70 years ago: Hong Kong's wartime diaries

The University of Hong Kong's Professor Gordon King has been working in Free China since his escape in February 1942. Today he sends a message to the British Colonial office:

In the view of the Vice-Chancellor, Mr. D. J. Sloss, who is still under Japanese confinement in Stanley Camp, Hong Kong, it is necessary to decide whether the future scope of the University is to be mainly a local one, and limited chiefly to the training of subordinate officers for the Hong Kong Civil Service, or whether it is to count as an expression of British policy towards China and the Far East. In the past the University has existed without subsidy from the Imperial Government and has been too poor adequately to fill the wider function, yet too large and cumbersome economically to fulfil a purely local purpose. It is essential to consider and decide for which of these two functions the future University is to be planned.

Duncan Sloss and the other imprisoned members of the University Senate have continued to discuss two visions of the University's function - 'local' versus 'Far Eastern'. This question had proved controversial before the war and would not be finally settled for some years after it.

But it's interesting that even after the apparent destruction of the British Army Aid Group's operation in Hong Kong in the spring of 1943 Sloss was still able to smuggle messages out of Stanley. Presumably a degree of organisation remained, or was reconstituted.

Source:

Clifford Matthews and Oswald Cheung, Dispersal and Renewal: Hong Kong University During The War Years, 1998, 401

Note: see also the entries for July 16, 1943 and November 30, 1944.

Note 2: One source (see comment beloiw) says that Sloss sent a message about the University's future through one of thee Canadians repatriated in September 1943. This is an alternative to his having used a continuing BAAG route - but I still believe that such continuing contacts existed.