Cover Story
Looking back
WITH PRIDE
Former Far Eastern Economic Review editor Philip Bowring pays tribute to the men and women behind the success of the magazine
N
ow one can only look back. But nostalgia is no vice, at least under the circumstances of the FEER’s demise. For me, the story started nearly 33 years ago. I was working in Sydney for Finance Week, a joint venture start-up owned by the unlikely combination of Rupert Murdoch and the Financial Times. The latter owned a stake in the Review. In Hong Kong, FEER business editor Stewart Dalby was conjuring up what was to prove a prophetic cover story headlined: Jim Slater: Asia’s Worried Welcome, about the arrival of then famous British financier and asset-stripper Jim Slater. Through the FT connection and because I had written about Slater in London I was asked to contribute a short piece on his Australian operations. This was fortuitous. Not long afterwards Finance Week folded and as an enforced freelancer I started writing regularly for FEER, taking over from Bob Hawkins who had been on the desk in Hong Kong in the late sixties. Again fortuitously, early in 1973 the FT sold its stake in FEER, and with Stewart Dalby itching to go to Vietnam I was offered his job as business editor
and FT stringer. (After years covering small wars for the FT Stewart now runs the website www.oilbarrel.com). When I got to Hong Kong in April, the Hang Seng index was in the early part of a collapse which would take it from a bubble peak of 1,770 to 150 at the end of 1974. The FEER was thriving in a modest way with a circulation of around 17,000. There were
THE CORRESPONDENT JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2005
no overseas staff correspondents, only a small editing, writing and support staff consisting of Editor Derek Davies, Leo Goodstadt (to become head of the Central Policy Unit), TJS George (founding editor of Asiaweek and now in Bangalore), the late Denzil Peiris (first editor of South), the late Mike O’Neill (Asiaweek founder), Barry Wain (now based in Singapore and author last year of FEER’s last memorable story on Stanley Ho), Rodney Shaw, Bill Kraitzer and Minette Marrin, now a writer in London. Then there was the inimitable cartoonist Morgan Chua, a refugee from Singapore who was to be with FEER for 20 years and now lives in Batam. Also present in 1973 was a young typist by the name of Lily Kan who was to become the magazine’s longest serving, most loyal and devoted employee. The business side was headed by the very large, very persuasive and very English Freddie Wadsworth who did rather more for FEER than most of his successors with the possible
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