Stuart Wolfendale

STUART WOLFENDALE
Writer and Journalist
I am an Englishman who has lived or been based in Hong Kong since 1980.

Because a bout of nineteenth century boundary drawing was tweaked so that the Earl of Stamford and Warrington could have all his property in one fief county, my home town of Stalybridge is in green and milky Cheshire whereas its once dark satanic mills marked it indelibly, filthily as a Lancashire cotton town. Propelled by the desire to get out of the place and kindly assisted by my Dad who sensed I would be well out of it too, I was “crammed” to pass the examination for a place at The Manchester Grammar School.

There my accent moved up from the flat Lancashire of back-to-back terraces to what is known as “educated Northern”.  After three deeply undistinguished years reading history at Downing College, University of Cambridge, where I was admitted on a wave of hilarity after naming the then poet laureate as a pre- Raphaelite painter in my interview, the accent was upgraded again to “Received Pronunciation” also known wrongly as BBC, Oxford or, queerly, the Queen’s English.

After spending a year of teaching the sex and violence version of history to secondary school boys and being declined by the government of the British Solomon Islands because I was squeamish over the prospect of flogging the natives, I joined the Church Commissioners for England in 1974.

I spent a lot of time as the deputy press officer telling white lies in the name of God and I acted as secretariat to committees of Commissioners which involved me looking straight ahead and saying “Good morning, my lord,” to bishops in the urinal line up at coffee breaks

Foolishly spurning the opportunity to begin as a professional actor in a company touring Cornwall in the summer of 1977, I was accepted as a mini-mandarin into the United Kingdom Home Civil Service, Ministry of Defence. To this day the Official Secrets Act prevents me from saying a word of what went on in there except to mention that I knew roughly in which towns in England the children would be being taught in Russian by day two of a war with the Soviet Union.

In 1978, in what I believe was a sort of hint, I was sent to Hong Kong on the staff of the Commander British Forces. I lived jollily for a year in the Headquarters Officers Mess in that part of Victoria Barracks which is now the garage for Regent on the Park apartments. With the sort of inevitability that Hong Kong expatriates will be familiar with, I had moved to the Hong Kong Government as an administrative officer by 1980. I learned about eating out every night, partying late, shopping for bath towels in the Lane Crawford sale and how surprisingly powerless a colonial government was.

As some expatriates will also know, decline was delicious, the merry handcart to Hell unstoppable. I began as a locally based writer and journalist in 1984. They also know that autobiography from this point is far too fogged to be of use. There now follows and approximation of what I wrote and what I do.

From 1985 until 2005, I produced weekly columns in one or more English language newspapers or magazines. Long running columns included TV Watch in the TV Times magazine for which I had to buy a television, Column 8 in the Saturday edition of The South China Morning Post for which I had to dodge writs and The Way It Is in The Sunday Morning Post for which I had to be photographed in silly postures.

I was the daily diarist of The Eastern Express newspaper in Off The Wall, 1993-94, the schedule for which nearly killed me but got me mentioned in a debate in the House of Lords, my greatest achievement, which I am storing up for my virtual grandchildren. I can now confess to having written “Betty’s Diary” in the splendid, scurrilous and much lamented Spike magazine from 2003-4. I used to make up flamboyantly with the Mary Kay left-overs to get into that one.

Most recently, I wrote a column for the Weekend Standard, which felt like writing into a void and readied me for this blog.

I have written as a humorist, (presumptuous but technically accurate), a food and restaurant critic, a travel writer and a general features writer for a wide spread of Hong Kong based publications. I was an occasional broadcaster with Radio Television Hong Kong. Publications I have contributed to outside Asia and which might ring a bell are - The Times, London, The London Evening Standard, Punch magazine, Time and Tide magazine, The Toronto Globe and Mail The Los Angeles Time and Travel and Leisure magazine.

For some years, I was a Board member of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Hong Kong and second Vice President for two. It has not all been down to a commute between my desk and my club. I have lived from time to time as a freelance writer and correspondent in Jakarta, Bangkok, Phnom Penh and Los Angeles.

Over the last fifteen years I have spoken to a wide spread of audiences in Hong Kong, some of those I can remember being:

• Allied Dunbar (UK) Insurance convention (massive)
• The Hong Kong Consular corps (a riot)
• The Hong Kong Institute of Chartered Surveyors (wonderfully quick audience)
• Mary Kay Cosmetics convention (started off my make-up period)
• Hong Kong Medical Consultants Circle (had to change GPs after that)
• The Oxford and Cambridge Society (Boat Race Dinner, speaking in reply to the late Mr Justice Barker)
• The Island International School Assembly (they let me do that twice!)
• The Wig and Pen Club, Hong Kong. (against another judge)
• The Yorkshire Society of Hong Kong (a gift for a Lancastrian)
• The Rotary Clubs, Hong Kong and Kowloon (all so cheerful, I can’t remember one from the other)
• All of which is to say that I am available to do that for money — with apologies to Rotary and the School.