond the pale of the Merchant Shipping Act, disowned by their respective Consuls and Shipping masters, ��beach-combers�� well known to the Marine Magistrates as drunken sots. They hang about the grog shops, levy blackmail on former shipmates and on native fruit hawkers, call at gentlemen��s houses early in the morning begging for food and clothes which are forthwith converted into drink.
Eitel classed the Chinese destitute as beggars, strangers, waifs cast on the community by kidnappers, lunatics or men disabled by accidents or opium smoking. For them too no provision had been made. Eitel reported:
It is neither humane nor reasonable for the Government to have no other
remedy to offer for the misfortune of its Chinese subjects suffering from the
natural consequences of such misfortune but that of fine, imprisonment, whipping and transportation. 23
He contrasted the early vision of Hong Kong as a model colony which would become a beacon of light to the so-called ��semi-civilized�� pagans of China with its present un-Christian mode of dealing with its poor and the destitute. He described official policy as a ��barbaric policy of brute repression��, which treated poverty as a crime and drove men to despair. He attributed the unusually high number of suicides in Hong Kong to this policy.
The Army
The Soldiers of the Garrison
The reports of the heroism and sufferings of the soldiers in the Crimean War had
been instrumental in arousing in the public mind a better image of the common
soldier. This had been strengthened by an incident in the Second Opium War.
An old Scottish sweat, serving in the Kent regiment, was captured by the Chinese and had refused to kowtow and had consequently been beheaded. According to one account, he had earlier helped himself to his unit��s rum ration and his recalcitrance was due in no small part to the fact that he was drunk.24 The Times newspaper, ignorant of the details, published a poem written by Sir Francis Doyle in his honour which was quoted in the China Mail:
Soldier��s Sacrifice for His Country
Last night among his fellow-roughs,
He jested quaffed and swore. A drunken private of the Buffs Who never looked before.
Today beneath the foeman��s frown He stands in Elgin��s place, Ambassador from Britain��s crown, And type of all her race. Poor reckless, rude, low-born, untaught Bewildered and alone; A heart with English instinct fraught, He yet can call his own. Honour calls! �X with strength like steel He put the vision by; And thus with eyes that would not shrink,
With knees to man unbent,
Unfaltering on its dreadful brink, To his red grave he went.25
Hong Kong after the Second Opium War was beginning to view its garrison
in a more favourable light. A long article in May 1863 in the China Mail railed against the obstinacy of conservatism and red tape that denied soldiers proper
respect in death. In this case, a grave only three feet deep and filled with water had
been prepared for some poor fellow:
It is doubly painful to see that sublime ceremonial for the burial of the
dead, [the Protestant Burial Service] brought face to face with the indecent
spectacle of a grave in which one would scarcely bury his dog.26
The editor proposed that there should be a proper soldiers�� cemetery while still making clear their lowly position near the bottom of the social scale:
So long as the Church maintains the practice [of burying Christians in consecrated ground] and so long as the laity attach the smallest importance
to it, just so long will the lowest subordinate in the social scale adhere to his belief that there is something in it and so believing �K he is fully entitled to claim the prospective satisfaction of being buried in holy earth.
The conditions under which soldiers lived and died were still bad. The China Mail waged a long campaign on their behalf. The editor argued that the press was frequently ��the best if not the only advocate of the poor man��.27 The specific charge that the editor brought against Major-General Guy and his surgeon-general Dr. Dick on this occasion was dereliction of duty to his troops. It was stated that
due to ��culpable and wilful neglect��, and ��conduct that ill befits any officer of rank,
and which greatly resembles desertion from duty in the moment of action��, the general had been in Japan lining his pocket while the 11th Regiment was sickening and falling dead like flies. Only 102 men of that regiment were fit enough to show up at the parade on the previous day out of a total of 550, and several were actually without arms �X ��a fact sufficient to make the bones of the late Duke of Wellington shake in their coffin��. Again in 1865, the China Mail wrote: ��From incapacity, ignorance or wilful neglect of sanitary arrangements, and even bare accommodation, the troops who lately arrived here have come all the way round the Cape to this Colony to die��.28 The high number of deaths produced a sense of outrage among the authorities and newspapers in England:
The officers thro�� whose mismanagement,
the mortality of the 9th and 11th
(Regiments) was brought about, have it seems caused something more than the deaths of the men who died. They have caused prejudice at home against the colony which will endure for many years�K. The Army & Navy Gazette is fairly disgusted with Hong Kong and pens an acrimonious article in which the offensive name of the place is repeated in varying accents of contempt, anger and vituperation in every second line.29
Hong Kong was sometimes seen as a perpetual drain on Anglo Saxon strength and accused of wasting the blood of British soldiers for its
own benefit.
A mark of the increased esteem in which soldiers were held by the end of this period is shown by the fact that, for the first time, ordinary private soldiers began as a matter of routine to be given headstones. One of the first to be dignified with an individual headstone with his name on it seems to have been Private J. Poole, who died on 3 July 1865. He and eleven others, all belonging to the 2nd Battalion of the 9th Regiment, have similar granite headstones, but they were the exceptions.
The lists of soldiers dying in 1865 when cholera struck show that many more died unmemoralized. On Thursday 6 July for example, no less than fifteen soldiers, mostly privates, can be counted in the ��in memoriam�� column of the China Mail. The unnamed young men in the prime of life, who died in Hong Kong, must have exceeded those with headstones by many times. The most senior officer in the army to die in Hong Kong during this period was Major-General Brunker [17/14/1], commander in chief of the forces in China and Japan and lieutenant governor of the colony. He followed his wife to the grave in March 1869 aged sixty-two. According to his obituary, he had not been the same man since her death and had gradually sunk ��notwithstanding the unremitting care and attention of his daughters and medical adviser��.30
Some attempts were made in the face of such criticisms to alleviate the lot of the soldiers. A soldiers�� club and reading room had been opened in Hong Kong and a reading room in Kowloon by February 1862. The club was described as ��a glittering beer and gin palace open early and late with its fiddle, bad liquor and sundry other accompaniments, which also boasted a skittles alley, a racquet court and a billiard room��. 31 The subscription for the private was a sixpence a month which was considered affordable.
Women
Women were able to act with toughness and decision as, for example, was shown
by Mrs. Dunn, an Irish woman, while travelling from Hong Kong to Macau to
join her husband. In 1862, she happened to be aboard the SS Iron Prince when the Chinese passengers aided by three nearby piratical junks tried to seize control of the ship. Although wounded in the neck and shoulder in the initial pirate charge, Mrs. Dunn made her way to the after-cabin where the captain was mustering his forces and had earlier stowed arms against such an emergency. She proceeded to pass out arms to all the able-bodied passengers and crew and then to fire at the pirates with such good effect that they fled the ship in panic, jumping into the water where many who could not swim were drowned. The Iron Prince was
carrying $40,000 worth of opium and would have made a fine prize.32
Yet the position of women in society during these years had hardly changed. Their lives like their clothes were incredibly restricting. Crinolines and corsets were in fashion. In the China Mail of 1864, Salomon��s of London was advertising their patent jupon, a spiral crinoline in steel and bronze, which would collapse under the slightest pressure and resume its shape when the pressure was removed. Along with the jupon went ��Castle��s patent ventilating corset invaluable for the
ball room, equestrian exercise and warm climates��. Women would not have been
allowed to venture out by themselves, let alone do their own marketing. Ladies had to be guarded from sights that might have upset their frailer senses:
The filthiness of the Chinese quarters where most of the shops are situated
and the rowdy nature of the native frequenters of Central Market make it impossible for ladies to visit these places in person even when desirous of making their own purchases.33
It was not until about 1874 that women were allowed to take the female roles
in Amateur Dramatics. An extract from the China Mail recorded that: ��During the visit of the Hongkong cricket team to Amoy, the Amateur Dramatics �X assisted by real ladies [sic] �X performed with considerable success, ��To oblige Benson�� and ��The Goddess with the Golden Eggs��. 34 Croquet and tennis were about the only sports open to women. Swimming was considered unladylike. The fair sex was not allowed to bathe in the Swimming Club pool and swimming off beaches would have been a subject for scandalized gossip. A letter from some brave man to the
Daily Press in July 1870 entitled ��Advanced�� Bathing, asked: ��Why should we not
have bathing houses at Pokfulam or Stonecutter��s Island and a Bathing Society �K composed of ladies and gentlemen who should bathe together in costume?�� He continued: ��Behold the uplifted palms of some walking Code of Proprieties as he reads this terrible suggestion��. 35 Needless to say his suggestion was ignored.
Croquet had become fashionable and popular and, in 1870, a croquet club
was set up, perhaps like so many of Hong Kong��s clubs to regulate against improper social mixing and make sure that only those of the right social status could participate. An article about the club pointed out that its committee consisted exclusively of gentlemen:
It is hardly possible to conceive a stronger proof of the degrading subjection
of women, than is afforded by this proceeding. If a woman has one field more
especially marked out for her than another it is the Croquet Lawn. Yet the people of Hong Kong are so wedded to prestige and precedent, so blindly ignorant of the great truths that John Stuart Mill and Miss Martineau, and Miss Josephine Butler have been labouring to bring before this world that a Croquet Club is started and its management offered to men. This indicates a wish on the part of the residents in the Island Colony not only to keep women in their present position of social bondage, but even to thrust
them from those fields of delightful usefulness which they now occupy. We
trust that a colony called after the Queen will not allow so sad a stain to rest upon its chivalry. Let the Ladies immediately start a rival club unless prompt reparation is made them.36
The frailty of women so much played upon by men at this time was only too
often proved to be close to the truth. In this period fifty-six wives were buried in
the Cemetery. Taking the forty-eight whose ages we know, the average age of death can be worked out as thirty-three years, not a great improvement on the
thirty-one-year-old average found in the first period. The average age was brought
down by the seven army wives whose average age at the time of their death was only twenty-seven. Included among them is the first female found serving in a regiment among the soldiers. Elizabeth Ann Atherley [31/1/5] was school
mistress to the 88th Regiment. She died in 1874 aged thirty-one. Her eight-month-
old son had died just two days before herself. Mary Ann Namick [24/5/2], the wife of the band master of the 2nd Battalion 20th Regiment who died in 1865 aged twenty-seven, has the largest headstone in that part of the Cemetery, a token perhaps of her husband��s love, but also of the prestige of the regimental band and its band master.
Childbirth was still dangerous and could all too often lead to a weakened state of health. Poor Edith Ann Ryrie [10/6/3], again aged only twenty-one years, died in February 1866 in childbirth and her infant daughter, Muriel, died too ��having survived her birth by only a few hours��. Perhaps the overwhelming sorrow was too much for her husband, the well-known merchant Phineas Ryrie [23/8/6]. He never married again, but is rumoured to have quietly installed a Chinese mistress instead. Eliza Storey [16Ci/4/11], the wife of the architect, Charles Storey, ��obeyed her Maker��s call�� in November 1866. She had had a baby girl earlier that month. Another victim of childbirth was poor young Grace Malzard [38/3/10] who died five days after giving birth to a son who only survived eighteen hours. Women also suffered greatly from complaints that could now be alleviated
with analgesics. Harriet Vincent [38/4/11], the wife of a foreman boilermaker in
the Royal Navy dockyard, died in October 1872 aged forty-four years:
Affliction sore
Long time she bore And seldom did complain. Till God was pleased to call her home, And ease her of her pain.
Problems with debt-ridden or drunken or abusive husbands must have
seemed worse so far from the support of family and friends. One such was Sarah
Jane Barnes [42/2/6] who died in 1874 aged fifty. Her husband, Leonard Barnes,
was a coach builder from Duddell Street who had formerly been a wheelwright in the Royal Artillery. Leonard Barnes and Edmund Boyd had established a partnership as farriers, keepers of a livery stable, and harness and coach makers but, as his appearances in court for the non-payment of debts and assault mounted, Barnes became a person that few wanted dealings with and the partnership was
dissolved. In 1869 he became the government undertaker and by 1871 he was
combining undertaking with goods and furniture delivery. The position of women caught in an abusive relationship would have been dire. They had little option but to stay with their abusers and bear the brunt. Anna Maria, the wife of Gerardus Baas of the City of Rotterdam tavern, who laced his brandy with common salt, went so far as to charge her husband with violent assault. ��A great row had taken place and cries of murder had been heard��. 38 Anna Maria appeared in court with her eyes bandaged but had changed her mind and refused to press charges and stated that she had fallen down the stairs. ��Mrs. Baas, amid her tears, said that this
was the first time she had ever been in Court and that it would be the last��.
A glimpse into the family life of a boarding house keeper of the time shows the
difficulties that arose from the death of a mother leaving behind an unprotected
daughter. In July 1866 Auguste Harewyn was charged with abducting Eugenie
Willis from her stepfather��s house. Louis Bourboen, proprietor of Argus Boarding
House in Peel Street, lost his wife, Rosalie Bourboen [16Cii/5/6], in November
1865. He was left with the care of Eugenie Willis, a pretty stepdaughter of fifteen.
Nine months after her mother��s death, Eugenie ran away to Marius Leon��s
boarding-house in Spring Gardens, Wan Chai, accusing her step-father of beating
her and treating her badly. Auguste Harrewyn had been a lodger in her father��s house and had struck up a rather too intimate relationship with Eugenie. He had been caught kissing her and, when turned out, had begun corresponding with the girl. According to the evidence, Eugenie had been found with a letter from Harrewyn, but Bourboen could not produce it as evidence because Eugenie had eaten it rather than let him see the contents. Mr. Leon, to whose house the girl
had fled for shelter and protection, told the court that when Bourboen came to his
house seeking his stepdaughter, he had become drunk and irritable. ��There was a bottle of brandy standing on my table when he came, to which he had helped himself as if it had been water��. The court sided with the young lovers against
Bourboen and C.H. Whyte, the magistrate, said that if he had known the facts,
he would never have granted the warrant for the arrest of Eugenie and Harrewyn. In a later case in February 1868, the magistrate judged Bourboen capable of violent behaviour when he was sued by his houseboy for unpaid wages and
damage to his leg amounting to $30. The boy had had a large flat plate smashed on him and the presiding magistrate awarded the boy $20 which he said was not
excessive for a broken limb.39 It rarely happened that, when Chinese servants sued their European employers, they were given what they asked for in damages. Bourboen was later bankrupted. Life for women in Hong Kong must have been uncomfortable and boring at best with illness, death and disaster never far away and at worst very hard indeed to bear.
European Prostitutes
By the late 1860s a new underclass was beginning to make its presence felt in Hong Kong. European prostitutes were finding willing customers among the richer expatriates and beginning to settle. In 1868, James Browne, the barkeeper at the Hotel des Colonies and described as a ��coloured man��, was refused a licence. In an indignant letter to the China Mail, he ascribed the refusal to colour prejudice. The authorities however cited the fact that he had employed a female barkeeper: ��It is of the opinion of the Colonial Surgeon and the Police Superintendent that the place was a sort of sly brothel and that many other women were in the house��. 40 Later in
that year, the female barkeeper herself, Mary Ann Garde alias Welch, charged two
men from the Gas Company, Henry Simmonds, brick-layer, and James Lyall, brass-fitter, with forcibly entering her house and assaulting her person and furniture. Inspector Horsepool gave evidence that things were generally smashed up. The
men were fined and significantly the prosecutrix was ordered to find security of $5
to keep the peace for three months. The same two men were later charged by Mrs. Julia Carter, ��a female of negro persuasion��, with assault:
Beaten on the arms kicked on the breast and bitten on the calf of the leg by their dog, Mrs Carter, inspired with a dash of the Amazonian, got to her feet and seizing a stick or cudgel improvised a very fair resistance.41
According to the defendant��s statement, had the stick wielded by Mrs. Carter alighted on Simmond��s head as intended instead of his arm, it must have terminated his brick-laying career at one fell swoop. The men were fined ten shillings and one Henry Darrell gave a bond of security for Mrs. Carter and carried her away. Darrell had recently been living at the Hotel des Colonies where he had been sued for board and lodging.42 Again in 1869, a Mrs. Miller sued Atai, a hard-working Chinese tailor with twenty years standing in the territory, for theft. Mrs. Miller was described by the judge as ��A woman living away from her husband �X being what is generally known as a ��soiled dove����. 43 Unusually the tailor��s word was believed and he was found not guilty by the unanimous decision of the jury.
Children
During this period thirty-three children, who were under the age of four years,
and five older children died. Babyhood was a dangerous time in an age when the
importance of hygiene in the fight against germs was not generally understood. Death was no respecter of position or wealth. The deputy registrar of the Supreme Court, Frederick Sowley Huffam, lost three babies, Henry Seymour, Mary Jane and Frederick Henry [20/14/4]. In April 1852 Huffam, who had arrived in the colony in 1855 and taken the post of a third clerk in the government, married Mary Irwin, the daughter of the colonial chaplain. In spite of his regular church
attendance, where he played the organ, Huffam was accused in 1878 of embezzling nearly $150,000, found guilty and sentenced to seven years in prison. The quiet
acquisition of illegal money was too easy when it was acknowledged at the time of his trial that ��his accounts had never been audited and the man had been left practically to himself��. Feelings of sympathy must be aroused by the plight of his poor wife who had to cope first with the death of three babies and then with a husband in prison. The only other person known to have lost three children, Isaac, Aaron and Elizabeth Jane McNally [7/27/10] was Sergeant Michael McNally of
the 75th Regiment and keeper of its canteen at Murray Barracks. He was refused
a spirit license because the barman of the Liverpool Arms made it known that he had been selling liquor for some time to men other than soldiers without a licence.
Section IV
THE TURN OF THE CENTURY, 1876�V1918
Chapter 20 Age of Empire
This next section of the book takes the reader by a much less detailed path through the last twenty-four years of the nineteenth century and the first eighteen years of the twentieth century. In this part, the concentration is on the Cemetery rather than the social history. The next chapter gives an idea of the kind of disasters that the people in Hong Kong had to cope with and the one after deals with the lives of those people who are buried in Section 23, the section set aside for residents who
survived over twenty-three years in Hong Kong. Subsequent chapters look briefly
at the other various groups buried in the Cemetery including the Freemasons,
the Chinese, the Eurasians, the Japanese, and finally the Russians. It was during
these years that the Cemetery received a major redesign to make it more like the
fashionable garden cemeteries of Western cities.
In this period, Hong Kong was still considered a far distant outpost of the empire as is shown by the opening lines of Major Henry Knollys�� book, English Life in China: ��Hong Kong �X Jericho �X Timbuctoo! Are these names not used indifferently to represent extreme remoteness��. He continued that Hong Kong was described ��by the majority perhaps as an odious place of exile��. 1 A picture of the colony emerges from the writings of the period that is not altogether unlike earlier descriptions. The horse-drawn carriage had by now given way to jinrickshas or rickshaws which had been recently invented by a missionary in Japan: ��These most convenient little carriages for hire having one coolie in the shafts, while private rickshaws have one or
two in addition pushing
behind ��. 2 A Chinese
small holder could still
be seen shepherding his
string of goats along
the thoroughfares and
milking them at the door
of customers�� houses. The
slopes of the mountain
were portrayed as covered
with alabaster -white
chalk patches which turned out to be the drying grounds where native washer-
men spread the European linen. Mexican dollars, still used as common currency, were each tested individually
by shroffs under the porticoes of the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank. ��Balancing each
chopped dollar on two fingers, the Chinese servant of the bank instantaneously decided on its fitness for currency and consigned it to three piles, good, bad or doubtful��. Some knowledge of pidgin English was still essential: ��The jargon has taken firm root and constitutes an indispensable acquirement�� without which ��communication with the servants is a source of constant vexation and misunderstanding��. A colourful international crowd thronged its streets: ��A walk here (and everybody walks on the street instead of the sidewalk) is a kaleidoscope of dress and a college of languages��. The crowd along the Praya included soldiers in high-buttoned, tight-fitting blue or red tunics, wealthy Chinese bankers from Bonham Strand with their ��powdered and carmined wives��. Belgian priests in black friar hats, Koreans ��with tiny black bamboo fibre hats perched on their rolled-up
hair and baggy white trousers fluttering in the breeze��, Hindu women in the ��flimsiest
pink silk from the bazaars of Calcutta��, Maharattas from Bombay with upturned shoes, native youths in long gowns of blue, buff or purple, and to complete the picture, ��an Episcopal bishop in a black morning coat, knickerbockers, silk stockings and pumps whose head was crowned by a solar topee��. 3
Yet during this period, a very different kind of colony was emerging. The ��magnificent city with stately buildings climbing tier after tier from the sea�� was the pride of its European inhabitants and impressed all who visited. Able men from many nations and backgrounds were putting their energies into building up a range of industries that changed the face of Hong Kong, giving it a new sense
of achievement and direction and a new energy. By 1900, Hong Kong was the
second biggest port in the world and men looked with affection to the harbour for its beauty and the prosperity it brought to the city. Sir Henry Blake, the ex-governor, described the view from the Peak as he looked down on it:
the great steamers of every nation trading with the Far East, round whose hulls are flitting the three hundred and fifty launches of which the harbour boasts�K. Out in the harbour, towards Stonecutter��s Island, the tall masts of trim American schooners may be seen �K while the thousands of Chinese
boats of all descriptions look like swarms of flies moving over the laughing
waters of the bay�K. The night scene is still more enchanting for spread out beneath are gleaming and dancing the thousands the thousands of lights
afloat and ashore. The outlines of the bay are marked by sweeping curves of
light, and the myriad stars that seem to shine more brightly than elsewhere are mirrored in the dark waters, mingling with the thousands of lights from the boats and shipping.4
By this period, a number of industries were employing thousands of Chinese overseen by a sizeable number of European technicians and managers. In the jury list for 1900, no less than seventy-six expatriates registered for jury service were working in the Hong Kong & Whampoa Dock Company or the Hong Kong & Kowloon Wharf and Godown Co. ��Where Eastern seas bubble up hot to the flame of an equatorial sun, Chinese workmen with Scotch overseers turn out 6,000 ton steel ships and do battleship repairing worthy of Woolwich or Devonport��. 5 The largest sugar cane refinery in the world (Butterfield and Swire��s Taikoo plant), together with the slightly smaller China Sugar Refinery owned by Jardine, Matheson & Co, were churning out 200,000 tons of sugar a year at 3.5 cents a pound. The same jury list of 1900 shows the refineries as providing no less than seventy-seven, predominantly Scotsmen, for jury service. The Taikoo Refinery was ��a marvellous study in Scottish sociology�� with its own company reservoir and hospital in the hills of Quarry Bay.
A cable car carried the European overseers five hundred feet over the gullies to the fever-free company bungalows on the cliffs. Company model tenements
were provided at inexpensive rents with a company loan fund for overseers
20.4. The Quarry Bay Sugar Refinery. (By courtesy of the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank.)
to bring out Scotch wives, a running track, athletic association, medals, (swimming) baths and launches for picnics. Employees were encouraged to join yacht, golf, water polo, gunning, cricket and riding clubs so as to be athletically happy even in enervating South China.6
Among those employed in the sugar trade were Henry Dickie [5/1/20] (1894), David Symington [5/1/35] (1897), both from Greenock, and Donald McCrae [5/2/20] (1905) from Inverness. They all worked for China Sugar Refinery, Dickie
as manager, McCrae as foreman clerk and Symington as a sugar boiler. Besides these, another twenty-nine engineers and technicians were working for
such enterprises as the Cotton, Spinning, Weaving and Dyeing Co., Green Island
Cement and the Rope Factory. Other technicians and managers were arriving to work in the utilities which now included telegraph companies, the China & Japan Telephone Company and the Electric Company, with China Light and Power Co. soon to follow. As Hong Kong became a Far Eastern hub, more visitors arrived. To cater to their needs, the number of hotels, whose managers or proprietors were
considered eligible for jury service, had risen to fifteen. Modern technology seemed
to have arrived in Hong Kong when, in 1883, the Hong Kong Hotel could boast ��Hydraulic ascending rooms of the latest and most approved type�� in its advertising.
This growth in managers, technicians and staff is mirrored in the Cemetery by an increase in the number of graves of dock workers, sugar boilers, wharfingers, hotel
and restaurant managers and so on. A growing number of expatriates were making Hong Kong their permanent home and are mentioned in a later chapter.
Society
In the social sphere, old attitudes continued their hold on men��s minds. Subtle demarcation lines dictated by birth and schooling combined with spending power and club membership rules continued to keep the social groups and the races apart. Racial and social segregation went one step further when the Peak
was declared a European enclave in the 1904 Ordinance. The Peak was by then a
popular year-round resort with its own church, bungalow club and hotel. Henry Knollys, a major in a less prestigious Artillery Regiment, complained that his experiences in the social sphere would be comparatively limited: ��inasmuch
as nine-tenths of those, who can afford the expense, take refuge from the heat at
the cooler Peak��. For the more sought-after infantry regiments, the Peak Hotel had become ��the centre of the garrison social life�� and every dinner was described
as ��a glitter of regalia, braid, buttons, forgivable swagger and affected intonations��.
The Hong Kong Club remained at the pinnacle of social aspirations, an exclusive haven of luxuries which included ��porcelain baths, electric fans, Amoy oysters in season, mango ice-cream, curries made opiate with powdered poppy seeds and the noblest wines of Europe��. John Stuart Thomson stated that the emperor of China himself could not be made a member because of his colour and the one Parsee who achieved ��getting in through the eye of the needle�� was said to have needed the help of the king of England.
Life at the top was expensive. Every foreigner earning more than $75 a
month kept a sedan chair with two or four coolies to carry it ��who were uniformed as conspicuously as the purse would allow��. 7 The governor was carried by eight coolies in bright red liveries, white gaiters and ��mutton pie�� hats with red tassels.8
Major Knollys sets out for us what he saw as the upper echelons of the social ranking scale when he explained the need for visitors to bring letters of introduction:
Our Addressee is, we will suppose, a local merchant prince, a Government
employee, a military officer or a well-to-do agent of a commercial firm. Stay clear of the rank and file of the civilian community, inasmuch as they are not
on the whole, a favourable set either in their associates or in their lifestyle.9
In an introduction to the chapter entitled Social Life, the editors of Twentieth Century Impressions of Hong Kong described the layered society:
In this little community are produced all the characteristics of suburban life in England, intensified by peculiar local circumstances. As is perhaps only natural, each of the principal nationalities represented �X British, German, Portuguese, Indian and Japanese �X resolves itself into a separate and distinct unit, while the Eurasians here �K hold a precarious position somewhere between the foreign and native elements.
The chapter continued with a description of the British community, which:
after all the more familiar methods of social distinction have been exhausted �K have introduced other and more ingenious devices to satisfy the desire for exclusiveness. Thus a man��s exact position in the social scale is not infrequently determined by the altitude of his house. Generally speaking it may be said that the higher he climbs up the side of the Peak the rarer becomes the social atmosphere he breathes, and as a consequence, between those who reside at the summit and those who live in the peninsula of Kowloon there is as wide a gulf as that which divided Dives and Lazarus. A club which welcomes with open arms a mercantile clerk �X or rather ��assistant�� as he becomes on landing in Hong Kong �X closes its doors resolutely against the head of a departmental store .
Robert Fraser-Smith [23/8/4] bears out this discrimination when he
reported on the St. Andrew��s Day Ball of 1881. While acknowledging that ��the stiffness and clique-ism so intimately associated with our public balls was happily
much less conspicuous than has been the case on previous occasions��, he criticized
��a flagrant case of most unladylike conduct��. A set for the Caledonian Scottish Reel
needed two couples to complete it. The couples were found and took their places. Immediately one of the original women: ��the term lady would be misapplied in this case, �X deliberately walked away taking her partner and vis-a-vis with her��. The reason for this ��gross infringement of all the recognized rules of well bred behaviour�� was that one of the new couples was a storekeeper who was dancing
with another storekeeper��s wife. To cap the story the offending lady according to
Fraser Smith was herself originally from the same class of tradesmen.10
20.5. St Andrew��s Day Ball. (From the Graphic, 26 February 1887.)
Sport still held its importance in the lives of the expatriates. As John Stuart Thomson put it: ��An Englishman (few as there are in the East compared to the Scotch) brings all his sporting and club impedimenta to the Orient��. Sport still formed ��the pivot of existence�� with racing still attracting the most attention. It was followed by cricket, yachting and golf each with their own exclusive clubs to organize their activities. Shooting birds was a popular sport with parties visiting Castle Peak and Deep Bay to shoot huge numbers of ��ortolans, teal, wild geese, and partridges and noblest of all, the pheasant��. The remaining leisure hours were filled with card playing and tennis games. Picnic parties and junk trips to quiet bathing beaches dominated the social calendar in the summer and the winter dancing season was initiated by the St. Andrew��s Ball, which was preceded by Scottish reel practice sessions.
Rudyard Kipling, who visited in 1888, described how the residents did their best to imitate the life of an Indian up-country station:
They are better off than we are. At the bandstand, the ladies dress all in one
piece �X shoes, gloves and umbrellas come out from England with the dress, and every Memsahib knows what that means�K. The Inhabitants complain of being cooped in and shut away. They look at the sea and they long to get away. They have their ��At Homes�� on regular days of the week, and everybody meets everybody else again and again. They have their amateur theatricals and they quarrel and all the men and women take sides and the station is cleaved asunder from top to bottom. Then they become reconciled�K.11
Kipling recognized the same patterns of behaviour that he had seen in India: ��Henceforward Hong Kong is one of Us, ranking before Meerut, but after Allahabad, at all public ceremonies and parades��. 12 According to Major Knollys, religion was ��coldly regarded�� by many of the British: ��The majority of our countrymen have left their religion behind in England��. But he also added: ��A large proportion of the shepherds are idle and inferior��.13
The Colonials and the Chinese
A sizeable number of respectable, well-to-do Chinese families were by now living exemplary, quiet, hard-working lives in Hong Kong. In spite of this, the rather negative view that a good many Europeans held about the Chinese still prevailed. It was reinforced by the news of attacks on Europeans and atrocities
which emerged from China during the Boxer insurgency of 1900. The ex-
governor of Hong Kong, Sir Henry Blake, when writing the text to accompany the illustrations in China by Mortimer Menpes, could say without any qualms: ��The average European, if he thinks of China at all, sets her down as a nation just emerging from barbarism, untruthful, deceitful and having more than her share of original sin��. Sir Henry continued by describing the Chinese view of the foreigners:
On the other hand, the Chinese who have come in contact with foreign powers regard them as bullies, who have by their destructive prowess forced themselves on the Middle Kingdom and deprived the Emperor and his government of their sovereignty over the various concessions at the treaty ports.14
The distance between the European and the Chinese races can still be read in the gulf that existed between these two views.
The contrast between the rich and poor in the city was still very marked. Hong Kong was described as the ��world famous city of the unroofed��, with ��20,000 coolies having no place on which to lay their heads at night��.15
Again in the 1920s, the roofless coolies
were pictured as a pathetic sight: ��Rows of homeless toilers, wet or dry, sleep in their tattered rags on the pavements �K dressed in straw sandals at a penny a pair, �K their clothes sometimes made from bags��.16 The too obvious poverty of the toiling masses would inevitably have lowered the prestige of the Chinese in the eyes
of foreigners. Yet, astute Chinese businessmen in Hong Kong had created for themselves a prosperity not dreamt of in earlier years. Sir Henry Blake could now say: ��The wealthiest part of the city is in the Chinese quarter, and here property
has changed hands at startling figures, sometimes at a rate equal to one hundred
and sixty thousand pounds an acre��. The way the Chinese rallied to help themselves after the typhoon of
1906 demonstrated an independence from the Western bureaucracy and a determination to look after their own community. On the day after the 1906
typhoon, Sir Henry Blake sent for a Chinese gentleman and offered help. He found that all that was necessary had already been done: ��The guild had sent two
powerful launches, one with coffins for the drowned, the other with a doctor on board, equipped with the necessary means of succour for the injured��. When he
later steamed along the Kowloon shore, instead of the expected stunned despair, he found:
a crowd of boatpeople, men and women, �K working with a will, each endeavouring to save something from the smashed wreckage of what had been their homes, the men jumping from one heaving mass to another, diving
betimes and struggling with adverse buffets of fate with an energy none the
less for their stoical acceptance of the inevitable.17
The old antipathies were now tinged with admiration.
The Civil Service
The public school man was now the more or less established choice among the upper civil servants. As an example of this type of man, mention might be made of the puisne judge, Francis Snowden [11B/5/5], who died in April 1883. The decision to grant him sick leave had been made too late and thus he became almost the only judge to be buried in the Cemetery. Snowden was typical of the public-
school-educated men being sent to the colony to fill posts in the government and
judiciary. The second son of a Somerset squire, he had been educated at Rugby
and Oxford and was called to the bar in 1854. He had arrived in 1874 on promotion
from the Straits Settlement, where he had acted as senior magistrate. He was part of the new imperial elite who had received training to instill in them a sense of duty to those under them and also of Christian beliefs, manliness and sportsmanship in the preparatory and ��public�� schools they had attended and whose belief in their own ��good breeding�� and education gave them a sense of superiority over all those who had never had their privileges. Men like him travelled round the empire on promotions that were in the hands of the authorities at home and often felt more need to please their masters in England than the population they were responsible for in some distant corner of the empire. Hong Kong had assumed a position rather low in the pecking order of the various Crown colonies in the British Empire. Snowden is described by Norton-Kyshe as ��painstaking, patient and conscientious��.18
The Police and the Prisons
George Hayward [8/7/1], who occupied a much lower rung on the social scale,
died of an apoplectic fit in November 1883, the same year as Francis Snowden. He
was aged forty-four and had, only three months before, been promoted to acting superintendent of Victoria Gaol. He had been in the Hong Kong prison service
for fifteen years and had come to Hong Kong from Chatham convict prison where
he had been trained. He was originally chosen for the post from among some thirty candidates. A mechanism was now in position to identify and attract trained men such as Hayward into service in the colonies. Unlike Mrs. Snowden, George Hayward��s wife, Eliza, and his children remained in Hong Kong after Hayward��s death. Eliza died in 1919 at the age of seventy-four. She and one son, George Cresswell Hayward, are buried in the same tomb as their father. The Hayward family could
not have afforded the cost of the journey home. For those Europeans filling the less prestigious jobs, the mortality rates and
average age at the time of death had hardly changed over the years. Between the
years, 1876 and 1918, seventy-seven policemen, whose age at death was recorded
on their headstones, were buried in the Hong Kong Cemetery. Their average age at death can be worked out as 31.2 years, an age when a man should be in the prime of his life. Only seven men survived beyond forty, the oldest man being
Johann Rauch [23/9/1] who died at the age of fifty-six. Sixty-two percent of these officers came from Scotland, Ireland or Wales with the great majority coming
from Scotland.
A glimpse into the life of Sergeant John Swanston [27/3/2] shows the difficulties of trying to raise a family in the less-than-comfortable police stations of the colony. Swanston was the son of a blacksmith from Caithness, Scotland,
who joined the Hong Kong Police Force in 1872. His brave fiancee, Anne, arrived
in October 1876 on the SS Fleur Castle and married her sweetheart in the Union Church
straight off the ship. In 1877 their first son,
N.J. Swanston [27/3/3] was born in Shau
Kei Wan police station and died there aged one year and eight months. When Swanston left Shau Kei Wan, he was waited on by a
deputation of Chinese villagers who presented him with a very handsome silk flag as a mark of their appreciation.19 Another son, M.T.B.
Swanston, died at Wan Chai aged eight years and ten months. Then a newborn died at West Point aged one hour. Next, in April 1900 Annie died at Wan Chai aged ten months,
followed five months later by Archibald, the second surviving son, aged three years and ten months.20 The one remaining son was
enrolled in 1887 in the Diocesan Home and
Orphanage and educated there and only died
in 1935. Five children had died in five different
police stations. One wonders how Anne could have borne so many losses. That Swanston was considered ��respectable�� is shown by his membership of the Freemasons which is indicated on his headstone. He died in
February 1891 aged thirty-eight.
The police did not again lose the respect
they had gained by the end of the 1870s. Their
standing in the community was boosted by
the courage, devotion to duty and sterling work during the plague years. Other
than one prominent and exceptional case, corruption in the police force no
longer featured in the colony��s newspapers. In late 1897, a far-reaching network
of corruption was uncovered when Sir Francis Henry May raided a gambling house. That led to a ruthless cull: nearly half of the establishment was lost through dismissals or forced resignations. The only European to be convicted and sentenced
to six months in prison was Inspector Job Witchell from Gloucestershire. His wife,
Mary Maud Witchell [5/2/24], the daughter of
William Powell, owner of the General Drapers, lost one son in November 1887, then died
herself at the height of the scandal in February
1898 leaving her unfortunate husband in prison
and five children with no parent to care for them. Dr. Cantlie��s views probably mirrored the general feeling that a certain level of squeeze was a perk almost universally attached to a policeman��s occupation:
At the present moment there is considerable scandal in connection with the acceptance of bribes by European police, and men of great local experience are being got rid of because they took ��tips��; surely a well-understood purloin of the police in all countries.21
In 1915, an incident gained general sympathy and respect for the police.
A tiger had severely injured a villager in Sheung Shui causing his death and the police were called out to deal with the
animal. When Police Constable Ernest Goucher [2/2/6] approached the bushes where the tiger was said to be hiding, it sprung out and mauled him. The poor man died of his wounds soon after. Before being shot dead, the tiger also managed to kill an Indian constable. It was a huge beast measuring eight and a half feet from nose to tail tip and standing four foot three inches high.
Then in January 1918, the dangers
attached to being a policeman were brought home to the public when four policemen and two robbers were shot dead and one robber and six policemen wounded in the Gresson Street shoot-out. Gresson Street was a row of small dingy
shop-houses in Wan Chai
whose back rooms had been subdivided into cheap cubicles let out to the poor and the transient. At 11 o��clock in the morning, Inspector Mortimer O��Sullivan, probably acting on a tip-off, led a search party to the doors of Number Six. They were met by a hail of bullets as the men in one of the cubicles made a desperate dash for freedom. O��Sullivan was shot five times in the head, Sergeant Goscombe Clarke [2/2/3] four times and an Indian sergeant who tried to stop the men fleeing was also shot dead as he pursued
the robbers down the street. Reinforcements were sent for and with the arrival of the dockyard police, the army and the police reservists, the shooting began again.
Bullets flew everywhere. The door of the room where the remaining robber was
hiding was forced open by a gas bomb. The robber had shot himself in the head
and was found to be dying. When O��Sullivan was buried in the Catholic cemetery,
the priest said: ��Erin has lost a faithful son, the Empire a faithful member and the Colony a gallant officer and an honest citizen��. It was thought that Sergeant Norman Gibson Johnson [2/2/4], who had been shot dead while on patrol five days earlier, was killed by a member of the Gresson Street gang. The dead men were buried with pomp and honour and were elevated to the status of heroes in the territory. The police force had dramatically shown the dangers it faced and earned real respect from the community.
The Army
The prestige and also the living conditions of the ordinary soldiers continued to rise slowly during these years. As reported in the Hong Kong Telegraph in July 1881:
The following resolution according to the latest home papers was shortly to be moved in the House of Commons by General Burnaby: ��That the
cost of a soldier��s funeral shall not be defrayed as at present, by a preferential charge on the sum realized by an auction of his underclothing (the cost of which has already been deducted from his pay), or from any savings he may have in the Regimental Savings Bank; but all soldiers shall be buried at the cost of the State.22
A further resolution moved that the state should provide the entire cost of a soldier��s food, not just the cost of one pound of bread and three-quarters of a pound of meat then provided. As the smart monument to Corporal W.H. Stephens [6/6/29] of the 25th Regiment, Royal Engineers with its surrounding of potted plants shows, the ordinary soldier was by now given a great deal more respect in death.
At the time of the British involvement in the Boxer troubles in China, Section 3 of the Cemetery was reserved for the inclusive use of soldiers; and a monument was raised on which are inscribed the names of nine soldiers who died in action, three died of their wounds, seven were killed by an explosion and two suffocated by fire. The last and only one to die in Hong Kong accidentally drowned. But in spite of their better social status, the average age of death of soldiers in these years seems appallingly low. Taking fifty consecutive graves in Section 3 of men below the rank of sergeant who died between 1901 and 1909, the average age of death is only 26.2, the youngest soldier being only sixteen.
Women and Children
The ladies of the colony had begun to gain a little ground. They acquired their own club with formal approval given in 1883 and the grant of land at a nominal
rent of $1 a year. The Ladies Recreation Club was organized and run by ladies for the benefit of those who wanted a place where they and their children could play tennis and other games, keep fit and find friendship.
Golf should have been a very suitable game for the ladies of the colony but
even as late as 1897, the captain of the Golf Club reported:
The question of granting permission to ladies to play golf has provoked a lot of discussion due to the already crowded conditions during the year, but I have decided that in the coming year I shall allow them to play on a very restricted basis.23
The ladies were limited to Sundays and an application for the establishment of a ladies�� golf club at Happy Valley was refused by the governor. It seems likely that due to lack of occupation and boredom, the ladies indulged in endless gossip, fomenting and increasing tensions between the already fragmented sections of Hong Kong society. In the poem entitled The Sisterhood of Eternal Silence, Dolly reported that the ladies of Hong Kong had started a society, ��the principal rule of which is that no word of scandal or gossip is to be uttered by any of its members��. Two verses of the poem are quoted below:
Tis told of how a lady through forgetfulness one day Fell back on talking scandal in the old familiar way; And of how the others relished every word she had to tell, Then rose in wrath and horror and on the culprit fell. (She was expelled from the new society.)
But can we alter Nature? Does a surface change ensure A woman��s whole foundations being shaken to the core? Is it not a little doubtful that the change will lasting prove,
And will not woman��s nature find its old familiar groove?
For if women don��t talk scandal it will mean, when all is said, That they��re simply pledged to silence, curtain lectures too will cease, And this planet glow with happiness and universal peace!24
20.16. Afternoon at Scandal Point on Kennedy Road. (Illustrated London News, 6 January 1883.)
It took until 1903 for the Golf Club to relax its rules and allow ladies onto the
golf course. As described by Betty in Intercepted Letters:
This year the members of the Royal Hong Kong Golf Club have most kindly and generously allowed us poor down-trodden women one afternoon a week
�X Thursday to wit, �K On this day we are allowed, not only to play round the course, but even to come inside the sacred enclosure of the Club House railings to drink a cup of tea. Before this magnanimous rule was made, we had to drink our tea standing outside the fence.
The golf course at Happy Valley also accommodated football and cricket and Betty found it fearfully overcrowded when thirty to forty people played mixed foursomes on a Thursday afternoon. Mixed tennis and bathing parties were now taking place in the summer though according to Betty it was necessary for ladies to wear a skirt over their swimsuit which reached down to the knees, making swimming difficult.
A ladies�� tennis club also existed though Betty admitted: ��It is true we are inclined to be exclusive, but the membership of our club is a guarantee of respectability��.25 The colony��s ladies stand accused of setting the social standards. Captain Casserly in ��The Land of the Boxers�� wrote that: ��The merchant class is supreme and their wives rule society��. He later expanded on this:
The English merchant or lawyer overseas is usually a very good fellow though
occasionally puffed up by the thought of his bloated moneybags; but his wife
is often a sad example of British snobbery, the spirit of which has entered her soul in the small country town or London suburb from which she came�K.
The naval and military officer is puzzled and amused at the minute shades of difference in Hong Kong society.
The differences even penetrated Kowloon society where ��the wives of the superior dock employers are the leaders of Kowloon society; and the better half of a ship��s captain or marine engineer is only admitted on sufferance to their exclusive circle��. 26
Hong Kong was still seen to be unhealthy for prolonged residence, especially for women and children, though not quite as deadly as in previous years:
The majority of men, nearly all the women and the children, without exception, succumb more or less, sooner or later to the enervating effects of severe heat combined with steamy humidity. Dysentery, fever, liver or a general breakdown ensues and it is out of the question to re-establish health thoroughly here after such attacks �X a voyage to other climes is inevitable.27