On his arrival, MacLehose was shocked to find more than 300,000 refugees from the mainland living in "squatter huts", and many thousands of others in inadequate re-settlement estates.
He established a Housing Authority which set out to build five high-rise new towns in the New Territories. Some 960,000 people were rehoused in 10 years, and the new towns eventually accommodated 2.5 million. As government funds grew through sales of land, many other projects were embarked upon, including the Mass Transit Railway.
But perhaps MacLehose's most important initiative was his action against corruption. During a posting to Hong Kong in the early 1960s, he had observed rampant police corruption - but a lack of will in Westminster or Hong Kong to tackle it. Early in his governorship the issue came to prominence when an inquiry into the activities of Peter Godber, a well-respected former chief superintendent, found him to have taken bribes of several million dollars from vice racketeers.
Concluding that the police could not be relied upon to clean out their own stable, MacLehose set up the Independent Commission Against Corruption. This was embarrassingly successful: 59 sergeants were arrested in a single division, three senior British officers were jailed and another took his own life.
Threatened policemen finally stormed the ICAC offices and assaulted its staff. MacLehose had to allow an amnesty for all but the most serious offences, but his warning of severe action against future misdemeanours turned the tide and boosted public confidence.
In external relations, he was determined to move away from the confrontation between Hong Kong and China that reached its height in the Cultural Revolution of 1967. He was willing to recognise, albeit unofficially, the Hong Kong director of the New China News Agency as Beijing's de facto consul-general in the colony, and even to dine with him.
He was the first Governor to celebrate China Day, and he made a point of signing the book of condolence on the death of Mao in 1976.
Under the pragmatic leadership of Deng Xiaoping, China was for the first time keen to welcome foreign investors. It was against this background that MacLehose received an invitation from the Chinese foreign trade minister to visit Beijing in 1979 - the first official visit by a Hong Kong Governor since the Communist takeover.
Conditions seemed propitious for the broaching of the question of Hong Kong's future after 1997, but Maclehose opted for a sidelong approach, in which Chinese approval would be sought for the sale of individual land leases in the New Territories extending beyond 1997.
But the Chinese refused to be drawn on lease technicalities, and Deng himself wrong-footed the British delegation by going straight to the bigger question. As summarised by Sir Percy Cradock, the British Ambassador, Deng's message was: "Of course Hong Kong will return to China. Sovereignty belongs to China. But 1997 is quite a long way off. Don't worry down there, you'll be all right." A phrase from the official translation, that Hong Kong investors should "set their hearts at ease", was widely proclaimed on MacLehose's return to the colony.
But MacLehose was convinced that China would eventually reclaim Hong Kong tout court, and that attempts to discuss continued British administration after 1997 were pointless. There, in effect, matters rested until Margaret Thatcher's stormy visit to Beijing in September 1992, shortly after MacLehose's retirement. In the meantime he opposed any significant move towards constitutional democracy in Hong Kong, a topic neglected since the departure of the first post-war Governor, Sir Mark Young, in 1947.
When a group of senior civil servants sketched out plans for reform in 1979, MacLehose declined to support them; in the same year, a group of backbench MPs (including the young Chris Patten on his first visit to the colony) arrived from London to harangue him on the same theme.
It was to no avail: the introduction of partial direct elections for District Boards - the equivalent of parish councils - was his only concession. He remained convinced that full-scale elections could not be other than provocative to China. "If the Communists won," he said, "that would be the end of Hong Kong. If the nationalists won, that would bring in the Communists."
Crawford Murray MacLehose was born on October 16 1917 and educated at Rugby and Balliol. As an undergraduate, he developed a love of sailing.
He joined the Colonial Service in Malaya in 1939, and during the Second World War held consular posts at Amoy and Foochow in China, serving briefly as a lieutenant in the RNVR. In 1948 he was appointed Acting Consul-General at Hankow.
These early encounters with the Chinese had a deep effect on him. Later, he spoke of "the thrill of that different world". He found the Chinese, "provided you take them on their own terms, very rewarding". But his diplomatic career took him elsewhere first. He was transferred to the Foreign Office to work on Marshall aid, and went on to serve in Prague as commercial secretary and in Wellington as head of chancery. In 1956 he moved to Paris, where, as commercial counsellor, he began to be noticed by visiting ministers. Three years later he was appointed political adviser to the Governor of Hong Kong, Sir Robin Black.
In 1965, MacLehose became Principal Private Secretary to the Labour Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart, and then to his successor George Brown. Coping with the volatile, sometimes drunken Brown provided useful training for the stresses of his next posting, as Ambassador in Saigon at the height of the Vietnam War, from 1967 to 1969.
In Saigon he developed close relations with the Americans, who saw him as one of the few foreign diplomats who really understood the military situation in the context of the tensions of the region.
It was a disappointment to MacLehose that his next posting was Ambassador to Denmark. But the interlude was brief, and he returned to Hong Kong to succeed Sir David Trench as Governor in November 1971.
MacLehose was created a life peer in 1982, before his departure from Hong Kong. He took his seat on the cross benches, and was by some distance the most authoritative of the mixed bunch of peers who spoke out against democratic reform in Hong Kong.
In a debate on the Legislative Council elections of November 1991 - in which pro-democracy campaigners scored notable successes on a low turn-out - he was dismissive of the results on the grounds that 80 per cent of those entitled to vote had not done so.
MacLehose spoke again in the Lords in November 1992, in a debate on the electoral reforms introduced by Chris Patten in the teeth of furious opposition from mainland China. When there was so much common ground with China about the future of the territory, he said, it was a pity to have provoked a "major confrontation".
In a later interview, MacLehose admitted that it sounded "remarkably feeble" that the fear of provoking Beijing led him both to sidestep the pressure for democracy during his governorship and to oppose it later in the House of Lords. But "I felt my job was to make Hong Kong as contented and prosperous and cohesive as possible. Insofar as I don't sleep at nights, this is the sort of thing one looks back at and wonders whether one should have done it. I still think I was right."
MacLehose joined a group of British grandees, including Sir Edward Heath and Lord Howe, at the official swearing-in ceremony, boycotted by the British Government, of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region chief executive on July 1 1997.
Murray MacLehose was appointed KCMG in 1971, KCVO in 1975 and GBE in 1976. In 1983 he was made a Knight of the Thistle, an honour which he held with special pride as a loyal Scot. He was a Deputy Lieutenant of Ayr and Arran.
In retirement, MacLehose was a director of the National Westminster Bank, chairman of the governors of the School of African and Oriental Studies in London, and chairman of the Scottish Trust for the Physically Disabled. He took to sheep farming at his home near Maybole in Ayrshire.
He married, in 1947, Noël "Squeak" Dunlop; they had two daughters.
