HVT Around the World

We are pleased to announce that the Harinder Veriah Trust has been selected as a recipient trust for donations to the 7th Paris Peking Motor Challenge Rally.

The rally has now begun! Track the Bentley as it travels across the world.

An HVT sticker is now travelling from Beijing to Paris along with Douglas and Mike McWilliams (whose journey has been sponsored by the Centre for Economics and Business Research), on the rally car- a beautiful 1958 Bentley S1 (pictured below).

Donations to the rally will help to support the Trust’s work sponsoring the education of girls at the Assunta Primary and Secondary Schools in Petaling Jaya.

We now have a crowd-funding page, where you can donate directly to the Trust. Click here to make a donation towards the girls at the Assunta Schools and help the Trust’s work!

A word about Douglas and Mike McWilliams:

Doug and Mike McWilliams were brought up in the 1950s a few hundred metres from the Assunta School. Their father, Sir Francis McWilliams, was the man who probably did most to develop Petaling Jaya as Town Engineer from 1955-65 and chaired the fund raising committee for the Assunta Hospital. Their mother, Lady Wyn McWilliams, set up the Assunta Kindergarten and even acted as a temporary Mother Superior for a few months during the 1950s when the then Mother Superior went on leave to Ireland.

Doug’s first bob a job week as a cub scout at the age of 6 was to raise money for Assunta; about the same time Dato’ Sister Enda Ryan prepared him for his First Communion. So it was quite exciting when Doug was introduced to Martin Jacques sixty years later. Doug, by now a well known economist, author and founder of the renowned Centre for Economics and Business Research shares many interests with Martin – in particular their work on the implications of China’s emergence for the rest of the world has some remarkably similar conclusions reached entirely independently and from quite different political perspectives.

Sadly Doug never met Harinder but his father remembers her father Karam Singh very well, who was a famous lawyer, fierce opponent of British colonialism and much revered in his community. Doug can remember how many lunchtimes at home in Petaling Jaya were dominated by conversation about problems that appeared to be caused by Hari’s father. Says Doug ‘I suspect with 60 years of hindsight that there was right on both sides. My father in his zeal to develop Petaling Jaya quickly was pretty contemptuous of delays caused by politicians. Anyway I think that both Harinder and her father looking down on us would be amused by the fact that the sons of one of her father’s main opponents sixty years ago are spending some of their time trying to raise money in her name.’