Cricket Club, the Royal, Hongkong, and Corinthian Yacht Clubs, &c. He resides at "Goodwood," No. 5. Babington Path.
MR. JOHN WILLIAM BAINS, the writer of our article on sport in Hongkong, was born at Wreck Bay in 1880. After being educated at Camdenville Superior Public School, he received a training in newspaper work in the office of the Sydney Daily Telegraph. In July, 1903, he left Australia for Hongkong to join the China Mail, on which newspaper he is sub-editor and sporting editor. He is keenly interested in sport, and has a seat on the committee of the Victoria Recreation Club. For some time past he has been one of the instructors at the Hongkong Technical Institute.
The Hongkong Daily Press.
Having published its jubilee number on October 1, 1907, the Hongkong Daily Press obviously must have shared the major part of the history of Hongkong as a British Colony. Sixteen years after the cession of the island—during the administration of Sir John Bowring, the last Governor to be at the same time Minister Plenipotentiary and Superintendent of British trade in China—the Daily Press made its appearance as a four-page shipping paper, with only a couple of short columns of editorial comments on such news as arrived by mails—then few and far between. Mr. George M. Rider figures in the imprint as editor and pro-proprietor, and certainly deserves what glory may attach to the bold enterprise of publishing the very first daily newspaper to appear in the Far East. "Having roamed somewhat extensively on the surface of this Planet," he confides in his first editorial, "we have naturally acquired a trifle above the average knowledge of matters connected with Shipping." As a shipping paper the Hongkong Daily Press began, and as a shipping and commercial paper it still chiefly claims pre-eminence among its contemporaries. Even in those early days, however, it had a soul above mere dollars and dividends, and showed
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a stronger sense of public duty than modern communities, in comparatively small towns, are accustomed to from journals depending largely on their subscribers, and advertisers, for existence. On public affairs of interest to the Colony, its pronouncements had a tone refreshingly candid; a spade was a spade fifty years ago; and in its second volume there are indications that this journalistic infant was growing as sturdy as its conception had promised. Some of its editorials were written in the local gaol, the Governor of that period having his own view of the limits of legitimate criticism. Governors and editors came and went, practically pari passu, and as the Colony developed and expanded so did the Hongkong Daily Press, which almost immediately trebled the area of its pages and increased their number. It is now an eight-page production, showing on each page its acknowledged status as a caterer for serious-minded men of business and affairs. There is a weekly "mail edition" of from twenty to twenty-four pages, which conveys to a wide circle of distant readers an epitome and digest of the news of the Hongkong hebdomad. For forty-five years it has issued the Directory and Chronicle for the whole of the Far East—a book now regarded as indispensable in offices, all over the world, having anything to do with China, Japan, Korea, the Straits and States, Borneo, the Philippines, &c. This volume, though condensed as much as possible, has swollen to over 1,720 pages, giving details of places, as well as of persons, and much important information bearing directly on all departments of the Far East. The European staff of the Hongkong Daily Press and its germane publications, which include occasional books and pamphlets relating to Hongkong, China, and the Orient generally, includes (in London) the managing-lessee and two reporters; (in Hongkong) the editor, two reporters, two European proof-readers, the business manager, accountant, and others. From its office in Fleet Street it receives, daily, an independent service of telegrams, with the letters and reports of its European correspondents in London, Paris, Hamburg, &c. It also has correspondents in Japan and various cities and Treaty ports in China.
