Chapter 15: Peripatetic Players In A Movable Feast

Chapter 15: Peripatetic Players In A Movable Feast

David Ford's tenure as DIS spanned a period when improved labour conditions, reduced working hours and increased leisure time led to a blossoming of artistic creativity in what many had previously condemned as a cultural desert.

Like Governor Sir Murray MacLehose, who took up his appointment in 1971, Ford was personally interested in doing what he could to foster this development. He volunteered the services of ISD to help the Hong Kong Arts Festival, which was launched in 1973 but by 1975 was running short of funds.

Along with publicity campaigns, arts promotion went under the wing of the newly-retitled 'Festival and Campaigns Sub-division', an appellation which, though still cumbersome, was vastly preferable to the collective designation of 'Technical Services Division' previously employed to refine the department's overall publicity services. Today such duties fall under the ambit of the Promotions Sub-division.

Regarded with about as much suspicion by their fellow ISD colleagues as ISD, in turn, was still regarded by most other civil servants, the personnel of the Festival and Campaigns Office Sub-division found themselves cast as peripatetic players performing in a movable feast. Accorded the lowest priority in accommodation, they led a brief and ephemeral existence on the first floor of Beaconsfield House, immediately above the public lavatory.

Alternative accommodation was found in the United Chinese Bank Building, where they worked alongside the Arts Festival Office, affording them more salubrious surroundings. But this was not a long interlude. Next destination was an abandoned fire station at 1A Garden Road, where the Citibank Plaza now stands.

Stories abounded of unquiet ghosts dating from the Japanese occupation, when the building was used to interrogate hapless prisoners. George Yuen, who had arrived in ISD to head the marketing office somewhat loosely attached to festivals and campaigns, was not thrilled at the prospect of sharing his room with any uninvited and invisible presence. He took the precaution of surrounding himself with fung shui defences of every conceivable device and collected funds from his colleagues, ostensibly for a 'house warming' but in reality to employ Taoist priests, along with roast pigs, for an exorcism ceremony.

Employed primarily to help with the Arts Festival publicity programme, together with whatever other vaguely celebratory events might crop up, Gillian Newson joined a team that included others who were learning the business as they went along, including Richard Mann, Sian Cadwallader and Pauline Ling. As she was already well aware, from prior experience of working with the artistically-inclined, Gillian knew she would have to cope with prima donna sized temperaments, and had developed just the right bedside manner to nurse bruised egos. When the Cullberg Ballet Company from Sweden was preparing its world premiere of a new ballet entitled Adam and Eve, based on Vivaldi's Four Seasons, Gillian had a hard time persuading the director that a key element of the decor simply would not prove acceptable in Hong Kong. At virtually the eleventh hour the director gave in and a gigantic stage prop - an erect phallus rendered in anatomical detail - was removed from the City Hall stage, to be replaced by a vaguely androgynous statue symbolising sexual awakening.

"One of our aircraft is missing," was the anguished cry from members of the Kai Tak Model Club who, at the behest of ISD, had brought their exquisitely crafted radio-controlled model aeroplanes to the Government Stadium to test whether they might be used for a Silver Jubilee Pageant in 1977, commemorating the 25th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth's accession to the throne.

The idea was for the miniatures to perform aerobatics to entertain nightly audiences during the pageant's week-long run. But it took only one afternoon's dress rehearsal to demonstrate that the proposal was hopelessly impractical, and that wireless frequencies employed to control the models were dangerously vulnerable to interference. Sent aloft to see what kind of range it would cover, a diminutive World War II bomber soared heroically onward and upward, way above the football field, above the serried ranks of stadium seats and beyond the stadium perimeter, never to be seen again.

Intended as the piece de resistance was the largest multi-media show ever attempted in Hong Kong. Television guru Robert Chua was commissioned to produce this spectacular, on a giant screen that stretched across the entire width of the stadium. When the moment came to throw the switch on opening night, nothing happened. Among those madly scrambling in the darkness to find the one missing link in a vast tangle of wires and electrical outlets were Robert, Gillian Newson and Grahame Blundell, still soldiering on in ISD as Assistant Director/Publicity after his experience at Expo '70.

All told, the pageant was witnessed by some 150 000 spectators, but even before it faded in the memory the festival and campaigns office was on the move again, this time to the old Fire Services building alongside Central Market. From there it moved into the Admiralty Centre, and then again into the French Mission Building, right behind Beaconsfield House and at the other end of the bridge connecting the latter with Battery Path. Promotions Sub-division is now back safely 'within the fold' at ISD Headquarters in Murray Building on Garden Road.