I am very pleased to be invited, in my capacity as Commander of the Marine Police Region, to provide a foreword to Sui Geng: The Hong Kong Marine Police 1841–1950 which is the first detailed history of the Hong Kong Marine Police. Those who have read The Royal Hong Kong Police (1841–1945) by Chief Superintendent Mike Watson and historian Colin Crisswell, published in 1982, will find this a worthy companion. It will also be enjoyed by anyone with an interest in maritime policing or the history of Hong Kong, as it is a factual, interesting and very readable...

History and politics have combined to make the role of the Hong Kong Marine Police wider than that of comparable organizations. This is as true today as it has ever been, and has led to problems for observers who feel the need to apply ‘labels’ to disciplined formations.

Over the years the fleet has been compared with maritime establishments ranging from navies and coastguards to the Thames Division of London’s Metropolitan Police. None of these comparisons is really valid, although there are undoubtedly elements of the fleet’s duties that would elsewhere be carried out by a coastguard. Nonetheless the principal...

In October 1985 the Legislative Council of Hong Kong commenced a new legislative session. The dignified ceremonial procedures were unchanged from previous years, but the venue where they took place was very different. For this was the first meeting of the Council in its new home: the pillared and panelled, freshly refurbished central chamber of the gracious old building which, for the first eighty years of its existence, had been known as the Supreme Court of Hong Kong.

As His Excellency the Governor, Sir Edward Youde, opened the session many present noticed that he did so from a high-backed, beautifully...

Hong Kong was a tough town in the 1840s and 1850s, and it attracted tough people. Every race and colour was represented in the riff-raff which thronged the dirty, brawling, ill-lit streets; many of the more desperate among them, including Europeans, found their way into the Chinese pirate fleets which prowled outside the harbour. Not always outside either, as pirate junks often anchored off West Point while their crews bought supplies and picked up information about ships and cargoes in the brothels and taverns which had blossomed there.

The first European pirate to be convicted in Hong Kong was Henry...

Until the arrival of Sir Hercules Robinson in 1859, the principal qualification most of the senior officials of the Colony had for their positions was, simply, that they had been in the right place at the right time when the Colony was founded. This had led to somewhat varied performances, and undoubtedly had a bearing on the acrimony and in-fighting, which was such a prominent feature of the conduct of public affairs in the 1850s.

Sir Hercules was supposed to be the ‘new broom’, and arrived in Hong Kong with a specific brief to sort the place out. In fact...

The year 1872 was a momentous one for the Hong Kong Police Service, for on 27 June of that year was published the Report of the Police Commission. The Commission had been called for in 1871 by the Justices of the Peace backed by a petition signed by over 400 residents, which says a lot for their opinion of the general Police performance so far. The commission was actually authorized by Sir Richard MacDonnell, but he left before its report was ready. In the event it was his successor, Sir Edward Kennedy, KCMG, CB, who received it and had to...

In 1974 a splendid four-lane road, to be known as Kowloon Park Drive, thrust southwards from Yau Ma Tei to join Salisbury Road. The new highway was to link with other road developments to the north and relieve Nathan Road, until then the main route up the western side of the Kowloon peninsula.

This it undoubtedly did, but it also had another effect. The last few hundred yards required the slicing away of part of a wooded hill beside the YMCA, leaving a bare fifty feet cliff beside the new road. On top of this, revealed to the public gaze...

Returning now to 1884, the Water Police found little time to relax after moving into their new building. This was the year that war broke out between France and China (Britain remained neutral), and in the same month that the new Water Police Station was occupied (September 1884) the cargo boatmen in the Harbour refused to work on French ships. This was escalated by rather heavy-handed action on the part of the shipowners against some of the boatmen, and for some ten days in October work on all ships in the Harbour came to a standstill. There was rioting and...

The New Territories changed everything, not only for the Water Police but for the Colony of Hong Kong itself. Indeed, without the expansion and change of role the Water Police had to undergo to meet the responsibilities thrust upon it at this time, it is unlikely that the unit would ever have acquired the stature worthy of a formal history. This could be said about Hong Kong as a whole, of course.

Unlike so many parts of the British Empire which were acquired through the unilateral activities of adventurers or as part of some Imperial requirement of the moment, the...

The 1904 experiment with Basil Taylour was brought up again by Sir Frederick Lugard in February 1909. In a letter to the Colonial Office¹ he referred to its success and the fact that it had only been stopped for lack of funds, and went on to state that ‘it would conduce to the greater efficiency and usefulness of the Water Police’ if it could be resumed. Attached to the letter was a schedule of duties for the proposed post. It was a wide charter: the supervision of all craft, buoys and equipment (including monthly and quarterly inspections), recruitment, drills and...

The professionalism that the Water Police had by now attained was certainly needed in the 1920s and 1930s. There is a saying, ‘When China sneezes, Hong Kong catches cold’, and this was never so true as it was during these violent and turbulent decades.

Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang (KMT) had consolidated their position in Canton by this time, and were preparing to advance against the ramshackle and corrupt warlords who had held sway since the fall of the Ch’ings. One of the unifying factors in Chiang’s campaign was his rallying cry of ‘China for the Chinese!’ and his...

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. To most of the people living through it, the decade of the 1930s probably felt like any other decade. True, the troubles in China rumbled ever louder and the depredations of the Japanese seemed to go from bad to worse; but little of this impinged noticeably on the daily life of Hong Kong. Trouble in China was normal.

With the clarity of retrospect it looks different, however, and the awful times that we know were to come loom over that last era of a vanished age like a long shadow. In fact, with the possible...

Any organization, whether disciplined or civilian, is in a constant state of change. The bigger events in this process, such as the introduction of new buildings or major items of equipment, can of course be definitively chronicled. The minutiae of evolution cannot be dealt with so easily, however, and such things as uniform changes, vessel colour schemes, conditions of employment and pastimes tend to blend into the mainstream of history almost unremarked. In this chapter we will take an in-depth look at the Water Police in 1937, which was a significant year both historically and in terms of the development...

As I said at the beginning of Chapter 10, in retrospect the closing years of the 1930s have a ‘doomed’ air about them. This was not so evident at the time, and the ‘gay young things’ of the day had as frenetic a time in Hong Kong as did their equivalents in Europe. If anything they were even more complacent; as the experience of the First World War (and previous wars in Europe) gave them every reason to beheve that their own involvement in any conflict would be peripheral.

The fact that just across the border China and Japan were...

The occupation of Hong Kong lasted until the Japanese surrender on 14 August 1945. At this point its history as a separate entity might well have ended, for there was considerable pressure from the USA for the territory to be handed over in toto to the KMT forces of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.

This move was pre-empted by F. C. (later Sir Franklin) Gimson, who had taken over as Colonial Secretary on, ironically, 7 December 1941. On his own initiative he re-hoisted the Union Flag, proclaimed himself Acting Governor, and set up an ad hoc administration using the fittest internees from...

The interim measures that had re-established the Water Police’s ‘presence’ were all very well, but would obviously not do for the long term. New vessels were needed, together with an organization to support them. Fortunately the enormous fleet that the Admiralty had built up during the war was now in the process of being wound down, and no less than one hundred and sixty-two of these very varied craft were allocated to the Hong Kong Government on ‘permanent loan’. Many of the better ones came to the Water Police.

Most of the vessels arrived early in 1946.¹ The biggest single...

On the face of it, the transition from ‘Water Police’ to ‘Marine Police’ was largely cosmetic. Pay scales improved, uniforms were better tailored (although they were still different from those of the Land Police) and men could now carry out arrests in their own right instead of as part of a crew. But the launches were the same, as were the patrol areas and the problems connected with them. Most of the men were also still the same, for it would be some time yet before the bright young men now joining as ‘Marine Police Constables’ would make their mark.¹...