SCM Post, Thursday, August 14, 2003
By Steve Cray (Email steve.cray@scmp.com)

Fishermen's friend

"MY VOICE ISN'T too loud, is it?" boomed Jonathan Gray, as I discreetly moved the microphone away from him. An unforgettable voice to anyone who heard it. Deep, resonant, authoritative and, well, yes, loud. But I said: "No", of course. The meeting place was at the back of one of Gray's favourite seafood restaurants in Yung Shue Wan, on Lamma, where he lived. A fitting choice for someone known to many as the man who did more than any other to improve the lot of Hong Kong's fishermen.

Jonathan Gray. Born June 26, 1936, died August 4, 2003.

Arriving here from Shanghai in 1952, Gray was to go on to help found the Hong Kong Fishermen's Association and win the trust of local workers - remarkably for a Westerner - adding mastery of the local Hakka dialect to his Cantonese and Putonghua. During the next 51 years, Gray would spearhead campaign after campaign on their behalf. Issues ranging from land reclamation, exploitation and pollution, to the provision of education for their children and the improvement of their meagre living conditions would form the subject of hundreds of letters to the press and calls for government action.

One recent early afternoon, we were drinking the first of many lagers as Gray - one of Hong Kong's best-known expatriates and most colourful characters - got into his stride. Our interview was punctuated by quips and jokes in Cantonese as the 67-year-old "unofficial mayor of Lamma" exchanged pleasantries with nearly everyone who passed.

"One of my grandfathers - I had two you know - came to China to work on the railways in the early 1900s," he explained. "It was financed by the Brits, and most of the people who worked on it were either Scots or Irishmen. He was from County Tyrone in Ireland."

Gray's grandfather married a local girl and his father, Jimmy, was born in Shanghai, and began his career in the coal industry in northeastern China, fighting for the rights of miners, taking their plight to the top and eventually becoming a good friend of Chairman Mao Zedong and Premier Zhou Enlai. After he spent seven or eight years in the coal industry, he returned to Shanghai and became a silk exporter, before he moved to Hong Kong.

"I left Shanghai in 1952 and came to Hong Kong with my father. My mother was Serevina Horvath, a Russian, and her father was Hungarian General Heinrich Horvath, who became a confidant to Tsar Nicholas II. He was later appointed director-general of the Trans-Siberian Railway and that was why my mother moved from St Petersburg to Shanghai."

At 18, Gray went into the publishing industry and after a spell as a chicken farmer found his vocation in civil engineering, a career that would last about 40 years. "It was a great life. I ran a number of companies over the years, and the first job I had was at the High Island reservoir at Sai Kung. I also worked on the Mass-Transit Railway tunnels, subcontracting, supplying the labour. We worked very long hours, cold-bending steel beams. The young people I worked with were great, very loyal."

He became Lamma's first expatriate in 1975 when he moved to the island to find a better environment for his teacher wife, Gloria Castro, who had cancer. She died 12 years ago.

But he went broke after he was forced to sell his property to pay his workers. "I didn't have a penny. The problem was that the work periods were too long; the main roads at Junk Bay took two years and the Tolo Highway took three," he said. "We started off paying workers $200 a month, but by the time we finished that had gone up to $700. When I first arrived in Lamma, I had several houses, but I had to sell them to carry on working and pay my workers. There were very few people living here then, not more than 800 on the whole island."

But it was Gray's tireless campaigning for the rights of Hong Kong's fishermen for which he is best known. His involvement started when he met Charlie Thirwell, a Marine Department employee. T They started the Hong Kong Fishermen's Association because of the "appalling conditions" fishermen were living in. "They were bullied and exploited," Gray said. "I used to go out fishing and one day when I got back I found this family sobbing. The old man and his wife told me their son had been taken away for stealing a handbag from a woman, but said he couldn't have committed the crime because he was too frightened and gentle.

"I went to Shau Kei Wan police station where the woman couldn't pick him out of the line-up. It was another guy entirely. Inspector Gordon Ridell - later superintendent - became a good friend of ours and agreed to investigate. That led to the setting up of the fishermen's association. At that time fishermen were begging on the streets."

Gray's stepson-in-law, Lai Ngau-chai, himself a fisherman, said he had worked tirelessly for the fishing community.

"He helped fishermen, their families and children so much. There was no club for them before he started one," he said, a tribute endorsed by his close friend, Legislative Councillor Wong Yung-kan. "I feel sad at losing such a good friend," Wong said. "He was such a friendly, active and energetic man."

Gray had lived with a benign brain tumour for a number of years, and RTHK disc jockey Ray Cordeiro, who often dedicated songs to him, described how he would listen to music to relax when he was in pain. "He told me it was the only relief he used to get." One of Gray's best friends, Lamma resident Frank Murdoch, who knew him for 28 years, said: "Perhaps it was Jonathan's upbringing that made him stand out. With a rich, baritone voice, a manly handshake and the gift of the blarney inherited from his father, he was larger than life and an impressive character."In a letter to the South China Morning Post following the death of Deng Xiaoping, Gray wrote: "The world . . . has been deprived of a great soul. The death of this remarkable man signifies the end of a time." Words that, many would agree, are equally true of the passing of Jonathan Gray himself.