Foreword

By Thomas Chan
Director Information Services

GIS – as the Information Services Department is more commonly known – has always been a ‘different’ department. A major reason is the scope of our work, which includes news enquiries, public relations, research, overseas promotion, advertising, creative design and publishing. Another is the nature of our work which, in a nutshell, helps build bridges between the HKSAR Government and the community it serves through the dissemination of news, information and policy. Working at the coalface of public interaction as we do, GIS also serves as the ‘eyes and ears’ of government, reporting reaction to important decisions or policies and then helping devise ways in which to sell that ‘product’ to an often sceptical public or media. It is true to say also that the scepticism can sometimes extend to within government, where GIS’s public relations instincts might not always sit well with a more conventional approach preferred by a policy bureau or department. These are the challenges we face daily and expect. And we would not have it any other way.

	It should come as no surprise then that this book, written by former Assistant Director Peter Moss, is not your usual ‘anniversary publication’.  As you might expect from a published novelist and unconventional civil servant, it is not a dry chronicle of GIS achievements or milestones over the past four decades, nor does it simply explain what we do with lots of nice pictures. Rather, it is a story about Hong Kong from the perspective of a man who worked in the Information Services Department (ISD) through some of Hong Kong’s most formative years. 

	Peter was with GIS for almost 29 of our 40 years and is a keen student of the Hong Kong story.  He returns from his retirement home in Vancouver from time to time to provide the text for Frank Fishbeck’s pictorial essays on old and new Hong Kong.

	Peter’s book on ISD takes a personal broadbrush look at the development of the ISD since it was established on April 1, 1959, and also provides a potted history of Hong Kong, its free and vibrant press and the genesis of the Hong Kong Government’s public relations efforts and strategies. In that regard it is a book to mark our anniversary, rather than an anniversary book. 

	The department today has come a long way since 1959 when, on establishment, staff strength, was bolstered from 53 to 95. In early 1999, there were some 350 information officers in the department, and a further 210 general and common grades staff. Technology has transformed the work of the department. The cacophonous chatter of typewriters has long been replaced by the click-clack of a computer keyboard; teleprinters have been relegated to the scrap heap and replaced by an electronic news service, GNIS, which is wired into every major news organisation in Hong Kong. The Government Information Centre, the HKSAR Government’s Internet home page, gives us a world-wide presence in cyberspace which allows anyone with an Internet account to tap into millions of words of information about Hong Kong. Our photographers now transmit their ‘prints’ digitally, instead of processing hundreds of copies for distribution; our creative designers use the latest software and equipment to produce in minutes, visual effects that once took hours or were impossible. Government officials can now hold a 30-minute video conference with overseas offices in Europe and North America, Australia, Japan and Singapore when once such in-depth briefings would have only been possible one-on-one over the phone and taken much longer.

	Our 40th Anniversary has given us all a rallying point for 1999 – an opportunity to look back at our achievements and developments over the past four decades and to look forward to the challenges of the new century. Whatever technological advances there may be, our job will always be one that basically relies on personal contact with our civil service colleagues, the media and the public. The job is getting harder, as the public, rightly, demands more of the government and its ‘public servants’. But I have no doubt that GIS staff are well equipped to deal with any challenges thrown their way. After all, that’s what we have done for the past 40 years. Why should the next 40 be any different?   

Chapter 1: Some Fatal Pestilence, Some Doubtful War

Throughout the first century of its existence, Hong Kong persevered through flood, fire, typhoon and the occasional outburst of civic unrest without any kind of formalised liaison between the British colonial administration and the news media. So long as it responded to the demands of the powerful mercantile companies that dominated its commercial life, and refrained from interfering in their business, the government was left considerable freedom to pursue its mysterious affairs.

	The bulk of the community, from the outset mainly immigrants from neighbouring provinces in the Mainland, was generally too driven by their own ambitions, or too preoccupied with the mere process of survival, to take much notice. They held to an attitude, acquired through long isolation in the southern periphery of the Chinese Empire, that the mountains were high and the emperor was far away.

	Nevertheless they steadily acquired a taste for newspapers, which began to thrive and prosper in the closing years of the 19th century. In 1895 there were 19 Chinese-language newspapers in Hong Kong. Three years later the number had increased fourfold.

	English newspapers established an even earlier foothold on the South China coast. The Canton Register, launched as a weekly in 1827, supplied whatever validated reports or unsubstantiated gossip might inform or titillate foreign traders trapped in the ghetto-like isolation of their factories' on the banks of the Pearl River.

	Hong Kong's earliest English-language newspapers were of indifferent quality. A Government Gazette was first published in March 1841, just two months after the British flag was raised at Possession Point. Within a year other publications made their appearance - notably The Friend of China.

	The latter made a determined stand against the evils of opium, the prohibition of which by Chinese authorities had precipitated the first of two infamous Opium Wars and led to the ceding of Hong Kong to Britain. Despite its euphemistic title, one of its two editors, American Baptist minister Lewis Shuck, proclaimed on May 26, 1842:

	"We believe that Hong Kong is destined, by the uncontrollable force of circumstances, to become the base of naval and military operations, which sooner or later must revolutionise or subvert the existing state of things in China."
 
	Another editorial in this typically unfriendly newspaper described the first governor, Sir Henry Pottinger, as 'a man who appears either to have been utterly devoid of the sense of the moral obligations imposed on him, his heart being perfectly seared to the impression of suffering humanity, or deliberately living in seclusion among a few adoring parasites whose limited intellects were devoted to pandering to the great man's vanity'.

	With fewer axes to grind and little hard news to report in an embryonic colony of limited population, where everyone knew just about everyone else, rival editors resorted to plagiarism, parochial gossip, smear and innuendo.

	Government legislated in 1844 to regulate the publication of newspapers, but generally failed to curb the rampant exercise of what one commentator described as 'the widest freedom', pointing out that 'there were no clauses to safeguard against libel, and the expression of opinion of press writers was couched in what would nowadays be counted criminally libellous language'.

	The Friend of China later merged with the Hongkong Gazette, but was overtaken by the more popular China Mail, established in 1845. Its editor, Shortrede, saw himself as guardian of the public conscience and scourge of incompetent administrators. In his first year at the desk he alleged underhand dealings by Colonial Secretary William Caine in regard to the banishment of prostitutes.

	Not all editors escaped retribution. An irate Irish officer, objecting to his description as an 'informer' in the columns of the Hongkong Register, attacked its editor, John Cairns, with fists and an umbrella. William Tarrant, a former Registrar of Deeds, bought out The Friend of China and used it as a weapon of revenge for his dismissal from government service - only to be charged with libel, sentenced to a year's imprisonment and fined 50 pounds. Shortrede himself fell foul of Ordinance No 2 of 1844 by failing to communicate to the authorities the removal of his printing establishment.

	Yorrick Murrow, of the Daily Press, was sentenced to six months jail and fined 100 pounds for libelling Governor Sir John Bowring, whose conduct over the Arrow incident had led to the infamous destruction of the Summer Palace in Beijing. Murrow had accused Bowring of showing favour to Jardine Matheson & Co over the award of charter contracts.

	Undaunted by his punishment, Murrow continued to contribute 'editorial effusions within prison walls', thanks to the fact that Bowring had asked for him to be treated with every indulgence and to give him every facility for carrying on his paper. As a result of Bowring's intercedence, Murrow was transferred to a far more comfortable debtor's prison, but this did nothing to curb his attacks on the deservedly unpopular governor.

	Observing these insular bickerings from its hallowed fastness in London's Fleet Street, The Times  commented that Hong Kong 'is always connected with some fatal pestilence, some doubtful war, or some discreditable internal squabble. So much so that the name of this noisy, bustling, quarrelsome, discontented and insalubrious little island may not inaptly be used for an euphonious synonym for a place not mentionable in polite society'.

	The Duke of Newcastle declared, in the House of  Lords on January 26, 1860, that 'in no part of Her Majesty's dominions is libel so rife and flagrant as in Hong Kong'. When Sir Hercules Robinson arrived as Bowring's replacement, entrusted with the task of restoring order in the colony, the Duke cautioned him 'against stirring up again all the mass of mud which appears to have encumbered society in Hong Kong'.

	Sun Yat-sen, founder of China's Nationalist movement to depose a floundering and enfeebled Manchu Dynasty, had been educated in Hong Kong and initially chose it as his base of operations. This was to cause acute embarrassment to a colonial administration that had elected to remain seemingly indifferent to his revolutionary aspirations.

	More alert to the potential damage to Britain's own dubiously-founded imperial footholds on the China coast, and as ever placing mercantile interests above all else, the local media were vehemently opposed to Sun's machinations. 'Sun must go' thundered the Hong Kong Telegraph, following the defeat of the Canton Merchant Volunteer Corps by Sun's Kuomintang in 1924. Alarmed by the KMT's collaboration with communist advisers, Hong Kong's Chinese media were equally critical.

	Labour disputes became the principal threat to commercial complacency in the years between the two world wars. A prolonged seamen's strike, for example, almost brought the city to a standstill before it ended in 1926.

	In 1941, at the close of its first century as a trading port on the South China coast, Hong Kong emerged largely unscathed from its occasional alarms and excursions, its strikes and boycotts. It had even escaped the brunt of the astonishing upheavals overtaking the neighbouring Mainland, where central authority had been eroded by the rising power of the warlords and a falling out between communist and KMT forces.

	All this was to change dramatically on December 8 that year when, coinciding with their raid on Pearl Harbour, Japanese forces launched an invasion across the border, circumventing a system of defence based on the mistaken premise that any such onslaught must come by sea.

Chapter 2: This Remarkable Sample Of Peaceful Co-Existence

Disembarking in Hong Kong at war's end in 1945, leading units of the relieving British fleet were surprised to find a newspaper in circulation, announcing their arrival. It was a single sheet special edition of the South China Morning Post, which had been founded in 1903.
 
	Restored to his desk, after a grilling at the hands of Japanese occupation forces, was its Australian Chinese editor, Henry Ching, who had held that position since 1926. Ching had risen rapidly through the ranks even though, as a mere reporter in a still racially-segregated Hong Kong, his ethnic background had denied him admittance to many of the functions he'd been assigned to cover.  His son, also Henry Ching, became an Administrative Officer in the Hong Kong Government, serving as Deputy Financial Secretary for many years to Phillip Haddon-Cave, and eventually retiring as Secretary for Health and Welfare.

	Humiliated by its defeat at the hands of the Japanese, the re-established colonial administration set out to justify its return to Hong Kong in the face of concerted opposition by the Kuomintang and their American allies. As late as December 11, 1946 the newly-founded Far Eastern Economic Review ventured to suggest that 'virtually all Chinese, even those living there, say that in the near future Britain will have to return the New Territories, Kowloon and Hongkong to China'.
 
	The military authorities assigned to initiate the post-war clean-up discovered the value of public relations in promoting their measures to rehabilitate an economy devastated by the effects of war. From this was to evolve the Information Services Department (more commonly referred to as Government Information Services, or GIS) - but only by degrees.

	The first step was the appointment of a military Press Relations Officer to deal with war correspondents still milling around in the aftermath of hostilities. The post was created in September 1945 and held by a succession of occupants on an acting basis until 1947, owing to a rapid turnover of staff. 

	The original, ex-services appointee died in December 1946 and the principal of the Trade and Technical Schools, George White, acted as Public Relations Officer through the early part of 1947. White was followed by  John Henry Burkhill Lee, who served as  caretaker until the arrival of Wing Commander A H Marsack in September 1947. Marsack fell ill and resigned in March 1948, when Mrs Elaine Davis took over as Acting PRO, to be succeeded on August 23, 1948 by  W Gordon Harmon, OBE.

	Retitled the Public Relations Office, the fledgling apparatus was established on a formal footing as a new government department once a civilian administration took over from the military in 1946. Its first home was an arcade located where the Landmark now stands, on a site once occupied by the illustrious Hong Kong Hotel before its destruction by fire on New Year's Day, 1926. From there it moved to 'temporary' offices in Statue Square, alongside what is now the Legislative Council.
 
	This temporary stay lasted three years, during which the staff dealt with an influx of journalists covering the civil war in China, and the consequences for Hong Kong arising from the Korean War. These were the years when Hong Kong became the destination of choice for foreign correspondents, who established here a comfortable base from which they could make their forays into less salubrious neighbouring countries that offered them news - even sensational news - but fewer modern conveniences and a great deal less security.

	They were also the years that witnessed the birth of the so-called 'China watcher'; that alleged expert on Chinese affairs who could raise a damp finger in the air and tell which way the political winds were blowing.

	Anxious to remain helpful but apolitical, the PRO arranged press briefings confined strictly to pertinent local topics, gingered up by occasional showings of relevant documentary films. These were staged in Statue Square's non air-conditioned, makeshift structures, often in temperatures above 30 degrees Celsius.

	Meanwhile, the domestic press corps prospered and the numbers of locally based newspapers and periodicals grew rapidly, topping 150 in all by the close of 1955 - vastly more than were available to any other population of comparable size. Arriving in 1950, on a commission to write a book for the Colonial Office, Harold Ingrams remarked: "How plentiful, opulently thick and reminiscent of the past Hong Kong's newspapers seemed after those at home! And it recalled a bygone era to see newsboys, generally women, carrying printed posters. One morning, soon after my arrival, I was confronted by one reading 'Labour Government may fall tonight'. One was left in no doubt that such an event was felt generally to be a consummation devoutly to be wished."
 
	That year the broadcasting section of the diversified public relations enterprise began a move from Gloucester Building into new studios in the newly-built Electra House, Cable & Wireless Ltd's regional headquarters on Connaught Road Central, where the Ritz-Carlton Hotel now stands. This allowed the Public Relations Officer to take up the space vacated and to record: "The excellent accommodation now at the disposal of the Public Relations Office has contributed in no small degree to an increase in efficiency."

	Administrative and policy control of Radio Hong Kong (later Radio Television Hong Kong) passed formally to the PRO on April 1, 1951, having been the responsibility of the Postmaster General since 1938. Not until July 1953 did Radio Hong Kong became a separate department.

	In 1952 the PRO, still nominally in charge of everything that went out on the air waves, noted that Hong Kong's government radio station was remarkable among British colonial broadcasters because it made a profit (from broadcast fees), whereas most others were heavily subsidised by the state. Radio Hong Kong broadcast more locally-generated hours each week than any other station, and staff numbers were about half those in comparable operations elsewhere.

	The PRO at the time was John Lawrence Murray, whose appointment on September 1, 1950 began a period of relative stability for that post. Murray became the first Director of Information Services (DIS) on June 19, 1959, shortly after his organisation was renamed the Information Services Department on April 1 that year.

	Meeting this 'white-haired Scotsman' for lunch, towards the end of the latter's long term in office, Frederick Joss describes, in his book Of Geisha and Gangsters, sweeping his hand across the seething expanse of Hong Kong harbour below.

"Tell me," Joss asks, "who is doing whom?"
With a possibly over-emphasised Scots accent he said "You mean who gains the greater advantage from this remarkable sample of peaceful co-existence?"
"Quite. It's obvious both are making a profit. We, and they over there."
'Over there' in Hong Kong means across the mountains, the country of well nigh a quarter of the world's population.
"How are we doing? 50/50 perhaps?"
Jock threw back his mane. "50/50 be damned! It's more like 80/20."
"80/20 for whom? 80/20 for us, or 80/20 for them?"
Jock Murray grinned. "80/20 for us. And 80/20 for them."

Chapter 3: Many-Splendoured Things

The stabilising influence of  Murray's long tenure could not have been better timed. The '50s were the truly formative years for Hong Kong, when external factors produced internal pressures that altered the whole course and direction of this former entrep_t on the China coast.

	On May 18, 1951 Hong Kong's reason for existence vanished at the stroke of a pen, virtually overnight. To comply with a United Nations resolution of that date, arising from China's entry into the Korean War, the Hong Kong government was required to impose a complete embargo on the export of strategic materials to its key trading partner.

	The previous year had produced the best trade performance on record - an all-time high of  $1,314 million. In the aftermath of the embargo, figures plummeted, and it looked as if Hong Kong was finished as a world trading port. Even the government's official report for the year, not normally given to hyperbole, conceded: "It is no exaggeration to say that the Korean War and the world events following it have put Hong Kong in an economically impossible position."

	The tremendous political upheaval on the Mainland towards the close of the '40s had accelerated the flow of refugees into a colony still struggling to fully regain its footing and composure in the aftermath of World War II. Rudimentary social services were also placed under an impossible burden. 

	Lacking adequate accommodation, even in the ugly, though commercially profitable 'fast buck' residential blocks that escalated around the harbour, the bulk of the population contrived to seek their own housing in makeshift squatter huts scattered wherever the terrain allowed, sometimes up precipitous hillsides.

	A series of disastrous fires, culminating in an inferno which swept unchecked through the congested squatter shacks of Shek Kip Mei on Christmas Day 1953, forced the government's hand, and precipitated a major review of its woefully inadequate concessions in the form of temporary 'cottage areas'.

	'Resettlement' became the catchword for the new government initiative, and focusing on administrative progress in this field became a preoccupation of PRO Murray, whose still meagre 'one man and a dog' outfit arranged press facilities and conducted tours of the so-called seven-storey 'H-blocks'. 

	The first of these, completed on a fire site at Tai Hang Tung, north of Boundary Street, became something of a showcase, and an object of almost morbid curiosity to overseas visitors unused to the kind of basic standards Hong Kong was compelled to provide in order to deal with the enormity of the problem.

	Compliant families, shoehorned into a single room measuring 12 feet six inches by nine feet six inches, were encouraged to smile bravely for probing cameramen and film makers and to say how much better off they were now they were no longer living under the threat of being swept from soggy hillsides by the next rainstorm. Delegated by Murray to accompany these media teams, escorting officers smiled bravely too.

	The more perceptive observer might discern that, viewed from Victoria Peak, the Kowloon promontory is a pestle descending into the concave mortar of the Hong Kong island coastline. The alchemy this crucible produced in the '50s was to mould the shape of Hong Kong's future destiny.

	Its chief ingredients were the very factors that imposed its greatest burden - the trade embargo that forced Hong Kong to industrialise and manufacture its own goods, and the huge boost of population that produced the labour, the skills and, paramount of all, the determination to bring about that transition.

	Hong Kong had always been a base for light industry. The Chinese Manufacturers Association was founded in 1934 to promote its exports to other colonial territories. But never before had it been forced to rely almost exclusively on its manufacturing base for its sheer survival, or to aggressively seek out overseas markets for its vastly expanded range of products.

	These were the years of 'flatted factories', rapidly erected by government contractors to stack one above the other and to house, in conditions of controlled chaos, such disparate enterprises as artificial flowers, hand-painted porcelains, plastic toys and clock radios. They were also years that produced a new perception of Hong Kong in the world at large, as some kind of vast transit centre whose occupants were desperately knitting, hammering and soldering their way towards sufficient savings for a better life somewhere overseas.

	It was a perception bolstered by such hugely successful novels - translated into films which, curiously, both starred William Holden - as Han Suyin's A Many-Splendoured Thing and Richard Mason's The World of Suzie Wong. And while it was a view on the whole sympathetic to Hong Kong's plight in the face of adversity, it was also to label and dog Hong Kong for many years to come until - like a successful businessman haunted by his past as an orphan child - Hong Kong would fight to reshape its own outmoded image.  

	The fight to put it all in perspective, and achieve a more balanced view of Hong Kong, was embarked on early within the scope of Murray's still limited domain, and little by little the additional posts, the talents and the technical resources were acquired to achieve that objective.

	When the Public Relations Office became the Information Services Department in April 1959, staff numbers were increased from 53 to 95, with proportionately increased funding. By now the organisation had moved into the West Wing of the Central Government Offices, just across the courtyard from the seat of power and fount of all information it would ever be permitted to release.

	Despite this closer proximity, it was still viewed with detachment and cynicism by many civil servants who, as in imperial China of old, had acquired rank and status through the process of civil service examinations. As such, they distrusted those that, in the days when GIS placed emphasis on journalistic experience rather than academic qualifications, might have gained access through what the mandarins regarded as the 'tradesman's entrance'.

	Successive Directors of Information, from Murray onwards, have fought to achieve professional status for the information grade, balancing the government's insistence upon academic qualifications and university degrees against the invaluable asset of sound journalistic experience. Although not incompatible, the two - at least in the early years - seldom went hand in hand.

Chapter 4: Through the Camera Lens

Photography was early recognised as one of the weapons with which Hong Kong could combat negative reportage and entrenched misconceptions regarding prevailing conditions. By building up a photo library second to none, as a freely-available resource for visiting correspondents, the department set out to present a positive view of a still emerging economy, feeling its way out of squatter huts and flatted factories into better planned resettlement and industrial estates.

	Some of its longest-serving officers have left their mark in the department's photographic studios, often producing pictures of salon quality to grace the pages of the government's best-selling annual reports and its numerous other publications. Among the earliest of these veterans were Gatlin Lin, David Au, David Ching and C C Tang, who donned raincoats to patrol the streets in the vilest of typhoons and produced some of their best work under difficult conditions. 

	They particularly excelled in recording the spirit of ordinary people, many of whom held down two jobs and snatched whatever sleep they could, either while commuting or in a rented tiered bedspace occupied on a shift basis and located as close as possible to at least one workplace. 

	GIS cameramen were particularly skilled in capturing the winsome moods of children, then more than half the population. Whether emerging spotlessly clean from squatter huts to study in rooftop schools, or contriving to amuse themselves as best they could away from crowded streets, these youngsters were visually emblematic of the buoyancy of a challenged but resilient community. As evidence of all this engaging photographic evidence, GIS bequeathed to posterity an early pictorial essay entitled City of Children.

	Valuable groundwork for an increasingly comprehensive photographic archive was laid by Frank Rogers, an expatriate officer who joined the department in its infancy and who has left behind his own photographic legacy in an album simply entitled Hong Kong, which he produced in the early '60s for the newly-established Hong Kong Tourist Association.

	The Hong Kong Annual Report 1961 is surprisingly and uncharacteristically specific in regard to the detail of the GIS photographic output: "Each set deals with a different subject and normally contains between one and two dozen 10'' x 8'' glossy prints. Each picture has a comprehensive caption of between 100 and 200 words, enabling them to be used either singly or as a 'spread'. These picture sets are proving of value to overseas publications, both for immediate use and for picture libraries for use with future stories about Hong Kong.

	That year the department acquired the services of Nigel John Vale Watt, who was to become Murray's successor in the top post, and who himself came from a photographic background, via colonial service in Africa and Aden. 

	Watt recalls that when he arrived in Hong Kong early in 1961, aboard the passenger liner Oriana, Murray came aboard to meet him. "He was a rather beefy looking gentleman, with a florid complexion and a mass of white hair. He said 'I might as well tell you, Watt, so that we get things straight from the start, you're not the man I asked for'." Who exactly Murray had in mind was never divulged, but the relationship that developed from this unpromising beginning set the stage for a smooth succession two years later, when Watt resolved to preserve the goals and objectives set by his formidable predecessor.
 
	Since Hong Kong had long exerted a special fascination for outsiders, who saw it through Hollywood eyes as an exotic locale filled with mystery and intrigue, it was important to dispel old misconceptions and replace them with a new respect for what was being achieved here. And since the West was targeted as the principal marketplace for Hong Kong's expanding and increasingly sophisticated product range, it was even more important that this reassessment should take account of the territory's brave new role on the stage of global commerce.
 
	The image Hong Kong set out to portray was of a surprising new 'can do' powerhouse of industry, whose tiny size packed a considerable wallop. Much emphasis was placed in these early days on overseas output, in the form of syndicated feature articles on a wide range of topics, each with an accompanying photo spread. The marketing strategy for this enterprise was carefully devised by Bill Fish, recruited from the Straits Times in Singapore to take charge of the editorial output.

	Aware from his own experience as a newspaper man that no self-respecting editor would knowingly accept free hand-outs from an official government agency, Fish decided that at all costs the materials marketed should be free of any suspicion of propagandist intent.
 
	His small team of writers were encouraged to write positively, with a semblance of objectivity, on topics that would bolster rather than detract from Hong Kong's image. And since it would seem strange if all this material kept appearing under the same limited range of bylines, he also encouraged them to invent a variety of pseudonyms, as if their articles were originating from different sources.

	Entering into the spirit of the thing, Keith Robinson selected a whole range of exotic alter-egos under which to masquerade, while Peter Moss was translated most frequently into Frank Watson or Ishmael Iskander. Later recruits into the ranks, including Adam Lynford, Brian Hickman and Peter Iliffe-Moon, ventured their own variations on the name game.

	Even more to the point, it was essential that none of this material should find its way directly into editorial in-trays directly from government sources or bearing the GIS imprimatur. A series of middle agents had therefore to be found in the respective target territories who would proffer it - for whatever commission they might make - as though it had stemmed from assorted stables of freelance writers.

	The gambit proved remarkably successful, particularly in the case of GIS photographs, whole categories of which, classified under all the most commonly-wanted subject headings, found their way into the archives of the world's major newspapers and magazines, from which they could be readily retrieved every time someone needed a piece on Hong Kong. Watt's own photographic background proved invaluable to this exercise, for he had links with Camera Press in London, who took on the role of marketing the GIS output.

	For GIS it was the product that mattered; not the credit for it.

Chapter 5: Tales of Mystery and Imagination

With government's policy on information already under review back in 1957, Murray started thinking ahead and pushing for staff expansion, particularly through the creation of more senior personnel. Among the officers he acquired that year were specialists in features writing, visual publicity and films.

	The last of these posts was intended primarily to oversee the production of documentaries and short educational films that might be shown between the commercials and before the main feature presentation in Hong Kong's 68 cinemas. Although Governor Sir Alexander Grantham had just inaugurated the first television service made available to any British colony - courtesy of Rediffusion Ltd - its 2.5 million yards of installation cabling fed into the homes of only 2,000 subscribers. And the latter were unlikely to be found in the squatter areas and resettlement estates.

	The vast majority of the populace continued to confine their hard-earned leisure hours to the restaurants and the cinemas, where they might enjoy brief air-conditioned comfort and escape into the unreality of ancient court intrigues and melodramas featuring sorrowful heroines battling to preserve their virginity against desperate odds.

	The Hong Kong Annual Report 1957 announced that "The demand of Overseas Chinese cinema audiences for films of Chinese theme told in their own language is insatiable, but the total possible market is not numerically large enough to guarantee an economic return unless production costs are kept at a minimum. This results in the majority of Hong Kong films being produced on what is by Western standards a 'shoe-string budget', and quantity rather than quality is the general trend of Hong Kong production."

	With the annual report under his overall supervision, it is easy to envisage Murray dictating this particular paragraph, seeking to justify his high expectations for the department's embryonic film unit. By the following year he could claim: "During 1958 there was considerable expansion of the government's general publicity programme, particularly in the field of visual publicity."

	Not only did he have his film unit, but it had taken on additional staff. and over the next three years was to make rapid strides, enabling Murray to recount that: "The short film has proved an invaluable medium for reaching large sections of Hong Kong's population, and an excellent vehicle for projecting Hong Kong overseas. For this reason the film unit of the department concentrated upon the production of newsreel shorts during 1961."

	In addition to these newsreels, six short black and white 'comedy' films were made in connection with that year's road safety campaign, together with six colour films for the Fire Services. These were intended for local cinema screenings, and would later become the staple fare of the mobile cinema that entered service in the mid-'60s, touring resettlement estates to set up its collapsible screen on playgrounds and other open spaces.

	Distribution prints were processed for the department in the commercial studio of T C Wang, whose son Charles joined the GIS film unit to learn production techniques that would later stand him in good stead when he replaced his father as head of Salon Films.
 
	No longer would it be possible for local cinemagoers to escape reality in their palaces of dreams. Reality would pursue them there, either in the form of 'dramatically simple but important fire prevention precautions' or through the explicit detail of a 15-minute film on anti-tuberculosis measures, also distributed to cinemas in 1961.

	With an eye to the future of television as an increasingly useful medium of communication, Murray assigned his newly-arrived deputy, Nigel Watt, to draw up a plan for the future of that medium, together with its related medium of sound radio.

	"That particular obligation influenced the course of my future career," recalls Watt, "for I was placed in the unusual situation of laying down ground rules that I would later come to enforce as Commissioner of Television and Entertainment Licensing."

	Aside from labouring over this blueprint with the help of the then Director of Broadcasting, Donald Brooks, Watt became involved with some of the early GIS film productions directed by the first head of the unit, Ben Hart. 

	Hart's successor, Brian Salt, had more ambitious goals. Having cut his teeth in the production of feature films, Salt had romance in his soul. Documentaries, he believed, were best served spiced with an element of drama. If the objective was to report on Hong Kong's achievements, why not bring the humble wooden kitchen god to life so he could deliver the report in person to the celestial deities? Hence Report to the Gods, as conveyed by well-known Cantonese comedian Leung Sing Bor in the role of the kitchen god.

	Much more grandiose was Salt's historical costume drama The Magic Stone, filmed at the little fishing village of  Lung Suen Wan, or Dragon Boat Bay. For this he managed to persuade actress Nancy Kwan, newly-returned from Hollywood and the success of such films as The World of Suzie Wong, to play a humble fisherwoman.

	This wasn't to be just any fisherwoman. Salt's script called for her to be married to the inventor of the compass. Defending this enormous historical liberty, he argued, in a handsomely produced book which GIS published to accompany the film: "It is a fact that magnetic compasses - pointing south instead of north - were being used by Chinese mariners in these same waters a thousand years ago."

	Sensing that the invention of the compass wasn't enough to engage movie enthusiasts for long, leave alone Nancy Kwan's dramatic talents, Salt decided that the real drama should focus on the latter. As the faithful consort who scaled the heights every day, with her child strapped to her back, to keep vigil for her husband's return, refusing to believe that he is lost at sea, she would be rewarded for her fidelity by being turned to stone - together with the child.

	The shipwreck in which the doomed inventor of the compass meets his untimely end was less easily devised. Salt persuaded the Government Supplies Department to purchase a suitably elderly sailing junk and then proceeded to wreck it on the rocky headlands of the Sai Kung peninsula. Supplies Department was appalled. Deliberately contrived shipwrecks were not acceptable means of writing off government equipment.

	The completed film aroused great interest but some bewilderment among overseas audiences unused to seeing loving spouses turned to stone for their loyalty. The last time they had heard of such a thing was when Lot's wife gave the literal origin to the word petrified by flouting celestial prohibition and turning to look back on the destruction of Sodom and Gomorra.

	Salt's quest for the unusual led to the production of the first GIS announcement of public interest - a brief black and white forerunner of the APIs (Announcement of Public Interest) which the department would later produce at the rate of one a week - to be banned by the government film censor operating under its own departmental jurisdiction.

	Produced as an appeal to conserve water, the shortage of which was to haunt Hong Kong throughout the '60s, this depicted four adults of mixed sexes and racial origins bathing together in the same tub. 'Save water - share a bath' was the motto. The film censor did not agree.

Chapter 6: Manning the Battle Stations

Where circuses might be left to the publicity division, the daily bread was baked in the GIS news room, which from the outset has remained the powerhouse driving the entire department. "News equals information," as one news room incumbent put it. "The rest is just icing on the cake."

	Geared to instantly transmit press releases by teleprinter (nowadays through a computerised newswire service and on the Internet), or dispense them through an ever-growing array of dedicated press boxes for local and overseas media, the news room has long been the department's 'perpetual flame'.

	A 24-hour vigil, manned on a 12-hour shift basis, has kept this unsleeping nerve centre alert to the possibility of suddenly and inconveniently breaking news that must be communicated, at any hour of the day or night, to those with a need to know.

	Crisis always brought out the best in the news room, as was the case in April 1962 when, without warning, thousands of people began pouring across the border from the Mainland. By the end of May, more than 60 000 were apprehended and returned, in an operation which taxed police and military patrols to the limit of their endurance. 

	The eventual estimate was that the numbers who evaded capture, to swell an already burgeoning populace, probably exceeded those who were caught. Information officers worked alongside security forces and immigration officials, whose own department had only come into formal existence the previous year, to report on the phenomenon and raise the alarm regarding its potential consequences.

	As the Colonial Secretary was later to state in a policy speech: "Nothing could wreck both our plans and our achievements more rapidly or certainly than a further flood of immigrants."
 
	No one relished crisis more than long-standing news room supremo David Willis, who was never happier than when winds were rising, rain clouds gathering and barometers dropping to herald another typhoon.

	Out would come movable blackboards, with chalk at the ready to record incidents, evacuations and casualties. Out would go instructions as to which shift would be manning the desks in relays around the clock until all signals were lowered and Willis would reluctantly put himself to bed. If he snatched any sleep at all before the storm abated it would be on a camp cot near to the phones, with instructions to be awoken if anything singular occurred. 

	This emergency footing met its severest test when Typhoon Wanda swept through Hong Kong on the weekend of  September 1-2, 1962. It was the worst typhoon since 1937 and killed 138 people. A further 34 were missing, presumed dead, two tugs sank, with the loss of their 39 crew members, 75 000 people were made homeless and 20 vessels of more than 100 000 tonnes were driven ashore. Sha Tin experienced a three-metre tidal wave which flooded the town - then at the head of a long inlet from Tolo Harbour - more efficiently than technology could later devise for The Magic Stone.

	The news section operated on an emergency basis for three days. Its teleprinter transmitter ran non-stop for 36 hours, sending out weather reports and forecasts, situation reports, warnings and news of the damage. The pace was so hot that the printer head had to be replaced.

	Perhaps the worst year for the sheer number and intensity of direct hits and near misses was 1964, when five typhoons struck and five others came close enough to trigger warnings. The five that hit Hong Kong waters with gale force winds and more did the greatest damage. Local storm signals were hoisted for a record of 570 hours that year, equivalent to some 24 days.

	Although they brought relief from a desperate water shortage, which had restricted supply to only four hours every fourth day, the storms did so in such abundance that streets and cars were left buried in mud sweeping down from the hillsides. The season began early, with a visit from Typhoon Viola in May. Next came Winnie, succeeded by Ida, which killed five in an avalanche of mud, followed by Ruby, which left 38 people dead, six missing and 1,336 squatter huts together with 400 fishing boats damaged or destroyed.

	Then came Sally, which killed another nine with a dislodged boulder at Shau Kei Wan, just ahead of Tilda, which hung around close enough to keep signals raised for a record 161 hours. Next were Anita, Billie, Clara and finally Dot, whose centre passed 20 miles east of the Royal Observatory as late as October 13.

	The GIS summary of these extraordinary events, in the 1964 year book, is restricted to the following comment: "In a severe storm, when movement for the public, and even for reporters, may be difficult, the department's direct links with police stations, fire stations, hospitals and other key points provides a steady flow of news which might otherwise not be available."

	No mention is made of the difficulty GIS staff might have experienced in their own movement, but then that was ever the case. If there was a chance you couldn't get to your shift on foot or in a taxi you'd better be there well before such obstacles might arise; failing which Willis could always send the duty van for you, with its windshield protected by wire mesh against falling trees and flying debris.

	Even in the quietest of times, there was never a moment when the news room was left unmanned. In this respect it has maintained the same record of round-the-clock service as hospitals and emergency services. Somebody has to be there to stand guard for incoming missiles in the way of press agency reports that might have sufficient bearing on Hong Kong affairs to warrant a rapid response.

	In the course of 1958, just a year before PRO Jock Murray became DIS, the Daily Information Bulletin (DIB), distributed to all newspapers, foreign news agencies and correspondents, totalled between 2,500 to 3,000 items. By 1964 that output had doubled to more than 600 items per month, or 7,200 in all - and that was without counting the typhoon bulletins. By then the DIB, as it came to be known, was going out in English and Chinese to more than 100 recipients, while the teleprinter service reached 31 subscribers, who were fed instant reportage in order to meet publishing deadlines.

	Murray persuaded the government it was in their best interests to bear the costs of installing teleprinter links in the offices of those newspapers and press services which agreed to accept them. But it was to be a long, hard battle persuading subscribers that what they received through these channels was not propaganda but information, pure and simple, without embroidery and without editorial comment. For years the GIS teleprinter installed in the Hongkong Standard newsroom bore a label describing it simply as 'The Enemy'.  Kevin Sinclair, who merits a stack of files all to himself in the GIS newsroom for his many requests of - and complaints - to the department noted early on in his long and colourful Hong Kong journalistic career that GIS stood for “God Is Speaking”.

	Alongside Willis in the newsroom was Bob Sun, who had joined the department in 1957 as an Assistant Press Officer, equivalent to an AIO, and rose through the ranks to become the first 'home grown' Director (1980 to 1983). Sun was also the first information officer to receive overseas assignments. He recalls taking a team of local craftsmen to give demonstrations at the Ideal Home Exhibition in London: "Most of those people did not speak much English and would follow me around.  Pushing through a crowd, I would normally say: ‘Excuse me. Excuse me.’ One ivory carver attempted to follow my example but did not hear me clearly. To a group of ladies standing in his way, he politely said: ‘Kiss me. Kiss me.’ Wondering why they gave him a strange look, he asked me for an explanation, which he thought funny enough to relate to his friends back in Hong Kong.”

	Sun accompanied Bill Fish across the border to Shenzhen in 1964 to witness the signing of the original water supply agreement. The actual signing ceremony - a major historical event - was completed in a matter of minutes, but the Hong Kong delegation spent the rest of the day being wined and dined at a sumptuous eight-course dinner.

	Sun remembers: "The wide variety of Chinese liquor served created the deepest impression on those present. Hong Kong guests included editors of the Ta Kung Pao, Wen Wei Pao, New Evening Post and Xinhua News Agency with all of whom I was well acquainted. The spirits provided by the hospitable hosts ranged from mao tai and kao liang to ta chueh and wu chia pi. There was indeed a great deal of drinking that evening.

	"When I returned to the office, it was about 9.30pm. I learned that by 9pm, the local press had become fidgety for news about the water agreement. Because the delegation had not returned after an early morning departure, it was suspected something had gone awry. The managing editor of the Sing Tao Jih Pao, the late Cheng Yu-long, telephoned my house and said to my wife: ‘Vivian, I think Bob has been detained. He's not likely to be coming back tonight.’ She of course did not believe him and countered it was a preposterous speculation. Before such a rumour could gain momentum, an official press release on the agreement appeared on the teleprinter.”

Chapter 7: Defending the North House

On June 8, 1963 the Information Services Department moved from the Government Offices West Wing into newly-built Beaconsfield House at No 4, Queen's Road, Central, which was to remain its home for almost 33 years.

	The move followed closely on the heels of Jock Murray's succession by Nigel Watt, who was appointed DIS on April 11, 1963. Relocation to Beaconsfield House inevitably meant a major upheaval for a total staff which still numbered less than 100.

	The site of the new home was originally a steep slope from a rocky hill to the shore of Victoria Harbour - which lay generally within metres of Queens Road. In 1841, Hong Kong's Deputy Superintendent of Trade and acting administrator, Alexander Johnston, levelled the top of the hill to build a home. The slope below was cut away to provide space for stables and outbuildings. The rock and earth were used for reclamation. 
 
	The new Beaconsfield House, its Cantonese name Gung Bak Hong (Defend the North House), beckoned when ISD outgrew its quarters in the Government Offices West Wing. But the department was at first allowed only the two top floors of the ugly and utilitarian six-storey structure. The lower floors housed three service messes, a post office and a public toilet.

	Into the two floors allocated to ISD were decanted a news room, press conference room, Chinese translators' office, teleprinter service, photographic studio and darkroom, art studio, editorial section, film unit and two theatres for the censorship of commercial feature films, which then also fell within the purview of the DIS. Also shoehorned into this already constricted layout were a publications distribution office, administrative office and various secretarial desks.

	The entire building was serviced, at one end only, by a single lift which was sorely overburdened, particularly at lunchtime, by various members of the public seeking relatively cheap meals in one or other of the messes catering - no questions asked - to their demands.

	Despite various unsuccessful attempts to provide separate access for tradesmen, senior government officials and visiting politicians, arriving for a press conference, would frequently find themselves crowded into a corner of the lift by delivery boys with bloodstained tunics, bearing baskets and trays of raw meat.

	From the rear of the fourth floor's western extremity a narrow bridge linked Beaconsfield House with Battery Path, alongside the French Mission Building (which at one stage housed a wing of ISD and is now the Court of Final Appeal), and this too became congested with pedestrian traffic when the noontide rivers of civil servants flowed down from the heights above.

	Competition for parking spaces, lining vehicular access via the Central Government Offices from Lower Albert Road, grew so fierce that staff cars occasionally spilled into the precincts of St John's Cathedral. Returning to the vehicle he had left in the church grounds, one information officer found a message slipped under his windscreen wiper warning that 'God will strike you dead for this'.

Chapter  8: The War of the Louder Speakers

Government's traditional non-interventionist stance - except at the behest of big business - had created a climate rich in commercial opportunity but uncongenial to labour relations. Even so it was apparent, from a sequence of events in the early months of 1967, that at least some genuine industrial disputes were being exploited for political gain. Taking their cue from the Cultural Revolution sweeping across China, local dissidents inflamed grievances in key sectors of Hong Kong industry, producing an atmosphere of mounting tension and concern.

	Prime targets for their intervention were four taxi companies, a textile factory, a cement company and the Hong Kong Artificial Flower Works. The Hong Kong Seamen's Union was simultaneously engaged in a dispute with a shipping company and an official boycott of the Government Seamen's Recruiting Office. In each case identical tactics were employed. Workers were intimidated, and attempts to settle their complaints were frustrated by the injection of political issues that had not been their original concern.

	Lists of demands requiring 'unconditional' acceptance were followed by rowdy demonstrations designed to intimidate management. Offers of mediation by the Labour Department were rejected as 'unwelcome meddling'. At least one press photographer was attacked for photographing such a demonstration.

	On May 6, 1967 some 21 dismissed workers of the Artificial Flower Works in San Po Kong were arrested by police for ignoring repeated warnings and preventing the removal of goods from the premises. Reaction in the left-wing press was immediate. The government and police were accused of persecution and brutality.

	Further picketing and demonstrations at the San Po Kong factory culminated in a more serious clash with police on May 11, sparking a riot which spread to neighbouring areas of Kowloon, where buses and other vehicles were set on fire and government offices and staff quarters were looted. A curfew was imposed on that and the two following nights.

	The campaign of intimidation spread to Hong Kong Island. Delegations from branches of Mainland-owned department stores, from left-wing publications and from trade unions - most identically attired in white shirts and black trousers - converged at the gates of Government House, waving the little red books so conspicuous among the Red Guards in China.

	Powerful loudspeakers, mounted on the Bank of China building, broadcast propaganda at high volume and provoked the government into responding by mounting a battery of even louder speakers on the roof of Beaconsfield House, directly above the DIS' office, playing the contemporary equivalent of today's Canto-pop music at deafening decibels. Working conditions in the heart of Hong Kong's business and banking centre became all but intolerable; but nowhere more so than in ISD.

	Bob Sun recalls: "There was rioting in Kowloon and the government had to order a curfew. A command centre under Assistant Commissioner Sutcliffe was set up at the Kowloon Police Headquarters. As the GIS Press Officer, I moved to the Police command centre for my news operations. Latest information was released via teleprinter back to ISD for forwarding to the media. 

	"In the middle of the evening, Sutcliffe decided to send out a Police squad to reconnoitre. Superintendent Godber (later of corruption notoriety) was ordered to lead the party. He went into the armoury to get his gun. However, he openly admitted he had not carried one for such a long time that he would not know how to handle it. I went along with them.

	"It was pretty quiet everywhere we patrolled, except when we reached Nathan Road in Tsim Sha Tsui. No sooner than I got out from the Police vehicle, down came a rattan chair from an upper storey. It landed squarely to my right. As my reflex made me dodge to the left, a bottle filled with water nearly nicked my head. It popped beside me. If either of them had been a direct hit, it could have been fatal.
 
	"Back at the command centre, it was 4am. A voice came over the speaker. It was Henry Heath, the Police Commissioner, speaking from Arsenal Street. He said: 'Ask Bob Sun to go to Yau Ma Tei (police division) to read the riot act to the four correspondents of CBS, Time and NBC. Then escort them to the Star Ferry concourse to await the first ferry back to the Island.' We did not have to wait  long for the ferry service to resume. That was the very first time in my life I crossed the harbour at the crack of dawn."

	Michael Stevenson, then Deputy Director of Information Services, formed a special team to respond to the propaganda programme mounted by the dissidents. Their prime objective was to preserve the morale of the community and to win public support for the measures government was compelled to impose in order to maintain security.

	In July 1967 a mob attack on a police post and the Rural Committee Office at Sha Tau Kok, left five Police dead and 11 wounded. Control of the sensitive border area shifted under the umbrella of joint police-military operations and Peter Moss, Gerry Xavier and photographer Gatlin Lin were attached as the GIS contingent to the so-called PolMil headquarters at Sek Kong.

	Irene Yau, then an Executive Officer on secondment to GIS, recalls: "I spent the first part of the morning reading out the Chinese papers in the English language in a very dark, smoky room, to a group of gentlemen who included Jack Cater, Mike Stevenson, Bob Locking and some army officers in uniform. They were a pretty high powered lot.

	"I joined government as a housing assistant, and then got into the Executive Officer grade. At the height of the disturbances I was posted to GIS, where I remained. One morning I saw a curly, blond guy in the group, and learned he was David Ford. Later the group was joined by a moustachioed gentlemen with a monacle and a long cigarette holder, whose name was John Slimming."

Chapter 9: Hearts, Minds and Mobile Cinemas

The events of 1967 - just 30 years before expiry of the New Territories lease - led to some stocktaking, both by government and the public at large. If it achieved nothing else, that troubled period forced Hong Kong people to re-evaluate their relationship to their chosen place of residence.

	Until then, many had looked upon Hong Kong as a temporary transit centre in their as yet unfocused search for a more durable home. Now they began to examine more attentively what this temporary refuge had to offer. Its benefits became more tangible, its amenities more compelling.

	If a territory so small, so vulnerable and yet so well suited to their expectations could be placed so precipitously at risk, perhaps there were ways in which its securities could be better reinforced. A closer inspection of its mechanisms seemed in order. The administration, stirred out of complacency, reacted by positively inviting and encouraging this public examination. The opportunity arose for establishing a closer working relationship between government and governed.

	To enhance public participation in public affairs, the government began to seek advice on its various policies by appointing committees, the members of which included those with established expertise or familiarities in appropriate fields. By 1980, more than 150 advisory bodies had been established, forming a comprehensive network through which to sieve policy initiatives and legislative proposals.

	Government by consensus  became the catchword of the new order and bridges of communication were the construction task allocated to its newly-established wing of public relations in ISD. And among the newest of the 'bridge engineers' was Tony Clark, transferred to the department as Senior Information Officer.

	"I had worked in the New Territories Administration since my arrival in Hong Kong," recalls Clark, "and survived the riots, despite being tear gassed - by the police as it happened, though you couldn't blame them, since they were merely trying to clear assembled protestors from the steps of the south Kowloon magistracy next door to my non-air-conditioned, windows-open-in-all-weather office.

"In 1967 - and through beyond 1968 - I was District Secretary in District Office (South). Which meant, in those days, that I ran the office administration, the local publics works programme,  liaison with the military and so on. Three 'good ideas' were advanced as to how we could bring impartial news to the remote areas:

�h		There would be a free newspaper delivered from the sky by the RHKAAF;
�h		An Army Information Team (AIT) would be set up to show entertainment and news films in remote villages; and
�h		The military would mount joint 'hearts-and-minds' village patrols with the Police and the District Office.

"I was the link at the District Office for all three of these operations once they became established. My task was to report back villagers' complaints about bundles of air-dropped newsprint drilling great holes in the roofs of village houses.  I presumed that GIS would pick up the tab for all this.

"I was much more directly involved with the tasking and deployment of the AIT and the PolMil patrols. So much so that, when the time came for the army to withdraw, I was asked whether I would like to seek a transfer to ISD, as a Senior Information Officer, to get the new 'CIT' up and running.

"I had, by then, left the outdoor life of the District Office and was the Secretary of the Government's Central Tender Board -  an immensely boring job, and the first of many posts I was later to occupy in the Colonial (later 'Government') Secretariat.  One of my first tasks, incidentally, was to open the tenders for the extension of the runway at Kai Tak.

"The Government system - then, as now - doesn't usually allow for individuals simply to move from one grade to another. I was asked to respond to an advert that would eventually be published in the South China Morning Post - I then had to compete with whomever also responded. In the event, there were, I recall, two candidates, including myself. I always like to feel that although I knew the chairman of the interview board (Nigel Watt) and the Secretary (John Telford) such acquaintance had nothing to do with my selection!

"Getting selected and getting appointed are two different things.  I recall two hurdles - the Head of the Executive Grade called me up and asked if I really knew what I was doing.  How dare I leave such a thriving family of friendly people for all those strange guys in GIS. In any case, he didn't know when he could release me - and it was not until some months later that he did.

“The other hurdle came from GIS itself.  Dick Norman was the Assistant Director in charge of personnel.  I had set him a problem.  I was on the permanent establishment of the Hong Kong Government.  All other expats in GIS were on contract.  Would I resign from the Hong Kong Government so I could be reappointed on the same terms as all the rest?  Not likely was the answer. More delay.  But the day eventually came when I was released and reported to my new boss, John Slimming, CIO/PRD, in Sutherland House, just across the Hong Kong Cricket Club ground from GIS headquarters in Beaconsfield House.

"At least the time had not all been wasted - John Telford had asked me what equipment would be required.  I told him - two Land Rovers, film projectors, mobile generators and the rest of it.  I even had an office - in the spanking new Canton Road Government Offices in Kowloon - much more convenient for travel to the NT; and very handy for the Government Dockyard which provided all our marine transport to the outlying islands."

Back at Sutherland House, Irene Yau (herself destined, some years later to become DIS) had joined Slimming's team, having transferred from the executive to the information grade to continue the vital task of analysing, and abbreviating in a nutshell, what the Chinese media had to say in response to, or in the absence of, various government initiatives.

Irene had proved her mastery of the art of appearing cool and unruffled in the most daunting of circumstances, when she presented a daily condensation of media highlights to a panel of luminaries back in that 'dark, smoky room' in Beaconsfield House.

Out of such Herculean efforts in rapid digestion of voluminous headlines arose GIST and, later the Daily Media Summary which, ever since, have been in great demand both among heads of department and - when they can get their hands on it - the media at large.

Chapter 10: Bounding into the '70s

To reward the beginnings of a new sense of community in its citizens, the government launched, in December 1969, the first Festival of Hong Kong, with a crowded week of programmes including musical and sporting events, exhibitions, youth rallies and special displays.

Succeeding Roy Wraight as ISD's new Art Director, Arthur Hacker arrived just in time to design the Festival logo. He found he had inherited an office manned by the charming veteran designer David Chin and a solitary assistant.
 
Like some prophetic precursor of the flag designed many years later for the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong, the Festival logo's spiralling orange and white radials suggested a 'bright, bouncing ball incorporating the Hong Kong orchid in the centre, representing 'the progressive and resilient spirit of the community'.

Fittingly, the festival took place on the eve of Hong Kong's most progressive and resilient decade, when both the place and its populace finally came of age. With the arrival of the '70s, the people of Hong Kong began to reap the benefits of their industry. Improved labour legislation, combined with increased competition for a workforce that had earned the right to choose from a range of available options, ushered in new affluence and greater self-assurance.

This was also the age of the emergent middle class, at first narrowly parting and then laying massive and unmistakable claim to the gap between rich and poor. These became the exemplars of Hong Kong society, the extensive middle ground of new money from which arose a younger breed of entrepreneurs, if anything more adventurous and confident than their predecessors.

Fittingly, the '70s was also an era of rapid localisation within the civil service, as reflected in the recruitment policies of  ISD. Since 1972, there have been only two expatriates, as opposed to seven locals, appointed to occupy the post of DIS, and none since the untimely death of John Slimming in 1979.

Hong Kong started taking off in new directions, its products acquiring greater flair and style, setting trends rather than following them. Fortunes were made and unmade by riding this formidable engine of enterprise. Risk-taking sometimes went disastrously wrong, but the impetus was ever upward and onward, and those who fell momentarily by the wayside simply had to run harder to catch up.

Government's efforts to assist industry in its quest for wider trade opportunities had their origins in the previous decade, when the Trade Development Council and the Hong Kong Productivity Council were founded in quick succession, in 1966 and 1967 respectively. But Bob Sun can remember even earlier forays into prospective new markets overseas. His trip to London for the Ideal Home Exhibition was not his first exposure to the milieu of the international trade fair.

The previous year, Jock Murray had assigned him to assist the Commerce and Industry Department in the month-long First International Trade Fair in Nigeria. "He gave me specific instructions to learn the management of such a display, in preparation for the forthcoming one in England," Sun recalls. Bill Fish was another ISD staffer loaned for the purpose of promoting Hong Kong's presence at such venues, and was regularly detached to assist the TDC in its initial ventures on to the world stage.

It was left to Murray's successor, Nigel Watt, to take on the task of preparing what was to be Hong Kong's first participation in the series of category one world Expos staged, every four years, with elaborate expense and ceremony in major cities around the globe, many of which compete vigorously for the honour of hosting these events.

In 1970 the honour fell to Osaka, in Japan, and Watt recruited Grahame Blundell as co-ordinator of the Hong Kong pavilion. Arriving two years early, to keep within the long lead time required for so elaborate a venture, Blundell commissioned the late Allen Fitch, architect of Hong Kong's City Hall, to design the structure. Fitch came up with a low profile building spectacularly crowned by a flotilla of full-sized masts and junk sails, designed to be raised and lowered each day and to rotate with the prevailing winds. The fabric for the sails was a fine mesh to let the air through and protect them from sudden gusts.

Blundell recalls: "Over nine million visitors from all over the world trooped through the pavilion.  Prince Charles was perhaps the most important visitor. He was followed by three Kings, two Crown Princes and various Presidents and lots of ambassadors. The VIP room in the pavilion was rather small and there was always a shortage of chairs.  Frequently, distinguished guests sat on the floor having enjoyed a superb Chinese meal in the pavilion restaurant.  They sat on the floor in the VIP lounge enjoying good conversation, champagne and brandy.  The parties were great and frequently quite boisterous!"

It would be 16 years before Hong Kong next participated in a major international exposition (Expo '86 in Vancouver), but the pavilion at Expo '70 marked a significant escalation of Hong Kong's efforts to earn wider recognition for its spectacular post-war achievements, and set the tone for its engagement in a succession of other events in the international arena.

Initially - and inevitably in view of its status as a British colony - the bulk of this endeavour went into arranging venues and showcases in Britain, where attendance at trade fairs, arts festivals and events such as the International Boat Show became almost an annual exercise. But increasingly, as Hong Kong gained respect and renown as a self-supporting entity making its own way in the world, these efforts were directed wider afield, in Europe, the Americas and Asia.

Chapter 11: Jacks - and Jills - of all Trades

Among the first GIS officers to prove the adaptability of the grade, by leaving the parent department on secondment to other arms of the civil service, were Jimmy Evans and Joseph Cheng, assigned respectively to information liaison posts in the Hong Kong Government Office in London and in Police Headquarters.

Irene Yau, by then a Senior Information Officer in the Inquiry Service, became another early 'lone scout' on detachment when she was posted to the Social Welfare Department. "Those were hectic days," she recalls. "I was the only one there, and there were lots of fires in squatter areas, which meant I was called out practically every other night, helping to deal with hundreds of people made homeless. I learnt early on to sleep by the telephone."

At the beginning of 1979, she was transferred to the Police as Chief Police Information Officer. "I can't recall whether it was the first or the second day I joined the Police, but we had two things running at the same time. One was an unprecedented protest in the yard of Arsenal Street Police Headquarters, when hundreds of Police officers were demonstrating against the ICAC. That was before Governor MacLehose declared the amnesty.

"At the same time there was a big hijacking incident at the airport. It was a bit stressful, but great fun.

"I was very, very lucky that the Police trusted me, and counted on my advice. We worked very well together. We just hit on the right note I guess. And the experience I gained there, in handling crisis events, was extremely helpful to me when I later returned to GIS. I learned from them how useful it was to have clear operational orders, and how important it was to have the discipline to carry them out. 

"There are lots of activities in GIS which are quite similar in their logistical requirements, particularly in organising big events. You have to be very methodical, and disciplined, in planning the detail and preparing for any eventuality.

"The contacts I made in the Police remained valuable to me throughout the rest of my career, especially when we required Police co-operation in mapping out the route for a VIP tour or any other occasion where senior government officials or visiting dignitaries might attract the attention of the media. I believe it was useful to the Police too. They had somebody whom they trusted, talking to them about the media whom they disliked.

"I have also been very lucky in receiving tremendous support from colleagues I worked with. I had the good fortune to be blessed with good teamwork and to benefit from a tremendous team spirit. Those I worked with remained loyal to me, and have proved their abilities in many other testing roles since -  people like Akber Khan, Julianna Chen and S Y Tam.

"In all my years in GIS the most significant development was the rapid expansion of the department. When I first joined, the department was still a small, family-scale operation. It has since expanded I don't know how many times.

"It becomes a very different operation to control when your people are not working together under one roof but spread all over the different departments of government - even all over the world, as is now the case. It requires tremendously complex decision making when you have to decide who to send where, because you are in fact looking for jacks of all trades who are masters of everything." 

Chapter 12: A Mini United Nations

Betty Shum arrived in ISD at the point where it was just beginning to take on some of these new initiatives. "I joined," she recalls, "in late 1968 when it was a small news-oriented organisation staffed mainly by ex-journalists.  I was among the first few female university graduates without any journalistic experience to be recruited as an Assistant Information Officer. Being my second job after leaving the campus, little had I expected it to become my life-long career. But I ended up spending 28 years in the department!

	"It was a sunny December morning when I set foot on the sixth floor of Beaconsfield House for the first time. As I met my colleagues, among whom were David Willis, Osman Talip, Jimmy Evans, Johnny Khan, Gerry Xavier, Tommy Hahn and Jimmy Marshall, I thought I had mistakenly walked into the Office of the United Nations!
 
	"Later, the multi-racial and international flavour of the department became even stronger with the arrival of newcomers like Carlos Digmanese, Alberto de Cruz, Harold Yau, Lionel Rodrigues, Bushi Ratour, Vinki Sharma, Ramachandran, Halima Gutteres, Jo Tashiro and Akber Khan to name a few. Their ethnic origins ranged from Pakistan, India, Malaysia, Korea and Japan to Spain, Portugal and Holland. Added to the list were their Chinese, British, Australian, New Zealand and American counterparts. It would not be an over-statement to say that the department was made up of people from four of the five continents.
 
	"Another characteristic of the department in the old days was the high percentage of smokers.  Ashtrays were everywhere and the newsroom was filled with the aroma (or odour if you dislike the smell of tobacco). As a non-smoker in those days, I used to watch in amazement how one or two heavy smokers would talk on the phone with the receiver being placed comfortably between head and shoulder, light up a cigarette and let it hang loosely between their lips, and bash  away on their typewriters with two index fingers, all at the same time! It fascinated me to see their cigarettes getting shorter and shorter as the ash at the end grew longer and longer, desperately trying to cling to the butts against the force of gravity.

	"My previous employment was in the academic field, where many  fellow workers could be described as 'intellectual snobs'. The casual and lively atmosphere of GIS was a refreshing change and I fell in love with it at first sight. The compact and simple structure of the department held its staff together as a closely knit family. It must have been one of the least bureaucratic government departments there were. Our then Director, Nigel Watt wore long hair with sideburns, smoked a pipe, and travelled around on a motorbike. To me, he was certainly not the picture of a typical civil servant.

	"David Willis, then assistant director, was also a character. Whenever a typhoon hit Hong Kong, he would show up in his shorts and sandals, jumping up and down with excitement like a little boy about to take part in a war game. On such occasions, one would find in the GIS theatre objects that one would not expect to see in a normal office environment. These included helmets, raincoats and boots prepared specially for officers who were required to cover outdoor incidents during the storm.
  
	"There would even be canvas beds, blankets and mahjong tables! In those days, there was no MTR, and cross-harbour ferry services would be suspended, very often at short notice, when the gale force became too strong.  To make sure that they could get to the office in time for their emergency duties, officers living in Kowloon or the New Territories would come in much earlier or even spend the night in the theatre. What better way was there to kill time than playing a few rounds of mahjong with ones colleagues while waiting to go on shift!

	"Another colleague who still makes me giggle whenever I think of him is the one-time editor of the Chinese DIB, Hui Ying Ke.  He had this habit of slapping his forehead while subbing our copy. I suppose our translations sometimes drove him up the wall, and in frustration, he would hit his head very hard with his palm, first from the front and then immediately from the back.  'To balance the blow' was the only reason I could think of.  Watching him repeat this act throughout the day could be painful, and that was probably why our Chinese improved by leaps and bounds when we were working under him.

"I majored in English literature at university. But after I joined GIS, I discovered to my horror that I could not write, not even a simple three-paragraph press release on such topics as 'water cut', 'road closure' or 'buildings declared dangerous'.

“Training was non-existent in those days; you learned on the job through your mistakes. For months, which seemed to me years, every single draft I passed to the editor was thrown back in my face.
  
"All he said was 'Rewrite'. No guidance, no advice.  Then one fine day my draft did not come back, and I actually found the press release in the next morning's DIB.  But alas! It bore no resemblance whatsoever to what I had written. I think what happened was that the editor got so tired of repeating the word 'rewrite' that he decided to do it himself.  As my writing was time and again torn into pieces, so was my self-confidence.  I was about to embark on a job-hunting exercise when the long-awaited breakthrough came.

"One day, Osman Talip, then a PIO, assigned me to interview an officer in the Agriculture and Fisheries Department and write a feature article on fish marketing in Hong Kong. Eager and excited, I churned out a three-page story and handed it to Osman.  Nothing happened for a long time. I said to myself, 'Uh oh, it's ended in the wastepaper basket again!'  Then on a Saturday I found my story in the DIB, printed almost word for word!  Overnight, I grew a few inches taller, only because I was able to walk with my head held up high.

"There was a time when new recruits were required to take turns to man the press enquiries desk on week-ends and public holidays, single-handedly. You were practically alone except for a few teleprinter operators.  We were then unfamiliar with the personalities on the other end of the line, how and where to obtain the necessary information, or how much we were supposed to release to the press. Unlike nowadays there was no 'line to take' except  in very rare cases.
  
"Moreover, there were no departmental units; GIS headquarters provided a one-stop service to the media. Whenever an incident occurred, the telephones would start ringing all at once. You hardly had time to take down one set of questions, not to mention getting the answers, before another set came in. And let's face it, some reporters could be really nasty, particularly when they discovered that you were new on the job. Every time I went home after a shift duty, I would suffer from stomach pain which, according to my doctor, was induced by stress and anxiety. The way we used to describe this experience among ourselves was: 'They dump you in the water. You either learn to swim right away or you drown.'  Well, we all survived, and became pretty good swimmers too! 

"Editors' briefings were at one time regularly held, almost once every fortnight if I remember correctly, in the Director's office after 5.30pm.  Senior government officials were invited to conduct briefings on their respective subject areas, particularly those aspects that were controversial.  The editors of Chinese papers in the '60s were mostly elderly veteran newsmen who spoke relatively little English, although I am sure they all had a good understanding of the language. The speakers, on the other hand, invariably used English as the medium of communication.  So we, a group of inexperienced AIOs, were ordered to interpret on those occasions.
  
"Usually we would go in blind, without being told of the topic. It was not at all surprising that we would often get stuck over figures, jargon, and technical terms, or even get them wrong.  Ironically, it was always one of the editors, Eddie Tsang of the Hong Kong Times, who came to our rescue!  Those were the moments when I wished there was a hole in the ground so I could hide.  The feeling of incompetence was bad enough. Worse still was the awareness that everyone there had spotted your mistakes but pretended not to have noticed. Worst of all was the realisation that your presence was totally unwarranted!  We all uttered a sigh of relief when the practice was finally stopped.  One good did come out of this farce though - we became very thick-skinned in the process, which helped us to deal with more awkward situations in later years.

"I guess, like first love, initial impressions and early experiences always make the strongest and most lasting impact. There have been more significant events in the latter part of my career, but somehow they seem comparatively dim and blurred.  Looking back, it is the people with whom I have worked that form the best part of my memory. A unique personality trait, a peculiar mannerism, a characteristic laugh or a favourite expression.  They always remind me of their owners, and I miss them, very very much."

�h		Betty Shum was Assistant Director Public Relations before she retired in August 1997

Chapter 13: Of Green Monsters and Broken Daggers

The Publicity Division received a considerable boost when David Ford replaced Nigel Watt as Director in September 1972. Having arrived in Hong Kong on a military posting in the aftermath of the 1967 disturbances, Ford remained on secondment to ISD and later resigned from the army to join the information grade. He relished the challenge of community building.

In step with the gathering momentum of social development in Hong Kong was the introduction, in 1972, of the first of many major publicity campaigns with which ISD set out to inculcate and foster a sense of civic pride in the newly self-aware community. Arthur Hacker came up with the design for an emblematic 'public enemy number one' of the new Keep Hong Kong Clean Campaign, in the form of Lap Sap Chung, the litterbug.
 
A green, long-snouted monster with red spots and a forked tail, Lap Sap Chung was supposed to be repulsive but ended up looking almost endearingly naughty instead. This despite the fact that an early poster for the campaign - and one which prompted great demand - shows him looming, gigantic and Godzilla-like, above the city skyline, poised to trash the metropolis. Happily his advent coincided with the rapid inroads of broadcast television services into every home in Hong Kong, so that, even though his anti-social behaviour was not to be emulated, he became an instantly recognisable icon of the new age.

His creator, 'Frankenstein' Hacker, ruefully comments on Lap Sap Chung fever in Hong Kong in Posters, published by ISD many years after the event: "The litterbug, Lap Sap Chung, and Miss Super Clean were both launched at the same time and promoted equally. Miss Super Clean soon dropped out of the picture, but Lap Sap Chung became a folk villain. For the 'Year of the Rabbit' a white bunny called Siu Pak To (Litte White Rabbit) was introduced to counteract the villainous litterbug. Once again evil triumphed."
 
Television in fact became the principal medium for getting the message across, and here the groundwork laid by Nigel Watt, in formulating the licensing conditions under which the television stations were to operate, proved invaluable in securing generous allocations of free air time for announcements of public interest.

When the Keep Hong Kong Clean campaign targeted public beaches in 1975, ISD came up with the idea of forming Clean Your City groups, comprising your children who would adopt particular beaches and, through their volunteer efforts, compete for the honour of achieving the cleanest. The project proved so successful that, at year's end, ISD succeeded in encouraging the Education Department to preserve both the concept and the acronym by establishing Community Youth Clubs on a permanent basis.

For the Fight Crime campaign, launched to enlist public support for a crackdown on crime, Hacker devised a symbol of a broken dagger. This was followed by numerous other logos, targeting the different strategies employed by the Police in later phases of this campaign.

Since designing the look of a campaign only marked the first phase of ISD's involvement, a new sub-division was formed to follow up with the intricate logistical work entailed in devising and coordinating various public activities and events, with the help of city district offices, schools, auxiliary forces and voluntary services. 

This 'bread and circuses' entourage had to fly largely by the seats of its pants, making it up as it went along. Among its early graduates were Ted Thomas, who soon moved on to form his own independent public relations consultancy, Gillian Newson, now a theatrical agent for some of the world's better known opera singers and orchestras, and Bill Yim, the popular cartoonist who was commissioned to design and operate a troupe of puppets for a mobile theatre.

Mounted on a flat-bed truck, for rapid deployment in factory precincts and housing estate playgrounds, the mobile theatre used lights, loudspeakers, hired talent and a pastiche of variety acts and social dramas heavily laced with public service messages. One reader wrote her Chinese newspaper to complain of the high decibels of this 'obligatory entertainment' - but that was in the days before ISD launched its Environmental Protection campaign which emphasised noise as a contributory element of social ills.

Supporting the television APIs and posters was a wide range of print material, including leaflets and explanatory booklets explaining the objectives of each campaign and the role the public could play. Quickly sensing how their own targets might be attained with the help of such campaign treatment, heads of departments competed vigorously for the mounting funds allocated to ISD each year for an ever-expanding range of programmes.

In turn, Road Safety, Fire Prevention, the Anti-Narcotics and Anti-Smoking drives, AIDS education, Industrial Safety, Home Safety, Recreational Safety, Child Abuse prevention, Metrication and Voter Registration all got the campaign treatment. With a host of other topics calling so heavily on public service airtime the broadcasting media were obliged to provide, the Publicity Division had to produce monthly schedules mapping out time slots for each message.
 
ISD's growing publicity apparatus came in particularly handy at a time when the government was developing new satellite towns in the New Territories, and facing resistance from a populace wary of moving into them. Inroads into the no longer 'new' territories had taken on greater urgency in the '70s. By the middle of the decade the Housing Authority's long-term development programme envisaged that at least half of the new projects would be located there, principally in the new towns of Tsuen Wan, Sha Tin and Tuen Mun. But planning and building these new towns was one thing. Getting people to inhabit them was another.

While the comforts of domesticity were assuming greater importance in the minds of Hong Kong residents, most still held home to be subordinate to workplace, and believed that a minimum distance should separate the two. On the other side of the Kowloon range lay rustic backwoods one might venture into - if time permitted - for a Sunday outing. But they were no place in which to work or live.

The skills brought to bear in breaking down this resistance, and encouraging the exodus of pioneering new town settlers, became part of the new motivational armoury of ISD. Investors had also to be wooed for the new industrial areas that would form the employment base for these new populations, and housing, schools, social and commercial amenities and public utilities had to be developed in parallel - all of them dependent on ease of transportation and none of them likely to work unless ordinary families could be prevailed upon to take up residence there. Heavily involved in this programme was Kerry McGlynn, newly-recruited to ISD from Australia.

Chapter 14: A Sniper in the Bell Tower

Although it seemed, at the time, merely a logical extension of the work of ISD, the creation of public relations units within various other departments marked a significant development with profound implications for the government's overall information policy. For as the years went by, ISD would find individual departmental heads exerting greater independence and control of their own public relations output.

The 'diaspora' was linked to the growth of political maturity in the community, and to the more critical role played by the media. David Ford, as DIS, had publicly stated that, because of the limitations on democratic development, the press had to serve as the 'opposition' in Hong Kong. 

The creation of departmental public relations units also coincided with a major review of government's information policy in the early '70s, which in turn arose from a group of management consultants' recommendations to strengthen and reinforce the overall structure of the administration. 

The Central Government Offices acquired their first Secretariat Press Officer in 1972, accompanying Jack Cater in the newly-established post of Information Secretary. Cater was already familiar with ISD's operations as a result of overseeing the government's response to the 1967 disturbances. The following year responsibility for information policy was absorbed within his wider ambit as the first Secretary for Home Affairs. In late 1973 he was succeeded by Denis Bray.  David Ford moved from ISD to become Bray’s Deputy Secretary for Information, later becoming Secretary for Information and eventually Chief Secretary, the last Briton to fill the post.
 
Other departmental information units were set up in the Police, and in Labour, Social Welfare and Resettlement Departments. The momentum was accelerating so fast that by the end of 1972 there were a further five in operation.
 
At first the move met with resistance from certain department heads. They resented having to find space to accommodate personnel seconded from ISD, and resented even more the idea that they were in need of advice on how to handle their public relations. Even when they grudgingly acquiesced to such 'infiltration', the information officers seconded to them were given little or no familiarisation, or indeed encouragement to discover where their services might be required.

While some seconded staff found their new assignments heavy going, others quickly established an almost unhealthy relationship with their hosts, and saw fit to declare virtual autonomy from ISD, much to the alarm and chagrin of the latter's directorate.
 
Notable early 'rebels' were Barry Walsh, in Labour Department, Drew Rennie in the Police and Alberto Da Cruz, in Medical and Health, who set an independent tone that would be followed by one or two successors, including Chris Wong.

Inevitably, of course, there was always a danger of divided loyalties arising from such postings. Working side by side with the professional staff to whom they had been attached, ISD's 'outriders' were like scouting parties sent far afield from the main body of their troops. They had to learn to speak a different language, accommodate to new ways and, not surprisingly, to view public relations problems from a different perspective.

The best of them displayed precisely the kind of initiative they were expected to display, and clung to their standpoint even if it put them at odds with headquarters back in ISD. It was a learning experience, both for them and - more especially - for their superiors in the information grade. How much free rein should you allow the hounds in pursuit of the quarry, particularly if the quarry was something they could scent better than you could?

Irene Yau, one of the earliest to head a departmental unit, describes the experience as almost schizophrenic. "Not only are you torn between your department head and your boss back in GIS, but you are also torn between the government and the media.

"The media find it difficult to trust us because they think of us as civil servants, and civil servants ask 'Which side are you on? The media's or ours?' If you defend the media to your fellow civil servants you're suspected of aiding and abetting them. What too many of them fail to realise is that we're actually there to help them."

Once she became DIS herself, Irene found it surprising how often civil servants would cling to the mistaken belief that GIS still exercised responsibility for the by then long independent Radio Television Hong Kong.

"I was frequently challenged by quite senior officials, who should have known better, to explain what I intended to do about RTHK. My response was I was the same rank as the Director of Broadcasting, over whom I had absolutely no control," she said.

By 1976 the number of departmental units had grown to 15, the latest - and for a long time the smallest - being in the Civil Aviation Department. Whereas 'our man at Kai Tak' had at least one genuine hijacking to deal with, most departmental units were left to cope with crises that spared them any risk to life and limb. Sensing that too much reality would blunt their taste for adventure, government decided, every now and then, to stage an imaginary security exercise that would prod civil servants out of their seats and on to their toes.

Even though ISD was consulted on the preparation of the scenarios for these exercises, and expected to loan its personnel to staff imaginary 'news media', information was the last priority in the minds of those senior government personnel who responded to the often highly improbable circumstances devised by the authors of these exercises.

Frequently the pace of events was so unrealistically exaggerated that the 'media' were asking questions regarding events that had not been notified to the operations centres. Police Commissioner Roy Henry, for example, was left flatly denying, at a simulated press conference, that any hostages had been taken from a fictional consular office, even when shown photographs of 'deceased hostages' left to hang from the consulate balcony.

On another occasion ISD personnel, about to come off duty from a harrowing session in the subterranean recesses of Central Government Offices, were denied permission to leave the premises on the grounds that a sniper was posted in the bell tower of St John's Cathedral to cover the rear entrance. How he might have gained access to this sanctuary without killing the sexton and stealing the keys was a detail conveniently overlooked.

What about the front entrance? was the exasperated response. Before the exercise controllers could quickly vary the scenario, by posting a second sniper in the tree dominating the main quadrangle, the ISD contingent made its escape.  

�h		In March 1999, there were 25 departmental units and 11 Secretariat Press Offices.

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 d_cor 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 pi_ce de r_sistance 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.   

Chapter 16: The Unauthorised Addition

The index at the back of the particular edition of the annual report entitled Hong Kong 1970 contains a curious entry on page 330; an entry that exists purely to direct the reader back to itself. It simply states ‘Dougherty P.W., Editor, Hong Kong 1968, 69, 70, 330’. Denied the opportunity to officially accept the credit for editing that complex and demanding record for three consecutive years, Paul Dougherty found his own unofficial way to circumvent the prohibition.

Later editors, commencing with Anthony Tobin in Hong Kong 1975, would indeed receive accreditation, immediately following the title page, when the embargo was finally lifted by Director David Ford. And other editors, like Dougherty, would find themselves trapped in the editor's chair year after year, simply because there were few contenders - and certainly no volunteers - for this thankless task.

Tobin was succeeded by Joyce Savidge (two successive reports), Philip Rees, Dianne Wood (two), Cynthia Kerr Rao (later Cynthia Lockeyear), Mark Pinkstone, Melinda Parsons (two), Bill Knight (two), Aladin Ismail (three), David Roberts (two), Renu Daryanani (one) and the record-holder Bob Howlett (four), who has been in the chair since early 1994. Like the Editorial Sub-division - now the Publishing Sub-division - in which they served, these editors also pursued their displaced existence away from the power centre of Beaconsfield House.

For several years the sub-division enjoyed a splendid isolation at Baskerville House in Icehouse Street, before coming to rest alongside the Promotions Sub-division in the French Mission Building. The sub-divison - along with the Promotions and Creative Sub-divisons - found a temporary home at the Shiu On Centre in Wan Chai from March 1995 until 'reunification' in January 1999 with ISD Headquarters in Murray Building.    

As the flagship of ISD's editorial production, the year book topped the priority list for the Design Sub-division (now the Creative Sub-division), whose hard-working photographers laboured to produce ever more spectacular picture essays to embellish its pages and boost its sales. 

Until the late '60s and early '70s, the entire publications output of ISD was safely in the hands of one editor, supported by the indomitable Dolly Ng, who had originally been recruited as books designer, and who worked at an adjoining desk on a string of projects including City of Children. However, by the middle of the latter decade, expanding public interest in civic affairs demanded a stepped-up output and more editorial staff.

An early response to this desire for more information on the hitherto mysterious mechanics of government was a series of fact sheets, each treating a different aspect of administrative affairs and each requiring to be updated annually with the latest facts and statistics. The range of titles grew so voluminous that editing them became a year-long job for the particular information officer assigned these duties. The Senior Information Officer assigned to this task nowadays oversees the updating of no less than 67 Fact Sheets, as well as more than 60 leaflets or booklets on how to apply for various government services.   

Backing the editorial staff were the sales and marketing personnel, who controlled and painstakingly expanded the department's only source of revenue. Originally seconded from the establishment of the Government Printer, who continued to print ISD publications but declined to take any further responsibility for the goods delivered, these stalwarts pursued an existence so specialised that there were few opportunities for them to cross over into the mainstream of information duties. 

Very few succeeded in achieving this transition. The rest heroically and uncomplainingly pursued a closeted existence in the one section of the department most vulnerable to audit queries, producing a virtually flawless record.

Chapter 17: Profound and Lasting Consequences

The Royal Visit in 1975 - the first by a reigning British monarch - coincided with the first influx of refugees from Vietnam, where the previous year American forces had abandoned their efforts to help withstand an unstoppable communist advance. The day the Queen and Prince Philip set foot on Hong Kong soil a Danish vessel, MV Clara Maersk, sailed into the harbour bearing 3,900 refugees picked up at sea from a small, overburdened and imperilled vessel, the Truong Xuam.
 
Conversing with veteran foreign correspondent Anthony Lawrence at a reception in Government House, Her Majesty expressed concern for the implications of this development and correctly surmised it could be the beginning of a much larger and ongoing exodus with profound and lasting consequences not only for Hong Kong but the world at large.

Though slow to materialise at first, the exodus gained rapid momentum by 1978, when a total of 3,356 were similarly rescued at sea and a further 2,441 arrived directly aboard their own small craft, many so laden with their human cargoes that they were barely seaworthy. These numbers did not include some 3,000 aboard the Panamanian freighter Huey Fong, which at year's end was still anchored just outside Hong Kong waters, denied permission to enter because she had originally been bound for Taiwan and only diverted after picking up her unscheduled passengers.

John Slimming had just taken over as DIS from Richard Lai Ming, a Mauritian Chinese who for the previous two and a half years, before he retired in June 1978, was the first local officer appointed to that post. Lai Ming had done much to advance the careers of promising local officers, but his directorate was still dominated by expatriate 'old timers'.
 
Slimming had pursued a colourful career as British Council representative in Burma, advisor on aboriginal affairs in Malaya and author of a number of successful novels, including The Pepper Garden, before arriving in Hong Kong in the aftermath of the 1967 disturbances. He was a man who took his work very seriously and whose particular talent was to anticipate the downside of almost every development. 

One of his staff, invited by the Hong Kong Tourist Association to address a group of students about to depart for universities overseas as 'goodwill ambassadors', found that by chance the date of this address fell on June 30, 1977 - 20 years before the New Territories lease was due to expire. When he later reported to Slimming that he had settled for this topic, and invited what proved to be a lively discussion on the prospects of reversion to China, Slimming was greatly dismayed. It was not, he felt, a subject to which anyone should be drawing attention, leave alone a senior member of his own department. 

For Slimming the implications of the rising refugee influx were nothing less than disastrous. He became obsessed with this particular issue to the point where, because he was unwilling to delegate responsibility, it began to take an appalling toll of his health.

An additional burden was his anxiety for his beloved wife Lucy, a Malaysian Chinese he had met while on a language course in Kuala Lumpur, and whom he had married from the home of David and Jane Akers-Jones, then stationed in Malaya prior to that country's independence in 1957. Yet in the end it was John who preceded Lucy's demise through his sudden death from a massive heart attack in 1979. 

In his desk drawers were found copious notes of his observations on the manner in which the refugees had made their desperate voyages in hope of a better life, as though he had half toyed with the idea of using them for a future account of their remarkable odysseys.

The man who took over from Slimming, in an acting capacity until Bob Sun's return to the department as DIS on January 1, 1980, was Bernard Renouf Johnston, better known as 'Johnny'. Already thoroughly familiar with the refugees issue, Johnston organised special documentary films, booklets and information kits designed to highlight the burden posed for an already overcrowded territory that was not receiving the co-operation it needed from countries far better equipped to share the load. Though he often personally organised briefings and conducted tours of improvised refugee centres, Johnston also busied himself with other departmental priorities, including the importance he attached to recreational events organised by the staff club. For relaxation he embarked on weekend excursions to the New Territories and outlying islands with his wife Gwyneth, a noted authority on butterflies who succeeded in rearing lesser-known species in a special room assigned for the purpose in their government quarters in Mount Austin Road. Together they collaborated on a book on Hong Kong butterflies, published by ISD.

More intimately involved with refugee matters were David Roads, a veteran AP correspondent who had been based in Hong Kong almost throughout the post-war years, and Matthew Cheung, who was later to leave ISD and make his mark in the ranks of the administrative grade and is now the Commissioner for Labour. These two formed the nucleus of the Overseas Public Relations Section established in 1977 under the Public Relations Division.  The most famous holder of the post, however, was undoubtedly Mark Pinkstone whose unfailing good humour, accessibility and helpfulness were recognised by his “clients” who awarded him a rare life membership of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club.

Hong Kong was to carry the cross of its refugee centres for many years to come, constantly defending its policies and raising the issue in the world arena to focus attention on the unfairness of its struggle to cope, largely unassisted and with little sympathy for the dilemma it faced. 

Not until June 1997, on the eve of Hong Kong's reversion to Chinese sovereignty, did the numbers of Vietnamese migrants in detention centres decline to the point where the government could afford to close the largest - and most contentious - at Whitehead. Inmates at this Sha Tin facility had frequently staged violent protests against efforts to repatriate them. Less than a year later, the last of the detention centres was closed bringing to a humane conclusion a saga that had dogged Hong Kong's development for more than two decades.

Chapter 18: So Much for Fairy Tales

Those who believed in fairy tales - particularly of geese laying golden eggs - thought it a mistake to remind China of the New Territories lease. They felt that, if nothing were done to draw attention to the fading 'use-by' shelf-life on the New Territories label, Hong Kong could slip through the 1997 time barrier with no one being the wiser. 

There was in fact no prospect of ever playing things that way. The governor and his advisers were clear that, lacking sound arrangements for the future, confidence in Hong Kong would begin to run out soon after 1982. The precise year can be disputed, but there is no doubt that anxieties among investors would increasingly have undermined confidence as the deadline approached and nothing was done about it. Nor could the British administer Hong Kong after 1997 without an extension of the Order in Council from which the governor drew his authority; and no such legislation would have been possible without evidence of Chinese agreement.

It was a fallacy to believe the Chinese were content to let things run on. They had made repeated attempts to recover either the whole of Hong Kong or at least the New Territories. As far back as the close of World War I, the Chinese representative at the Paris Peace Conference had put forward a resolution calling for the abolition of spheres of influence in China, the return of foreign concessions and of leased territories, including - quite specifically - the New Territories.
 
Nevertheless expectations were raised in 1979 by an invitation from the Chinese Minister of Foreign Trade, as a result of which Sir Murray MacLehose made the first-ever official visit to China by a Hong Kong Governor. Confidence was further fuelled when Sir Murray returned from Beijing with an assurance from Premier Deng Xiaoping that Hong Kong people could set their hearts at ease.

Whatever comfort lovers of the status quo might gain from that statement was of brief duration. Against a background of continuing economic prosperity, and a cautious experiment with limited forms of representative government, tempered with concern for renewal of the New Territories lease and a settlement of the growing crisis of illegal immigration, Hong Kong watched with bated breath as Britain's Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, fresh from victories in the Falklands War, made her way to Beijing in September 1982 for discussions with the Chinese leaders.

There had already been significant pronouncements in Beijing. Peng Zhen, a vice-chairman of the Communist Party and leading authority on constitutional and legal affairs had stated, in July that year, that Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan were to become special administrative regions of the People's Republic. And in January that year, Britain's Deputy Foreign Minister Humphrey Atkins had met with Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang and Vice-Premier Ji Pengfei. At these meetings, according to Wang Yincheng, in The Return of Hong Kong: "Zhao reiterated China's stand regarding the Hong Kong issue: First, China possessed the sovereignty over all the territory including the Island of Hong Kong, Kowloon and the New Territories. Second, the Chinese Government stressed Hong Kong's position as a free port and international trade and financial centre. Third, in the near future, both the Chinese and British sides would negotiate over Hong Kong's future position."

Despite these omens, it was hoped Mrs Thatcher's visit would produce some words of encouragement similar to those which - at least for public consumption - had been conveyed by Sir Murray on his return from China three years earlier. One hundred and eighty nine years had elapsed since Lord Macartney, envoy of King George III, headed in that direction to persuade China to open up to world - and more specifically British - trade. But that was long before Hong Kong came into existence, and even longer before it became rich and famous.

Wang Yincheng says that Deng Xiaoping told Mrs Thatcher: "No latitude is allowed in the issue of sovereignty. Frankly speaking, sovereignty is not negotiable. Now the time is ripe. It should be made clear that China will take back Hong Kong in 1997. In other words, China will not only take back the New Territories but also the Island of Hong Kong and Kowloon. China and Britain (should) conduct negotiations under this precondition to find the way to settle the Hong Kong issue.
 
"We've waited for 33 years. It will be 48 years in 15 years. Our long wait has been based on the people's full confidence. If we couldn't take back (Hong Kong) in 15 years, the people would have no reason to trust us again and any Chinese Government would be forced to relinquish power and step down from the stage of politics of its own accord. There can be no  other choice."

ISD had organised numerous press conferences, but seldom one as portentous as that given by Mrs Thatcher on her return from Beijing. This time the message was loud and clear. And information channels had to be geared to convey its considerable ramifications.

Chapter 19: Faster than the Speed of Thought

The Chief Secretary of the time, Sir Philip Haddon-Cave, decided if ISD was to meet the greater demands now placed on it, in a time of uncertainty and anxiety over what the future might bring, the department was due for an overhaul.

On an inspection of Beaconsfield House, not only ISD but also other floors still occupied by miscellaneous and largely non-departmental tenants, he encountered a rat. Nobody is entirely clear as to the precise setting for this encounter - or even if the rat was there entirely of its own volition - but it was momentous for the results it produced. In Sir Philip's mind the cause was due to the presence of food on the premises. The messes, together with their assorted restaurants, would have to go.

The news was greeted with jubilation among information officers and their loyally-supportive but long-suffering administrative personnel. Not only would they no longer have to share the one and only lift with porters in blood-stained aprons bearing raw carcasses and baskets of meat, but there was finally a real prospect of freeing up some space for long overdue expansion within the building.

Another of Sir Philip's decisions was to have a greater impact on the management not only of the building but of the department itself. He selected Peter Tsao from the administrative grade to head ISD - making him the first director without prior experience of the department's workings. Tsao's immediate predecessor, Bob Sun, may have spent a long sojourn outside the ranks of the civil service, heading the publicity arm of the Trade Development Council, but he possessed considerable knowledge of how ISD functioned from his news room days.

Tsao had cut his teeth in Trade and Industry, long before that department outgrew its boots and broke up into separate spheres of responsibility. He had made a name for driving hard bargains across the discussion table whenever Hong Kong had to fight against restrictive practices and other barriers set up against its survival in global trade markets.

	He arrived in ISD with a charismatic personality, a blunt manner, an aggressive attitude and - some suggested - a determination, if necessary, to turn the department upside down with his demands for better results. He began at the top by bringing new blood into the directorate and replacing all but one of its posts. The sole survivor, Moss, who until then had been the youngest assistant director, suddenly found himself the oldest.

	Though he insisted on maintaining the time-honoured ritual of morning briefings, to catch up on overnight news and discuss any response that might be necessary, Tsao laid even heavier insistence upon the latter consequence. His style was nothing if not proactive. "I feel particularly robust this morning," he would announce to those assembled at the elongated table in his office, thereby making it clear he was in no disposition to accept negative advice.

	Some of the old-timers at these morning meetings, including Geoffrey Somers and Harry Tsui, found this disinclination hard to accept. It was, they felt, their job to play devil's advocate and to point out the possible negative repercussions of any course of action. At one such meeting Somers, who decided he had taken enough, snapped back at Tsao and reduced the table to silence.
 
	Tsao said nothing at the time but, when the meeting broke up, enquired privately what had precipitated the outburst. Told it was probably due to the stress under which everyone was working, Tsao nodded affably and said he perfectly understood. He would forgive anyone surrendering to such pressure, but added - holding up a finger to emphasise the point - 'once'.

	Among the new arrivals in the directorate were Cheung Man-yee, also brought in from outside the information grade, although at least it could be argued she had come from the related field of broadcasting, Irene Yau and Kerry McGlynn. The latter had years of experience heading departmental information units, including a stint running the press office of the Hong Kong Government Office in London, where he had been closely involved with promoting, under his old boss at ISD, Commissioner David Ford, the ambitious Hong Kong in London carnival staged at Battersea Park in 1980.

	Irene too was steeped in departmental information work, including a long stint as head of the Police Public Relations Division, and had a acquired a wealth of experience of both public relations and news.

	Tsao expected his new team to behave as a 'think tank', matching him in brilliant ideas as to how to engender public confidence in a time of great uncertainty, when the whole question of Hong Kong's future was thrown into debate, when the Hong Kong dollar was plunging and the stock market went into a tail spin. Another of his catch phrases was "Crisis? How do you spell crisis?" As though the whole concept of a crisis was alien to him and not to be entertained.

	Proposals would sometimes ricochet so alarmingly inside this think tank that its one surviving 'old timer' would duck for cover, dodging ideas which he grumbled were 'flying faster than the speed of thought'. 

Chapter 20: Suspended by a Pair of Chopsticks

Sir Edward Youde had succeeded Sir Murray MacLehose as Hong Kong's 26th governor in May 1982. He joined the British delegation, headed by Sir Percy Cradock, at the bilateral talks on the future of the territory, nobly bearing up to the scrutiny of television cameras and the interrogations of the media in his frequent commuting between Hong Kong, Beijing and London.

	Peter Tsao sought to attach himself to the delegation to provide public relations support. But he failed to obtain prior approval through the New China News Agency before announcing his intention, and as a result suffered humiliation when his subsequent bid was rejected. Used to organising the local media whenever Hong Kong officials confronted them on their home ground, ISD could only watch helplessly as those same reporters pursued Sir Edward down Beijing streets or collared him at the gates of the British Embassy. They sympathised with Chinese officials who had never before encountered press liberties so brazenly flaunted and aggressively pursued.

	In the old days, Governors of Hong Kong had cut patrician figures and spoken from Olympian heights. MacLehose had loosened up the style a bit, but was still cast in the aristocratic mould. It was left to Youde, modest, disarming and engagingly ready to talk - even when waylaid in the road by a battery of microphones - to play the role of the ever amenable, ever accessible governor. It mattered not to him that this meant devising new ways of saying nothing of moment on matters as sensitive as the Sino-British negotiations, so long as one expressed it in a basically helpful and co-operative tone of voice.

	Nevertheless, despite the oft-repeated statement that the talks were ‘useful and constructive’ - the term carefully agreed between both parties as their concerted response in all dealings with the media - the impression grew that they were running into serious difficulties, that both sides were negotiating from irreconcilable standpoints.

	The Pearl of the Orient had once been memorably portrayed, in tourist posters, as delicately suspended by a pair of chopsticks. The opposing implements were now Chinese and British. In the course of transferring it from one platter to another, the fear was that somebody would fumble that precious orb and let it slip.

	Yet of the two sides, it was demonstrably apparent that the Chinese were by far the better prepared. They had in their favour the fruits of various carefully-laid initiatives, going back over many years, for the reclamation of their sovereign rights in regard to Hong Kong. They had laid the foundations for their negotiating position with great care. According to Wang Yincheng: "The Chinese Government sped up preparation for negotiating with the British Government from the beginning of the 1980s. It set up special organisations to make investigation and research, formulating the principle and policy regarding the Hong Kong issue."

	But time, he remarks elsewhere in his book, was an unfavourable factor for the British Government.

	Given this race against the clock, and the distance that had to be covered in bringing both parties to any kind of reconciliation, the final product of the protracted talks surpassed expectations. British Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe, returning from a meeting with Deng Xiaoping, held a press conference in Hong Kong on August 1, 1984 - again organised by ISD - at which he presented the broad outlines of an agreement about to be initialed in Beijing.

	Sir Geoffrey said the purpose of his visit to Beijing had been to 'review progress of the negotiations, to make real headway  on remaining issues and to strive for the best possible result for the people of Hong Kong'. The two sides, he announced, had agreed to 'the framework and key clauses of a legally-binding accord which would preserve Hong Kong's unique economic system and way of life'. Furthermore, he added, there would be 'satisfactory provisions for liaison and consultation after the conclusion of the agreement'.

	Reaction was bullish. The stock market climbed as the Hong Kong public eagerly awaited proof of Sir Geoffrey's assurances in the Sino-British Joint Declaration.

	David Wilson - later to become Lord Wilson - joined the British team in the final stages of the negotiations, and well before his eventual replacement of Sir Edward Youde as governor of Hong Kong. He recalls (in Hong Kong Remembers) that the last lap was intense and absolutely exhausting.

	"Matters were complicated by the fact that the Chinese text of the agreement was as important as the English, and would be read by more people in Hong Kong. We didn't want a separate negotiation on the Chinese version of the text after an English one, however, so the two were negotiated together. We were aided by the use of modern technology with a computer in the Embassy which could transmit in cipher the Chinese text of what was being agreed. The Chinese side either had to use a typewriter or revert to pens. I believe the use of this sort of information technology for diplomatic negotiations was probably unique at the time."

	ISD was made responsible for organising publication of both Chinese and English versions of the draft agreement on September 26, 1984. Presented in the form of a White Paper, this led to queues that wound through the streets of Central and other districts as thousands filed their patient way to the counters of government publications outlets and district offices to receive their free copies. They had heard that the seemingly impossible could be made achievable; that it really was feasible to have one country with two systems. They wanted, in their own hands, tangible evidence to support this miracle, to justify claims of life after 1997.

Chapter 21: The Long and Winding Road

George Orwell prefigured 1984 as a year of grave portent, by using it for the title of his novel set in an authoritarian future where Big Brother would be forever watching the movements of every citizen. He simply inverted the numerals of 1948, the year in which the book was written. For Hong Kong, the year proved far removed indeed from any Orwellian prophecy. Given the assurances of the Joint Declaration, within the parameters of the foregone conclusion that the colony would revert to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, the future seemed about as rosy as anyone could dare hope.

	By any reckoning, the declaration was a remarkable document, in which China guaranteed the retention of laws, customs and social institutions very different from her own, together with the preservation of the freedoms enjoyed by all Hong Kong citizens. Not only that, but the terms of the guarantee would endure for 50 years - to June 30, 2047. 

	Thirteen years was a long time in which to prepare for the Handover. Under Lord Mountbatten's guidance, India had been rushed to independence - and separation into India and Pakistan - in a mere five months. If all of the intricacies associated with the severance of an entire sub-continent could be dealt with in less than half a year, the equivalent of 150 months - from the signing of the Joint Declaration to the enactment of its intentions - was a generous margin indeed.

	So generous in fact that it gave rise to another difficulty altogether - the question of pacing. As any journalist knows, nothing so concentrates the mind as a tight deadline. Prolonged lead-time encourages ennui and boredom, prevarication and delay. All of the latter results were to beset the long and winding road to 1997.

	Although the grace period seemed lengthy enough, something had fundamentally changed. A watershed had been passed. Before 1984, if you asked what made Hong Kong tick, you might be told it was the mechanism of one of the world's great engines of industry. After 1984 you didn't need to ask. The ticking was in everyone's head, relentlessly counting down the days.

	But everything started out with the best of intentions. While there was no question of calling a referendum, the people of  Hong Kong were invited to submit their views to an  assessment office. Many did so, collectively and individually. The independent monitoring team concluded that 'most of the people of Hong Kong found the draft agreement acceptable. It also detected a general feeling of relief and a wish to build Hong Kong's future on the foundation provided by the draft agreement'.

However, the monitors further noted that, of the 1 000 or so written views received, more than two-thirds expressed dissatisfaction with the agreement. Nevertheless, submissions from 430 representative bodies, including residents' associations, trade unions and religious organisations, showed that 334 approved the agreement and only 33 opposed it.

Ever since Mrs Thatcher's fateful visit to Beijing, every utterance that might be construed as having any bearing on Hong Kong's future had taken on profound - though frequently unwarranted - significance. As an early Greek philosopher is alleged to have noted, in times of uncertainty people will read omens even in bird droppings.
 
Still taking to heart David Ford's description of them as 'the opposition', the media pursued their investigations - and their quarry - with renewed vigour. It was a time for instant rent-a-quotes from those who might be presumed to, but very likely didn't know, and for cautious prevarication by those who did know but were reluctant to admit to their knowledge.

As Assistant Director in charge of the news division, Irene Yau had long been used to facilitating a more orderly access to senior government officials, sparing them from being overpowered by all this media attention. Her GIS 'minders' now came into greater prominence as 'Irene's Army', surveying locations in advance for the best placement of mike stands and Mills barriers they carted around to provide media opportunities. Key figures in these operations were Akber Khan and S Y Tam.

While more aggressive journalists might resent being 'herded' into situations where they must compete with their rivals for hoped-for words of enlightenment, it was the only way to manage what might otherwise have been an impossible situation that would discourage threatened senior officials from making any kind of public appearance.

As it was, many such officials, performing ceremonial functions which they felt deserved the greater and more topical prominence, refused to answer questions on matters that did not pertain to the occasion because they felt that to do so would rob that occasion of much deserved publicity. Life, as they were at pains to point out, went on regardless, and wasn't all future-oriented.

Lacking that excuse, delegates from both sides of the Sino-British Joint Liaison Group, which would follow through on the nitty-gritty of amending and implementing the numerous laws, ordinances and procedures to be sorted out, had a particularly hard time of it whenever they met in Hong Kong.

They had already agreed a schedule of meetings to process this considerable volume of business. The first meeting was held in London in July 1985. The objective was to ensure that 'the transition of present-day Hong Kong to a Special Administrative Region of China should be smooth and co-ordinated, causing as little disruption as possible to the social, business and administrative environment in Hong Kong'.

The Basic Law had been stipulated by the Joint Declaration as the means of enshrining its provisions in greater detail. It was intended to serve as the Bible for the administration of the future Special Administrative Region. The Basic Law Drafting Committee had been formed even before the signing of the Joint Declaration.

Its deliberations took so long that most of Hong Kong's avid newspaper readers began to tune out of those columns devoted to their coverage. Nevertheless the appearance was of no stone left unturned, and when the draft document was published in 1988 the public were invited to comment. Those citizens who woke up to the fact that this - and not the Joint Declaration - was going to define the mode and manner of the future Special Administrative Region began to scrutinise its contents with greater application.

Seminars were called to discuss the Basic Law and books were published analysing its provisions. Although not responsible for producing the API's and other publicity materials urging such discussion, ISD did much to schedule television placements and distribute print materials.

Chapter 22: Cutting Apron Strings and Getting Wired for New Technology

Meanwhile, changes were taking place in the way government conducted its own public relations. Departmental heads were given greater autonomy to determine their individual PR needs and to either expand their PR units or, as happened in some cases, develop entirely new ones. And ISD hard pressed to staff the rapidly increasing new posts that resulted. 

The '80s were proving a testing time for a 'mother ship' in danger of losing communication with its flotilla of offshoots out there, in the wild blue yonder, doing their own thing. Those 'client' departments that had nurtured the belief ISD was too monolithic in its approach to what could and could not, should and should not, would and would not be publicly said, were revelling in their independence. Others, uncertain as to whether they needed any, and unwilling to cut their apron strings, still counted on ISD to handle the whole awkward, uncertain business of information presentation.

In an effort to 'stay in touch', Bob Sun had instituted with Johnny Johnston a programme of visits to departmental units, allowing for perhaps two such calls a week. Giving the growing number of units to be covered, it was estimated that each unit might be visited perhaps twice a year. In reality, the intervals were to become progressively longer - so much so that, by the next time round, it was often pointless discussing topics that had been raised the time before.

The visits became, in effect, social calls, useful for discussing establishment scales and possible staff movements, but illuminating principally for the visitors, who departed envious of the way in which some units were acquiring equipment and technological apparatus far in advance of anything possessed in Beaconsfield House.
 
Technology became the new battle cry. Hong Kong's leading newspapers had long been computer literate, while ISD newsroom personnel were still battling away with ancient typewriters and teleprinters. Though younger recruits were anxious for the department to emerge from the Iron Age, the 'old guard', whose technological excursions had been limited to changing typewriter ribbons, were more sceptical. Despite what David Wilson may have said about the technological advantage in processing the text of the Joint Agreement, they thought computers should be left to accountants and bank tellers.

The newly-formed Information Technology Services Department, the listing of which in the government telephone directory fell immediately after ISD's - and was the cause of frequent confusion when callers failed to check more closely - was given the task of deciding where, in ISD, lay the greatest need of the equipment they were empowered to dispense.

The decision went in favour of the Public Relations Division whose veterans, such as Tse Ming and Harry Tsui, had lived in almost monkish seclusion, distilling great tides of potential 'feedback' too vast for mere mortals to digest. Suddenly they found themselves required not merely to summarise today's headlines but also to hark back to hitherto inconceivably unmanageable archives of past editorials and opinions.

They were called upon, in effect, to set up a data bank from which withdrawals could be made instantly in any denomination and on any topic. No more trying to remember which past issue of GIST - by now filed in such towering columns that they threatened to collapse and smother their compositors - might contain something somebody had previously said. It had to come at the press of a keyboard.

The compilation of this huge information base took much time, manpower and heartache - particularly when hard disks collapsed and backup systems failed - but the end result was to give ISD an unparalleled resource of encyclopedic dimension.
 
If, for example, you wanted to know how many times the press had said nasty things about Secretary for Transport Alan Scott's proposed scheme of Electronic Road Pricing, a brilliant concept ahead of its time (and one being studied again now), you had only to key in the necessary phrase. The cumulative death knell was enough to drive the project into premature extinction and Scott, who had earlier served a spell as Secretary for Information, into accepting an appointment as governor of the Cayman Islands.

Once PRD's technological requirements had been met, the second urgent priority fell to another set of backroom boys. These were the sales personnel of Publishing Sub-division, by now installed in the high-ceilinged but poorly-ventilated rooms of the historic French Mission Building.

Much lower on the priority list was Creative Sub-division, whose artists were still grappling with paint pots, acrylics and airbrushes on large sheets of paper long after they could have been producing better results on computer monitors in a fraction of the time.

Chapter 23: Trying to Read Tealeaves through Highly Discoloured Tea

The very success Hong Kong had achieved with its efforts to promote itself overseas came back to haunt it in the aftermath of the conclusion to the Sino-British negotiations. All its considerable achievements were now seen to be at risk in the years of  'countdown' to restoration of Chinese sovereignty. 

Where cynical foreign media had once been at pains to undermine the magnitude of Hong Kong's accomplishment with stories of sweatshop labour, 'caged men' and the lack of organised labour, they now chose to emphasise its progress in order to illustrate how much it stood to lose. 'The great Chinese take-away' was typical of the facile phraseology they employed in allowing free rein to their forebodings.

Almost overnight, the task for ISD was no longer to say how well Hong Kong was doing but how well it could expect to continue doing after 1997. With little to go on other than the remarkable framework of the Sino-British agreement, the assurances given by China's leaders, the intrinsic belief that they stood by their word and Hong Kong's own past record of peaceful co-existence - through thick and thin - as next-door neighbour to the motherland, it was not an easy assignment.

Even if invested with clairvoyant powers, ISD veterans in the Overseas Public Relations Sub-division, including stalwarts such as Akber Khan and Mark Pinkstone, could hardly be expected to read tealeaves while they were still cooking in highly discoloured tea.

The more Hong Kong could demonstrate its increasing prosperity, the more it invited questions as to how long it would all last. Growing numbers of visiting correspondents were arriving, not as doctors examining a healthy patient but as undertakers measuring a coffin. Most had but one agenda, which was to portray Hong Kong as a fatted calf readied for the sacrificial altar.

It was decided that the time had come to reinforce Hong Kong's overseas representation, to extend its reach beyond superficially dismissive journalism in order to present the facts to those with the most need to know. Although the News and Public Affairs Division of the Hong Kong Government Office in London remained in close liaison with ISD, especially in the wake of increased interest on the part of UK politicians, the emphasis began to shift to other arenas, and particularly to the more recently established offices in Brussels and New York, both of which made their own calls on ISD staff.

The untimely death of Sir Edward Youde, on December 5, 1986, deprived Hong Kong of one of its most beloved governors and forced it to change horses in midstream. Sir Edward, who died, aged 62, at the British Embassy in Beijing, in the course of one of his frequent China visits, had hoped to see Hong Kong through the most difficult stages of the transition period, and would have been well qualified to do so. His role in the Sino-British negotiations had played no small part in securing the Joint Declaration.
 
Small and clerkish in appearance, with a disarmingly shy smile, Sir Edward possessed an astute intellect and a thorough understanding of the Chinese. The gentle despair of his public relations advisers in ISD, because he declined their image-building proposals to make him seem more visibly gubernatorial, he was nevertheless esteemed by the public as a tireless champion who literally risked his life in Hong Kong's cause. 

Thousands of mourners streamed past his coffin in the hallway of Government House to pay their last respects prior to his funeral cortege. He was succeeded, after a brief interval when Sir David Akers-Jones held office as acting-governor, by Sir David Wilson, also from the Foreign Office, steeped in Chinese affairs and returning to Hong Kong after having served as political adviser to Youde's predecessor, Sir Murray MacLehose. Like Sir Murray, Sir David cut a stately figure in his formal attire, complete with plumed helmet.

Meanwhile, changes were also taking place in ISD, where Peter Tsao had been succeeded as DIS, on January 1, 1985, by Cheung Man-yee, who returned to RTHK as Director of Broadcasting the following year, when John Chan Cho-chak took her place. What had become a high-profile department, very much in the public eye, was seeing a rapid turnover in top management, as though its pressures were difficult to take.

Even John Chan remained at the helm for barely more than a year before handing over, on January 8, 1986, to Irene Yau. The first director since Bob Sun to have made it through the ranks of the information grade, Irene was to occupy the post right through the following decade, making her its longest-serving incumbent since the redoubtable Jock Murray left it some 23 years - and eight other directors - earlier.

Chapter 24: The Crucial Years

Irene Yau directed GIS through 11 of the most crucial years of Hong Kong's history. "They were very interesting and eventful years," she recalls, "and for me personally they were very challenging years that I thoroughly enjoyed. I had more fun than most other civil servants because I was always in the thick of things.

"I felt privileged to be present at so many major events, whether through contributing towards the planning, playing a role in the organisation of media arrangements or merely participating. And through my involvement, I believe my colleagues in GIS also enjoyed a more colourful life than they would have in other government careers.

"In the first years of my directorship I concentrated primarily on the local scene, but in later years I devoted much of my time to overseas promotion. I was involved with some pretty high-powered delegations to various parts of the world: America, Europe, Japan, Australia. We staged conferences, seminars, gala dinners; we took young Hong Kong talent along with us to present artistic performances. 

"I travelled in America with people like Jackie Chan and Michelle Yeoh, who is now a Bond girl. We had a great time, but it was all for a good cause. The objective was to tell the world that Hong Kong had more than money; it had heart and soul and a love of culture. That helped to combat some of the negative press coverage Hong Kong was getting over its future prospects."
 
In the course of this tenure she was to dispel numerous rumours that she would be retiring to join her family in Vancouver, and survive major changes in the government's overall information apparatus, chief of which was the appointment by her former ISD boss and current Chief Secretary, Sir David Ford, of an Information Co-ordinator.

Instituted in 1989, the role of the Information Co-ordinator in the Chief Secretary's Office was described, in the 1990 Annual Report, as maintaining 'overall policy responsibility for the government's relations with the media, while the Information Services Department is the executive agency for implementing that policy'.

The post was in fact a logical development of Hong Kong's determination to improve its image overseas. The Information Co-ordinator's office was to maintain close contact with the government's overseas offices, and with consuls-general and commissioners of foreign countries in Hong Kong. Influential politicians, parliamentarians, government officials and businessmen from countries enjoying close relations with Hong Kong would be invited to visit the territory and see conditions for themselves.

Programmes of overseas speaking engagements for senior government officials and prominent local personalities would also be co-ordinated through this office, with suitable platforms arranged for them to speak on Hong Kong before specially targeted audiences.  The whole operation went back to an expanded overseas Division under a Deputy Director in 1992.

And inevitably ISD's own reinforced OPRS personnel would contribute a major input to this extensive undertaking, preparing special information packages and brochures designed to appeal to those targeted audiences. A significant contribution to this input was a handsomely encased twin-volume publication entitled 'Hong Kong - Asia's Business Centre', produced in 1992 when Hong Kong hosted the 25th annual meeting of the Board of Governors of the Asian Development Bank.
 
Greater emphasis on overseas public relations also required reinforcement of the publicity posts attached to the burgeoning overseas offices. Paul Brown and John Chuan (now CIO in New York) were among a succession of officers to replace Kerry McGlynn in London.  McGlynn was later seconded from ISD as Director of the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office in New York, the only non-Administrative Officer to have headed an overseas office for the Hong Kong Government.  George Yuen went to the Toronto Office as CIO, a post now held by Frank Chuan, brother of John.

By April 1999 there were 10 offices around the world where ISD staff were manning the PR front lines – New York, Washington, San Francisco, Toronto, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo, Brussels and London and the most recent addition, Beijing.  

Chapter 25: Gearing for the New Millenium

ISD had been born of a need for the administration to route its information output through a single authoritative channel. But by the late '80s and early '90s it was increasingly difficult for that channel to handle all the traffic. The administration had grown too large and disparate to speak with one voice. The system was becoming unmanageable.

The wonder was that Hong Kong's government had persevered so long, and so successfully, with a single department co-ordinating and managing all its public relations. Almost nowhere else in the world had an organisation of similar size and complexity soldiered on in this manner.
 
In the United Kingdom, the Central Office of Information had long been essentially decentralised, and now served only as a service agency for those departments wishing to avail themselves of its services - at rates competitive with what commercial PR agencies might quote. The United States model was a labyrinth of communication channels. Even in Singapore, perhaps the nearest reference point for comparison purposes, the different ministries each had their own information set-ups, often competing vigorously with one another for public attention.

Successive Directors of Information Services had fought tenaciously to retain the monolithic approach, arguing that proper co-ordination, consistency and a centralised pool of resources not only saved money but made sense. The counter-argument, derived from models overseas, was that it was still possible to draw on a centralised pool of resources without hampering the freedom of different sectors of government to speak for themselves.

Even the established protocol for information output through the information units operating in various departments required a review, now that the government was extending its policy branches at secretariat level to oversee all departmental activities. Policy secretaries each wanted their own information advisers, and their needs had become too diverse for one secretariat information unit to handle.

With the arrival of Hong Kong's last colonial governor, Chris Patten, the picture became still more confused. In his book The Last Governor, Jonathan Dimbleby quotes Patten as saying: “‘I'm going to have a spokesman for me here in Government House, just as Bernard Ingham was at Number Ten. Someone who can speak for me but can also make sure that the operation of the information service right across the departments is pulled together.’ The man he chose was an enigmatic and approachable government official on the GIS staff, Mike Hanson.”

Dimbleby was jumping the gun. Hanson was never on the ISD payroll, in fact he was on secondment from the British Government, although he had enjoyed a close working relationship with ISD since his earlier appointment as Information Co-ordinator in the Secretariat. However, his successor as Patten's spokesman was a GIS man - no less than Deputy Director Kerry McGlynn, who is described, later in Dimbleby's book, as professing himself 'gobsmacked' by a statement from Michael Heseltine, UK deputy prime minister visiting Hong Kong as president of the Board of Trade. 

The word was a favourite of Patten's, and marked a departure from the established gubernatorial lexicon. However, in the best traditions of ISD, McGlynn had taken on some of the style, and the colour, of his new surroundings, proving that seasoned information officers are nothing if not adaptable.

The same was true of Irene Yau when she stepped down, after more than a decade at the helm of GIS, to spend the last five months before her retirement as PR advisor to Chief Executive-designate Tung Chee Hwa, in the lead-up to the Handover in 1997. Effectively this placed her on the opposite side of the fence from McGlynn, but both were sufficiently versatile to take this in their professional stride.

Irene looks back on those hectic months as her 'seven-eleven' period: "Seven am to eleven at night, seven days a week. There were only a handful of us. It was very busy, very fruitful and I wouldn't have missed it for the world. It was a bit like going into the opposition benches. We had little or no back-up. I had to proof read; something I hadn't done in years. We prepared our own press releases and publications, did everything ourselves."

	The Government House operation had been even smaller - just McGlynn and Chief Information Officer Tse Cheung-hing, who had been despatched a little earlier to provide support for Mike Hanson.  For the last couple of months of the transition, the team was reinforced by Paul Brown, on secondment from the Publishing Sub-division.  Remembers McGlynn : “Before I took over from Mike Hanson for the last 2 years of Chris Patten’s governorship, I was the Deputy Information Co-ordinator in Anson Chan’s office, looking after the administration and acting as back up spokesman to Hanson.  So I was close to, or at the centre of, the action for most of those final momentous years of British administration.  An unforgettable experience and enormously hard work fielding phone calls from journalists at all hours of the day and night, 7 days a week, but hugely stimulating.  I think I learned more about political PR in that period than I had in the rest of my career.”

Irene’s departure from ISD, just at the start of Hong Kong's new era as a Special Administrative Region, was not intentional but the result of a decision reached many years previously, when she opted for the new terms that would enable her to retire at 55. "I chose 55, and it so happened that I would reach that age in 1997."

She regrets leaving at a time when GIS was experiencing a problem of succession in the directorate. "I anticipated difficulties years before, because I saw that the directorate were all more or less of the same age. If some of us chose to retire at 55, we would be leaving at around the same time. That indeed did happen, but what made it worse was the fact that those I did not expect to retire early also chose that course.
 
"I expected George Yuen and Betty Shum, being more or less the same age, would retire at about the same time. Chris Wong was also due to go around that period. I did not anticipate that Akber Khan and Harold Yau would opt to leave as well. That created quite a problem, from which of course GIS has long recovered."  Ironically, the only “survivor” from the old directorate is McGlynn, now a 25-year departmental veteran.  Irene’s successor as DIS, Thomas Chan, moved quickly to fill the gaps with experienced professionals including Ella Tam, Juliana Chen, Mak Kwok-wah, Joe Yiu, S Y Tam and Alex Choi.
 
Thomas, who like his namesake predecessor John Chan, was also from the ranks of the administrative grade. However, he was coming to the position with a wealth of knowledge of how ISD functioned, derived from his days when he had served as Deputy Director under Irene. His particular strength was his ability to combine the related disciplines of information and information technology - an alliance that brought together both the message and the carrier.

To him fell the task of organising the enormous role the department would have to play in providing media facilities and press arrangements for the Handover ceremonies, when 6,500 media personnel collected accreditation badges to cover the various elements of the programme. The world had shown intense interest in Hong Kong in the months prior to the Handover, and live television coverage of the actual ceremonies was relayed around the planet. A world-class press and broadcasting centre - the largest and most complex ever established in Hong Kong - was set up in the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, managed by ISD staff from its opening on June 15 to its closure on July 9, 1997. 

Much of the credit for the establishment of the media centre goes to the small planning team of information and executive officers in ISD (and later under the umbrella of the Handover Ceremony Co-ordination Office). The team was first headed by Akber Khan and when he retired, the difficult task fell to Ella Tam who was initially assisted by Jonathan Lange as CIO, the first information officer to be specifically recruited into the media centre planning unit when it was set up on April 1, 1996. A much larger team gradually built up to handle the accreditation process for the media ‘invasion’. In this task, Ella was helped by CIO, Daniel Sin. Following the Handover, Ella was transferred to the Chief Executive’s Office as Assistant Press Secretary.  She has since become Deputy Information Co-ordinator with the reintroduction of the Information Co-ordinator post attached to the CE’s Office. 

At the height of the Handover operations, more than 200 Information Officers and 100 Executive Officers and representatives of other grades provided support services for the various facilities made available to the international media.

The last years of colonial rule, in particular, could have proved a perilous time for ISD, when four decades of experienced information management were put to the test. Instead, they provided an opportunity to demonstrate the value of all that experience, when the department's most senior and promising personnel were elevated in rank and seconded to the new posts created at much higher levels of the expanding information hierarchy.

The fact that the greater part of this transition was achieved when Hong Kong was confronted by all the stresses and uncertainties of changing times, in the final countdown to reunification, is a credit both to the calibre of the information grade and to the quality of its officers. Many have gone on to vital posts in the quasi-public and private sectors; among them Kathleen Lau to Legco, Juliana Ma to Hong Kong Electric, Selina Lo to the Hospital Authority, June Tong at New World Telephone, Philip Bruce at the Airport Authority, George Yuen to the Better Hong Kong Foundation, Peter Randall to the Hong Kong Tourist Association and Irene Yau herself to KCRC along with Akber Khan, Raymond Wong and C. K. Yeung. And the inimitable Arthur Hacker remains one of the most readable contributors to the Hong Kong press.  Other old GIS hands have made a mark internationally.  Mark Pinkstone secured a globe-trotting job for a Malaysian conglomerate when he left the department and Barry Walsh, Ross Clarke and Richard Linning now run successful consultancies in Sydney, London and Brussels respectively.

The Hong Kong Annual Report 1957 carries two paragraphs describing the work of the Government Public Relations Office. Yet the second of those paragraphs speaks - even then - of the government's policy on information being under review. Who at that time could have foreseen that, in December 1995, ISD would launch a Government Home Page on the Internet (http://www.info.gov.hk), making it possible to directly access essential Hong Kong information on a Net-connected computer screen anywhere in the world?  Or that digital technology would enable ISD to dispense with issuing photographic prints - except to those who still needed them - and instead digitise its picture output for direct incorporation into page lay-outs on any editor's desktop monitor? 

	This upgrading should have come with no surprise as Thomas Chan is one of the most technologically literate officers in the SARG.  He created the first Hong Kong Government Home Page when he was Director of the San Francisco Office prior to his return to Hong Kong to take up the post of DIS on Irene Yau’s retirement.   

	Recognising the shift in media focus from Sino-British transition issues to domestic concerns, Thomas Chan also set about ensuring an accelerated expansion of the Secretariat Press Office teams under the supervision of two Assistant Directors, Juliana Chen and Mak Kwok-wah, so that the department’s professional expertise was on tap to the SARG’s policy - and news- makers.  There are now 10 SPO teams serving 15 policy bureaux.  The eventual aim is to cover them all.

Forty years later, the successor to that annual report, entitled Hong Kong - A New Era, summarises the multi-disciplined role of this ever more complex department, pointing out that ISD serves as the government's public relations consultant, publisher, advertising agent and news agency. All of which enables it to continue doing - albeit vastly more effectively - what it set out to do at its inception; namely, to provide the link between the administration and the media and, through the latter, enhance public understanding of government policies, decisions and activities.

Nobody who has worked in, or is even slightly familiar with, ISD will believe it can ever be content to rest on its laurels. It has spent the final years of a closing century gearing for the new Millenium. 

As they say of breaking news in the media world:

Watch this space...

Directors of Information Services
Mr John Lawrence Murray		1.4.59 		- 	10.4.63 (PRO from 1.9.50-31.3.59)
Mr Nigel John Vale Watt		11.4.63	-	26.9.72 
Mr David Robert Ford		27.9.72 	-	4.1.76
Mr Richard Lai Ming			5.1.76		-	19.6.78
Mr John Desmond Slimming		20.6.78 	-	3.7.79
Mr Bernard Renouf Johnston		9.7.79 		-	31.12.79 (Acting DIS) 
Mr Robert Strong Sun Yuan-chuang	1.1.80 		-	31.1.83
Mr Peter Tsao Kwang-yung		1.2.83 		-	31.12.84
Miss Cheung Man-yee		1.1.85 		- 	7.1.86
Mr John Chan Cho-chak		8.1.86 		- 	28.1.87
Mrs Irene Yau Lee Che-yun		29.1.87	- 	11.3.97
Mr Thomas Chan Chun-yuen		12.3.97	-