In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

When Frederick Franch Johnson stepped into the post as senior chaplain in 1902, he was already in office in St John’s. He was the first man to have been appointed as an assistant chaplain. Up to this point, the colonial chaplains, followed by Cobbold, had ministered alone. They had been backed up intermittently by CMS missionaries, naval chaplains and ordained schoolmasters. Commitment to a fulltime assistant chaplaincy found great difficulty in gaining a foothold on the craggy finances of the cathedral. In 1896, Cobbold had wrung a commitment of $200 a month from the Church Body and went to find a chaplain while on leave in England. He cabled success to the Church Body and they cabled back that, on reflection, $200 was not enough. They got ‘cold feet’. We have seen how simple and unadorned the cathedral’s income was in those days. They had a genuine fear that they might ship a man all the way out and run out of the funds to keep him.1 Bishop Hoare, prior to his arrival in 1898, was very keen on having an assistant chaplain to handle the Peak Church, the Kowloon ministry and the Treaty Ports. The Church Body felt the pressure and found $250 a month to offer. Hoare picked Frederick Johnson, and he arrived in February 1899. His role in the Treaty Ports turned out to be imaginary, but he took services in Kowloon, where worship was held in the curiously transient setting of the navy’s torpedo depot, before St Andrew’s Church was built. When Cobbold’s initial three years as senior chaplain had been up in 1895, the Annual Church Meeting (ACM) renewed his appointment but only after the newly invigoured subscribers and seatholders had held a ballot. In 1901, when the Church Body offered Johnson the job, the ACM found a new if finicky reason to posture power. It claimed that Johnson was too young. It questioned the process of Chapter 4 The Search for Substance, 1902–1927 108 Imperial to International his appointment. It demanded that the Church Body minutes on the matter be read. This was objected to on the grounds of propriety, but they were nonetheless read as ‘a matter of courtesy not a matter of right’.2 The strutting did not stop. A resolution was passed condemning the Church Body for appointing Johnson without consulting the subscribers and seatholders. Fervour took them too far in that. The Church Body definitely did have the power to appoint under the ordinance , but the meeting had become very serious about its rights to oversee. Mr. Johnson’s age was not the true concern. The issue was the power of appointment, not the appointee. He could stay. Johnson’s promotion meant that a new assistant was needed. Imagining they had coped with an assistant chaplain only by the skin of their teeth, vacillation returned to the Church Body. When Bishop Hoare sent his single-word cable ‘trombone’ from London saying he had found a musically inclined replacement, the Church Body reneged, saying they needed the money for an organ overhaul. The foundation stone for a new church in Nathan Road, Kowloon, had been laid in December 1904. Funds for it were provided by Sir Paul Chater and land by the government. Eventually, the Church Body was persuaded that this new Kowloon vestry could share, with the cathedral, the costs of an assistant chaplain. His special preserve would be what was to become St Andrew’s, but he would still be a cathedral chaplain with duties there too. The Reverend A. J. Stevens was appointed. He was a Durham University graduate and well travelled after curacies in Birmingham and Gateshead and chaplaincies in Odessa and South Africa, where he had been acting chaplain to the forces. He was secretary to the British Syrian Mission. His wife was more cautious in her movements . She would not come with him to Hong Kong at first.3 Steven’s time was almost entirely taken up by Kowloon. St Andrew’s was dedicated on 5 October 1906, by Archdeacon Banister, accompanied by the Reverends Stevens, Longridge and France. In the Early Gothic design with a fifty-five foot long nave, it seated three hundred people. These people no longer had to consider themselves cathedral parishioners. Mr. Stevens was now in complete control, according to the Church Body.4 Even so, Stevens was not allowed to forget who employed him. In 1907, he took a short holiday without...

Share