Remember A Day | Nixon’s Hong Kong ‘lover’, Charlie Chaplin’s grave and a strike over toilet breaks: headlines from four decades ago
A journey back through time to look at significant news and events reported by the South China Morning Post from this week in history
Unbelievable as it might sound, women factory workers in Hong Kong had to fight for toilet breaks and the government had to overhaul moneylending laws to curb a rising trend of public servants borrowing money from finance companies, both of which made an interesting read four decades ago this week.
April 16, 1978
• A 49-year-old man asked the California Supreme Court to hear his argument that his domestic life had been ruined by an article in a weekly newspaper that linked his wife romantically with former US president Richard Nixon. The article alleged that Nixon had helped Marianna Liu emigrate to the United States from Hong Kong, where she had previously worked as a hotel hostess. The FBI later revealed she was being investigated as a communist spy.
April 17, 1978
• Wealthy owners of Britain’s big deer parks hit upon a profitable sideline business – exporting the animals’ genitals to Hong Kong for use as aphrodisiacs. The genitals of young deer, which had to be culled, were sold by the centimetre for use in a variety of medicinal compounds.
An airport taxi racket, a missing nuclear device and a sex-crazed frog: headlines from four decades ago
• Finance companies were preying on civil servants so voraciously that the government was forced to conduct a major review of the Money Lenders Ordinance and consider imposing an upper limit on the interest charged on loans as well as a ban on compound interest. The total sum owed by civil servants was estimated at between HK$30 million and HK$50 million.