Horace Kadoorie

Origins and early life

Sir Horace Kadoorie (1902-1995), younger son of Elly Kadoorie, was born into a Baghdadi Jewish family and spent a year at Clifton College in Bristol, in Polacks House, the boarding house kept for Jewish boys.

Work and career

With his brother Lawrence Kadoorie he worked for Victor Sassoon in Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s and then for their father. In 1937 he founded the Shanghai Jewish Youth Association school, which became a refuge for the Jewish children of the Shanghai ghetto, where some 23,000 refugees from Europe were confined by the Japanese in 1943; before 1941 Shanghai had let them in without visa or passport. In 1951, with Lawrence, he founded the Kadoorie Agricultural Aid Association, which over the following decades helped hundreds of thousands of people in the rural New Territories of Hong Kong become independent farmers; the Kadoorie Farm, built in a valley at Pak Ngau Shek in 1956, came out of that work and is today a centre for the conservation of biodiversity.

The two brothers received the Ramon Magsaysay Award for public service in 1962 and were made Chevaliers of the Légion d'honneur. Nepal gave him the Gorkha Dakshin Bahu, first class, for helping Gurkha soldiers return to farming after leaving the British army. He is buried in the Jewish cemetery at Happy Valley.