Bonham Strand was named after Sir George who built it. He was known to the people of the colony as “The Model Governor.”

The early governors of the new British colony of Hong Kong were unpopular with the people that they ruled, in particular the former traders from Canton (Guangzhou) known as the "Interlopers" by the Honourable East India Company, who had held the monopoly of trade between Britain and China since 1600. The Interlopers had discovered a loophole in the company's monopoly which they succeeded in breaking.
As the early governors had been former East India Company men, they regarded the Interlopers as scum, while the Interlopers thought that the second governor, Sir John Davis, was a useless, incompetent intellectual snob. There was a bewildering and wilful lack of communication between this governor and the people that he governed.

The third governor of the colony, Sir George Bonham, had for ten years been the highly successful governor of the Straits Settlements: Singapore, Malacca, and Penang. He had an amiable personality and was soon on speaking terms with the aggressive traders. He actually consulted them and appointed “two gentlemen of the commercial body” to serve on his Legislative Council as unofficial members, thus sowing the seeds of democracy in the colony.

When the British arrived in Hong Kong in 1841, the area was infested with pirates. Sir George Bonham was the first governor to do anything sensible about the problem. He was a veteran pirate fighter and had rid the waters of Singapore and Malaya of this menace by disguising his warships as Arab traders. When the pirates attacked, Bonham's "Q-boats" blew them out of the water.

The problem in Hong Kong was that the Royal Navy had difficulty telling the difference between an innocent fishing junk and a dastardly pirate junk. Bonham was a pragmatist with an abundance of commonsense. Imperial China had no effective naval force so Bonham persuaded the Chinese to lend him some military mandarins to help fight their common enemy – the pirates. With Chinese mandarins aboard, it took the Royal Navy gunboats a couple of years to clear the China coast of pirate junks from Hong Kong waters to as far as the distant Cochin China (Vietnam).

In 1850, the gunboat HMS Medea sank 13 pirate junks at Mirs Bay close to the colony. The Chinese Imperial Commissioner Seu Kwang-tsin, who was notoriously anti-foreign, was so delighted that he surprisingly offered to pay for the gunboat's coal. When Bonham declined the offer, Seu presented the ship's crew with eight oxen, eight sheep, eight boxes of tea, eight barrels of sugar candy, eight barrels of dried lung ngan (dragon's eye fruit), eight barrels of dried lychees and eight barrels of dried oranges. They also received around eight thousand pounds in prize money from the British Admiralty. The crew of HMS Medea were happy to agree with the Chinese tradition that eight is a lucky number. Bonham's successful anti-piracy campaign kept the Chinese Imperial Commissioner off his back.

The Times newspaper's foreign correspondent, George Wingrove Cooke, described Hong Kong as a "noisy, bustling, quarrelsome, discontented little Island."

How did Bonham handle this problem? The answer is that he set about creating a community out of the mess he had inherited. The appointment of non-officials to his government kept the traders, whom Governor Davis had antagonised, reasonably happy. He also discussed his plans with other members of the public before he acted on them. His commonsense was a great asset, and being an experienced administrator meant that he had the skills to reorganise the civil service.

Unlike Governor Davis, he introduced no new taxes. He was able to achieve this by not drawing his salary for a year in order to balance the budget. The community that he had created deservedly called him “the model governor."

An attack on a Chinese piratical fleet by the boats of HMS Cleopatra in Bias Bay in 1851.