The English historian Edward Thomson once wrote of the “enormous condescension of posterity” towards those of us – overwhelmingly most of us – who are not movers and shakers. Yet it is those lives, humdrum and invisible though they often are, that actually make moving and shaking possible. In being moved and shaken, it’s we nobodies who actually do the moving and shaking. Chance can sometimes reveal one of the moved and shaken caught up in larger historical patterns…and through their personal stories lead to undermining received assumptions. In 2015 a small brass label was discovered under five metres of mud in Victoria Harbour. It belonged to a Royal Marine called Edgar Goodman. His story reveals that HMS Tamar was not always Hong Kong’s 20th century naval base…and that there were Hong Kongers at Gallipoli.

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