Sir Alexander William George Herder Grantham (15 March 1899 – 4 October 1978) was a British colonial administrator who served as the 22nd Governor of Hong Kong from 25 July 1947 to 31 December 1957, a tenure of ten years and five months that was the second longest in the territory's history. Born in Surbiton, Surrey, he joined the British Colonial Administrative Service in 1922 and was posted to Hong Kong as a cadet, serving there for about thirteen years until 1935. He was then Colonial Secretary of Bermuda (1935–1938) and of Jamaica (1938–1941), and Chief Secretary of Nigeria (1941–1944); during the Second World War he worked in West Africa and was not in occupied Hong Kong, where the governor interned by the Japanese was his predecessor Mark Young. In 1945 he was promoted to Governor of Fiji and High Commissioner for the Western Pacific, holding that post until he was appointed to Hong Kong in 1947. He arrived as the population was soaring because of refugees fleeing conflict and upheaval on the mainland, rising from roughly 600,000 after the war to more than two million by 1950, and after the Korean War began in 1950 a UN embargo on trade with China damaged the entrepot business, pushing the colony toward manufacturing as textiles and garments expanded quickly. On Christmas night, 25 December 1953, a fire in the Shek Kip Mei squatter area left around 50,000 people homeless; Grantham, a practical and decisive man, inspected the site the same day and immediately ordered resettlement blocks to be built. The Resettlement Department was set up in 1954 and eight six-storey blocks at Shek Kip Mei were completed that year, the first step in Hong Kong's public housing programme. He also had to house and employ a flood of refugees, making population policy a central task, and in October 1956 clashes between rightist and leftist camps erupted into the Double Tenth riots, requiring troops and police to restore order. The fireboat Alexander Grantham, built in 1953 by the Hong Kong and Whampoa Dock Company and named after him, was the flagship of the Fire Services Department's marine fleet until it was retired in 2002 and preserved by the Hong Kong Museum of History, with an exhibition gallery at Quarry Bay Park. He left office at the end of 1957, handing over to Robert Black, and later published the memoir Via Ports: From Hong Kong to Hong Kong.
The resettlement programme that followed the Shek Kip Mei fire set Hong Kong on a course of relocating low-income families into public housing, becoming the starting point of later housing policy. Under Grantham the territory shifted from an entrepot to an industrial city, reshaping its population and manufacturing base. His pragmatic, firm style of governance also helped keep postwar Hong Kong comparatively stable while it sat between rival camps in the Cold War.
Achievements
- 1947 · Became the 22nd Governor of Hong Kong.
- 1953 · After the Shek Kip Mei squatter fire, began building resettlement blocks for the victims.
- 1954 · Helped establish the Resettlement Department, beginning the public housing policy.