Cavendish Heights, Jardine’s Lookout, circa mid-1970s

Here is a colour copy of the black & white aerial shot that has been uploaded to Gwulo before. This colour copy has been sent to me by my brother Fred, via his friend Trevor Huddleston, whose father Bill Huddleston (a former HK Electric employee) purchased it in the 1970s. I don't know where from unfortunately. The original Cavendish (an absolute paradise as far as we kids were concerned) is sadly long gone, but the blue and white building back left, Pinewood Garden (constructed in 1967 and first inhabited in 1968), is still there.  I wonder if anyone remembers any details about the murder/robbery-gone-wrong that took place in Pinewood Garden* in the mid-1970s? The Police came door-knocking at Cavendish for witnesses. 

* I mistakenly typed Paradise Gardens before , but it should be Pinewood Garden.

Date picture taken
1970s
Shows street(s)

Comments

I was a kid, living on the first floor of... well, the address was 31 Perkins Road, I don't know if that indicated my building, or just the overall Cavendish Heights complex address, but anyway, I was on the first floor of building on the left as you reached the center of the complex, with visitor parking there in the center and resident parking under the building.  My building was 10 floors, and as you came up the hill, there was one or two slightly taller (12 floors?) that I think were slightly newer.   We were there from  1975-1978.      The one time I definitely remember RHKP being there in numbers was to finally investigate water balloons being tossed from the roof of (um... my...) building onto the double-decker busses way below on Perkins Rd as they lumbered up the hill.  The water balloon terrorism lasted off & on for about a month, but stopped once the uniformed police and inspectors started knocking on doors, even though no guilty parties were actually apprehended...        I do seem to recall coming home with the family one evening (after dark) and there being a num,ber of the RHKP Land Rovers, some with emergency lights-on, in the main parking lot. I'm pretty sure they didn't come to our door, and either we never found-out what happened, or perhaps my parents did, but chose not to tell me, as I was ages 10-13 back then.           

  It looks like the newer Cavendish Heights apartments may have sat on the same foundations created for our beloved original Cavendish Heights?   The wonderful photograph doesn't give a good sense of the slope at the front of my building, and in my day, there were trees and other foliage in the front of my building -- I used to go down there & explore, finding LOTS of toys, some trash & other debris that'd been tossed off people's balconies over the years.   Someone had even tossed a bowling ball, which made me decide it wasn't smart to be spending a lot of time there...

 

 I don't remember the Paradise Gardens structure at all!  It seems to be located over by where the small football (soccer) area was, adjacent to the tennis courts.  I remember the soccer field was about the border of Cavendish Heights property line - next to it was some sort of small, open field that may have been unused, or it may actually have been someone's small farm field, as I also recall some small shacks/improvised housing.  We 'investigated' it once or twice, but mostly stayed-away, either because it was spooky for us gweilos, or maybe someone yelled at us & chased us once, but Paradise Gardens should have stood-out just on the other side of that, so it's strange I don't recall it.

Thanks Tim. I mistakenly typed Paradise Gardens originally, but it's actually Pinewood Garden.  I wouldn't really expect a kid to remember a random building. There were far more fun things to do and see at Cavendish! I only remember it because I overlooked it from my bedroom window and because of the murder!  We were away at boarding school for much of the 1970s, so I don't remember you. You may remember my younger brother, Fred Bottomley, who was closer to your age, or perhaps his friends Richard "Titch" Campbell (died young), Tim Hare or Trevor Huddleston maybe? But they were all HK Electric and sounds like you hung out more with Americans and non-HK Electric. There was an American family with the surname Burns, with seven kids(!), in the apartment next to us from the mid-1970s, but think the kids were all younger than me, so not really on my radar. I do remember some of the kids had to sleep in the amah's quarters because there weren't enough bedrooms, which we found amusing at the time, but with hindsight makes total sense. The amah's quarters in the original Cavendish were actually very spacious as, when it was built in 1959, many expats still had a lot of servants. That had all changed by the time you arrived. 

The name Trevor Huddleston sounds vaguely familiar, but unfortunately, so much time has passed since my HK/Cavendish Heights days that maybe the name is familiar from a different time & era.   It's a shame that I didn't have any strong-enough friendships with any of the Brit/HK Electric kids, and I don't think it was anything intentional, but from a sociological perspective, I would love to know why that seemed to be the case.   I think it was mostly because there were a good bunch of American kids living at Cavendish Heights that I knew from HK International School & thus we rode the bus together or car-pooled together. I had two close friends that lived in my same building (Robert Ritzman & Steve Smith), but as I've mentioned in prior posts, I do believe there was a cultural difference between most American & British kids -- I could be wrong, but I think we Yank kids had a lot more freedom (which usually manifested itself in innocent, but obnoxious, behavior) and thus I think many of the UK kids at Cavendish Heights were told to not associate too much with us!  When I'd be out & about after dark, playing on the tennis court, using the squash court, jumping into the swimming pool, etc.  if I ran into another kid, it usually was an American.  The one kid I can kind of remember, that was definitely British, lived in the first or second building to the left as you came-up the hill, passing the guard station.  He had red hair, and I definitely remember his father was a RHKP Inspector, who was not too friendly - perhaps not happy his son was developing a friendship with an obnoxious, semi-feral American kid.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              And yes, our flat's servant area had two small bedrooms, a washer/dryer, bathroom, and the separate entrance/exit with a stairwell & tiny elevator. I want to say it also had a second kitchem, but am not sure about that.  I think the flooring was either bare concrete or maybe tile -- a far cry from the hardwood flooring we had in the rest of the apartment.  Once a week, the local fishmonger would go door to door (I think the rear/servant quarters door, unless the family was interested directly, and then he'd come to the front door). I can still remember him wandering around Cavendish Heights, and coming up the stairways, loudly saying "Groupaaa!" (Grouper, the type of fish he normally sold).  The silly reason I remember him is because especially if our family bought fish from him regularly, he'd have sticks of Wrigley's Spearmint Gum to give to us kids, who'd chase after him for it...

Yes, it was a long time ago. I can't talk for all the British kids, but I can talk for the HK Electric ones, and you couldn't be more wrong about us not having any freedom. We had masses of freedom. From as young as 6 years old, my friends and I could catch the number 11 bus to Causeway Bay on our own. By this age, we also all had catapults and penknives, not to mention roller skates (cops and robbers on the roof), skateboards (which we rode down Perkins Road to Tai Hang Road), bikes of course, and many hours spent in total freedom playing down the bank. My friend Susan Scott and I even caught a snake once which we took swimming with us in the pool after dark! At age 7, a friend and I decided to conquer Mount Butler at the peak of summer and were gone all day (the police were eventually called!), one of my brothers and his friend Titch scaled the entire ten stories on the outside of the front block in his early teens without a harness, and another friend (who shall be nameless) accidentally set the bank on fire playing with matches and the fire brigade had to be called. And, of course, I'm sure many things were thrown from balconies by children all over HK! We used to make parachutes for our GI Joes and throw them over. We had a lot of adventures, but I don't remember us being deliberately naughty or disrespectful.  If there was a cultural divide, I'd say it was between the HK Electric people in the original four Cavendish buildings and the non-HK Electric transient newbies in the new apartments, not an American/British divide per se. Not only did most of we HKEC kids go to the same primary and secondary school, but our parents all worked together, and many of them were pre-War and had also gone to school together, or were even in prison camp together during the Japanese occupation, even some of our grandparents knew each other, so the bonds were deep-rooted. We were never told not to associate with anyone. Having said that, my brother Adam's best friend at Cavendish was a non-HK Electric American boy, but they were about ten years younger than you. I don't remember the fishmonger specifically, but I do remember the fruit and veg man coming regularly and singing "Appley, olangey, do you want to buy any?" to the tune of "Knick Knack Paddy Whack". Very happy days at Cavendish Heights. We were there for 23 years, and my family were in HK from 1924.