Hi all!  I hope someone can help.  We have a kneeling stool in St Stephen's Chapel, Stanley and it is inscribed 'In Memoriam Hugh McCabe Xmas 1941'.

I have already done a fair bit of research on Hugh McCabe.  He arrived in Hong Kong in March 1940 to work in the Hong Kong Survey Department.  He was a gunner in the HKVDC in WW2 and died in the grounds of St Stephen's College, probably near Bungalow C as his section was fighting there on Christmas morning 1941 (there were no survivors from his section).

What we don't know, however, is how this stool ended up at the Chapel, and who commissioned it, why and when.  The Chapel was built in 1949 and consecrated in 1950 so it wouldn't have been during the internment camp years (also, he wasn't really in Hong Kong that long).  The workmanship is quite fine.  Our current assumption is that it was donated by his family in the 1950s or 1960s as it was near the place where he fell, but that is just an assumption.  I'm hoping somewhere here can cast some light on this!

This is part of a wider project to catalogue some of the historical artefacts in the Chapel.