The Aberdeen Mafia in Hong Kong
May 2006
SECRET SOCIETY: The Twa Gees dinner in Hong Kong in 1962. Without realizing it, I become a member of Hong Kong’s most exclusive secret and illegal society – and my only crime was to wear my Grammar FP tie to church.
by Duncan Macrae
Shortly after I arrived in Hong Kong in 1962 I was attending a service at Union Church, Kennedy Road, when I was accosted by a fellow with an Aberdeen accent who advised me that he would see me at the club on Friday night for the annual Twa-Gees dinner, “Eight prompt, black tie of course”.
That was it. No application form, no subscription, no initiation ceremony. I had instantly, without realizing it, become a member of Hong Kong’s most exclusive secret and illegal society – and my only crime was to wear my Grammar FP tie to church. I had been identified as a victim by Superintendent Alistair McNutt of the Royal Hong Kong Police Force.
Many years later, the commissioner for police, whose more important post at the time was Chieftain of the St Andrew’s Society, advised me that some of my colleagues and I were under close surveillance by Special Branch because they had reason to believe that we were members of a secret society. This was true, the Twa-Gees was not a registered club and as such was in conflict with the strict laws of the colony. We were, in fact, a triad society. In order to assist the commissioner, I offered to provide him with a list of all the Gordonian members.
The Twa-Gees refers to former pupils of Robert Gordon’s College and Aberdeen Grammar School, resident in Hong Kong, whether or not they are members of the school’s parent FP club. The name ‘Twa-Gees’ was coined by the mother of Charles Smith, who attended his first dinner in 1947. He must have had more warning of the dinner that I had, because he had time to write home to his mother and tell her of the forthcoming event.
A telegram from Turriff duly arrived at the Hong Kong Club wishing the Twa-Gees a successful dinner. The name was immediately adopted. In the 1970s Charles Smith retired from his accountancy business and relocated to Australia where he became a successful racehorse owner.
As far as I am aware, no written history of the Twa-Gees exists and meetings and events were never recorded. After all, it was a secret society. I assume, however, that the club existed in the early days of the colony.
The company I worked for was started in 1846 in Whampoa, the port for Canton, by John Couper, a shipbuilder from Aberdeen. With much foresight the company relocated to Hong Kong in 1863, Number One on the register of companies and the pivotal concern which enabled “a barren island with hardly a house upon it” to become one of the world’s largest and most important ports.
At the opening of the Hope Dry Dock in Aberdeen, Hong Kong in 1867, the first chairman of the Dock Company, Sir Thomas Sutherland, commented on the remarkable fact that the three big names associated with the dock were from Aberdeen, and that he was from there as well. The old boy’s network was operating even in those far-off days.
Incidentally, two years previously this same Aberdonian (when plain Tommy Sutherland) founded the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank, but that, as they say, is another story.
During my 25 years in Hong Kong, the Twa-Gees membership hovered around the 25 to 30 mark. Most members held senior positions in commerce, industry or government and were long-term residents of the colony. At least one member, Bill Shewan, was incarcerated in the Japanese POW camp during the occupation. Bill said that his three-and-a-half years in Stanley Camp “gave him time to mature and gain a more tolerant and sympathetic understanding of human nature”.
The Twa-Gees met for dinner every year, usually at the Hong Kong Club, and in between times we held a farewell dinner for any member who was leaving the colony. There are far too many names to mention, but we did have such luminaries as David Bonavia (Grammar) who was editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review and formerly The Times correspondent in Peking and a veteran China-watcher, and Ian Black (Gordons), the international swimmer who was headmaster of an army school in the New Territories.
In Hong Kong life your employment status was just as important, if not more so, than who you were as a person – a somewhat regrettable fact. Prominent Twa-Gees during the 1960s included the director of the Public Works Department, the commissioner for Housing, the deputy Police commissioner, a high court judge, and the Government chemist. In the private sector Twa-Gees were general managers or directors of Jardine Mathieson, Butterfield & Swire, the Shell Company of Hong Kong, Taikoo Dockyard, the HK Telephone Company, Lowe, Bingham & Mathews (now Price Waterhouse), China Provident, the two major medical practices and the three major banks, to name but a few!
We kept in touch between meetings and worked to the old adage that ‘rules were made for fools to obey and for the guidance of wise men’. The colony prospered! It was little wonder that the Governor of Hong Kong, in a semi-official speech, made mention of the Twa-Gees as ‘the Aberdeen mafia’.
We were all Aberdonians to the core. I well remember our committee of two, Jimmy Rasmussen and myself, debating for hours the cost of advertising our dinner in the South China Morning Post in an effort to spread the net. Needless to say this never happened, as word of mouth was cheaper.
Our funds were never wasted; the bills from the organiser of our annual soirée usually ended with the cryptic note, “As usual the cost of our refreshments far exceeded the cost of the meal and other expenses”.
We did, however, make a handsome donation to the new Fraserburgh lifeboat fund in 1985. And we once hired a grand piano to accompany our after dinner bothy ballads, only to discover that nobody could play the bloody thing.
On a personal note, I am probably the only Twa-Gee to have attended a dinner in the company of his son. Finlay was despatched to Robert Gordon’s and Sillerton for his secondary education, our own Grammar bug-house at 8 Queens Road being long gone by 1975. I was glad of his company because when we returned to Kowloon Cricket Club from wherever we had been to collect my car, he was agile enough to climb over the 15-foot-high locked gate and awaken the sleeping watchman. Gordonians have their uses.
I retired from Hong Kong in 1986, but was fortunate to return on a number of occasions as a consultant on the new airport project at Chek Lap Kok.
On my last visit, in 1993, I had the pleasure of attending a Twa-Gees reunion in the new American Club on Hong Kong Island. It was organised by Gordonian Philip Stratton who lives in Hong Kong, China, who assures that the club is surviving, albeit on a smaller scale than in my days.
Grammarian DUNCAN MACRAE spent 25 years in Hong Kong, but only found time to write about his exploits much later. He breaks the Leopard record by missing a deadline by 26 years.
This is an article from the May 2006 edition of Leopard Magazine. To read much more like this every month, see our subscription details.