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Solved – the mystery man with Dick Hughes in 1980s Hong Kong

Posted: August 5th, 2023 | 2 Comments »

Last week I blogged about how a picture in Jan Morris’s 1988 book Hong Kong has me wondering. There is Dick Hughes (the model for le Carre’s Old Craw in The Honourable Schoolboy (1977) and Fleming’s Dikko Henderson in the Bond novels). With him was a man who pops up in many photos of Hong Kong and, I think, most famously in the David Llyod shot of the view from the toilets at the old HK FCC at Sutherland House (now demolished – though made famous as a scene in The Honourable Schoolboy. See the post for more here….

So thanks to Geoff Wade in Canberra who spotted that it is the prolific author and journalist David Bonavia, former writer on China, Far Eastern Economic Review, Foreign Correspondent with The Times (London) and author, among many other books of The Chinese: A Portrait (1980). I should have known this as I constantly refer to his great study of the Warlords.

Sadly Hughes died in 1984 and Bonavia in 1998.

The picture on Morris’s book

2 Comments on “Solved – the mystery man with Dick Hughes in 1980s Hong Kong”

  1. 1 Esther Rank said at 4:26 pm on August 5th, 2023:

    I knew David Bonavia and he is the reason my late husband, Michael Rank, became a journalist back when they first met in China in the 1970s. Our son is named in his memory. I could be wrong but I don’t believe it’s David in the photo.

  2. 2 Paul French said at 5:47 pm on August 21st, 2023:

    thanks Esther – several others have suggested it’s not David, despite a resemblance. He remains a mystery!

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