RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1975 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d 100 H. J. LETHBRIDGE besides music-halls and lodging-houses, the haunts of vagabonds well known to the police.19 The spectacle of Jack Tars, returning from the grog-shops of Tai Ping Shan and Sai Ying Pun, tipsily and rowdily weaving their way along Queen's Road, affronted respectable Britons. A Wesleyan missionary complained in 1894 that the colony was always upset by the arrival of a fresh man-of-war whose crew once ashore would behave like wild animals. "They drink like fishes," he complained, "ride round the town in rickshaws, making night hideous with their shouts, eat over-ripe fruit from street stalls, are stricken with cholera, and die in a few hours." He insisted that for soldiers and sailors (and possibly for most others in the East at the present moment) "total abstinence is a duty".20 The Wesleyan missionary, a fervent supporter of the temperance movement, misunderstood the reasons for excessive drinking among servicemen in Hong Kong. It was not due to innate depravity or irreligion. Soldiers and sailors drank because of the tedium, the hideous boredom they had to endure as pariahs in Hong Kong. They were totally excluded from polite European society; there were no young white women of their own class to walk out with; there were few entertainments, except lugubrious church or mission functions, provided for them. Off duty the only pleasures available, apart from a climb up the Peak, a jaunt in a sampan, or a visit to the Botanical Gardens, were the drinking dens and brothels of the more welcoming Chinese quarters of the town. Sailors, in particular, led almost completely isolated lives in the Far East. News from home could take months to reach their ships. Often they spent over a year without going ashore on leave. Walter White, a ship's painter, joined H.M.S. Scout at Sheerness in 1859, left England in that year and did not return from service on the China Station until 1864.21 His experience was typical. He spent New Year's Day, 1862, in Hong Kong and put up at the European Hotel, a hostelry overlooking Tai Ping Shan. From the verandah of his hotel, he wrote home, "you can sit and look down upon the teeming, squalid living, jangling and evil smelling Chinese quarters."22 But it was in this teeming quarter that White and his naval companions were obliged to spend their evenings of leave, Major Henry Knollys epitomises the life of the British gunner in Hong Kong in the 1880s thus: ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1975 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d 112 10 Ibid., p. 31. H. J. LETHBRIDGE 11 Fifty Years of Progress: The Jubilee of Hongkong as a British Crown Colony, Hong Kong, Daily Press Office, 1891, p. 43. 12 J. S. Thomson, op. cit., p. 8. 13 Ibid., p. 54. 14 Allister Macmillan, ed., Seaports of the Far East, London, 1923, p. 340. 15 Information about Bridget Montague is to be found in contemporary Hong Kong newspapers and the Report on the Contagious Diseases Ordinance (see note 5). 16 Alfred Weatherhead, Life in Hong Kong: 1856-1859. Typescript in the Library of the University of Hong Kong. 17 W. A. Hornaday, Two Years in the Jungle, London, 1885, p. 185. 18 Capt. Gordon Casserly, The Land of the Boxers, London, 1903, p. 193. 19 John Thomson, F.R.G.S., The Straits of Malacca, Indo-China and China, London, 1875, pp. 192-3. 20 J. A. Turner, Kwang Tung or Five Years in South China, London (1894), pp. 108-9. 21 See China Station 1859-1864: The Reminiscences of Walter White, London, National Maritime Museum, Maritime Monographs and Reports, No. 3, 1972. 22 Ibid., p. 27. 23 Major Henry Knollys, English Life in China, London, 1885, pp. 56-7. 24 'Report of the Commission on Alcoholic Liquors', Hong Kong Sessional Papers 1898, p. 1. 25 E. J. Eitel, "Treatment of Paupers in Hong Kong', Hong Kong Government Gazette, 1880, p. 470. 26 Ibid., p. 469. 27 The Kowloon British School was opened in 1902; before that some girls were educated at convent schools in Macau. 28 Marjorie Topley, 'The Role of Savings and Wealth among Hong Kong Chinese', in L. C. Jarvie, ed., Hong Kong: A Society in Transition, London, 1969, p. 193. 29 J. Thomson, op. cit., pp. 203 and 208. 30 L. N. Wheeler, The Foreigner in China, Chicago, 1881, p. 242. 31 Rev. E. J. Hardy, John Chinaman at Home, London, n.d., p. 29. 32 Leon Radzinowicz, Ideology and Crime, London, 1966, p. 38. 33 Allister Macmillan, op. cit., p. 339. 34 Op. cit., p. 151. 35 Samuel Couling, The Encyclopaedia Sinica, Shanghai, 1917, p. 437. 36 W. A. P. Martin, A Cycle of Cathay, New York, 1900, p. 24. 37 L. C. Arlington, Through the Dragon's Eyes, London, 1931, p. 151. 38 H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, New York, 1958, p. 186. 39 Arnold Wright and H. A. Cartwright, Twentieth Century Impressions of Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Other Treaty Ports of China, London, 1908, p. 341. Page 120 Page 121 ================================================================================