Then & Now | How Hong Kong’s unattached British servicemen found love between the wars: bar girls, brothels and ‘down ’omers’
- Unable to interest the British girls in colonial Hong Kong, lovesick soldiers struck up relationships with the city’s other outcasts: bar girls and prostitutes
- Many of these ‘girlfriends’ were set up in subdivided flats, and some of the relationships grew into happy marriages
From its urban beginnings in 1841 up to the 1997 handover, Hong Kong had a permanent British garrison. Until the last “accompanied” postings ended in late 1994, when most residential quarters were mothballed, married servicemen were generally posted here with their dependents.
From Shek Kong to Stanley, a complex supporting infrastructure of flats and bungalows – size and location varied, according to service rank – schools, clinics, sporting and other recreational facilities, along with NAAFI (Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes) supermarkets and canteens, existed to support these families.
Family-focused welfare provisions for armed forces personnel were largely a post-World War II phenomenon; for much of the Hong Kong garrison’s first century, most men who served in the colony were single.
Marriage itself was complicated; formal permission had to be obtained, and suitable accommodation allocated, before tying the knot was even possible. Until certain ranks had been reached, usually only attainable after about 15 years of peacetime service conditions, someone who had joined up as a teenager had been single – often not by choice – all their adult life.
Long periods spent away from Britain were a further complication; sequential postings in several overseas garrisons from Gibraltar, Egypt and India to Singapore and Hong Kong meant that men could be stationed abroad for more than a decade. Time and distance effectively eliminated pre-existing home-side relationships; mail took several weeks each way, and few “long-distance” romances survived several years of separation.
Establishing a lasting connection with someone of their own socio-economic background in an overseas garrison was almost unattainable. In At the Peak: Hong Kong Between the Wars (1983), a soldier who had served in Hong Kong in the late 1930s frankly summed up the local dating situation: “There was no point in trying to ask out English girls as they wouldn’t even look at you!”