My dear Cox,
COPY
c/o Martins Bank,
Oxford.
29th October, 1945
124
49
I was
Since the project of a Far East University is mooted, I should like to give you my recollections of my discussions with Channa, when I met him in Singapore. I should begin by saying that I was very much in favour, before I talked to him, of the establishing of a University College in Singapore or elsewhere in Malaya which should be the nucleus of a Malaya University to come into being at an early date. influenced in part, I know, by the feeling that Hong Kong should not have to face the cost of training Malayan doctors who were employed in Malaya and engineers who were not (The ring fence round the engineering services was not to be breached by any outside effort!) In discussing developments in Malaya, I floated the suggestion, which still I think is sound, that Universities in Hong Kong and Malaya should be developed but that there should be a governing policy limiting development in both places (stimulating it too but with clear aims). It was and is clear that the need for doctors in both places is going to be felt as medical and public health services develop, as they must, and as western medicine more and more establishes itself against the local "herbalisms". There is ample room for good and fairly large medical schools in both places. In the matter of the provision of courses in special branches of medicine and surgery it appears to me that co-operation should be the policy. Orthopaedic Surgery is defective in both places; so also is Radio-therapy. We in Hong Kong are well equipped to make provision for post- graduate teaching in the latter. Singapore has, on the whole, gone further than we in respect to the former. As the medical degrees of both places are recognised by the G.M.C. it would not be difficult and it would compromise neither institution, if free exchange of graduate students were made for special studies. Such a scheme made to cover all forms of medical and surgical specialism would not be difficult to agree on and would be economical. Singapore already has an admirable School of Dentistry; Hong Kong is very short of qualified dentists. It would be an economy if the Singapore school were entended rather than to launch out into establishing a second school in Hong Kong.
The training of teachers would have to be duplicated on linguistic grounds, but, if here after, as I think it very necessary that we should, Hong Kong develops a special Department primarily for the study of English and Chinese Phonetics and their application to language teaching, it seems reasonable that teachers in training for Chinese schools in Malaya should come to Hong Kong for these special courses, while our teachers for Indian schools might profitably attend in Malaya courses specially designed for teachers in Tamil and other Indian schools.
In Engineering Hong Kong has training facilities, unequalled in the Far East, for Mechanical Engineering.
In addition to two considerable power stations we have three large modern dockyards capable of competing with Great Britain in the building and engining of all but the largest ships. Singapore has nothing to compare with this. Both places
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