Frederick Hardy NEALE (aka Freddie) [c.1901-1987]

Freddie Neale is recorded in the Jurors List of 1932 as a member of the Wireless Department in Butterfield & Swire. He met the 18 year-old Dorothy Moon in Hong Kong in 1930, who had accompanied her father, Edward Moon while her mother stayed in England. They married in England in 1933. Dorothy was evacuated to Australia in August 1940 with their children, Margaret and Chris. Freddie managed to get away to Pelambang, Sumatra before the Japanese invasion in December 1941. Butterfield & Swire established an office in Calcutta where Freddie spent much of the war, but when the Japanese began to bomb Calcutta, Butterfield & Swire moved their office across to Bombay. In 1944 the company offered Freddie three months holiday and he succeeded in travelling to Australia for a reunion with his family. In 1945 Dorothy and the children joined Freddie in Bombay, but in 1946 the family was able to return to Hong Kong and even retrieved their furniture and household goods nearly intact from the West Point godowns where they had sent them in 1941. They moved into a penthouse flat in Conduit Street until due for home leave in 1948. In 1951 Freddie decided to move to Australia hoping to secure a job with the radio and electrical firms from which he had been buying equipment, but on arrival, his English qualifications debarred him from joining without a 5-year apprenticeship. To make ends meet he took on odd jobs and finally worked for an abattoir. He was hospitalized with a heart attack in 1957 and it is not clear how he supported the family until his death in 1987. Although Dorothy was forced to destroy her diaries and letters on moving to India in 1945, her autobiography Green Jade contains many interesting details of life in Hong Kong in the 1930s and 1940s and of her evacuation to Australia.