OPY
13
PERSONAL & CONFIDENTIAL
104 11
CIVIL AFFAIRS ADMINISTRATION,
Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank Building,
Hong Kong.
19th October, 1945
G.E.J. Gent, Esq., C.M.G., D.S.0., O.B.E., M.C., LONDON.
Dear Gent,
The trouble about coping 15 hours a day with succeeding problems (each of which appears more immediate and ticklish than the last), is that no time is left for the business of reporting. I hope that I have kept you sufficiently informed by telegram, and I have sent weekly "appreciation" signals painting the broader picture.
2.
Wallinger's report of his Hong Kong visit enclosed with the Ambassador's despatch to F.0. of 5th October may have caused you to wonder about several points not touched on in the telegrɛms. As in most reports (and books) written by week-end visitors, there are inaccuracies.
3.
I trust, for example, you will not think that I waited for any suggestion from Wallinger before laying on arrangements to get firewood from Borneo. In actual fact, about the first thing I did here after I had sized up the situation was to persuade the Admiral to agree to special arrangements by which Bass went to Borneo for firewood, Holmes to Shanghai for coal, and a Frenchman to Hongay for coal, peanut oil and anything else he could lay his hands on. The success of these jaunts is not yet known.
4.
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You may have been surprised too to read that "all executive decisions were taken by a committee presided by the Admiral's Chief of Staff. This is very wide of the mark. The committee referred to forms a sort of clearing house for service matters, etc., and for some weeks now it has been attended not by me but by my deputy. Major matters are seldom raised. Up to the present as regards executive decisions, I have been exercising a form of personal government through the Admiral, who takes the possibly optimistic view that I was sent out because I knew the job and the Colony, and he shows every disposition to accept my ¿dvice on all save service matters. Last week he formed a Military Council of the G.0.C., A.0.C., the Commodore and myself, which meetsweekly under his own chairmanship so I may have a better chance of spreading the responsibility a little more in future.
How
5.
The reference in Wallinger's report to the S.C.A. developed from a flanking attack made on the dignity and scope of that office by John Keswick in which Wallinger himself later, with proper discretion, joined. This does not seem to me to be the time to consider amendments in the functions of the S.C.A., and it is aggravating to be compelled to take time off from the all engrossing task of getting rice, peanut oil and coal into the Colony by fair means or foul, to parry thrusts of this sort. A copy of my improvised stalling operation is enclosed as a matter ✰ of interest.
6.
In view of my own case-history I would forgive you if you smiled at my present predicament. So many people come so many hundreds of miles on triple A priority to tell me that a new China has been born, and that Hong Kong is, as it were, no longer an island. Everyone seems now to say and to think what would have been usefully said and thought any time from 1937 to 1941. But this is late 1945 and the situation has changed. Then China needed friends: now she has more candidates for friendship than she knows what to do with. Our cards now in Hong Kong are the same as they always were courtesy, efficiency and usefulness
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