22 / 23 Broadwood Road [????-????]

Thanks to Nona Pio-Ulski for sharing these memories of life at 22 Broadwood Road in the 1960s & 70s:

We lived at #22 from either late 61/early 62 until my parents retired in January 1974.  It was a gorgeous house on top of a hill just near the end of Broadwood Road where it joins Tai Hang Road. 

It was a semi-detached house, back-to-back with #23.  We fortunately got the harbour view while #23 faced Tai Hang Road and everyone who lived in Lincoln Court, Peace Mansions and the other block of flats (cannot remember the name) at the top would have had a bird's eye view of any comings or goings in that garden :(

Fortunately we didn't have neighbours the whole 12 years we lived there so  it seemed like the whole place was ours!  

I will try and explain better with the photos.

This shows the layby up the hill where the two garages were for both houses:

If you continued down Broadwood Road from the garages:

You went around a corner and the front stairs up to the house were there.

Even though no one lived at 23, my father wouldn't let me use the empty garage when I got my car so I used to park either in front of his garage door or by the front steps.

The back path walked right along the length of #23's garden and you can see the fence on the right hand side of this photo of my mother coming home:

The path then went past our back gate and continued all the way down to Caroline Hill and, during football matches, we'd get quite a few people using the path as a shortcut.

When we first moved in I decided to explore that path and found it went through a number of horseshoe graves. Saw a cobra in a bone pot and that was enough to send me running back home as fast as I could!! Never wanted to go down that path again  :D

We did have a number of snakes that came into the garden and even the house, especially after typhoons.  I remember one of my father's colleagues told him he had to stop just by our front stairs as there was an extremely large python slithering down from our house and it seemed to stretch forever! LOL!

My father also had to ring some number when we had snakes in the servants' quarters downstairs - they came to get them and told us they were baby cobras :P We never did find the mama or the father, thank goodness!  Eeek!

This shows the size of our garden and also where the other houses were compared to ours.

 #21 was also a Tramways house but #20 were 2 storeyed flats (I think 2!!).

This shows the view from the right hand side of our house:

and this is the view from the left hand side:

These are the steps going up from the road:

Continuing up:

Til you reached the front gate:

Funnily enough, even though we had the mailbox on the gate, the mailman didn't come up our main stairs - he used to walk along the back path and, I guess, made his way to #20 before carrying on!  

This shows the steps coming away from our front gate and you can see the stairs on the opposite side going up to #23:

I had some of my father's 8mm films put onto DVD and then I put snippets of what he shot on YouTube. There is this one of our house taken in 1966:

The quality is not good - unfortunately the shots my father took inside the house were very dark so I made it lighter on YouTube but that made the outside shots look odd.  

If you look at it, it was a 4 storeyed house - downstairs you'll see the sitting room and dining room, then the kitchen.  

Going up two flights of stairs, my parents' bedroom was directly over the sitting room while my room was over the dining room.  The last shot was my grandmother's area - a sitting room and a bedroom beyond.  Then there was another flight of stairs up onto our roof.

The first flight of stairs going up from the hallway was to the guest bathroom and then there was a door which led to the servants' sleeping quarters - two bedrooms.  Their other rooms were downstairs in their area which was alongside our kitchen on the ground floor.

There were a number of Tramways’ houses but the only ones I know of on Broadwood Road were #4, which was at the bottom of Broadwood Road just before it joined Link Road and #21, which was down the road from ours. 

Both houses were actually on the road so I must say I was very happy our house wasn’t.

Broadwood road was super narrow - just enough for one car to go either up or down, and if you met another car coming the opposite way, one of you had to back up/down. 

There was also a very difficult angled bridge as you came up just past #4, also a Tramways house.  Some taxis used to refuse to take us up that way during the last couple of years we lived there, wanting to go up Blue Pool Road and Tai Hang Road then down Broadwood Road instead.

The second video clip shows what it was like driving down Broadwood Road, and you might be able to notice how far away #21 was from our house (the film of the drive starts at 0:30).

I was taking the movie while my mother sat in the back, for a change, and we also picked up a friend of mine from Leighton Hill just as we got down before Link Road (perhaps you noticed?) whose name was Sheena Watt.  Her father was in the Police.

The Backyard Path you stumbled on with a horseshoe grave and a cobra more than a century ago led to the Mount Caroline Cemetery which is still there which I visited again just last Sunday 

Many thanks for posting these lovely photos and cine clips of Broadwood Road in the 1960s. As you know, I went looking for signs of my grandfather’s old house at no. 20 in 2004 and ended up in Mount Caroline Cemetery. It was interesting to see the kind of plants and flowers that would have been growing around there and the sulphur crested cockatoos. I finally deduced that the well-guarded block of flats that now carries the name “Jardine’s Lookout” on the flat land at the top of Broadwood Road, but accessed from the Tai Hang Road, is roughly where “The Towers" used to stand. It is interesting that the grandparents of at least four other contributors to Gwulo lived in Broadwood Road. Starting from no. 4, Siobhan Bland Daiko’s grandparents were Vernon and Doris Walker of Hong Kong Tramways; John and Annie Olson at no. 13 were the grandparents of Sean Olson; Charles and Hannah Warren at no. 20, “The Towers”, were my grandparents and Stuart and Florence Deacon, also of Hong Kong Tramways at no. 21 were the grandparents of Peter Braudé. I hope I’ve got the generations right! I’ve already asked for information about Shirley Anne Hewitt, whose parents lived at no. 18 until the evacuation and Eric and Dorothy Walch (née Dransfield) who lived at no. 20 for a while. Eric Walch was an accountant at Lowe, Bingham & Matthews.

Noted an advertisement for the sale of two semi-detached houses including two tennis courts and garages at 22/23 Broadwood Road. HK Daily Press 1 February 1929 refers.  In the same advertisement , a bungalow at 18 Broadwood Road was also available for sale.

The Hewitt family must have moved into 18 Broadwood Road after 1929 as my cousin's photos of her friend, Shirley Ann Hewitt date from the 1930s. There were several different  Hewitts in Hong Kong and I haven't discovered which one the Warrens' neighbour, Mr Hewitt, was. I uploaded a photo of him at the Lido, Repulse Bay. His wife and daughter were evacuated but I don't know what happened to him.

In case it is useful, the Rate Books give I.L. 2259 as the lot number for 22 and 23 Broadwood Road. The first entry that I have recorded for these two houses is in the Rate Book for 1924-1925. They are not given in the Rate Book for 1921-1922 and I'm afraid I can't yet find my record for 1923-1924. In 1927-1928 the garage mentioned by Nona has its own entry and rateable value. In these early years the owner of the two properties is given as The Staff Building Co. Ltd.

The plan below gives the positon of I.L. 2259 in relation to I.L. 1947 Section A, which was no. 20 Broadwood Road, known as "The Towers".

IL 2259 was first auctioned on 8 July 1918, see: 

GA 1918 (suppl) no.146    Land Sale,-Inland Lot No. 2259, Happy Valley