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In the first year of Stephen Sidebotham’s deanship, Frederick Truman, who had been a choirboy at the cathedral during the First World War, revisited Hong Kong. Apart from recalling that Dean Copley-Moyle had been nicknamed ‘Chocolate oil’ by the boys in some connection with his hair lotion, and saying that soldiers had been needed to guard St John’s one Sunday in a moment of more than usual anti-British sentiment, Mr. Truman remembered an incident involving Bishop Lander and a punkah wallah. According to Truman, the punkah nearest Bishop Lander as he was preaching slowed almost to a stop as the youth operating it dozed off. The perspiring bishop stepped down to prod him with a swagger stick of sorts. Somehow, this action miscarried. Lander lost his grip on his stick; and his sermon notes, which were also in his hands, shot out all over the floor. The choir burst into laughter but were later fined for doing so.1 The cathedral that Sidebotham took charge of was certainly a less discriminatory and less pompous one than that of sixty years before, yet it was, in a sense, more parochial and less involved with China and matters Chinese than it had ever been. A reminder of this was another visitor, Canon Christopher Hall, son of Bishop R. O. Hall, who came back to preach in his father’s pulpit in 1979. Christopher Hall was baptised in the baptistery of St John’s Cathedral on 2 January 1936, by the Right Reverend Mok Shau Tsang, the formidable Bishop of Canton. One of his godfathers, Cheung Wing Kue, gave him the name ‘Kei Do’, ‘Established in Christ’. Guests were a mixture of British and Chinese with a sprinkling of Norwegian Lutherans. That Anglo-Chinese sense of missionary purpose, the slow-burning fellowship of the long haul, had no resonance in late 1970s Hong Kong. Chapter 8 Towards an International Church, 1976­–1992 244 Imperial to International It was becoming a city of short contracts. Sidebotham chafed against it. ‘Short timers can be stimulating but also disruptive and disappointing to belongers,’ he wrote in St John’s Review after a ‘cathedral workshop evening’ held in his home in June 1977 to identify cathedral priorities. The later twentieth-century Hong Kong church could be as socially insular as it was in the earlier years. The reasons were no longer so much an assured cultural supremacy of the Victorian merchant class as an uneasy ignorance from British suburbia, but the phenomenon was still there to a degree. Chris Phillips, who was dean from 1987 to 2003, recalls that, when he arrived in Hong Kong in 1977, ‘the cathedral did serve as a parish church for English-speaking Anglicans. Its services were “C of E” and its worship very much in the style of a middle-of-the-road suburban parish church.’ There is a flicker of insight into how ‘C of E’ the cathedral might have been at this point. At a 1979 fundraiser, 34,000 can ring pulls were collected and sent to a hospital towards a kidney machine. The hospital was in England.2 ‘It would seem from the priorities that we are solely concerned with ourselves. I would deny that we are an introverted cliquish body,’ said the dean with resolute optimism. Nevertheless, he was concerned about the atmosphere at St John’s at this time. Sidebotham noticed how people could be so easily and visibly left out, even inside the community and most particularly the Sunday morning parish breakfast . ‘There are the standers and the sitters,’3 he observed tellingly. Nearly ten years later, breakfast seating was still a problem, and it was rearranged in June 1987 to dispel the sense of an inner and outer circle. In the St John’s Review of June 1984, a member of the congregation , Mrs. June Powell, was allowed, on her farewell to Hong Kong, to give a frank account of her circumstances and her feelings about the cathedral. She spoke of her self-doubt and how she always compared herself poorly to others. Her husband had been interrogated by the ICAC (Independent Commission Against Corruption), which had made her very angry. Low self-esteem and anxiety over a husband’s position were not uncommon problems for expatriate women. In her worries, the clergy came out well. Rex Howe was ‘a very gentle person’. John Tyrell, she felt moved to say, had ‘good looks and a fine voice’. She straightforwardly dismisses...

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