TNAG-0012-FCO40-48-Kowloon-disturbances-1967 — Page 81

I

had a rather unruly crew somewhere and while they were in some

Australian port the Captain shot one of the crew, and the crew

did not like it. Not unreasonably, I thought. But they had

settled the matter, as they thought, with the police in Australia,

but when the ship came back the Seamen's Union which is, of

course, a communist organisation, took up this dispute and they

started mobbing the offices and chanting in the manager's office

and using all these techniques we have now seen so much of in

furtherance of their dispute with the Royal Inter-Ocean Lindes.

This dispute is nothing to do with the Hong Kong

Government at all and our Labour Department had no status in

the matter at all. It had taken place outside Hong Kong in

Australia and was a dispute between a foreign company and the

Seamen's Union. Not over pay and conditions of service or

anything like that, but over a police matter.

I

What appeared at that time was the demand by the

communists that in this dispute, and indeed in every other

dispute, the police and the Labour Department should not be

allowed to intervene. This became one of the tenets of their

creed and they said that the proper way to conduct disputes of

this kind was directly between the workers and the employers,

by which they meant by the workers intimidating the employers.

The next thing that happened was there was a fight in

a factory between a right wing nationalist foreman and a couple

of left wing workers. As a result of this fight the management

sacked one of these left wing workers for assaulting the foreman.

The left wing then started chanting in the factory and processing

up and down; they got into the police station, started chanting

at the desk sergeant and they had to be put out.

Again, although the Labour Department looked into the

matter, this was not an industrial dispute but a police matter.

But it was at this point it became obvious if these tactics by

the left wing were going to continue then one day somewhere,

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