Profile‘Being blonde was essential’: former model, PR and gossip columnist on a hairy Hong Kong junk trip with Joan Collins, corrupt police, and her jewellery line

I was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, but have spent vast swathes of my life riding the crest of a wave in Hong Kong – and what a ride it has been! We – mum, dad and my younger sister – landed there in 1964 after five years in what was then Western Samoa. At first, we lived in the Merlin Hotel (behind The Peninsula, in Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon) and then in a government flat at Piper’s Hill just by what is now Lion Rock Country Park – we used to have fun chasing the monkeys that ran wild there, but not one we called The Big Chief who was nasty and stood his ground. Later, we moved to The Peak on Hong Kong Island; I went to Island School in the former Military Hospital on Bowen Road. I loved that building, but it was supposed to be haunted so it was scary on winter evenings. I hung out at the Ladies’ Recreation Club: lots of tennis and sunbathing by the pool and fun discos upstairs. I was dispatched to boarding school in New Zealand in the 1970s. Once, when my dad, who was Crown Counsel in the Legal Department, was driving me to Kai Tak, I asked him why he seemed so preoccupied. He said he had been working on the case of a corrupt policeman called Peter Godber, and they had asked him to explain all the [money] in various overseas bank accounts. He was on a “stop list” at the airport, but Dad was anxious. “It just all seems a bit too easy,” he said. Hong Kong carpenter quit the 9 to 5 to follow his dream Sure enough, Godber used his airport security pass to slip aboard a plane. Once in Britain, he could not be extradited on charges of living beyond his means until Ernest “Taffy” Hunt, his former colleague newly convicted of the same charge, offered to testify that he had seen him take a bribe – for which he received early release from prison. Dad subsequently flew to London to ensure Godber was extradited. He got four years. This was all wildly different from my teenage life in Hong Kong, when I was chiefly occupied with having fun and making pots of money in the holidays dubbing films at Shaw Brothers Studio, which paid HK$300 a day: to give you an idea, the average monthly wage then was about HK$1,000. I was good at “female screaming” and “female martial arts sounds”. I did some modelling, too, ciggies and booze mostly; being pretty was not necessary but being blonde was essential. Socially, I had graduated to the Captain’s Bar at the Mandarin Oriental and the Godown – next to the Hong Kong Club, closed in 1998. I studied law – yuck – at university in New Zealand but dropped out after two years and was back in Hong Kong by early 1979 working as a PA for Femina magazine’s editor and publisher, Mary Lai Stirland. My next five years, from 21 to 26, were extraordinary. I had an absolute blast doing fashion shoots, going to pret-a-porter shows in Paris – YSL, Lanvin, Chanel – covering parties as the de facto social reporter. At one bash in a Bangkok hotel, the ballroom had been turned into a golden park, with a pond, bridge and yellow ducklings: all the guests were ladyboys or hairdressers. What a mad scene. I headed to Sydney in 1984 and got into hotel PR but missed Hong Kong and came back to join The Peninsula. I loved the hotel, and still do, but it was a bit sedate after dealing with demanding Aussie media. I was 30 when I left to set up on my own – KPR was the obvious name – handling restaurant clients like Va Bene and Bentley’s. After a media dinner, we would press on to Wan Chai for a few (more) bevvies. As you do. In 1987, I joined Tatler as social editor, and then moved to the Sunday Morning Post, writing – ta-da – Penlington’s People. I struck lucky with my first column: I was on board a junk with film star Joan Collins and barrister Gilbert Rodway when the engine blew up in the middle of a typhoon. She was not impressed and excerpts from that first column found their way into the News of the World, with Joan “nearly drowning in the shark-infested waters of the South China Sea”. The early 1990s were the height of hedonism, when it seemed everyone was throwing money at charity balls and holding mega parties. I practically lived in Lan Kwai Fong. My parents went back to New Zealand in 1995. Dad had worked his way up to the Court of Appeal, and mum had been a barrister and lawyer (and published Law in Hong Kong, which has become textbook reading for law students). I shifted to Sydney for a couple of years, but – you might see a pattern forming here – came back to Hong Kong and PR in 1997. Fast forward a couple of years to a wedding in Bermuda, where I met David Luard, who restores wood carvings by the 17th century Anglo-Dutch artisan Grinling Gibbons – you can still see his work in England at Hampton Court and St James Piccadilly. My darling dad died in 2001, so I decided my days of living in Hong Kong were over and moved to London. David and I were married the following year. In 2003, I took on a new job doing PR for Shangri-La, which was then expanding at a rate of knots; I worked all hours organising trips to China or Asia and prepping for the opening of the flagship hotel in The Shard in London. I had also joined the Hong Kong Society, and became chairman in 2012. We held annual fundraising dinners and I got my old pal Sir David Tang to headline them with guests like Lord Patten. I also hosted lunches for ex-Hongkongers with speakers like Kate Blewett, who made The Dying Rooms (1995) documentary, about neglected kids in mainland Chinese orphanages. Our daughter, Antonia, was born in 2007, so at 49 I was very much a poster-girl for technically geriatric mothers. For more flexibility, I quit Shang to open up my own PR business – history repeats itself – and I’ve since also started my own fashion jewellery line, KPearlies. However, my Next Big Thing – and I suppose you could trace it back to that trip to the airport with dad all those years ago – is a book on the early history of the ICAC (Independent Commission Against Corruption). My recent interest was piqued when my mother handed me a folder of newspaper clippings of my pa extraditing Godber, and prosecuting Taffy Hunt, with the absurd Miles Jackson-Lipkin defending – himself later imprisoned for fraud. I started talking to people from that era and reading books that touched on it. It seemed astounding that the ICAC had been so effective so quickly at largely eradicating what, it transpired, had been endemic and entrenched corruption in the civil service, with the police force its initial high-profile focus. Then I got to the nitty-gritty about the police protests in 1977, which nearly derailed everything the ICAC had achieved, and the subsequent amnesty. I was gripped, especially as I had been so close to events without really realising it. To date, I’ve talked to several former cops and ICAC officers, who have been very supportive, and have had a huge amount of help from Karl English – elder son of Superintendent Jack English, who committed suicide in 1976 after two decades in the police and just over a year at the ICAC. ‘I have two brains’: Hong Kong artist Eddie Lui’s rational/sensual split I’m learning more each day, some of it really eye-opening stuff. Taffy Hunt once extracted a confession from a suspect by inserting a firecracker, er, inside him and threatening to ignite it. I’m hoping to talk to more people – on or off the record – who were involved in establishing the ICAC or who worked in the police, or any other government sector, in the 1960s and ’70s. I feel so lucky to have had the opportunity to work and live the relatively carefree life I did in Hong Kong … due in no small part to the decent and dedicated men like my dad who did so much to ensure its well-being. The book will be my tribute to them.