C.O.
REGISTERED No.
DRAFT AND RECORE COPY
Colonial office,
4
DRA
MR. Gent 25/1
MR........
MR...
3.5.11/
ENCLOSURES
FURTHER ACTION
Copy & Sit Pratt
Conf.
To
LETTER
SENT
Dear Ashley clarke,
Downing StreeBATES. .1. 25th January, 1941.
Thank you for your letter of the 21st January (F.5053/5053/61) regarding arranging for closer liaison between Hong Kong and H.M.'s Ambassadors in China and Japan.
8
Ic.
I must confess to some feeling that the proposed arrangement would not be likely to be fully satisfactory to meet the purpose which we had in view in Hong Kong, viz. a close and continuous liaison between the Governor and a trusted personal representative of our Ambassadors in China and Japan, experienced in the current sympathies and antipathies of the parties concerned in the Far Eastern situation.
The information that in any case the proposed Connsellor would not be available for several months very seriously detracts in my view from this proposal as an alternative to the original idea.
You may have seen a letter from Sir John Pratt to sterndale Bennett of the 23rd January with a proposal from R.H. Scott that a Political Bureau should be organised in Singapore under a senior Foreign Office official, and obviously the alternative in your own draft telegram is more akin to that proposal than it is to the more limited plan to ensure that Hong Kong's policy is intimately related to His Majesty's policy in China and Japan. I still thin: that the immediate circumstances in the Far East call, temporarily at least, for the attachment to the Governor in that Colony of an experienced officer from the Embassy staff in China or Japan whose business it will be to keep closely in the eqnfidence of the two Ambassadors and the Governor of Hong Kong and guide the latter in local decisions affecting British relations with China and Japan.
H. ASHLEY CLARKE, ESQ.
The
(6094) Wt. 25403-113 40,000 ea. 2 sorts 9/40 T.S. 695
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