(F 258/258/10)
PRIVATE & CONFIDENTIAL
72858/30
Dear Grindle,
FOREIGN OFFICE, S.W.1.
30th January, 1931.
4
Very many thanks for the copy of the
interesting memorandum by the Governor of Hongkong
on Kowloon and the New Territories enclosed in your
letter of the 9th January. I now return the
photographs accompanying that memorandum, as requested
in your letter.
•
The memorandum would have been even more
valuable to us if Sir William Peel had made a clearer
distinction between the territory ceded to us in 1860
and the New Territories leased to us in 1898. Any
irredentist demands by the Chinese are likely to be
aimed at the latter in the first instance, and a
memorandum in which Hongkong and ceded Kowloon were
treated together as one unit, and the leased
territories as another, would enable us to realise what
would be the effect of severing the latter, in whole
or in part, from the former unit, and help us to
consider what steps could best be taken, or what price
Sir Gilbert Grindle, K.C.M.G., C.B.
it