Colourful Gloria a witness to Hong Kong's history

Gloria D'Almada Barretto 1916-2007

Few lives connect Hong Kong's earliest years with the present. Gloria D'Almada Barretto's was one. Gloria, who died on February 24 at the age of 90, had numerous colourful family memories from the city's beginnings.

Of Portuguese descent but born and raised in Hong Kong, the retelling of Gloria's life is a recounting of the most significant events in the history of the territory - from her defiance in the face of the Japanese occupation to being a frontrunner in the heritage and nature conservation movements that are just now gaining momentum.

For over a century after the beginnings of urban settlement in the 1840s, the Portuguese were Hong Kong's largest non-Chinese, non-British community, and some of modern Hong Kong's first truly 'local' people. Throughout the Pacific war, local Portuguese were designated 'Third Nationals' by the Japanese and left to fend for themselves in the city. Many decamped to Macau, while others, like Gloria, somehow maintained a precarious existence in occupied Hong Kong.

Her grandfather, Jose Maria D'Almada e Castro, came from Macau in 1842 with Sir Henry Pottinger, Hong Kong's first governor, to help set up the Hong Kong government. A distinguished public life followed; among other benefactions, land was donated for the Italian convent on Caine Road.

Born in Kowloon in 1916, most of Gloria's long life was spent in the New Territories countryside. Long before the NT became a commuter belt, Gloria travelled daily from the family home at Fanling to school in Kowloon; the stationmaster occasionally would delay the train's departure if they were late. In the 1920s Gloria frequently raced her pony alongside the Sha Tau Kok Branch line's diminutive trains - sometimes the engine drivers would slow down a little, to give the galloping young girl the illusion of catching them up. Bandits were a feature of New Territories life during her childhood - so were tigers and poisonous snakes. A crack shot, Gloria handed in her gun to the police only in the 1980s.

Gloria's elder brother Leo D'Almada e Castro, a prominent barrister and Legislative Councillor, remained in the city for some months after the Japanese invasion. D'Almada had started to attract the interest of the Japanese Kempetai, and was questioned by them.