One of the pleasures when going to Hong Kong is to dine at the Cub. It preserves an old fashioned, oak-panelled Pall Mall style with a discreet Asian gloss and maintains the best menu and winelist in the Territory. Last week I was lucky enough to be invited for lunch and breakfast, and also to speak at a British Chamber of Commerce function there.
It’s plush and pleasant inside, but the tall skyscraper building where it is located is unremarkable. It was put up during the big building boom of the Eighties when the old Club building was demolished. You have to look at an oil painting behind the porter’s desk to see what the original looked like. My brother was the artist. It was one of Piers’s first professional commissions as a painter, and he chose to portray the Club as it was in about 1900. Every time I pass the painting it gives me pleasure, because that white and blue shaded colonial building with its pillars, shutters and verandahs was an institution during my boyhood.
It was always a treat to be taken there for Sunday tiffin. We children, like the women, were only allowed in one airy dining room. The intimidating-looking members disappeared upstairs to the library (probably for a nap or a cigar). Do I really remember them wearing white linen suits or is that a trick of the memory? It was certainly grey business suits by the end of the sixties when my father took me there to dine among the imposing administrators and taipans. And of course we wore dinner jackets for the St George’s Ball. It was in one of those airy halls, sunlight slanting through the shutters, that I had my wedding reception in the late seventies, after a service in St John’s Cathedral…. Church and club: each in their way anchored the memories of a colonial past, while the glass and concrete of real life Hong Kong grew skyward around them.
Now only St John’s survives. It would be crocodile tears to mourn the old Colonial buildings of Central – the Gloucester arcades, the Post Office, the Club. Hong Kong’s ethos has always been to knock down, rebuild and move on. That’s the vibrant if rather ruthless place it is – but I am proud when I pass my brother’s painting, and I am grateful that the Club still sees fit to hang it there, because beauty in Hong Kong, while always being a one night stand rather than a long affair, does deserve a memento.
The Hong Kong Club, circa 1900, by Piers Williams.
Check out his website www.piersart.com to see paintings from his latest exhibition The Attraction of Flowers.
Hello. Just looking for some information and if you could help me out I would so much appreciate it. I have 2 original prints of old Hong Kong by Piers Williams but can’t seem to find out anything about them. They are beautiful and signed by the artist in 86.
Looking forward to hearing from you.
Kind regards
Christine Clift.
I was in the US Navy in 1969 and my aircraft carrier stopped in Hong Kong during that cruise. I took a picture of the Old Hong Kong Club Building as it was then. After restoring all my 900 slides from my 4 years in the Navy, the restored picture of the building looks as good as it did the day I took it with my Nikon! At the time, I didn’t realize the significance of The Cenotaph Monument that is at the edge of my picture as it stood in front of the old club building. I’ve also got a shot of the rear of the old club building in another of my slides! When I took the pictures, I didn’t know that the Old Hong Kong Club Building would be torn down and replaced in the early 1980’s by the current building. I’m very glad I preserved a part of Hong Kong’s history!
It makes me sad too, seeing the government replace old buildings with the new. The Hong Kong I grew up in is nothing like it used to be — and that’s something I find so difficult to reconcile.
It makes me sick to think of what those of us who never saw these beuatiful buildings are missing. Why couldn’t they have preserved a bit of it?
Only last week I was watching with nostalgia a cine film that my son is editing which was taken of my wedding reception in “The Blue Room” in the late seventies. It’s where my parents and grandparents also celebrated their marriages and is a part of my family history. I’m glad the club is hanging Piers’s painting of the grand old neo-renaissance style building that used to dominate the skyline. What a shame it has been replaced by an ugly modern skyscraper! As you say, that’s the way things are done in Hong Kong. But I can’t help feeling sad about it.