Bulletin Spring‧Summer 1996

Lor dWilso n of Tillyorn GCMG A Citation T h e descent to Kai Tak on a clear night reveals displays, likejewellery, of growth and prosperity scintillating for all to see through the good offices of China Light and Power. It is entirely possible that Lord Wilson, i n his present capacity as chairman of the power company that serves an area a quarter the size of the United Kingdom and stretching from the Clyde estuary to the Western Isles of Scotland, has similar plans for the northern part of the Scottis h night sky. I f so the neon signs would doubtless be in English, Chinese, and Scots Gaelic. Another of his current jobs is to chair the Scottish Committee of the B r i t i sh Council. He is also th e Chancellor's Assessor of the Court of the University of Aberdeen, which means he is the senior lay member of the university's governing body. Our honorand’s previous activities in Hong Kong's seat of power during five difficult years of crisis were in no small measure responsible for maintaining the well-being and prosperity of the territory, for he is certainly one of those who have laboured to make a small, unremarkable trading post into one of the world's great cities. The winding trail from youthful obscurity to the privileges and difficultie s of running Hong Kong is a remarkable one. Bom at Alloa, Scotland, on St. Valentine's day in the mid- 1930s, David Clive Wilson attended Trinity College, Glenalmond, then won a scholarship in history to Keble College, Oxford. Before Oxford, though, he served as an officer in the Black Watch, otherwise known as 'the ladies from hell' because soldiers of this regiment wore kilts in the trenches in the Great War, 1914-1918. After Oxford, yet another kind of education followed when in 1958 he joined the Foreign Office. In 1960 another surprise on the trail: two years of Chinese language study at Hong Kong University, where he emerged as one of Prof. Ma Meng's very brightest students. His next posting was Beijing in 1963 at roughly the same time that our university was bom. Many Hong Kong links had been made and the first steps taken on the unforeseen trail that led to Lord Wilson's gracious acceptance of the invitation to be here today. After two years in Beijing, he returned to the Foreign Office, Far East Department. Then academia beckoned, he resigned fro m the diplomatic service, and became executive editor of The China Quarterly in London University's Contemporary China Institute at the School of Oriental and African Studies. In 1973, he obtained a London Ph.D . for his work on British relations with the Kuomintang i n the 1920s. During these years he had met D.C. Lau, 4