REVIEW OF THE YEAR
19
An important Anglican Church meeting took place in February, when the Bishops of Hong Kong, the Philippines, Borneo and Singapore, and the Assistant Bishop of Korea, assembled to take counsel on common interests in this part of the world.
A spectacular British Forces Tattoo, the first since the war, was held in November at Caroline Hill Stadium for three nights, and was witnessed by capacity audiences.
In the same month work was completed on the impressive Military Cemetery at Sai Wan, on the east side of Hong Kong Island. The Cemetery has been established jointly by the Imperial War Graves Commission and the Government of Hong Kong, and contains the graves of the greater number of Commonwealth troops who died in the defence of the Colony against the Japanese in December 1941. At the entrance is a War Memorial commemorating several thousand men whose names are inscribed, but who have no known grave. At the ceremony, at which the Governor unveiled the Memorial, a wreath was laid by the Colonial Secretary on behalf of the Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill.
A Festival of the Arts, the first of its kind to be held in the Colony, and an entirely home-made product, attracted considerable interest, and is described in the Arts Chapter. Its success encouraged its sponsors to plan a similar Festival for 1956.
On 12 April a whale was found in the water under a wharf on Connaught Road West. It had apparently found its way between the piles of the wharf during high tide and been trapped as the water receded. After being shot by Marine Police the entire specimen was handed over to the University for research and teaching purposes. This is the first recorded occasion of a whale entering Hong Kong waters. It was a young male common finback whale, 27 feet long and weighing 2 tons, and the popular suggestion was that it had swum too far away from its parent school and got lost.
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