Maurine's folly : an archival and oral history of the leisure craft of Hong Kong's colonial governors

Abstract

Dual-purpose governors’ launches have long been a perk for governors who served in territories spread out across the length and breadth of the British colonial empire. One such vessel was The Lady Maurine, built in 1953 during the administration of Sir Alexander Grantham and named after his wife, Maurine. The motor launch was decommissioned in 1999 and sold to a Hong Kong businessman who was contractually bound to rename the ship the Madam Maurene. Even after she retired, The Lady Maurine remained a signifier for different groups: for Hong Kong’s former colonial governors she is a leisure vehicle, for some of Hong Kong’s people she is a reminder of optimism and better days, and for others, she is a symbol of British colonial power and executive privilege. This paper presents the story of The Lady Maurine in four parts; it begins with a narrative around the commissioning and use of the vessel from 1953 until the Hong Kong handover, with information taken from archival research on newspapers and declassified Marine Department documents. The paper then turns to and makes use of semiotic analysis theories developed by Ferdinand de Saussure and Roland Barthes to understand how The Lady Maurine might have been perceived by the different groups of people who came in contact with her. From there, the paper views The Lady Maurine from a post-handover context to understand why the government chose to dispose of an icon with potential cultural and historical significance. Lastly, the paper presents discussions by cultural scientists on the role heritage and tourism sites could have on a post-handover identity discourse for Hong Kong, to ascertain whether the HKSAR might room for pre-1997, colonial icons like her today.