If a visitor drops by the Cricket Club on any Saturday morning between October and April, he can scarcely find the cricketers for the red-and-white-capped youngsters bounding about in various sectors of the field, playing a dozen different games without apparent confusion. All the players are from four to twelve years old; mostly boys, with a few girls here and there. It is the weekly workout of the Tingle Athletic Association, one of the colony’s honored institutions. Billy Tingle, an ex-boxer and lifetime physical culture instructor, has taught 50,000 children to kick, throw, catch, swim and master the rudiments of cricket, soccer, rugby and basketball. Billy is a short, compactly built man about sixty, who speaks softly but accepts no back talk; discipline is as much a part of the job as athletic skill, he believes.
Parents are permitted to look on from the grandstand while Billy and his nine assistants put 350 children through a three-hour workout. These are “upper-class” boys and girls, but Billy also conducts classes among the shack dwellers in Wanchai. The colony’s schools, with 700,000 pupils, often resort to three daily shifts to accommodate them. Very few schools can afford any physical training program.
At the seaward end of Statue Square, the government has remedied a deficiency of many years by erecting a City Hall, a five-unit complex with a 12-story tower, concert hall, theater, banquet hall, library, museum, art gallery and municipal offices. Architecturally, it is modern, rectangular and unadorned, in sharp contrast to the curlicues of the Hong Kong Club next door. Part of the hall was opened in 1962, with the rest planned for completion in 1963. Sir Malcolm Sargent and the London Philharmonic Orchestra launched the concert hall with suitable fanfare, presumably ending the long, lean era in which visiting artists had to go from one private hall to another, hoping that music lovers would find them.
The Star Ferry terminal, right beside City Hall at the waterfront, is the tie that binds Kowloon and Hong Kong Island together. Every day, 100,000 commuters cross the harbor on these spotless new boats at a first-class fare of 3½ cents or second-class at less than 2 cents. The ferry stops running at 1:30 A.M. on most nights, and for the late prowler it’s a “walla-walla” and a 50-cent trip on this rolling, pitching, cross-harbor motor launch. Walla-walla is the Cantonese equivalent of “yak-yak,” and memorializes the endless bickering over fares that the launch owners indulged in before a flat rate was set by the government. Sir Lancelot, the Calypso King who plays many Hong Kong engagements, was trapped on one of these wallowing tubs and composed a “Walla Walla Calypso,” celebrating “the rockin’ and the rollin’ and the quakin’ and the shakin’” they inflict on night owls.