Saturday, August 18, 2018

Lord Jim - Peter O'Toole (1965) - Former Fire Brigade Dock, Tsim Sha Tsui

Following on from the revelation regarding the Hankow Bund seen in The Sand Pebbles, an elusive location from Lord Jim has finally been revealed to me. This is the location of the Seaman's Home and Hospital where our main protagonist, Jim, is convalescing just before he accepts a position on the apparently doomed ship that he later abandons.

The first building can be seen below. It's the same building that can be seen on the left of this behind-the-scenes shot of The Sand Pebbles (although you can't see it on screen in that film). The grey building on the right being the same godown building that had "Hankow Godown" written on it for The Sand Pebbles. Anyway, the top two images below are of that white building. The third image appears to be the view from the same building looking out towards the waterfront. I suspect the trees and other greenery were put there simply for the benefit of the film seeing as this was essentially a working Govt dockyard.


The next images include the same two colonnaded buildings that can be seen on The Sand Pebbles. In the first two images it's the red brick building that can be seen on the far right of the screen shots I included in my earlier post (but here is one of those images). Again, I have no idea what it used to be and all trace of it has now gone.


In the final shot from the pier, we catch a glimpse of the final white building. Similarly style with lower floor colonnades, this one has thinner pillars on the upper floor with rattan blinds hanging in the openings.


Again, I have no idea what any of these buildings were, but given that this was a piece of Govt land that included a Naval yard and a torpedo depot then it's possible they were originally military in nature. If anyone can shed any light on them please feel free to comment.

According to this Gwulo image, it looks as though they had already been demolished by the late 1970's.

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