Australian journalist Richard Hughes was a lunchtime fixture at the Hongkong Hilton’s Grill bar right up until his last days in 1985.
In the 1970s it was men only at The Grill for those famously long lunches of the era and that’s the way Hughes liked it.
When a couple of Girl Reporters from the China Mail stormed the barricades, he rang their boss and demanded their sacking. The boss was Norman Barrymaine, another heavyweight in China Watching circles.
Hughes was a brash Australian with an expansive character and a flair for the ecclesiastical, addressing my father as Your Grace and passing on to me his love of Sherlock Holmes.
He had a delightful habit of calling for the waiter to bring over a postcard whenever conversation turned to an absent mutual friend.
It would have all the flourish you’d expect
“It would have all the flourish you’d expect – Year of the Horse, 12th day, 8th Moon, a benediction and a bit of friendly abuse,” Dad said. “But mostly it was just to say we were thinking of them, and that’s a nice message to receive, wherever you are in the world.”
Hughes’ dining habits were unvarying. At the Hilton Grill he would eat only garlic bread, house pate, thinly sliced rare roast beef, strawberries and kirsch, and Irish coffee.
His luncheon circle included lawyers and bankers, diplomats and authors, scientists and scholars. One of its number, Hong Kong journalist Kevin Sinclair, said the gossip and information swapped at these gatherings was slanderous and delicate in the extreme.
There was one glaring omission from the free-ranging cultural association enjoyed by Richard Hughes – women
In his obituary of Hughes for the South China Morning Post, Sinclair said the group cut across all Hong Kong’s racial, religious and social boundaries. Well, not quite all. Sinclair neglects to mention one glaring omission from this free-ranging cultural association – women.
Their only place at table was in a toast. “Here’s to the ladies,” Hughes would say, raising his glass.
“God knows why they want to be equal and drag themselves down to our level. Let’s keep them on their pedestal where they belong.”
In 1973, intrepid Girl Reporters Linda Siddall and Vicky Wong decided to leap down from their pedestal and crash the Hilton Grill in protest at its discriminatory lunchtime rule.
Siddall ran the China Mail’s Town Talk column and Wong was her assistant. They roped in two other women and headed to Central to storm the barricades.
Fighting on: The only picture I have of Vicky Wong and Linda Siddall, taken at the height of the China Mail dispute. Photobomber to the left is my dad Jack Spackman
Before setting off, Siddall cleared the action with China Mail Editor Barry Sullivan, Deputy Editor Dave Smith, and the Mail’s proprietor Norman Barrymaine.
“I think one of them tipped off the TV channels, because both TVB and RTV crews were waiting when we arrived at the Grill Room door, along with the general manager of the Hilton and a big bear of a security bloke blocking access to the door,” Siddall said.
“I was trying to reason with the GM and convince him that discriminating against half the population was not a good look for the Hilton when Vicky got bored, walked up to the security hunk and kneed him in the groin.
“Then, as he doubled over, she calmly walked in and sat down at the table we’d pre-booked under a male name. The rest of us quickly followed, with the GM stuttering in protest.”
Stalemate
The entire restaurant fell silent as the women took their seats. “We waved to them and studied the menu. A waiter eventually arrived, but instead of taking our orders he cleared all the cutlery and glasses. Stalemate!”
At that moment, a Hong Kong public relations figure named Ted Thomas, in possibly his finest hour, stepped gallantly into the breach.
“He called over another waiter and ordered a bottle of champagne and glasses which he brought over to us, found out what we wanted to eat, ordered that too and paid for it all himself,” Siddall said.
“By the time we got back to the office – slightly tipsy on the bubbles and fun of it all – Richard Hughes had called Norman Barrymaine, demanding that he fire me for having the temerity to invade what he regarded as his private club.”
Nostalgia and its trimmings: Some Sunday afternoon research by Your Girl Reporter
Richard Hughes and Norman Barrymaine were two very different men, but if I’d had to guess which one was the old sexist I would have picked Barrymaine, simply because he appeared the man most likely to uphold tradition.
Both men were distinguished by decades as foreign correspondents breaking some of the biggest news stories of the Cold War.
It was Hughes who – when not complaining about the presence of women in anything other than a servile capacity over lunch – had tracked down Guy Burgess and Don Maclean, two of the Cambridge spies, after their defection to Moscow in the 1950s. And it was Hughes who was immortalised as ‘Dicko Henderson’ by his one-time boss and all-time friend Ian Fleming in You Only Live Twice.
Barrymaine seemed the very model of a Gilbert and Sullivan caricature
The gregarious Hughes with his comfortable safari jacket and easy hospitality couldn’t have appeared more different to the small and precise Barrymaine, the very model of a Gilbert and Sullivan caricature of a colonial Englishman.
Barrymaine was the kind of Englishman who gave his London address as the East India Club in St James’ Square, the kind of Englishman you might expect to defend the pedestal so fragrantly occupied in those days by the Ladies of Empire.
Barrymaine was a dandy and the only person I ever met who wore spats and carried an umbrella in all weathers. His nickname on the China Mail was ‘the Beaver,’ because he modelled his style on his old boss Lord Beaverbrook. The Mail’s last News Editor Lindsay Brinsdon called him the Penguin, after the Batman character as played by Burgess Meredith.
Norman Barrymaine, taken at the Lo Wu border crossing on his release from a Chinese prison and reproduced here from Your Girl Reporter’s copy of his book The Time Bomb.
As far as I know, Barrymaine inspired no spy novelist although his story would have made fit fodder. He was an actual double agent – working for the British Foreign Office and the Soviet Secret Service during the Cold War.
Barrymaine’s spying game led to his greatest scoop – and later to his downfall. Six years before the Great Hilton Grill stand-off, Barrymaine was the London Evening Standard’s diplomatic correspondent.
Using his Russian contacts, he had managed to get aboard an East European freighter delivering supplies from Vladivostok to Hanoi, putting him in the box seat for the 1966 American bombing of the North Vietnamese capital.
Barrymaine’s despatches, filed from the ship’s deck and the Haiphong docks, made front page news round the world.
Two years later, in 1968, Barrymaine again used his East European connections to get a berth on another freighter, this time bound for North Korea in the wake of the USS Pueblo incident. The Pueblo was an American spy ship which was captured by the North Koreans in one of those moments when the Cold War looked like getting very hot.
“It was the beginning of what was to prove an ill-starred voyage. At 3pm on Monday 5 February we dropped anchor seven miles off Chungjin. Next afternoon the captain ordered me not to leave my cabin,” Barrymaine said.
Barrymaine spent 20 months in solitary confinement in a Chinese prison
The ship diverted to Shanghai, passing Chinese torpedo boats on the Yangtse which Barrymaine photographed, an act which led ultimately to his arrest and 20-month solitary confinement, accused of spying for both the Russians and the CIA.
I knew none of these details, of course, about the funny little proprietor of the China Mail who won such respect from my dad, until I read Barrymaine’s book The Time Bomb which recounts the events of his arrest, imprisonment and subsequent release.
I picked it up in a Hong Kong bookshop because Jack had said Barrymaine was one of the few journalists he’d worked with that he’d do it all again with. It seemed peculiar that my outgoing father – in personality seemingly more in tune with someone like Hughes – would hold this rather comical figure in such high regard.
I found Barrymaine’s book written in the rather pompous style that I remembered of the man, in contrast to the jovial manner of Uncle Dick.
But when heavyweight push came to bombastic shove in the Battle for the Hilton Grill of 1973, Barrymaine refused to budge, backing his Girl Reporters to the hilt.
And, after a face-saving interval, the Hilton quietly abolished its men only rule.
Barrymaine relinquished his role as publisher of the China Mail in February 1974, six months before Siddall and Wong fought their next great battle. Both women played leading roles in the fight for a fair payout for the staff when the newspaper was closed down suddenly in August that year.
They won that one too, but the cost was high. A year after the China Mail dispute Siddall was eking out a living as a freelancer. She left journalism for law school, studying at Hong Kong University, and spent the rest of her working life in Hong Kong as a barrister and director of the Duty Lawyer Service.
Meanwhile Wong had left the newspaper game for the world of magazine publishing, taking over as Editor of Style, a bilingual fashion glossy. It’s unknown if she celebrated the new job over lunch at The Grill. But I like to think she did, raising an unrepentant glass across the room to Mr Hughes.
© Maria Spackman 2017
Further reading:
Your Girl Reporter’s account of the death of the China Mail and its aftermath starts here:
More on Richard Hughes and the spies – real and imagined – who inhabited Hong Kong’s Foreign Correspondents Club during the Cold War. By Your Girl Reporter, natch!
Thanks for yet another brilliant story, Sally. I did manage an occasional mid-80s breakfast meeting at the Hilton’s Cat Street cafe (I think it was right at street level on Des Veoux Rd. Never made it to The Grill, which made your post that much more enjoyable.
Thanks Robert! I never made it to The Grill either – but breakfast in the Hilton cafe was a regular stop.
Your dad and I were good friends in Hong Kong in the late 70’s early 80’s. When he had his morning show on Commercial Radio he invited me into the studio to chat about advertising – my trade. It was a helirious morning – Jack Spackman and Sam Jackman. We didn’t know who was who for a while – especially on talk-back radio! A truely wonderful nan who I much admired.
Great to hear from you Sam! I remember that morning well – I was listening to it in the Computer-Asia office. He asked his guests to bring in their own music and you brought in a new album from Australia. It was the first time I heard Men at Work and for that alone I salute you!
Fascinating yarn. Well done. Most enjoyable.