Royal - HKU Libraries - The University of Hong Kong

Macau Victory celebrations were joyfully displayed for threedays. We presume that there will he a warm celebration for thesame in Hong Kong later.We think at the very near future all devils will steadily bedriven out from Hong Kong and are quite sure that the colonywill soon be orderly reestablished, particularly our ObservatoryDepartment. Since we arrived here we are under the support ofBritish Government through the kindness of H.M. Consul inMacau. Now we are waiting your order to return.With best regards and awaiting the favour of your earlyinstruction, we beg to remain, Sir, your obedient servants,Lau Pak Wa } Chi Wen Kai,Pow Ka Ming, Pow Chi MingEvans did not return to Hong Kong after recuperationleave and Mr. G. S. P. Heywood was appointed Director ofthe Observatory from the resumption of civilian government.The loss of Observatory equipment was a setback butit could be replaced. Observatory officers worried moreabout the irreplaceable records.The reality was much better than they had feared. In his reportfor 1946-47, Heywood was obviously pleased to note that:Almost the entire library of some 3 500 bound volumes was leftintact, though some unbound papers were lost. Stocks of all theprinted records and other publications survived.There was, however, one tragic loss, an item of greathistorical value:The treasured manuscript record book, in which the meteorologicalresults had been entered month by month since thefoundation of the Observatory in 1884, has gone.Following the Japanese surrender, Hong Kong had a militaryadministration, during which the Observatory was operated bya joint Royal Navy and Royal Air Force staff. When the civiladministration took over on 1 May 1946, two European officerswere available, along with 10 former Chinese staff.The hand-over of duties from services personnel tocivilian staff was completed by mid-July 1946 - just intime, as Heywood noted:71