Marine Lot 122 [????- ]

Thanks, David. I certainly haven't done an exhaustive comparison and may be wrong, but it is a blessing that most of the Marine and Inland Lot numbers seem to have remained fixed and give a template of old Hong Kong, even though the street names and numbering may have changed, to say nothing of the landscape.

Jill

Dear David,

You are a glutton fo work.

Thanks for going back on this again. But I am now somewhat mystified as I thought the long correspondence at http://gwulo.com/node/6098 settled the fact that 98a and b were on this Lot.

moddsey had an Olson at the Lot in 1915. 

There also seems to be some confusion as to whether  I had confused ML122 and ML111. Several years ago when I tracked down the site of 98a and b with the Government Info people they gave me ML122 as the lot number for the address. Now it seems from your latest that 98 was not on the lot but further up or down the road.

While I am not equipped to agree or disagree with anybody I do know that according to death certs which I hold  my grest grandfather and great grandmother  died at 98A and 98B. One in 1915 and one in 1918. I also know Charles Olson lived in 98B at some stage also.

My interest in the place ends when the building, or buildings, became the head office of C.E.Warren as part of the settlement Charles Warren made with the Olson family when the company's offices in Des Voeux Road had to be sold in 1921.(See Dreams Dissolve at www.thehongkonglegacy.com). Again thanks for all your help.

Sean

Thanks for the clarification David.

Sean

David,

In case others need to search for lot numbers corresponding to old street addresses, it seems that the land registry use the 1936 Street Index to help them trace this information. Digging into my correspondence of 2007 I have come across a nugget from the Land Registry, forwarded to me by Sean, and for which I claim no credit. At the time, we were trying to pinpoint the addresses used by our common forebears. The address 98A Wanchai Road was used by my father and his brothers as their private one, when writing back to their school in England in 1926. The Land Registry writes as follows:

The earliest edition of the Street Index kept by us is the 1936 edition. We learnt from this Street Index of 1936 edition that 33 Caine Road and 98A Wanchai Road were formerly assigned to Sub-section 1 of Section B of Inland Lot no. 1086 and Section A of Marine Lot no. 122 respectively.

The current land registry gives seven entries for M.L. 122 under the heading of ‘On Lok Lane’, as you say. M.L. 122  s.A   is given as the  Lee Cheong Building 利昌大廈. In brackets it says  “see also Wan Chai Road”.  Does this current M.L. 122 Section A tally at all with what might have been 98A Wanchai Road in the early and mid-20th century?

Jill

David,

By January 1910 the location of the CE Warren & Co. hardware factory was 100-108 Wanchai Road. I should have thought that 96 and 98 would have also been created by then – maybe in 1909? I haven’t seen the original application for the cleaning of human hair relating to 96 and 98 Wanchai Road in 1912, given as ML 111. What is the source for that? At least we now know that no. 98 is a different property from 98A or 98B. 

In her post on 98 Wanchai Road, Patricia noted the absence of 96 and 98 from the Victoria Rate Books of the 1880s. I found that 98 and 100 were still absent from the 1894-5 Rate Book, but wasn’t able to check 1900-1910. 

ML 122 is divided into Sections A, B, C, D, of which Section A is the largest. On the page that Patricia posted for 1918-19 we have 98, 98A, 98B, 98C and 98D, which presumably matched  the corresponding Sections of ML 122. The Olsons were only associated with Sections A & B, and finally the Warrens only with Section A. So yes, this must have been ML 122 A & B, abbreviated to s.A and s.B in the street index.

Do we think that 98A was a ‘Dwelling’, as recorded in the 1918-19 Rate Book, or a go-down, or both? Can you ‘dwell’ in a go-down?  I haven’t been able to check the China Directory post-1918, by which time the Warren manufacturing operation had moved to Tai Hang, but was perhaps using 98A Wanchai Road as their office address. 

Thank you for trying to inject clarity into all this. I think we need to lay the Rate Books end to end!

Jill

Hello David,

Many thanks for your point by point reply and investigation of old maps. As far as 98A Wanchai Road is concerned, until contrary evidence emerges, I'm happy to trust the clerk's careful entry of 'Dwg.' ('Dwelling') shown in Patricia's post at http://gwulo.com/node/17805  If I were more skilful, I would link her scan of that 1918-19 Rate Book page to this string and others. The valuation of 98A, at three times that of the following properties 98B, 98C, 98D, 100A and 100B, which aren't labelled as 'dwellings', would seem to indicate that it had a different status. We see that it is termed the "residence of the informant" in a 1915 death certificate, so everything points towards it being habitable from these early days up until 1926, when my then 17 year old father used it as his address in a letter to his English school.

Jill