Aileen Bridgewater, 69, arrived in Hong Kong in the early 1960s, having worked at the BBC. She joined Radio Hong Kong before she moved to Commercial Radio, where she became the station's long-standing talk-show host. She recalls how her work on radio helped lead to the launch of Helping Hand, the charity that caters for the homeless elderly, and the Kidney Patients' Trust Fund.
It was very early on that Bob Saunders (the unofficial mayor of Tsuen Wan) rang and said he'd found a starving, old Hakka lady who lived by gathering sticks on the hillsides which she then took to the dai pai dongs in exchange for food. That was her life; that's how she lived. And she lived in a pigsty. I went out to interview her and found she couldn't speak Cantonese and she didn't read or write, so there was no way that the government could reach her. Social security has never been great in Hong Kong, but it was something even less in those days. And she wasn't getting it. So we took her to Social Welfare and she got what, to us, would have been a pittance, but to her was a fortune. And she brought 10 other old ladies who were in the same situation. We realised then there was a whole section of the community that the government wasn't getting through to.
Then Bob rang up again and said, 'I just found 100 old men living in cages.' He was always one for exaggeration, but I thought if there were 10, it was dreadful. Bob met me and we went down this street which was just a decaying tunnel of buildings. Across the doorway of one were two sticks and a sign that said, 'Demolition Order'. We climbed over the sticks and we went up seven flight of stairs, covered with rubbish.
When we got to the top it was like a horrible pet shop. There were cages from floor to ceiling and in each was an old man. In the front was an old man cutting up a newspaper. He was mumbling. His hair was matted.
Bob said, 'Come in, come in. You ain't seen nothing yet.' I went in and there I saw what I thought was a corpse. I put my hand through the bar of the cage and it moved. And this face looked at me with such despair that I knew I would remember it always. I found out the despair wasn't because of the appalling conditions. He'd been there for 16 years. It was a brotherhood; those who could went out and got food for those who couldn't. Some hadn't been out for 12 years. They looked after each other. Now they were being thrown out and they were going to be separated. The next day I broadcast all of this and the listeners responded. They suggested we form a committee.
We had terrible times with the government in those days, but they did give us land and the Hongkong Shanghai Bank lent us $40,000. We built these little chalets for the old men on the outskirts of Tsuen Wan and the bank wrote the loan off.