Barbara Anslow remembers

Barbara Anslow worked at Central Police Station before the Second World War.

I was not a member of the HK Police, but a stenographer at the Colonial Secretariat who was sent to Central Police Station for a month in 1938 while the regular steno was ill or on leave.

I was 19 and had only then been in Hong Kong for a few months, and in awe of all authority. To get to CPS I took a bus from my home (my Dad had quarters next to the Naval Dockyard in Queen’s Road, then I had a steep walk up very smelly streets.

I worked for the CP, Thomas King, who was also Commanding Officer Fire Brigade and he had a tiny glassed-in office with some clerks. To my horror I had to work a tiny telephone exchange – a completely new experience.

When the CP was seen coming towards the building in the morning, some messenger or clerk would shout “CP Come!”

The person who impressed me most at CPS was the Chief Chinese Clerk. He had the most beautiful English accent. A verandah ran along the side of our office and the CP’s. If this clerk wanted to know if the CP was busy, he would flatten himself against the wall of the verandah and slide carefully along until he could just see the CP in his office, then sidle back – even thinking about that now I can’t help giggling!

After the war Barbara, nee Redwood, married Frank Anslow who was working as a clerk at Central Police Station when the Japanese attacked in 1941. He passed away in 2003. Barbara’s father was the Superintending Electrical Engineer in the Generating Station of the Naval Dockyard. They lived in a flat on the ground floor of block six, separated from the dockyard itself by a high brick wall. She thinks that the office verandah was one looking onto Hollywood Road, rather than the parade ground: “I think our view was onto the back streets etc., because the extreme heat and the smells remain my strongest memory!”

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