Russ Stewart: July 2025

They offered me the office, offered me the shop
They said I’d better take anything they’d got
Do you wanna make tea at the BBC?
Do you wanna be, do you really wanna be a cop?
“Career Opportunities” – The Clash 1977

I successfully used my time at university to postpone a working career.  Not through laziness, rather a consequence of not having the foggiest notion of what career to follow.

I did work during the extensive “holiday” breaks between terms, getting reasonably well paid temporary work on building sites, demolition contracts and as a warehouse operative. I was never really short of money during my student days.

I retain the ghost of a leg injury from crashing a dumpster truck into a pile of pipes working as a builder’s labourer in Cambusbarron during the summer of 1975. 
To this day I wonder if the current residents realise that the builders were skimming rows of bricks off of the builds (each house is probably still 4 inches shorter than planned). 

To placate my parents, as graduation approached in 1979, I applied for a trainee manager position with Ballantines Whisky in Dumbarton. I navigated my way past the Chinese White Geese security cordon surrounding the bonded warehouses, to the HR office.  Interview went well, but not well enough. I got on a shortlist of 4, from over 100 applicants, but no further. 

I actually missed my 1979 graduation, opting to spend most of that summer in Canada, USA  (and a day in Tijuana Mexico), with John Allan.  We stayed with relatives and friends for the most part and spent several weeks hitch hiking in Canada and USA. 

I regarded that time as well spent rather than learning the whisky business whilst surrounded by squawking geese. 

Late autumn 1979, back in Glasgow, the necessity to earn a living loomed.  During a mid-day drinking session, mooching about in a pub at Charing Cross, sheltering from the freezing November rain, I thumbed through the employment pages of the Guardian. 

Colour printing was a recent innovation in newspapers. A quarter page advert caught my attention. A stalwart moustached chap in khaki uniform seemed to be ordering some underlings about in a densely built-up housing estate in Hong Kong. What caught my eye was the vast, enticing expanse of blue sky in the background.  

Application soon followed.  About four weeks later, mid-December, I attended the Hong Kong Government offices in Grafton Street London. 

The Hong Kong Government paid for a sleeper train ride to London. I spent a time in the train bar drinking with a retired London copper and the actor who played the posh weedy part in the Cockburn Sherry ad (being near Xmas the ad was on telly a lot).

Main event was an interview with a three-person panel. The matronly female member was from Bearsden.  She was very senior in the Girl Guiding movement and was impressed with my 24th Glasgow (Bearsden) scout troop commitment. I did not expand on the fact that it was just an expedient one-month membership that allowed me to go on an alpine climbing trip with the troop in 1976. 

A few weeks later, end of January 1980, I am in Police Training School located in sunny Aberdeen, Hong Kong Island. 

Fast forward a couple of years to 1982.  I am inspector in charge of a platoon of the Police Tactical Unit. 

Just before night shift at Sheung Kwai Chung police station I pitch up at the station duty officer’s lair.  The Scottish duty inspector invites me to join him for a whisky. We discuss deployments for the forthcoming shift.  He was already a few nippy sweeties ahead of me.  

Turns out he was the chap who got the Ballantine’s Whisky trainee manager job, instead of me. 
He quit after 6 months and joined the Royal Hong Kong Police.