Then & Now | Queen Mary biographer James Pope-Hennessy had some harsh words for Hong Kong after 1960s visit
- Best known for his biography of Queen Mary, the 20th-century Anglo-Irish writer didn’t mince his words after a brief stay in the city
- ‘This Crown Colony, so oddly reputed sensual and exotic, in actual fact so harsh and so banal,’ he wrote of Hong Kong
Many minor literary figures, having passed through colonial Hong Kong, mined their experiences and observations in the territory for professional purposes. The resulting works usually originated from articles pre-commissioned by (mostly British) mainstream newspaper or magazine titles.
After a rewriting, these features were often syndicated in North America, Australasia and elsewhere and eventually expanded into a book. Such rehashes typically combined travelogue and personal observation mixed – depending on the interests and expertise of the author – with political, social, historical and economic reportage.
One such writer, who spent a few months in Hong Kong in 1967-68 and later wrote about the place and its people, was Anglo-Irish author James Pope-Hennessy.
The grandson of controversial 19th-century Hong Kong governor Sir John Pope Hennessy, who served here from 1877 to 1881, his Verandah (1964) researched his forebear’s gubernatorial experiences from the Bahamas, Mauritius and Labuan to Barbados, Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast and Hong Kong.
James Pope-Hennessy had served as a private secretary to the governor of Trinidad, a sojourn that produced West Indian Summer (1943), a beguiling anthology of Western observations of the Caribbean.
