8/5/2023 0 Comments Never have i ever bingo card![]() ![]() “She said she’d do all her chores with the promise that when she finished, she could sit down, have a cup of tea and a biscuit, turn on the computer and see what new messages had come today.”Īnslow, far left, enjoys milkshakes with friends at Hong Kong's Repulse Bay. “I was a bit cautious about reaching out to Barbara because – why would I be bothering an elderly lady? Then she posted this lovely message one day about how valuable the group was,” Bellis recalls. He decided he would ask if he could use her entries in a daily newsletter for Gwulo’s readers, with each diary entry corresponding to the day’s date. ![]() One of them was Barbara Anslow,” he says.īellis had an idea. “I’d been following a Yahoo group forum for people who had been to the Stanley camp. Bellis also sells prints and has written six books about the old Hong Kong photos and tales he gathered over the years. “I thought it’d make me rich but that didn’t happen either,” Bellis laughs.ĭonations have kept the site alive but it’s mainly fueled by his passion for the city. There are more than 50,000 pages of content and around 30,000 of photos – one of the biggest crowd-sourced digital photo archives of old Hong Kong. Today, the website has a huge cult following made up of Hong Kong travelers and history buffs who share fun facts, stories and photos of the city. Eventually, he decided to shift gears and, in 2009, founded Gwulo, which means “old” in Cantonese. When he wrote about the fascinating historic sites he saw, readers would respond by sending him their own old photos to share on the blog. “But it turned out that Hong Kong’s history was a lot more interesting than my experiences,” says Bellis. In 2002, he decided to start a blog with his friend Ross to document their lives in Hong Kong. Her mum had been a vegetable hawker for many years and approved that I knew how to pick a good loh baak, not knowing it was the last one for sale on the market stall.”īellis says he’s always loved wandering off the traditional tourist trail, giving him greater opportunities to meet locals and learn about the city’s history.ĭavid Bellis moved to Hong Kong in 1992 and has called the city 'home' ever since. I bought her a turnip (loh baak) that she took home. “When we started dating, I asked her which flowers she likes and she told me ‘turnip’ (she meant ‘tulip’). “She was a client before she became my co-worker,” says Bellis. But it was at that job that he met his wife, Grace, a local Hong Konger. When Bellis made a permanent move to Hong Kong in 1992, he was thrust into a sales job instead of working in programming – his true passion. But little did she know, her wartime diary would lead to an unlikely friendship with another Hong Kong resident – Bellis. The family eventually moved back to the United Kingdom in 1959 – for good this time.Īnslow’s former home became a distant memory for her. ![]() The couple had five children – all born in Hong Kong. She moved back to the city to start a job as a stenographer and, in 1948, married a fellow Stanley internee. “Mum would tell us how (life at the camp) was ‘a bit boring really’ and how she put on plays for the young children and wrote her stories on any paper she could get her hands on to pass the time,” shares Maureen Rossi, Anslow’s other daughter.Īfter the war, Anslow vowed to never return to Hong Kong again. The dedicated diarist documented her daily life in the camp. She spent more than three years in an internment camp in Stanley, now a tourist-friendly seaside area of Hong Kong. She witnessed the Japanese invasion and the Battle and Fall of Hong Kong in 1941. Travel experiences you can only enjoy while you’re youngĪnslow’s 20s would prove to be a tumultuous time. “As a teenager, she enjoyed going to weekly whist drives (a social gathering centered around cards) with her older sister and mother, as well as bingo, tennis and launch picnics run by the Naval Dockyard,” Anslow’s daughter, Kerry Maddison, tells CNN Travel. Her family left Hong Kong in 1929 but returned in 1938 when Anslow was 19 years old. ![]() Thankfully, Anslow eventually came around. “If I stay much longer I shall be in tears.” Judging by this excerpt, it wasn’t love at first sight. In honor of the occasion, she wrote a poem in her diary. Her father, an electrical engineer for the Naval Dockyard, had been relocated to the city, which was under British rule at the time. Her reaction was very different from that of Bellis.Īt nine years old, in the summer of 1927, Anslow boarded a steamer to make the long journey from England to Hong Kong with her family. More than 60 years earlier, Barbara Anslow was experiencing her own introduction to Hong Kong. In the 1930s, at the age of 19, Barbara Anslow relocated to Hong Kong with her family for the second time in her life. ![]()
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