imperial-to-international-a-history-of-st-john-s — Page 2

The goodwill offerings, which Lieutenant Colonel Wyatt as treasurer so keenly pursued, had a choppy start. By August 1931, Dean Swann was reminding his congregation that the scheme was not a volunteers�� bazaar, not some flash in the pan. A regular income was needed. Nine hundred people had been approached, naturally not all of them on the electoral roll, and $31,000 a year was needed, he estimated.8
Swann considered a hypothesis in which twenty-four firms gave $4 a week; one hundred individuals, $2 a week and four hundred indi-viduals, $1 a week, which would yield a little over $35,000 a year. ��Am I optimistic enough to believe that that this is not too high?�� he asked. Apparently, he was. Collections at services were wholly inadequate, he said. It was giving without self-examination.
��Ask ��What does God think?���� he put to his readers. ��An honest churchman will reckon up and assess himself. If you give by weekly envelope and you don��t come one week, bring two next time. When you make out a banker��s order, think carefully what you could give each week and multiply it by four.�� Annual cheque givers were the weakest self-examiners. At the 1932 church meeting, the honorary treasurer, J. H. Sutcliffe, said, ��Decide as early in the year as possible how much you can give,�� in an attempt to stop donors underestimating their wealth to the cathedral as though it was the tax inspector.
The year 1932 proved to be testing for St John��s new system. Expenditure was $49,200, but offerings, though up $3,000, stood only at $22,600 when $35,000 was needed. The Finance Committee was very concerned. It was now that closing St Peter��s Church at West Point was suggested openly for the first time.
The 1933 Annual Church Meeting was told that goodwill offerings were indeed good at $24,000 even though income was $10,000 under expenditure and there was an overdraft of $3,000 causing additional discomfort. A proposed rough cast plastering of the cathedral exterior would have to be postponed. By the next year, however, there was an ��odd�� surplus of $4,700 because there had been no assistant chaplain to pay after Mr. Koop��s departure, and the ruinous annuities being paid Copley-Moyle had ended. The cathedral had looked rather des-perately for help with the Copley-Moyle payments to supporters in England. The returned Walter Pattenden, acting on its behalf, was offered a paltry 3 pounds and $25, all crying poverty and economic depression. An additional if transient addition to the books in 1933 was the $4,000 anonymous donation to refurbish the rough cast on the entire exterior of St John��s. This work was carried out in the autumn of 1934.
The new assistant chaplain, Harry Baines, was about to arrive, and by the same time in 1935, St John��s was back in debt by $5,731. Swann, not too fond of bazaars and gimmicks, one imagines, said to the Annual Church Meeting of 1935 that he ��won��t descend to undignified methods to raise money�� and wanted ��straight giving��. Death is straightforward enough. In March 1935, Lady Maria Chater died, leaving $50,000 on trust for care of her grave and that of her husband, and the balance of income for the trustees to spend as they saw fit. Ah Sing, the hall coolie, may have got wind of this and asked for a raise but in vain. In fact, the money was eventually put towards the purchase of the On Lee property in Pok Fu Lam, originally for clergy accommodation.
Intermittent references to the cathedral��s own subscriptions to others at this time reveal why it was less well off than it might have been. The Finance Committee report to the 1934 church meeting reveals a commitment of $42,000 to the Kowloon Tong church that was to become Christ Church, and that this would have to be paid in stages; $2,250 was being paid per year at that time to the diocese as the cathedral��s quota.
A generous scattering of missionary commitments for 1932 indicate a kind ear easily caught rather than a well-considered plan. St John��s Church Yunnan Fu had borrowed $10,000 at some point and was being paid $500. The CMS Mission in Lim Chow was getting $1,960. A scheme at Tsan Tsing got $250, a catechist, Lam Pak, was helped with $100 and St Hilda��s Canton, $150. ��Bible women�� in Canton got $100 and in Hong Kong, $170. CMS day schools in Hong Kong were given $100.9 The cathedral supported a student at Hong Kong University with $100, and six orphans at the Victoria Home. It is fair to say that, around that time, $10,000 to $12,000 a year was being disbursed by St John��s to aid other churches, missionary work and needy individuals.
This does not take into account money simply lost through bad judgement, which any organisation can make, but which St John��s seems to have wallowed in over Kellett Crest, the chaplain��s house bought for Copley-Moyle. The purchase price was $30,000. It had been a continual strain on St John��s finances and on Dean Swann��s weak heart, a two-coolie chair being needed to carry him up the drive. In 1936 it was valued at $26,000. Honorary Treasurer P. S. Cassidy thought letting it go for that was ��a breach of trust��.10 The economic depression in Hong Kong at the time was no respecter of trust. It had to be sold in middle of 1937 for $13,000, having had $4,000 more spent on it to make it buyable at all.
Dean Swann��s other struggle was one he considered of much greater importance than funding. He pressed hard upon his ebbing and flowing flock the importance of worship and, in particular, the taking of the sacraments. Special weekday services he noted had been seemingly impossible for people to attend. As the St John patronal festival approached in 1930, he stressed how important attendance was for the ��sense of corporate fellowship��.
��With changing personnel, it is so difficult to be like England,�� he wrote, almost plaintively, ��to know what it is like to look to the parish church for inspiration, guidance and renewal. We long to see this here.�� At the Annual Church Meeting of 1929, the new dean noted that the average Sunday attendance at Holy Communion was twenty-five. ��These numbers give pain to those who love Holy Communion,�� declared Swann. Out of the new council, he set up an ��active service committee�� for ��renewal of depth and power through the sacraments��.11 With the approval of Bishop Duppuy, whose feeling on the priority of Holy Communion was very much in harmony with Swann��s, an experiment was begun. On the second Sundays in Lent, Choral Holy Communion would be held at 11 a.m. instead of matins, which was to be sung instead at the 9.15 a.m. military parade service. Episcopal permission was given for the 1928 Communion service to be used at all celebrations.
This did not become a permanent feature. Matins returned to its 11 a.m. position. By 1936, there was one Sung Eucharist a month and a 12.15 p.m. Holy Communion on Sundays. The congregation needed longer acclimatisation, and parade services had to disappear before the Eucharist could take a central position. Nevertheless, it marked the beginning of a campaign by Swann and his successors over three decades to bring the sacraments into prominence. ��We only rarely use this great sacrament. We are missing something �K it should not belong only to a few,�� wrote Swann. ��It is the common spiritual meal of the Christian family. It is impossible to make good use if we only come to it occasionally.��12 The breeze from the Oxford Movement had arrived in Hong Kong.
His quieter but likely deeper legacy was the nurturing of a 7.45
a.m.
Holy Communion on the third Sunday of each month, some-thing he asked Church Council members to go out of their way to support. As is the way with services that become beloved, a small fellowship grew out of it, centred in the breakfast that was always organised afterwards.

Mass followed by breakfast is a mysteriously powerful mover of men and minds, and the numbers attending this service became impressive. It impressed Bishop Duppuy��s successor, R. O. Hall, on his first Sunday in early 1933. ��I was fortunate in striking the Third Sunday Fellowship Communion and breakfast in the cathedral. This was started two years ago by Alfred Swann. 80 to 100 cathedral members meet together for Communion and adjourn afterwards to
the Hall for breakfast together.��13 The newcomer Hall could not resist a light-hearted swipe at colonial manners. ��Old Hong Kong hands will, I hope, not feel that British prestige is lowered by the fact that we are not waited on by Chinese ��boys�� but by our own dairy maids.�� By current mores, points the bishop scored against racism were probably lost for sexism.
Swann achieved a growth in use of ��that great sacrament�� within his own short time at St John��s. One Sunday in December 1934 records eighty-seven communicants and forty-seven staying behind for break-fast, which was being paid for by M. J. D. Stephens, the unsuccessfully anonymous donor to the hall. It was Bishop Hall, again, who noted it in his February 1935 letter to the Victoria Diocesan Association, ��The best tribute to his [Swann��s] work was the Easter Communion service less than a fortnight after he had left. There were at the cathedral and the Peak Church 438 communicants. In other words, in the seven years of the Dean��s work, the number of Easter communicants has been doubled.�� In August 1935, the Communion Fellowship which had grown out of Holy Communion attendances and the breakfasts was listed as 110 strong.14
It would be a mistake to see the progress towards more commu-nicants as a steady one. Only four years later, at the church meeting of 1940, the report was that matins and evensong attendances were up but those at Communion were decreasing. They were down two-thirds at the third Sunday celebration, and there were fewer at the choral service as well. It was suggested that some worshippers were transferring to the Peak Church but, given that the overall attend-ances up there were small anyway, this was thin reasoning.
In the face of entrenched habits, Dean Swann learned to brace himself for disappointments. An interesting example of his approach was connected to Bishop Hall��s arrival. The bishop wanted a family Communion followed by breakfast the morning after his enthrone-ment on 30 December 1932. This meant a part-Choral Holy Communion at 7.45 a.m. on New Year��s Eve. Anticipating resistance, Swann wrote in St John��s Review, ��I know it��s unusual. I know there will be difficulties but if the desire is present to meet the Bishop then no difficulties will stop us.��
As a place of worship for the English community, St John��s was increasingly busy and important through the 1930s. Most events involving the Royal Family in Britain were marked under its roof. A service of ��Thanksgiving for the Recovery of the King�� was held on 7
July 1929, to celebrate George V��s recovery from septicaemia. The governor was met at the west door. His Majesty��s message was read. Psalms 21, 23 and the ��Te Deum�� were sung and, before the blessing, a ��Peace version�� of the national anthem was sung. Approved by the Privy Council in 1919 and published in ��Songs of Praise�� in 1925, its sentiments seemed tilted towards the League of Nations and it is unknown today.
The South China Morning Post the following day was quite lyrical over the event. ��Rarely has such fervour been expressed by any one congregation �K,�� it claimed, most improbably. This passion was ��expressed in respectful prayer and �K the timbre of the voice of the preacher. Dim light brought into relief the khaki and white drill of the navy and military.�� Listed as present representing St Peter��s Church was Miss Ruby Mow Fung. She was of a notable Chinese family which had returned from Australia. Along with Andrew Cheng, who was a member of the early Cathedral Councils, she was one of a handful of Chinese who were prominent in the cathedral before the war.
The records are silent on the abdication of King George��s son, Edward VIII, but on the day of the coronation of his successor, George VI, early Communion ��with special intention for Their Majesties�� was held followed by breakfast in the hall. The Chaplain, Harry Baines, had held lectures on the meaning of the coronation, which Edward VIII had done much to subvert, and the 11.15 service to mark the coronation itself was ��non-liturgical��, to attract the widest possible attendance from the city. A choral celebration followed on the Sunday. Royal services were not restricted to the British monarchy. A memorial was held, jointly with the Lutherans, for the life of Queen Maud of Norway on her death in November 1938 although that she was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria and had died of a heart attack in London doubtless strengthened the sentiment. On the imperial theme, Empire Day on 24 May always saw the cathedral packed, albeit with children. Few adults made it, but for church schools, attendance was compulsory. Dean Swann took the 1934 celebration as an opportunity to take his steely pin to the imperial conscience. Of it, he wrote, ��The Church stands for responsibility and service not privilege and aggrandisement.��
The 21 October 1934 saw the first service attended by the entire judiciary to mark the opening of the Legal Year. Bishop R. O. Hall preached a sermon on justice of such passion that one wishes the stones of the church could utter it again. Although St John��s retained
no formal connection to the Crown, this event was an indication of the strong informal link. Interestingly, the judiciary still attends this service at the cathedral even though the Crown has gone entirely and the Special Administrative Region can in no sense be considered officially Christian. Quite simply, the cathedral has always had a natural appeal to organisations which wish to give thanks to heaven or seek its mercy.
The Mothers�� Union in Hong Kong, run by Mrs. Strachan of 366 The Peak, had become joined at the hip to the cathedral by holding its meetings there and was in cheerful alliance with the Women��s Guild, whose unlikely motto was ��Charity without chatter�� and was run by Mrs. Handley Pegge of 12 Leighton Hill. In April 1930, they decided to hold jointly their quarterly corporate Communion service. This could sound grander than it actually turned out. In 1934, seven people showed up for it.15
A place which had a brief experience of small attendances was the Colonial Cemetery Chapel in Happy Valley. Anglicans were said to find it inconvenient to get from Happy Valley and Causeway Bay to Garden Road. Given that these two districts were some of the best connected on Hong Kong Island, this was an odd conclusion. Admittedly, the Colonial Cemetery Chapel in Happy Valley was sitting there, underused, in what was called the most beautiful cemetery in the world. Special permission was obtained from the government to hold evensong services each Sunday. The cathedral donated the old altar from the Lady chapel, where it had been recently been replaced, and the government raised the marble floor a foot for the step up to it. The first service, one of Holy Communion, was held on All Souls�� Day, 2 November 1931, and there were eighteen communicants, which was prescient of the attendances to come.
In the following year, on 29 March, the chapel was dedicated under the name of ��The Chapel of the Resurrection��. The dean officiated in place of Bishop Duppuy, who was confined to his room with illness. Also present was the Reverend E. C. H. Tribbeck of the Wesleyans and the Reverend E. G. Powell of the Union Church. Other con-gregations used the chapel for burial services. The principal service was Sunday evensong, held at 5.15 p.m. because the cemetery closed at 6. Eventually, Holy Communion was held on the first Sunday of every month. The capacity of the chapel was forty, but attendances ranged from five to ten. In the last few months of services, ��no con-gregation�� was entered in the service book more frequently. Other rare comments made there had a suitably mournful tone for a cemetery
setting. ��Very cold�� and ��Time wrongly advertised�� can be found along with ��Diphtheria outbreak on increase��, on 27 December 1931. The last recorded service at the chapel, in its sultry tropical graveyard, was held on 9 February 1936.
The Church Council had more success with new ideas for com-munity services. In their meeting of September 1936, they discussed holding a seafarers service on 25 October, at which the cathedral would be presented with local merchant marine company flags and then display them. China Navigation, Indo China Steam Navigation, Douglas Steamship and Hong Kong, Canton and Macau Steamboat all offered theirs. At the beginning of the service, their representatives were received at the west door by the two trustees and escorted to the chancel steps, where the presentation was made. The flags were hung in the nave. Such was the good feeling generated by this that plans were made for a similar ��aviation service�� for 15 November. Given the limits of air travel, the only two flags that could be summoned were the Civil Aviation Department flag and the house flag of Imperial Airways.
Later that month, there was less harmony. The sermon at matins on 30 November was disturbed by bagpipers of the Scottish branch of the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps. Apologies were received, and to conciliate further, the general officer commanding promised that there would be no War Department blasting during divine service. What was being blown up so close to the centre of Victoria is not mentioned.
One service that was ��tremendously moving in itself but significant far beyond itself��, according to Bishop R. O. Hall, was the consecra-tion of Bishop Mok on 25 January 1935.16 The cathedral was crowded. Many people had to stand. The laying on of hands was performed by Bishops Norris, Curtis, Hall, Ding and Nichols. A Chinese choir led the music. English and Cantonese were used, the Cantonese for the Litany and, remarkably, for the sermon, which was given by the Reverend P. Jenkins, who was about to retire after thirty years in the diocese and had a fluid grasp of the dialect. Bishop Hall saw in it a deeply touching promise for the church.
The little old figure (Mok��s smallness was one source of his impact) so moved and yet so unaffectedly simple, kneeling there, as before the Master Himself, to receive his Apostolic commis-sion, joins all the richness and costliness with the future of infinite possibility.
At this time, evensong had become a service of alteration and experimentation, all with the intention of getting people to actually come out to it on a Sunday evening. In 1929, it was decided to sing the service up to the third collect as usual, after which there would be a hymn, a sermon and prayers, followed by discussion in the hall with the preacher present. ��Strangers to the church may find guidance in clearing their minds on subjects of vital importance,�� said Bishop Duppuy of the change; ��it allows teaching the best possible chance of being accepted �K�� This was a clear attempt to attract service person-nel, who tended towards this service when their duty day was done.
Efforts to increase the civilian congregation were more utilitarian. In October, it was announced that the time of the service would be altered to 6.30 p.m. from 6 p.m. to accommodate bathers and tennis players and catch the golfers. Sport was essential to socialising on the one truly free day of the week, and in summer, taking to the water in one way or another was a compelling draw among the 22,000 Europeans living in Hong Kong, without air conditioning. This com-promise was not the petty indulgence it appears to be. From as late as the 1960s, Muriel Clayton recalls it.
Sunday evensong we would arrive straight from the beach to quickly don our cassocks and head into church, herded along under the supervision of a patient, and anxious, [Dean] John Foster, who had waited for his flock to rush through the door looking sunburnt and healthy. If only the congregation could have seen below the cassocks to the assortment of shorts and sandals we still wore, and grains of sand falling from our feet.
The time change did not work. People with less commitment still dawdled at the beach or by the pool. Bishop Hall proposed leapfrog-ging over the problem by holding the service at 9 p.m. In June 1938, it was moved to as late as 8.30, which only shifted the problem to the timing of dinner. Dean Wilson suggested a break in the tradition that nobody goes to church in the evening and that people had a lighter meal before or afterwards. It would be less work for them, he reasoned, forgetting, perhaps, that his congregation had servants anyway. They managed a maximum of fifty on one evening, but by winter, it was back to 6.30. In playing dinner off against bathing, evensong came out the loser.
It is difficult to assess how much preachers did for attendances. Some effort was put into seeking variety from a limited English-language pool. In August 1931, sermons were given by G.K. Carpenter,
headmaster of St Stephen��s College, C. B. Shann, warden of St John��s Hall and J. Pratt of the CMS, visiting from Hingwa (Hinghua). A different note was probably struck by Father Walter Bentley, a former Shakespearian actor who was founder of the Episcopal Church��s Actors�� Church Union. He must have made an impression, because St John��s showed a peculiar fondness for this institution and made several donations to it in subsequent years.
On 2 September 1937,17 a typhoon struck Hong Kong and St John��s. Part of the roof over the high altar blew off, the stained glass in the north transept was damaged and the wooded compound was torn about. It did not fare as badly as the Taipo Orphanage to which it contributed. That was destroyed. The cathedral coolies went into the church in at 2 a.m., rolled up the carpets and removed the frontals and linens which had been ruined when water flowed in over the altar. The floor was inches deep in sand and leaves, but they were ready for afternoon weddings.
The Church Council took a cavalier attitude when reviewing the situation. They calculated that the cathedral was damaged on average once every four years. The insurance premium necessary for that period would have exceeded the money spent on repairs. Having arrived at a conclusion that would make an insurer��s toes curl, they went on to inform Leigh and Orange, the cathedral��s official archi-tects, that they were to take out no typhoon insurance unless they foresaw major damage. Leaving the firm in the role of oracle, the matter was closed.18
The deteriorating finances of late 1934 led to a suggestion in the last edition of St John��s Review for that year that a Victorian-style Day of Humiliation be held to draw attention to the plight and ��to the inevitable condition which will arrive if we continue neglect of the financial side��. Here, the dean, who had spoken to his first trustees meeting of the importance of ��Art and Beauty��, may have let his own aesthetic fears loose. It was imagined how the organ would break down at a critical moment, torn old prayer books would lie on seats without rattan, choir surplices would go unwashed and unmended, the lectern would be unpolished and the cathedral unkempt. In fact, photographs of the period show the church looking very kempt and gracefully equipped both inside and out. There had been some thoughtful purchases and contributions to the fabrics and furnishings from the beginning of Swann��s period.
In 1930, larger altar tables were placed at the high altar and in the Lady chapel. With this in mind, Dean Swann went on a voyage of decorative discovery during his leave trip to England that year. Seeing, on his way, the fourteen-foot altar at the cathedral in Victoria, British Columbia, he felt justified in having extended St John��s own to eleven feet. That table did not survive the Japanese Occupation. It was replaced in 1949 by one donated by the Royal Navy, also eleven feet long, with an anchor motif on it.
Swann visited as many cathedrals as he could on that trip, looking for inspiration. He got it from Chester Cathedral, where he saw a pattern he liked for the new altar frontals that would be needed for both tables. He bought the materials in England, and they were made up back in Hong Kong by the Women��s Guild. Whether the design of the present frontal is of direct descent from these has not been established.19 At Liverpool Cathedral, which he was being shown over by Sir William Furse, a golfing chum of the architect Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, a fald stool caught his eye. Scott donated the woodwork design on the stool, and this became the decorative base of the altar rails being funded by W. L. Pattenden.20 Dedicated on Trinity Sunday, 1931, they were carved by Chow Fook of the Hong Kong Furniture Company. Sir Gilbert Scott was sent pictures of Pattenden��s rails and wrote to Swann, ��I really think that your Chinese carpenter has been most successful.��
The rails were lost to a bomb during the Second World War, dropped on the Catholic convent and orphanage in Causeway Bay where they were stored, but it was a fald stool in the same design, yet again, which survived as an inspiration for replacements. These were donated by a trustee, David Margarett, and his wife, in 1950, and were placed originally in the east end and then moved with the altar to its present western position in the chancel. The old fald stool sits, nowadays, quietly to the right of the altar in the St Michael��s chapel. The sanctuary of the 1931 high altar was finished off with the artistic flair of Mrs. Koop, wife of the chaplain. She designed rails with a grapes and wheat motif in the art nouveau style, which completed the enclosure. They were also placed at the altar in what was the Lady chapel, now the St Michael��s chapel, where they still are today.21
Munificent members of the congregation gave items of value. Albert ��Bunny�� Abbott of Kelly and Walsh Bookshops, who gave us the account of the choir ladies, was an indefatigable if opinionated giver. In February 1930, in the early stages of his generosity, he offered
the council a brass altar cross and candlesticks. Interestingly, this was rejected, and it was suggested that he might give a sanctuary carpet instead. Mrs. Black, more in tune with the spirit of Medieval Gothic than her colleagues were, said that she liked the sanctuary tiles exposed and suggested that Mr. Abbott give new offertory bags.22 This was a drop down the value scale too far for ��Bunny��, so the sanc-tuary got a Peking carpet by Fette. In 1934, he donated a dean��s stall in for the north sanctuary in the tones of a strong man correcting error. The present stall was not worthy, he declared, because it was more of a litany desk which should be next to chancel steps. In 1938, Mr. Abbott came up with a new flag for St John��s, which had been designed in conjunction with advice from the College of Heralds and, for reasons which satisfied Mr. Abbott, the full approval of the Earl Marshal of England. Only war halted Abbott��s giving, which resumed at the peace.
Rather more quietly, Colonel W. F. Christiansen gave a finely wrought silver chalice and paten in memory of his daughter, Dulcie, who had died in 1929. There was a touching sequel to this. Shortly after the liberation of Hong Kong, Colonel Christiansen wrote from England asking the then Dean, Alaric Rose, if the chalice had survived. Rose was able to tell him that it had. His wife and Miss Betty Bicheno had taken some of the altarware across to the French Mission building for safekeeping in a brief interim between the sur-render and internment. The chalice was back in use.23 Christiansen��s letter of response describes the deep relief and happiness felt in his family, knowing that this vessel should have survived to keep the memory of his child alive in their beloved cathedral.
In 1928, P. S. Cassidy had stated a need for a wall tablet listing the cathedral chaplains. He got a response from an interesting source. The Reverend Holman T. Holman OBE, the Canadian who had been assistant chaplain from 1920 to 1922, was now the Chaplain to the British Legation in Peking. He donated a teak name board which was lost during the war but found again and hangs by the west door. Donated too by Holman, then lost but sadly not found, was a splendid free-standing copper ewer to serve the font. He also gave to the diocese the silver bishop��s crozier, which fared better and can be seen in its stand by the throne in St John��s today.
Cassidy, at that same 1928 meeting of the Church Body, one interesting for its resolution to throw beggars out of the compound, made public his awareness that the cathedral had no memorial to Sir
Paul Chater. Could not the restored organ be named after him?24 The last notable restoration had taken place in 1925. It may have been visually spectacular, but it was technically flawed. Cassidy��s reference to the organ doubtless came out of what Colonel Johnston��s history calls its ��growing eccentricities��. Frederick Mason, who came from St Mary��s Parish Church, Woburn, replaced Denman Fuller in 1923 and tackled the organ and taught music at Diocesan Boys�� School. Lindsay Lafford, who took over in February 1935, concluded that the organ needed rebuilding.
He foresaw an all-electric and not a pneumatic organ because of the climate, with a console over the north vestry. This was almost prophetic of him. In the meantime, a more conventional repair had to be waited for. An appeal for the estimated cost of $3,500 was raised and a bridge and mah-jong drive was held at the Hong Kong Hotel roof garden on 27 April 1936. In October 1936, ��no organs in town are working because of a dry spell. Mr. Blackett is run off his feet,�� reported St John��s Review. Mr. Blackett, the remarkably skilled and adaptable organ builder, was 78 by now and the only one in the entire Far East. The council took to consulting the Tsang Fook Piano Company, which had been operating in Hong Kong since 1916, and Moutrie and Anderson in England. The St John��s instrument was ready enough to be played in a limited way on Christmas that year and was rededicated in June 1937. Paul Chater��s name was never attached to it.
Lindsay Lafford was quite right about the climate, of course. By December 1939, the organ was reported as malfunctioning again. So, for a while, was Lafford. He was a hardworking man, teaching in schools and broadcasting on Radio ZBW, but in June 1937 he came down with malaria. Illness took its toll in high places. Bishop Duppuy��s health had been declining steadily over two years and, by 1933, his departure from Hong Kong had become compelling. Mrs. Duppuy was also suffering from illness to the extent that she could not even attend a farewell tea party for the couple at Government House.

P.
S. Cassidy, on behalf of the council, paid tribute to the Bishop��s Foundation of the Victoria Diocesan Association. Dean Swann touched on the reality of life as a missionary bishop when he spoke of the difficulties and weariness involved making long journeys by small river steamers, and he paid tribute to the bishop��s intellectual labours in framing the Church of England Ordinance. He was pre-sented with a gift of a sterling draft of 109 pounds 18 shillings and


6 pence with a little joke from Cassidy about this being the easiest item to get through British Customs. His Chaplain, Victor Halward, later an Assistant Bishop in Victoria and Canton, writing an appre-ciation of Bishop Duppuy for the Victoria Diocesan Association after the war, says he discovered in the bishop ���K a deep personal devotion to our Lord, an amazingly broad and loving affection for his fellow men, a wise counsellor and a most sincere friend��.25 The bishop returned to England and Worcester Cathedral as a Canon, where he died in 1943.
Duppuy��s successor, R. O. Hall, was probably the most striking of all the occupants of the Victoria throne. Much has been written about him, and the overdue beginnings of a full biography are being made at this time. He has been described as brilliant, saintly, impetu-ous, frugal and even ��red��. He once called the Hong Kong colonial administration of the 1930s ��a comic opera government��. That faintly alliterative expression ��a legend in his own lifetime�� might fairly apply to him.
His enthronement took place in St John��s on Friday, 30 December 1932. Dean Swann and Archdeacon Mok led Hall to his chair. Prayers and the sermon were in English and Cantonese. The epistle was 1 Thessalonians 5:8�V14 ending ���K admonish the idlers, encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with them all��. A forging feature of Hall��s spirit had been that he had lost his three best and closest friends in the Great War and had only been coaxed out of his emotional withdrawal by friendship with a Chinese, T. Z. Koo, a prominent Anglican layman in the Christian Youth Movement, about whom Hall eventually wrote a book. He opened his sermon with a poignant summary of that.
Jesus of Nazareth wept over Jerusalem. My heart is still sore for my beloved Tyneside, for my fellow townsmen, for the pits and shipyards and heather hills of the north country. In a strange way God has tied my life to China �K I am proud and grateful to God that I am allowed to serve you here in this vigorous and beautiful colony, and also the great Chinese people, through whom God opened my heart again to friendship after the bereavement of the war.
The new bishop was always to have his patience strained by his English-speaking listeners. In his sermon that day, he also described St John��s as ��the Mother church of our communion in the Far East, the Mother church in the growing family of God which we call this diocese��. He was to observe later that the English-speaking parts of the diocese�Xespecially the cathedral�Xthought of the bishop as a sort of grand chaplain and resented his time and absence in the diocese.26
Humbler curates came and went too with some rapidity up to 1940. The Reverend Neville Watkins, who had been chaplain in charge of the ailing St Peter��s, left in 1932 to take up a post in Christchurch, New Zealand. He married in the cathedral in 1930 and gave up teaching twenty hours a week for twenty dollars at St Paul��s College because he ��could find better things to do��. He returned to Hong Kong on a visit in February 1971 and shared some recollections with St John��s Review.
I was measured for a Palm Beach-style suit in Wellington Street. St Peter��s was 150 yards inland by then but davits for long boats were still attached. The congregation at the time was Chinese, Eurasians, White Russians, Hong Kong police and Hong Kong University staff.
He visited a gaol, took Holy Communion at the Peak Church, founded Toc H (Talbot House) in Hong Kong, joined the volunteers regiment and acted in a ��nigger minstrel group�� entertaining troops at the border. What was not mentioned at the time was that he stood in occasionally as organist for Frederick Mason. ��It was a fine 3-manual instrument �K the humidity made it ��cipher�� �K a nightmare.�� Watkins��s strongest impression on his return was the ��integration of the Chinese into the whole life of the cathedral �K a new feel in racial relationships is evidenced everywhere. Now, European women do their own shopping.��
After the departure, also in 1932, of the Reverend H. V. Koop to become Vicar of St Paul��s, Princess Park in Liverpool, there was a hiatus until 1934, when Dean Swann, on leave, recruited Henry Baines as chaplain or as Bishop Hall put it, ��unstuck Harry Baines from St Mary��s Oxford��. Swann was keen on this appointment. Baines was a tall, imposing man with charm and an ��Oxford accent��, accord-ing to Lindsay Lafford.27 This was not surprising. He was educated at Repton and Balliol. He was as affable on the sports field and over a pint of beer as he was as straightforward in his faith. ��Harry Baines and I will be in the cathedral every day to pray for you,�� said Swann to his St John��s Review readers, but his time was soon to be up.
In February 1935, the dean��s doctors told him that he would not survive another summer in Hong Kong. His heart would give out. He left in April. Bishop Hall called him a ��sporting parson��. ��He has shown us religion as a sportsman shows on the sports field where a man must play hard and play the game.��28 At his last meeting with the Cathedral Council, Swann left them with priorities. They must nurture the communicants�� fellowship, for the Sacrament was the cathedral��s most important activity; they must promote the training group, his initiative for ministry amongst laypeople and encourage the children��s services and kindergarten.
Swann went away for eight months�� rest in England, reimbursed by the cathedral for a Kelvinator, a Gestetner copier and a $1,160 exten-sion to his garage. As often was the case when clergy were withdrawn from the deadly climate of southern China, Swann��s heart revived remarkably for a while, though in health he was destined to suffer. Later he contracted cancer but, even in remission from that, he held down the acting deanery of another St John��s Cathedral, this time in brisk Newfoundland. In an address on his death in April 1962, Swann��s former chaplain, H. V. Koop, gave a steely glimpse of Swann��s beginning in Hong Kong.
There was opposition; of course, there always is. There were those who cannot endure the quality of the wholly dedicated man, who found his honesty too much for them; but that is the lot of God��s elect.
Bishop Hall took over as dean in the interregnum and worked merrily with Harry Baines, who also came from Tyneside in the industrial north-east of England. They were about to become a trio of Tynesiders. The Board of Patronage, consisting of Sir Henry Pollock, Professor Forster, Mr. Barton and Mr. Cassidy, were paying close attention to the Reverend Leonard Wilson, Vicar of St Andrews, Roker, Sunderland. Wilson had been curate to a bishop and an incumbent in some of the most depressed mining communities of County Durham, where he had filled previously empty churches. P. S. Cassidy, on leave, interviewed him in comparatively balmy Brighton, and in February 1937, the board recommended him to the trustees as dean. Bishop Hall later described him as ��the man I most wanted �K��29
Looking forward to the early 1960s, there were four Anglican clerics who were quite well known to the agnostic classes in England: the Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, for his bushy eyebrows; David Shepherd, Bishop of Liverpool, for once having been England��s cricket captain; Bishop Trevor Huddleston, for his furious opposition to apartheid; and Leonard Wilson, Bishop of Birmingham, for being courageous and holy. In those days, British veterans of the war in the Far East still filled the Albert Hall every year for their Burma Star Association gathering. The BBC televised it; Bishop Wilson was there as their chaplain and simply everybody knew his story. He had been the Bishop of Singapore when it fell to the Japanese in 1942.
Imprisoned in Changi Prison, he had helped with escapes and resistance, been tortured for it and survived. When his tormentors asked him why his God was not saving him, he told them that he was, by helping him take the pain. After the liberation of Singapore, he found himself confirming a Japanese man, a former torturer who had seen Christ in Wilson��s faith. Back in 1937, Mr. Cassidy and his colleagues had given the nod to a man who was to become probably St John��s best-known dean.
Harry Baines said that Wilson had taken no easy decision in coming to Hong Kong and outlined its essence: ��An unfamiliar parish in a much disturbed part of the world compared to a northern English church sensitive and loyal to his leadership in a district clamouring for the power of Christ which only attracts a man of rare spirit.��30 Interestingly, his chaplain at Roker, David Rosenthal, volunteered to follow him. Harry Baines had made it clear that he did not want to continue as chaplain for another contract. The council was again chewing on the issue of how to afford a dean and one if not two assis-tant chaplains. There was an Assistant Chaplains�� Fund once again, now standing art $13,000, but it was in no condition yet to have allo-cations made from it.
Cassidy had empowered Wilson to find a chaplain before he sailed. Rosenthal, it was imagined, could work between the cathedral, St Andrew��s and the new Kowloon Tong church of Christ Church. Long-distance planning was again rendered fictitious. After he arrived in September 1937, Rosenthal found himself with his hands full as Priest-in-Charge of Christ Church. Harry Baines was extended to April 1938, to bridge the gap in Garden Road. He left after a farewell tea party at which no one could guess, let alone Baines himself, that he would follow Leonard Wilson as Bishop of Singapore, after the war, or end his ministry as a rather radical Bishop of Wellington, New Zealand.
It was not until December 1938 that his direct replacement, the Reverend Alaric Rose, arrived from a curacy at Gateshead Parish Church, another north-east England location. Rose was the son of an Anglican missionary in China, educated at St Edward��s Hall, Oxford, and Ripon Hall and ordained in 1933. No one could guess either that this young man would be tested with the leadership of the cathedral for a decade under the most extraordinary circumstances.
Dean Wilson was instituted and installed by Bishop Hall on 20 February 1937. The congregation was large and included the governor, Sir Geoffrey Northcote; his aide-de-camp, Captain Batty-Smith; Major General A. W. Bartholomew and his wife; Sir Atholl MacGregor, the chief justice, and Lady MacGregor; Royal Navy Commodore E. B. C. Dicken; and Mok Shau Tsang, now Bishop of Canton. The Reverend J R Higgs and cathedral trustees P. S. Cassidy and J. R. C. Hance presented Wilson to Bishop Hall. The new dean��s salary was $750 a month, the dollar now standing at one shilling and three pence to the pound. A subcommittee was formed to find him a house. The subject of finding the dean a deanery has been neither resolved nor quite dropped until recent years, since when, modestly, any suitable lodging has sufficed.31
Wilson was a keen gardener, and so Ava Mansions on May Road was thought suitable for a moment or two. Mr. Eldon Potter offered a furnished place at Mt Cameron for $375 per month, and 112 The Peak was offered at $112. It was decided that building a deanery cost too much, given the war conditions across the frontier and the conse-quent costs. In January 1940, the council wondered about buying an old house for a deanery and modernising it. Events were soon to put an end to that conversation. Since then, deans have lived in Upper Albert Road, Bishop��s House, the Cathedral Lodge, Mount Davis Road and even Mountain Lodge, the long-demolished Peak getaway of the governor, which was where Northcote let Leonard Wilson stay until he was accommodated.
The dean was slightly taken aback at his new congregation��s relaxed attitude to religious observance. In his Review letter of Lent 1938, he chided them with a little irony over their absence for any weekday Communions and the Wednesday Lenten service. These figures could not be a true reading of the situation, he said. ��Some of you must be giving more attention to your prayer life. It is not a good idea to pull up plants to see how they are growing so I will be patient.�� The Maundy Thursday service got 40 attending which, out of an electoral roll at that time of 407, was considered ��not bad��.
Other features of St John��s congregational habits were still con-founding Leonard Wilson a year later.32 There were 8 o��clock regulars who were not seen again the rest of week, and tireless volunteers who never went to services. People, he said, did not understand the concept ��missionary church��. Nevertheless, this still habitually exclu-sive band of eccentric colonial worshippers did what they could in the years before the Second World War to improve and do good wherever they could. ��Outreach�� was a term which was to come later into the vocabulary of organised Christian charity, but the cathedral congrega-tion had a sense of it.
Contributions to the Victoria Home and the Waifs and Strays Society were consistent. In the year 1936, for example, St John��s supported the Hong Kong Society for the Protection of Children, the CMS Leper Colony Hospital Pak Hoi, the Bible Churchman��s Missionary Society and the Tai Po Chinese Boys�� Orphanage. When the 1937 typhoon destroyed that, there was generous giving to restore it. There was organised lay visiting to Queen Mary Hospital, and every year, the girls of the Blind Home, Pok Fu Lam, were taken on their annual picnic.
In that same year, there was little the cathedral could do for the outbreak of cholera that occurred, but assistance was being provided in helping feed and shelter war evacuees from Shanghai and Hankow (Hankou). That ill wind brought some good. American church volun-teers came into Hong Kong to help, among them the Reverend Michael Bruce of the Episcopal Church, who was secretary of the Chinese YMCA and became almost an unpaid member of staff at St John��s.
The most elementary and earthed act of compassion in which the cathedral was a moving force was the Street Sleepers�� Shelters Society, to which the St Peter��s Church building was lent as a shelter until it was demolished. The Reverend N. V. Halward was the chairman of a strong British and Chinese committee. Sir Henry and Lady Pollock were prominent in a group of cathedral people who went along to help. Their aim was to provide a night��s lodging for the homeless, including a bunk, hot water, soap and hot tea. From December 1933 to April 1934, for example, 16,372 street sleepers were accommodated.33
The democratisation of the cathedral, the growing awareness that there had to be more to the sense of community than attendances at matins and the dogged encouragement of a succession of clergymen who had fought in war which lost you your faith or grew you in it, was slowly building the habit of fellowship within the life of St John��s. By 1936, most of the hopefully titled committees of the council set up in 1930 had blown away from lack of substance. Only the Finance and General Purposes Committee and the St John��s Review committee were left, the latter being renamed from Press and Publicity because dealing with the magazine was all it did. However, there were some busy group activities which were run under the council.
Interesting and not repeated in less colonial times was the Cathedral Messengers programme, in which representatives from the parish working in government departments, businesses and schools reported to the clergy on newcomers to Hong Kong and others they worked with who were ill or were thought to be in need.34 Eventually, it was discovered that this work was being duplicated by the Mothers�� Union, and so the programme organisation was split into men��s and women��s groups. As organisation increased, effectiveness seems to have diminished.
There was the Training Group preparing adults for confirmation and the Communion Fellowship, both anchored by the chaplain. The Training Group had the recurring disadvantage of being either too small or too large. It was last heard of before the Japanese invasion and had twelve members. In 1938, though, there was an increase in adult baptisms, there were thirty-eight confirmations and it was claimed that the Chinese congregation was growing steadily.35 The Bible Reading Fellowship was in an amazingly healthy state, having a declared mem-bership of 113 under the leadership of Miss A. J. Bennett.
There was a considerable regiment of women. Apart from the Mothers�� Union under Mrs. F. Archer, there was a Women��s Catering Committee under Mrs. W. C. Clarke which, one feels sure, must have paid some obeisance to the Women��s Guild under the redoubtable Lady Pollock. Organist Lindsay Lafford remembers her as radiating ��an impressive sense of power that was hard to escape. Whenever she hove into sight I had the mental impression of a galleon under full sail.�� She was the wife of Sir Henry Pollock K. C., who was frequently a Cathedral Council member, often Attorney General and a founder of Hong Kong University. An example of Lady Pollock��s style was her complaint to the council in 1937 that the coolie quarters were over-crowded and that something must be done about it. She managed to couple this with a ��demand�� to be told what Christian instruction the coolies received. She accepted as adequate the information that the coolies�� spiritual welfare was provided by ��the Reverend Lee��.
Lafford once witnessed her displeasure at the disappearance of the bananas from the Harvest Festival display:
Ignoring me and bearing down on Ah Kau (the cathedral ��coolie��) with all cannon at the ready, she unleashed a salvo at full decibel,
��Where are the bananas?�� Almost taking a pull at his forelock, he ventured a feeble question/answer: ��I think lat live in organ?�� he ventured. ��Yes,�� agreed the Lady. ��A two-legged lat!��36
Although the Pollocks were in obvious ways colonial buttresses, and Pauline Pollock had all the resonances of a memsahib, they were compassionate if old school liberals. She was awarded an OBE for her efforts in setting up camps for Chinese refugees in 1940, and he persistently presented the British government with reasons why Hong Kong should have constitutional reform.
There was a Servers�� Guild under Mr. A. Flynn and, after a false start in 1912, doubts about what they were supposed to do and dif-ficulties in getting anyone to turn up on time, there was a function-ing Sidesmen��s Guild under David Kwok. An inaugural meeting of the Scout troop was held on 3 November 1938. Four boys attended although ��you really need 24 to play scouting properly�� as the Review put it in its report. There was a weekly troop meeting and a Saturday outing. The khaki uniform cost $14, and the weekly sub was 10 cents.
There was also a Cathedral Club although precisely how it functioned as one is not clear. Membership was open to electoral roll members for $8, and it incorporated the Badminton Club, the Photographic Club, the Sketching Club and the Drama Club. The first reference to drama comes in the first 1932 edition of the Review, which reported on the Christmas play of 1931, The Next Door House, which ran for two nights and was a moral tale about a better-off family coming round to helping the worse-off one next door. The Naval Chaplain, F. Darrel Bunt of HMS Berwick, helped with the production. The Cathedral Club element in St John��s life seems to have had its limitations in Dean Wilson��s view. He put together a whole ��cathedral fellowship�� as it was called, in which communicants, women��s groups and these social fellowships became one and which he hoped would ��socially express itself beyond badminton��.
One very clear expression of fellowship beyond badminton was the beginning and takeoff of the Michaelmas Fair in 1937. It began as a ��sale of work�� in the cathedral compound. It had been intended as a garden fete on a larger scale, possibly borrowing Government House grounds, but the state of war in China, cholera, typhoon and economic depression meant that the congregation had other things on their minds. The event was held on 2 December and earned a very creditable $1,529.25. It was resolved that the proceeds should not go to a specific fund but in aid of the cathedral funds, a policy decision which was to have a profound and unexpected impact on the cathedral��s books in the years to come.
The Michaelmas Fair proper and so titled was opened the fol-lowing year on Saturday, 15 October, by Lady Northcote at the Volunteers Headquarters, at the time just south of the church where the east wing of the Government Central Offices now stands. Patrons were the governor, the general officer commanding, the bishop, the colonial secretary and the commodore RN, who made a signal to ships in port advertising it. The cathedral had a consistent contact with ships in port. Service cards were sent round to them every week. Stalls included white elephants, curios and the provision of mineral waters. There was no bar, but there was a fun fair featuring ��multi clock golf��, a ��swinging bottle�� and euphonious ��balls in a bucket��. The 2nd Battalion, Royal Scots Band played, and tea was in the drill hall. The organising secretary was Colonel Geake, borrowed from Christ Church, Kowloon.37
The fair raised a very satisfactory $3,000. The Review noted that it was obvious some people regarded the fair with distaste �K that it had a ��church bazaar�� dullness. To begin with at least, Bishop R. O. Hall was one of them. ��I must confess to disliking bazaars,�� he wrote in The Outpost. ��They can be causes of disputes and a spiritual setback in the life of a congregation.�� Dean Wilson had talked him round. ��I am convinced he is right and the cathedral will be better spiritually from the experience.�� He did attend, of course. Those who did not ��missed out��. Children specially enjoyed themselves with clowns on the slide, which sounded both cumbersome and exciting for little ones.
Leonard Wilson certainly excited some of his parishioners, one way or another. Lindsay Lafford remembers him as a ��bluff, genial, hearty, outgoing, down-to-earth sort of character��. There was also a disinclination to compromise and a preference for rigour, shown in his handling of the Sunday schools of which, by now, there were several, in St John��s itself, at the Peak Church and even one attached to the anomalous Chapel of the Resurrection Church in the middle of Happy Valley Cemetery.
The dean said that it was better to have no Sunday school teachers at all than bad ones. Children should not have to junk in later life what they learned at Sunday school. Six teachers had left and had not been replaced. The implication was abrupt. They appear to have been rapidly ��let go��.38
In another fit of searing frankness over their attitudes, Wilson told his flock in 1939 that ��Jesus did not die upon the Cross in order that a British community might have its Mattins at 11 and give catholic privileges to a chosen few��.39 This statement straight in the face of his parish is part of the evidence of highly charged views on faith, coloni-alism and society that were about at the time, some radical and angry, others trenchantly conservative and, occasionally, hilariously obtuse.
Lady Bella Southorn, wife of the colonial secretary, after whom the Wan Chai playground is named, led the Girl Guides in Hong Kong and lamented the difficulties a Girl Guide on the Peak had to go through to visit a guide in Kowloon, in a St John��s Review edition of 1932. ��If a Peak guide wants to meet a Kowloon guide, it takes her as long as to get from London to Brighton. She must take a rickshaw or chair to the Peak Tram, then a chair to Star Ferry, then a rickshaw or a taxi.�� No awareness is registered of the adult labour and sweat devoted to carrying this little lady on her epic trip.
One of the issues social which the church concerned itself with was to be part of the pressure on the government to abolish licensed brothels for the suppression of vice and disease. These days, secular authorities often move in the opposite direction to achieve the latter, but in 1932, abolition was meeting with success, which the Review reported in an article, ��An Evil to be Checked��. Brothels operated by foreigners, in the Lyndhurst Terrace area, were to be abolished straightaway. Those operated by locals catering to foreigners, typi-cally in Ship Street, Wan Chai, had six months�� notice from 1 January 1932, and those which were Chinese for Chinese were to be more gradually reduced. Writing a vigorous letter of response in the July edition of the Review from No. 5 The Peak, Mr. G. H. Forster gives us a vivid and unselfconscious observation: ��I myself have been in brothels where the girls rush to the door in scant attire to shriek for customers �K�� The best we can make of that for him is that he was a police officer.
Professor Forster of the council and Hong Kong University con-tributed ��Searchlight��, a firm if gloomily predictive analyses of current affairs, for the Review right up to the Japanese invasion. The Japanese Occupation in China provoked a quite heated argument in the maga-zine��s pages. An article entitled ��Christ in an Occupied Area��, which generally questioned the validity of violent resistance, was answered by an aggressive piece, ��Advice to a Peacemonger��, and a remarkable article on Hong Kong��s colonial divide came from an anonymous writer titled ��Ajax��.40
Ajax liked the Chinese. He found them ��pleasant, naturally polite and ready to laugh at a joke��. The men looked ��boyish��, and he asks us to even ��consider the beauty of the woman selling newspapers in the street��. Yet he felt sorry for the British, ��close to paradise, yet vilely discontented��. He saw theirs as a life of boredom, ��entertaining and being entertained and keeping fit so to be more entertained �K a social life that must astonish the Chinese��. Of Chinese social life in the backstreets, ��laughing, talking, joking��, he thought they knew how to live. ��We call it childish, yet our religion stamps sophistication as a deadly sin. Except ye become little children �K�� he adds.
That this should have appeared in the Review must reflect at least the consent of Dean Wilson. Its style, fresh amazement and infusion suggest its author may even have been one of the recently arrived Tyneside clergy if not Wilson himself. Ajax goes on: ��We make no attempt to study their culture �K we segregate clubs �K we haggle over 50 cents �K we show indifference to the burdens of coolie labour.��
Dean Wilson left to become Bishop of Singapore in 1941. On St. Mary Magdalene��s Day of that year, 22 July, he was consecrated a bishop in St John��s. Although a colonial bishop would normally have been consecrated at Canterbury, the war made travelling a risky arrangement, and Hong Kong was, at the time, the only place where the necessary three bishops for the purpose could be assembled. Hong Kong��s own Bishop, R. O. Hall, was already here. Bishop T.
C. Song managed to make it from West Szechuan Diocese. He was expected to take the lead in the ceremony until Bishop N. S. Binstead, an American, arrived from the Philippines church and turned out to have a year��s seniority.
As the Review��s correspondent wrote, ��We had to attribute even what we had to war which also made it possible for the service to be held in Hong Kong Cathedral.��
Before the service, Bishop-elect Wilson took an oath of allegiance to the King, in the cathedral hall, administered by the chief justice, Sir Atholl McGregor, and witnessed by the governor, Sir Geoffrey Northcote. This was nothing if not a state occasion. The master of music was J. R. M. Smith, and anthems by Wesley, Elgar and Byrd were sung. The communion service was set to Merbecke. ��Reverence, dignity and spiritual values prevailed,�� reports the correspondent.
There was a ��brotherhood of nations with British, American and Chinese bishops present��.
The service was completed in two hours with ��no mishap�� and ��before the black-out��. Japan��s expansion had not quite burst in on the British Empire that July day though the Japanese were massing up the road in Sham Chun, and the atmosphere was tense. Leonard Wilson was about to leave on a ship for Singapore. He was to enjoy seven months as bishop before Singapore fell and his famous and fearful incarceration began.
In the farewell gathering for Wilson, cathedral trustee P. S. Cassidy was frank about the gulf in temperament between him and the dean. After years of experience in Hong Kong, he said that his instinctive response to Wilson��s initiatives had been to say ��for heaven��s sake, leave it alone��. But the problems with Wilson had run deeper. In a letter to Bishop Hall in June 1941, Cassidy had asked that he allow the appointment of the popular and hardworking Reverend N. V. Halward as the new dean.41 Cassidy felt that Halward was a neces-sary antidote to a dean who had been abrasive with the congregation. Cassidy had admired Wilson and stood by him but said that his sharp-ness and impetuosity had meant that others had found admiration far harder to come by. He quoted the instance in 1940 when expatri-ate wives and children had been evacuated by ship to Australia and Wilson had gone with them to minister and as a holiday, ��without so much as a by your leave,�� says Cassidy.
Hall refused Cassidy��s request. He said that he must have at St John��s a man with strong and recent preaching experience from England. Hall had always admired Wilson��s own preaching, ��a fresh-ness and directness, a real touch of the Gospels��, he said about it. In the meantime Rose would stand in but, if he had not found the right man within a year, Cassidy could have his Halward. Sadly, no such year was to be left to them.
In 1941, for the Hong Kong British, the prospect of the Japanese taking on the British Empire was emotionally indigestible. Yet wives and children had been evacuated in the stark face of Japanese forces massed across the Sham Chun River, and the cathedral was certainly feeling the loss of womanpower. The Michaelmas Fair, which had truly got under way in 1938, could not be held in 1941. There was a Prayer and Gifts Day instead. Volunteers manned the cathedral on 4 December 1940, to receive gifts from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. Just forty people showed up and twenty-nine sent in items. By the lights of those days, an impressive $4,500 was raised by just a few.42
Sunday school was all but lost, as were boys from the choir and practically everything requiring volunteer women. One small band that kept going was the Communion Fellowship. It was a reduced band by now. The breakfast helpers left just before the invasion were Misses Basto, Bicheno and Souza and Evan Stewart and Peter Wilson. Miss Bicheno, the choir mistress, was interned and helped provide the music for united church worship in Stanley Internment Camp, practising keyboard sometimes in the teeth of irritation amongst the Japanese guards. Colonel Stewart was wounded in the First World War and was about to be wounded again in this. He survived was interned and later awarded the Distinguished Service Order. Peter Wilson fought with the Volunteers. He was killed in battle. Like many, they did not foresee the swiftness of what was to come. The fel-lowship was concerned that the Volunteers had no provision for Holy Communion during training camps. These only lasted a week, they noted, but what would happen if they were mobilised? In the event, mobilisation endured for just two Sundays.
It was the centenary of the colony��s foundation but needless to say not a festive one. Leonard Wilson��s view was that a colony that counted only its wealth was a vulgar one. He made the point that Hong Kong 1941 had ��extravagant displays of wealth, cabarets, cinemas, racing, gambling and luxurious cars�� at the same time as ��degrading poverty, slums and street sleeping��. It had few schools, no civic centre, art gallery, museum or library.
In those last months of freedom, the Church was most vigorous outside its walls. In February there was a joint effort to set up a church relief centre staffed by locals who knew who to help with a dollar here and forty cents there. The Hong Kong Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children was formed dealing with 14,000 cases of which only 1,800 were to do with actual cruelty; the rest concerned poverty and disease. In a battle against sublet slums, a Christian group actually took over three flats in Wai Ching Street, Wan Chai, and set them up properly for poor families. ��A candle in the dark�� is how that was described. A boys�� club was started for shoe-shine boys and street urchins. The Hong Kong Refugee and Social Welfare Council, set up in 1938 with strong backing from Bishop R.
O. Hall, was coordinating these efforts. Almost all these organisations breathed again after the war.
The Bishop ordained Li Tim Oi as a deaconess on Ascension Day 1941 in the cathedral. This humble lady, thrust into controversy, was to light a path for women in the church universally, but she herself was inspired by one who went before. On 31 December 1931, a momen-tous event took place in St John��s Cathedral. Janet Lucy Vincent was ordained as the first woman deacon in the Anglican Church. The congregation was a packed one, and a large proportion was Chinese. Bishop Duppuy officiated, and Bishop Mok, Dean Swann and the Reverends Blanchett, Shann, Lee, Stewart, Carpenter, Tsang So, Lee, Watkins and Martin were in attendance. There was an augmented choir with singers from St Stephen��s, St Paul��s and All Saints, Ho Man Tin. The lesson was Romans 16:1�V2, commending Phoebe.
Li Tim Oi was present for this and it inspired her. A decade later, when she was deaconed, Bishop Mok preached. The Reverends Wong, Wittenbach, Brown, T��so, Strong, Myhill, Lei Kau Yan, Tsang, Chung, Martin, Halward and Deaconess Jane Vincent herself were present. Li went on to serve in Macau, and it was for that isolated congregation, deprived of the sacraments, that Bishop Hall was to take the momentous step in 1944 of ordaining her as a priest. In September, he ordained John Cheung as a deacon, preached his last sermon in the cathedral for what was to be a long time and left for a trip to the United States. The new Acting Dean, Alaric Rose, came out of seventeen days in hospital and finished his sick leave with a short holiday in Sha Tin, probably in the bishop��s farmhouse home up there.
The Cathedral Council held its regular meeting on 24 November 1941. A $100 donation was approved towards the building of the parsonage for David Rosenthal at Christ Church. The Acting Dean, Alaric Rose, was teaching part-time at the university, so he returned an equivalent part of his stipend. The verger on the other hand had his wage increased from $24 to $25. A rather heftier $800 was needed to send Bishop Song back to Chengdu after Leonard Wilson��s conse-cration. It was noted that there were no plans for compulsory primary education. Neither would there be for some time.
With stolid normality, the November 1941 edition of St John��s Review printed the list of the month��s servers, which included John Pau, George Ladd, Arthur White, George Budden, John Huang, James Reedie, David Parsons, Norman Smith and Luke Lim. You stare at the names and wonder about them a month hence. The magazine��s last article is a book review of The Nature and Destiny of Man by Reinhold Niebuhr. Then there is silence.

Chapter 6 Out of Darkness, 1941�V1953
Major General Christopher Maltby, general officer commanding, had only just sat down in his pew from reading the lesson on the morning of 7 December 1941, when a messenger slipped down the nave and handed him a note. He read it, stood and left the cathedral quickly, his party following. The Japanese were not yet invading. The Sunday morning attack on Pearl Harbour was still to come on the other side of the international dateline, but the 52,000 men of their 38th division were making ominous moves along the Sham Chun River. They invaded Hong Kong at 8 a.m. the following day.
Maltby��s hurried exit was the first of the events that altered St John��s irrevocably through the fall and revival of Hong Kong in the years to follow. The cathedral saw no battling or bloodshed. There was damage though, a collapse of all that was familiar, and decay and anxiety. The light of worship flickered within it for a while and then went out. Prayer continued elsewhere in the internment camps and in the Bishop��s chapel, which the Japanese mercifully neglected.
Then darkness receded suddenly and thin, drawn men and women made their way back to St John��s. A new light streamed in, literally, through plain glass windows, onto a church stripped bare of ornament as they were of fat. Many welcomed the austerity and simplicity of the place as an opportunity for a fresh start and, in many ways, that was taken. The decade of death and resurrection from Christmas 1941, also described by the tenure of Alaric Rose, was a catharsis in the congregation��s history.
Attitudes did not change completely, nor did direction alter entirely. Colonial distinctions were not yet dead, but the superiority of the white man certainly was. An awareness of a world in which they were simply a part rather than controller was dawning in the core of the congregation. A new humility was being born.
During the battle for Hong Kong itself, services in the cathedral were conducted by Alaric Rose as priest-in-charge and the Reverend Charles Higgins of the American Episcopal Church, who had been seconded as a temporary assistant chaplain. He could have left earlier in the year but chose to stay with his wife and 2-year-old son. They were repatriated from Stanley Camp to the United States under a swap deal with the Japanese, and he submitted a detailed account to Bishop Hall of how matters stood in Hong Kong as he left it in August 1942.1
In the fighting, between eighty and one hundred people attended St John��s on Sundays. They sat quietly as shells fell around the cathe-dral. The church attracted so much fire because of its proximity to the barracks and the Volunteers�� Headquarters which stood right next door. Altogether, it received around fifteen direct hits from medium shells, including one in the north transept, which passed through the organ loft. David Leigh, son of the first Chinese archdeacon of Hong Kong, a music student and later an honorary canon of St John��s himself, was due to play the organ that day, probably because the organist was fighting with his unit. His mother forbad him to go because of the dangers. Had she not, he would have been sitting there at the moment of impact.
The fighting touched the cathedral in poignant ways. Alaric Rose remembers ��a bunch of Indian soldiers who had been shelled and nerve shaken and wanted sleep��. They found it in the tunnel under the sanctuary. This is one of the rare references to any use being made of that feature. They slept there with their rifles and left cheer-fully. ��I hoped they fared well,�� he says.2
On the last fateful Christmas Day, Higgins reports that he drove, as usual, with his wife, Mary, to celebrate Holy Communion at the Peak Church. Nobody came. He carried on nonetheless and restored the Communion vessels to a cupboard from which they were ultimately rescued by Jesuits. He drove down to the cathedral under sporadic shellfire, to be stopped only by a futilely officious soldier who threat-ened to report him for unauthorised use of petrol.
He was robing for matins when the most damaging shell hit the cathedral tower. It left a gaping hole in the arches of the top section and broke the beam supporting the bells. As the congregation was leaving to an uncertain future, a resolution was moving among them to install a clock in the hole when the opportunity arose. To add to a peculiar sense of normality, the following morning, after the British surrender had been taken, the South China Morning Post published Charles Higgins��s sermon, as usual.
Death came to the congregation over those seventeen days of fighting. J. R. M. Smith, the organist, had telephoned Alaric Rose on Christmas Eve to give him some details about an insurance policy, prior to going into action. It is interesting how attention to procedure can occupy men��s minds on the brink of certain disaster. Nothing was heard of John Smith again. He died in the fierce fighting which ended the defence. Maurice Barton, secretary of the Communicants Fellowship and a candidate for ordination, was mortally wounded in his armoured car when the Japanese landed at North Point, and died after thirty-six hours of semi-consciousness in Bowen Road Hospital. Lindsay Lafford, who ��messed�� with Barton in Bishop��s House, recalls him as ��many talented and a close friend of Harry Baines��.3
Luke Lim, who was included in that last sidesman��s list, a regular server, was killed by a direct hit on his first-aid post. He was a Borneo Diocesan medical student, chairman of the University Christian Association and an ordination candidate. Perhaps the youngest to die in the fighting was Peter Wilson, the senior choirboy. He too was a server and, as Bishop Hall described him in his inimitable style, ��the only layman actually in the sanctuary at Dean Wilson��s consecration because he was faithful above all others, a devout worshipper and bursting with common sense��.4
The only combatant to be buried in the cathedral precincts was not an Anglican, and he was buried in a hurry, against regulations. Ronald (Roy) Maxwell was a Roman Catholic Eurasian, a former student of La Salle College belonging to No. 3 Company of the Hong Kong Volunteers. He was shot in the head by a sniper at his post in Wan Chai. It was known that Roy would have wanted to be buried in church ground, and three of his comrades managed to carry him in their retreat to the closest one at St John��s.
Denominational distinctions were ceasing to matter under such fire. So were regulations. The 1847 ordinance stated that the cathe-dral precincts were not to be used for interments. A copy was obvi-ously not to hand. The soldiers deepened a foxhole that was already under the tree at the west end and laid Maxwell��s body in it. By strange and poignant chance, an Irish Jesuit priest, Father Ryan, was hurrying out of the then French Mission building at the top of Battery Path. He was called over and said the words of the burial service. The three soldiers covered their bayonets in case reflections off them were spotted by Japanese planes flying overhead.5
So an Irish Jesuit came to bury a Roman Catholic Eurasian boy in Anglican ground. Such is a glimpse of the Kingdom that war can afford but peacetime finds expensive. Despite all the anomalies, the grave remains as a cathedral treasure. An offer was made to move the body to a war cemetery, but Maxwell��s family preferred him to stay where he was. In 2010, a Commonwealth War Graves Commission headstone was formally placed over it in a ceremony attended by the British consul general and Private Maxwell��s sister, Nancy.
Before the invasion, both Higgins and Rose had refused to be lay superintendents of hospitals, which was expected of clergy, preferring to be free to go about the island in their pastoral capacities. During the Japanese attack, the Church Guest House was a refuge for many who were able to get out of Kowloon before it was abandoned. The guest house had been set up in 1937 to receive missionaries and others fleeing the Sino-Japanese War. At first it was in Kennedy Road, and now it was part of Bishop��s House. Rose commandeered rooms in St Paul��s College and put boys from the Diocesan Boys�� School on Kowloon side in the cathedral hall. He struggled hard to provide provisions for all of them. Higgins described his example of Christian patience in this as ��beautiful��.6
On 4 January after the surrender, enemy nationals were gathered by the Japanese and imprisoned first, in discomfort, in cheap hotels catering to the poorer classes or lesser instincts. After some days with little food or water but often sickness, they were moved to the internment camps. All the Anglican clergy with the exceptions of the army and navy chaplains were interned at Stanley. Two-thirds of the Cathedral Council was there, including the trustees, P. S. Cassidy and Professor L. Forster, and roughly half the congregation.7
However, the congregation could not simply continue as St John��s at one uncomfortable remove. Facilities for public worship were so restricted that circumstances forced the clergy into an unprecedented ecumenism. A programme of union services had to be devised. This was conducted by a committee of clergy elected from the fifty-one British and American clergy who found themselves in Stanley. The Roman Catholics managed to maintain separation.
Alaric Rose was the secretary of the committee and, on him, most of the work fell. Higgins observed, for the time he was there, that ��the committee spent more time trying to prevent schism than it has in its constructive efforts to meet the religious needs of the internees��. However, he left early, and the union approach lasted until the end in 1945.
It would be misleading to speak of a United Church of Stanley. This was rather a series of united services of the type that had been held by the different denominations before the war but now of a greater and more regular frequency. This we are told by a remarkable document called ��The Church Review��, bearing rough similarities to St John��s Review and published within Stanley Camp in August 1942. How many editions there were is not clear, but of this one there were only five copies printed, and so a copy could be kept for only two days before being returned to the block librarian.8
There was a sermon, articles on camp life, including one titled ��Rumours��, which concluded that they were as entertaining as they were harmful, and a lengthy piece on evangelism. There was a page from a letter home, waspish poetry, a short story and an outline of how the services were to be distributed among the denominations. Easter Day was given as a specimen.
It began with an open-air sunrise service conducted by Mr. Gates, an American Presbyterian. At 8.15 a.m. there was an all-Anglican Holy Communion with the Reverends Wittenbach, Myhill, Richards and Brown. At 9 a.m., Alaric Rose and E. W. Martin (Anglican), F. Short (Congregational) and R. P. Beaver (Evangelical and Reformed Church of America) celebrated Communion. At 10 a.m., it was an all-Anglican Communion again with Rose, Brown, G. E. S. Upsdell and Charles Higgins. At midday, J. E. Sandbach (Methodist) and K. Mackenzie Dow (Presbyterian) offered morning worship followed by the Sacrament of the Lord��s Supper. The day ended at 4 p.m. with evensong and sermon from Anglicans Rose and Higgins and Congregationalist Short.
Whatever its flaws and fractures, the ��united programme�� was a powerful development, perhaps too much so to be handled in peace-time. In a 1947 edition of St John��s Review, Alaric Rose looked back on it as ��strengthening and enriching��, making them realise ��we are united closely as fellow workers not rivals��. But unification was not to be embraced. He went on to write that now ��differing needs �K diverse patterns of worship �K serve God��s purpose at the time��.9
In the absence, the regular clergy and the bulk of the congrega-tion who fell into the category of enemy nationals, worship continued at St John��s. The imperial Japanese attitude towards Christianity at this point, and in Hong Kong at least, seems to have been one of indifference. That its British and American followers were locked up seemed to be enough. An example of this distinction was when prayer books were sent into Stanley Camp by Dr. Charles Harth, the Austrian Jewish convert who became a secretary to Bishop Hall and who remained at liberty. The Japanese sole but vigorous objection was that they contained prayers for the King. ��God save the King�� was replaced by ��God save the world��.
Dr. Harth was made a proxy trustee of the cathedral by Cassidy and Forster from their confinement in Stanley. He made a report on the wartime workings of the cathedral to the Victoria Diocesan Association after the war.10
From New Year of 1942, services at St John��s itself were patchily, nervously ecumenical and international. That they were attended at all in the atmosphere of vicarious violence created by the Japanese military was still remarkable and courageous. A file of Japanese soldiers had appeared a few days after the surrender, looking for quarters to acquire and saw the letter of protection pinned on to the west door. They looked in and grew angry when they recognised the Union flag in quarters of the regimental flags still hanging. They made scissor-like signs that they would be cut out.11
The mainstay of English services were the Norwegian Lutheran pastors of the Tao Fong Shan Monastery at Sha Tin, Pastor Thelle, his son Gerhard, Pastor Reichelt, its founder and, from the Norwegian Seamen��s Mission, Pastor Nielsen, who had never conducted a service in English before.
Karl Ludwig Reichelt, originally of the Norwegian Missionary Society, became looked upon as radical in his openness to Buddhism and his seeking for ��points of light and connection points�� in Buddhism brought about by the Holy Spirit. He founded the Nordic Christian Buddhist Mission, which provoked a split with the society. He had to flee Shanghai and, in 1929, with Thelle, Reichelt came to Hong Kong and was given permission to build Tao Fong Shan (��the mountain where the wind blows��) in Sha Tin. In 1931, Dean Swann laid the foundation stone.12 This institute has since become the seat of Buddhist Mission��s work in China.
Reichelt and his pastors from Sha Tin are said to have walked to the cathedral on Sunday mornings during the occupation to conduct the services when no other means were available. The relationship between the cathedral and Tao Fong Shan has remained warm ever after. Reichelt died in Hong Kong in March 1952. After his death, the relationship with Buddhism at Tao Fong Shan faded, but the monas-tery prospers as a Christian study centre, frequently used by St John��s.
The Chinese clergy also gave support to the cathedral which, in itself, was not without risks. Association with Europeans, even neutrals, could lead to arrest by the Japanese. George She, barrister and later priest and stalwart of the post-war cathedral, spent three months in prison because of his friendly attitude to the British. Alaric Rose said that he raised morale in the local congregation and wrath in the occupiers by preaching in Cantonese, ��Don��t you worry about what is going on; God still rules the world and he will not let this present regime of oppression and unrighteousness go on for long. One day not too far ahead, you will wake up and find your oppressors vanished.��13
The Reverend E. E. Low conducted services at St John��s, as did the Reverend Lei Yin Pui, who then became Vicar of St Mary��s. The Reverend Chung Yan Lap, Vicar of St Stephen��s Church, which never closed during the war, agreed to be presented to the Japanese as pastor in charge of the cathedral when no one else dared put his name down, according to Dr. Harth��s account.
Those outside the camp attempted to set up an interim cathe-dral council. It met once at Bishop��s House on 21 January 1943. Its chairman was George She, the vice chairman, Katie Woo, and the secretary, Miss E. Westergaard. The treasurer and warden was Dr. Harth. The organists, Ruby Mow Fung and Mrs. P. G. Wong, were, for as long as it worked, the last people to have played a pipe organ in St John��s. The ladies convener was Mrs. R. Souza. Other members were George Ladd, Dr. M. Klein, H. A. Keller, Dr. S. Yung and Mr. D. Javez.
The caretaker and verger was Ah Kau, who had been with the cathedral for many years up to the war and was baptised with his family in 1938, following a coincidentally advantageous accommoda-tion swap with the single coolies the year before. He was to stay on, doing his best to guard the cathedral, throughout the war.
The cathedral��s assets totalled 78 military yen. Collections averaged 8 yen. Thirty yen were required by the diocese, which, under Bishop Mok, was being run by an emergency executive committee, and 20 yen went to the Hong Kong Churches Union, a Japanese concoc-tion under their government��s Education Department. With this the Reverend Chung Yan Lap would have nothing whatever to do. The two necessary delegates to it were named as She and Harth. Letters of thanks for their support were sent to Reverends Nielsen, Thelle and Lei Yin Pui.
Gatherings of any kind, particularly involving Europeans, were so easily open to misinterpretation by the Japanese. Harth says that they were simply ��advised not to meet again��.
In his report, Harth takes time to mention the Japanese Christians involved in the story. He was full of praise for them and, like Reverend
J. H. Ogilvie, Vicar of St Andrew��s, who gives account of Japanese Christians worshipping alongside Chinese there after the occupa-tion, he seems to describe men and women who acted not against but somehow apart from their own people.
��That I have survived,�� writes Harth, ��I have to thank �K also a Japanese pastor. Samejima is his name. I know for certain that he saved me twice from being arrested.�� Samejima, a US-educated Methodist, was a professor and chaplain at the Christian University at Kobe. He was sent by the Japanese government as chief advisor to the Hong Kong Churches Union. On Easter Day 1945, Samejima baptised a young Japanese Cambridge University graduate in the chapel in Bishop��s House. He persistently supported Harth��s legal objections to any takeover of the house by the military government.
A Lutheran Japanese minister, Reverend Watanabe, was attached to the camp authorities. According to Harth, he took great risks to help the internees and prisoners of war. Samejima continued to send Christmas cards to the cathedral for many years after the war.
At some point, the Japanese took over the cathedral as a ��social club��. Harth, in his report to the Victoria Diocesan Association, says it was September 1942. Alaric Rose, in a similar document, tells us that it was ��autumn, 1943��. The Hong Kong News of 5 July 1944 records a celebration to mark the official opening of the ��former cathedral�� as headquarters of the Yamato-Kai, which means, essentially, a society for Japanese culture. ��Those present included Lt-Col. Nagao, ADC to the Governor, Lt-Col. Masuhisa, Chief of the Information Bureau, high officials of the Governor��s Office, members of the Japanese com-munity and a number of women and children. A number of newsreels were shown during the afternoon.��
It is likely that the church was being used as a Japanese public hall before this official ceremony was organised but, whatever the date of the handover, it was clear that the Japanese wanted the place stripped of its Christian imagery and its furniture. Harth must have been as persuasive as he was courageous. He says that the Japanese lent him a truck for three days. With a friend, Mr. Owen Hughes, ��a fellow member of the F.A.U.��, possibly the Friends Ambulance Unit, and Preston Wong Shiu Poon, a senior master of St Paul��s College, they moved ��everything that was moveable��.
We do not know what notice of this Harth was given by the Japanese before they lent him the truck, but it was likely to have been inconsiderately short. There would have been an awful lot to move in three days. The heavy stained glass window parts had to be pulled out in a particular hurry without finesse. Those that did survive the war suffered from this, and it was one of the reasons why they were never to be reinstalled.
There is the belief that the cathedral was used for stabling horses. There are no clear references to this, and it is difficult to see how, in the change from church to social club, the Japanese would have been inclined to put it to such a lowly use. However, that is the fate that befell Christ Church Kowloon Tong and the Catholic cathedral in Canton.
A brightening feature of this gloomy time was the spirit of coop-eration shown by the Roman Catholics. Bishop Voltara, an Italian, was having a hard time himself getting a glimmer of respect out of the Japanese, who insisted on calling him ��Mr. Voltara��. He had sent a strong letter of protest to the authorities when, at some point, there seems to have been a proposal that Japanese Buddhists take over St John��s.
Now that the cathedral had to be evacuated, Bishop Voltara arranged for all the furniture and the stained glass to be received at St Paul de Chartres Convent and Hospital in Causeway Bay and to St Mary��s Church there also. Later, Bishop Hall was under the impres-sion that the windows had been stored in the cellars of Bishop��s House, and it is possible that some should have been, except that there is no reference to this having been done. The French Fathers kept the cathedral��s Communion vessels, the vestments and some brasses in the French Mission. The Irish superior of the Jesuits�Xa neutral national�Xretrieved the Communion vessels which Charles Higgins had used that Christmas morning in the Peak Church.
Services were transferred to the Bishop��s chapel in Bishop��s House. The Japanese military, out of quirkiness rather than kindness, had inspected the Church Guest House there, noticed the mix of nationalities and decided, initially at least, that it was an international settlement of some sort, best left alone. Worship went on there, rela-tively unscathed. The ��cathedra�� itself, the old bishop��s chair, was moved there, as witness that Victoria was still the See city. It seems likely that only the seat of the throne�Xthat which survives�Xwas moved and that the tall and elaborate canopy was detached, stored and lost.14
Bishop��s House itself was seriously damaged in an air raid of 21 January 1945. Bishop Hall is cheerfully ironic about it in his 10 December letter to the Victoria Diocesan Association.15 ��Poor Mrs. Duppuy! I remember with what care she told me that the Drawing Room curtains needed 72 yards of material and with what care we�X in consequence�Xremained curtainless. And now a good Allied bomb has blown even the glass out of the doors �K��
The Sunday school, of all the church��s activities, soldiered on in the house throughout the war. Betty Primrose, then Betty Wong, remembers how, as a teenage girl, she attended with ten to fifteen others every Sunday. They became starved of material until the very end of the occupation, when the former Dean Swann��s son, now in the RAF, brought through some reading books from India. Betty was briefly in charge of the choir and accompanied them on the piano when services resumed after the occupation. In 1947, she married in St John��s, as her parents had done before her.
Betty was the daughter of Preston Wong Shiu Poon. He was not only a schoolmaster, devout Christian and member of St John��s but also a resistance worker against the Japanese. He was rounded up as one of the ��Thirty-Two��, as they were called, who were executed by the Japanese on the beach at Stanley on 29 October 1943. They had operated a covert wireless, planned breakouts and had connections with the British Army Aid Group. They were military men, administra-tors�Xincluding the Deputy Attorney General�Xbusinessmen teachers and policemen. There were Chinese, British, Portuguese, Indians and Americans among them, all on the same charge, facing a common death. One of the Chinese was a woman.
Before they were shot, the senior officer in the group, describing Wong as the bravest man he had ever met, asked him to lead them all in prayer.16 Under persecution and in death, a new polity was coming into being.
St John��s Cathedral came back into its own with some speed at the end of the occupation. Canon Wittenbach, himself just out of intern-ment, reported to the Victoria Diocesan Association that a service of Holy Communion was held on 7 October, the first Sunday of freedom from the camps, in the Bishop��s chapel, celebrated by Alaric Rose. It was attended by many from the camps who got a sense of the con-ditions of worship for those cathedral people who had been left to different perils outside.17
Much had to be done to clear away the detritus of the Japanese presence and restore St John��s itself to its elemental state. During the church��s brief and ill-fitting role as a Japanese social and cultural club, walls had been built to split it into three parts. The sanctu-ary was used for fencing and ju-jitsu, the chancel had been turned into a movie house and the nave was a canteen. In a room formed between the sanctuary and the choir, there were dozens of treadle sewing machines. A guess was that this had been the meeting area of the Japanese equivalent of the Women��s Auxiliary, who also met, chatted and drank tea.
Concrete had been laid over the chancel floor, raising it by two feet. According to A. S. Abbott��s account,18 the stone font had been ��desecrated��, but the manner of this was not described, leaving gen-erations of imagination to follow on. Interestingly, the pulpit was neither removed nor damaged. The Japanese may have found a use for it.
There is a small photograph taken days after the cathedral was reclaimed, of workers tearing down a dark, high wall dividing the nave from the chancel, a shaft of brilliant light from the east bolting through where they had demolished the first corner. Beneath, at the foot of the chancel steps, stands a small innocuous table with a cross and flowers upon it, acting as the very first altar after liberation. On the back of the photograph, in an anonymous hand, is written the comment that the Japanese had kept the ashes of their war dead behind that wall. There is no other confirmation of this. It would have been ironic if a usurper observing the Shinto rite had kept his dead, unwittingly perhaps, in a Christian sanctuary.
There was a brief interim period of bizarrely liberating functions in and round the church. British government was set up again in the French Mission building, described by Alaric Rose as government ��with a walking stick and two typewriters and the faith that we were doing the right thing��. A police officer had the brilliant idea of estab-lishing a traffic office in the cathedral porch. For a while there were three or four desks, telephone wires, cars with flashing lights and messengers running in and out.
A school of Chinese shadow boxing had been started in the compound during the occupation. Passers-by said it was an obstruc-tion, and some feared the worship of unknown gods was going on. Getting rid of it was hard because clients had paid a lump sum for a course and ��were disinclined to allow the liberation to cancel the unexpired remainder��, observed the dean.19
With a loan from the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, without need for security and with no conditions attached, St John��s resumed services a few days after reoccupation. On 14 October 1945, Rose was celebrating the Eucharist in the church itself. ��The place was full of light and there were flowers everywhere,�� reports Canon Henry Wittenbach to the Victoria Diocesan Association.
There are several references to the brightness of the church by returnees. ��The Cathedral is so light, spacious and peaceful,�� records visiting missionary Margaret C. Knight.20 The stained glass was gone.
Bishop Hall��s impression of it was a succinct summary of the cathe-dral��s aesthetic virtue. ���K the clear light of the windows and the wide, deep chancel shows now the essential grace and beauty of the design of the cathedral and makes us daily grateful for the inspiration of the colony surveyor who designed it.�� Cleverly must have blushed in heaven.
The newly returned Bishop Hall preached at the 11 a.m. service that day. There was Communion at 8, a union service with the Church of Scotland at 10, another service at 5 and evensong at 6. Members of the Union Church, whose building had been destroyed, led by Lieutenant Colonel Dr. Lindsay Ride, were also worshipping at St John��s. The cathedral was packed at all the services, largely with contingents from the armed forces who were in Hong Kong in some numbers under the interim military government.
The cathedral was thick with uniforms of all colours. Even men who had been prominent as civilians in the church before the war came back to it in uniform on a Sunday morning. Harry Owen-Hughes, so dressed, must have seemed a big man because, by slip of the tongue of a Chinese member, he became ��Lieutenant Colonel Huge��. ��The truth will out,�� said the bishop.21
In that same month of October 1945 there was the first confirma-tion service after the war. Candidates from the Sham Shui Po and Stanley Camps put their names forward. Hall described the sight as that of ��Nehemiah returning from captivity to Jerusalem. The yellow pallor of long starvation was still visible on all faces.��
By December 1945, the Sunday timetable included four services of Holy Communion, matins and evensong. Alaric Rose had been sent to England for a period of recuperation. Bishop Hall took over as dean for ten months. Because no official Board of Patronage could be assembled, Hall, on his own authority and with a characteristic flourish of justness, appointed Rose Dean of St John��s, dated to Christmas Day 1941.
Marjorie Bray, a former council member whose marriage Rose conducted, remembers him as ��sincere and dead serious��. His wife, Mary, ��a sweet woman��, was a Quaker by background. Rose was also an intellectual. According to Michael Goulder, in those early repair-ing days in Hong Kong, some of the brightest and the best, resident or passing through, could be found around the dean��s simple dinner table, some nights up to twenty strong.22
In the first diocesan service after the war, George She was made a deacon, rapidly priested thereafter on St John the Evangelist Day, and appointed part-time chaplain. The cross-bearer at that diocesan service was Kenneth Wong, only son of the executed Wong Shui Poon, who had led the prayers for the condemned ��Thirty-Two��.23
Amazingly, Vyvian Copley-Moyle made the sea journey back to Hong Kong at 76, quite unbidden, to assist with the revival of the cathedral. This extravagant act of selflessness and surprise was a late insight into the dedication, self-assurance and showmanship which seemed to be characteristics of Copley-Moyle. The Chinese press caught on to the event and dubbed him ��the Aged Priest��. Hall made him a canon emeritus of the cathedral along with four new honorary canons, Paul T��so, Lei Kau Yan, H. Wittenbach and E. W.
L. Martin, whose beloved wife had died in Stanley just before the end of internment.
The laity were fielding a strong team at this point. P. S. Cassidy was treasurer. Brian Crozier was secretary, and H. S. Margarett joined Cassidy as a trustee. He was the managing director of General Electric, who had been interned with his wife, and she became an inspiration to amateur dramatics in Stanley Camp. Mrs. Bicheno was the choir mistress, notable for roaring up to the vestry door in her small black sports car. Mr. Dickens was in charge of cathedral music, interim, and Mr. Wilby restarted St John��s Review. Mrs. Wilby handled the altar linen, and Mrs. Rose, the flowers. David Kwok was head sidesman and Henry Kwok, head server.
O. W. Skinner took charge of reviving the Goodwill Offertory scheme and was reaping HK$1,000 a month by 1946. To repair the depredations from neglect and abuse and refill the church with basic furniture and fittings went beyond the scope of an offertory scheme.
Restoration plans called for $300,000 total expenditure, and trustees Cassidy and Margarett brought their connections and influ-ence to bear amongst the British business community to come up with pledges of support for a 1947 Cathedral Centenary Appeal. Such was the scale of the works, including repairs to the roof and the tower, that promises of $100,000 were needed before it could start.24
The high cost of the roof repairs and the 11,000 square feet of tiling needed brought ��considerable disappointment�� to the dean. Yet, by June 1947, it had been completely stripped. Tiles had been replaced or renewed, and the beams were scraped and replaced where necessary and left with a natural wood colour. The floors of the tower were replaced by ferro concrete. The old floor had positively sagged under the crowd at the consecration of Bishop Mok. Three thousand square feet of plaster was stripped, pounds of rust came off the cast iron window frames and the woodwork was bleached of dark varnish, followed by painting, colour washing and waxing.25
Direct gifts to the restoration fund by the business community provided the bulk of donations and meant that the congregation did not have to dedicate all its own efforts to bricks-and-mortar issues. On Sunday, 28 September 1947, a service was held to give thanks for donations of $130,000, all of which had been spent.26
Then came a lacuna. The financial year 1947�V48 was ��not pro-pitious�� for fundraising because of civil war in China and freezing austerity in Britain. Sir Mark Young, the governor, restored from his captivity, and patron of the appeal, declined to sign any fundraising material directed at Britain, because he could imagine the unfavour-able reaction.
On 19 July 1947, the bishop, the dean and a mix of clergy and council members gave a dinner in the cathedral hall for ninety-six Chinese men�Xand women who carried the earth�Xwho were working on the cathedral. It was an appreciative and talkative gathering. Among the leaders of the workers was Mr. Cheng of Hung Yu, the main contractor working under the cathedral architects, Leigh and Orange, Mr. Leung from the Building Contractors�� Association, Mr. Kam from Messrs. O Shun, the decorator, and Mr. Ma, secretary of the Carpenters�� Trade Union.
The bishop gave an address, and Canon Martin explained what it was they were doing, that their Master was a carpenter and that it would be nice if the carpenters�� union secretary might say a few words. Mr. Ma said not a few. For ten minutes he preached the Gospel from the platform with ��terrific zeal��, according to Bishop Hall. It wasn��t clear what Christian denomination, if any, he belonged to, but he told the bemused but delighted bishop in no uncertain terms why they ought to be Christians and what it meant.27
There were significant gifts of money or items from individual members of the congregation. Carpets and cathedrals might not readily suggest each other but they did in the minds of men back then. Carpets featured prominently in the generosity. The 9 a.m. service fellowship opened a special fund to provide them for the chancel and chapel. Fanny Li gave it $1,000. With the help of Dr. Ernest To, two green ones were provided for the high altar and the Lady chapel, at a cost of $2,700. L. E. Lammert of the auction house also gave a carpet.28, 29
The Royal Navy donated a new altar table of carved teak, through the offices of the Naval Chaplain, Clifford Davies, who had recently made it clear in the pages of St John��s Review that he did not like the idea of ordained women.
One-half each of the two pairs of Communion rails created by Mrs. Koop�Xat the high altar and in the Lady chapel�Xhad been lost. Using two halves together and shifting them from high altar to Lady chapel, Mrs. Koop��s design was preserved in unity. They still stand in what is now the St Michael��s chapel. Mr. and Mrs. Margarett donated the two replacements halves.30
Smaller items of need were almost put out to tender in St John��s Review. The altar books needed rebinding at a cost of $100. Who would pay for that? There were three offers. Can someone supply a new chain for the sacristy lamp?
In the compound, thanks to council member Dr. Herklots, hawkers, food vendors and idlers were kept out by a four-strand wire fence between Battery Path and Murray Parade Ground. The result was, according to St John��s Review, ��The North east corner cleared.�� It had been ��used for all sorts of improper and disreputable purposes��, it was reported, regretfully. Yet there was still a problem of the grass strip between path and parade ground and the low wall bounding it. Whether it was people practising tai chi or just sitting on the wall, they kept falling over it.31
Of Mr. Parry��s original 1870 gift of bells, two remained intact and were rehung.
In 1949, it was thought timely to relaunch the Centenary Appeal to coincide with that of the diocese, and the decision was rewarded. To mark their 40th anniversary, Li Tse Fong and his wife give $5,000 for the bishop��s throne. This was designed by Mr. Tebbut of Leigh and Orange. It was not the one wanted by Bishop Hall, but it was graciously accepted, even if the effect, anchored as it is, side on to the chancel wall, is of entering an old-fashioned first-class railway compartment.
Mrs. Marden, wife of George Marden of Wheelock Marden, who was later a member of the council, donated choir stalls, designed by
D. Hindmarsh of Leigh and Orange, at a cost of $14,000, amounting to six rows. The choir then stood at 20 boys, 10 sopranos, 5 altos, 7 tenors and 7 basses. Prior to the socially aristocratic Mrs. Marden��s generosity, they had been lodged in the gallery over the west door, which was a creative use of the location but far away from the locus of the service.32
There was an urgent need of furniture. The kindness of Bishop Voltara in having it stored in Causeway Bay when the Japanese took the cathedral over did not make it bomb proof. The Sisters of St Paul de Chartres Convent was a converted cotton factory compound which also accommodated an orphanage, school and hospital. Bombs from an Allied air raid rained on the compound on 4 April 1945, destroy-ing buildings and killing seven sisters and many orphans and staff. Probably the least of the disaster was the loss of most of St John��s fur-niture, including the choir stalls, the screen, chairs, stools and other bits and pieces. Talking of which, 850 yen was made from the sale of the remnants for firewood.
A further $100,000 was given for seating by the stewards of the Jockey Club. Six new benches were made and two hundred chairs, among which were distributed three hundred newly made hassocks.
As ��Bunny�� Abbott got back into his pre-war stride as a generous donor of striking items, he made a gift of high altar decoration with riddle posts although, possibly from some shadow cast by their previous relations, he refused to contribute 19 pounds to altar dec-orations sent from England by former Dean Swann. Mr. and Mrs. Margarett gave a blue tapestry to the Lady chapel, now lost.
In 1949, the Japanese concrete overlay on the chancel and sanctu-ary floor was tackled without any certainty of what mess would be found underneath it. In fact, they had placed a layer of rubble under the concrete, which included chunks of the transept roof crosses. This had the effect of preserving the original. The tiles of the chancel and the marble of the sanctuary, so diligently funded and extended by Chaplain Cobbold, were found to be more or less intact.
At the suggestion of the new Verger-Clerk, H. L. Kwok, the same treatment was given to the Lady chapel, where the squares of original granite flooring were revealed. There had been a rocky period with vergers before the war. Mr. Shaw was fired for absence without leave, and his successor, Mr. Poye, got deeply into debt and the council did what it could to help him out of it. Mr. Kwok was not only a Chinese in the job, but he was a new level of verger with an interesting past. An employee of Gilman and Co., he was baptised and confirmed in the cathedral in 1941. At the beginning of the occupation, he toured the internment hotels with food, looking for European friends. When he moved to Canton, he was kidnapped for ransom and later became a lay reader�Xa remarkably uneven experience.
The memorial tablets which had congested the walls in the years before the war and hurriedly brought down in the middle of it were not restored. They still existed, piled up outside the church, some broken but some intact. The dean and his council decided that they were too ugly and too many to restore. A. S. Abbott described most of their inscriptions as ��doggerel��. Some were placed in the Happy Valley Cemetery Chapel. The rest were destroyed.
So too were the remnants of the stained glass windows. Evidence of their fate is patchy but conclusive. It has to be remembered that a disassembled stained glass window is a fragile collection of fragments. In the best of conditions�Xand these were nearly the worst�Xthey are vulnerable. Wherever they were kept, be it in the convent or even Bishop��s House, they survived the war but incompletely. They did not remain stored and then forgotten about, awaiting discovery. Mrs. Marjorie Bray, then a young parishioner about to wed her government cadet husband, Denis, recalls banging her shins on them regularly as she went into the cathedral. They had been reclaimed and lay piled up inside the west door.
The council took its time deciding what to do about stained glass. Perhaps people were enjoying the sunlight. In July 1947, the council installed 24-ounce plain glass windows in wooden frames in the east, because that which had been put in by the Japanese would have been blown out by the next decent typhoon.
A. S. Abbott, in combative mode, wrote to the dean about putting an end to ��the jigsaw puzzle games�� with the surviving window frag-ments and commissioning a new one. There had even been a sug-gestion that surviving pieces of the Bishop Hoare memorial window from the south transept could be incorporated into the east somehow. On 8 August that year, Dean Rose wrote to James Parnell and Sons of London about making a stained glass east window. ��We still have the glass which was removed by unskilled workmen and stored badly. Can it be used again?�� he asked. The answer was that it could not.33 As Marjorie Bray believes, the pieces were thrown away.
Stockbroker and council member Noel Croucher, who became a noted if testy benefactor of many institutions in Hong Kong, offered the cathedral an east window. By 1950, the cathedral had not moved on this, and he felt they were being dilatory. The difficulty was that, although Croucher was prepared to pay 600 pounds, a window from England cost 2,000 pounds, and Croucher refused to share the donation. It was discovered that a window could be made in Florence for half the cost, but the dean didn��t think that a Florentine window would satisfy the congregation, doing them the honour of believing that they would notice the difference.
By 1949, all that remained of the old organ were grimy sham pipes which had once made music and looked out with such authority over the chancel. They were taken down. The former organ box room was designated as a ��chapter house��. Bookcases were installed, and a library with five hundred books was begun. Alaric Rose had a tradi-tional vision of the cathedral as a resource of knowledge.
The lost organ was the most spectacular St John��s ever had. Lindsay Lafford, organist from 1935 to 1939, recalled it fifty years later.34
��It was a 3-manual J. W. Walker, probably one of the instru-ments the firm boasted as having been specially built to deal with the tropical conditions found in the Empire.�� He was assisted in maintaining it by Mr. Blackett, the uniquely Hong Kong-based English organ builder. ��The humid, hot climate, while apparently to Mr. Blackett��s liking, was extremely distressing for such objects as musical instruments,�� observes Lafford. ��A sudden drop in humidity could be expected in the Autumn. When this came, an overnight drop would find wood shrinking and cracking with loud explosive noises. The organ wind trunks and windchests, mostly made of wood, would open cracks to the extent that the blower could not keep up with the leaks.��
To counter this, a concrete basin was placed under the main pipe work, and the Number 1 Boy had standing instructions to fill this with water whenever the humidity drop was expected. ��Since the drop could never be forecast with any accuracy, this was a kind of crap shoot,�� says Lafford. ��The standing water under the organ in virtual undisturbed darkness was a heaven-sent breeding ground for mosqui-toes, and an organist��s ankles were constantly under attack.��
The organ was ��tubular pneumatic��, whereby the pressing of a key on the console would open the valve under a remote pipe to permit air to flow into it and make it sound. Lafford explains the disadvantage in Hong Kong. ��This requires a large number of small pneumatic motors, miniature bellows, using calfskin for flexibility. But the severe climate affected the calfskin so that it quickly grew hard and cracked and useless. Replacements were not only difficult to come by but very expensive.��
Tubular pneumatic actions were becoming obsolete. ��During a very important service connected with the death of King George V, one of the loud pedal notes developed what is known as a cipher, that is, it stuck in the on position, only silenced when the blower was shut off. This was dramatic reinforcement of �K my strong assertions that it was time for a major overhaul,�� Lafford remembers. Blackett was charged with rebuilding the instrument, using a more modern style of action known as electro-pneumatic, allowing the console to be placed in a more remote location from the pipes.
This remoteness permitted the player a far better appreciation of the balance of sounds. Blackett set about devising his own version of electro-pneumatic action, involving a 12-volt generator from a car.
The organ was rebuilt and the console moved over to the north side of the chancel. Wires running through the sanctuary tunnel under the altar connected the two.
In 1949, to have replaced all that would have cost $100,000, and all the difficulties of maintaining a pipe organ in a tropical climate would have returned. A Compton electronic organ, which did not rely on glue or leather, cost $36,000. The organ fund already had $31,000, $10,000 of which had been given by the beneficent Mrs. Marden. The Hong Kong Singers held a concert in aid of the organ and the King��s Theatre on Queen��s Road Central and donated its Easter Monday takings to it.
Dr. Eric To, a council member and aficionado of the instrument, lent his own electric organ for a recital in St John��s. His wife played it.
St John��s Review said that they would be glad ��to obtain some impres-sion of what our Compton will be like��. There was no report of what the impression was. The organ arrived in April 1949. Continuing the generosity of the business community, through sympathies both Christian and masonic, the instrument had been shipped out free by the Glen Line and was installed free by General Electric.
By May 1950, the new organ was already malfunctioning. The cathedral would not accept it as a going concern and demanded Messrs. Compton put it in order. The council refused to pay the technician��s fares but would put him up. Comptons agreed, and the Roses paid the price of that economy by accommodating him. The nineteenth century was repeating itself.
The Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club had given $10,000 to the repair of the hall. Messrs. Cassidy and Duckworth split the memorial cross restoration cost of $2,400 between them. Duckworth had lost his brother at Vimy in the First World War.
There was still much to be done. Amplifying equipment was needed which would cost $6,300. Damp in the transept and baptistery walls would cost $6,000. The altar linen was worn out. The prayer books almost needed chaining, so great were the losses reported by the Lammerts�� inventory. There were proposals to revive choir scholar-ships, because a shortage of regular choristers meant that weddings often went choirless.
Yet, the rolling urgency in which repair money was being spent immediately it had been collected, a feature of the previous two years, was slowing by 1950. In January, $48,000 of the centenary appeal had not been allocated. It was divided between restoration and clergy funds. It was decided to keep the appeal open till May but not to press it.35
No matter what repair was going on in the church itself, the cathe-dral was enjoying a renaissance as a centre of activity. In the October 1947 Review, the dean��s report claimed that the cathedral was becoming more of an international centre for English speakers, ��a kind of Canterbury of the East��, he thought. Like Cobbold, Swann, Lander and Duppuy before him, he urged readers to ��keep steadily in mind the idea of cathedral; prayer, worship, learning, study, music, beauty��.
It was a busy place for preaching. That year, Bishop Lyndon Tyson, Bishop of Hunan and Presiding Bishop of the Chung Hua Sheng Kung Hui, passed through Hong Kong and gave a sermon. He was one of many bishops of the Chinese and other Asian dioceses who attended meetings in Hong Kong or passed through to them else-where. For the most part, they would stay, modestly, in the Church Guest House.
This had moved out of Bishop��s House to the former St Paul��s Girls�� School Hostel on Upper Albert Road, which had been reclaimed from the RAF. There were thirty-four double rooms, and it was usually packed out. Dr. C. J. Harth, who had been made a deacon of the church, was its warden. Mrs. E. Klein, who had been a member of that brief council of 1943, was its hostess, and its unofficial ��elder statesman�� was Harold Smythe, a charming, generous and slightly eccentric businessman whose hallmark was to walk around the city in shorts and walking boots.
Communal worship picked up momentum in the post-war years. There was a memorial service for those killed in the Yangtze Incident on 29 April 1949, at which the band of the Royal Buffs played ��brilliantly��.36
On 8 May there was the funeral of Police Inspector R. F. C. Olivier, Sub-Inspector Haynes and Detective Corporal Wong Kam, killed by two of their locally employed seamen on the No. 1 Police Launch. This was a murderous mutiny which disturbed and puzzled the colonial community.
On a bigger and happier note was the diocesan centenary service of 29 May 1949, at which the congregation overflowed into mat-sheds from the west door and along the north wall. The churches processed in reverse order of their foundation. The bishop preached, the governor and Canon Paul T��so read the lessons, the Reverend Lee Kau Yan conducted part of the service in Cantonese and there was a combined churches choir of 160.
Ascension Day services were always regarded as worship in which schools must be prominent participants. The 1951 celebra-tions involved a 10 a.m. service for the Diocesan Boys�� and St Paul��s Schools, conducted by the Rev J. H. Ogilvie, the Diocesan Boys�� School Chaplain, and George She preaching. At 7.30 p.m. there was a Chinese youth fellowship service. Schools were still shipped in for what were now ��Commonwealth Day�� services. Attendance was ��good and representative��, code probably for acceptable, although the end of this trailing imperial observance was in close sight.
Well-organised instances of collective worship should not mask the more ordinary Sunday evenings which still had attendance problems. During an evensong in 1953, four clergy walked in behind one choir member. A congregation of ten sat in the front four pews, and curtains drawn across rails on castors shut out the emptiness of the rest of cathedral.37
The choir itself, although falling short for weddings occasionally, was thriving in its vestry. Staunch member Zena Mansell married Jack Mitchell from Kowloon on 24 May 1947, forming a couple who were to be of invaluable service to both choir and council for the next thirty years. Betty Wong, who had been succeeded by Betty Bicheno, also married that year to become Mrs. Primrose.
Choir practice was on Wednesday, beginning with tea at 4.30, followed by practice for boys only, who were joined by the adults at 5.30. Mrs. Bicheno reported that one boy, Alan Barnes, had not missed a choir practice or matins for nine months. In 1949, Donald Fraser succeeded her as choir director and became the organist. Continuing the early tradition in ��multitasking��, he also worked as a music teacher with the Education Department.
With Communion at 8 p.m., a growing Eucharist service at 9 a.m. and the main matins service at 11, the 10 a.m. service on Sunday was being given up for lack of support. The Sunday school, which had so pluckily stayed open throughout the occupation, was experiencing one of its periodic ebbs.
Dean Rose blamed parents for not imposing on children the same discipline over attendance that they would for day school. He chided them for their embrace of the modern notion that children might make up their own minds on religion. This was ��excessive tolera-tion��. It placed ��on the shoulders of a child a heavy burden of strain��. ��Reasonable and sweet faith�� in the mind of a child was being replaced by ��ugly and superstitious elements��.
As ever, cathedral income ebbed and flowed too. For 1947, it was $59,000 and over expenditure by a whisker of $29.60. By the begin-ning of 1949, the cathedral does not appear to have been awash with income or offerings. Expenditure in 1948 had been $69,000. Offertories, letting the On Lee property at Pok Fu Lam and $9,000 income from the Chater Endowment Fund had only come up with half of that. Goodwill Offerings had only seen 157 subscriptions, raising $28,000 of the $36,000 needed. The treasurer describes the response as ��surprising and distressing��.
Nevertheless, Bishop Hall could praise St John��s generosity in paying $2,000 to the Victoria Diocesan Association�Xeven though it had been deferred in 1947 out of penury�Xand for giving Sunday offerings to the diocese. Hall said that the cathedral had no record of such consistency of giving into the Chinese church or society before this.
The post-war years were to see an improvement in the record of giving to organisations outside the cathedral. A particular favour-ite of the bishop was the St James�� Club and Settlement which St John��s took to its heart. From its beginnings in a room in a Wan Chai temple, funds had been raised by 1951 for a new silver Nissen hut on Kennedy Road, the settlement��s first permanent premises. Donations and fees raised $1,000 from a showing of the popular new release, Passport to Pimlico.
Traditional dedication to the unfortunate continued undisturbed. In early 1949, as the Communists were about to take over on the Mainland, ladies in the cathedral were busy knitting pullovers for the Taipo Orphanage and the Fanling Babies Home. They hoped to have as many pieces as possible finished before summer, ��which makes knitting unpleasant��.38
Certain changes in the cathedral��s financial fortunes were making generosity more feasible. The Michaelmas Fair of 1951, held on Murray Parade Ground, raised $17,277, $10,000 of which went to the recently created Clergy Endowment Fund, and $7,000 to the General Fund and provision of a sound system in the church. The RAF, which had been compelled to hold its own rivalling fair on the same day, had gallantly announced the Michaelmas Fair over its own Kai Tak aerodrome speakers.39
Cannily begun again by Alaric Rose, the Clergy Endowment Fund, over years of steady growth, was promising an interest on capital which would take this burdensome element of clergy stipends off Goodwill Offerings from the congregation. In 1951, the goodwill scheme amounted to $43,000, or two-fifths of the cathedral��s running expenses.
The objective was to leave the Clergy Endowment Fund untouched until it had reached a level of $200,000. By January of 1952, it had grown to a point where the bank advised it be split into two parts, one from which the clergy took their wages independently and the other from which the council could vote funds.
This caused a serious fracture in the council, setting the dean against some members. Opposition came from Mr. Skinner and Mr. Duckworth, who wanted the funds to be all one and the clergy to be financially bound to the cathedral as a whole. The dean wanted to be independent of congregation on matters of stipend, which happened in England through endowments managed by the Church Commissioners. Rose even threatened to set up his fund, independ-ent of the council, if such a thing had been constitutional.40
The large and sensible figure of Harry Owen-Hughes crafted a compromise. Eventually, the matter was referred into oblivion, but it highlighted the fact that traditional debate over the status of the clergy still had life in it at St John��s.
Alaric Rose stayed on for another contract after 1949. New to the cathedral was Michael Goulder, who was employed first as a lay reader in June 1950, at $10,000 a year, then made a deacon and finally ordained as a priest on Advent Sunday 1952 in the cathedral by Bishop Basil C. Roberts. He became an assistant chaplain along with George She in 1951.
Goulder was a bright and very special young man for Hong Kong. He was educated at Eton and Oxford and was in Hong Kong as a cadet with Jardines. He began his Christian experience with youthful evangelical movements but did not really fit that picture any more than he did Jardines. He attended St John��s, became involved in youth work and was encouraged by Alaric Rose to come over to the church. This he did, and Bishop Hall ��gave thanks�� for him being ��stolen�� from Jardines�� private office.
Hall was impressed by the spirituality of many of the cathedral clergy who served him. In July 1952, he rolled off a list of them whom he thought put his own to shame. It included Alfred Swann, Harry Baines, Leonard Wilson, Alaric Rose, George She and Michael Goulder. One he did not name he suspected ��had a direct line to God��.
George Samuel She went to Keble, Oxford, from 1933 to 1936 and was called to the Bar at Gray��s Inn in 1934. He returned to Hong Kong as a barrister from 1934 to 1941, and he became a police magistrate from 1945 for two years. Yet She was a committed Christian who had been sent by the cathedral to study at St Augustine��s Canterbury from 1928 to 1930. He was made a deacon and honorary chaplain in 1945, and a priest the following year.
For a while he was a heady combination of judge and priest. He worked part-time at the cathedral from 1947 and, after an initial refusal, consented to a full-time chaplaincy in December 1951. Though his tenure would be brief, his impact was to be considerable. As a Chinese priest, his position was not always easy. A bonus payment of $1,500 to him for shouldering much of the dean��s work in Rose��s absence in 1950 met some opposition on the Finance and General Purposes Committee for being money-grabbing and ungentlemanly.41
A far from original question arose about whether to have two part-time chaplains or one well-paid full-time one. By April 1952, the Finance and General Purposes Committee decided they needed a full-time third to replace Mr. Gould, who had worked well among young people. Finances were ��not pessimistic��. They resolved to cast about for a younger man who might encourage younger interests, which is where they needed more goodwill offerings from. It was carried that an ��about 24-year-old�� chaplain was to be recruited for $1,200 per month on a four-year contract, with free quarters.
On Liberation Sunday, 1951, the governor, in an address, lamented ��how quickly the solid company of prisoners of war and internees has dispersed��. In the new colonial government posting system, the cathe-dral was losing stalwarts to other colonies. Herklots, Macdougall and Himsworth, who was described as ��a pillar�� in Stanley, were trans-ferred in quick succession.
A spirited, tragic and unrepeatable episode in the congregation��s history was fading. Yet the story moved on. Lieutenant Colonel E. G. Hazelton, former trustee of Christ Church, was one of four ordina-tions that year. ��We are increasing the score of men coming from this small diocese,�� observed a heartened Alaric Rose. Given the transi-tory nature of the congregation, he wondered if there was any ��really permanent building of unseen life and character here. We are not altogether idle, then.��
A look at the 1951 Cathedral Council gives us a glance at the leaders of that congregation and the cross-section of the professions if not of the society they were in. Three were from ��the Bank��, Black Skinner and Slade. Five were educators, Stewart, Crozier, Endacott, and the Misses Bicheno and Grey. There were three lawyers, Kan, Kwok and Gould, and one policeman, Wilcox. Charter and Dark were architects, and Duckworth and Margarett were from utility compa-nies. Beeching was from Jardines, Fielding from Hong Kong Land and Cassidy was from Hutchison. Dowbiggin was from Stewart Bros. and Harry Owen-Hughes from Harry Wicking and Co. There were two independent ladies, Mrs. Marden and Mrs. da Souza. Of the twenty-three laypeople, four were women and two were Chinese. Of that same number, sixty years on in 2011, seven were women, seven were Chinese and four of those were Chinese women.
Of course, those who were not Chinese were transitory. Rose himself was destined to depart in September 1952, with a canteen of cutlery and a carpet from a grateful congregation. He was not going far. He was taking up a teaching post at Hong Kong University and was still available for help at St John��s.
Dean Rose had learned to take pride in his flock. Why had he been ��distracted to his wits end�� to get any of his laity to do more for the church? Because, he realised, they were the ones up to their eyes already in communal work. It was in the post-war period, after some had died in service and others took the lead in internment, that he understood, he said, what a part they played in the life of Hong Kong. Much of the privately organised social service which forced the pace for the community was staffed by his church people. ��That has been the tradition of the congregation, I think �K to carry into existing organisations of the colony the energy, faith, love and wisdom of Christian principles and ideas.��
Rose may have hit upon a truth which has a bearing upon times before and after him but which is difficult to fully illuminate. Unlike a conscientious parish church which sends organised activity out and about, St John��s may act as more of a gathering place for worship, a centre of prayer and music and beauty which its deans have always yearned for and as a host to good works. Its parishioners, as indi-viduals, do take back into their daily lives love and wisdom in Christ��s name rather than, specifically, the cathedral��s.
For Philip Cassidy, leaving the cathedral was of a more usual kind. After twenty-five years in Hong Kong, three-and-a-half of them in Stanley Camp, and the latter ones as taipan of Hutchison, he went home in June 1952. He was to visit Hong Kong again, but the rest of his life was spent in England, where he died in 1972. Alaric Rose summed him up with a lucidity and style: ��His life is large, transpar-ent conscientious; although of many interests, yet of one piece, with one single-minded pattern going through it all whether in business, administration or the church to serve God in his generation.��
At his valedictory farewell, he noted that his last attendance at the cathedral was also for Michael Goulder��s farewell sermon. Along with Copley-Moyle, Swann, Wilson, Rose and She, Cassidy said this young newcomer had impressed him.
Cassidy recalled his early experiences of the church. He said it had a shabby exterior, which would have been the case before the works of 1934. Interestingly, he observed that it ��lacked the light and the spaciousness of today��. In that, he may have been unconsciously enjoying the fact that the building had no stained glass. His conclu-sion went to demonstrate that, gradual though it may have seemed to some, change at St John��s was visible to the long-stayer: ��The contrast between the Cathedral as I first knew it, when it was a parish church of the British element of the community with today when it draws its inspiration from the community as a whole is almost staggering.��
Looking back from 2011, the inclusiveness of the 1950s cathedral does seem rather nascent, but for one who arrived in the days of pew rents and punkahs, the shift in interaction between St John��s and the Chinese world outside in Hong Kong must have seemed seismic.42
To the north of Hong Kong, the ground was quaking. A Communist state had taken over in the Mainland. For Anglican Chinese, there to be seen as attached to a Western colonial territory would compromise the church��s effectiveness in China and pose potentially dangerous consequences for its members. The Diocese of Victoria and its bishop separated themselves from the Diocese of Kwangtung (Guangdong) and became the detached Diocese of Hong Kong in 1951. It asked for the Archbishop of Canterbury��s oversight only a few years after having given it up. This time, however, the diocese welcomed him as ��chairman�� of the worldwide communion. It was emphatically not reverting to the old colonial status.
A writer in the Review, tuned in early to the techniques of the ��non-aligned movement��, went even further. The archbishop��s oversight should be as a trustee. In future, Hong Kong should get a Chinese as bishop, and the archbishop should send an Indian bishop to conse-crate him to convince the Beijing leadership that the church is inter-national and not a handmaiden to the trading interests of Britain and America. There would be a thirty-one-year wait for a Chinese bishop, and an Indian consecrating in St John��s has yet to be seen.
Dean Freddy Temple was installed there on 19 March 1953. He had been picked out to replace Alaric Rose by a patronage team of Bishop Hall, F. Duckworth and H. S. Margarett, now honorary treas-urer. Governor Grantham, who had replaced Sir Mark Young, read a lesson at the service. Archdeacon Lee and the Reverend George She wore capes for the occasion. The shadows of war, that war at least, had receded.


Chapter 7 Shedding Colonialism, 1953�V1976
Frederick Temple, always known as Freddy, had the most eminent clerical heritage of all the St John��s deans and chaplains. His grand-father, Frederick, had been Archbishop of Canterbury from 1896 to 1902 and his uncle, William, was archbishop from 1942 to 1944 and regarded as one of the greatest primates England ever had. Freddy followed them in the family tradition of Rugby School and Balliol College Oxford. He never matched them in prestige, but he eventu-ally became a very capable archdeacon and later a suffragan bishop. His gift was a pastoral one, and he bestowed it with considerable effect during his time at St John��s. He was a very gentlemanly and popular dean, who was also a happy one, save, significantly, for the loss of his 6-year-old son, Michael, during a tonsillitis operation in 1954. One of the most moving sermons ever delivered from the pulpit in St John��s came from Bishop Hall in memory of the little boy and support of his father and mother.1
The new dean��s induction service was held on 4 March 1953, followed by a reception for all those on the electoral roll. At the service, the governor, Sir Alexander Grantham, read a lesson, and only three nave rows were reserved. Temple was sometimes bemused by the ceremonial which went with St John��s being the unofficial state cathedral. He recalled his first conversation with the governor��s aide-de-camp, prior to the governor��s attendance. The officer asked that two seats be set aside for His Excellency. Temple asked him why two. ��The cocked hat, dear boy, the cocked hat,�� was the reply.
Dean Temple had harmonious relations with most of his lay council members, who could range from the distinguished to the iras-cible. His first council included academic Dr. E. Todd, senior civil servant and Cantonese expert Ronald Holmes, taipan John Marden, Baronet Sir John Kinloch, historian George Endacott, business man and Volunteers Commander Colonel Henry ��Dow�� Dowbiggin, and our keen and opinionated giver and chronicler, A. S. ��Bunny�� Abbott.
It is a testimony to the balming qualities of Freddy Temple��s approach that Abbott could say, at the 1953 church meeting, of the dean��s first year, that it had been ��the happiest of my thirty-two years at St John��s Cathedral��. Strangely, for a man so formal and yet under-standably from one with passionate convictions, he could sign letters to the dean ��Love, Bunny��.
Relations with Bishop Hall, or at least his more experimental side, were not always that easy. His earlier idea that the dean might be housed in the old Peak police station had not come to a vote, but in May 1953, the council declined to lend him $50,000 to extend Bishop��s House as premises for Chung Chi College. It was incau-tious and inappropriate, they thought. Perhaps more meanly but with equivalent sense of propriety, they also declined to fund a book of Alaric Rose��s talks. Somehow, the bishop did that himself.
Temple faced a pastoral challenge almost straightaway. Assistant Chaplain George She left for the United Kingdom for further studies, and a man as yet unique in St John��s history withdrew from the scene. He was to return a year later but then as headmaster of Diocesan Boys�� School. She was a practical and spiritual comprador, a cross-cultural bilingual, witty Eurasian at home with Westerners, which the cathedral had never had before. He was ��an intellectual a profes-sional, inexhaustible, guileful if need be in a Cantonese way, affable and open in an English way��, according to the dean.
In particular, he was a pastor to the Chinese and the returned Chinese. From this position, he had achieved a remarkable break-through. He had begun and sustained a 9 a.m. Sung Eucharist with a hearty breakfast fellowship afterward. It was, in its way, a family group. She was ��Uncle George��. In no sense was it sectional, yet the origins and early mainstay of what is now the cathedral��s principal Sunday service were Chinese.
Chinese Anglicans who preferred to worship in the English liturgy of the cathedral created this service. They had been educated in Anglican schools, so they were comfortable with English forms, and they found the Chinese prayer book too difficult to understand. They were a social elite or potentially so. Christianity in this form was an entrance door into the upper reaches of the English language and its society. It is a satisfying irony that all the efforts of previous British clergy among the Western congregation to improve the position of the sacraments in the cathedral��s worship were carried through, just about, by a Cantonese priest with Chinese communicants.
Dean Temple was a deep fan of this development. He was also deeply concerned. He understood She��s importance in making English-speaking Chinese feel that St John��s could be a spiritual home along with the expatriate British. She��s departure might see that effort crumble. ��I feel confident that our good Chinese and resident friends will remain loyal,�� he wrote.2 I find myself quite as much at home at the 9 o��clock breakfast on a Sunday as anywhere else in the colony.�� Temple was busy with practical steps to sustain what She had left. He visited the Chinese laity. He held meetings in their homes. His confi-dence was borne out. Ten years later, when the proportion of Chinese in St John��s overall was closing on 40 per cent, Dean John Foster had a pastoral committee of Chinese advising him on the relationship of Chinese laity to cathedral.
The quiet chapel, a bricked-off conversion from the old baptistery and a little musty from underuse, is supposed to be called ��the George She Chapel��, but nobody remembers that. Soon he will be beyond recall, which is how it is for most of us. If you seek a more fluid memorial to She, be present in the nave at 9 a.m. on Sunday, hear the choir and the people strike up the introit hymn, see the cross hoisted and the procession begin, and you will find it.
George She was replaced by Jimmy Froud, one of four full-time chaplains appointed during Dean Temple��s tenure, who included Timothy Beaumont, John Foster and Ernest Fisher. Froud was another novelty at St John��s, a young man of little formal education, an ex-serviceman and formerly secretary of the Hong Kong branch of Toc H, the rest and recreational society founded in the First World War for service personnel. Bishop Hall had taken Froud on as a lay assistant to the dean. He was made a deacon and appointed as a chaplain for two years on $2,000 per year, and free accommoda-tion and board in the Church Guest House. He was made a priest in October 1955. He was exceptionally good with service personnel but rather too much for Colonel Dowbiggin. When the time came for the council to discuss his extension for two more years from 1956, he and ��Bunny�� Abbott went on record with their opinion ��that he was not the type of man fitted to hold the post of chaplain to a cathedral��.
You can almost feel Temple��s pain over this outburst of class dis-tinction as he tries to palliate the situation. Yes, he acknowledged that Froud was not educated at the ��right�� schools or colleges or very much at all theologically, but he had other talents. At home they were ordaining people like this ��these days��. Come 1958, he would go home for theological training. He would only be a chaplain till then. He would not be coming back. The extension was approved with one abstention.3
The bishop, having wind of this, wrote to the council pointedly: ��I wonder if anyone has brought more people to church in the cathedral than Mr. Froud.�� There was, between the bishop and these council-lors, a variance in attitude over several issues, including the place of women in the ministry and relations with the Chinese church. In 1957, the bishop��s jubilee year, Abbott wrote a furious letter to the editor of the Review about him putting Deaconess Jane Hwang in charge of St Thomas��s church.
The Froud incident was a stark demonstration of how defensive elements of British society, especially colonial society, struggled as hard as they could to make the 1950s life in the 1930s by other means. Abbott was preoccupied with tradition and precedent, yet was, in any normal light, a bookshop manager. Dowbiggin was a businessman who began as a ��Mr.��, took rank from his years with the Volunteers and became clerk of the course in the Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club. ��Irascible and disturbingly outspoken��, according to the Reverend Frank Roe, who joined as a chaplain in 1960, and obviously concerned with status, ��Dow�� also had a certain size and courage to him. In internment, the Japanese beat him for refusing to kowtow. He refused to call Governor Sir Robert Black ��Your Excellency�� because they had shared night soil duties in Stanley Camp. Roe remembers that, when instructing his driver to take him to St John��s, he would say, ��Right, Wong! Number One Joss House!��
When Jimmy Froud did go home, the congregation presented him with $3,000 in cash and a small silver salver. The 9 a.m. fellowship gave him a camera and projector, which must have delighted him. He had asked the council if they could fly him home so that he could ��see a bit of Europe��. In 1960, he married Mary Saull at Great Malvern, and Freddy Temple, then Chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury, officiated. He never went back to parochial life but founded an exten-sive social service organisation in East London which he ran for the rest of his working days.4
In 1955, for the first time formally, the cathedral had three full-time clergy. Timothy Beaumont came out from England with his wife to be an assistant chaplain, and a flat was found for them in 33 McDonnell Road. He was made a deacon in October in the cathedral as Jimmy Froud was priested. Beaumont was the social antithesis of Froud. From an aristocratic and conservative political background, he went to Eton and Christ Church Oxford. He was ordained just before he went to Hong Kong, and priested there in 1956.
In 1957, the bishop decided that he was the man for the vacancy at Christ Church, Kowloon Tong. Jimmy Froud was specifically barred by the trustees from applying because he needed more parochial training ��at home��. After two constructive years there, Beaumont came into a fortune and responsibilities upon the death of his father, which took him back to England. They flew back on a Comet jetliner. In London, he funded and ran church reform magazines and a politi-cal weekly. He went into Liberal politics but found being a million-aire radical vicar too contradictory, so he resigned his orders. He was given a new title, Lord Beaumont of Whitely, and became spokesper-son for the Green Party in the House of Lords. When his political career faded and his money had run away into radical causes, he resumed his orders and became Priest-in-Charge of St Phillip��s and All Saints, Kew.
By Christmas 1957, John Foster had stepped into the breach as chaplain, and he was to stay at the cathedral until he retired as dean in 1973. He was ��gentle and dedicated��, according to Rosemary Inglis, wife of former treasurer Desmond Inglis and stalwart of the Michaelmas Fair. (��As soon as one was over, you started preparing the next one.��) She recalls how Foster postponed his leave to give spiritual support to a congregation member, herself a nurse, who was going through a particularly difficult pregnancy.
The last appointment under Temple was not an entirely happy one. Ernest Fisher was 25 years old. He was ordained as a deacon at Worcester Cathedral on 2 September 1958, and flew out to Hong Kong ��tourist class�� on 4 October with the promise of a four-year contract, $400 a month with board and lodging and the use of a Vespa scooter. Unfortunately, the speedy ordination followed by total immersion into parochial life seven thousand miles away, which had worked for the sophisticated Beaumont and the spiritually fascinated Goulder, did not serve Fisher well. By April 1960, with the agreement of the bishop, he resigned because was unsuitable. It ended happily, though. Fisher got a teaching job at Diocesan Boys�� School, and he could buy the Vespa if he wanted to. The council resolved that any successor must have been ordained at least two years.5
The honorary secretary��s report for 19536 described the year as a period of progress following consolidation in 1951 and transition in 1952. It is a fair overview of what was feeling like a fresh start in a new if not always brave world. Congregations were increasing, helped, it was noted, by the memorial service for Queen Mary followed with a speedy poignancy by the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. On Monday, 1 June 1953, from 7.30 a.m. to 7.30 p.m., there were con-tinuous intercessions for the Queen and Commonwealth.
Numbers were sustained, particularly in the precious matter of Holy Communion. In 1952, there were 8,000 Communions, 2,000 up on the previous year. On Easter Day 1953, 500 took the sacra-ments. By 1955, there were 14,000 Communions. The 9 a.m. service regularly saw over 100 communicants. The Lady chapel became too cramped for the regular 50 to 70 at the 8 a.m. Holy Communion. Matins collections were averaging close to HK$1,200 on Sundays. Thirty-two more seats were put into the nave and 100 in the aisles. Twelve additional sidesmen were recruited. ��Bunny�� Abbott donated an additional 600 copies of Hymns Ancient and Modern. The dean was far from complacent. He thought the situation should be even more crowded. ��It is only a tiny fraction of the English-speaking popu-lation,�� he noted, ambitiously.
Numbers at evensong during this time had risen from near nothing to a hundred. It was mostly a male congregation again, strengthened by men from the armed forces. It had its own choir of ten. A Miss Crossley did evening teas afterwards for the service personnel. They were obviously substantial because, for a while, she made Hong Kong famous in the homes of soldiers and sailors around Britain.
An Evensong Fellowship which really rolled its sleeves up was formed out of the choir. The Reverend Frank Roe, who arrived as assistant chaplain to replace Fisher in 1960, describes it as ��assisting in coolie work�� building St Simon��s School, Castle Peak. Roe had spent three proving years as a curate at Hayling Island, England, doing excellent work among holidaymakers. He was part of the newer classless Church of England which was spilling into Hong Kong. He had left school at 14, joined the Royal Navy as a rating and later studied at Braistead College and Westcott House. He was ��a good mixer and talked naturally��, the council were told. Roe was a popular chaplain who was cheerfully direct. Rosemary Inglis believes that he was ��sidelined�� for his frankness. When he moved over as Chaplain to the Seamen��s Mission, he resigned in a disagreement with Bishop Baker over not being tough enough over the club manager��s alleged racism.
The Evensong Fellowship visited the children at the St Christopher��s Orphanage, and they began a Friday night youth club in the cathe-dral hall which attracted four hundred members. The Hilton Hotel hosted the youth club ball with sausages and mashed potatoes, and a band and a bow tie was whisked up for even the poorest Chinese boy. Those still remaining from the fellowship hold a reunion in England every three years, so memorable was the need they met and so strong was the bond that worshipping and volunteering together created.
The choir, led by Donald Fraser, was over seventy strong in 1954. By 1956, the total number had risen to eighty choristers in two choirs. The 9 a.m. choir numbered now fifty with just nine Westerners. Unfortunately, Mr. Fraser chose to stage one of his numerous and somewhat fluorescent resignations. This proved one too many for even the patient Dean Temple, and it was accepted. Cecilia Cheung, who had studied in England under the patronage of the bishop and was later to be married to head sidesman David Kwok, was serving as ��deputy acting organist�� on $400 per month. Now she stood in as acting organist and choir mistress until someone else was found. No one was found. She served on for twenty-five years.
In April 1955, construction of the new hall and lodge was approved. In its early stages, it was often just called the Sunday school building, because the urgent purpose of any new structure was to properly house the growing numbers in Sunday school. By 1956, there were three hundred children in the school taught by sixty volunteer teachers who came in on alternate weeks. Much of this activity was the work of Mrs. Temple, who had an exceptional skill as not just as a Sunday school teacher but as a ��superintendent��, a title of deceptively Dickensian forbiddance.
Designed for the neglected north-west corner of the compound, the building was developed to also include a wing for clergy accom-modation, which went under the title of Cathedral Lodge. As well as illegal hawkers, two banyan trees and undergrowth which was said to conceal a multitude of mild sins, the Bate Memorial had been removed from the site. This edifice was to the death of a gallant Captain of Marines who was killed in the storming of the walls of Canton in the Arrow War. It was a pillar on a stone base, topped by a globe, and photographs suggest that its ugliness was almost inspired.
With no artistic merit to mitigate against its disposal, it was disas-sembled when Garden Road was widened and Battery Path recon-structed into its present form in 1954. The marble inscription tablet was set in the outer wall of the north transept, perpetuating a message of doubtful political tact but the memory of a man who was a regular worshipper at the cathedral and who dedicated much of his time to helping out there when he was in Hong Kong.
The cost of the new hall was estimated at HK$300,000. A fund-raising subcommittee was formed, which included Noel Croucher, who was about to make a major donation of stained glass and was entering into the most active period of his service to the cathedral. The strategy was to raise money from income, from loans against investments and then by appeal. There was a congregational contrast in approaches to making an appeal. The 9 a.m. congregation, prin-cipally Chinese, decided to make approaches in person among their own people. The Europeans at matins thought that a letter to theirs would do very well.
The ever-reliable Leigh and Orange were architects for the new hall. On the council, it was a civil servant, C. R. Holmes, who taught his colleagues some basic truths about tendering procedures, includ-ing being very wary of the lowest bid. Sui Kin and Co. proposed by Messrs. Black and Crozier were the lowest and got only eight votes. Croucher and Dowbiggin proposed Lam S. Woo and Co. They were awarded it because they were known to some council members and were supporters of the church. A room in the new building to com-memorate Harold Smythe was proposed and approved, but an illu-minated statue of St John in the south wall was not. Mrs. Temple laid the foundation stone. Five thousand dollars was spent on tables and chairs and $10,000 on furniture for the clergy apartment, of which Tim Beaumont and his wife would be the first occupants. One thousand dollars was earmarked for books to go into a space which was to become the Kenneth Tyson Library, finally a home for the cathedral library which had lived everywhere from the west porch to the former organ box in the south transept.
In the building, gas was used for cooking, and electricity for heating the water. Servants were intended to cook their own food on kerosene stoves.
Sir John Kinloch was worried that pedestrians might use the new gate opened from Garden Road leading down the side of the building as access to Battery Path. In fact, it proved too obscure or intimidating to develop that traffic. In any event, the cathedral, in return for having donated small slivers of land to the government for the widening of Garden Road, clawed back the public right of way through the compound which had been ceded in 1892.
The compound was crowded enough anyway and particularly congested on Sunday through the attempt to pour a quart of cars into a pint pot of parking spaces. A particular objection was that cars could not get to the west porch to pick up and drop off, a complaint handed down from the days of the sedan chair and still heard today in defence of people with disabilities and overprotected children. An idea surviving brightly from the colonial spirit was that a police officer should be placed on the Garden Road gate to stop the traffic for cathedral children. This was never was arranged, as promised, with the Transport Department.
St John��s Review reported a great response to the appeal for new hall funds. In nine months, $400,000 had been raised, which included enough to cover the furnishings. The new hall was used for the first time on Sunday, 28 October 1958, charging $50 a day thereafter for lettings. The magazine, understandably perhaps, gave rather less coverage to the ��Double Ten�� riots in Kowloon by Nationalist against Communist sympathisers in which fifty-nine were killed and five hundred injured. ��It is not for a church newspaper to pronounce but for all Christian citizens to be actively concerned��, was its calm, ambiguous advice.
One smaller expansion which was less easily achieved was the extension of the Lady chapel, which was still then in the south transept. In 1957, Mr. Abbott donated a rhodium-plated bronze cross and candlesticks to the high altar to mark Bishop Hall��s jubilee. It is worth pausing here to tot up ��Bunny�� Abbott��s contributions over the five years to that point. He also contributed towards crosses and candlesticks in the two chapels, paid for furnishing in the St Michael��s chapel, put up the diocesan plaques around the chancel and shipped in six hundred copies of Hymns Ancient and Modern. Spectacular but now long gone was his gift of four angel-topped riddel posts for the high altar. These, and the back altar hanging they sup-ported, achieved a curious resemblance to a Roman campaign tent and totally obscured the cross and central panels of Anne Bowdler��s William Morris reredos, perhaps deliberately so. After the angels were made redundant, they were used in 1972, as resting places for choir microphones in one of the succession of amplification systems the cathedral has struggled with.
Fresh from the rhodium-plated cross, and along with Colonel Dowbiggin, Abbott pushed the chapel extension proposal to a vote in council in July 1956. They found themselves the only two in favour. Years later, in his retirement speech, then treasurer Harry Owen Hughes recalled that he was so set against spending funds which he saw no prospect of replacing that ��I set my head and even my heart against them��. This was one such occasion. The impasse was breached the following year by an anonymous donation of $27,000 for the very purpose. The project also included the enlargement of the vestry and the installation of full-length cupboards down the south transept walls for altar frontals. The extended Lady chapel was dedicated on 12 October 1958. The first few rows of seating were pews. The rest were chairs. It meant goodbye to a space which offered the only chance of accommodating a pipe organ again, but since one would cost 13,000 pounds, it was hope too remote for consideration.
The replacement of the stained glass windows was much closer to reality. All that fresh, self-propelling sunlight was once again to be slowed and shaded through beautifully crafted glass. In a move that may or may not have been calculated to annoy stockbroker Noel Croucher, who had been trying to offer a permanent one, his per-ceived nemesis, taipan George Marden, offered a temporary stained glass window for the east end. The idea was rejected by the council, ostensibly because they did not like the lacquers on offer. Eventually, Croucher��s vision prevailed. In September 1956, a new east window was dedicated to all those who suffered and died in Hong Kong during the Japanese Occupation. The five lancets grouped under the Agnus Dei symbol show Christ on the cross outside the walls of Jerusalem with Mary and the disciple John standing at a neat and tidy distance each side, the sun of the Resurrection rising behind.
Joseph Edward Nuttgens designed this window and subsequently those which went into the transepts. He was born in 1892 in Aachen, worked out of a studio in Buckinghamshire and was described as the last exponent of the stained glass movement stemming from William Morris. Over seventy years he designed windows for churches in all continents, and the St John��s commission was one of his largest. In 1930, on his way home to England, Dean Swann would have seen his work in the nave of Christ Church Cathedral, British Columbia.7
Dedicated in October 1958, the south transept window, featuring scenes from the life of Christ, was donated by Mrs. John Liddell and a group of former worshippers at Holy Trinity, Shanghai.8 European worshippers had left that cathedral, but it was still being used ��under great difficulty��, according to St John��s Review. Mrs. Liddell, widely known as ��Mrs. John��, was June, the wife of John Liddell of Liddell Brothers and Company, which was of Hong Kong with branches in Shanghai and Tientsin. This window carries a bounty of freema-sonic symbolism. Freemasonry and Anglicanism maintained their mutual attraction, if no longer in Shanghai, then without remit in Hong Kong.
The north transept window was donated anonymously in 1957 and dedicated on Whitsunday 1959, to all who lost their lives at sea. In the centre, a refreshingly windblown Christ stills a gusty storm. On each side are traditional and then contemporary, slightly self-conscious, seafaring images. Croucher is widely thought to have been the donor. The governor and the commodore read the lessons at the ceremony, which would have pleased him, but the design attracted criticism, which would not.
The north window came to preside over the most poignant chapel ever created in St John��s. As early as 1950, Lieutenant Colonel A.
W. Mann, commanding officer of the 1st Battalion of the Middlesex Regiment, which lost 105 men, indeed was obliterated, in the Japanese invasion in 1941, proposed a memorial chapel to the war dead. It began with a display of wartime memorabilia on tables, and ultimately, in April 1955, a chapel was established. It was rededicated in 1956 as the Chapel of St Michael and All Angels. This dedica-tion of a war memorial chapel to the soldiering archangel was quite a common one in English churches, but it was also done to mark the death of Dean Temple��s 6-year-old son, Michael, which was as ironic as it was sad.
Before going to Hong Kong, Freddy Temple had been Vicar of St Agnes, Rusholme, in Manchester. One of the reasons he took the St John��s post was a doctor��s recommendation that Michael needed warmer, cleaner air to combat the bronchitis which the dirty, damp atmosphere of South Lancashire was inflicting on him. The boy was responding well to his new surroundings. What no one could foresee was that his heart would succumb to the anaesthetic in a straight-forward tonsillitis operation. Temple��s faith and commitment carried him through, but he did not always hide the pain. Before he went on leave in February 1957, he wrote a ��Profit and Loss�� account for the previous four years. ��I will not call them happy,�� he said. ��Far too much of us left this world with Michael.��9
The chapel was moved to the east of the south transept in 1968, when the chancel was rearranged and the Lady chapel moved to the east end. The wooden reredos made by Lieutenant R. Wood RN in the Sham Shui Po Prison Camp from box lids and a brass crucifix off a rubbish heap and inscribed with the prayer of St Richard of Chichester is mounted on the chapel screen wall. It was presented by the Reverend Charles Strong RN MBE, who had been chaplain in the camp. Even today, flowers under the reredos are always placed in an old jam jar, as they had been in the camp.
The colours of the British and colonial armed forces are laid up in this chapel. It is a commentary on the ways of post-colonial Hong Kong that there was neither pressure nor inclination to remove these direct emblems of the colonial power��s previous military presence. Indeed, flags recalling the colonial power��s civil authority have actually been added since. The flags include the Union Flag, the original colours of the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps, which were dug up from their wartime hiding place during construction of the US consulate in 1958, and their replacement colours.
The colours of the Royal Military Police are there along with those of 28 Squadron of the RAF from Shek Kong, laid up in 1955, and the White Ensign of the Hong Kong Naval Reserve, laid up in 1967. There is also the plaque of HMS Cornflower which had been the Reserve training ship but was brought back into service in 1940 and sunk in Aberdeen Harbour in 1941. On 1 July 2011, the flag of the former Crown Colony of Hong Kong and the flag of the previ-ously Royal Hong Kong Police Force were laid up in an early morning service. Everything suggests that this should be the last of these ceremonies, but such is the utility and flexibility of the cathedral in matters of remembrance that the possibility of suitable bodies that carry banners seeking a similar rest for them cannot be ruled out.
After much discussion back in the 1950s, illuminated display cases were decided for the Books of Remembrance. They line the south wall, and a page is turned in each book every day. Dean Alaric Rose put together a record of all the tablets which had been removed from the church walls, and that book lies there too.
The linen fold design wooden altar was carved by local artisans, and the striking teak and bronze altar crucifix and candlesticks were donated by the munificent Mr. Abbott along with Mrs. Todd and Mrs. Hart. The credence table came from Butterfield and Swire, in memory of Harold Swabey. The fald stool next to it is the sole survivor of the pieces bearing the original Gilbert Scott design motif and the post-war work was copied from from it. All this internal beautification could have been rendered close to naught in the interests of electric-ity consumption and economy. It was only with some difficulty that Professor Parsons persuaded the other council members not to install strip lighting.
The outsides of the cathedral were painted in April 1958, the first time since 1951. Two shades of grey were applied. A yellow-coloured tower was something that council resolved not to have again. As part of a renovation scheme, the tower was painted yellow again in 2009.
The church��s activities were not of course all about embellishment. Congregation members volunteered their services in beauty and in scruff. There were four ladies on the council in 1957: Mrs. V. G. T. Davis, Miss B. M. Kotewall, Mrs. A. D. Scholes and Mrs. May Ho. Frank Wheeler was rated a great head server, reverent, orderly but not fussy. David Kwok continued as head sidesman�Xa job for life in a cathedral�Xand Major Doggett looked after the evensong sidesmen. Mrs. Hart was at the Sunday school. The scoutmaster was John Duthie. Up in the tower loft, Mr. Green and his team rang the bells. On the staff, Mr. Kwan continued as head verger, and Mrs. Remedios, the dean��s secretary, had become indefatigable and indispensable.
Mrs. Swabey and Mrs. Washer, suitably named, took care of the robes. Mrs. Willcocks did the silver. Mrs. Sainsbury helped with Cecilia Cheung��s choir practices. Cecilia, born in Hong Kong, a graduate of the Royal School of Church Music for which Bishop Hall had found her a scholarship, had come back to Hong Kong in 1951. She now ran a Eucharist and a matins choir. Because the organ console was now in the loft above the north vestry, she could neither hear the congregation nor see the choir at the east end. She had taken to putting a deputy at the console and conducting from the chancel. This she had been ticked off for doing as too theatrical. Her solution, she recalls, was to put ten choristers in her line of sight on the south side of the chancel. The effect was a new antiphony to the singing. It was lost after the 1968 chancel rearrangement had the entire choir facing the people. It was being sought again in new arrangements for the chancel put in place in 2011.
If the cathedral was seeing progress from 1953, it was not made without money. That year saw a $1,500 surplus in income over outgo-ings. Offerings had increased to $6,700. St John��s could give away $5,000 to the St James�� Club, $500 to the RAF Benevolent Fund, $400 to the British Legion, $400 to the Sailors and Soldiers Home and $400 to the British and Foreign Bible Society.10 By 1955, the overall surplus had become $7,400. Investments of $41,000 had become $91,000. The endowment fund stood at $386,000. Because John Marden and Noel Croucher were on the council keeping often-contesting eyes on the funds, this is not surprising. For a while, Croucher ran an anonymous one-man investment operation for the cathedral under the melodramatic acronym ��Z��.
At the March 1957 annual meeting, though, expenditure was reported as increasing and income was levelling off. Goodwill offer-ings were dropping among newcomers. This was put down to a new, less grateful generation. Still, at the end of the decade in the 0ctober 1960 council meeting, there is a record $19,000 surplus in the bank balance, which is looked on as low but cheerfully mitigated by $50,000 cash on fixed deposit.
The Michaelmas Fair, held on the parade ground, developed as a considerable force in the economics of the cathedral over this period. A working party to increase its impact had been started under Joan Temple. In 1953, the fair raised $23,000, of which $15,000 went to clergy salaries. In 1958, Lady Grantham, the governor��s wife, opened it. The Royal Air Force promised to avoid holding a competing air display that day. Hopes were high. There was a target of $32,000 to help balance the budget. By 1960, it had gone beyond that and raised $53,000. Council member Mr. Fripp complained that it had become too commercial and was losing its character. Indeed, it should be dis-continued. The Cathedral Council, obviously uncomfortable over the noise the golden goose was making but unwilling to throttle it, said that the fair should be reduced in scale to preserve its parish charac-ter. There is no evidence that this was done, and the fair remained a force in the working budget for over a decade to come.11
Another more mammon-like but thoroughly familiar Hong Kong source of income was the On Lee property in Mount Davis Road, bought with the funds bequeathed on the death of Lady Chater. The original idea behind the purchase was to provide clergy quarters. It never caught on. With occasional and brief exceptions, a succes-sion of deans has shied away from moving in there. Though Bishop��s House and grounds where they lived for $1,000 per month rent were ideal in many ways, there was a sense of insecurity about relying on the diocese to house the dean in an area that could be wanted any time. The deans were also a cause of overcrowding. In 1958, the bishop complained that Freddy Temple��s servant, Ah Kai, and his family of eight made such a racket out the back that he could not work. Yet they could not steel themselves to Pok Fu Lam. It was regarded a simply too far out. Not everyone has a motor car, observed Dean Foster in 1968.
On Lee could be put to more fruitful purposes than housing clergy. By 1961, the Cathedral Council saw clear advantages to redevelop-ment and replacing the old structure with a block of flats. The plan was for fifteen flats and a penthouse in three low-rise units. Each should have servants�� quarters capable of housing children, was the thinking at a time which did not foresee imported foreign domestic workers. The development cost was put at $1.4 million. A bank loan for it would take far too long to pay off, so it was resolved to sell some investments and release money on deposit. Over this development, Noel Croucher and John Marden held opposing views.
Croucher believed the design would reduce yield and saleability. He foresaw a glut in the large luxury flat market and advocated one taller block of twenty flats over 25 per cent of the area. Marden said that demand from firms for expatriate flats that size would increase. The council was worried about the government premium charge which a tall building would attract. They went with the Marden view. They attempted to mollify Croucher, crediting him with ��deep thinking�� and ��thorough investigation�� and saying that they were ��fortunate to have him��. That last remark has about it the sense that he might care to go at any time. It probably fuelled his apparently prolonged unease that he was not completely accepted in Hong Kong society.12
In May 1963, when rents were dropping, Croucher weighed in again, urging the sale of some units. This was thought to be diffi-cult because, along with deans, the area was not popular with the Chinese. Europeans in those days rarely bought. Croucher��s advice was again sidelined in favour of five- to seven-year leases.
Foreseeing the path of a congregation was no easier than predict-ing one for assets. At the 1959 Annual Church Meeting, Dean Temple stated how he saw the future of St John��s as a worshipping commu-nity. Apart from the arrival of Tagalog with the Filipina domestic workers, and Mandarin with political change, neither of which he could foresee, his vision became the most optimistic identity of the cathedral for the following fifty years.
We have amongst the Anglican churches the largest Chinese congregation. And it is right that that should be so and that there
should be no national or racial division in any way between the churches beyond one of language. There are some 12 different nationalities that worship in the cathedral every Sunday. The life and vitality of this English worshipping community should ever be increased.
The cathedral��s other identity was that of a church of colonial ceremonial, and this did not diminish markedly till the colony��s end. Memorial services were the hallmark of St John��s, not least because they memorialised those of the great and the good who were precious to the full spread of nationalities in the community. Services were held for Gustav V of Sweden in November 1950, and Haakon VII of Norway in 1957. President Dwight Eisenhower was remembered in March 1969. Winston Churchill was obviously mourned and, less predictably perhaps, the Duke of Windsor, for whom a modified version of the Churchill service was used. The cathedral offered itself as a focus of grief after communal losses. In August 1971, a service was held to remember those killed by Typhoon Rose, and another in June 1972 for those lost in the torrential rains.
Ceremonial occasions were inevitably complemented by moments of mild amusement behind the formality. Rev. Frank Roe recalls that, minutes before the arrival of Princess Alexandra, the Queen��s cousin, for matins, he was bent down under the high altar table where ashes are temporarily stored, in an urgent search for an urn needed for burial. He bobbed back up suddenly as head server Frank Wheeler was lighting the altar candles. Wheeler fainted and had to be carried, shoulders and feet, into the vestry, where Bishop Hall revived him, before the bishop scuttled round to the west door to greet the princess.
Council member Brian Hart had a warm and courtly moment with Princess Margaret, sister of the Queen, at another matins, in March 1966. It was a warm day and Her Royal Highness slid off her shoes. Then she lost them under the pew. Hart, sitting behind her, searched around down there and handed them back to the barefoot princess. ��She thanked me most graciously,�� he remembers, loyally.
Freddy Temple had two stately visitors in what was to prove his last year in office. Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, attended matins on Mothering Sunday 1959, at the altered time of 10.30 a.m. Extra seats were put in, but none was reserved. Frank Roe recalls that, on these visitations by VIPs, the church was filling up for the matins before the 9 a.m. Eucharist had barely finished.
The Archbishop of Canterbury arrived a month later, the very first time an English primate had ever visited Hong Kong. It was a semi-state affair. The dean and wife were woken early by a call from the governor��s aide-de-camp. Harry Owen Hughes and Dr. Fok, as senior laypeople, accompanied them over to Kowloon where they were joined at Kai Tak Airport by the acting colonial secretary. Bishop and Mrs. Hall were already there, and mixing pomp perfectly with parsi-mony went off with Archbishop Fisher in a government car to eat at their ��farm�� in Sha Tin.
On 5 April, the archbishop celebrated a diocesan communion in the cathedral and then preached at matins. Harry Owen-Hughes, as a cathedral trustee, arranged a tea reception and, as its president, hosted the affair at the Hong Kong Cricket Club. Sandwiches were from Dairy Farm at $1.50 a head, catering for two to three thousand people. This visit spelt the end of Freddy Temple��s time in Hong Kong. Archbishop Fisher asked him to become his senior chaplain at Lambeth. He had resisted the proposal two years before, but now he complied. For his farewell, a pre-evensong presentation was made in the old hall, presided over by the bishop. The governor, Sir Robert Black, praised Temple on behalf of the whole colony, and Owen-Hughes did so, wittily, for the whole council. Sir Robert and Lady Black were regular attenders at St John��s, but this was the last time that a governor in his official capacity felt disposed to bid farewell to a dean.13
Before he went, Temple wrote in St John��s Review of what had pleased him about his tenure. The gift of a new peal of bells from the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank had been dedicated for the corona-tion in 1953, and of the two surviving bells from 1870, one had gone to the St James�� Settlement and the other to St Mary��s, Causeway Bay. The year following, what Temple called the ��chill and despair�� curtains behind which the once tiny evensong congregation huddled, could be taken away.
He had been delighted by the gathering of South-east Asian bishops in Hong Kong in 1955, who met in the old hall and which had included the return of Harry Baines as Bishop of Singapore. ��A Little Lambeth of East Asia��, is how Temple described it. Brother Michael Fisher of the Franciscans, who had visited to investigate the prospects of a ��house�� in Hong Kong, had made a great impact with his preaching, especially in St John��s at Bishop Hall��s 1957 jubilee celebrations. Temple was also impressed by Billy Graham��s ��superb oratory, simplicity and unimpeachable biblical orthodoxy�� when the evangelist came to Hong Kong in 1956. ��It is not the type of preach-ing which is popular in the Anglican church but have we become far too restrained �K forgotten direct evangelism?�� he wrote in the Review.
Funds were raised throughout dioceses for Hall��s silver jubilee as bishop. His intention was for them to be dedicated to the improve-ment of one particular church, but the Chinese churches did not much care for being so specific. The idea was broadened to a fund for general extensions, particular churches earmarked. The US Church gave to it US$50,000 which had originally been intended for China.
The dean clearly felt affection for former trustee and treasurer
O. W. ��Ozzie�� Skinner and his wife, Hazel, who were given a warm send-off ��home�� in 1957. He had gratitude for the opinionated but passionately sincere A. S. Abbott for having given the altar cross and sticks and the crests of all the English cathedrals, arranged round the chancel in a frieze which, if you notice them, leave the momentary impression of a sports club lounge. ��Bunny�� Abbott also left St John��s that year. It was a quiet exit to a retirement in South Africa which obviously did not suit him. He returned to Hong Kong within the year and died in Tai Po in 1961. There is no reference to him having been back in the cathedral. Perhaps he could not cope with the changes wrought by Freddy Temple��s successor.
Barry Till, Dean of Jesus College Cambridge and probably the most theologically charged of St John��s deans, was installed at matins on 15 May 1960. He came with his wife, Shirley, and their two boys. He was, by too many removes to concern us, a cousin of the Queen. He had two men to assist him. The senior chaplain was John Foster, who was given the title of ��precentor��, which made him the clergyman in charge of liturgy and worship. This office did not catch on at St John��s. Till himself introduced such sweeping liturgical changes that Foster cannot have had much chance to lead. Foster did not pass on the office when he became dean although it was revived briefly for Stephen Sidebotham.
Till, interestingly, did much too to help establish the Church in the Philippines, but his greatest impact and his legacy at St John��s was over liturgy and worship. The 1960s arrived at the cathedral with Barrie Till, bang on time. Dean Till introduced the ideas of the Church of England��s Liturgical Commission by straightaway express-ing his dislike of the font being at the north door and not the west and by rewriting the baptism service, which was now to be celebrated as part of matins. Bishop Hall may have been taken unawares. ��See how it wears,�� he said, giving an uneasy nod to the change.
By May 1962, the new baptism service seems to have been accepted.14 Now came the need to move the font to the west door. The council, cautious over the consequences of having this stone monolith in the doorway, wanted some form of ��mock-up�� demonstra-tion before the font was moved from the north transept. The move was never made. This was a pity, because Till had his keen artistic eye on the west door. A mosaic was created there in 1964, designed by Julia Baron, a local artist noted for this form. It is an octagon of Italian tiles to reflect the early baptisteries of Florence and Rome and was laid down by a local artisan, Luk Ah Yee. It incorporates symbols of the Trinity and a local white-bellied sea eagle as the symbol of St John. The cross at the centre of the octagon was copied from an approximately thirteenth-century one discovered in China, now at the University of Hong Kong��s Fung Ping Shan Museum. Until recently, it was described as ��Nestorian��, but historians regard this as a pejora-tive misnomer and now prefer to describe Yuan dynasty Christians as East Syrian or Church of the East.
The mosaic was dedicated to the memory of Dr. Arthur Woo. There was now the need of a font. Subsequently, Mrs. Arthur Woo, to cele-brate her seventieth birthday in 1971, donated one. Designed by Eric Faber, a consulting engineer of many years in Shanghai and Hong Kong, it is designed around four Celtic crosses with a removable silver bowl, and it is on wheels. It is kept at the west door, where it holds holy water and is used for larger initiation ceremonies presided over by the bishop. For parish baptisms on a Sunday, it is often wheeled to the chancel steps.15
Till was struck by the disappointingly small impact that Lenten Sundays and Easter seemed to have on his flock in 1961. He announced liturgical changes for 1962 which he said were ���K not going to be High Church. It��s a silly label �K We should be past that.�� Rather, they were special acts of worship to increase the drama.16 He wanted to get away from the eighteenth-century form of matins, so he altered it. The litany was now sung, there were penitential psalms instead of canticles, and there were special antiphons at sung Communion. An antiphon or psalm replaced the gradual hymn, and a hymn was inserted between the sermon and the creed. St John��s Review carried the intercessions rota for the month in tear-out pages for personal use. Till described the effect he was seeking as ��a mixture of Roman Catholic and Orthodox traditions and the ��magic lantern�� of the gospel hall��. You can see traditionalists wincing then and now. Not all of what he introduced survived, but a powerful body of it has.
In April 1962, he expanded the Easter liturgy, ��along the lines the Church has been observing for 1500 years��. He introduced the Vigil Mass and the striping of the altar on Maundy Thursday. He began the Easter Eve Eucharist with the lighting of the fire and the restate-ment of baptismal vows. St John��s Review carried the additions to the services, set out in fourteen double-page spreads, the procedure on the right and commentary on it to the left. Till had a passion to explain. You can hear the commitment beating.17
Most strikingly and probably irrevocably, Dean Till moved the high altar and celebrated the 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. Eucharist facing the people. The permanent relocation of the altar from the east end to the top of the chancel steps was not achieved until 1968. However, Till proposed the concept to the council and it began it on a shut-tling basis in April 1961. It was moved down for the two Communion services and back to the east afterwards. In November, the Cathedral Council discussed the new arrangement and rather liked it.18 Mindful of the congregation, they asked, through a Review article, if anyone would like to revert to the old east-end arrangement for a month to at least think about it. By January 1962, there were only six responses to the piece wanting the east-facing celebration back, so the council declared the change permanent.
Even though the physical arrangement appeared transitory, some consequences were not. Two rows of choir stalls which had stood at the very western end of the chancel were now in the way and were moved to the back of the church on each side of the west door where they stand, strangely congruous and quite usefully, to this day. One other piece of staging introduced by the dean and with us still is the reading of the Gospel from the nave. Another, less frequent, one is placing the surviving seat of the old throne dedicated to Bishop Alford at the top of the chancel steps for installations, ordinations and con-firmations, given that the bishop��s throne proper defies leverage and is all but invisible to the congregation.
Barry Till��s first year saw remarkable progress.19 There was an increase in attendance, the biggest being at the 9 a.m. Eucharist, and an advance in finances. The balance sheet showed an increase of $350,000, which was mostly profit for the judicious sales of invest-ments rather than a quantum leap in Goodwill Offerings. That profit allowed for greater giving, in particular to the Chinese Church. Till was delighted. St John��s had given away 7 per cent of its income. Now it could give away 15 per cent.
A local initiative with which Dean Till was deeply concerned was the bringing together of the Chinese- and English-speaking Anglican churches. This was the last big colonial and incipiently segregationist hurdle to be leaped. A six-member working party, of which Till was chair up to his departure in November 1963, did not quite make it. By 1949, the diocesan bishop was still both a bishop of the ��Holy Catholic Church in China��, a missionary legacy which included with its bounds the Chinese-language churches in Hong Kong, and ��Bishop of Victoria��, who represented English-language Anglicanism. After the Communist victory in 1949, in order that the Church in southern China might not be compromised by colonial associations, Hong Kong��s offer to withdraw in 1951 was accepted. The diocese was split into South China and Hong Kong and Macau. St John��s became the cathedral of a rump.
The diocese came under the direction of the Archbishop of Canterbury, but this was anomalous. It was later placed under the oversight of the Council of Churches of South-east Asia, which included Episcopal Church in the United States. They had ��guardi-anship of the canons and constitution of the diocese��. Within the diocese was the Diocesan Synod of the Chinese Churches, which was what was left of the Diocese of South China and the Diocesan Conference of English-speaking Churches. Till��s group was striving to amalgamate the three English parishes with the seventeen Chinese parishes. What had existed over the wider canvas of South China now survived on a postage stamp in Hong Kong. The only common point of governance between them was the bishop, and this in itself was a source of concern.
In January 1956, the Diocesan Conference meeting had reported discussion on the bishopric with the Chinese Synod. Financially, Bishop Hall was managing by his personal preference for living in Sha Tin and letting out Bishop��s House, much of it to the cathedral for the dean. The Chinese Synod might not make the expected provi-sion for a future expatriate bishop who chose not to live on a farm, and he was their right of election. An endowment fund was needed, they said, but that meant that most of the charge for it would fall to the cathedral. The cathedral disliked this as quite beyond its remit, and the matter was deferred, permanently.
In 1964, after Till had gone, the amalgamation discussion was sidelined too on the grounds that ��conduct of affairs was widely dif-ferent��. The obstacle was presented as a pragmatic, financial one. The English churches had unusual expenses, including the provi-sion of expatriate clergy, who were costly. Ironically, an increase in giving to the Chinese Synod, which had so delighted Till, was used in argument against amalgamation. How could that be maintained, along with compulsory dues, to the united diocese?
No dean made such an impression in so brief a period. Barry Till put faraway St John��s in the vanguard of English liturgical reform, almost as far to the fore as it was in the ordination of women. It is remarkable that one of the most distant colonial cathedrals, with a predictably conservative pattern of behaviour when left to itself, should become associated with two radical changes when called upon, without demur or apparent stress. Of the introduction of the west-facing altar, the only criticism that Brian Hart can recall of it is was a characteristic English bashfulness over ritual: ��Why bother?��
As bright and inspiring as his presence had been, Till��s departure was shaded and sad. In essence, his marriage collapsed. Shirley Till, a creative, hard-working woman with a feeling for innovation, worked hard on many projects, including the Michaelmas Fair and the St James�� Settlement. A taste of Mrs. Till��s approach was the ��Not So Ideal�� stall she organised with cathedral members at the Ideal Home Exhibition to raise funds for the settlement. She re-created a makeshift squatter home for six. It grabbed headlines.20 She became a founder of the CLARES, the Care Love Action Response Effort Service, in October 1962. By 1963, the CLARES, a re-formation of the Women��s Guild, was providing the altar guild, making visits to the Sandy Bay Children��s Home, sewing mattress covers for the St Christopher��s babies, fundraising for St Simon��s, Castle Peak and packing supplies for distribution by the Red Cross.
In the meantime, Mrs. Till had a relationship with another man. Fortunately, this did not grab headlines. She left Hong Kong, prema-turely, in January 1963. The dean followed on leave later in the year, with the evident intention of returning with a patched-up marriage for his second contract. Infidelity within clergy marriages was not a part of the 1960s that St John��s was ready for, it seemed. Bishop
R. O. Hall wrote a letter to Barry Till, telling him not to return. This was plainly announced to the parish. A Board of Patronage rapidly appointed John Foster as dean, on a salary of $2,250 and an enter-tainment allowance of $750.
Till wrote a letter to A. T. Clarke, the honorary secretary to the council, expressing his dismay at his dismissal and unpleasant things that had been said in Hong Kong. Trevor Clark, described by Marjorie Bray as ��deep�� and Rosemary Inglis as ��very clever��, found himself in a rare but painful position that volunteer council members can suffer. He communicated sympathetically with Till. He must have navigated degrees of hostility towards the man��s wife, of which no record remains.21
Till disputed his position no further. He had no job and he was hard up. The bishop told the council he hoped they could help out. They made him an ex gratia payment of $15,000. In the end, he received $20,000 and the anonymous gift of a car. The Tills ulti-mately divorced. He did not re-enter the parochial ministry. He put his strong aesthetic sense to great work as principal of Morley College for Adult Education in London, which specialises in courses in music, the visual arts and drama.
Barry Till remained well enough disposed to St John��s to help find Stephen Sidebotham in England as their new ��third man��. The Tills remained together for long enough to have the Sidebothams for tea. He was in a curacy in Southampton. Till reported that he spoke with intelligence and a good sense of humour. His wife was ��very sensible��.22 The bishop wanted somebody ��with better theology��, but Sidebotham had other prospects and the Church Council did not want to dally.23 Freddy Temple met him and approved, and a vigorous young man who was to be at St John��s disposal for thirty-five years was taken on board.
In an attempt to maintain three men in its ministry and achieve a fourth, John Foster��s incumbency saw a busy traffic of clergy moving through St John��s. In 1962, Reverend Theodore ��Tad�� Evans from the US Episcopalian Church had been seconded to St John��s. He is remem-bered as being tall, handsome, great fun and good with young people.
In June 2011, Evans recalled a moment of his time at St John��s.
One of the most vivid memories I have �K is that of my ordination to Priesthood. It was on the Sunday after Easter �K on a steamy evening. In order to be there, I had to rise from a hospital bed where I was being prepared for major surgery on my lower back that week. In the ancient tradition when I knelt to have Bishop R.O. Hall lay his hands on my head, the several other priests present gathered around to add their hands. The sheer weight of all those extremities pressing down on my rather frail spine was both agonizing and, at the same time, strangely exhilarating.
He recalls the service as ��quite long as it was conducted both in Cantonese and English�� and that Joyce Bennett, who was later to become the first woman ordained in the Anglican Church, was made a deacon at that same service.
His time was brief. He moved on to become Chaplain to the US embassy in Saigon in 1963 and ultimately a priest to the US military in Vietnam, where he ministered with distinction. As Rector of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, he was invited to preach the sermon in the National Cathedral Washington, DC, on Sunday, 14 November 1983, the day after the unveiling of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Constitution Gardens.
Foster, Roe and Sidebotham were joined in part by Reverend John Yates, who was, in fact, a diocesan appointment, shared with the cathedral and, as such, had the use of a Morris Minor Traveller. This, along with Stephen Sidebotham��s second-hand Hillman, made them a two-car team. Till once responded to a letter criticising clergy using cars when so many Roman priests did not. He pointed out that the Roman Catholics placed less emphasis on visiting. St John��s had three clergy to cover the island; they had 322 overall. Scooters were not an option. One could end up as a drowned rat. Buses might treble the time taken to make a visit.24
Office accommodation was now equally stretched, particularly since space had to be found for a bookshop called Challenge. The dean��s office was elevated to a cockloft, constructed for $20,000 in the roof space of the old hall by its front door. It was a shoddy and palpably temporary measure which took on a semi-permanence, partly out of self-effacement on the part of deans and partly out of its appeal to honorary treasurers as an admirably economical use of space inside a structure which was remarkably wasteful of it.
John Yates, like Evans, acted as deputy to Michael Goulder, who had returned to Hong Kong at R. O. Hall��s insistence, as principal of Union Theological College, a by-now misnamed and underpowered pre-war school which was shortly incorporated into Chung Chi College. Goulder described Yates as ���K relaxed, fat and somewhat larger than life��25 (see Five Stones and a Sling: Memoir of a Biblical Scholar), who infuriated the dean with his laid-back attitude. To Goulder, John Foster was serious yet a bon viveur, a delightful preacher, a lover of books and a good manager of the cathedral bookshop.
Foster��s seriousness took him into a lot of hard work which lay beyond the cathedral precincts and, in a way, he took the cathedral with him. He sat on an exhausting spread of committees, as a member and an officeholder, which were involved in the promotion of social welfare and reform in the wider community. He was involved in coop-eration with government and even setting a pace for it over social pro-grammes in a decade when the colonial administration realised that social control could only be kept through increased social welfare.
When Frank Roe arrived as assistant chaplain, Foster had so many commitments that he handed some, including the Discharged Prisoners�� Aid Society, to Roe. Even before he became dean, he was on the executive of the Council of Social Service, of which he was to become chairman in 1967. He was a founder of Alcoholics Anonymous in Hong Kong, and he set up the first employment exchange. He became vice chairman of the Kowloon Christian Council, chairman of the Church Development Board and a new ecumenical library.
Barry Till picked up on what Dean Swann had perceived of his flock fourteen years before. In an address to the Victoria Diocesan Association in October 1963, which was to be his last as dean, he told them, ��What really warms my heart �K is when I see our Cathedral or Church people are working for causes which may not be directly con-nected to the Church at all but which none the less are just as surely doing the work God wants done in Hong Kong.��26
The new dean came to spearhead this inclination. Foster appreci-ated ministry that went beyond parish boundaries. John Tyrell, a young Royal Navy chaplain who was to come into his service as an assistant chaplain in 1972, had a flair for working with children, which he took into the community, and Foster enjoyed this. Welfare organisations with no apparent religious connection were planned and brought into being within the bounds of St John��s. By 1971, the dean had become concerned by the number of marriages he saw in trouble. He felt that the brief but generous two- to three-year expatriate contracts enjoyed by Western executives led to a lack of commitment, shallowness and instability which took their toll on marriages.
Dean Foster met Patricia Nicholl, who had recently arrived from England, where she had spent ten years with the Marriage Guidance Council. With the help of others, the two of them set up the Hong Kong Marriage Guidance Council in 1973. They only had the vaguest idea of what they were starting. Soon, such was the demand for the service from local Chinese too, that available time and space was rapidly filled. This bringing into being within the cathedral, this hosting and sponsoring role of wider initiatives, was to presage the current outreach ministries, including St John��s own counselling service. It became a late-twentieth-century missionary model for a church so central and iconic in Hong Kong yet in such a minority in its faith.
The cathedral also hosted an event with impact far beyond its paro-chial concerns on an issue with which it will forever be associated. On Advent Sunday, 1971, in the cathedral, the Reverend Jane Hwang and the Reverend Joyce Bennett were ordained priests by Bishop Gilbert Baker. What was an issue of catholic importance and turned out to be a bone of contention among some in England was taken rather as a matter of course in Hong Kong. The synodical vote in favour had been overwhelming, because the issue had been discussed to exhaustion for over thirty years. The bishops of south-east Asia who were its guardians consented, and the usually cautious Bishop Baker went ahead.
The South China Morning Post tried to stir up a correspond-ence with an editorial and, apparently, not one letter was received. Indifference here might have been mistaken for calm. Just how far ahead of the curve the Diocese of Hong Kong and Macau was, though, is shown by the Church of England��s refusal to accept the women as priests when they visited England. In 1982, when Joyce Bennett went to look after the Chinese congregation at St. Martin-in-the-Fields, the Bishop of London forbade her to act as a priest. In the Hong Kong Diocese in general and the cathedral in particular, women were being taken on board as paid or unpaid clergy well in advance of elsewhere. In busy, disrespectful Hong Kong, some tradi-tions�Xor prejudices�Xcould not maintain their hold.27
A ministry effort as perpetual as it was difficult to uphold was revived at the cathedral in 1969. In February, the dean initiated home fellowships. These were discussion groups of no more than twelve, to be located in different areas of the parish, involving no clergy. The aim was deeper involvement, a better understanding of one��s own faith and the responsibility of the Christian in the commu-nity. They were not sustained. For the middle classes in Hong Kong, a sense of neighbourhood was too weak. For expatriates particularly, society was geographically fluid. If a sense of bonding was hard to achieve in the purposeful setting of a cathedral, how much harder it was in a block of flats.
In some ways, the cathedral��s relationship with its own diocese, of which it was ostensibly the mother church, was more distant. In a May 1968 visitation by Bishop Gilbert Baker, who had succeeded Hall on his retirement in 1966, the main observations had been on the slimness of the relationship. Baker believed that St John��s should have more of a diocesan focus. There should be more trust between the Chinese-speaking and English-speaking churches, of which the cathedral was obviously the leading force. St John��s was regarded as one of the obstacles to the union of the two. It should increase its contributions to the diocese and the bishop��s office, said Baker. This he believed should take the form of responsibilities for specific projects.28
In a council meeting of October 1966, Li Fook Hing, who was variously cathedral treasurer and treasurer of the Diocesan Finance Committee, had already stated that the council should support Bishop Baker, then new to office, if he wanted to see a closer tie-in between diocesan conference and synod. This was not to happen until 1975, but by March 1969, on giving at least, the cathedral made moves: $20,000 was given as part of $100,000 promised over five years to the rebuilding of a Chinese church, St Matthew��s, Hollywood Road, including an elderly care centre and a kindergarten. This was the exercise in specifics that the bishop had in mind. Ten thousand dollars also went to the Diocesan Finance Committee to support diocesan expansion, and $45,000 went to the St James�� Settlement. Toys and food were sent there at Christmas, as well as donations from the Harvest Festival.
The relationship between the cathedral and the settlement has always been likened to that of younger brother James to older brother John. A memoir by Robin Hutcheon, executive committee member from 1973 to 1986, entitled ��From the Very Beginning��, described it as that of the ��poor, sponsored orphan of the well-to-do congregation��, and in an area of pimps, prostitutes and poverty little visited by its members. Bishop R. O. Hall, its virtual founder, said of the effort in 1951 with typical vigour, ��St James�� Settlement was founded by the Anglican Church and it is going to be Christian �K We do not believe that the world��s problems can be solved by cod liver oil and ping pong.��
Although there were other donors, St John��s provided a core of volunteers. Michael Goulder dedicated himself to it. The St John��s congregation��s interest was gradually captured. Thousands of dollars came from the Michaelmas Fair. John Foster and his wife, Margaret, became closely involved with the settlement. Bishop Hall��s quite audacious plan for a six-storey development bursting out of the Nissen Hut is one that truly soared.
Stephen Sidebotham later came to describe what lay behind the bishop��s success as a fundraiser. ��R. O. got hold of people who weren��t really Christians and got them to cough up. Remember he held the Military Cross from the First War. He had a lot of ��street cred�� with an older generation of Brits like Marden, Croucher and Lindsay Ride.�� In the 1960s the old British hong congregation were still important at St John��s. It was still a focal point of spirituality for the establishment. When people like that wanted to go to church, that was where they went. They gave help to the cathedral��s causes because they had a vested interest in it which was, unusually, not fiscal.
The new settlement building was opened on St James�� Day 1962 by the governor, Sir Robert Black. It held a church, day nursery, feeding centre, the boys�� club, training shops and a primary school. Bishop Hall insisted that the governor should be introduced only to ordinary Wan Chai folk, whose place this truly was.
The cathedral was not averse to giving its own buildings over to needy causes. Between 1951 and 1954, the old hall and the north transept of the church itself were used as classroom by the students of Chung Chi College. Bishop Hall was the moving force behind the college and, since it had no premises, Alaric Rose had allowed it to hold classes in the hall. Lyon Y. Lee, one of those early alumni, recalls that when the hall was being used, students met in the church itself. Eventually, the college acquired a more permanent site in Caine Road, which was probably a more forward solution than extending Bishop��s House as Hall had proposed. The cathedral had done what it does so well and quietly. It provided early foster care to an institu-tion that went on to greater things. When you consider that Chung Chi became its founding college, it is not too fanciful to say that the Chinese University of Hong Kong began under the eaves of St John��s.
Support was also given by St John��s to smaller, nascent Chinese churches at Kei Oi Church in Sham Shui Po and St Thomas, Castle Peak, located close to the place Bishop Hoare was drowned. Indeed, the cathedral was doing what it saw as its best to meet need where it could reach it. Sometimes, during the mad post-war rushes of immi-gration, it reached where the government could not. For example, $2,500 went to the Sandy Bay Home for Crippled Children, which would also become a St John��s favourite, not least because of Noel Croucher��s close involvement with it. Modestly but brightly, the Sunday school children��s Lent project sponsored an ordinary working-class girl, Shar Suk Ling, with $360 towards her educa-tion. How she was selected is not clear, but she was in Primary 4 at Tanner Road Police Primary School, North Point. She lived with her mother, father, grandmother and four siblings in 245 square feet, comprising two cubicles and a sitting room. It would be nice to think that some of the St John��s children visited the place and were evangelised, socially.29
Some of the Youth Club boys may have been, politically. In October 1967, a group of them were involved in a fight outside the Central Government Offices. Although St John��s Review said it was not to do with ��the disturbances��, it was bad enough for the club to be shut for a while.
Denial was also issued over a report that congregation members had been hailed as ��foreign devils�� when leaving the church at the Garden Road gate. Given that Garden Road was the passage for Red Guard demonstrations up from the Hilton Hotel to Government House, it is difficult to see how persons so prominently Anglican emerging into a sea of Little Red Books could have avoided the attention. Brian Hart recalls in 2011, at age 94, that there was not too much trouble from that quarter. ��It was as well to keep away but if you became involved, a useful ploy was to wave your HSBC chequebook, if you had one, as it was the same colour as Chairman Mao��s Little Red Book.��
Apart from the youth club there were Cubs and Scout packs, a day nursery and English conversation classes for poor children, in the old hall, by volunteers twice a week. The hall was lent out for pre-examination studies and as rehearsal space for three choirs and an orchestra. It had been refused to the Arts Festival as a venue, on the grounds that the audiences would be too disruptive.
The Sung Eucharist Choir Fellowship, led by Jean Yun and Eddie Ho, raised money for the Street Sleepers�� Shelter Society, which was originally a cathedral initiative, and Holy Carpenter Church Hostel in Hung Hom, another outreach into the Chinese Church. In the earlier days of this choir fellowship, they organised a party for five hundred poor children. We have seen how their evensong equivalent had organised and run a spread of social activities for people beyond the cathedral. Choirs in previous decades had come up with similar autonomous initiatives. Choirs the size of a cathedral��s can prove a considerable force for mission. They have a common passion, com-pulsory meetings and the discipline of performance. In the wider society of the parish they can be the equivalent of the military.
The Youth Club did not run purely on lay energy. In 1968, the Reverend Patrick Nicholas was appointed an assistant chaplain. The bishop��s visitation of 2 May had concluded that the cathedral needed a Chinese priest. He would look to attach a young priest in training. St John��s might sponsor the overseas training of that priest in return. That did not happen for a while longer and then not in the manner the bishop outlined. Instead, they got Nicholas He, who replaced Reverend Philip English, who arrived in 1966 and took over from Frank Roe, who had gone to the Mission to Seamen. English was not long for Hong Kong. He contracted tropical sprue, a disease of the small intestine involving malabsorption, usually afflicting expatriates. The only cure at that time was to leave the tropics.
Nicholas took to Asia well enough. He had a particular flair for inspir-ing interest in young people, and though there was no formal youth ministry at St John��s, he came to define one. They put him in a flat in the diocese��s new Upper Albert Road development, Ridley House, and added to the motor pool. The council found him a 1964 Volkswagen.
He was called on as a peacemaker in a critical dispute. There were now two choirs, the 9 a.m. Sung Eucharist and the matins, which was eventually to be given up. It was almost as though the memberships sensed that one would go. There were a total of eighty members, mostly young Chinese between the ages of 13 and 20, and the increasing rivalry between them bordered on the unpleasant. This was esprit de corps turned sour. Nicholas saw it and took a pastoral grip on it. He talked to the members, convened a conference of them in the summer of 1970 and took them on joint work camps. Peace was restored.
Nicholas produced an interesting report on youth work at St John��s for the council meeting in April 1971. Two hundred children were registered for Sunday schools, meeting at 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. The expatriate teachers were always moving out, and attendances were irregular because parents had demands on the children too. His own service commitments meant Nicholas had inadequate clerical contact with kids. Most children were lost to the Church after the age of 11. There was no neighbourhood contact with young people around the cathedral.
He found that, in confirmation classes, Western children were more talkative in racially mixed classes, but the Chinese kids were more serious about confirmation. For Westerners it was more a social custom and a good behaviour ��bribe��. He concluded that there was a need to provide something to hook post-12-year-olds and to raise the standard of confirmation candidates.
In May 1969, after being made briefly precentor, Stephen Sidebotham was released to take over Christ Church, Kowloon Tong, to succeed the incumbent, Simon Ridley. Keeping three clergy in place at St John��s was proving a slippery act. Bishop Baker promoted the appointment of Reverend J. L. Mitman from the Episcopal Church for his skills in mission preparation. The Finance and General Purposes Committee fretted over how this was to be funded and sent Mitman a holding letter, but by early 1971, he had arrived.
The cathedral had the prospect of three full-time clergy for eighteen months. It could afford this. The post-war endowment fund had foreseen it. Mitman was developing a programme for adult education and mission preparation rarely seen on a parish scale. Mitman��s strength was in organising seminars, dialogues and study groups. He involved Brother Geoffrey, the Franciscan who was passing through Hong Kong in December 1971, and offered him a speaking engagement between March and April the following year. He actually operated a ��bar ministry�� for six weeks, spending three to four nights in the Hilton Hotel and Mandarin Oriental bars, being available to people there. A lesser man in that setting would have ended up needing his own counsel.
Apart from asking for $125 to support this drinking ministry, Mitman was able to report that there was altogether more need of socialising to offset boredom and loneliness. Most particularly, it was needed after the 11 a.m. service, he said. The cathedral seems to have been going through a period of detachment. John Downes of Peak Mansions wrote to St John��s Review complaining that no one at St John��s knew if its members were sick or noticed if they stop coming. He and his wife had to almost cease attending for a period without anyone noticing�Xand he was a sidesman. He thought it a ��poor show��.
Then the clergy staffing picture dissolved again. John Mitman was diagnosed with a form of sclerosis and had to return to the United States. Fortunately, his condition improved enough for him to have a very impressive ministry, and he now holds the title of Special Honorary Canon of Hartford Cathedral for work throughout the Episcopal Church.
At the Annual Church Meeting of 1970, John Foster looked back over the decade and announced,
There is a limit to the amount of progress or change which an individual human being, family or community can absorb within a period. To press beyond that limit will see little true develop-ment, rather the likelihood of disintegration. I do not believe that this latter result is in accordance with God��s will for his children.
You could see why Goulder described him as a serious man. He was also called a worrier, but the dean did have a point nonetheless. The 1960s had seen alteration to the point of eruption in the cathe-dral as well as the streets and society around.
In 1968, the whole of the chancel had been rearranged perma-nently. There had been a sequence of ��musical pews�� as the Lady chapel made its third move up to what had been the high altar, and the St Michael��s chapel crossed from the north to the south transept to take its place. An ingenious but ecclesiogically curious wooden chancel screen designed by Eric Faber and made of wood without any nails was erected to separate off the Lady chapel, when ��rood screens�� had originally been meant to screen off the chancel from the nave.30 It had the effect of a garden fence and was eventually removed and put up, in parts, as a screen for the St Michael��s chapel. Enough had happened for Dean Foster. He planted his chair, Canute like, on the shoreline of ��disintegration��.
The year 1966 had not only seen the onset of the Cultural Revolution but two elections to the episcopal seat after the depar-ture of R. O. Hall. Bishop Joost de Blank of Cape Town, an interest-ing external candidate, had been elected in a process in which the Diocesan Conference churches had taken part and to which the cathedral had submitted three names to the joint nominating com-mittee: Bishop Daly, Archdeacon James Pong and Reverend Gilbert Baker. De Groot had been compelled to withdraw on doctor��s advice, and the China-seasoned Baker succeeded in the second election.
In 1967, Dean Till��s introduction of the moved altar and westward-facing celebration was to be fixed. The table was to stand at the steps permanently. A platform apron was to be extended from them to accommodate activity. The chancel seating and organ console was to be arranged, and the choir swung round as a body behind the altar to face the congregation. Bishop Baker, whose permission was needed, feared there would be less seating for diocesan services.
Still, these were Dean Foster��s own proposals and the council approved them, in principle, in April 1967, urging the bishop to give his approval. Council member Miss Barker dissented from the proposal, but the bishop relented. The changes, completed in 1968, met with approval, or from Brian Hart��s recollection, ��no particular objection��, except that some disliked the placing of the bishop��s throne.
There were quite a few particulars that could have been objected to. There was an element of modernist vandalism which can be found in many 1960s developments, even attached to this treatment of the chancel. To make this congregationalism work, the floor levels of the chancel were altered by layerings of plywood. Cobbold��s precious sanctuary extension of 1898 disappeared. Oddly, the vestry doors half disappeared below the floor line. All sense of flow through the chancel was lost. Remaining was the reverberation of hollow floors and the clutter of a furniture auction room, which was tolerated for over forty years. One of the most refreshing moves the cathedral made for itself in 2011 was to pull the plywood up, rediscover the original floor, rearrange much of the furniture and restore the chancel to its authentic state.
At the 1967 Annual Church Meeting, Brian Hart, as honorary treasurer, made a summary of the endowment funds available to the cathedral. The Chater Endowment Fund of 1920 contained gilt-edged and fixed deposits, the annual income going to St John��s. The Cathedral Endowment Fund, begun by Canon Rose in 1948, was for stipends, gratuities and pensions and came to be used for extensions to property ownership. The Cathedral Hall Endowment Fund of 1922 was given by M. J. D. Stephens for the running, insuring and upkeep of the hall. Anything in excess of $500 was to be spent on musical entertainment and the upkeep of the piano and other instruments in the Hall.
Forty years on, the picture has changed a little. Of the Chater Fund, there is no trace. It had been spent out. Newer to the assets are the Percy B. Dillon Fund, which began as $1.5 million created under the will of his widow, Cecile Norah Dillon, in his memory in 1982, for the upkeep of the church. The other is the Noel Croucher Endowment Fund. It represented at the outset the contribution of a portfolio of Hong Kong shares made by Noel Croucher.
Croucher was to live on until 1979, giving and serving generously and with sometimes insistent confidence, particularly when it came to stocks and shares. Other pillars of the laity at that time were M.
W. Kwan, John Stokes and Dr. Eric To, whom Frank Roe describes as having the biggest sound system in the world and who donated a new Thomson electronic organ in 1966. Alastair Todd, who, some-times honorary secretary, was director of social welfare in the gov-ernment and later, on retirement, was ordained and took a parish in Eastbourne. Prominent too were G. L. Strickland, whose son John later became chairman of the Hongkong Bank; Li Fook Hing, educa-tional philanthropist and later honorary canon; Li Fook Kow, distin-guished public servant; and John Morley, barrister and judge and the cathedral��s legal adviser. F. W. Stephens and W. E. L. Fletcher, both lay readers, were able to conduct evensong when called upon.
Up to 1969, evensong had been said every day until ��traffic conges-tion�� reduced it to Wednesday and Saturdays in the week. It is the first and perhaps only record of services being altered for that reason. In the same year on Sunday, 15 February, the new Series 3 order for Holy Communion was introduced, on trial for a year, apparently to little fanfare or resistance. The order of service in 1969 was looking closer to what the cathedral has today, at least in respect of Sundays. Holy Communion was at 8 a.m. Sung Eucharist was at 9 a.m., matins and sermon were at 11 and evensong with sermon was at 6.30. There were two Sunday schools, one at 9 and one at 11. In the weekdays, Holy Communion was at 7.30 a.m. and said in Cantonese at 8.30 on Thursdays. There was a matins at 8 and the reduced evensong at
5.15. We can see that, on Sunday, matins carrying the sermon was still seen as the main morning service, but only just. Within a decade, the matins choir was gone.
The 23 January 1971 matins service became an unusual one. Francis Hsu, the Roman Catholic Bishop, preached in a swap with Bishop Baker, who did the same over at St Joseph��s. It had never happened before, and the dean described it as ��a moment of grace��. Equally graceful but less elegant would have been the chaplain��s ��chat-in�� for young people, held in his flat in Ridley House two nights a week for two hours. Both in their ways were signs of those times.
There were ways in which the cathedral lagged behind the times in the tradition of the canny employer. In 1970, M. W. Kwan, the honourable treasurer, reported that the rising cost of living was making nonsense of the clergies�� stipends. The dean was earning $2,970 a month, John Mitman as senior chaplain, $2,100 and Patrick Nicholas was on $1,620. The assistant clergy were falling back on savings, which were nearly gone. One unnamed priest admitted to having to dip into savings at the rate of $600 a month. Another could not afford new clothes and was wearing those of a deceased friend. The dean had to pay three servants from his enter-tainment allowance, so no entertaining was done. An urgent review of salaries followed. The dean��s was increased to $3,850, Mitman��s to $2,850 and Nicholas��s to $2,650. Perhaps it was holes in his soles that led Patrick Nicholas to move on and accept a chaplaincy to four schools in the diocese. John Tyrell, the Navy Chaplain, took over from him in January 1972.
Clergy were not the only cause for concern treasurer Kwan. He said of the retired verger pension of $600 ��a shame�� and that it should be trebled. He was also anxious about the living quarters of the minor staff. They live in ��pillboxes�� outside the south door. He thought these unsanitary and unsightly. What about providing a small block of rooms by redeveloping the vergers�� quarters next to the old hall? The chaplain could be put on the top floor and space in the new hall released for storage. The obligation to house the labouring staff on the premises was becoming redundant with the onset of public housing estates. For as long as it survived, it acted as one of the motives to restructure the old hall, which had a great deal of height but only one cockloft office. Varieties of plan for this ran through the 1970s and came to almost nothing.
John Foster left the deanship in January 1973. He said that he had taken to heart the advice of Freddy Temple��s uncle, who said that no one should stay in an incumbency beyond ten years. He was not leaving for another job, he told trustee Li Fook Hing. To Bishop Baker he wrote, ��My special calling is to a personal ministry and those in special need. The time has come for someone here with more abili-ties as a teacher and an evangelist.�� The cathedral��s ministry needed reshaping to meet new needs, he believed.31
In a parting definition of his parish as he saw it, Foster said of St John��s, ��We are not British or European or even westernized. We are an English-speaking Christian community in which no race may pre-dominate by its own nature.�� This was not exactly the case. Sixty per cent of the parish was still Caucasian and, although more Chinese influence was being felt through giving and fellowships, although 50 per cent of baptisms and confirmations were of Chinese, just a casual glance at the clergy, council and office-holding lists showed Western predominance.
Yet Foster��s definition, incomplete though it was, had certainly become the vision of the cathedral for many of its membership as the post-war years rolled on. Although Hong Kong��s territorial future was still muted, social change was increasingly voluble in the years after the 1967 riots. The increasing power of Chinese business, the localisation of the administration and the retreat of colonial trappings into tiny pockets of occasional ceremonial were irreversible. The cathedral��s exclusiveness remained only in its language and perhaps its liturgy, and they were open to all who could handle them. What Foster described had not been reached. It was fanfare for the episode to come.
In appreciation of his ten years of service, the council voted John Foster a $100,000 gratuity. To balance generosity with self-denial, he waived his $40,000 leave pay. The parishioners collected $22,000 for him and presented him with a rose bowl as well.
In spite of the dean��s wish to the contrary, things had carried on changing through the last few years of his incumbency. One innova-tion he led and which could well have been left aside was the altera-tion in the way the council did its business. It was decided that the council did not need to meet more than four times a year. It could save its full meetings for matters of substance. Committees would be given budgets, meet to their own cycles, be responsible for specific issues and be able to empower the dean. Finance and General Purposes Committee (F and GP) became the Standing Committee. Fabric and Furnishings Committee (F and F) had a lay chair. Thus three committees could get on with their routine within their funds and terms.
On paper, the deal looked sweet and utilitarian. In fact, it led to strife. The hotly defended financial authority of F and GP came into question. In particular F and F sought to exercise more autonomy than F and GP could accept. In June 1974, redevelopment of the new hall, just twenty years old and redundant in design, plus alterations to the old hall and the church itself, were again keenly contemplated. Architect J. Prescott was asked by the F and F for designs for buildings that would pleasingly offset the cathedral and maximise impact.
To those familiar with rushes of enthusiasm which burst out of general meetings and break on the rock of a finance committee, it will come as little surprise to learn that this initiative was criticised by F and GP under Li Fook Hing as a use of funds towards structural changes that were beyond its remit. It was withdrawn at the October meeting. Prescott was paid off. 32
The Reverend Erik Kvan, an honorary chaplain of this period, capped all with the accurate observation that the council with its occa-sional meetings and agenda still heavy with reports, had become merely a rubber stamp. During the interregnum before the arrival of Rex Howe, Foster��s successor, the bishop acted as dean, Tyrell as priest-in-charge and Erik Kvan was one of the three clergy along with Geoffrey Speake, headmaster of Island School and the architect of the English Schools Foundation, and Reverend P. T. Chan, executive director of Advancement of Christian Higher Education in Asia, who helped out.
Kvan himself was another of the highly accomplished clergy which the cathedral attracted to its service, free of charge. His work was in the fields of psychology and social science. He established the Psychology Department at the University of Hong Kong and later became head of the Social Sciences and Law Faculty. Shortly after he arrived in Hong Kong after the war, R. O. Hall encouraged him to be ordained. He acted as warden of St John��s Hall, Master of St John��s College and Master of Robert Black College. He pioneered physical rehabilitation in Hong Kong and for thirty years headed the Hong Kong Spastics Society.
The Reverend Rex Howe was 44 at the time of his appointment in 1973, and he arrived with his wife and four teenage children. He was a Cambridge graduate, trained at the Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield and had been Vicar of Redcar and Rural Dean of Guisborough. As the retiring dean was going on to a Yorkshire parish�XLythe near Whitby�Xso his successor was coming from one. In his inaugural remarks to the Church Council on 27 November 1973, the dean said that the upcoming 125th anniver-sary of St John��s was a call to mission and that the gospel must be preached ��in and out of season��. Most immediately, he faced a human resources problem and the traditional difficulty in maintaining a full complement of clergy.
Rev. Barry J Simmons arrived to replace Patrick Nicholas. On the face of it, he was a good choice. He had done his military service in Hong Kong and fondly remembered the cathedral of 1956 with Temple, Froude and Beaumont. He had asked to come by sea, but by 1973, scheduling a sea voyage was not realistic. Neither, perhaps was Mr. Simmons. He came with his wife, and maybe it was she who recoiled from the climate or the company, but it was he who wrote a frank and regretful letter of resignation in November, saying that he could not make a go of it in Hong Kong and realised that his ministry should be in England.
Simmons proved not to be without courage. Later, back in the English parish of Shoreham, he attracted criticism and publicity for insisting that the names of soldiers shot for desertion should be included on the war memorial, because post-traumatic stress had not been understood at the time.33 Prior to that, from 1980 to 1990, he was Chaplain of the Anglican Church of Luxembourg.
Manning fortunes swung back a bit. Patrick Nicholas had been helping out with the Sunday school, which was enthusiastic in staging ��walkathons�� for charities. Now, while maintaining a chaplaincy at St Paul��s Co-educational School, he came back onto the cathedral staff. Then they lurched the other way, sadly. Earlier in 1973, John Tyrell had married Veronica Kotewall. Veronica was diagnosed with a serious cardiac condition, the best treatment for which lay in Britain. They went back in June 1974. Reverend Hugh Stevenson arrived to take over from Tyrell and moved into Cathedral Lodge, bringing numbers back up to three with the dean in No. 1, Upper Albert Road and Patrick Nicholas in Ridley House.
March��s new council that year saw Li Fook Hing giving up the treasurership to Desmond Inglis, citing pressure of work. Inglis recalls that, as treasurer, he bought shares in San Miguel Brewery, of which his father was a director. The council was flushed with disquiet at this and demanded that they be sold. This they were at a huge profit, Inglis remembers with satisfaction. Alan Lack, formerly of the Merchant Navy and Director of Marine, became honorary secretary. Hadland continued in F and F, and C. N. Harding took over the Pastoral Committee from the dean. Dr. B. M. Kotewall, teacher and daughter of the famed entrepreneur, patron and ben-efactor Sir Robert Kotewall, and J. D. Kit, for twenty-eight years director of the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce, were the trustees. Among the council members were Noel Croucher,
L. M. (Bim) Davis, who was secretary for security, K. W. Farmer, Professor Frank King, D. B. Minns, Jack Mitchell, the Government Registrar who ran the Goodwill Scheme, A. D. A. G. Moseley, David Litchfield, Marjorie Bray, Mrs. S. Martin, R. F. May, D. M. Shea and D. E. Vessigault.
In the April 1974 meeting of the council, in the light of the Bishop��s Working Party on Diocesan Reform, St John��s role was discussed.
F. H. Li believed Chinese-speaking churches should join in more at the cathedral, while R. F. May asked, one imagines rather plaintively, what it was the Chinese churches wanted of St John��s.
In May, the council attended 6 p.m. evensong and met in the old hall to ponder whether they should increase the $20,000 annual donation to the diocese. Harding, in vigour, called for $60,000. Kotewall, with caution, said there were additional contributions being made that should be counted in. Harding, in compromise, said double and this was carried.
On the subject of replacements for Chaplains Tyrell and Nicholas, it was time for a Chinese, said the dean; but in fact, it was not. At the August meeting, Hugh Stevenson was chosen over an Australian expatriate Chinese but not without a countermotion by Messrs. Farmer and May. The Chinese of the priest in question was thought to be far from native, and employment on expatriate terms would dig an immediate gulf between him and the local clergy.
Of the cathedral��s application to join the diocesan synod, David Litchfield asked why they should bother. Little interest was shown by Saint John��s people in the Chinese churches, he said. That, for many expatriates in the congregation, was, sadly, telling it as it was. Nevertheless, the historic vote was taken at a special meeting in March 1975 of the Synod of the Chinese Churches to admit St John��s, St Andrew��s and Christ Church into their fold. They had been ��unequal yolk fellows��, wrote Bishop Baker to the Victoria Diocesan Association, and now that was over. The vote that day was essentially to go forward with the union, and sort out the details at the first meeting of the combined synod on 2 November.
To the Victoria Diocesan Association newsletter, the bishop seemed to restrict his explanation for the merger and the disappearance of any obstacles to the miracle of simultaneous translation. Closed-circuit radio transmission and excellent translators meant everyone could understand each other. That the fifty years and more of separation and misunderstanding had all been down to a language problem was a nifty packaging of the tale. It may or may not have been bought by those members of that association who had lived and worked on the ground in Hong Kong.34
The 125th anniversary of the cathedral was taken without fire-works by the congregation. A dinner was held at the Hong Kong Country Club, as any solid professional society might. The governor, Sir Murray MacLehose, and Lady MacLehose and four hundred people showed up to hear speeches by the dean and trustees J. B. Kite and F. H. Li.
In April 1975, the dean identified to St John��s Review the high points of his ministry up to then. He attached importance to scrip-ture and evangelism. There had been a course on John��s gospel, an eight-week Bible study course and two lay study conferences attract-ing one hundred people. There had been ��ginger�� Lent house meetings and a weekend retreat to Lan Tau. Canon Bryan Green, Rector of Birmingham and one of the most effective evangelists in the Church of England, had come on a mission.
If the choir had been quiet, it may be because Rex Howe was not very musical, according to choir mistress Cecilia Kwok. ��He wasn��t very interested.�� Dean Till was ��strict��, she says. Dean Temple and, to come, Dean Phillips, chose the hymns. Dean Clasper played the cornet. Dean Sidebotham introduced contemporary hymns. Dean Howe restricted himself to telling her not to play the same voluntary more than twice a month.
The congregation, led by the CLARES, became laudably if unusu-ally involved in one of the great overseas tragedies of the generation. In May of 1975, it organised twenty tons of light clothing to be sent to Vietnam although since Saigon had fallen on 30 April, it was difficult to know where that would be going. In June, rather more realistically, the cathedral acted as a transit reception area for Vietnamese orphans going to Canada and received the thanks of the High Commissioner of Canada.
The Queen came to Hong Kong in 1975 but not to church. The front south side nave pew with its coat of arms never did seat a reigning monarch. A week before the fall of Saigon, Bishop R. O. Hall died in England. It would not be true to say that this was the end of an era. Hall skipped through a few of those, and anyway his bishopric was already ten years past. It might be the moment to remember one of his more delightfully frank outbursts about the cathedral. On 12 September 1956, he wrote to his son Christopher,
I was most acutely miserable for losing my temper with one of our most faithful ��Cathedralists�� for calling the Chinese Diocesan Board of Finance ��a nondescript body��. I just despair of the English people here�Xso good and yet so smug and every time I try do things with them or for them�XI get in then wrong. They all assume the Bishop is some sort of ornament of the Crown of England. They do not realise, seem incapable of realising it, that there is a Chinese Church and my concern is to dig its roots down deep �K35
Even though his task in China itself had been put on lengthy hold, those ��Cathedralists�� and their days were coming to a close.

Chapter 8 Towards an International Church, 1976�V1992
In the first year of Stephen Sidebotham��s deanship, Frederick Truman, who had been a choirboy at the cathedral during the First World War, revisited Hong Kong. Apart from recalling that Dean Copley-Moyle had been nicknamed ��Chocolate oil�� by the boys in some connection with his hair lotion, and saying that soldiers had been needed to guard St John��s one Sunday in a moment of more than usual anti-British sentiment, Mr. Truman remembered an incident involving Bishop Lander and a punkah wallah.
According to Truman, the punkah nearest Bishop Lander as he was preaching slowed almost to a stop as the youth operating it dozed off. The perspiring bishop stepped down to prod him with a swagger stick of sorts. Somehow, this action miscarried. Lander lost his grip on his stick; and his sermon notes, which were also in his hands, shot out all over the floor. The choir burst into laughter but were later fined for doing so.1
The cathedral that Sidebotham took charge of was certainly a less discriminatory and less pompous one than that of sixty years before, yet it was, in a sense, more parochial and less involved with China and matters Chinese than it had ever been. A reminder of this was another visitor, Canon Christopher Hall, son of Bishop R. O. Hall, who came back to preach in his father��s pulpit in 1979. Christopher Hall was baptised in the baptistery of St John��s Cathedral on 2 January 1936, by the Right Reverend Mok Shau Tsang, the formidable Bishop of Canton. One of his godfathers, Cheung Wing Kue, gave him the name ��Kei Do��, ��Established in Christ��. Guests were a mixture of British and Chinese with a sprinkling of Norwegian Lutherans. That Anglo-Chinese sense of missionary purpose, the slow-burning fellow-ship of the long haul, had no resonance in late 1970s Hong Kong.
It was becoming a city of short contracts. Sidebotham chafed against it. ��Short timers can be stimulating but also disruptive and disappointing to belongers,�� he wrote in St John��s Review after a ��cathedral workshop evening�� held in his home in June 1977 to identify cathedral priorities. The later twentieth-century Hong Kong church could be as socially insular as it was in the earlier years. The reasons were no longer so much an assured cultural supremacy of the Victorian merchant class as an uneasy ignorance from British suburbia, but the phenomenon was still there to a degree. Chris Phillips, who was dean from 1987 to 2003, recalls that, when he arrived in Hong Kong in 1977, ��the cathedral did serve as a parish church for English-speaking Anglicans. Its services were ��C of E�� and its worship very much in the style of a middle-of-the-road suburban parish church.�� There is a flicker of insight into how ��C of E�� the cathedral might have been at this point. At a 1979 fundraiser, 34,000 can ring pulls were collected and sent to a hospital towards a kidney machine. The hospital was in England.2
��It would seem from the priorities that we are solely concerned with ourselves. I would deny that we are an introverted cliquish body,�� said the dean with resolute optimism. Nevertheless, he was concerned about the atmosphere at St John��s at this time. Sidebotham noticed how people could be so easily and visibly left out, even inside the community and most particularly the Sunday morning parish break-fast. ��There are the standers and the sitters,��3 he observed tellingly. Nearly ten years later, breakfast seating was still a problem, and it was rearranged in June 1987 to dispel the sense of an inner and outer circle.
In the St John��s Review of June 1984, a member of the congrega-tion, Mrs. June Powell, was allowed, on her farewell to Hong Kong, to give a frank account of her circumstances and her feelings about the cathedral. She spoke of her self-doubt and how she always compared herself poorly to others. Her husband had been interrogated by the ICAC (Independent Commission Against Corruption), which had made her very angry.
Low self-esteem and anxiety over a husband��s position were not uncommon problems for expatriate women. In her worries, the clergy came out well. Rex Howe was ��a very gentle person��. John Tyrell, she felt moved to say, had ��good looks and a fine voice��. She straightforwardly dismisses the laity as ��an unfriendly congregation��. She gained some peace for herself from the healing service and the laying on of hands.
This slowness in fellowship, these shortcomings in the cathedral��s view of itself, were tackled with an encompassing vigour. Influenced perhaps by the language of central planning just across the frontier, the dean came up with a five-year plan.4 The idea was from Hugh Stevenson, the Chaplain at Stanley, who seemed to be the intellec-tual of the team with his thoughtful articles on social controversies in the Review. Sidebotham gave it body. Like all scheduled programmes which are intended to have the punctuality of a train, the plan was a long one.
One hundred adults were needed to commit to a training pro-gramme. Fellowship was to be developed through more and smaller groups. Churchmanship was to be nourished and the cathedral��s organisation better structured. St John��s needed to look out into the community. A study centre should be initiated. There should be a Christian counselling service with professionally trained laity, and a healing ministry. Ecumenism should be encouraged. Numbers needed bolstering by more attractive services and back-up visiting. Youth work needed to be developed among children who were church members and those who were not.
It would be invidious to identify what of that was achieved in any particular timeframe. One hundred people did not commit them-selves to anything as a body. There had recently been a very success-ful ��family weekend�� organised at the Salesian Monastery on Cheung Chau, involving one hundred parishioners. Perhaps that is how the figure made its appeal to the authors of the plan. Fellowship developed stubbornly in its own piecemeal way, and the cathedral��s organisation followed developments rather than lead them, and looks remarkably similar now to what was unfolding around then.
Neighbourhood Caring Groups were wound down in April 1981 for a lack of leadership and likely a lack of neighbourhoods. It was not the first time that an effort in that direction had foundered. No study centre was created. In a society where the mercenary was vaunted, a notable weakness of St John��s as a cathedral was in the intellectual.
However, a counselling service saw its beginnings, as did a healing ministry, on which Sidebotham was particularly keen.5 By January 1981, an evensong service was being given over to it. Ecumenism got nowhere. The local Protestant churches were inclined to evan-gelicalism and suspicious of liberal Anglicans. The Roman Catholics, while amicable, were formally uninterested in any bonding. Service numbers grew, though, thanks to a quite unplanned influx of Filipinas and a widening desire for digestible liturgical worship in English, which the cathedral offered.
The cathedral did begin to strengthen its impact on society in the late 1970s and early 1980s, from small initiatives and early joint ventures often involving the dean, which took bigger shapes and unexpected directions in later years. What is now the St John��s Counselling Service, the Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB) and the Mission for Migrants Workers (MFMW), which was having difficul-ties lodging in Holy Carpenter Church, were all invited under the cathedral��s roof by Sidebotham and thrived there. In November 1978, Dean Sidebotham, as its chair, initiated the China Coast Community��s search for a hostel.6 As so often is the case, the cathedral was a benign foster agency rather than a missionary force marching as to war.
The Pastoral Committee made heartfelt and varied attempts to scale the walls of indifference. In October 1981, they resolved to split themselves up into six small ��functional�� teams to simultane-ously tackle the different items in their portfolio. This method left no legacy. In the same year, worried too about insularities, they called for the most diffident and possibly Anglican of solutions. They asked for ��suggestions for bringing people together in an unobtrusive way��.7
Dean Sidebotham, in one of his moments of frustration, spelt out a ��failure of church life�� as being ��continual disappointment �K flashes of enthusiasm which fizzle because of inadequate leadership leaving you disillusioned and unwilling to try again��.8 Sidebotham��s vision for St John��s was that it should move away from its English-speaking parish church function and more truly serve as the cathedral seat of a Chinese bishop, who appeared in the form of the Right Reverend Peter Kwong in April 1981. Sidebotham foresaw a Chinese dean with an English chaplain to look after the expatriates. Services might be bilingual, in English and Cantonese.
This foresight was still being mulled over in February 1988 at a council meeting over which Bishop Peter Kong Kit Kwong was pre-siding as acting dean. Bishop Kwong had been elected as the first Chinese bishop in 1980. There had still been a body of opinion which had held it was still too early to have a Chinese bishop. In fact, the timing could not have been better. Peter Kwong was able to build on his already considerable experience to help the Hong Kong Sheng Kung Hui to consolidate its identity and make strides into a period of quite rapid and political social change. The structure of the diocese, relations with the Mainland, even the place of the cathedral were all to feel his influence. Yet though he was the first Chinese bishop, he was far from keen to dismantle that of the Hong Kong church which was foreign.
The idea of a ��vicar�� for the English congregation was put to Bishop Kwong. He stood reluctant to sideline English and turn St John��s into a more Chinese church. He favoured a mixed church with an English-language base. The Mandarin service reflected that this was a basically Chinese diocese, he said. It redressed the perception that St John��s was a solely English place. There were sufficient facilities elsewhere for Cantonese speakers.
This last observation by the bishop held a nugget of concern. St John��s congregation was already large by local standards. To lure away worshippers from smaller Chinese parishes would be damaging. The integration of St John��s was not a simple takeover exercise. The Chinese dean was to wait for another twenty years.
The laborious notion of bilingual services was not pursued and is only observed in small part on special occasions in the interests of correctness rather than comprehension. In worship there were one or two high points of change up to the early years of Chris Phillips��s deanship. For the rest, it was cautious moves, a modest way up the churchmanship scale to include aspects of ritual and occasional experiments in the radical and the populist.
Dean Sidebotham, ever keen to get closer to the people in services, introduced the sedilia, which he likened to a bench of three judges, whereby the celebrant and the two deacons can more directly face the people.9 He introduced the peace greeting, which still causes rumbles of embarrassed dissent. He could not find a method of overcoming the far separation of choir and congregation, which he disliked.
In the 1980 report to the Annual Church Meeting, a decision was announced to retain matins. That the abolition of this once central service was contemplated at all was amazing. It was described as an important part of the Anglican liturgy but ��vocally a very dull service��.
On a Sunday in February 1981, the matins congregation was invited to join in the HMS Tamar service. Those who will recall the size of that chapel will understand that the St John��s congregation for matins could not have been large. In November 1984, the council was considering experiments to liven the service up. ��It puts newcom-ers off completely��, was the worry.
The Eucharist was approached rather differently by the introduc-tion by the dean of the Alternative Service Book�Xthe ASB�Xin July 1981. Sidebotham had not acted ��like a dictator�� in doing this he said to the Review. It had been passed by the General Synod of the Church of England and was being received around the Communion. The ASB was the latest in a series of attempts at liturgical reform that spread over the twentieth century. The 1928 reformed Book of Common Prayer had failed formal acceptance but had still been in common use. The Liturgical Commission recommendations led to a measure in 1965 which brought in Alternative Services 1, 2 and 3 which were a source of debate, variety and confusion for fifteen years. According to Sidebotham, Dean Foster had ��fought a stout rearguard action against series 2�� until 1968. The ASB succeeded these as the first complete prayer book since 1662. Dean Phillips was still defending it in April 199110 as a source of language now common to other denominations and much the best for worshippers whose second language was English. It was superseded by Common Worship in 2000. Another innovation which stuck was a council decision of March 1982 to introduce a Saturday evening Eucharist as an anticipatory service. Today, it is the one service held entirely in Cantonese.
The Mandarin Eucharist at 10.30 a.m. on Sunday was begun in January 1987 under the Reverend Samuel Wu, a non-stipendi-ary priest. That was to anticipate political and social change and demonstrate what Bishop Kwong observed, that St John��s was not entirely English on a Sunday. Samuel Wu was to be chaplain to the Mandarin worshippers for thirteen years. His immediate suc-cessor was Paul Kwong, now Archbishop; and the current Chaplain, Peter Koon, who is the provincial secretary, was preceded by Andrew Chan, who is also now a bishop. The congregation has stayed steady in numbers, at around one hundred, but fluid in components. There have always been worshippers from the Mainland, and these increasingly include students attending tertiary institutions in Hong Kong. Interestingly, some Filipina domestic workers show up. ��They enjoy the atmosphere,�� says committee secretary Stephen Wu, son of the founding chaplain.
Dean Paul Clasper actually got laypeople up to preach on appro-priate days. To his self-confessed surprise, Dr. Ronald Lo, an anaes-thetist and sometime council member, found himself preaching for the first time in his life on Medical Sunday in October 1984. Clasper was the first non-British dean in the cathedral��s history. He was a man of warm paradoxes. A senior lecturer in theology at Chung Chi College, Chinese University, where he had made a firm friendship with the now Bishop Peter Kwong, he been ordained a Baptist in the United States and served as a pastor for ten years and as a mis-sionary in Burma before turning to academic life. He made a brave move from Baptist minister to Anglican priest. He was attracted to Anglican spirituality and liturgy and served under the encourage-ment of Stephen Sidebotham as an assistant at Christ Church. He also represented a radical move by St John��s in appointing its first non-British senior clergyman.
A former colleague said, ��I don��t think he ever set out to be a radical reformer but under his leadership the cathedral began to feel more international and it was during his time that Eucharistic vest-ments began to be worn.�� Another recalled that he could not bring himself to bow to visiting royalty and once called Princess Alexandra ��Mrs. Ogilvy��.
The Reverend Roger Holloway, a non-stipendiary minister at the time and, by paradox, a wine merchant, found Clasper��s ministry ��pastoral and wholly unpompous��. Holloway, writing in the Review in the summer of 1989, wanted a window put up to him in the vestry showing him stocky and silver-haired as he was, puff-cheeked and blowing a trumpet, which he was skilled on and used to play in services occasionally. The idea found no takers. Clasper died on 29 October 2011 in Claremont, California, and the memory of him in Hong Kong was long enough for a well-attended memorial service in St John��s Cathedral.
The departure of Stephen Sidebotham in 1983 saw the responsi-bilities of the cathedral towards organisations which operated outside its own walls greatly increasing. Sidebotham could be unnervingly humble over what he saw as failures. Writing in the Review in October 1982, he accused himself of being a ��butterfly��, especially over church growth. He thought his had been a reactive ministry ��taking up what was asked but without goals��. He was observant of one feature over which he probably had little control. ��Membership of the Cathedral by local people was perhaps stronger in the Sixties, an area to which I paid insufficient attention.��
A longer perspective suggests that his period and that of Paul Clasper, who followed on up to 1986, contain the beginnings of two phenomena which distinguish the cathedral today from that of forty years ago: the daughter churches and the outreach ministries. The daughter churches were an entirely new development. St John��s had taken on some responsibility for St Peter��s, West Point, but only because it had been in decline from its seamen��s missionary purpose. It successor church, Christ Church, was entirely self-sustaining, as St Andrew��s in Kowloon had always been. The Peak Church and the Happy Valley Chapel had been purely chapels of ease without their own clergy. From the early stages of St Stephen��s Chapel, Stanley, a commitment was made to give a significant portion of time of one of the cathedral chaplains to the congregation. This practice was followed afterwards at Emmanuel, Pok Fu Lam and Discovery Bay. The pull between acting as a cathedral chaplain from the centre and a priest in an outlying congregation became an interesting tension that is still there.
The strong connection with St Stephen��s College made use of its chapel a comfortable arrangement to arrive at. It was built in 1950 and dedicated by Bishop R. O. Hall, to those who suffered in Stanley Camp during the war. The cross there is said to have been rescued from the Peak Church upon the Japanese invasion and used in Stanley Camp during the occupation. The Reverend Hugh Stevenson, who took up the Stanley challenge with enthusiasm, had a congregational nucleus of eight at the beginning, but in January 1978, he was report-ing that it was growing in ��leaps and bounds��.11 He had fifteen families coming regularly and hoped for a weekly 9.30 a.m. Eucharist before long. Within two years, they were experimenting with evensong too. The intent was not simply to make worship easier for south-side Anglicans who would otherwise have to face a long round trip to Garden Road. There was a whiff of evangelism in the foundation. In those days, 15,000 people lived between Shouson Hill and Tai Tam. There was the hope of attracting first-timers in the neighbourhood, or at least those expatriates who had attended church back home but were finding it all too difficult in Hong Kong. Enthusiasm was high. The St Stephen��s Annual Church Meeting of April 1981 lasted a brisk five minutes and aimed to raise the $96,000 a year necessary to keep the chaplain.12 A real sense of fellowship existed there. They used his fruit bowl as a font.
At its church meeting the following year, buoyancy was leading to thoughts of a long-term aim of independence.13 Costs did not deter their enthusiasm. The bishop did somewhat. He objected. The con-gregation grew nonetheless under a succession of dedicated chaplains who took up the role of de facto priest-in-charge. Michael Simpson, who was later to become Vicar of Christ Church, succeeded Hugh Stevenson in 1982. Before he left in 1984, he asked that a clearly designated priest-in-charge should succeed him at Stanley and regis-tered disappointed because the bishop declined to do so.14
Hugh Stevenson had actually moved down to Stanley in 1981. His successors, Simpson, Michael Phillips and Peter Frowley, seemed to have spent almost as much time at St. Stephen��s as any parish priest would have done. They lived, rent free, in a colonial-style bungalow in the college grounds. In October 1986, Michael Phillips hammered out with is congregation committee, chapel and housekeeping rules and guidelines on relations with the cathedral. It was a mini constitu-tion of sorts though not officially one at all.15
The congregation developed a busy English-language prison-visit-ing ministry in nearby Stanley Prison. Peter Frowley, who had prison ministry experience before he arrived, expanded this. There were repeated but vain pleas to the bishop to supply Cantonese-speaking clergy visitors. In May 1991, Frowley went as far as to draft a synod motion on it.16 Chinese clergy, at the time, did not see this as one of their roles. So complete was the daughter church��s commitment to the chapel, that when St Stephen��s College wanted to extend the chapel in 1987, the cathedral raised $650,000 of the cost out of grati-tude for the arrangement.17
Even though the title ��priest-in-charge�� was conceded to the daughter church chaplains, there was no concession over the issue of incumbency. They were, and remain in principle, cathedral chap-lains. In April 1982, when a vacancy for Emmanuel, Pok Fu Lam, was advertised, the wording settled on was ��Chaplain on Cathedral staff whose principal responsibility is for a daughter church��. John Tyrell returned to Hong Kong in 1979 for a second bite at a cathedral chaplaincy. He took charge of the development of Emmanuel, Pok Fu Lam. Again, this was a church not entirely for the convenience of cathedral worshippers disinclined to catch the bus or compete for parking space in the cathedral close, as it was now officially called. The church had its eye on expatriates in the huge Baguio Villas devel-opment and the other residential blocks that had been built along Pok Fu Lam Road. The cathedral put Tyrell himself into one of these flats at Cape Mansion for $15,000 a month, because no flat in On Lee could be recovered. The congregation lodged in the chapel at St John��s College, Hong Kong University��s Anglican Hall of Residence, though not as comfortably as in Stanley. The college placed tight restrictions on its use.
Sunday, 19 October 1980, saw the first parish communion with a congregation of fifty. Three months on, there was a report of eighty-two committed members. ��Now we are in the second phase of growth with the usual relationship and personality clashes,�� reported Tyrell to the council in March 1981. Liturgically, Emmanuel was going in a more evangelical direction from the more ceremonial St Stephen��s. They were having free prayer during intercessions and ��spontaneous comment on new songs��. Sunday evening worship developed into fifteen minutes of worship and forty-five minutes of Bible exposition.
In January 1981, when Tyrell��s contract and the flat were up for renewal, Emmanuel sent a memo to Cathedral Council members saying that Emmanuel was so orderly, did they want to continue a full-time clergyman? Tyrell left in June 1982, ultimately to become Dean of Nicosia, to be replaced by the Reverend Chris Butt, who stayed at Emmanuel for six years. During that period, in 1984, a constitution of sorts was also hammered out, but separatist tendencies were to become more pronounced in Emmanuel than in St. Stephen��s.18 The congregation showed considerable commitment to parish ministry, probably most notably in its dedication to street sleepers in Western. Penny Lawton and Peter Stobart from the Emmanuel congregation were devoted to this ministry. In 1988, they set up the St Barnabas Society with the cathedral��s financial support.19 The society exists to this day, working on the streets, very much Bible based and commit-ted to evangelism. Its website says it was ��started by two people�� but otherwise not a trace of Emmanuel or St John��s remains on it.
The growth of the daughter church ministries was a response to the financial expansion of Hong Kong that had brought in a raft of expatriate English speakers, the ��short-timers�� as Stephen Sidebotham would have them, to service it. The most recent daughter church grew up in one of the later and more unusual suburbs of Hong Kong Island, the Discovery Bay development. It is worth noting that the claimed figures for attendance or involvement in daughter churches�Xand indeed at St John��s itself�Xwere well above those who were willing to put their signature on a paper stating membership. At the cathedral��s Annual Church Meeting in April 1983, the electoral rolls showed 361 enrolled members at St John��s, 44 at St Stephen��s and 26 at Emmanuel.
In January 1990, Bishop Kwong was asking the Cathedral Council if the establishment of a daughter church in Discovery Bay had their support. An interdenominational gathering there was already being served by a spread of non-Roman Catholic clergy, including those from St John��s. Continuing organisation on this basis was likely proving difficult, and one of its leading lights, Neil Kraunsoe, was a devout Anglican and formerly of Christ Church. He lobbied for the cathedral to take it over.
It turned out well, especially given that its first chaplain-in-charge was the Reverend Robert Gillion, who joined the staff of St John��s in June 1990. He held the various denominational groupings together with skill and understanding. Former Dean Chris Phillips recalls visits there with pleasure. ���K a bit like going on an outing to the seaside. The congregation were very welcoming and people just got on and did things, no matter what their denominational background.�� The con-gregation has met in classrooms and a school hall, where it presently worships. Gillion managed to persuade the Hong Kong government to give him some pastoral access to the Hei Ling Chau Vietnamese Detention Centre but had no luck in persuading the Discovery Bay developer to set up a church recreation centre. There was discussion about a church at Clearwater Bay. The cathedral earmarked $120,000 towards the project even though it was to be a diocesan church and not a ��daughter�� of St John��s. It must have been a suburb too far. It was never established as such. The money was joyfully released. A daughter church of St Andrew��s, Kowloon, was later set up in that area. Within twelve years, three daughter churches of St John��s were up and running. In mission and ministry, that was quite crisp. The outreach ministries took rather longer. Their development has been more of an evolution and could be considered still going on.
A considerable congregation of its own within the cathedral are the Filipinas. The growth of high-profit service industries such as design, marketing, and finance during the 1980s meant more Hong Kong women were drawn into employment. Families with two incomes sought help to manage their households, and this began the demand for domestic workers from the Philippines. Filipinas from the Philippines Independent Church gravitated to St John��s, as well Roman Catholics, who found the liturgy of the cathedral sufficiently familiar.
Their working hours have always been long. In 1980, they told clergy that they did not wish to be organised, as they had so little time. This did not deter a Filipino Bible study course from beginning on Sunday morning in the Harold Smythe Room, led by the Reverend Eric Chong and Faye Hanson. Chong was a successor to Ian Lam and, in mild irony, one of the long-yearned-for Chinese-speaking chaplains who could appeal to a Cantonese congregation. Hanson, a parish worker for Filipinos, was an indirect lay successor to the Reverend Peggy Sheldon of the US Episcopal Church, who had come to Hong Kong with her husband, an executive of Dow Chemicals, and had been on the staff of the cathedral.
The Bible studies went well. Bishop de la Cruz from the Philippines visited. The following year, $20,000 was made available for priests of the Philippines Independent Church to come up to Hong Kong. By 1982, two Filipino missionaries, Cynthia and Juan Tellez from the National Council of Churches of the Philippines, were running a counselling service and were accommodated in the lodge. The council felt that it might need the lodge, unwanted as it was, and the suggestion was made that the pair should be assisted with living accommodation outside.20 The understandable observation was made that 95 per cent of the Filipinos were Roman Catholic and that some contribution from that direction might be appropriate. That being unforthcoming, the Annual Church Meeting of 1982 announced its support of the rental of a flat from the Evangelical Reform Church in Kowloon Tong at $2,500 per month for Cynthia and Juan while the counselling went on from the cathedral.
This, should any be needed, is the point at which migrant worker outreach settles into St John��s. In September 1983, the council noted that the ��Philipina Mission for Migrant Workers�� was to supervise fel-lowship use of the new hall on Sundays. It received $42,000 in grants. In June 1988, the St John��s Filipino Fellowship became regulated by appointment of a committee and enrolment of members. The fellow-ship was placed under the direction of a member of the cathedral staff. Whether they had time or not, the Filipinas had been organised.
Interestingly, at a council meeting of February 1989, a suggestion that there should be separate services for the Filipina congrega-tion was ��totally rejected�� by the Reverend Julie Leaves, a cathedral chaplain, who was involved at the time. Rejected too was an unnamed lady from Macau, who had been bringing in ��unusual tracts�� and was told to go away. By May 1991, the council was recording that the MFMW was accommodated and assisted by St John��s Cathedral but not part of St John��s Cathedral. The separately registered status gave the mission more independence and placed a discreet firewall between the cathedral and some of the more radical social positions it sometimes adopted in support of its membership in the city.
Ultimately, after a brief extension in May 1987, Faye Hansen��s contract had not been renewed. It was considered that an ordained priest was needed to meet the pastoral needs of the Filipinas. In September 1991, the Reverend Susan Hewitt came in as a non-stipendiary priest to give support. By April 1993, a priest from the Philippines was finally decided upon. Father Dwight de la Torre arrived on a three-year contract, stipulating that he spend three and a half days a week with the MFMW and two and a half days as a cathedral chaplain.21 How, if at all, that division was monitored is not explained. Whatever the practice, the result was most satisfactory. Father de la Torre remains with St John��s to this day.
Puzzlement over the distinction between the MFMW and the other cathedral outreach to migrants, Helpers for Domestic Helpers (HDH), is understandable. HDH��s role is more specific. It was established by a group of lawyers in the congregation who were concerned about the legal vulnerability of individual workers. The organisation��s work focuses mainly on employment and immigration problems. Terminated workers are assisted in making and pursuing labour claims. Much of its efforts are in persuading the Immigration Department to allow a terminated worker to take up new employment where permission has been refused.
In March 1991, solicitor James Collins produced a paper on the idea and made a proposal to the Cathedral Council in May 1991. He asked for a base office with a telephone. The dean found him the space. It was agreed to make available financial aid and other assis-tance and that the free services offered by the scheme need not be confined to members of the congregation. With lawyers at the helm, HDH was skilfully crafted into an unincorporated charitable society with constitutional affiliation to St John��s Cathedral. It became an integral part of the cathedral��s pastoral work.
Michael Corbett-Jones had left that work in the summer of 1980. His Australian Church Missionary Society sponsors were so stingy with his shipping allowance that there had to be a whip-round for him to send his books home. He had deserved it. He left behind the sound if small beginnings of a counselling service. The Reverend Ronald File was recruited into the chaplaincy to take up what Corbett had begun. Age 59 and described as ��deeply spiritual��, he had worked as an industrial chemist and trained in clinical theology.22 By 19 November 1981, File was reporting to the council that he person-ally was fully booked, seeing twenty clients a week. Importantly, ten lay people were qualified to counsel, and others were working their way through a three-part course. The council unanimously approved that the balcony in the new hall be enclosed to provide space for the service.
By May 1984, the counselling service had so grown that it needed a management committee, which was to include the dean and two council members. File returned to England in 1985 to fulfil an awkward caveat in the pension regulations whereby he had to be filling an active post in the Church of England or he would not get a pension. He was succeeded by the Reverend Gareth Jones in 1985. The Reverend Karlo Misso from Sri Lanka gave strength to the cathe-dral��s international flavour by becoming director in December 1989.
An interesting meeting took place between the dean, the Pastoral Committee and the counselling service in the spring of 1993.23 The dean found that many of the staff were both committed Christians and very professional. They did not impose values and provided some-thing different from clergy counselling. They received referrals from other churches too. Mrs. Margaret Evans of the Pastoral Committee was firmly convinced that the service was not offering sufficiently Christian counselling. Mrs. Evans was also opposed to the sale of any items in the cathedral grounds on a Sunday. She is remembered for being moved, on occasion, to break into charismatic song at inter-esting moments during services, but she was not alone in sensing a possible compromise on doctrine over counselling.
A debate in the council over the name of the service in June 1990 preferred ��St John��s Cathedral Counselling Service�� over ��The Counselling Service, St John��s Cathedral�� on the grounds that the latter might be ��misleading�� to Christians. The service��s mission, ��to empower the human spirit towards greater awareness in making choices for growth and happiness��, certainly meets its objective of being non-denominational. Today, its website has dropped the word ��cathedral�� altogether. The cathedral accepted that psycho-logical counselling of a spiritual value for all comers could not be professionally sound if it had to be avowedly religious at all turns. The counselling service has moved out from under the cathedral��s crowded roof. The directorship has shifted from a clerical profes-sional on the cathedral staff to a lay professional outside.
Initially, pastoral direction of the counselling service added to the swelling numbers in clergy ranks. An allowance had been made for a fourth man to cover time spent, overall, on the daughter churches. By the middle of 1981, Peggy Sheldon and Eric Chong, deaconed in St John��s in September 1980, were full time at the cathedral. Michael Simpson was at Stanley, John Tyrell looked after Pok Fu Lam and Ron File ran the counselling service.
Over the following eleven years, fourteen chaplains served in the cathedral, each having fulfilled at least one three-year contract. At the beginning of the century, when to sustain one chaplain was hard enough and often not done, this would have been incomprehensible.
Accommodation was as haphazard as ever. The dean lived in St Martin��s House on Upper Albert Road as a tenant of the diocese. Eric Chong had a flat there too. Michael Simpson lived in the St Stephen��s College bungalow, Ron File was in another diocesan rental in Ridley House, John Tyrell was accommodated expensively in Cape Mansion and Peggy Sheldon lived, in admirable economy, with her husband.
In 1983, Tyrell was given a buffet supper farewell at the dean��s house, and the dean himself said farewell at a $55-a-head dinner at the Hong Kong Country Club. His successor, Paul Clasper, moved into the lodge in the close because of mooted redevelopment plans for Upper Albert Road. Nothing was to come of the development till 2011, but Clasper spent three years in a gloomy, humid building, prey to lost souls, petitioners and petulant parishioners. It was part of his style that he did not seem to mind, but it was never lived in by clergy again.
The briefly serving Dean Smethurst rejected the lodge even before he had arrived, and his successor, Chris Phillips, as dean from 1987, did not have long to avoid it before it was sensibly converted into the administration office in 1991. Phillips had been a missionary school teacher in Zambia before taking a teaching job with the English Schools Foundation in Hong Kong. He was active in the congrega-tion, chairing the Pastoral Committee, before becoming ordained at the 9 a.m. Eucharist on 22 June 1980, and joining the non-stipendi-ary support team. He became a full-time chaplain in December 1983, to replace Eric Chong.
At this time, the dean��s and the chaplains�� stipends were fixed to the government master pay scale. Chaplains were at point 27 and paid $5,115 a month, the same as the vicars of St Andrew��s and Christ Church. The dean was at point 30. Eric Chong was on the ��Chinese scale�� and paid $2,800 per month. Dignity over this point alone may have deterred Chinese clergy from taking up posts at St John��s.
Phillips was the priest most available to carry out the duties of priest-in-charge during the interregnums following Paul Clasper and David Smethurst. In February 1988, following the sudden depar-ture of David Smethurst, the Board of Patronage recommended that Phillips be made acting dean for a trial two years, because of his short time in the cathedral and holy orders. There was a gust of opposi-tion to this. The honorary secretary and Reverend Chris Butt led a call for immediate permanent status. F. H. Li said it was people on the board, like Angela Smith, who were not St John��s congregation members who were worried. These concerns were swept aside. D. Mace and S. Dobbing moved a motion to make Phillips permanent.24 Both Frederick Johnson and John Foster had become deans directly from the chaplaincy, but Chris Phillips��s evolution into the deanship from having been a layperson in the same cathedral only seven years before was peculiar in its speed. It bore testament to the management style of the trustees, his own talents and the quick-fire ethic of Hong Kong from which not even the Church was removed.
On the council there was change too. Alan Lack, the honorary treasurer and sometime trustee who had sat on it for twenty-three years, was the government director of marine leaving on retirement. He had been a characterful and energetic mainstay of the church, at the helm at demanding times. He was sometimes capable of propos-als that were at once practical and indigestible. He wanted the west door shut during services in winter to keep out draughts. As treas-urer he was succeeded by Peter Williams, another senior civil servant and formerly commissioner of the ICAC. In fact, the civil service predominance on the council was a thing of the past, but only just. Expatriate predominance remained, of course. At that point, it even had an African flavour.
One member, Laurence Stretton, a South African with still strong roots, was a juvenile court magistrate and was to die back there two years hence. Dr. Elizabeth Hynd, who was a science teacher, came from Lesotho; and Mike Sammes, like the other two, a devout evan-gelical, had previously been in Zambia, where he had been a lay reader and involved with the Church there. Other stalwarts of the council in 1986 were Michael Dennis, who had been with Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation since 1961, and Roger Kynaston, the operations manager of the MTR (Mass Transit Railway).
In October 1985, Canon Henry Wittenbach wrote to remind the dean that he was still an honorary canon of St John��s. His name had been omitted from the list in the Review.25 He was the last survivor of the four canons created by Bishop R. O. Hall in 1945, but survive he did. The recipient of the letter, Paul Clasper, was to become one of a new batch of four honorary canons, including David Leigh, who missed that shell in the organ loft in 1941, Jane Hwang, one of the cathedral��s celebrated female ordinands, and Joe Gooch, a non-stipendiary priest who was catering manager of the Jockey Club. Cataloguer of his colleagues, Roger Holloway wrote of Gooch��s almost exaggerated Cockney accent, his shiny cheeks, his bounce and his limitless generosity. Jim Gooch died two years after the honour was bestowed.
An interesting appointment in November 1988 was the Leaves couple, the Reverend Nigel and the Reverend Julie. They had met at theological college in England and had been recently married. Even though he had four chaplains on the cathedral roll, Dean Phillips had no one with him, full time, at the cathedral itself. The demands on the cathedral seemed to be growing. At the February meeting of the council there had been a call for the expansion of the clergy. The Leaves must have been an appealing prospect.
They were not exactly two for the price of one, but the economy in accommodation was not ignored. They were not, as individuals, well ahead of other candidates in their appeal. They were relatively inexpe-rienced, Julie especially so. She was still a deacon. As an appointment, the duo were something of a risk. Yet it was one that the council took. It turned out to be quite inspired. Nigel was scholarly and good with young people. Julie joined an AIDS support group. In June 1991, she became involved with Comfort Care Concern, which was originally begun to help people cope with terminal illness. Julie took a special interest in AIDS victims, and by December, she had Comfort Care Concern meeting in the cathedral. Dean Phillips picked up on this with enthusiasm, and when the Leaves left for Perth in January 1992, he made it clear he wanted ministry on these lines continued. The ultimate result, the HIV Education Centre, a major outreach ministry, began in 1996. Julie Leaves is now known as Mother Julie, Rector of Sandgate-Northpoint Parish in the Diocese of Brisbane. Father Nigel, Associate Priest there with her, is also a Canon of Brisbane Cathedral. Julie might also make a claim as a mother of a St John��s outreach ministry.
The non-stipendiary ministry supporting the cathedral expanded. Jenny Wong and Stephen Green were priested in 1989 in St John��s.
John Chynchen was deaconed in Salisbury.26 Chynchen was a char-tered surveyor who had run a successful practice in South-east Asia for some years. He was later to join the full-time ministry of the cathedral. Wong was a schoolteacher who was to become principal of St Stephen��s Girls�� College. Green was an executive of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank who later went on to be its global chairman and then join the British coalition government in 2011 as minister of state for trade. In November 1990, Erik Larsen arrived on the team from the Episcopal Church. He described himself to John Chynchen, now playing reporter for the Review, as a Connecticut-born cradle Episcopalian who attended their divinity school in Boston.
The Leaves and Peter Frowley gone in one sweep, Dean Phillips travelled to England on a recruitment trip and returned empty-handed. He reported to the council, ��It is difficult to attract clergy to work here. Why that can be I am not quite certain.�� It had always been difficult. In the past there were the distances involved and the threat of discomfort, disturbance and disease. These had been minimised by the 1980s but, to a younger priest in England, so had the prospects. Mission to China remained sealed off. Ministry would be to a floating parish of middle-class expatriates, and for that he would put himself dangerously out of the preferment loop back in England. Hong Kong may have been a shoppers�� paradise, but towards that and the sort of recreation his parishioners could afford, the chaplain��s salary would not go very far.
The cathedral��s income did not go very far either in that decade. Replacement of the roof, which an appeal for had not entirely covered, had been an outstanding challenge at the beginning of the decade. Commitment to diocesan funds was significant and consistent. The generosity of the council, if not boundless, pushed resources to the limit. Many members saw Hong Kong as changing and needful both in the church and outside it. Where the cathedral was not establish-ing ministries of its own, it wanted to give to those that did. There was conflict in the council between the needs of the cathedral and the wider world. Sometimes it was dramatic, on occasion it was painful, inevitably it was formative.
In 1983, there was an overall budget deficit of $357,000. Hands went to the pumps. In January 1984, there was a reversal of policy on the disbursement of Michaelmas Fair Funds. After endowment funds had made the cathedral��s income more stable, the fair��s funds had been released for donation to outside charities. Now the Michaelmas Fair Committee was asked to agree that $70,000 of the takings should be given to the General Fund. Some, including Dr. Michael Sammes, objected to money being diverted from charity to the deficit. The dean, using what seemed like a sleight of hand, said that the $70,000 could be allocated for use in the cathedral close. Since the close was open for the benefit of the general public, this could be regarded as charity.27
Council member Jack Mitchell, who was to become a temporary administrator of the cathedral in his retirement, had called the 1983 budget ��inward looking�� and the congregation ��complacent��. John Yaxley said at the council meeting of April 1984 that the cathedral compound could hardly be called a charity and expressed disappoint-ment that the cathedral��s contribution to the diocese had also been reduced. Clearly disturbed, he was driven to blunt language, calling the cathedral, ��an inward-looking expatriate congregation cut off from the mainstream of the diocese��. Both these men were senior civil servants. Perhaps their working involvement with the majority of the population made them more acutely aware of what was needed for this expatriate congregation to integrate. They spoke about impor-tant instruments, the budget and the diocesan allocation. In its giving overall, the cathedral was much more praiseworthy.
Even allowing for the $70,000 shaved off for the close, the Michaelmas Fair raised $124,000, distributed amongst the CMS ($10,000), the Diocese of Sabah ($10,000), the Bible Society ($5,000), St Christopher��s Home ($5,000), Holy Nativity Church ($5,000), St James�� Settlement ($30,000), Hong Kong Sea School ($2,000), Kam Tin Church School ($5,000), Rotary Club School ($4,000), the Spastics Association ($15,000) and the Mission For Migrant Workers ($3,600).28 The Cathedral Council was perfectly capable of giving $120,000 towards street sleepers or $650,000 to St Stephen��s Chapel and, later in 1990, $500,000 for a Bishop Hoare memorial chapel to St Peter��s Castle Peak, near the place that the bishop had drowned. At one point, the Pastoral Committee, which had a modest working budget of $30,000, blew the lot on a needy school in Papua New Guinea.
There was disparate giving from all directions. In 1984, for example, there was a retiring collection for the Busoga Trust Uganda and donations to the Kwun Tong Health project and the rebuilding of a Sri Lankan church. Let it be remembered too that the Sunday school raised money towards a horse for a Philippines priest.
In October of 1985, the council and the Michaelmas Fair Committee were in disagreement again over charity giving.29 The council complained that too much was being given to the already well-funded St James�� Settlement. They wanted to be more involved in making the list of recipients. In March 1986, they resolved to work towards a formula for giving. The solution they arrived at, opaque in its wisdom, was that there should be no formula. In the same year, the council allocated $60,000 to the Diocesan Finance Campaign and $60,000 to diocesan clergy stipends. This was only $10,000 more than was given in 1979, and the Pastoral Committee urged them to make it $150,000. By 1987, the budget had a deficit projection of $520,000. When Carrian Holdings imploded, $80,000 had been lost. Onto this scene of conflicting priorities came the Reverend David Smethurst.
Paul Clasper had resisted a mild clamour for him to serve a second term. He was 65 and wanted to see more of his grandchildren in the United States. He felt he had one more opportunity to practise a dif-ferent kind of ministry and took up visiting professorships at Virginia Theological Seminary and the General Theological Seminary in New York. Alarm bells over David Smethurst��s suitability as dean in suc-cession to Clasper were pealing before he was appointed. He was not the first choice for the job. A more favoured candidate had dropped out. After he had visited Hong Kong, at least two council members expressed written reservations to the Board of Patronge.30 A deputa-tion of the clergy went to them with concerns. The board listened politely but was not swayed. One of the trustee members from St Andrew��s was keen on Smethurst��s evangelicalism. After the liberal road which he felt Paul Clasper had gone down, he told one of the cathedral clergy that it was necessary to ��redress the tendencies��.
Smethurst had considerable talents. He preached well. His ideas on stewardship were creative. Yet his evangelicalism and his fondness for the charismatic were not hidden. In an interview with the Review, shortly after his arrival, he happily admitted that he had once been called in by the Bishop of Manchester for unorthodox use of laypeople in Holy Communion. Nonetheless, clerical referees spoke warmly of him.31
For a priest who was so personable socially, it surprised many how quickly he alienated people. At the first staff meeting, he told the clergy, ��I know a dead church when I see one.�� The Cathedral Council minutes, normally models of the calm in the passive voice, positively hum with tensions.
At the May 1987 council meeting, the dean criticised the council��s forward planning. He ordered committees to submit plans for the fol-lowing twelve months and to cap the session, he proposed compre-hensive review of the Church of England Ordinance to reflect social change. In the June meeting, Dr. Hynd, a supporter of the dean, began with a proposal to put street sleepers on the upper floor of the lodge. The discussion was so protracted and divided that its length was com-plained about. There was disagreement over an art exhibition in Holy Week, and one clergy member asked to go on the record to disassoci-ate himself from an invitation to a prominent American evangelist, Luis Palau. Increasingly, the dean found support from groups who favoured conservative evangelicalism and charismatic renewal. These were in a minority in a congregation which had recently enjoyed Clasper��s more catholic liberalism.
The main point of difference between the dean and his council was radical. He believed that churches like St John��s should give away much of their money. In the final volcanic council meeting he chaired on 15 October 1987, he said that they had nothing to fear about the church remaining an economic entity after giving, because God favours charity. What he failed to understand or refused to accept was that the cathedral was only just an economic entity, even with its endowments, which were carefully locked down against precisely the disbursing passions which were in the dean��s chest.
The matter came to a speedy head when Canon David Bindon, commissary from the Church of Melanesia, arrived in Hong Kong on a fundraising tour. A hurricane had struck the Solomon Islands and destroyed an Anglican college. He needed $2 million. The dean wanted to help in a very significant way. He was advised that the college had assets in Auckland. Smethurst countered that they were tied up. The irony was that so were the cathedral��s. Nevertheless, he instructed the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank to liquidate the trust funds. This cannot be done with a dean��s signature alone. Trustees Alan Lack and Li Fook Hing refused to add theirs.
The dean revealed this and a subsequent difficult session with the council in his sermon at the 9 a.m. Eucharist, which packed maximum exposure by being in front of the governor and broadcast that day on RTHK. The eruption over this came at the very end of that October meeting, the last official trace of Smethurst as dean. He was accused of revealing confidential matters, misrepresenting the church��s wealth, circumventing the council and raising matters inappropriate to a worship service. The dean replied that his sermon was prophetic and that prophecy leads to discomfiture. The dean led the congregation, and the bishop supported his mandate. He could not be bound by the council. He was wrong on both points. The trustees got his resignation. The bishop revoked his licence in Hong Kong.
Smethurst had some considerable support in the congregation. There were those who saw a purity in disendowment for charity as deeply attractive. The congregation was not exactly divided but cer-tainly fractured. Council minutes were leaked to the South China Morning Post. There was a brief slanging match in its letters column. The November 1987 council meeting was almost as painful as the October one. There were those on the council, like Michael Sammes and Elizabeth Hynd, who felt that the speed and confidentiality with which Smethurst had been removed was opaque and had cir-cumvented them. The trustees were compelled by a vote to give the membership a confidential account, which was accepted. There was concern too for Smethurst��s future. Lady Heath, wife of the govern-ment��s director of protocol, asked if the Archbishop of Canterbury had been informed of what had happened to him. Indeed, the arch-bishop had.
In a letter sent out to the congregation on 18 December 1987, it was felt necessary to say, ��We realise that members of the congrega-tion had received from David and Dorothy love friendship and spir-itual counsel on a personal level and we extend our sympathy to those individuals in their loss.�� Yet there was added an observation which found its way back to those earliest meetings of the trustees, in the long-vanished vestry, in the humid half-apse, at the east end of the original church, ���K from time to time the trustees may be forced to make very painful decisions for what they believe to be the overall well-being of the cathedral��.
St John��s steamed on through its crises. Though deans came and went, the 1980s to the early 1990s was a period of quite significant structural alteration, some of it very clear and some of it difficult to see. Nevertheless, what was done has left the church more viable as a building and more functional as a cathedral. The least visible but most enormous alteration was the replacement of the roof during 1981. The termites�Xthe white ants�Xhad taken their destruction to a new level. For only the second time in its history, St John��s was having to take its top off and replace it. Man Sing and Co. were contracted to do the job for $2 million. The total cost turned out to be $3 million. Dean Sidebotham firmly believed the money would be forthcoming through donations and that there would be no need to launch an appeal. The predicament was publicised to the congrega-tion, interested individuals and hongs. The dean pledged to sit outside the cathedral on All Saints�� Day to receive gifts.
Vigers and Man Sing representatives met at the cathedral on a Tuesday evening to pray for the project and the safety of the workers. Work began, and what had threatened during major works in times past came to pass this time. All services, including the major Sunday celebrations, were moved into the old hall. The contractors moved with what despatch was possible in matters as weighty as roofs, to return the congregation from its exile. The church was re-roofed with Spanish tiles over Japanese plywood and Malaysian hardwood. Ventilation was improved, and the opportunity was taken to improve the lighting and install new organ speakers. For months, the building was a cavern of scaffolding, dust and plastic sheeting.
The congregation repossessed it on the first Sunday of October 1981. The physical exercise had been a success. The financing had not quite matched it. In March 1982, towards the total cost of $2,962,453, some $601,000 had come from cathedral funds, members and friends had given $1,003,000, and companies had donated $1,045,900. Over $300,000 was still needed. The one physical casualty of the restoration had been some of the pews. The work being done inside the church was too sweeping to allow the furniture to sit amongst it. There was no alternative but to move it outside, where it got caught in the February rains. The thought that it might have been stored in the old hall and the congregation worship in the rains must have been dismissed.
Weather was not the only threat to the pews. The council was looking at them stormily. They were, admittedly, in bad shape by the time the restoration work was beginning. Their long-term mainte-nance was in question. It was not just a question of replacing the rattan seats and backing, but whether the wooden joints of the framework would give up on being further tested by time. Chairs and benches were being considered as an alternative, the best of the old seating being moved to the north transept. It looked as if St John��s signature seating might be usurped. At a meeting in September 1981, Li Fook Hing came down strongly on the side of retaining the rattan. A demonstration pew had been satisfactorily restored for $2,500.
To do them all would cost $125,000. Concerns about the joints had been magnified. They would last longer than ten years. To throw away these treasures in rosewood would be wrong and expensive, he thought. The idea of replacing them is still mooted today. They are notoriously heavy, and the difficulties in moving them reduce flex-ibility for alternative services and performances. However, the seats are unusually generous and well aerated for pews, and the nave would be duller without their uncomplicated colonial grace. Nobody can summon up enough ruthless utilitarianism to do the deed.
The organ was replaced at this period, too. It was the sixth the cathedral had had and the fourth in forty years. You can imagine the scepticism over the usefulness of electronic organs and the nostalgia for a return to pipes. However, in June 1987, it was realised that, even if the space had still been there, the only hope for the survival of a pipe organ was to air-condition the whole cathedral. There was obvious disappointment that the Allen Digital Computer organ 623�V3 from 1979 had become something of a wreck in such a short time. It had no trade-in value either, and no one could work out why twenty-seven clothes pegs were found inside it. Yet Allen still stood high in reputation, and it was to them St John��s took its business again. The Coxion Fund for Organs, set up in memory of his father by Dr. Eric Tso, who had done so much towards the 1966 Thomas organ, was so endowed that only the income from it and not its bulk could be used for purchase, so the very flexible and bountiful Percy Dillon Fund was used to buy the organ.
On 20 April 1989, the installation took place of the new Allen ADC8350A digital computer with eighty-three speaking stops using draw knobs. It had seventeen speaker channels feeding thirty-six separate speakers and 1,700 watts of power. Carlo Curley, virtuoso American organist, came out specially for a 12 May inaugural concert. He was described by the Review as, ��outrageous, eccentric and skilful��, and admission to hear him was $75. Doreen King recalls of Curley that ��he was a very large man and one could only be amazed by the deftness of his feet��.
The most evident of the alterations undertaken at this time is also the most recent change to the layout within St John��s. From spring 1990 to the end of 1991, the lodge, the new hall and the old hall were renovated. In June 1988, a working group made a preliminary report on the uses and possible alterations to these three locations, including an extension to the old hall. With what one suspects was a touch of weariness, Li Fook Hing summarised three previous schemes which had the same objectives and had come to nothing. In 1974, Dean Howe had been quite enthused over a rather advanced idea to redevelop the new hall, make alterations to the old hall and even integrate the church itself into the scheme by creating a walkway into the north transept. He saw this as assisting the flow of people and theological ideas. The council saw it as a vast expense and it did not happen. Neither, as Li pointed out, did a 1975 plan to extend and create three storeys out of it for staff quarters, a verger��s flat, meeting hall and even a coffee bar and patio. A subsequent idea for a new office building on the north lawn proved to be impossible, because of the $2 million that would be needed for a retaining wall along Battery Path. So, the council had to be satisfied with minor alterations in the new hall and soundproofing of the extraordinary cockloft office arrangement which the dean had been hoisted into at the east end of the new hall.
The tentative plan of 1988 found more traction if not simply because a stage had been reached in the use of space where some-thing had to be done. It began with the remaining loyalty to the idea that clergy should be accommodated in the close, not now in the lodge but in apartments that could be tacked onto the old hall. There was a clear pastoral appeal in having a priest on the premises, and because of the skyrocketing rental market, economy figured in the reckoning. Yet it was an extravagant use of working space to deliver what would have been cramped quarters. Along the way, this item disappeared from the plans. A building committee was appointed, and $150,000 was allocated to exploratory works. In February 1990, Alan Gilbert and Associates were appointed to start the renovations.
As matters stood, all the administration was conducted from the old hall. In that cockloft were three office spaces, including one for the dean and one for the CAB. Under the cockloft was the bookstore. All this was to go. At the east end were the kitchen, the lavatories and what had been the old verger��s quarters being used by the CLARES Castaways for the charity sale of second-hand items. It was very much the arrangement you will find there today. The one-storey annex next to the entrance was where the dean��s office used to be before he was usurped by the general office reception area and storage needs. There are small structures, brick huts which stand near the clergy vestry and the Castaways shop. Known as the ��pillboxes��, which hints at their charm, they were actually used for minor staff quarters. As one long-serving priest recalled, ��Families lived in them. Children may have been born there.��
In the new hall the Harold Smythe Room had been subdivided to give office space to the CAB and MFMW. A meeting room with storeroom was behind it. Upstairs was a large room�Xnow the Fanny Li Hall�Xwhich doubled as a theatre with stage and a dining room with kitchen and lavatories. Halfway up the stairs was the library. The balcony overlooking the first floor room was blocked off for the counselling service. Amahs lived in the basement. The lodge, now the administrative centre of the cathedral, had become two largely empty floors put to casual use.
In April 1990, the council approved Alan Gilbert and Associate��s plan to reorganise the space and shift functions to the purpose which you see today. Dr. Mary Board resigned from the council because they passed the plan before she had chance to see it and because she was sure that it would interfere with facilities available for the Michaelmas Fair, for which she was responsible that year. For some, the fair was a loyalty above all. The project was finished in December 1991. The lodge became the main office and the dean��s office. The new hall now housed the David Kwok Conference Room and the Kenneth Tyson Library. The old hall had cleared itself. The bookstore found a perma-nent home in the single-storey annex. Some of the organisations which it had been hoped to house did not find space. Most notably, the CAB had to move out. This is recalled with regret by some, because the CAB was an early port of call for many newly arrived expatriates who would become acquainted with St John��s thereby.
At the July Annual Church Meeting in 1992, Dean Phillips paid tribute to the immense amount of volunteer work and expertise which had been put into the project, particularly from trustee Eric Bohm and the Reverend John Chynchen, who had all but sacrificed his practice as a chartered surveyor to be on site in the cathedral. Still, Phillips thought that this degree of volunteerism was neither fair nor easy, and he stated specifically that, in future, renovation projects needed a project manager.
New and reworked spaces were given particular names, some of which fell into immediate disuse. The office in the old lodge should have been ��Church House��. No such pomposity ever fell from a lip. It has always been called ��the Office��. The new hall building is supposed to be called ��The Tebbut Wing��, and it is a pity this never caught on. It was named after an official cathedral architect who was responsible for much work round the cathedral in its more recent years. At a January 1990 meeting of the council, Mrs. June Li was concerned about where money was coming from for the renovation in conjunction with the costs of the newly adopted Discovery Bay daughter church and the recent donation to the Castle Peak Church. The answer seems to have been from the Lord through Mrs. Tebbut. At that point, the architect��s wife, Daisy, gave $1 million in memory of her husband.
June Li and her husband, Fook Hing, were in the forefront of private donors to St John��s. In honour of this, the building that had variously been referred to as the cathedral hall or the old hall was formally named the Li Hall. This was not for any particular gift to that recent project. The Lis gave prodigiously to the Church church in many directions over the years. It is fair to say that, if they had not brought their generosity to the replacing of the roof a decade before, the congregation would long ago have been sitting amidst fallen debris in puddles of rain.
June Li��s prudence over money is laudable in a great church where worshippers are forever custodians for posterity. Yet she doubtless had an instinct for where the money was coming from. It was coming from successive generations of people like her, like Daisy Tebbut, Mrs. Percy Dillon, Noel Croucher, Sir Paul Chater and M. J. D. Stephens, who originally funded most of the old hall and had hoped to remain anonymous. Giving through faith runs strongly on anonym-ity. Because lips were sealed and records lost or never kept, there can be no account of the dollars that ran through St John��s with no name attached to them.
The May 1985 edition of the Review carried a letter written to the Dean, Paul Clasper, from John Foster, in which he talks about the shortcomings of the still-unreformed new hall. ��I would like to have demolished the whole block and rebuilt,�� he writes. Forty years hence, his successors would still like to do that. ��We even discussed the pos-sibility of pulling down the whole of St John��s Cathedral and building a skyscraper with a cathedral on the ground floor.�� His successors think rather less of that. Then Foster recalled the words of an old friend and worshipper which drew him back from the fancy: ��Tread lightly on the stones which form the floor of St John��s, for beneath them lies part of my heart.��
It is difficult to evince pomp or civic ceremony in the ground floor of a skyscraper. St John��s continues to stage that. Bishops have continued to be consecrated and installed as bishops, in the case of Peter Kwong in 1981 and 1999, and Paul Kwong in 2000, with the great dignities of the English Church��s tradition and to the sounds of trumpets. St John��s has managed to remain a civic centre of thanksgiving and memorial worship for communities beyond the Anglican and, on occasion, Christian fold. People removed from England and with only the mistiest notions of Anglican values feel comfortable gathering in recognition of some fellowship under St John��s Gothic roof.
Yet there was one grand and poignant moment when St John��s Cathedral was a colonial church for the very last time. The British governor, Sir Edward Youde, died of a heart attack on 5 December 1987, on a visit to Beijing to negotiate the terms of the joint agree-ment under which the colony would be finally and irrevocably be returned to China. A courageous and erudite man who had worked exhaustingly and with diligence and could broadcast his Christmas messages in Chinese, he established a surprisingly deep respect among Hong Kong Chinese. He was granted what is described in the United Kingdom as a royal ceremonial funeral, a rare honour, approved by the sovereign and involving a procession and full military honours. His coffin, borne on a gun carriage, was escorted by a large contingent of the British garrison and high-ranking official mourners, to a slow march, down the hill from Government House to St John��s. Within the church built by the governors who began the colony, to the strains of the ��Death March�� from ��Saul�� and Elgar��s ��Enigma Variations��, the governor who arranged its end was bidden farewell.
A plaque to Edward Youde from the Hong Kong Civil Service, a little too large, perhaps, but suitably unadorned, is on the wall in the south-west corner of the nave. It was supposed to have gone some-where further up the church, but that was judged over-prominent. After one hundred years of the saintly, sad, great and good of the empire being up there, the only memorial tablet left on the walls is to a Welsh nonconformist who gave it away. For a church that has known surprises and professes selflessness, the irony and the purity in that are perfect.

Chapter 9 Into the ��Chinese Century��
The 1954 building, the Tebbut Wing, is the most recent structural addition to St John��s but far from the last word on the compound��s north-west corner. To the contrary, the council discussed the site��s future in 2011, and a strong possibility was that Dean Foster��s wish may be granted and the whole structure razed as part of an alto-gether more ambitious project. From that last point of the church��s alteration, as colonial authority waned in favour of irresistible Chinese sovereignty, history shunts into the back of current affairs. The cathedral may still have been the spiritual refuge for economic transients and ��short-timers��, but Hong Kong has developed new generations of ��belongers��. Many who worshipped and worked at St John��s twenty years ago do so still. There are still living and compet-ing memories of events.
The handover to Chinese rule in 1997 was a smooth passage for Christian denominations in Hong Kong. The newly formed Province of the Sheng Kung Hui treats the Mainland authorities with a certain deftness and achieves cooperative results. Representatives of the State Council��s Bureau of Religious Affairs attended the installation of Paul Kwong as Bishop of Hong Kong Island on 15 January 2007. They continued attendances at ceremonies involving church leaders. At the consecration of the former Dean of St John��s, Andrew Chan, as a bishop on 25 March 2012, there was a pew full of Mainland offi-cials, including members of the Central Government Liaison Office, representatives of the Bureau of Religious Affairs and the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing. Also present were sixteen guests from the China Christian Council in Shanghai and Guangdong.
The cathedral felt barely a breeze from the handover. There was the briefest of conversations over the future of the fabled freehold and whether this might have to be converted to a lease with the new government. That would have been unaffordable for the Church and probably have caused its departure from the site, which was a result no one sought. In any event, the covenant under which the land was used had so many restrictions that a change in status did not become an issue.
The Church in Hong Kong did some nation-building of its own in harmony with the handover. The anomaly created by Hong Kong��s withdrawal from the Chung Hua Sheng Kung Hui in 1951 was faced up to as the end of British rule neared. The wandering Diocese of Hong Kong decided to anchor itself as a province at a synodical meeting in December 1991.
The options before it were independence or joining up with Sabah, Taiwan and Singapore in a new joint province. Interestingly, most del-egates were comfortable with the status quo, but they were persuaded by Bishop Peter Kwong that coming political change compelled the Church to keep pace. The appeal of a union with the other dioceses was a stimulus to internationalism and grew from the sense that Hong Kong was too small to go it alone and that the diocese lacked the experience and the time to put something together for itself.
On the other hand, there was little contact with the other dioceses, and to create it and maintain it would be expensive. The dioceses did not have much in common with one another, and the Hong Kong Diocese��s independence and traditions would be compromised. This faintly chauvinistic reasoning was partly a cover for a political reality. The Anglican Church in a Hong Kong newly regained by the moth-erland should not appear, from the point of view of secular Chinese authority, to be under instruction from outside sovereignties. That reasoning won the day. Peter Kwong was to be installed as first Archbishop of the Hong Kong Sheng Kung Hui in 1998. This was achieved in the face of a scepticism on the part of Canterbury as strong as opposition from any other quarter. After a fact-finding visit to Hong Kong, which opened the eyes of the Anglican Consultative Council to the realities on the ground, the communion��s bureaucracy was won over.
George Carey, Archbishop of Canterbury, had visited Hong Kong in September 1994, on his way to China, and preached in the cathedral on missionary faith in a pluralistic world. For his pains, he attracted vigorous criticism in an editorial in the Eastern Express. Undeterred, he came back for the inauguration of the new province and the enthronement of Peter Kwong on All Saints�� Day 1998. This was one great ceremony that St John��s stood silent for. So great were the numbers expected that it was held in the Convention and Exhibition Centre in Wan Chai. The starkly multipurpose hall, built blind to senses of occasion, was decorated by ecclesiastical motifs and back-lit by faux stained glass windows. The impression of a Hollywood lot was redeemed by the joy over what was being achieved.
Following his retirement in January 2007, the vindicated Peter Kwong became Archbishop Emeritus. Peter Kwong can be regarded as the principal architect of the Hong Kong Anglican Church��s survival into the Chinese century. From 1984 to 1990, as Bishop of Hong Kong and Macao, he worked tirelessly as a member of the Basic Law Drafting Committee. He did a great deal to assure Hong Kong��s religious freedoms, not least by making close connections with the Religious Affairs Bureau of the State Council of the PRC. He also forged closer and more forward-looking relationships with the leaders of the Chinese Christian Three-Self Patriotic Movement and the China Christian Council, the institutional embodiment of non-Roman Christianity in the Chinese mainland. He became especially close to Bishop K. H. Ting (Ding Guangxun), the last Sheng Kung Hui Bishop in China, who was then head of both bodies.
The cathedral��s part in this movement to a province was not insig-nificant but on the sidelines nonetheless. The meetings from 1 to 5 December 1991, which set the scene, were held in the Li Hall, a convenience which underscored the symbolism and physical central-ity of St John��s. According to the former Dean, Chris Phillips, ��there was a great deal of goodwill towards the Sheng Kung Hui and a real desire to be part of the diocese. There were, however, issues involved in the relationship . . . It was far easier to let the ��parallel universes�� continue so long as relations were amicable.��
The expressed wish on the part of the clergy and leading laypeo-ple to come closer to the newly forming province was sincere. At the Cathedral Council meeting on 8 January 1998, members were urged to attend a scheduled talk by the bishop on the new province. At the June meeting that year, the dean spoke of the importance of attendance at council meetings in the year ahead, because of issues that would affect St John��s status and its place in the province. These issues did not arise, at least not in the council.
By the September meeting, a consultation document on the province ��In Christ We Move Forward�� had been issued. The English-speaking churches had what appeared to be a small role. St John��s set up a discussion group including the dean, Chaplain Peter Yeats, and council members Timon Shum, Justin Ko and Cindee Lee. On 14 October 1998, the council members of all three English parishes came together to air their views to the provincial secretary, the Reverend Paul Tong. At the council ��Away day�� in September the fol-lowing year, Dean Phillips still lamented the little involvement that St John��s was having with the new Hong Kong Island Diocese. More must be done, he said, to ��be taken seriously�� and get involved with the province��s five-year plan.
Archbishop Emeritus Peter Kong, in conversation in April 2012, recalled that secular and lay committees set up to study the future and the choice of membership was based on suitability not represen-tation. Any perceived exclusion of the English-speaking churches was not deliberate. He pointed out that it had been the habit of history before that time for both language sides of the church in Hong Kong to overlook each other.
Through goodwill and logic there was an attempt to integrate the cathedral physically into the new province, but for much the same reasons as secular government left the freehold alone, it did not get anywhere. The question of making a change of ownership from the trustees to the province was discussed in a council proposal in October 1995. This would involve relinquishing the freehold and making a re-grant by the state which would then have involved $170,000 a year in rates. Simply handing over the freehold was not an option. A proposal that the cathedral should issue a declaration that it held the freehold for the bishop and the province was considered well meaning but not meaningful. An article by Rowan Callick on the province in the 1998 spring edition of the Review1 patiently outlined the circumstances. The Hong Kong Sheng Kung Hui had separate legal status from the English-speaking churches. The Hong Kong Anglican Church had not been a part of the Church of England since 1912, whereas the English churches were firmly established under the Church of England Trust Ordinance, and all their properties were held thereunder. Fraternal gifting or even gestures were impossible outside some profound and sensitive alterations. An extraordinary meeting of the trustees in February 1997 put the cap on it. Advised by the Diocesan Chancellor, Moses Cheng, it was agreed that there should be no substantive change in method of governance and there-fore no change to freehold.
The parallel churches set themselves for a slow convergence in the appointment of the first Chinese dean. After Phillips left hastily in 2003, a move attributed to ill health through stress, Stephen Sidebotham was invited to return as an interregnum dean while bishop and council wrestled with what to do with the office. The Reverend Andrew Chan Au Ming, the provincial secretary, previously a local parish priest trained at Ming Hua and Salisbury Theological Colleges, was invited to become dean. He was installed in May 2005.
The Reverend Ian Lam, who had been the first Chinese chaplain since George She, said quite plainly in the November 1978 issue of the Review, as he left office and went to study theology, that, ��on reflection, it is not essential to have a Chinese chaplain��. When the time came for a Chinese dean, it was certainly not for him to be a dean for the Chinese. Andrew Chan��s application of himself across all of the cathedral��s congregations was thorough and inspiring. His dif-ference from his Western predecessors was in his management style, founded in faith, which led to a courageous, trusting willingness to let others develop by developing tasks for themselves.
It will take time to realise what Andrew Chan��s impact really was on St John��s, but it may turn out that his ethnic value was in relations between the cathedral and the province where, for once, and literally, the two could speak the same language. Chan was elected to succeed as Bishop of West Kowloon in 2012. To have a Chinese diocesan bishop who was once a dean is likely to make the cathedral and the Church in Kowloon, at the very least, more aware of each other.
��We are ever more international, ever less ��colonial��, ever less ��Church of England��,�� said Dean Phillips in a report to a parish con-ference on 2 November 1991.2 Andrew Chan would still have been noticing that fifteen years later, because this lessening process is a gradual one. In 1991, the Reverend Donald Reeves, Rector of St James��s Piccadilly, visited and spoke about the challenges of the new decade. Inspired by him, the congregation conducted a parish survey which reported in October of that year.3
One of its subgroups, under Ms. Sally Stewart, surveyed the con-gregation over the summer months. Out of a sample of 417, 23 per cent were visitors, 26 per cent had lived in Hong Kong for three years or less and 15 per cent were complete newcomers. This was a very transient population.
Of the sample, 61 per cent had English as their mother tongue, 19 per cent claimed Tagalog and 14 per cent spoke Cantonese. Anglicans or Episcopalians made up 65 per cent, and a striking 22 per cent were Roman Catholics, Filipinas who preferred to go to St John��s and probably could not see much difference anyway. Ninety-five per cent of those who walked through the door were baptised and, of those who were not, most were Cantonese. Whatever the linguistic breakdown, the ethnic Chinese who attended were not so much ��locals�� as ��repatriates��. They were emigrants from the 1950s onwards who had returned from overseas and found it either more familiar to worship in English or associate with expatriates. The one regular Cantonese service was and remains the ��anticipated�� Communion on Saturday evening for those whose work does not allow them to attend on Sunday. The cathedral was chosen for this because of its central location. It was never meant to be the seedbed of a separate congre-gation, and originally, clergy from all around the province officiated in rotation to make the point. Even so, Archbishop Peter Kwong recalls that the more regular worshippers tried hard to make it so.
If Ms. Stewart��s exercise had been repeated twenty years later, changes would have been noticed in the increase in the percentage of Filipinas, a reduction in English mother tongue and the appearance of Mandarin speakers from the Mainland. Denominational allegiances would be harder to speculate about. St John��s liturgy ��liberalism��, and standards of preaching and music mean that the ��open altar�� policy has made the cathedral an attractive haven to an eclectic gathering of Christians.
From the debate in that province forming the 1991 synod, time was taken to say that St John��s should ��continue its dual role as cathedral of the diocese and parish church to the international community��. As we have seen, this duality was a concept but not a practice. St John��s role as a diocesan cathedral was symbolic more than working. Now that the former diocese was to be split into three smaller dioceses and there were no plans for cathedrals in East and West Kowloon, the role of St John��s as the sole cathedral and purely for Hong Kong Island was drifting into anomaly.
Archbishop Peter Kwong recalls that the suggestion that St John��s might become a provincial cathedral did not get very far. Expansion into that role threatened its international identity, among the clergy as much as the laity. A counter-idea took hold for a while. The Episcopalian Diocese in Los Angeles had sold its cathedral and resolved to do without one. Nothing in canon law stipulates that a diocese has to have a cathedral. At the Annual Church Meeting of 1995,4 the dean noted that the status of the cathedral in a new province was still unsure and that maybe the Los Angeles-style should be adopted. Phillips was clearly uncomfortable with abandoning ��the dramatic statement�� of a cathedral church in the middle of a city. Under this passing tension, ��St John��s Cathedral Parish�� was adopted as an official description, as though in readiness for the first half of that statement to fall away.
That did not happen. In a typically Anglican resort to patient pas-sivity, the whole issue was left alone and affairs fell into place around it. East and West Kowloon eventually got cathedrals of their own. St John��s is available to its diocese�Xits smallest in 163 years�Xas a gathering place without having to be particularly mothering. It is still a dramatic statement in the centre of the city and a parish church to repatriates as much as expatriates and foreigners of all Christian stripes. This is a twenty-first century distillation of what St John��s was born with. The ��international community�� of 1849 was small, precise and largely British. It was the ruling colonial community, and the cathedral was governed by some of its most influential members. Today, the British do not rule. Their numbers in the international community are diminishing.
Of the laity on the 2011 council, there were six Britons. Four members were Hong Kong Chinese, three were Americans, of whom one was ethnically Japanese and another Chinese, one was a Canadian, one a Malaysian Chinese, one a Singaporean, one a Filipino and two were Indians. Occupations were too diverse to summarise. They ranged from investment analysts and teachers to a wildlife preservation director and a pest controller. The Church Body of 1928 would have failed to comprehend it or would have believed that some advanced form of French Revolution had taken place among the colonies.
Another feature of the modern cathedral which would have sur-prised them in the 1920s is the prevalent misconception that St John��s has a lot of money. Because it has endowments, and cash flows appear to be in seven figures, it is almost dismissed as a rich church. It is a common response from secular society keen to sniff hypocrisy and convinced that no religious institution should have any money at all, without bothering to consider how that might work. Like many cathedral churches, St John��s struggles to maintain a financial position from which it can operate with a modest degree of confi-dence. Its assets might not be wiped out at a stroke exactly, but any church which is custodian of an antique building, has a very varied and sometimes courageous scope to its ministry and relies so much on giving, then funds could well be eliminated by two wing beats from one of global finance��s ��black swan events��.
Against this background, finances at St John��s in the 1990s expe-rienced what might be called ��business as usual��. Good management and good fortune rather more than compensated for mistakes, over-stretching and ill luck. Where giving to the church was concerned, the 1994 stewardship campaign came close to its $3 million target, even though three-quarters of the congregation made no pledges. In November 1995, Dr. Eric To, stalwart of St John��s, gave $820,000 in memory of his wife, a sad but illuminating example of how unforeseen donations came in as significant and repeated fillip to the cathedral��s fortunes. When it came to giving its money away, there was usually a majority of St John��s decision-makers doing that. At the January 1995 council meeting, all the Michaelmas Fair proceeds were voted to charity, and the old argument that they should go to cathedral funds was this time defeated. Thirty per cent went to Helpers for Domestic Helpers, which some were content to interpret as ��in house��, 10 per cent then went each to the St James�� Settlement, China Coast Community, the House of Shalom, Bethune House, the Children��s Cancer Fund, the Society for Relief of Disabled Children and Heep Hong Handicapped Children.
Then, as usual, matters could suddenly go less than well. The October 1996 meeting of the council was being told of a deficit of $673,000 and a decline in stewardship of $340,000 in the first two quarters, put down to inflation, departures and a general ��decline in participation��. Eric Bohm, treasurer and a trustee until his retirement in 2012, was minuted, interestingly, as ��threatening to balance the budget to face realities��. Bohm recalls that, apart from him, there were only four treasurers who could even for once qualify as members of the ��Surplus Club��.
At the May 1997 council, to haul matters round, the three trustees�Xpresumably including the dean�Xtook on the role of treas-urer jointly for three months. The scene lit up a little. By January 1998, there was a reported increase of $400,000 worth of pledges over the year 1996, and the cathedral administrator, Viola Ip, had ��tightened up�� the cash flow.
The On Lee apartment building in Pok Fu Lam, bought long ago with funds from the late Lady Chater, and whose shape was fought over by Croucher and Marden, had become a crucial piece in the cathedral��s financial game. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Bohm and Roger Cole, chairman of the Furnishings and Fittings Committee, had upgraded each flat as it became vacant, to maximize rental value. By 1994, On Lee rents represented 34 per cent of revenue against 31 per cent from stewardship and 16 per cent from collections. It was vital to St John��s income. However, at the Annual Church Meeting of 1995, that year��s stewardship campaign, forcefully led by the just-departed Chaplain and Precentor Erik Larsen, had brought pledged income just past On Lee��s rental income. The annual report for the following year observed that the costs of repairs and maintenance at an ageing On Lee would make it less likely to be ��the cash cow�� it once was.5 Today, the building plays a lesser role of being helpful but not crucial to cathedral income.
Some seek neatness and purpose in mission statements, but St John��s mission refuses to be defined or bounded. Its ministries grow up without much premeditation and run without regimentation. An urge to define what St John��s is or should really be all about is as strong in recent years as ever. It is thwarted as ever by a rambling spontaneity. The Holy Spirit does not seem to move men and women by pattern. There is a desire to help street sleepers, then orphans at the St Christopher��s Home, then a hospice at Sha Tin, the people of Wan Chai at St James��, then mistreated domestic workers, then families wracked by AIDS.
The cathedral works well, as most cathedrals should, as a city church and a centre of ministry and reflection for a weekday working community. Around St John��s the number of offices is huge and grows. They have dwarfed the building and long ago blocked its view of the harbour. Yet their occupants approach in their scores before the day begins, through the lunch hours and their working weekends, to seek refuge from office politics, deals going bad, fears for their job, fatigue and worries over relationships and families. St John��s has not been entirely passive in this ministry. Organised meditative prayer was introduced on Monday lunchtimes in 2009. The lunchtime concerts continue. Christians in Central hold a speaker lunch in the Li Hall once a month. Once a week too, there is a lunchtime Eucharist, and every weekday at 1 p.m. a priest says prayers in the nave.
The lunchtime ministry has grown up in recent years along with the MFMW, HDH, the counselling service and HIV/AIDS education.
Eventually, Reverend Julie Leaves��s involvement with AIDS Comfort Care Concern and the library on AIDS-related topics she left behind developed into a fully fledged outreach programme. In September 1994, the Pastoral Committee looked for support for the AIDS ministry and set up a working party. It seems the widespread misconceptions about contagion from meeting people with HIV/AIDS had infected some in the cathedral. Hugh Phillipson of the Pastoral Committee, at its November meeting, said that St John��s should be a source of strength and solace, not ignorance, and that the congregation needed educating about AIDS. In September 1995, the HIV Drop-In Centre was set up and opened by the governor��s wife, Lavender Patten, in the new hall wing. The cathedral donated $100,000, and other funding came from the AIDS Trust and the Matilda Hospital Charity. Moral support came from the Diocesan Welfare Council, and in May 1995, Elijah Fung was appointed full-time manager with a small staff and a group of volunteers. As yet, it is the only faith-based organisation to take up an AIDS ministry in Hong Kong. Its principle purpose is still the prevention and education on HIV/AIDS among women and young people in particular, and to reduce the stigma attached to the disease. The impact of the centre and the success of its methods have made it a resource for other provinces of the Anglican Communion looking to provide the same ministry.
Among the outreach ministries is ranked the Cathedral Bookshop, which, apart from doing a brisk trade in theological works, cards and candles, is a stopping place for some of the thousands a week who pass through the close from Central to the Peak Tram. It is a first point of enquiry about the cathedral, and on occasion even about the church and Christianity itself. The CLARES, begun back in 1962 by the unhappy Mrs. Till, is in high spirits, and its Castaways Shop for second-hand clothes and books thrives next door, in no apparent competition to the bookshop next door.
In 2011, the Sunday school, at over 200, has reached the levels of attendance seen in the high days of Mesdames Swann and Temple and Sidebotham. The irresistible opportunity of a morning��s free English conversation leads some parents, with no particular religious belief, to set their children on a course of contact with the Christian message. One hundred sixty years ago, the parents of boys at St Paul��s College, bemused perhaps but ambitious for them, did the same thing. Today, though, when the child comes to the altar rail after the school it is to receive the Sacraments and not just a blessing. St John��s has embraced child Communion, in common with other parishes in the Anglican Communion.
The choir developed a rigorous excellence under the direction of Raymond Fu, music master at St Paul��s, who took over from the inde-fatigable Cecilia Kwok. Standards have met the considerable demands of the English Church choral repertoire. No complexity is shirked. Soprano voices had been supplied by St Stephen��s Girls�� College for a while. Now voices are recruited from men and women across a wide spread of the congregation and its contacts, so long as they can truly sing�Xand maintain an uncompromising practice programme.
The diversity of the cathedral and its worship is reflected in the sprouting of choirs. The main Choir remains at its core for the Sung Eucharist and a monthly choral matins. Apart from that, there exists now an Evensong Choir, the Children��s Choir and the Filipino Choir. In 2011, the Main Choir returned delightedly to the past. A less sat-isfactory consequence of liturgical reform was reversed. The chancel was restored to much of its pre-1968 order and floor level. The original marble flooring was revealed, and the whole space regained its classic symmetry and openness whilst keeping the west-facing altar at the steps. The choir was put back into two parts, facing each other, north and south, in a way which is traditional and, they believe, makes better music.
Vyvian Copley-Moyle, who was commended for having handled the cathedral alone for periods at a time, would have been amazed and perhaps joshingly scornful over the seven stipendiary and seven non-stipendiary clergy available to the dean at St John��s in 2012. Spreading what becomes a rich collection of temperaments and talents over the cathedral��s four languages and eclectic involvements is a management challenge for the second decade of the twenty-first century. There is a view that we should not really count William Baxter in 1854, because he was never properly appointed as dean. However, if you do, and the Holman T. Hunt��s teak board by the west door says we should, then Canon Matthias Der, who was installed in succession to Andrew Chan in October 2012, is the twenty-third Chaplain and Dean of the Cathedral Church of St John the Evangelist.
Vincent Stanton would not have been surprised to know that he had a successor of that number. He may have been a little shocked that that the Union flag was no longer flying over him, perhaps happy that he lived within the bounds of a reformed Chinese government but sad that it was atheist. What Stanton would have envied, if such a sin was open to him, is the gushing of educational opportunity which the diocese provided and the teaching that went on in the cathedral that could bring between one and two hundred people a year�Xmostly Chinese�Xto baptism and confirmation under its roof.
He would have applauded the opportunity which this church he had helped found had grown to. That it was surrounded by material-ism and unbelief would have not surprised him. That, in essence, is how it was with his beginning. He would probably have said to Dean Der that his inestimable advantage was that St John��s was there and it stood strong, no matter that the landscape was venal, corrupted and sceptical.
Beneath the east window, which miraculously dulls to near silence the downhill racket of the Garden Road traffic, a thousand pray every Sunday; uncounted hundreds kneel in solitude through the week. Couples who know little about God and nothing of the future take a leap of faith. Those who now know everything about their future lie in caskets. Judges pray for their judgements. Ambulance workers give thanks for their work, and Americans give thanks for being so in November. Welshmen, Filipinas and visiting English schoolchildren sing. Vespers is sung to jazz. The sick are prayed over. Babies are baptised, national reconciliations are rejoiced over. At midnight on Christmas Eve, the people are crammed in every nook, they spill out back through the west door, and they sit in rows on the lawn watching on a screen. How the engineer in Charles St George Cleverly would have marvelled at that.
The marvels can be in the smallest things in St John��s. A home group of Kerala Indian members from the St. Thomas Christian churches, led by a member of the St John��s Cathedral Council, attend a service of evensong in the cathedral. Prayers are said in Malayam. Nothing of this sort could have been imagined by Chaplain Stanton or even foreseen perhaps by Dean Sidebotham.
The cathedral has moved from imperial confidence, through Edwardian complacency, reform, innovation and bouts of parochial-ism, to synodical unity, Chinese sovereignty and being the biggest church in the smallest province. From that 163 years of growth and shift, St John��s is finding the role that makes paramount pastoral sense for it as an English-language Anglican church in a great Chinese city; that is, to be open, working and praying for all who it can touch and all who touch it.
Appendix 1

List of Chaplains, Deans and Bishops
Colonial Chaplains
John Vincent Stanton 1843�V1851 Samuel Watson Steedman 1852�V1853 William Baxter 1854�V1855 James John Irwin 1856�V1865 William Robert Beach 1867�V1870 Richard Hayward Kidd 1871�V1879 William Jennings 1880�V1891

Cathedral Chaplains
Rowland Francis Cobbold 1892�V1902 Frederick Franch Johnson 1902�V1912 Vyvian Henry Copley-Moyle 1912�V1927

Deans
Alfred Swann 1928�V1935 John Leonard Wilson 1938�V1941 Alaric Pearson Rose 1941�V1952 Frederick Stephen Temple 1953�V1959 Barry Dorn Till 1960�V1963 John William Foster 1963�V1973 Rex Alan Howe 1973�V1976 Stephen Francis Sidebotham 1976�V1982 Paul Clasper 1982�V1986 David A. Smethurst 1987 Christopher J. Phillips 1987�V2003 Stephen Francis Sidebotham 2003�V2005 Andrew Chan Au-Ming 2005�V2012 Matthias Clement Tze-Wo Der 2012�V

Bishops
George Smith 1849�V1865 Charles Richard Alford 1867�V1872 John Shaw Burdon 1874�V1897 Joseph Charles Hoare 1898�V1906 Gerrard Heath Lander 1907�V1920 Charles Ridely Duppuy 1920�V1932 Ronald Owen Hall 1932�V1966 John Gilbert Hindley Baker 1966�V1981 Peter Kwong Kong Kit 1981�V2006 Paul Kwong 2007�V

Archbishops of the Hong Kong Sheng Kung Hui
Peter Kwong Kong Kit 1998�V2006 Paul Kwong 2007�V
Appendix 2


List of Stipendiary Assistant Chaplains and Chaplains
Frederick T. Johnson 1899�V1902
A. J. Stevens 1906
A. B. Thornhill 1908�V19011
H. G. H. Griffith 1915�V1918 Holman T. Hunt. 1920�V1922
T. B. Powell 1923�V1925 H. Koop 1928�V1932 N. Watkins 1929�V1932
H. W. Baines 1934�V1938 Alaric P. Rose 1938�V1941 George She 1951�V1953 Michael Goulder 1951�V1952 Jimmy Froude 1954�V1958 Timothy Beaumont 1955�V1957 John Foster 1957�V1963 Ernest Fisher 1958�V1960 Frank Roe 1961�V1964 Tad Evans 1962�V1963 Stephen Sidebotham 1964�V1969 John Yates 1963 Philip English 1965 Patrick Nichols 1968�V1971
J. L. Mitman 1969�V1971 John P. H. Tyrell 1972�V1974 Patrick Nicholas 1973�V1974 Barry Simms 1973 Hugh Stevenson 1973�V1980 Ian Lam 1974�V1976 Michael Corbett-Jones 1977�V1980 John P. H. Tyrell 1979�V1982 Eric Chong 1980�V1983
Ron File 1980�V1985 Peggy Sheldon 1980�V1982 Michael Simpson 1982�V1984 Chris Butt 1982�V1989 Chris Phillips 1983�V1987 Michael Phillips 1985�V1988 Steven Harrop 1989�V1993 Nigel Leaves 1988�V1992 Julia Leaves 1988�V1982 Peter Frowley 1988�V1992 Erik Larsen 1990�V1994 Robert Gillion 1990�V1998 Dwight dela Torre 1993�V Karol Misso 1993�V1994 Chris Briggs 1993�V1997 Martin Hollingworth 1993�V1996 Peter Yeats 1994�V2000
Jan Joustra 1997�V2004 Chris Tweddell 1998�V2000 Susan Hewitt 1993�V1997 Frank Nelson 1999�V2003 John Roundhill 2002�V2006 Desmond Cox 2001�V Matthew Vernon 2003�V2009 Will Newman 2004�V Sharon Constable 2004�V2010 Peter Koon 2006�V John Chynchen 2007�V David Pickering 2009�V2012 Mark Rogers 2010�V Nigel Gibson 2010�V Catherine Graham 2012�V Robert Martin 2012�V

Notes
Chapter 1 Genesis, 1841�V1850
1.
Friend of China and Hong Kong Gazette, 12 March 1847.

2.
Ernest John Eitel, Europe in China (London: Luzac and Co.; Hong Kong: Kelly and Walsh, 1895), 246.

3.
John M. Carroll, A Concise History of Hong Kong (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 12.

4.
General Correspondence of the Trustees 1841�V1880. Public Records Office (PRO), Government Records Service, Hong Kong.

5.
General Correspondence.

6.
UK Foreign Office Summary, December 1845.

7.
General Correspondence.

8.
General Correspondence.

9.
Carroll, Concise History, 20.

10.
Eitel, Europe in China, 242.

11.
British Army Education Corps, A History of Victoria Barracks (Headquarters, British Forces, 1979), 26.

12.
V. Copley-Moyle, ��St John��s Cathedral��, The Outpost, July (Victoria Diocesan Association, 1927), 13. Victoria Diocesan Association, based in London, was founded by Bishop Duppuy. One of its principal func-tions was to link the diocese in Hong Kong with former members and supporters at ��home��.

13.
George B. Endacott and Dorothy E. She, The Diocese of Victoria, Hong Kong: A Hundred Years of Church History, 1849�V1949 (Hong Kong: Kelly and Walsh, 1949), 11.

14.
George Smith, Exploratory Visit to the Consular Cities of China (London: Seeley and Burnside, 1847), 506�V508, 512�V513.

15.
Endacott and She, Diocese of Victoria, 9.

16.
W. Travis Hanes and Frank Sanello, The Opium Wars: The Addiction of One Empire and the Corruption of Another (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks Inc., 2002), 107�V113.

17.
Endacott and She, Diocese of Victoria, 10.

18.
Endacott and She, Diocese of Victoria, 11.

19.
Record of Episcopate of Bishop Charles Richard Alford, 1867�V1872. Public Records Office (PRO), Government Records Service, Hong Kong.

20.
Endacott and She, Diocese of Victoria, 13.

21.
UK Foreign Office Summary, December 1845.

22.
Carl T. Smith Collection. Hong Kong Central Library.

23.
Erik Kvan, St John��s: Documentary Evidence. St John��s Cathedral Records Office.


A sequence of correspondence between September 1843 and June 1851 which involves discussion between the Hong Kong govern-ment and the Colonial Office on the design, construction and payment for the cathedral was put together by the late Reverend Erik Kvan. It was researched from Colonial Office records to aid Doreen King in the writing of her own book, St John��s Cathedral Hong Kong: A Short History and Guide, published in 1986. She passed Father Erik��s typed work, ��St John��s: Documentary Evidence��, to this writer. It now rests with the Cathedral Office. The correspondence referred to is to be found in Great Britain, Colonial Office: Hong Kong: Original Correspondence: CO 129 (usually referred to as ��CO 129��), 1841�V1951, microfilm copies of which are deposited in the Public Records Office, Hong Kong, and the University of Hong Kong Libraries.
24.
General Correspondence.

25.
General Correspondence.

26.
Ah is a prefix placed before names, denoting familiarity amongst family and friends, or a servant or someone of lower status.

27.
Mott Connell Ltd. and Lovell Chen Pty Ltd., St John��s Cathedral Hong Kong: Conservation Management Plan Volume 1, 2007. St John��s Cathedral Trustees, Hong Kong.

28.
General Correspondence.

29.
General Correspondence.

30.
Bonham to Grey, 19 August 1850, CRO 129.

31.
Mott Connell Ltd. and Lovell Chen Pty Ltd., Conservation Management Plan Volume 1.

32.
Doreen King, St John��s Cathedral Hong Kong: A Short History and Guide (Hong Kong: St John��s Cathedral, 1986), 22.

33.
General Correspondence.

34.
General Correspondence.

35.
General Correspondence.

36.
Pulpit drawings. National Archives, Kew, UK, and Public Records Office (PRO), Government Records Service, Hong Kong.


Chapter 2 Imperial Parish, 1850�V1873
1.
General Correspondence.

2.
��Original Letters Patent creating Bishop of Victoria�X1849��, Record of Episcopate of Bishop George Smith 1849�V1864, 4�V6. Public Records Office (PRO), Government Records Service, Hong Kong.

3.
Endacott and She, Diocese of Victoria, 17.

4.
Rowan Strong, Anglicanism and the British Empire, c.1700�V1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), chapter 4.

5.
Endacott and She, Diocese of Victoria, 17.

6.
Diary of Mr. John Fortunatus Evelyn Wright, June 1849�VSeptember 1853, 30 March 1850, 102. Public Records Office (PRO), Government Records Service, Hong Kong.

7.
Endacott and She, Diocese of Victoria, 17.

8.
Episcopate of Bishop Alford.

9.
Diary of J. F. E. Wright, 31 March 1850, 102.

10.
Endacott and She, Diocese of Victoria, 18.

11.
Bowring to Russell, 29 June 1855, CO 129.

12.
Episcopate of Bishop Smith.

13.
Caine to Grey, 21 August 1854, CO 129.

14.
Carl T. Smith Collection.

15.
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 36 (1904).

16.
General Correspondence.

17.
Minutes of Meetings of the Trustees and Seatholders 1858�V1935. Public Records Office (PRO), Government Records Service, Hong Kong.

18.
List of Pre-war Memorial Tablets, St John��s Cathedral. Public Records Office (PRO), Government Records Service, Hong Kong.

19.
Christopher Munn, Anglo-China: Chinese People and British Rule in Hong Kong, 1841�V1880 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008).

20.
General Correspondence.

21.
General Correspondence.

22.
Minutes of the Trustees and Seatholders 1858�V1935.

23.
Carl T. Smith Collection.

24.
Minutes of the Trustees and Seatholders 1858�V1935.

25.
Carl T. Smith Collection.

26.
Church Notes, August 1924. Public Records Office (PRO), Government Records Service, Hong Kong.

27.
Minutes of the Trustees and Seatholders 1858�V1935.

28.
Minutes of the Trustees and Seatholders 1858�V1935.

29.
Carl T. Smith Collection.

30.
Minutes of the Trustees and Seatholders 1858�V1935.

31.
Minutes of the Trustees and Seatholders 1858�V1935.

32.
Carl T. Smith Collection.

33.
Musical Times, May 1868, Hong Kong, 391�V392.

34.
Record of Episcopate of Bishop Charles Ridley Duppuy, 1920�V1932. Public Records Office (PRO), Government Records Service, Hong Kong.

35.
Minutes of the Trustees and Seatholders 1858�V1935.

36.
Endacott and She, Diocese of Victoria, 31.

37.
Endacott and She, Diocese of Victoria, 32.

38.
Carl T. Smith, Christians, Elites, Middlemen and the Church in Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005).

39.
Episcopate of Bishop Smith.

40.
Minutes of the Trustees and Seatholders 1858�V1935, June 1868 to July 1871.

41.
Kennedy to Kimberley, 11 September 1872, CO 129.

42.
King, St John��s Cathedral, 20.

43.
Carl T. Smith Collection.

44.
Minutes of the Trustees and Seatholders 1858�V1935.

45.
Alastair Montieth-Hodge (former organ scholar), in discussion with the author, October 2011.

46.
Minutes of the Trustees and Seatholders 1858�V1935.

47.
Carl T. Smith Collection.

48.
Patricia Lim, Forgotten Souls: A Social History of the Hong Kong Cemetery (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011), 488.

49.
Minutes of the Trustees and Seatholders 1858�V1935.

50.
Endacott and She, Diocese of Victoria, 57.

51.
A. S. Abbott, St John��s Cathedral Hong Kong: A Photographic Handbook with Reminiscences and Explanatory Text (1955). Public Records Office (PRO), Government Records Service, Hong Kong.

52.
Endacott and She, Diocese of Victoria, 33.

53.
Endacott and She, Diocese of Victoria, 46.

54.
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 11 (1879).

55.
Bowring to Lytton, 22 August 1858, CO 129.


Chapter 3 Quiescence and Struggle, 1873�V1906
1.
Minutes of the Trustees and Seatholders 1858�V1935.

2.
Endacott and She, Diocese of Victoria, 59.

3.
Endacott and She, Diocese of Victoria, 59.

4.
R. F. Johnston, Manuscript History of St John��s Cathedral, 1937. St John��s Cathedral Records.

5.
Endacott and She, Diocese of Victoria, 91.

6.
Church Notes, 1898.

7.
Church Notes, January 1898.

8.
Church Notes, September 1900, 4.

9.
Endacott and She, Diocese of Victoria, 76.

10.
Endacott and She, Diocese of Victoria, 79.

11.
Church Notes, January 1898, 5.

12.
King, St John��s Cathedral, 58.

13.
Church Notes, November 1905, 7.

14.
Church Notes, May 1919, 4.

15.
Abbott, St John��s Cathedral.

16.
David M. Paton, R. O.: The Life and Times of Bishop Ronald Hall of Hong Kong (Gloucester: The Diocese of Hong Kong and Macao, 1985).

17.
Peter Cunich, ��Alford, Charles Richard��, in Dictionary of Hong Kong Biography, eds. May Holdsworth and Christopher Munn (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012), 3�V4.

18.
Bishop John Burdon. Correspondence. Church Missionary Society (CMS) Archive, Baptist University Hong Kong.

19.
China Mail, 14 December 1847.

20.
Endacott and She, Diocese of Victoria, 49.

21.
Endacott and She, Diocese of Victoria, 50.

22.
Record of Episcopate of Bishop John Shaw Burdon 1874�V1876. Public Records Office (PRO), Government Records Service, Hong Kong.

23.
Minutes of the Trustees and Seatholders 1858�V1935.

24.
Bishop John Burdon. Correspondence.

25.
Episcopate of Bishop Burdon.

26.
Robin D. Gill, A Dolphin in the Woods (Key Biscayne, FL: Paraverse Press, 2009), 213.

27.
Carl T. Smith Collection.

28.
Minutes of the Trustees and Seatholders 1858�V1935.

29.
Endacott and She, Diocese of Victoria, 68.

30.
Endacott and She, Diocese of Victoria, 69.