Chris Patten’s Hong Kong aide Kerry McGlynn on the handover, coining Asia’s World City slogan and never quite retiring
Australian former journalist Kerry McGlynn, the man behind Hong Kong’s branding as Asia’s World City, recalls the last British governor’s ‘amazing’ sense of humour and how the ‘heavens wept’ when Chinese rule resumed
I was born in a town in the Riverina district of New South Wales called Leeton. When we went to Sydney, just before I started school, my father took a job as a box maker and then became a butcher. I went to an Irish Brothers school called St James. I made just one term of high school – I was a 15-year-old dropout.
After an unsuccessful stint at a timber factory in working-class Glebe, my mother spotted an ad in the Daily Mirror for a copy boy. I applied and got it. They put me in the sub-editors’ room, where I used to shoot the copy into the composing room. After a year or so I worked in the police rounds rooms, ringing around the police, ambulance and fire stations finding out what was happening. I got accepted for a cadetship for my 17th birthday.
I worked for several years in the New Territories Administration under David Akers-Jones. It was an exciting time in Hong Kong’s development
I only did 18 months of a four-year cadetship. It was an era when journalism was expanding and there were opportunities. In 1963, myself and a journalist mate and photographer went to England. I worked in the Murdoch bureau, just off Fleet Street, and then for the Australian Consolidated Press.
I met my beautiful wife, Jenny, on a trip down to Bournemouth. We were married in Hampshire in 1965 and went back to Sydney in 1968. Because I’d been working in the Packer bureau in London, I resumed my career on the Sydney Daily Herald and Sunday Telegraph, mainly as a feature writer.
In 1974, I saw an advertisement for senior information officer with the administration in Hong Kong, applied and landed the job. My first job was in the Labour Department. After all those years in journalism, I found it difficult moving over to the “dark side”; it took a few years to get comfortable with it. I am settled on a philosophy that journalism and PR are two sides of the same coin.