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Policing Hong Kong An Irish History

Irishmen in the Hong Kong Police Force, 1864-1950
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Hong Kong, 1918. A tranquil place compared to war-torn Europe. But on the morning of the 22 January, a running battle through the streets of Wanchai ended in The Siege of Gresson Street. Five policemen lay dead, so shocking Hong Kong that over half the population turned out to watch their funeral procession. One of the dead, Inspector Mortimor OSullivan, came from Newmarket: a small town nestled deep in rural Ireland. He, along with a dozen and more relatives, had sailed out to Hong Kong to join the Police Force. Using family records and memories alongside extensive research in Hong Kong, Ireland and London, Patricia OSullivan tells the story of these policemen and the criminals they dealt with. The book also gives a rare glimpse into the day-to-day life of working-class Europeans at the time, as it follows the Newmarket men, their wives and families, from their first arrival in 1864 through to 1941 and beyond.
Patricia O'Sullivan is a writer and researcher on the lesser-known aspects of Hong Kong's history prior to 1941. Stumbling upon an article concerning the death of her great-uncle in 1918 when an inspector in the Hong Kong Police, she quickly became immersed in the social history of colonial Hong Kong.
Beginning with the ill-starred arrival in 1873 of a lone Irishman from Newmarket, County Cork, to be a policeman, followed by twenty more from the same town, and ending with the death of the last man in 1950, this groundbreaking book is a story of life, death, and crime in colonial Hong Kong. It is also an account of an important part of Hong Kongs population that has eluded most historians: the European working class. With an arsenal of previously untapped materials in Ireland, Britain and Hong Kong, Patricia OSullivan, granddaughter and great-niece of two of these policemen, tells the remarkable tales of the families who over eighty-five years built their own little Ireland in Hong Kong. John M Carroll, Department of History, University of Hong Kong, author of "A Concise History of Hong Kong" & "Edge of Empire: Chinese Elites & British Colonials in Hong Kong"
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