HF: Can anyone supply further information about The Oriental Construction Company which the 1905 advert below says were Consulting and Supervising Engineers and Contractors with branches in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Manila. The ad says the company were specialists in railways, mines, water supplies, reinforced concrete and concrete piles. Their 1905 Hong Kong office was in the Alexandra Buildings. This […]
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A tenuous, but intriguing, connection to Hong Kong’s disposal of sewage and refuse in around the 1880s. Can anyone confirm this link and suggest which of William Warner’s methods were adopted here? “The firm of Goddard and Massey started with Henry Goddard and appears to have had its origins in Nottingham between c1844-48. In 1848 Henry Goddard is listed as an ironmonger […]
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HF: Ricky Rowe, from Scotland, has sent these photographs showing a presentation at the retirement from Kowloon (HK & Whampoa) Docks of A M Calman on 30th July 1948. I presume Mr Calman is the gentleman wearing white trousers in the centre of the front row. And judging by the turnout he was a reasonably senior figure at the Dock. […]
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Ho Fan’s 何藩, extraordinary black and white photographs have appeared in several SCMP articles, linked below. He was born in Shanghai in 1937 where he started to take photographs when he was very young. He says the first thing he shot was the Bund taken with a Brownie, a “very simple, old-fashioned camera”. He immigrated with his family to Hong […]
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According to Claire Grey’s excellent family history website, linked below, W R Loxley and Company (China) Ltd was established in Hong Kong in 1872 and… ‘…J. M. Beattie bought it possibly in 1900. Later two brothers: A. Beattie and M. P. Beattie joined the firm. The business was sold to J. A. Russell and D. O. Russell in 1919 and under the agreement A. Beattie […]
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Our article about the origins of the Aberdeen Gasometer led us to discover that it was originally constructed by Samuel Cutler & Sons of Millwall, London and Telford, UK. This in turn provided both Stephen Davies and IDJ with the opportunity to link this particular gasometer design to Cutler’s Patent Guide Framing which was patented in 1888. Very familiar to any UK city […]
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HF: J H Stewart Lockhart was Colonial Secretary in Hong Kong from 1895-1902. He wrote a report to the Colonial Office in London, reporting on “The New Territory” . This followed “The Convention between Great Britain and China respecting an Extension of the Colony of Hong Kong.” The report was published on the 8th Oct 1898. The report has an intriguing mention […]
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HF: The image below shows the developing Tsuen Wan in the foreground, the Caltex oil storage depot in the background with a hill top cemetery above. JKW: I can confirm this, because I grew up here. My father worked for Caltex as a civil engineer supervising work at the oil terminal, as he called it, from 1973 to 1978. We […]
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Stephen Davies: Auguste Pierre Marty, who died in HK in 1909, was resident here (and in his latter years Spanish Consul) from his arrival, aged 17, in 1871, to work for his brother Auguste Raphael Marty (who also lived in HK until he moved to Haiphong in 1906 where he died in 1914), who founded the company (A.R. Marty & […]
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“The French merchant Auguste Raphael Marty (1841–1914) established his own trading house, A. R. Marty et Cie, in Hong Kong in 1874. Following the acquisition of northern Indochina by France, he and his business partner, [Edouard] Jules d’Abbadie in September 1886, founded the shipping company Marty et d’Abbadie in the port of Haiphong.”(1) Information about A.R.Marty et Cie appears thin on […]
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