Wan Chai's Southorn Playground is one of Hong Kong's least-attractive public spaces. Hemmed in by high-rise buildings, this concrete expanse enjoys an unsavoury, thoroughly well-deserved reputation as an open-air drugs supermarket. But who it is named after and what broader connections the name evokes have been mostly forgotten.
Sir Wilfrid Thomas Southorn (1879-1957) - known as Tom - was a career colonial civil servant who spent much of his professional life in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Appointed colonial secretary in Hong Kong in 1925, Southorn served here until 1936.
In 1921, he married Bella Sidney Woolf (1877-1960), a fascinating original whose brother had been a colleague of Tom in Ceylon. Bella was the elder sister of Leonard Woolf, who abandoned his overseas administrative career for a life in publishing. With his wife, Virginia Woolf, he established the avant-garde Hogarth Press in London. Like her celebrated sister-in-law, Bella Southorn was a writer and she penned a number of children's books, which drew on her own experiences; The Twins in Ceylon and its sequels were very popular. After her husband was posted to The Gambia as governor in 1936, she wrote a detailed history of the tiny West African territory her husband tartly (if accurately) described as 'a geographical and economic absurdity'. Active in community work during her years in Hong Kong, and commissioner of the Girl Guides from 1926 to 1936, Southorn was awarded an OBE in 1935.
For the most part, Southorn penned short stories with themes drawn from her life as the wife of a colonial civil servant. Later compiled as Bits of Old China and Under the Mosquito Curtain, (left) these gently humorous sketches of colonial life in Hong Kong and Ceylon radiate her enjoyment of life and love of place. One short story, The Pearl We Seek, describes a magical full-moon evening seen from Mountain Lodge - the official Peak residence of the Southorns - and the morning after.
'Over the peak of High West the moon hung in a sky sparkling with stars. The fishing fleet out at sea gleamed like a string of fireflies ... And then far below the first sound broke the silence - the voice of a barking deer - weird - fitful - like the horns of Elfland faintly blowing.
'Next morning at breakfast a grave Chinese servant came, with the air which seems to betoken some cataclysm.