Exploring the past visual story by Edward Stokes

Arrival in Hong Kong

Just over 70 years ago, my parents cast the familiarity of their life in Australia aside and, from Sydney with two young children, they left for Hong Kong.

The ship that we sailed aboard, the SS Changte, was one of the countless vessels that came and went from Victoria Harbour during the postwar years.

The reproduction of a postcard from a family photo album, is a highly romanticised view of the Changte.

Voyage Through Time

In fact, the ship was a low-lying, workaday cargo-passenger liner – like many other vessels portrayed in the Hong Kong Maritime Museum exhibition, Voyage Through Time: Hong Kong Maritime Photos 1940s – 1970s.

After a month at sea, steaming north across the tropics, the Changte entered a barren, narrow strait: Lei Yue Mun, the dramatic, mountain-ringed eastern entrance to Victoria Harbour.

The date, known from a stamp in my mother’s passport, was 4 September 1953. Stepping off a walla-walla, the family disembarked at Blake Pier.

Immediately behind the pier, ornate Edwardian buildings lined the foreshore.

Hedda Morrison

Seven years before, after her short voyage from northern China, on 21 September 1946, the photographer Hedda Morrison had also sailed through Lei Yue Mun into Hong Kong.

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She was aboard the SS Hanyang. The vessel moored midstream in Victoria Harbour. Thus, Morrison almost certainly also disembarked at Blake Pier, then Central District’s arrival point for ship passengers.

Morrison’s Hong Kong

Half a century later, in 1995, while researching at The University of Hong Kong Libraries Special Collections, by chance I saw Morrison’s Hong Kong photos in the government’s Annual Report 1946: a slender poorly printed postwar publication.

Unusually, each plate was credited to Morrison. Years before, then in Australia, I had bought her photo books of 1930s China – so I knew Morrison’s name. Two questions immediately jumped up. Might her negatives still exist? And if so, where were they?

Edward Stokes explorations

That fortuitous sighting was to change my own journey – indeed my life. Photos unseen for many decades excited my imagination and guided my heritage explorations.

After a multi-year search, I finally located Morrison’s Hong Kong negatives at Harvard-Yenching Library, Harvard University.

There, over a translucent light box, her superb photos leapt into view: fragile slivers of gelatin and emulsion, hundreds of them held in a cardboard container smaller than a shoebox.

Hong Kong’s past came vividly – viscerally – alive.

Visual story of the past

The Voyage Through Time photographs were taken by Hedda Morrison (1946 – 1947) and Brian Brake (1960s – 1970s).

Some of my own images, taken in 1979 when I was starting out as a photographer, complement Morrison’s and Brake’s visual story.

Hedda Morrison, born in Germany in 1908, had trained as a photographer. Modernism, with its strong lighting and dramatic viewpoints, was her documentary style.

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In China and notably Beijing, during the 1930s she followed her abiding passion, recording the daily lives of ordinary people. Meanwhile, she earned her living as a studio manager.

Having departed from the increasingly difficult postwar Beijing, after her 1946 arrival in Hong Kong, Morrison stayed here for just six months.

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In that short time, despite a limp from childhood polio, she photographed widely and especially around the harbour.

Sheung Wan praya coolies

On the Sheung Wan praya coolies, teenagers, even boys shoulder cargo across a narrow plank. Their bare chests show hungered ribs, the result of past wartime malnutrition and now rice-bowl wages.

At Kennedy Town, women with carrying poles and wicker baskets stoop to shift piles of building sand.

At Shau Kei Wan its low tide bay is an expanse of mud. A fisher family cleans the bottom of a tiny, upturned sampan – their home.

Brian Brake, born in New Zealand in 1927, first reached Hong Kong in 1957.

By then, he was a photojournalist in the key era of the renowned colour magazines: LIFE, National Geographic, Paris Match and Stern.

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Brake had more LIFE cover stories than any other photographer of his period. From 1962 until 1976, he was based in Hong Kong and working internationally.

In 1970, TIME-LIFE commissioned Brake to record Hong Kong for a book. It was published in 1977. Then a teacher in Australia but with photography increasingly enticing my mind, I was alert for books about Asia and Hong Kong.

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I bought Brake’s book and devoured its images. In Voyage Through Time, some of the book’s photos appear as framed pictures. They recall how Brake’s work helped to inspire – and inform – my own early photography.

Brian Brake & Edward Stokes

Brian Brake – sensitive to strangers, blending into the foreshore areas – left a superb record of the famed Lion Rock spirit era: the territory’s period of rapid growth and effervescent vitality. Industry powered Hong Kong, its economy, harbour and life.

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HYF (Hongkong Yaumati Ferries) crisscross the harbour, seemingly too close for safety. In fact, from a vantage point high up in a foreshore building, using a strong telephoto lens, Brake foreshortened the perspective to exaggerate the closeness of the ferries.

The harbour glows with a late afternoon sheen, island and vehicular ferries proceed past. The image shows Brake’s mastery of vantage points, light and timing. His skills encapsulated – superbly – the energised Hong Kong.

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The harbour and its ferries were little different when I visited Hong Kong in 1979. Living in Australia, I was pondering returning to live and work here.

Then, still finding my eye as a self-taught, starting-out photographer, I completed magazine features to build a small name – and to convince myself that photography could be my future. One such project was a GEO photo story on Hong Kong. For it I took my images seen in the exhibition.

During that 1979 Hong Kong visit, I met, for the first and only time, one of my admired mentor photographers – whose memorable photos and highly crafted books excited my mind and later guided my photographic future.

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I only ever met one of them in person: Brian Brake, encountered in Hong Kong in 1979, almost by chance.

From my 1979 visit, one photograph remains especially vivid in memory. At Sheung Wan, two boys paddle a makeshift float – a square of oil-stained polystyrene. They seem alert to their surroundings, though perhaps not to the oil slicks that give the water its quickly changing, iridescent reflections.

Using a medium telephoto lens, I try to predict the boys’ movements – to compose and frame the cameo. I observe the water’s shifting colours and ripples – focus – refocus – meter the light – wait… Then – click! About one sixtieth of a second in exposure time: today an enduring photo memory from over half a lifetime ago.

Thirty-four years before I photographed the two boys, my father had first reached Hong Kong. From 1942 – 1945, he served aboard the Royal Australian Navy cruiser Australia – flagship of the small but significant Australian fleet. Given its admiral aboard, and navy protocol, the virtually certain end-of-war destination for Australia was Tokyo Bay: to witness the final, overall Japanese surrender.

Related People and crafts that facilitated transport across Victoria Harbour

But fate intervened. In January 1945, Australia suffered severe damage – with great loss of life – from repeated Kamikaze hits during the Allied landings at Lingayen Gulf in the Philippines. Almost disabled, Australia was ordered back to Sydney. Most of her crew were dispersed onto other ships.

My father, John Stokes, was posted to a Royal Navy frigate of Admiral Harcourt’s fleet. Led by HMS Swiftsure, steaming in through Lei Yue Mun, Harcourt’s vessels entered Victoria Harbour and reoccupied Hong Kong on 30 August 1945.

Lieutenant John Stokes went ashore soon after. He walked westwards from Tamar along the praya – towards Blake Pier. In 1980, recalling that moment between war and peace, between anguish and hope, he wrote, “On that far away day, just after the war ended, the pier was silent and deserted. Not a soul came. Not a soul went.” In the following weeks and months, while stationed here, and as Hong Kong sprang back to life, the place and its people – with their grit and spirit – captured his heart.

Voyage Through Time is originated by The Hong Kong Photo Heritage Programme.

The Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation HK and The Swire Group Charitable Trust are the exhibition’s sponsors. Voyage Through Time is originated by The Hong Kong Photo Heritage Programme and its curator Edward Stokes.

Text Edward Stokes / Photo Copyrights: Hedda Morrison – President and Fellows of Harvard College; Brian Brake – Wai-man Lau; Edward Stokes – Edward Stokes

Epilogue

John Stokes married Gwenneth Woodger in July 1944 – in Adelaide, South Australia. He was on leave from serving as a wartime intelligence officer aboard HMAS Australia. She was a young barrister. After the war, they moved to Sydney, and from there, in 1953, they sailed for Hong Kong. A third child was born soon after arriving. John Stokes taught history at King’s College and Queen’s College during the 1950s and 1960s.

From 1965 to 1970, he was the Principal of Queen’s College. Together, the couple wrote numerous Hong Kong history textbooks, and the 100th and 125th anniversary histories of Queen’s College. They retired to Oxford, but Hong Kong forever remained the family home.

The album caption identifies the Chinese family as William Mac, with his children Tim Chee (top) and Shin Lan (bottom). John Stokes is wearing his Naval uniform, with the double gold stripes of a Lieutenant. Who William Mac was is unknown. Sadly, in later years, family time and his own books did not allow Edward the options to record oral history or album details with his father – who would have remembered William Mac. But from their dress the Macs were clearly Westernized and comfortably off. A second photo on the same album page shows Stokes with another local, Westernized Chinese family.

John Stokes first taught in Hong Kong for one year at St. Stephen’s School, Stanley, from late 1953 to the summer of 1954. He then joined the government’s Education Department. The family’s first Hong Kong home was in the ridgetop grounds of St. Stephens. The bungalow, seen here, is still standing – though its then spacious single-home layout is now internally subdivided. Here Edward, his sister Edith, and two St Stephen’s students pose with wicker hats bought in the then rustic Stanley village. The summit of The Twins, just visible in the top right, was a vantage point for some of Edward’s 1990s nature landscape photos.

The “KCR” clock tower shows it is 10.30am – the 1960 Cross-Harbour Swimming Race is off! At the bottom right, a blond Ed, then aged twelve, is about to leap off. Above, John Stokes, his father, a hanky in his bathers, is about to dive in. Initiated in 1906, the race was a fixture in the annual swimming calendar. In the 1960s, the event reflected the territory’s “Lion Rock spirit” – its “can do” achievement despite often great odds. Due to water pollution the race was abandoned in 1978. In 2011, with the harbour by then much cleaner, the race was re-instated. However, instead of crossing central Victoria Harbour as before, swimmers now cross its much wider, eastern reaches.

John Stokes taught history and geography at King’s College from 1954 – 1958. During a mid- 1950s sports day, he stands with a master and senior students of Kay House – named for an earlier headmaster. The clothes show it is winter. Like almost all Hong Kong schools, “King’s” had been severely damaged by looting and timber getting during the war years. In 1954 an additional Secondary Upper Six form was introduced to allow more places for students who would sit for the new Hong Kong University Matriculation Exam. In 1955, the first postwar group of King’s College graduates entered the University.

John Stokes was the Queen’s College Principal from 1965 – 1970. He pushed forward fresh programmes to widen the students’ extracurricular interests, especially their appreciation of social needs. Many pupils, notably those on Queen’s or government scholarships, were from poor backgrounds. With them and others, Stokes set up an activities club for children of the so-called “minor staff”: messengers, cleaners, handymen, gardeners and suchlike. Each year these staff – twenty khaki-uniformed men – were photographed with Stokes and his senior masters. The photo always appeared in the Yellow Dragon, the school magazine. Wong Kam Lun, the tireless, all-knowing school office “fixer”, had three children. Here, in the far left, they stand together as a family group.

Due to the Education Department’s age rules, though against his wishes, John Stokes retired from Queen’s College in 1970 – seventeen years after the family reached Hong Kong. Lasting bonds had been built in the then colony, especially with Queen’s staff and “old boys”. Here, this shipboard farewell includes Queen’s alumni of three generations. One “QC old boy”, at the top right, wears a traditional Chinese gown. Seated between John and Gwenneth Stokes is Cheung Wing-in, a prominent lawyer and longtime President of the Queen’s College Old Boys’ Association. A further seventeen years later, in 1987, Gwenneth and John Stokes’s magnum opus on the school was published – Queen’s College, Its History, 1862 – 1987. Edward, by then a photographer and writer himself, joined them in Hong Kong for the book’s launch. His parents’ historical research had helped to inspire his own work.

Text Edward Stokes / Photo Copyrights Edward Stokes

Related Vintage photos: Voyage Through Time, Victoria Harbour, Hong Kong

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