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In India, in China, and Twice in Hong Kong Bernard Mellor We were saddened to hear that Bunny Mellor died in O~ford on 28 January 1998 at the age of 80, and we extend our deep sympathy to his w[fe, Mauricettc, and their five so115. Following wartime experiences in India, China and Hone!!. Kong, Bernard Mellor, MA (Oxon) became Registrar of the University (~f HonL (!, Kong from January 1948 until December 1974, a period which included a twoyear secondment as higher education attache both to the British Embassy in Washington, DC, USA, atld to the British High Commission in Canada in Ottawa. He served ten years as aJP, was an Officer of the British Empire, and was awarded an honorary DUtt degree by the university. He is the author or co-author of nine books on a variety of subjects from cookery through poetry to diplomatic and institutional histories, including an indispensable if!formal history ifthe university. Following his retirement, Bunny Mellor worked as administrative adviser and actil1g General Manager in Hong Kong with the Philharmonic Society and Orchestra, and in Europe with the Urban Council as cultural adviser. He was retained as a planning consultant by the Asia Pacffic Institutes in Hong Kong, Auckland, and Vancouver and in Oxford by Blackwell Publishers as an 'outhouse expert', advising on impenetrable, commissioned, academic manuscripts. And he was a highly valued consultant and contributor to ollr volume of wartime reminiscences. Introduction The editors of this compendium have stretched their guidelines a bit in order to let me write a piece for them about my wartime life and meetings with students and graduates of the University of Hong Kong, and its teachers and prospective teachers, during the war in China. I had no 345 346 Bernard Mellor qualifying connection at the time - not long out of Oxford, a raw young man faced with a global war - but was fortunate enough to join its staff in 1946 and its prestigious list of honorary graduates in 1974. So I seem more or less qualified, though in reverse order as it were, to meet the basic editorial gUidelines. China was long a personal objective, taking origin in a close friendship at Merton College with Yang Xian I, and in a collaboration aimed at translating into English verse the complete poems of Li Ho - a task we never finished - which he nonetheless sets as the beginning of his own long career as a translator, in which he has since become famous. In common with young men of eighteen and nineteen in 1937, I was an idealist with somewhat unformed ideals. The times were in need of idealism, and offered some focus for it. The civil war in Spain had become, on both sides of the conflict, a magnet for young recruits from England. War with Germany was on the horizon. And China was in the grip of an undeclared war with Japan. Yang was afire with patriotic ideals and, between our translating sessions, would draw colourful maps of China as it was in his imagination, its boundaries extending into countries now quite separate but where he averred they once had been. He succeeded as president of the Oxford University China Society, had me elected vice-president, and became editor of the China Echo, a London periodical in which news of the war in China and some of our translations were published. Together, we mounted in Oxford an exhibition of the Chinese contemporary woodcuts that had been collected by Ivan Chen I Fan (son of Eugene Chen, China's one-time foreign minister), depicting the horrors of war and Japanese aggression. And we embarked on a campaign for the boycotting of Japanese goods in Oxford (with no great success). China was thus becoming an objective for me too, but still in cloudy and unformed focus. Yang Xian I himself has quite recently become a graduate of the University of Hong Kong, with the conferment in 1993 of an honorary doctorate of letters on him. With this as legitimacy, I have asked the editors to include the following stirring verses in which he urged on his countrymen to far greater effort to repel the Japanese, which he offered in the China Echo, written at Oxford in July 1937, at the age of twenty-two, in a foreign language and a foreign country, and within days of hearing the news of the Japanese advance on Peking: [18.216.233.58] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 23:54 GMT...

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