The eccentric, Chinese-reading Hong Kong University English teacher who became ‘everyone’s idol’ in the 1930s, before his untimely death
- Hong Kong University was known for its conventional types in the interwar years but Adrian Paterson, a Briton who commonly wore a Chinese robe, bucked the trend
- The Oxford graduate and fan of Chinese literature was admired for his energy, and he inspired those he taught long after a freak accident in Egypt took his life
Despite its reputation in the interwar years as an institution best fitted for sporting figures and “conventional” types, Hong Kong University nevertheless accommodated a wide variety of academic eccentrics.
Some of these individuals were fondly remembered by their students for the remainder of their lives; one notable figure was Adrian Paterson, who taught in the English department from 1935 to 1938.
In a later memoir, Joyce Symons, afterwards headmistress of Kowloon’s elite Diocesan Girls’ School, recalled that “Adrian Paterson was everyone’s idol.”
With an unintendedly ironic choice of phrase, she continued that “in the closeted world of the thirties, the few women undergraduates found it exciting to be taught by youngish men, instead of the more elderly women we had encountered hitherto.”
