The stories behind the stories: The day the Post was bombed

Carl Myatt, former sports editor

I was working my usual 18-hour shift. I'd gone home to have a shower and eat something, then raced back down from my home in Garden Road to On Lan Street, opposite the Post building in Wyndham Street, to park and start my night shift. It was the mid to late 1960s, when the communists were rampaging through the streets every day, and I had to beat the 6pm dusk-to-dawn curfew. The streets were dead. Only my car was moving.

I parked on On Lan and rushed towards the entrance of the Post building when there was an almighty blast - the whole street shook. Someone had tossed a bomb into the room that housed the press, in the basement of the building. All hell broke loose. Fire trucks converged on the scene. I waited for a while to make sure the building wasn't really on fire, then bolted up into the editorial department on the second floor. As luck would have it, the men who operated the press were changing shifts, and no one was hurt. The damage was also minimal.

There were also demonstrations outside the Wyndham Street offices at about two or three every afternoon for about a week. You could hear the mob coming down Wyndham after their performances outside Government House. They'd come down with megaphones blaring, then stand outside the front entrance of the Post and start chanting, snapping their little red books at those of us standing upstairs peering down at them.

I think it infuriated them that we weren't scared. We'd stand there, framed in the windows, looking down and smiling benignly at them. It drove them nuts, particularly as the Post had taken a very anti-communist position.

Our pictures of mobs rioting and looting became a prized source for police detectives, who came in regularly to gather up the prints for identification purposes. Many a looter and rioter ended up in jail because of the bravery of our photographers, particularly chief photographer Peter Chu, Chan Kiu and Henry Mok.