Wealth Blog | Goodbye to Arthur Hacker and Anthony Lawrence

This is a sad week. Not only have we lost the former legendary BBC foreign correspondent Tony Lawrence, who died shortly after his 101st birthday, but it’s farewell to another great Hong Kong character. Arthur Hacker, painter, illustrator, historian and creator of the anti-litterbug character Lap Sap Chung died yesterday morning in his sleep. Arthur spent the last year or so in a government home, where he received exceptional care from his diligent social workers and nurses. He died in hospital, having succumbed to pneumonia. Like many elderly expatriates of his generation, his dotage saw him with many friends, but no family in Hong Kong. An immensely private person, Arthur was a confirmed bachelor. If my memory serves me right, he turned 80 last year. His was along and creative life. 

The Lap Sap Chung Era

Arthur arrived in Hong Kong in December 1967. He had studied at the Royal College of Art in England and Hong Kong fascinated him, its colourful characters feeding his pop art drawings in the early 1970s. He revelled in the seedy, seamy side of life that fed his creative muse.

His pen and ink drawings and other works can still be found in Wattis Fine Art, in Jonathan Wattis’ gallery upstairs at 20 Hollywood Road, Central. Arthur was multi talented, a writer and historian as well as a painter and illustrator. He was an avid collector of books, historic post cards and photos.  He wrote and illustrated numerous books on his observations of the then British colony and afterwards. Hacker's Hong Kong was just one of many. He also designed many beautiful postage stamps.

Street pop-art

Arthur’s inspiration was street life, from the bell-bottomed boys and scantily clad girls in Wan Chai to motley stray dogs, visiting sailors and pillar boxes. His drawing style was mostly curlicues. He depicted the swinging '70s, Hong Kong-style, having already seen the swinging '60s in Britain, he said. 'The thing about Hong Kong was that you got a mixture of the very rich and the very poor wandering around in streets next to each other,' he said.

But most Hong Kongers remember Arthur for something completely different. In 1972, his employer, the Information Services Department (ISD) set out to foster a sense of civic pride to clean up Hong Kong. Arthur designed an emblematic 'public enemy number one' of the new Keep Hong Kong Clean Campaign, in the form of Lap Sap Chung, the litterbug.