A Little More on Signals Intelligence in Hong Kong in the 1930s

Yesterday I posted a small anecdote on the British listening post in Hong Kong picking up Chinese radio and being amazed that they cared seemingly deeply about the abdication of Edward VIII in 1937. Made me wonder where exactly these people were with their headphones on listening in to China before the Second World War. Well, here’s what I have (and Hong Kong war buffs can feel free to correct me of course).

Prior to WW2 the Royal Navy’s Signal Radio Interception (SigInt) team and a direction finding station were based on Stonecutter’s Island, which was formerly in Victoria Harbour but is now annexed, due to land reclamation, to Kowloon (Britain got the island as part of the 1860 Convention of Peking). Between 1935 and 1939 (i.e. a period covering the abdication crisis) the Stonecutter’s Island base was the main radio interception unit for Britain’s Far East Combined Bureau. So that’s where out man sat listening.

And many thanks to Warwick University’s Politics and International Studies web site for additional information on the wartime location of the Navy’s Hong Kong SigInt team (known as 367 Signals Unit, which  seems to have relocated from Stonecuter’s Island in Little Sai Wan. I believe the Japanese took over this location for their own signals intelligence after the fall of Hong Kong and until 1945. More on that location here.

Stonecutter’s Island in the 1930s

Little Sai Wan