60 years with youth

Dr Antony Chow, Chairman of The Hong Kong Jockey Club, recollects his boyhood when HKFYG was in its first decade, Moments of delight shared with boys and girls from very different backgrounds have become fond memories of well-remembered times.

“Where are you going?”

“Mansan Gai, 民新街 !”

“That’s what we all called it,” says Dr Anthony Chow, Chairman of The Hong Kong Jockey Club, recalling 1960s Hong Kong when he was a member of the Federation’s youth centre at Mansan Gai, Mansion Street in North Point.

“A schoolmate told me I could learn badminton there and I thought my mother would approve of that. My friend also told me I could have guitar lessons there, something I dearly wanted, but that was not considered suitable by my parents. They thought it meant rock ‘n’ roll. But they agreed to the badminton,” he says, with a twinkle in his eye.

Guitar lessons followed for Dr Chow, as did a lifelong love of music, but also came the chance to be outdoors and to taste freedom. For many of boys from hard-working North Point families it was a rare chance indeed that the Federation provided sixty years ago. Like the young Dr Chow, they barely knew remote parts of Hong Kong’s countryside. Picnics on Lantau and Lamma were grand adventures. Then, thanks to the Federation’s founder, Mr George Stokes, they had the chance to venture further, to Tai Mong Tsai and the new HKFYG seaside camp near Sai Kung.

“Not only was there overnight camping, there were days of shared fun, canoeing and sailing,” days that etched memories still clear to Dr Chow today. “There was also a pressing need to plant trees on the bare post-war slopes around the camp’s bungalows. As I planted them, I told myself that one day I would come back, one day when the tree would be tall.”

“It was a time to learn about friendship and those friendships have lasted so long. What I enjoyed most was the company, the unity, everything we shared back then. Even though our family backgrounds were so different, gradually, I was accepted by them, allowed into their rather different world.”

That world of HKFYG’s first decade was quite a contrast to the world Dr Chow knew at school, not only in Robinson Road, Mid-Levels but also at an English public school from which he progressed to London to qualify as a solicitor in the 1970s. But he never forgot the Federation.

On return to his hometown, he discovered a chance to follow his passion: horses and horse racing, a passion that ran in his family. “I also discovered that my love of horses could be a stepping-stone to charity.” That step

Photographs courtesy of Mr Patrick Tam

connected up with Dr Chow’s other love, of music. He heard of a new a cappella choir at the Federation and with his Hong Kong Jockey Club connection this led to the important sponsorship HKFYG enjoyed for its annual a cappella programme, bringing singers from around the world together to inspire one another as equals in the world of creative music.

Dr Chow’s concluding message is also about treating each other as equals, as he remembers his fellow HKFYG members doing with him back in the 1960s. “People demand human rights and freedoms all over the world, not only in Hong Kong. When young people here declare that they will fight for freedom, I tell them there are a limits to every freedom. I say if you give people dignity they won’t need to fight, but that to gain respect, dignity and equality, first you have to earn it. At the end of the day, this is something we all need to understand.”