Early China Coast Meteorology: The Role of Hong Kong

6 Typhoon Studies

6 Typhoon Studies Typhoons of such violence as really to present uncomfortable features to people on shore are almost unknown in China. Doberck, Law of Storms, 2nd edition A Rejuvenated Institution In this chapter we will take a look at the situation at the Observatory and its achievements over the first fifteen years or so of its existence, in particular its role in the study of typhoons, with a diversion for some more scandal en route. Figg, during his leave found a wife, one Frances Maria Cole, whom he married at Newton Abbot, in Devon, in the late summer of 1891, and in late October, accompanied by his new wife, returned per SS Glenshiel from London, after almost two years’ sick leave. So, by the spring of 1892 the augmented staff who would conduct the affairs of the Observatory for the next twenty years or so were in position. The community could have anticipated a less fractious institution and improved storm warning services. Satisfaction on either account, however, was not to be so readily found. For one thing, relations within the Observatory itself were strained. Plummer, who, as we noted, was already forty-six, and eight years older than Doberck, took up his position on 1 May 1891, but, to quote a later Colonial Office minute, ‘it was evident that Dr Doberck did not hit it off with Mr Plummer’.1 Within six months of Plummer’s arrival, in October 1891 we have the colonial secretary writing to Doberck: I am to inform you that His Excellency trusts that you, as Head of the Department in which you are both working, will find the means of placing your relations with Mr Plummer on a more satisfactory footing.2 MacKeown_06_ch06.indd 133 25/11/2010 9:30 AM 134 Early China Coast Meteorology No doubt this was not unrelated to a letter Plummer had sent to the director at the beginning of the month, which included: in connection with cleaning the time ball apparatus … is a disgustingly dirty job even for a Chinese Coolie and in consequence I must decline to undertake the cleaning myself. Indeed I am surprised that you should have asked me to do such work … you ask me to undertake the testing of currents which is work I am unfamiliar with, as you are perfectly aware.3 Doberck made his unhappiness with his new assistant even more clear in a letter to Christie, the astronomer royal, in November 1891, where he wrote: Mr Plummer has turned out to be a most incompetent man, no friend of science in general and a particular enemy of this observatory. He has been very troublesome and his conduct has been ungentlemanly. Were it not that he was selected by yourself and so warmly received by me, the consequences might have been deplorable.4 The logic of the final sentence is none too clear, but some rapprochement between the director and Plummer did occur. Doberck later took advantage of Plummer’s ability as an astronomer, and commended his work. Some further drama befell Plummer before he had been in position for a year, when he was required to appear in the Magistrate’s Court on 29 December 1891, where his cook and houseboy were accused of attempting to poison two of his children, by feeding them soup laced with some unknown substance for dinner, while the rest of the family were out. Samples of the soup, along with some ‘powder found in an unused fireplace in the house’, were produced and the two men were remanded for a week.5 Nothing more is heard of the case. The columnist ‘Brownie’ in the China Mail in June 1892, reviewing the director’s report for the previous year noted that the work of Mr. Plummer, his chief assistant, is not mentioned from one end of the report to the other.6 Plummer, who, as we have noted, was a respectably published astronomer before he arrived in Hong Kong (see Appendix C), was given no opportunity to continue with such activity while at the Observatory, and his only publication there, a year before his retirement, was a twenty-seven-page pamphlet on the origin of typhoons.7 In forwarding Doberck’s annual report for 1890 to London the officer administering the government remarked that ‘Dr Doberck is in error in stating generally that the suggestions of the Commission had not been carried out, all with one exception (that of the Peak Observatory) having been adopted...