search.noResults

search.searching

saml.title
dataCollection.invalidEmail
note.createNoteMessage

search.noResults

search.searching

orderForm.title

orderForm.productCode
orderForm.description
orderForm.quantity
orderForm.itemPrice
orderForm.price
orderForm.totalPrice
orderForm.deliveryDetails.billingAddress
orderForm.deliveryDetails.deliveryAddress
orderForm.noItems
IN DEPTH


Exploring the idiosyncratic: A journalist’s personal archives


Archives and Journalism have much in common. Archives preserve and retain authentic evidence from the past. Journalism reports on the immediate, providing “the first draft of history”. Garfield Lam looks more closely at that intersection, through his work on journalist Anthony Lawrence’s personal archives – constructed memories about the past, about history, heritage, and culture, about personal roots and familial connections, and about who we are as human beings.


THE journalist Anthony John Lawrence, OBE, was born in Wimbledon, south- east London, on 12 August 1912 and died on 24 September 2013, aged 101, in Hong Kong. He was inspired by an uncle, who was a political correspond- ent on the Daily Mail, to become a journalist. He went straight into local newspapers after attending King’s College school in Wimbledon. He was one of the most highly regarded and influential of veteran BBC foreign corre- spondents and radio broadcasters. From 1956 to 1973 he reported from the Far East on such historic events as the bloody birth of Bangladesh, the independence of Malaysia and Singapore, the Vietnam War, and the Cultural Revolution in China. His personal archive, comprising his original dispatches, correspondence with the Headquarters, books, photographs through purchases, telegrams, original manuscripts of one of his autobiography Foreign Cor- respondent, published in 1972, and some unpublished manuscripts, including the typescripts titled So to Man’s Estate 1945- 1952 and Stories and Voices from a Far East Diary 1960-1974.


“There is far more to it. The inventory is almost endless. It’s the nearest you get to an explanation – why it was that you spent all those years in a part of the world where success is so difficult, without ever really making up your mind to leave. – Anthony Lawrence, Foreign Correspondent 1972.”


44 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL


Garfield Lam, MCLIP, CA, FRSA (kfglam@hku.hk) – University Archivist, The University of Hong Kong and ICA-SUV Executive Bureau Member.


Hong Kong scene in ca. 1960 (Lawrence purchased from Government Information Services Hong Kong).


June 2023


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60