Early China Coast Meteorology: The Role of Hong Kong

5 Universal Dissatisfaction

5 Universal Dissatisfaction … it is important that I should have somebody living with me who would be at my beck and call any hour of the day or night. Doberck to Colonial Secretary, 18861 Conflicting Perceptions With the role of astronomy in the Observatory ostensibly sidelined, more harmonious relations between Kowloon and Central might have been anticipated and meteorological results in keeping with the government’s expectations forthcoming. However, in October 1887 we find Stewart, always keen to avoid bald confrontation, again writing personally to Doberck. Marked ‘Private’ and ending with ‘yours very truly’, the note includes: ‘I think that you will agree with me that it is contrary to all the traditions of the Service that an officer should dictate to the Government, and say “I will do certain work for you, but you must give me the salary I chose to name”. … It is not time but approved service which counts for advancement’.2 ‘Traditions of the Service’ is a concept that would take the director a long time to assimilate. In November of that year we again have a minute from the governor to the effect that: I observe that Dr Doberck signs himself as Government Astronomer and I request that he will cease so to sign himself, so giving a wrong idea of his position. He is Director of the Observatory and was appointed as such for specific purposes, though, after these are provided for, there is, of course, no objection to his giving his spare time to the general interests of science.3 MacKeown_05_ch05.indd 107 25/11/2010 9:30 AM 108 Early China Coast Meteorology By now, this insistence on his title is seen to be not as petty as it appears on first encounter, and its motivation is further clarified by later minutes by the governor: ‘I cannot see sufficient justification for the publication, at Government expense, of the tables on Double Stars. The printing for the Observatory already costs very disproportionately to the advantage obtained by the Colony’,4 and ‘Dr Doberck in his paper on Double Stars shows that he has abundance of spare time for other objects than those specific ones which occasioned his appointment’.5 It was not delusions of grandeur — presumption to a local equivalent of the astronomer royal — that drove Dr. Doberck’s enthusiasm for his title but the expectation that ‘Government Astronomer’ would entitle him to material support for the pursuit of astronomy in the Observatory. Indeed he was bestowed the grander title by at least two writers; in 1889 O’Rorke wrote: ‘Dr. Doberck, the present distinguished AstronomerRoyal of Hong Kong, has rendered services to science which are spoken of with respect in all the observatories of the world’,6 while as late as 1902 a visitor described how: ‘I called on … the Astronomer Royal — it is a fact that little Hongkong has one’.7 Doberck saw himself, above all, as a professional astronomer, and with some justification. When he died in 1941 he merited an obituary notice in Nature, the leading science journal of the day, lauding his astronomical achievements. But he may not have been unhappy, after the many years of bureaucratic conflict, to leave Kowloon when he reached the earliest retirement age of fiftyfive in 1907, and finally to return to what he had always wanted to do: observe the stars — but that’s in the future. Neither did the publication setback on double stars abort his astronomical ambitions in Hong Kong. He just had to be more circumspect, and omit such topics from his annual report in future. In his published report for 1887 he has yielded on the title of government astronomer and begins to sign himself ‘Director’. But he was clearly enamoured of the former title, which was never legally his, because in the less official Meteorological Register, carried in the daily press, he is still signing himself government astronomer until as late as 16 October 1889. However, presumably stung by a letter in the China Mail on that day pointing out that he had no right to the title,8 from 17 October it is signed ‘Director of the Observatory’. In 1888 a paper was read at the Liverpool Astronomical Society on Comet-seeking by Dr. Doberck, ‘Her Majesty’s Astronomer at Hong Kong’.9 Even then, as late as February 1925, in a letter resigning from an International Astronomical Union committee on double stars, he signs himself as ‘late Government Astronomer, Hong Kong’.10 Despite the...