Alick was both a dear friend of mine and a key source of information, photos and moral support for a book I wrote about his father's epic  wartime escape from Hong Kong, beginning  on Christmas Day, 1941.  Alexander Kennedy Senior was captain of one of  five motor torpedo boats that took the one-legged Admiral Chan Chak and a group of key British army and intelligence officers on a bold moonlit dash through Japan's naval encirclement of Hong Kong within hours of the colony's surrender after 17 days of fierce fighting.  On reaching the Chinese mainland, the escape group scuttled their boats and marched for four days over enemy-occupied mountains and rivers to freedom. The Royal Navy party of about 50 men  continued overland across China and Burma (coming once again under Japanese attack) to India.  Lt. Kennedy and his colleagues finally sailed into Glasgow on the same tide as his fiancée, Rachel, daughter of Hong Kong's Colonial Secretary. She had left Hong Kong on the day of the Japanese invasion five months earlier and her ship had subsequently been sunk by enemy planes.  

Alick's father's personal account of  his wartime adventures was privately published in the 1960s in a limited edition, under the title 'Full Circle'.  It  is much prized by those of us fortunate enough to own a copy and proved a major inspiration to me in writing my own book, 'Escape from Hong Kong', published by Hong Kong University Press in 2012.   As well as the book itself, Alick Senior also left a detailed wartime diary and a large and unique collection of photos, letters, notes, medals and newspaper articles. After his father's death in 1999, Alick continued to preserve all these historic treasures in immaculate condition and once we came into contact was tirelessly generous in sharing them with those of us involved in researching and commemorating the 1941 escape. He became an enthusiastic member of the Hongkong Escape Re-enactment Organisation (HERO), formed by families of the original escape party.  

Alick and his daughter Rachel travelled to the Far East in December 2009 to take part in HERO’s 're-enactment' of the escape  and associated commemorative activities in Hong Kong and southern China. These included the opening of a major exhibition at the Hong Kong Museum of Coastal Defence. The exhibits included an audio section featuring Alick reading from his father's wonderfully vivid diary and many photos from the Kennedy collection (his father having been the only member of the party to have had a camera to hand). But the star attraction was the crest from Motor Torpedo Boat Number Nine, which  Alick Senior and his men had carefully removed  from their beloved boat as it was being scuttled in Mirs Bay and proceeded to carry right across China and all the way home to Scotland. The colourful (but heavy!) lead crest, showing a flying fish (the MTB motto was 'Sting in the Tail'), was to find a permanent home on the wall of Alick’s downstairs toilet at his beautiful home outside Stirling.