Lockhart Road
Cultural Attache
- Mar 26, 2013
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(Dust-jacket of biography of China Light & Power, published 1982.)
Grasshopper’s Memo From Hong Kong # 6
POWER and SPONSORSHIP – A Three-Lane Highway Through History
9th February 2014
Dear Fos,
Pre-Season 2014. Already a lot happening. Entertaining stuff, enthralling even. Any follow-up story about our signing of a Joint Major Sponsor – even one so perfectly synonymous with the ‘Power’ moniker - risks getting swamped in the aftermath of that appalling stunt the Crows administration tried to pull last Wednesday. But that would never have held you back, would it?
Perhaps you’re laughed-out by now, and might be able to fit in a quick read of what I’ve got here to tell you.
It’s a story, a true one… about our favourite energy supplier and where they came from. By ‘came from’ I mean to begin with (back in 1900) and, much more recently, out of the clouds last year to sign up with us.
As the sub-title above indicates, there are three lanes to this true story, each of its own length. The first lane begins in 1870, the year PAFC was formed; the second in 1900 when a new power utility was first registered in Hong Kong… and the third in 1947.
That was the year a young bloke in his early twenties – who I’ll call Dean – left Adelaide, and got aboard a ship for Shanghai. He sailed away with a broken heart.
My grandparents, you see, had refused him permission to marry my youngest aunt. She was still in her teens, one hell of a looker.
If Dean hadn’t boarded that ship, he wouldn’t have created the third lane of this story and consequently, Fos, there wouldn’t be a story to tell you.
Under house arrest
Dean lived just up the road from us in Evandale. His home was on Kapunda Terrace, ours was south of the interestection with Llandower Avenue, in Morris Street. He was in the RAAF in World War II, flew Mosquitoes in the Islands, had an incident in one and badly hurt his back.
After the war he got his head into accountancy via a correspondence course and qualified as a chartered accountant. It was due to this, and the hardness of my grandparents’ hearts, that he applied for a clerical post in Shanghai, at China Printing & Dyeing. He landed it, and sailed to China and a new life. In many ways it turned into a very successful new life, but it got off to a bad start.
That was 1947, as I said, Fos. That was the year you played in your first SANFL Grand Final, roving for West Adelaide against Norwood. No bad start, that one, right? Five goals over those Redlegs.
A flag at your first attempt, in 1947… the year I was born.
I didn’t lay eyes on Dean until 1956, when he paid a visit to my grandparents’ home in Bakewell Road with his brother. I can still picture them standing in the hallway. Dean had never stopped carrying a torch for my aunt, even though as at 1956 he’d recently married a White Russian woman with tuberculosis, and brought her to Australia. Her citizenship application was lodged, and she would stay, and be cured.
Dean, however, would return, again as a single man, to the China Coast. I’d never heard of these places called Shanghai and Hong Kong that he and his brother were talking about, and I probably didn’t care too much. It was a Saturday afternoon, I think, and if it was the footy season a match would’ve been on the bulky Kreisler wireless-cum-record-player standing in a corner of the Bakewell Road living room.
What had happened to Dean between 1947 and 1956?
Well, Fos, for the last seven of those nine years he’d been under house arrest in Shanghai.
A deceptively wealthy man
When Mao’s PLA occupied Shanghai in May 1949, Dean was the only foreigner left behind in the Printing & Dyeing Works. Because he was the only bachelor on the foreign staff, he was volunteered to stay behind and supervise the running of the Works. The new Communist administration kept him at that, refusing to sign off on his exit permit until 1956, by which time they reckoned they’d bled the last drop of know-how out of him, and weren’t going to get any more money for him than what they’d already extorted out of his head office, run by a Eurasian called Gommersall, in Hong Kong.
By the time Dean stepped off the train at Lo Wu and walked across the bridge into Hong Kong, he was already a deceptively wealthy man. (He would remain deceptively wealthy; quiet, down-to-earth, never showy and always polite, but hard as nails when the occasion demanded).
Over those seven years minus freedom his salary plus bonuses had been paid into his bank account in the crown colony, acquiring compound interest until it was a small fortune.
In Shanghai, confined to his apartment in what had been Cathay Mansions and later became the Jinjiang Hotel, he had needed to spend precious little on his existence. Those years taught him the real meaning of frugality… and being, to boot, a chartered accountant, he was destined to land by personal contact and referral a prominent professional position in Hong Kong. A few years later he was the chief accountant at the power utility that held the exclusive franchise to generate power for, and supply electricity to, Kowloon and the New Territories.
This utility had the name of China Light & Power – CLP for short.
Other stuff on my mind
I first arrived in Hong Kong in May 1969. This was on R&R from South Vietnam. I’ve told you about this already, I think, Fos. I won’t go into it again. Not sure if I told you I’d flown in with a hangover, though. There were six Aussies in the R&R party, and we’d been well looked after all day long by the Yanks in the NCO’s Mess at Tan Son Nhut, a Vegas-style place with slot machines lining every wall.
We'd started at about 10 a.m., having landed by Caribou from Nui Dat. By 1600 hours, when our Pan Am 707 was ready for boarding, the pyramid of cans of Budweiser, Schlitz, Hamms and the like on our table was so high we couldn’t see each other. I slept through the flight and woke up as we were coming in to Kai Tak with, as I’ve said, a sore head born of dehydration.
I didn’t make contact with Dean during those three days and four nights in May 1969. My mother had written to tell me where he worked, but I had other stuff on my mind. On pre-discharge leave in September 1969 I came back to Hong Kong for two weeks for a sober look at the place, and this time I did call Dean. We had dinner together in his 3,000-square-foot apartment at the top of Garden Road, overlooking the Harbour. That apartment, and his Bentley in which he dropped me in Lockhart Road after the meal, decided me to come back for a third time. And to stay.
That happened two years later, in 1971.
Life turns on a Hong Kong dollar
‘Life turns on a dime,’ I’ve recently read Stephen King proclaim. It sure does, although my dime was a deaner.
You know, I hadn’t intended to go to Hong Kong on R&R in May 1969 at all. I’d pencilled in ‘Bangkok’ on the appropriate form as my preferred destination. One of my two best mates, a crayfisherman from Port MacDonnell, told me to rub it out and change it to Hong Kong.
“If I do, are you going to go there with me?” I demanded.
“Nothing surer, mate.”
Accordingly, I flew to Hong Kong on my R&R.
He went home to Australia on his.
Later, something that equally turned on a deaner for me was how I landed a job in Central District in December 1971 in a company that I’ll disguise as ‘A. & Co.’
Only this time it wasn’t a deaner, nor a dime. It was a Hong Kong dollar.
I’d been looking for work for months, cold-calling armed with a one-page c.v. that said bugger-all: I’d matriculated, worked in the Commonwealth Public Service in Adelaide until being conscripted in 1967, done my two years in the Army, gone back to the CPS, now I'd come to Hong Kong; I was 24 years old, wanted to write, wanted to start living a life I though was worth writing about…
For every two people who sat behind a desk at which they granted me an interview, one told me to get on the next Qantas flight out of Kai Tak and never come back... and the other gave me encouragement, even a name and phone number of somebody else worth having a talk with.
Someone I used to ‘talk with’ every night after a fruitless day of job-hunting was Johnny, the pint-sized barman in the Hawaii, a girlie bar on Cameron Road, Tsimshatsui.
For every can of Sam Miguel I bought (I soon switched to Carlsberg to avoid the headaches caused by the arsenic I was assured they used as a preservative) Johnny gave me a freebie. Having a customer sitting at the bar was better than an empty joint when GIs on R&R poked their heads through the scarlet curtains to check the place out.
This particular night I was down to my last red note (HK$100).
The only other asset I had was my return ticket.
“You talk my frien’ Bally at new’paper,” said Johnny. “He work new’paper. He write new story. Here his card, you take, call him say I tell you call him.”
The next night I’m telling Barry (not ‘Bally,’ note) from Bundaberg my life story, such as it was.
He gave me a tip that turned said life on aforementioned Hong Kong dollar...
“Write up a ‘position wanted’ classified,” he said, “and put it in the gazette of the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce.”
I found their office in Gloucester Building, Central District, passed them the advert and paid for it with a silver coin.
That’s right, Fos… HK$1.00.
Within a heartbeat of being my uncle
A week or so later the Chairman of A. & Co. read it, rang the number I gave in it, told me I sounded like the sort of young chappie who might make a suitable factotum for his son, the managing director of the company – you know: carry his bags, write his letters, laugh at his jokes…
“You’re an engineering company, you said?” I frowned. “I’m not an engineer.” He said something like: “You don’t have to be an engineer to carry bags, write letters – you want to be a writer your c.v. said – and laugh at jokes.”
I recall I had a rotten cold. Even so, in an hour – delayed only by a phone call to Dean to ask him who this A. & Co. were and receive his endorsement of them – I was across the Harbour care-of the ‘Star’ Ferry and talking myself up in determined fashion.
I started with the firm the following Monday - 13 December, 1971.
Since then I’ve worked for A. & Co. a sum total of 15 years in two stints, during which I became a company director. I’ve just begun, after a gap of 26 years, my third stint. A part-time one, as their Historian. The company is 150 years old in 2016. What goes around, comes around; sometimes it takes a while, that’s all.
A. & Co. used to be a big player in the engineering game in China pre-1949, as part of the Sassoon Group. Consequently they built up a list of import agencies for plant and equipment that filled three directory pages – some of the top international industrial names, principally British. They were into flour mills, sugar and jute mills, steel works, mechanical engineering equipment, fire services systems and contracting, marine instruments and paint… also electrical engineering plant and equipment, but not as extensively as they would have liked.
Come 1972, when I'd been with them a few months and had survived my probation, I started looking for an avenue to make my mark, to be more than just be a dogsbody. 'Electrical Engineering' as a possible avenue took my eye – not the least because I had a personal contact near the top of the biggest power utility in Hong Kong...
Yep, Fos: our lovelorn war hero called Dean, the ex-RAAF Mosquito pilot who'd come within a heartbeat of being my uncle. Selfishly, looking back, I’m bloody glad he didn’t.
China Light & Power Power
Dean, in his slot as CLP’s chief accountant, later managing director, became my mentor extraordinaire, my adviser, my sounding board. I guess you could say he became my sponsor.
Three years later, three years loaded with lucky breaks, I was in charge of a newly-created department in A. & Co. supplying CLP with not only most of their power and distribution transformers, overhead-line plant and fittings, cable joints & terminations, mechanical, marine, and maintenance stuff (the full list gets boring), we were also landing contracts from the smaller power utility which serves Hong Kong Island.
And so, Fos… that was how, over a period of three decades starting in 1972, I developed a pretty healthy portfolio of personal contacts in CLP.
In the 1990s, they changed their name to CLP Power (silly name, really: ‘China Light & Power Power') and started to go international – forming joint ventures in China, Taiwan, Malaysia, India… and Australia where after the turn of the millennium they expanded rapidly – most recently as a company called EnergyAustralia.
Last act in my screenplay
I’ve left out something essential from this story, haven’t I, Fos?
The punch-line, it’s not here, is it.
Those three lanes marked 1870, 1900 and 1947 have converged into one.
To find out how that happened, to get to the last act in my screenplay and perhaps understand why I decided it might be a story worth telling in the first place – (nobody wants me to repeat myself here) – anyone sufficiently interested can click on another post on another page on another thread: Page 18, ‘New Co-Major Sponsor – Energy Australia’….
http://www.bigfooty.com/forum/threads/new-co-major-sponsor-energy-australia.1047719/page-18
The End.
We’ll talk again soon, Fos. That’s a promise.
(signed) Grasshopper
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