Hong Kong Golf in the 1960s - Part Two

These are little things, and Shek O is made up that way, with strong emphasis on homely privacy. There is a strong family side, and the swimming pool, with the professional ‘save-lifer’ (as the Chinese call him), serves the dual purpose of keeping the kiddies happy and away from the golf course.
Three times a week, Billy Tingle comes over from his Hong Kong duties to give swimming and athletic instruction. Billy is five feet one inch of bounding Yorkshire energy. How he ever persuaded the Hong Kong Cricket Club to lend him their sacred sward, bang in the centre of the city with a land value of £5,000,000, no-one will ever know. But the Hong Kong kiddies benefit there, because Billy puts them through his course of games and athletics. He has become a bi-weekly institution.
Every Boxing Day, and this has been going on at Shek O for years, golfers set off in sixes, each member of the ‘team’ carries one club, all different. On these occasions the tiny children of the village turn out to caddie. There have been as many as two hundred and eighty! Each gets a present, and it has been known for members to finish up by carrying their kiddie caddies!
Village life and the golf club are tightly interwoven. The Secretary told me he once had to visit the local school to report that some of the children had been playing on the course. He had serious talk with the school ma’am and with great dignity and good humour a settlement was made whereby there would be no further trespassing—in exchange for the present of a football!
There is no post office in the village; letters, which are rare, go for collection to the communal assembly room, where Mr Lau, the golf club Steward, is master. In the garden of the police station there is an emblem in enamelled clay of John Bull shaking hands with John Chinaman.