When Harry Stanley was recruited from the Royal Automobile Club in London to head the newly formed Hong Kong Tourist Association in 1957, the idea of people coming to the territory on holiday was slightly comic.
Who would want to holiday in a city where half the population lived in wretched shanty-towns clinging uncertainly to hillsides, a tiny territory perched next to an immense unfriendly neighbour? Not many: that year, 50,000 tourists arrived in Hong Kong. When Stanley retired as executive director of the association in 1971, Hong Kong was poised to celebrate its first million-visitor year. He was widely called the father of Hong Kong tourism, and although he would have hotly disputed he was a one-man band, it was a title he fairly deserved.
When he died recently, aged 87, at his home in Britain, Major Stanley - he was invariably referred to by his military title in which he held immense pride - was mourned by the entire travel industry. That was a regard not confined to Hong Kong; as a life member of the Pacific Asia Travel Association and a founder of the East Asia Travel Association, he helped make regional tourism an industry without borders.
When he was hired to head the association, Stanley had already led a full and eventful life. He was an officer in the Grenadier Guards who had won a Military Cross for valour in World War II. After the army, he earned another reputation, for taking tough jobs in organisations facing problems.
The embryonic tourist association certainly answered that description. The man who interviewed and recruited Stanley was a prickly civil servant with a disdain for tourism. Later, when Sir John Cowperthwaite was financial secretary, he was to state bluntly that tourism was a frill, rather than a meaningful economic pursuit. Stanley disagreed.
He strived to elevate Hong Kong's hospitality standards and worked hard to put cramped Kai Tak airport on the aviation route maps of the region.
The early association was modelled after the British Travel Association, but in his 14 years heading the organisation, Stanley steered it through changes which made it purely local.