to go to supper and talk in less unusual surroundings.
I hope I have communicated the main characteristics of the man: his great knowledge and capabilities, his friendliness and helpfulness, and his delight in life from which more and more as he grew older, he derived his serenity, compassion and wit.
25th November, 1987
JAMES HAYES
I have remarked before on the propensity of the Hongkong bureaucracy to lose, deliberately or otherwise, the services of its best and brightest. One such was Kenneth Barnett who died suddenly in October while happily playing with his grandchildren. He was 76. He had joined the Hongkong civil service in 1933, fought the Japanese as a volunteer and spent the rest of the war in prison camp. He had left the Hongkong Government as Commissioner of Census and Statistics at the age of 58. He was not the sort of man to take up a lucrative post locally where his years of public service could be profitably exploited by his new employers (as is the lamentable fashion these days); Barnett went to work for the United Nations as a demographer in Bangladesh and then Malawi.
Barnett had one of those impressive brains somewhere up in the upper echelons of IQs. He was master of written and spoken Chinese in many dialects, including some of the more obscure tongues, and of a dozen other languages — each of which he was apparently able to absorb within a few months. He was an expert calligrapher and an authority on Chinese history.
He was the sort of man who polished cryptic crosswords off in 10 minutes, played chess in his head, littered his letters with obscure Greek and Latin quotations (which he generously assumed any educated person could understand), was an amateur archaeologist and anthropologist of note, and wrote poetry (I have quoted a couple in these columns most recently on 30 April, in which he likened the exoskeletons of Hongkong's buildings to a coral reef).
4
to go to supper and talk in less unusual surroundings.
I hope I have communicated the main characteristics of the man: his great knowledge and capabilities, his friendliness and helpfulness, and his delight in life from which more and more as he grew older, he derived his serenity, compassion and wit.
25th November, 1987
JAMES HAYES
I have remarked before on the propensity of the Hongkong bureaucracy to lose, deliberately or otherwise, the services of its best and brightest. One such was Kenneth Barnett who died sud- denly in October while happily playing with his grandchildren. He was 76. He had joined the Hongkong civil service in 1933, fought the Japanese as a volunteer and spent the rest of the war in prison camp. He had left the Hongkong Government as commissioner of census and statistics at the age of 58. He was not the sort of man to take up a lucrative post locally where his years of public service could be profitably exploited by his new employers (as is the lamentable fashion these days); Barnett went to work for the United Nations as a demographer in Bangladesh and then Malawi.
Barnett had one of those impressive brains somewhere up in the upper echelons of IQs. He was master of written and spoken Chinese in many dialects, including some of the more obscure tongues, and of a dozen other languages — each of which he was apparently able to absorb within a few months. He was an expert calligrapher and an authority on Chinese history.
He was the sort of man who polished cryptic crosswords off in 10 minutes, played chess in his head, littered his letters with ob- scure Greek and Latin quotations (which he generously assumed any educated person could understand), was an amateur archaeol- ogist and anthropologist of note, and wrote poetry (I have quoted a couple in these columns most recently on 30 April, in which he likened the exoskeletons of Hongkong's buildings to a coral
reef).
—
į
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