Advertisement
Advertisement
Profile
Get more with myNEWS
A personalised news feed of stories that matter to you
Learn more
Mark Isaac-Williams at an exhibition of his paintings at Kadoorie Farm and Botanic Garden, where he worked on and off for decades after growing up in post-war Hong Kong. Photo: Jonathan Wong

Profile | Painter of orchids on a colourful Hong Kong childhood, developing a passion for plants and swapping his brushes for pencils late in life

  • Botanical artist Mark Isaac-Williams tells Kate Whitehead about high jinks living in The Peninsula hotel post-war and how his passion for painting flowers grew
  • Now retired from Kadoorie Farm and Botanic Garden, his book The Hong Kong I Knew: Scenes and Stories from a Childhood in Kowloon has recently been published
Profile

In the early 1930s, Britain was in the grip of the Great Depression. My father had passed his final master’s certificate exams in Cardiff, south Wales, in 1934, but couldn’t find work in the British Merchant Navy.

In 1935, he accepted a position as second mate on a ship going to Shanghai on the understanding that he could return to Britain with the ship, or stay on in Shanghai and join the Chinese Maritime Customs Service.

From Shanghai, he telephoned my mother, who he’d only recently met, to say he’d take the job in Shanghai if she would join him out there and marry him. She did. After the fall of Nanjing to the Japanese in 1937, my father was ordered to sail to Jiujiang and expected to be return within 10 days. It was 13 months before he saw her again.

With so many people leaving Shanghai and my father unreachable, my mother decided to pack up and move to Hong Kong. She stayed at a guest house on Mody Road in Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon, and my father joined her in early 1939 and they moved into a house on Prat Avenue. I was born in November that year, my mother was rushed to Kowloon Hospital by rickshaw.

The Hong Kong Island waterfront from Tsim Sha Tsui in the 1940s. Photo: SCMP

Down under

In late June 1940, my father phoned my mother and told her to pack a small suitcase and prepare to board a ship to Australia. With the advance of the Japanese, the Hong Kong government had declared that all women and children must leave. My mother and I took a ship to Manila, in the Philippines, with 2,000 other Europeans and were there for six weeks until they could find a ship to get us to Australia.

The cover of Mark Isaac-Williams’s book.

In Sydney, my mother had to work because there was no money coming in and my father was in a prison camp in Hong Kong under the Japanese. She put me into a boarding house in Watsons Bay during the week with a woman called Mrs Ball who, with the support of two Chinese amahs (maids), took in the children of mothers who needed to work.

For the first five or six years of my life, I saw my mother at lunchtime on a Saturday until Sunday night, when I was dragged back kicking and screaming.

A man called Sam lived next door to the boarding house, he’d lost both his legs in the first world war (1914-1918). Sam was a keen gardener and I spent a lot of time watching him and helping him plant things – that might have been where I started my horticulture life.

One day, a few of us were playing in the garden when some American sailors stopped by the fence. They were carrying toys and said we could choose what we liked. I chose a koala bear made of sheepskin – I loved that bear and had it for years.

The lobby (circa 1950s) of the Peninsula hotel in Tsim Sha Tsui.

Hotel high jinks

After the war, my father was released from Stanley internment camp – he weighed just 84 pounds (38kg), not much for a man who was almost six foot (183cm). Aged five, I waited for him with my mother on the wharf in Sydney, but when I first met him I was overcome with shyness and it took several months for me to understand that I now had a father as well.

We went to stay with one of my mother’s brothers in Shropshire, in Britain. My father was called back to the Chinese Maritime Customs in Hong Kong and my mother and I joined him a year later. My father met us at Kowloon Wharf and we took rickshaws to The Peninsula hotel, in Tsim Sha Tsui.

Isaac-Williams and friend Sarah Bent. Photo: courtesy of Mark Isaac-Williams

It was not The Peninsula that you know today, the carpets had gone because the Japanese had taken them and it was full of mosquitoes and rats. The government had requisitioned two of the floors of the hotel for people like us coming back to Hong Kong.

I played with a group of kids and we knew every inch of the hotel from the basement to the roof. We got up to all sorts of naughtiness, paddling in the fountain and fighting with the bellboys. We’d roller-skate up and down the corridors of the hotel and up and down Hankow Road and Peking Road.

Across from the hotel was the YMCA where my friends and I spent our time after school swimming, under the watchful eye of Lykke Rose, a Danish Olympic swimmer.

Isaac-Williams and his dog. Photo: courtesy of Mark Isaac-Williams

Bored of boarding

In 1947, I started at Kowloon Junior School, in Kowloon Tong, and a couple of years later moved to the senior school, King George V. In 1951, we moved out of The Peninsula into a new flat on Kimberley Street, which was a new street. The road wasn’t even tarred when we moved there, it was made of red clay and I dug holes in the clay to practise my golf putting.

I was excited about having my own bedroom, but it didn’t last long because a year later, when I was 11, I was sent to boarding school. I was quite excited about the thought of going to England, but once my mother left me at boarding school, at Moor Park School, in Shropshire, I didn’t like it and I started to be naughty. I’d been so free in Hong Kong and suddenly I felt like a caged tiger.

When I was 15, and about to take my O-levels, I realised I didn’t know anything, so moved to a college in Devon and managed to scrape through. I thought I’d do journalism, so I went to Shrewsbury College for a year and learned shorthand and a bit of law and then worked in an advertising company in London, but I wanted to get back to be with my friends in Hong Kong.

Acanthephippium sinense (2013) by Isaac-Williams: a watercolour of the endangered orchid species found in Hong Kong and other parts of China. Photo: Kadoorie Farm and Botanic Garden

Top secret

Back in Hong Kong, a group of us went out to the nightclubs on Nathan Road – Highball and the Golden Phoenix – dancing until 2am. My father kept on at me to get a job and I finally was offered an interview at Victoria Barracks.

It was months before they got back to me and I learned later it was because they were checking who I’d been circulating with in the UK, because the job was as a clerk for the government communications office. Before I could start, I had to sign the Official Secrets Act.

I was stationed in Victoria Barracks and worked there for seven years, mostly doing paperwork. My salary was about HK$1,400, which wasn’t enough to rent my own place so I was still living with my parents and, at one stage, work asked if our flat could be used for confidential meetings. I was told it was better I didn’t know too much about what they were about.

Once a month, we went out, leaving the flat open, and when we came back they were gone.

Botanical artist Mark Isaac-Williams, who was born in Hong Kong in 1939 and recalls the shock of seeing his emaciated father freed from a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in the city. Photo: Jonathan Wong

Persona non grata

I had a girlfriend, but I wasn’t very popular because she was Japanese. I’d met her through friends, she was working as a dancer at Highball. My father was polite to her when she came to the flat, but when she left he said, “How dare anyone bring a Japanese into my house.” I told him that she was my age and didn’t know anything more about the war than I did at the time.

When she went back to Japan, I used to phone her every month and I went to see her several times. She married and had a daughter, and the last time I spoke to her she was a grandmother. I worried about what might have happened to her in the big tsunami (in Japan in 2011) because I never heard from her after that.
Gloria Barretto was a Kadoorie Farm botanical specialist. Photo: SCMP

Flowering passion

In 1962, I got a job teaching swimming at Diocesan Girls’ School over the summer and was asked to stay on and teach PE to primary students. I taught there for 12 years.

I love nature. I used to love to walk the dogs through the woods. I’d look down and see the autumn leaves and the lovely colours and I’d think, “That would be nice to paint,” and I’d go home with a bunch of leaves and I’d paint them just because I enjoyed it.

I joined an amateur orchid group led by (Kadoorie Farm botanical specialist) Gloria Barretto and we looked for orchids in the New Territories. The group walked the mountains nearly every weekend, more than often finding something of interest and even new species.

We were given a permit to collect one or two plants, as Gloria had the perfect place for them in her garden. From this small beginning the collection increased and an area of 1,200 sq ft at the farm became a conservation area.

Dendrobium pendulum (2016) by Isaac-Williams: a watercolour of the endangered orchid species found in Southeast Asia. Photo: Kadoorie Farm and Botanic Garden

Art calling

In 1979, I had the privilege of starting work with Gloria, who taught me a great deal. I left Kadoorie Farm in 1985 to run a nursery in Queensland, Australia, for three years and, in 2007, was asked to return to Kadoorie Farm to look after the local orchids, which have gone from six new species in 1977 to 1980 to over 150 today and they are still being discovered.

I retired from physical work in 2013 and became resident artist. I painted nearly 100 orchids up to my final retirement in 2020. Every year, the Royal Horticultural Society has a botanical art exhibition in London. I entered for three consecutive years from 2017 and won three silver medals and a bronze but never managed the gold. My paintings are displayed at Kadoorie Farm.

Now, unfortunately, because I have Parkinson’s, I’m having to slow down a bit, but I’m trying to use pencils, which are easier than a brush. When I put my hand on the paper, it starts to shake and it’s hopeless, but with pencil you can press hard and it stops the shaking, so I’m trying to do that.

5