Carol Webster has been in touch asking if we have any information about her great grandfather, Walter George Babb. Carol knows that at the time of the 1911 UK census he was working for the Asiatic Petroleum Company as a watchman and living at 42 Victoria Square, Portishead, Somerset, England. She asks if we have any records of the APC’s […]
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Roy Eric Xavier, Director, Portuguese and Macanese Studies Project at the University of California, Berkeley, USA has kindly granted permission to reproduce the following article. Roy also runs the absorbing website Far Eastern Currents which covers a wide range of research into the Macanese Diaspora especially in Macau and Hong Kong. Roy’s article and website are both linked below as are two of our […]
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HF: Peter Taylor, the great, great nephew of Alfred Dickinson, has left a comment below our article, Alfred Dickinson, Consulting Engineer HK Tramways, linked below, about Mr Dickinson. I thought this was of sufficient interest and value to post in a separate article. Peter wrote in reply to an enquiry I made about whether he could offer any information about […]
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James Chan: John L Sardy was connected to the Motor Car Works, 8 Saracen’s Chambers, Snow Hill, London which sold the products of the Steam Vehicle Company of America, Pennsylvania, USA, for which Sardy was the General Agent. In 1894 John’s life was about to dramatically change! “John L Sardy was engaged by the R.E. Dietz Company to circumnavigate the globe […]
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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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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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