History of the Ladies Recreation Club - Hong Kong

"From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches"
Rudyard Kipling, 1887-9

"Once, before I got away, I climbed to the civil station of Hongkong which overlooks the town. There in sumptuous stone villas built on the edge of the cliff and facing shaded roads, in a wilderness of beautiful flowers and a hushed calm unvexed even by the roar of the traffic below, the residents do their best to imitate the life of an Indian up-country station. They are better off than we are. At the bandstand the ladies dress all in one piece - shoes, gloves and umbrellas come out from England with the dress, and every memsahib knows what that means - but the mechanism of their lives is much the same. In one point they are superior. The ladies have a club of their very own to which, I believe, men are only allowed to come on sufferance. At a dance there are about 20 men to one lady, and there are practically no spinsters in the island. The inhabitants complain of being cooped in and shut up. They look at the sea below them and long to get away."

The L.R.C. - that is the Ladies' Recreation club, or, as some read it, Ladies' Recrimination Club, is managed with great care by ladies. Gentlemen are eligible as subscribers.

"John Chinaman at Home: Sketches of Men, Manners and Things in China", Rev. E.J. Hardy, 1905

The cable tramway is a comparatively recent institution; so that when the houses on the summit were being built all the materials had to be carried by coolies up a steep, zigzagging road from below. Even now most of the supplies for the dwellers on the heights are brought up in the same primitaive and labourious fashion. In the morning the trams are crowded with European merchants, bankers, solicitors and their clerks, descending to their offices in the city. In teh afternoon they are filled with the gay butterflies of society going up or down to pay calls, shop, or play tennis and croquet at the Ladies' Recreation Ground, half-way between the Peak and Victoria. The red coats of British soldiers are seen in the cars after parade hours or at night, when they are hurrying back to barracks before tattoo.

"The Land of the Boxers" by Gordon Casserly - 1910

"Am I the only one who remembers Mr Tingle? Am I the sole surviving Tingle boy in what used to be called the Crown Colony? Billy Tingle was as much a part of Brit family's life here 35 years ago as taking the kids to the PG Farm and throwing streamers down from the decks of a P & O liner at the beginning of a leave...

"Over to the longjump pit, a dog-defiled minefield of broken sand clods opposite what is now the front door of the Furama-kempinski,. Break, eagerly looked forward to, probably by Mr. Cartidge as well, was in the [Cricket Club] pavilion and consisted of Kit Kats, for which we had brought our 20 cents. No dried beef, no cahn pei mui (preserved plum with orange and licorice essence). And , of course, there wasn't a Chinese boy in sight, not even a rich one, like Donald Hardoon or Raymond Woo, the only Chinese boys in class 5. Or a girl for that matter (those creatures seen outside school hours at the Ladies Recreation Club - another bastion of half-witted Anglo would be exclusiveness - where a mob of boys and girls by lofty, high-minded, but deeply miscounceived adult decree had to change for the swimming-pool in the same tiny shack. Denunciation to turn the blood cold before one's guardians. "We saw Timmy looking at Kerrie's wee-wee.")

"Concert of Voices: An Anthology of World Writing in English" - Page 269
by Victor J. Ramraj - Literary Collections - 1994 - 489 pages

1962

"The week after I first arrived in Hong Kong, Maurice Heenan asked me if I had yet joined a club.
"Not yet," I agreed. "I expect they all have a long waiting list."
"There is for the Hong Kong Club and the Ladies Recreation Club. I would not advise the LRC, as you have to present yourself to a committee of women who run it. They tore me to pieces before they let me in. But there is no waiting list for the Cricket Club. It'll take anyone. It needs members badly, so you ought to get in."

"Another Disaster: Hong Kong Sketches" - Page 75
by Denys Roberts - History - 2006 - 272 pages

"Until recently, clubs like the KBGC were the beckoning centers of daily colonial life. Karen Penlington, raised in Hong Kong and the daughter of a judge, remembers them well. "Darling! Do I have memories! I practically grew up in the Ladies' Recreation Club [LRC]. We joined in 1969, and I would go to lie in the sun and get a tan with chums. We used to have great tennis parties and get tiddly on martinis. And I had my first crush on a fella there, an Argentine, God!"

1963

I, in the name of my wife Beverley, had applied for membership of the Ladies Recreation Club in 1963. But despite being Mrs. Beverley Taylor, Beverley was still of the Chinese Rrace - and an extremely frosty letter had arrived from the Club, scolding us that Chinese were NOT permitted to become members.

Zarzuela, A Taste of Life, By Geoff Taylor · 2015