Everything tagged: General

Folks,

A note even though all libraries are closed at the moment.  There may be bed mites in the spines of the books.  That includes ALL books in local public libraries as they are being circulated around the city.  Once those bugs got into your home, you may not recognize it immediately.  You may not notice it untils months later until they are grown.

Henry Qualtrough was a good friend of mine and we saw a lot of each other in the early 1960s through rugby. In my early days he was a colony selector and kindly selected me a couple of times to play for the colony.After that he ran the referees and I became secretary of the union so we drank a lot of beer together! For a fun account of those times Read "Tokkie Smith and the colour of rugby" , a historical rugby book I wrote leading up to the Hongkong Sevens. It's easy to get on Amazon kindle. Cheers John D'Eathe, West Vancouver.

Interesting to see horses are listed in the 1863 ordinance about hiring public vehicles, but I don’t remember having seen any horse (except for racing) or horse driven carriages on old Hong Kong photos. If someone knows more, please leave a comment.

Introduction

The population of Hong Kong in the early 1840s was about 6,000 people, increasing to 125,000 in 1865 (about 2,000 were Americans and Europeans) (source).

Increasing numbers of inhabitants lead to increasing traffic on the roads. As the “Colony of Hongkong and its Dependencies” was a civilized area and had a tendency to set rules for every aspect of life, there obviously was the need for a regulation.

Found this embossed bottle - Owbridge's Lung Tonic - on the side of a mountain on Hong Kong Island. Having not found this particular type of medicine bottle before, I took it home and went online to find out who Mr Owbridge was.  I had no idea how serendipitous this chance discovery would turn out to be.

In 1951 I went by BOAC plane to Hong Kong, arriving August 6th. Sitting opposite me for the whole way, a journey taking 2-3 days, was a 15 year-old schoolgirl, Angela Fairburn. We stayed the night before in Rangoon. I liked her a lot and hoped to meet up with her in Hong Kong. She asked me out with her parents, but I could not make it then. I never heard from her again and I have always wondered what happened to her.

I am 87 years old now so this query is a bit late in the day!

A week of hard labour has paid off.

Hi all - I'm trying to write up my life as a soldiers' son in the 50's and 60's and in an attempt to make it a more interesting tale of a world that no longer exists, I need to add some photos.  Tricky as mobile phones hadn't been invented!  If anyone has some oictures of Stanley in the early 1960's,  which I remember to be a rather smelly fishing village, I would be most grateful, and more importantly, so will my children, if I could pinch some copies.  If it helps, my email address is: jon.boileau@btinternet.com