Glory days of the Hong Kong FCC

It’s nice to keep the glory days of the HKFCC alive. I was a member even prior to the Club's move to Sutherland House from its wonderful top-storey possie in the Hilton Hotel with excellent cuisine overlooking the cricket ground - a bad move, I thought at the time. 

I had invested in a life membership of the Club, but the rights attached to life membership were later unceremoniously scrapped. It seems the Club is no longer primarily for foreign correspondents but for PR people and commercial executives. Such is life and the decline in the status of foreign correspondents.

It would have appalled people like Richard Hughes, a stalwart of the FCC bar (known as His Grace) who would hold forth about the Chinese "running dogs" in those Vietnam War days, when China was pretty much out of bounds to the western media and was monitored from HK. One or two of us managed to get across the border, but not many. 

In those days the Reuters office (pre-dating the establishment of a much larger Asian bureau in HK) comprised journos such as Ian McCrone (in charge), Derek Round and CP Ho, whose memories I salute. ■