Charity for cancer patients in Hong Kong faces hard times, founder Sally Lo says, as protests and coronavirus threaten its sustainability
- Self-described as one of the ‘last of the sloane rangers’, Lo founded the Hong Kong Cancer Fund after losing a friend to cancer in 1987
- Funding comes not from companies but from individual donors, and has been badly affected by protests and the pandemic
Surprise surprise: I was born in 1945, at the end of the war, in London. My mother was surprised to be told that she was having twins. My twin sister, Jillie, and I are inseparable, even if it’s just on the telephone – I’m headquarters Hong Kong and she is headquarters London. Our brother is three years younger. My father was a writer, he died when we were very young. My mother had a house in Knightsbridge, and we were brought up in the Food Hall at Harrods, that was where you shopped.
My mother was “twin set and pearls”, a believer that “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say it at all”. It was important to her that we were brought up as young ladies. We had nannies until we were 15 and a convent upbringing. By the time we were 16, we were very sophisticated. We left school and went to Amanda Hartley’s Finishing School.
Bond Street girls: When we turned 17, Jillie and I moved into the mews house behind my mother’s house and gave a lot of dinner parties. By 19, we were going to (London nightclub) Annabel’s. The men in our lives were all in the City. We had a trust fund. Jillie and I were Bond Street girls, the last of the sloane rangers. You had your Gucci or Hermès scarf, which you wore on your chin or tied to your handbag.
When I was 18, a friend said I had to meet his chum, Robert, who was a foodie, sophisticated, knowledgeable about wine. So Jillie and I went for tea at his South Kensington town house. The door was opened by a Chinese amah with a long plait down her back. Robert and I became immediate friends, we talked about art, the theatre and food.
Our brother was at Millfield School, the same school as Robert’s brother, so he would give me a lift in his sports car to visit. My brother fell into the flower power group. He bought a house in Fulham and filled it up with rogues. Jilly Cooper lived next door and in her column wrote about her “neighbours from hell”.