Thomas’s Work (7): Post-war Reconstruction

Note: this post is out of date; my father went into town on September 2.

The Stanley internees naturally expected that the end of the war would bring a speedy return of freedom and normal living. They were sorely disappointed. Colonial Secretary Franklin Gimson posted a notice in Camp telling them to stay put and not provoke the Japanese by celebrating too uproariously. It was excellent advice: 20,000 or so Japanese soldiers were the only armed body in Hong Kong, and it wasn’t absolutely certain that all elements in the Imperial services were going to accept the surrender; New Zealand writer James Bertram, who’d been imprisoned with his fellow volunteers in Shamshuipo and then sent to work in Japan, reports fighting in Tokyo between ‘die-hards’ and ‘moderates’, and a move by the former to kill the American airmen imprisoned alongside him – for forty eight hours it was ‘touch and go’ around Tokyo he tells us.[1]

Hong Kong recovered from its wartime ordeal with remarkable speed – rationing was ended in November 1945, six years ahead of Britain. People deported to China moved back and by February 1946 the population was over a million once more.[2] But things didn’t look so rosy in the early days after the Japanese surrender (confirmed in Stanley on August 15/16) or even after the arrival of Rear Admiral Harcourt’s fleet on August 30.

Hong Kong, pounded by American planes since October 25, 1942, had been allowed to slip into a state of near anarchy as the Japanese occupiers gradually lost a hold that had always depended on little more than fear inspired by massive violence. In their final days the Japanese had encouraged triad gangs to loot at will.

Lord Kadoorie paints a vivid picture of Hong Kong at this time:

Hong Kong really took off from a base of being the most looted city in the world – there wasn’t a piece of wood to be seen in Hong Kong when I got back from Shanghai where I’d been a prisoner of war….And the whole city was, well, there was one cable across the harbour, there was some light in one or two buildings on this side (Hong Kong-side) and there was some light at the Peninsula Hotel, which was the Japanese headquarters. But other than that there wasn’t any light at all in the place. And it was black. Rats all over the place…and {the dogs} had become so wild that they had to get police with guns to shoot these dogs because it was so dangerous.[3]

Most Stanley internees stayed in Camp, where they created an unfavourable impression on journalist Russell Clark and others who’d come in with Harcourt’s fleet: Clark portrays them as whingeing endlessly at their continued confinement and the failure, as they saw it, of the authorities to look after them properly.[4]

Whatever the grievances, real or imaginary of the internees, back in Hong Kong, according to Clark, things soon started to improve:

By about 3^rd or 4^th September things were settling down nicely. We were all breathing rather more freely and some plan, purpose and, particularly, ‘drive’ in relation to the colony’s reconstruction was becoming evident.[5]

A few brave ‘pioneers’ like Colonial Secretary Franklin Gimson left Camp quickly. The first large group out were key government personnel, whose task was to help Gimson reclaim Hong Kong for the British before the Chinese could take it: on September 3 Jean Gittins and about twenty government servants left Stanley for the city.[6]

Food was now being parachuted in to the internees so there was no immediate problem, and, in any case, the state of Hong Kongin August 1945 meant that large-scale baking would have been impossible. Harcourt’s first statement, made about ten days after the re-occupation, explained what he’d done: labour had been engaged for road and drain clearance, public services, hospitals, light and water supplies and for the ‘preparation of dockyards and factories for early operation’. He added that ‘equipment in the workshops and factories had been shockingly neglected’;[7]  Thomas was about to find this out for himself.

My guess is that Thomas was sent from Stanley into Hong Kong either just before or after this speech – sometime between the 7^th and 11th of September. The first surviving word of Thomas is a telegram dated September 13:

arrived safely at Hongkong hope be home soon.

He gives his postal address as the Hong Kong Hotel. That ‘safely’ is not just a formal assurance; Hong Kong was still a somewhat risky place at this time. According to his brother Wilfred, on some date before September 13 he’d written an undated letter, now lost, which informed his family of his release.[8]  The telegram was probably sent from the Gloucester Building, where Cable and Wireless were offering to despatch telegrams to any part of the British Empire for $1 a word.[9]

The position of workers like Thomas is summed up by Russell Clark:

Essential Service workers took over whole of Hong Kong Hotel where they lived on a communal basis. Europeans issued chits for everything until new currency arrived and lived off rations issued by the navy.

Thomas had lived ‘on a communal basis’ for most of the last 4 years, and now, at least, he was amongst friends and being properly fed. But anything like normal life in the Colony was a long way off indeed in those early days. Hong Kong’s Chinese majority were still having a dreadful time:

500 Chinese a day were still dying of starvation.[10]

And the Indians, although they had started the occupation as the most favoured nationality, with the best rations, by the end of it their emaciated looks made them stand out even amongst a ‘pitifully thin’ population.[11]

Even though he was one of the privileged minority, and he was probably delighted to get back in to town, and thrilled at the prospect of returning to work, Thomas might not have felt so happy about the conditions he found when he arrived. On September 12, the China Mail reported that, while things seemed good in Stanley – there was butter in quantity, cheese, oranges, apples, chocolate etc – these conditions could only be envied by the essential workers in town. They were promised shorts, shirts and shoes but didn’t get them – they had, it seemed, ‘the dirty end of the stick’.[12]

Still, there was a free dental clinic for the essential workers run by the former dental technician who had acted as a full dentist in Camp to great acclaim, ‘Sammy’ Shields and some RAF dentists.[13]

As Thomas was certainly in Hong Kong by September 13, he might well have attended the funeral of James Carson Fergusson, a Masonic district grand master, Scottish constitution.[14]  Thomas was an enthusiastic Scottish Constitution Freemason. If he did, this might have been the time he learnt about the death of Fergusson’s deputy, Ralph Shrigley. Thomas mentioned this terrible tragedy years later; he undoubtedly knew Shrigley through Freemasonry, and his suicide to avoid further torture stayed with him for a long time.[15]

Meanwhile, for the expatriate population, more help was at hand: relief stores that had arrived on HMS Vindex including contributions from the Australian Red Cross now awaiting distribution – they would go first to the ‘900 odd internees at Stanley’, second to essential services, and third to their dependants.[17] Whatever else Thomas got from these supplies, he acquired some Red Cross notepaper, as his only two surviving letters from this period are written on it.

On September 16, The Hong Kong Sunday Telegraph[18] listed some of the food delivered by the navy since the arrival of Harcourt’s fleet, and this included 31,500 tins of white flour, so somebody was needed to bake bread. However, there were probably naval bakers, so even this delivery wouldn’t have created any urgent need for Thomas’s services. Wherever, the baking took place, it wasn’t the Lane, Crawford bakery in Stubbs Rd., as we shall see.

There was a 10 p.m. curfew at this time – it had to be relaxed on September 16, a day of fireworks and celebrations at the official Japanese surrender.[19] On the same day Lord Kadoorie declared that Hong Kong had a future of unlimited hope as the war damage was ‘not nearly so severe as we’d been led to expect’. Nevertheless, the present realities were underlined by report of the successful looting of Australian Red Cross supplies of milk and shoes from Queen’s Building: a gang had taken advantage of the diversion of sentries caused by the surrender arrangements, and future guards were now to shoot ‘without mercy’.[20]

Thomas’s first recorded post-war product was a wedding cake; it’s not known exactly when he made it, but it was eaten, with or without his help, on September 17:

James Stuart Buchanan Bang Stuart decided at 9.30 a.m. he would get like to get married. Edith Alice Johnston was agreeable and the pair went to Hong Kong from Stanley and made all arrangements, being back in Stanley by 11.30 a.m. the same day!

Yesterday they were married at the Supreme Court by Mr. Leo d’Almada, the well-known solicitor, the witnesses being Mr. and Mrs. Owen Hamilton and Mr. and Mrs. George Halligan. The wedding cake was made by Tommy Edgar of Lane, Crawford’s (sic) and the reception was held in the mess of Stanley Prison where the bridegroom is employed.

Mr Stuart, who was one of the really willing workers during internment at Stanley….[21]

James Stuart had been in the ‘Stanley Platoon’ of warders during the fighting, and he was one of those in this detachment who had, for some reason, been interned in Stanley rather than the PoW Camp at Shamshuipo. George and Ivy May Halligan, like Thomas, are in British Army Aid Group records as uninterned in December 1942, but I don’t know why they were kept out or where they were living.

Slowly conditions began to improve. On September 25 The China Mail[22] reported a speech by Harcourt that said Hong Kong’s real problem was lack of coal but that a supply from Australia was expected soon.

On October 1 Thomas sent home his first surviving post-war letter, again from Room  321, of the Hong Kong Hotel. The letter was written on Australian Red Cross Society notepaper. He noted that he’d just received the letter of August 23^rd, ‘the first since September, 1943.’ He continued:

Well I think it is pretty well official now that I can not come home till about Christmas, Everyone is shouting for bread.(we have not had bread, meat or fish since January 1943 {sic –  should be ‘January 1944’, but even this claim is false. }.

He claims to be ‘fit’ (as he had done throughout the war) and states that the Navy and the Australian Red Cross are ‘doing their stuff now’. He glances at his work:

am very busy getting bakery into working order.

His family would have to wait for the next letter for more details.

Thomas wasn’t the only Lane, Crawford employee working to get things going again: Exchange Building advert – tenants asked to report to A. W. Brown of Lane, Crawford’s on the first floor on Friday 6, October at 9.30 so as to inspect their premises.[23] The building where Thomas had begun his wartime internment was returning to its peacetime life. Brown was a company manager and a member of the same bowls team as Thomas. Another member of that team, Frederick Ivan Hall, had been executed by the Japanese for smuggling messages in and out of Stanley.

On October 7 the Sunday Herald[24] reported that there was the possibility of a shift in  food provision for Essential Service Workers which for the moment would continue at Mac’s Cafeteria on the ground floor of the Hong Kong Hotel – there was a possible shift to giving  them higher salary rather than mean provision. Dried food will still be given to those wishing to mess for themselves. It was also announced that accommodation at the Hotel would be tightened up – large rooms would expected to take 2 people, camp beds to be installed so hotel can accommodate 280 people. Arrangements were in the hands of the food control department. We also learn that the Army had a mess on first floor of hotel, the part formerly known as ‘the Gripps’.[25] On October 16 the China Mail reported a speech by Harcourt saying that changes might be made in provision of meals for essential service workers, who might in future be given the right to buy supplies at the NAAFI.[26]

It seems that this shift actually took place, or that the Essential Workers were allowed the best of both worlds. The China Mail for November 28, 1945 published a letter from Service Civvys (sic) complaining about ordinary civilians using NAAFI stores –  ‘How do they get the coveted ration card’? But he stressed that he didn’t mind ex-PoWs and internees buying from the NAAFI.

On October 17 Thomas wrote his second surviving post-war letter, also on Australian Red Cross Society notepaper. He claims to have put on 17lbs since leaving Stanley – a creditable rate of about 4lbs a week! He describes his problems getting the Stubbs Rd. Bakery working again: he’s got the help of four men from the naval repair ship HM. Resource, but things are a mess because the Japanese used the bakery as a button factory, a rattan basket factory and for salt fish. He hopes to get home before January or February.[27] This period in Hong Kong is not recorded in those online accounts of the work of HMS Resource that I’ve consulted.[28]

It seems that Evelina was also able to draw rations at this time: The China Mail for October 18, 1945[29] reported that Volunteers who have dependents ‘rationed’ by the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Force must forward proof of relationship, for example, their marriage certificate.

On October 29 Thomas sent a telegram home: mum very fit busy writing. The letter he was composing is lost; the next communication to survive is an optimistic telegram sent on December 19 offering Christmas and New Year wishes and ending see you all soon.

However hard Thomas and his helpers worked, it was obviously not possible to resume normal bread production. On December 6, the China Mail reported complaints that you can’t get government bread at the fixed price and that the bread’s colour has changed from brown to white so people are now buying on the black market. One man found all bread sold out after queuing on each of 4 consecutive mornings. No wonder Thomas’s dream of taking his new (to his family) wife home for Christmas in England came to nothing!

However disappointed the general public was with the efforts of its bakers, appreciation from one source is recorded: in May 1946 a report (now lost) from Tung Wah Eastern Hospital notes their success and progress with the help of Cecil Harcourt, Fehilly[30] and T. H. Edgar of Lane Crawford.[31]

According to the introduction to Thomas’s article in The British Baker Thomas’s return to England didn’t take place until the summer of 1946, [32] and he chose the shorter air route – 10 days as against 35.[33] Whatever he found in England, it wasn’t enough to make him want to return, and he spent the next four years back in Hong Kong.

New Year’s Eve 1947, in a Hong Kong in which racial barriers, although far from disappearing, are much less sturdy than before the war: starting from the front left, we have Eurasian, a Swiss, a Chinese (probable), English, Eurasian, and Brazilian (probable)

Update: A front page Editorial in the Hongkong Telegraph for Friday, November 25,  1949 throws an interesting light on the experience of Thomas and other Essential Service workers after the war. The Editorial was prompted by the failure of efforts to establish an Essential Workers Corps to act in an emergency, and it speculates that one reason for this was the failure to acknowledge the work done by this group in 1941:

(M)any of those who found themselves posted to the Essential Services and Key Workers Group in 1941 remember the invidious treatment they received  when the war finally came to an end. For many there was little or no recognition of their active services and they were made to feel neglected and forgotten people.

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[1] James Bertram, The Shadow of a War, 1947, 273-274.

[2] http://gwulo.com/node/6185

[3] Cited in Tony Banham, Not the Slightest Chance, 2003, 294.

[4] Russell Clark, An End to Tears, 1946, 77-78.

[5] Clark, 61.

[6] Jean Gittins, Stanley: Behind Barbed Wire, 1982, 154.

[7] Clark, 99.

[8] Chronology drawn up by Wilfred Edgar in 1985.

[9] The China Mail of September 18 reports on page 1that such a service had been established for ‘some days’.

[10]Clark, 100.

[11]Clark, 48.

[12] Page 2.

[13] China Mail, September 11, 1945.

[14] China Mail, September 13, 194, page 2.

[15] https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2011/12/10/the-reign-of-terror-2-fear-in-the-french-hospital/

[16] Chronology, 1985.

[17] China Mail, September 14.

[18] Page 6.

[19] China Mail, September 17, page 1.

[20] China Mail, September 17, page 1.

[21] China Mail, Tuesday, September 18, page 4.

[22] Page 4.

[23] China Mail, October 3, 1945,

[24] Page 6.

[25] Sunday Herald, October 7, 1945, page 6.

[26] Page 1.

[27] Post War Letter, 2, below.

[28] http://www.naval-history.net/xGM-Chrono-28Depot-Resource.htm

[29] Page 2. This is confirmed by a story on page 2 of the October 31 edition.

[30] I think this is Colonel J. P. Fehilly, pre-war head of Kowloon Hospital.

[31] Chronology, 1985.

[32] Introduction to British Baker article, viewable at https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2011/10/18/thomas-edgar-some-documentation/; as this gets his initial wrong, it might not be accurate.

[33] Paul Gillingham, At The Peak, 1983, 143. Thirty five and ten days are pre-war figures that probably give a good idea of the relative post-war durations.

How Thomas Lived in England, How He Prepared To Die, And How He Died

In early 1951 Thomas, Evelina and Brian returned to the United Kingdom, making the month-long journey by ship:

 

At first they lived with Thomas’s parents in Windsor, in a large Victorian semi close to where he had grown up. Then they moved to the naval town of Portsmouth. Thomas was of the generation in which most men expected to work to support their families. In Portsmouth he was a junior manager for the NAAFI (Navy Army and Air Force Institutes). He lived in a flat surrounded on three sides:  by the dark stand of Fratton Park Football Ground (home to Portsmouth FC), by the long, low building of the NAAFI Social Club and by the large, noisy factory itself. He must have longed for the light and the beauty of far-away Hong Kong, but he was never one to complain.

To keep the old days in his mind there was a slow but steady stream of visitors from across the world:

In 1952 his second son was born; now his family was complete. A couple of years later he left the NAAFI because he wanted to join his parents and his brothers and sisters, who all lived in or near Windsor.

Some time before leaving Hong Kong Evelina and her boss – echoing Thomas’s pre-war good fortune on the horses – had a huge win on a lottery. She and Thomas hired a floor of the Hong Kong Hotel to celebrate, but most of the money was put aside, enabling them to buy a house in Windsor outright.  Thomas designed it himself, incorporating some of the principles of Feng Shui – as far as I know it’s the first house in Britain to consciously use ideas from this system! It’s also strangely reminiscent of the bungalow in Stanley where he spent the time between May 1943 and August 1945: Thomas and Evelina lived through the great consumer boom of the 1950s and 1960s in a bungalow that must have reminded them of the one in which they’d spent two years slowly starving, crowded into a small room and lacking everything beyond what was needed for immediate survival.

It was in this house that Thomas was to live until his death in January, 1985. They filled it with things from Hong Kong. Thomas had owned three trunks full before the war, all of them looted of course, and the objects that filled the house were brought back in the one trunk that he’d collected post-1945. For most of the rest of his life he worked in one factory or another on the Slough Trading Estate –  made famous in Ricky Gervais’s TV comedy, The Office. He wasn’t particularly happy in any of them. For many years he was a manager in a factory making sweet cigarettes, which his sons thought an excellent arrangement, but he didn’t like his boss and the work didn’t appeal to him much. His last job as canteen manager in a large engineering works probably suited him best. In any case, he never stopped wanting to work. He’d begun his life in Hong Kong by claiming to be older than he was in order to get a job with Lane Crawford, and ended up changing his age in the opposite direction in order to avoid being compulsorily retired.

I think he was really happiest using the skills as a master baker he’d learnt during a hard 1920s apprenticeship, but that wasn’t the kind of work he was offered. Eventually he was able to make some use of these talents by giving popular baking classes at a further education college close to Windsor, and he was in great demand as a judge for local baking and cooking competitions.

He went back to Hong Kong once, as a guest of his last employers, the Garden Company, who celebrated their fiftieth anniversary in 1976:

Thomas, probably with T. F. Cheung, one of the founders of the Company and visitor to Windsor on at least one occasion

In late 1984, as the great miners’ strike was dividing the country, Thomas, by now as firmly conservative as he’d once been radical, was dying of bowel cancer. It was a situation reminiscent of that in Terrence Rattigan’s play In Praise Of Love: Thomas didn’t want to upset his family, so claimed that the doctors didn’t know what was wrong with him, while Evelina and the boys knew exactly what was wrong, but pretended to believe Thomas so as not to cause him further distress.

One Saturday Brian was walking with his wife Jane up the bottom part of the hill that makes up Windsor’s main street when he came upon Thomas, dressed in his best suit and waistcoat and sporting one of the elaborate tie pins he’d always favoured. He looked embarrassed – Brian was obviously going to ask him what he’d been doing to need such a special outfit. Nothing in particular, he was just out for a walk…Brian ended the conversation quickly, as he knew he’d put on his best clothes to walk for one last time along the street that meant so much to him, the commercial and social centre of the town he’d grown up in, and to which he’d  returned to bring up his children.

The other place his mind went back to as he prepared for death was Hong Kong. In his last weeks he woke up early because of the discomfort he was in; he’d get out of bed, leaving Evelina asleep, and go around the house picking up the vases, the statues, all the objects he’d brought back in 1951  to remind him of his time in the Colony. As he held these things in his hands a thousand memories must have filled his mind – times, places, people, all drenched in the rich light of the Far East:

He never spoke about this but Evelina knew he was doing it because he never put anything back in the exact place he found it!

Brian sat behind him in the taxi that took him away for the last time. As the taxi left the close, Thomas didn’t look back – he was keeping up the pretence he was ‘going in for tests’, so he didn’t want to show he knew he would never see his bungalow again. Brian was amazed at his self control.

Thomas entered what was still at that time the town hospital:

Every day Brian woke up crying; later he’d visit the hospital.  There was nothing unusual about the way Thomas died; it happens like that to all strong men and women who are gradually weakened by the relentless action of cancer and of the morphine that makes the pain tolerable. Each time Brian touched him the cold had spread further as the heat and life retreated to the core. Eventually, the hands that had once pounded opponents in the boxing ring and effortlessly slipped baking trays in and out of ovens found it hard to lift a tea cup. It wasn’t long before the family got the inevitable phone call telling them to come and say goodbye.

Thomas had been asleep for almost the whole of the previous two days. Brian feared that the goodbyes would be all one sided. After an hour or so he left Evelina, his brother and Jane by the bed while he went to get a cup of tea. The moment he returned, one of the most amazing things he’s ever seen took place.

Suddenly Thomas woke up. His eyes found Evelina, who was sitting by the left side of his bed, not too far from his head. He looked at her. There was not a trace of morphine induced stupor in his look; on the contrary, it was totally alert. Thomas’s two sons were also close to the bed, but he knew, with utmost clarity, that his final business was only with Evelina. He held her eyes for a few seconds. There was no fear, no regret, none of the emotions we might expect in someone about to die. It was a gaze of lucid impersonality. Brian, watching amazed, understood intuitively what was happening, but it took years of contemplation and research before he could even begin to put this understanding into words.

Thomas was summoning Evelina and inviting her for a final time into the relationship that had begun amidst the shells and bombs of the Hong Kong war. He spoke to her – completely without words, of course– of the strange courtship in the brutal confusion of the early Hong Kong occupation. Of the hot day in late June 1942 when the Americans started their journey home and the two scared but hopeful lovers were married at St. Joseph’s Church. Of their growing hunger, of the hope and terror brought by the fierce American air raids, of their fear of the Kempeitai and the horror beyond words when they were kept prisoner in the French Hospital in the days following the arrest of Dr. Selwyn-Clarke.

That look contained their relief at being sent to Stanley, instead of hauled off to a torture chamber, and the way that relief turned back to horror when, the day before their first wedding anniversary, the Kempeitai came into Camp and took away Frederick Hall, a fellow employee of Thomas’s, and four other internees. It spoke of the black day, October 29, 1943, when they’d been with Mrs. Eileen Hyde while her husband was beheaded on Stanley Beach, alongside Alexander Sinton, who they’d lived with in the French Hospital, and 31 others.  All the rest of Stanley life was there too, the grim companionship, the failing food supply, the cold, dark winters, the bombs, the defiance and determination that kept most of the internees alive… The exhilaration of the Japanese surrender and of the first glimpse of the ships that came to finally rescue them, the celebration and mourning as lovers and friends met, or did not meet, in liberated Hong Kong…all this and so much more was summoned up in a gaze lasting no more than a few seconds in a hospital in a small Berkshire town, brought into the present with the total openness of a dying man with no reason to cling to, deny or distort his experience.

It was not that Thomas didn’t love his children; he was, by any standards, an excellent father. But they were irrelevant to this, the deepest part of his life. His final leave-taking could only be with Evelina. Nor was it that their marriage had been full of love in its final decades. At that bedside Brian learnt that there was something deeper than love, although he still doesn’t know what it is.

It was with love, and sorrow, that Evelina responded. She hugged Thomas and stayed with him until she felt the dying begin. But as Thomas’s muscles began to let go, his false teeth came out and started to choke him. Luckily Jane, his daughter-in-law whom he’d loved from the start, understood what had happened, opened his mouth and skilfully extracted the teeth. Thomas could now die undisturbed, and in less than a minute it was over.

Lucid impersonality is not for those whose lives will continue. The tears began at once, continued for a long time, but concerned Thomas no more.

  

My spirit will not haunt the mound
Above my breast,
But travel, memory-possessed,
To where my tremulous being found
Life largest, best.

Thomas Hardy

One of the small islands that surround Hong Kong:  ‘Below was a drop of about 400 feet’

Sheridan’s Escape: His own Account

Elizabeth Ride, daughter of Sir Lindsay Ride, the founder of the Hong Kong resistance organisation the British Army Aid Group, has kindly sent me some documents from theRide Papers that throw interesting new light on the wartime experiences of Thomas and Evelina. One of these is the escape statement (dated July 1, 1942) of RASC Staff-Sergeant P. Sheridan. I can now correct the account I gave in https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2012/03/22/thomass-work-2-the-fighting/

Sheridan was one of two RASC bakers who were sent to help Thomas during the fighting at the time when he took over baking for the Army when their own bakery fell on December 19. After the surrender they were interned in Exchange House, and started baking bread for the hospitals on January 9, alongside Thomas; when they were transferred to the French Hospital on February 8, Captain Tanaka ordered them to leave behind their army kit and ID. I’ll discuss this remarkable development in a future post; there’s  a story that shows militant hostility to the idea of letting a POW out of camp,[1] so my guess is that Tanaka was humanely trying to make sure that the bakers could carry on their work, while keeping them out of the terrible conditions in Shamshuipo. I’m sure he didn’t mean to be laying the groundwork for Sheridan’s escape.

 The Japanese had taken over the Lane, Crawford Bakery, so the hospital  bakers were using the Qing Loong bakery in Wanchai: a 1913 directory gives the address as 93, Queen’s Road East,[3] Sheridan’s statement as 41 Queen’s Rd – this location in is in Central (then Victoria) not Wanchai, so he must mean Queen’s Road East. The two possible addresses are just 1.1 kilometres apart, and might of course reflect the fact that the bakery had moved.

 Sheridan’s statement tells us that until April 15 he was living in Hong Kong on an enemy pass, but when the time came for renewal he claimed to be Irish. According to the story I reported earlier, he produced a passport in Gaelic, but this story seems to get many details wrong, and he doesn’t mention producing any evidence to support his claim in his statement. The Japanese reclassified him as neutral and in late May he asked for permission to go to Kwong Chow Wan. This was a French enclave on the south China coast in an area not occupied by the Japanese army and therefore part of an escape route to Chungking, the capital of Free China. The Japanese put an end to this by occupying the territory in February 1943.[2] At this time the Hong Kong authorities sometimes gave neutrals permission to go there or to Macao because they wanted to reduce the population they had to ration. Sheridan got permission to go on June 4 and sailed the next day. G. B. Endacott thinks he probably travelled via Macao or even Lantau, but he himself makes no mention of any stop before Kwong Chow Wan (Hong Kong Eclipse, 1978, 192), and I’ve found evidence of direct sailings at this time.

Before his escape, he was loaned $500 by Mr. Ng, ‘manager’ of the bakery. Mr. Ng. and his children became life-long friends of Thomas and Evelina, family members visiting them in England on more than one occasion. Every year the Ngs sent over Christmas cards and gifts. Evelina told Brian this was because Thomas had treated them fairly over a bakery when he could have taken it for nothing. Sheridan’s statement establishes this was the Green Dragon – I think Mr. Ng was owner rather than manager – and it’s most likely that the fair treatment relates to this period in 1942-1943. Thomas almost certainly took over the bakery during the fighting, but this was only for four or five days after the Lane, Crawford facility in Stubbs Road became unviable. Thomas praised the devotion to duty of the Qing Loong’s staff in the article he wrote for the British Baker in September 1946, and it seems that it wasn’t only the workers who deserve praise – that loan was an act of courage on Mr. Ng’s part, as no Chinese person could have been in any doubt as to the consequences of being caught in such an act. On February 16, 1947 the Hong Kong Sunday Herald (page 10) announced that Ng Yin-cheung would be presented with a certificate of merit for the assistance rendered to S-S Sheridan in his escape. In the post-war years the Ng family gradually moved to the West; one member became a doctor, another an art historian at a distinguished American university.

 At Machoung (probably the small town now called Machong in Guandong Province– there is still a customs post nearby) Sheridan received a further loan from Mr. Hopcroft, the Commissioner of Customs, who also entrusted him to two Chinese customs officers travelling to Chungking. He reported to the British Military Mission at Kweiyang (now Guiyang) and, when he wrote the statement, he was being helped to proceed to Chungking (now Chongqing).

 As I stated in a previous post, he was awarded the Military Medal for this escape and his subsequent exploits.

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[1] Andrew Leiper, A Yen For My Thoughts, 1982, 159.

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangzhouwan

[3]http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=oxZBAQAAIAAJ&q=ching+loong+bakery&dq=ching+loong+bakery&hl=en&sa=X&ei=p8xTT6ugI4Lh8AOArIXvBQ&ved=0CEMQ6AEwAg

Charles Hyde’s Resistance Work

In a previous post I wrote:

 ‘Ginger’ Hyde was one of those bankers kept outside Stanley to help liquidate their own banks, and he’d had been taken by the Kempeitai on suspicion of a whole raft of ‘crimes’. He was, to his immense credit, guilty of them all: he’d been raising money to provide extra food and medical supplies to be smuggled into Stanley to help meet the desperate needs of the internees. He’d been listening to an illegal radio with another banker, Mr. L.  Souza, and probably passing the news around the community of uninterned Allied civilians. He’d been ‘running’ Chester Bennett and the Portuguese solicitor Marcus Da Silva, two of the most effective of the British Army Aid Group’s agents in occupied Hong Kong. And he himself had been in contact with the resistance.

(https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2012/01/20/the-reign-of-terror-conclusion-on-the-stanley-peninsula/)

I’ve now got hold of a copy of Frank King’s history of the HKSBC (Volume 3) which reveals that there was even more to Hyde’s work than I’d guessed:

 In addition to his intelligence work Hyde had been collecting drugs from secret rendezvous and helping to arrange the escapes for certain Indian officers who were being threatened with mutilation by the Japanese.[1]

 Following Edwin Ride, King dates his arrest to some time in April (I gave the date provided by John Stericker, May 3, although I was aware that it was dubious) and attributes it to the interception by an Indian informer of a letter Hyde wrote to an inmate in Matauchang Camp (which contained a number of Indian POWs).[2] Ride gives the name of the addressee of Hyde’s letter as the courageous Captain Mateen Ansari;[3] both men were to die together on Stanley Beach on October 29, 1943.

 It seems that Hyde was also involved in the Talbot affair: he, as well as Grayburn and Streatfield had given Talbot money to smuggle into Stanley[4], but Grayburn, no doubt anxious to keep Hyde out of the hands of the Kempeitai, claimed responsibility for Hyde’s 1000 Yen contribution. Hyde managed to get a cover story to Talbot, which, although imperfect, passed muster with the gendarmes.[5]

Ride, basing himself on his father’s papers, writes:

 C. F. ‘Ginger’ Hyde passed particularly valuable  intellgence to the BAAG. Reports from Hong Kong indicated, however, that these valiant acts were carried out with a certain amount of openness, and there was concerning Waichow {BAAG field HQ} that they would end in disaster.

The context makes clear that it wasn’t just Hyde who acted too openly, but he was certainly the one whose resistance activities covered the greatest range. Another of the bankers, G. Lyon-Mackenzie wrote to the HKSBC Number 2 David Edmonston urging him to rein in Hyde. Lyon-Mackenzie was obviously concerned for his own safety and that of the other bankers. He was himself an extremely brave man: illness kept him out of Stanley, and even after the deaths of Grayburn and Edmonston in prison (aggravated malnutrition) and the execution of Hyde he continued to smuggle supplies into Camp.[6] King quotes what he calls Lyon-Mackenzie’s ‘blunt’ judgement:

Hyde definitely asked for it.[7]

King suggests that it was in part at least the strongly anti-Japanese atmosphere of occupied Hong Kong that led to the relative openness of the resistance network:

The atmosphere in Hong Kong was everywhere hostile to the Japanese, and thus the opportunity to conceive plans and attempt their execution using amateur methods and depending entirely on good fortune and loyalty made certain operations appear, as it were, too easy.[8]

This is plausible, but King goes on to make a rather ambiguous claim about the eventual arrests:

It was this betrayal of Hyde which led also to the arrests of D. C. Edmondston and Dr. P. S. Selwyn-Clarke.

I think his source for this is again Ride’s book, which puts it more clearly:

In the wave of arrests that followed the betrayal of contacts with Matauchang Camp, Edmonston was imprisoned, as was Dr. Selwyn-Clarke.[9]

In the accounts I’ve read, no-one whose name was given to the Japanese under torture ever blamed the victim, but I would like to make it clear that the record, insofar as I know it, does not support any claim that Hyde named anyone, even though he was subjected to more than usual brutality. We know that Hyde definitely did not name the two men who he was ‘running’ as espionage agents: one of them, the Portuguese lawyer Marcus da Silva, survived to become both witness and prosecutor at war crimes trials, and in 1946 he told the journalist Hal Boyle that his fellow agent, the American Chester Bennett, was executed in spite of the absence of either a confession or hard evidence as to his espionage activities, evidence that Hyde’s testimony would have provided.[10] The courageous and resourceful da Silva was arrested but managed to get himself released – a remarkable story which I’ll tell in another post.

Although it’s not relevant to the immediate topic of this post, it should also be noted that, contrary to Ride’s claim, Selwyn-Clarke’s arrest (May 2, 1943) is unlikely to have had anything to do with attempts to arrange escapes from Matauchang. Firstly, that was exactly the kind of ‘military’ activity he consistently refused to have anything to do with – his own conscience, and the need to stay free for as long as possible, dictated that he take part in purely humanitarian illegalities. Secondly, Emily Hahn – a friend of Hilda Selwyn-Clarke – implies that the Kempeitai were simply waiting for the doctor’s main ‘protector’, Japanese Medical Officer Colonel Eguchi, to be transferred from Hong Kong before arresting him – they struck within a week of Eguchi’s leaving.[11] They had begun arresting and torturing Selwyn-Clarke’s associates in February, 1943, trying to make someone link him to Allied espionage, as such a link would have enabled them to ignore Eguchi and arrest him anyway.[12]

Finally, what are we to make of the claim that Hyde was ‘asking for it’? Hyde’s fellow conspirator Marcus da Silva is a useful witness. After Hyde’s arrest, he and Chester Bennett were told that their names were on a Japanese ‘blacklist’ and advised to go into hiding:

(When) British bank accountant and ring leader of this small group of amateur volunteer espionage men was taken into custody by the Japanese, a Chinese secret agent employed by the gendarmerie came to Bennett. The Japanese have prepared a blacklist in Hong Kong of people they suspect, he warned, and you and Da Silva are both on it. You had better stay hidden.

Bennett and Da Silva talked it over soberly. They knew the odds were stacked heavily against them and that to continue their activities meant almost certain arrest. And they felt that arrest would almost as surely result in execution because the Japanese were growing sterner as the tide of war turned against them. But they decided the stakes were worth the gamble. Every ship they cost Japan was a step toward Allied victory. And hundreds of Stanley Camp internees would face lingering starvation if they failed to send in money for extra food raised by selling promissory notes to wealthy Indian and Swiss merchants.[13]

I think Hyde felt the same. Expecting arrest, torture and execution, he felt impelled to continue to do as much good as possible before the trap closed on him.

Tony Banham is currently working on the Lindsay Ride papers and I hope that the full story of Hyde’s activities will one day emerge. My guess is that they were even more extensive than I’ve been able to indicate here.  Alastair Sinton’s group, which is known to have smuggled messages in and out of Stanley, was linked with him,[14] as was Thomas Monaghan, a Canadian involved in helping escapers:

Mr. Hyde and others thought it their patriotic duty to form a branch of the British intelligence service… (and) Mr. Mongahan had joined.[15]

I suspect that there were few activities of the Hong Kong resistance that he didn’t take part in, give advice to, or at least know about.

I’ve been able to find out very little about the rest of Charles Hyde’s life.

He joined the HKSBC in 1924. In 1935 the Bank opened a Kowloon Branch in the Peninsula Hotel and he was working at the this branch in 1941.[16] At that time, the Bank operated a ‘ten years in the East before marriage’ policy;[17] Hyde’s age at death was 45,[18] and the age of his son Michael at the time was 5,[19] which fits with a relatively late marriage.

Before the war he used to go yachting, sometimes sailing with telephone engineer sLes Fisher and James Anderson in the ‘Tern’ – he ‘was always full of fun’.[20]

After his arrest, his wife, Florence Eileen, and their young son Michael were interned in Bungalow D alongside Thomas and Evelina. Thomas (and probably Evelina) was with Mrs. Hyde on the day of her husband’s execution.

Mrs. Hyde died of bowel cancer on September 7, 1944.[21] After his mother’s death, Michael Hyde was adopted by Lady Mary Grayburn, so he stayed in Bungalow D. He died in a freak firing range accident on his national service in 1956.[22]

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[1] Frank King, History of the HKBSC,Volume 111, 1988, 624

[2]For George Kotewall another man arrested as a result of this betrayal see http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stanley_camp/message/133

[3] Edwin Ride, British Army Aid Group, 1981, 205.

[4] See http://gwulo.com/node/10950

[5] King, 621-622.

[6] King 621, 624.

[7] King, 624.

[8] King, 612.

[9] Ride, 205.

[10] https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2011/11/16/chester-bennett-the-american-hero-of-hong-kong/

[11] Emily Hahn, China To Me, 1986 ed., 404.

[12] See https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2011/12/10/the-reign-of-terror-3-the-courage-of-dorothy-lee/

[13] http://newspaperarchive.com/indiana-evening-gazette/1946-01-30/page-9 (lightly edited due to corrupt source).

[14] https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2012/03/31/alexander-christie-sinton/

[15] Father Burke, cited in Alan Birch and Martin Cole, Captive Years, 1982, 103-104.

[16] King, 626.

[17] King, 285.

[18] http://www.twgpp.org/information.php?id=1817808

[19] D. O. B. given as 2.2.38 on the Stanley Camp Log, IWM MISC 932.

[20] Les Fisher, I Shall Remember, 229, 240.

[21] IWM MISC 932.

[22] Tony, Banham, We Shall Suffer There, Kindle Location, 5049.

Thomas’s Work (6) More on the Delivery Drivers

In a previous post[1] I wrote about the courageous truck drivers who worked for the Medical Department in the first half of 1942, delivering supplies to the hospitals, including the bread baked by Thomas and his fellow bakers. I’ve sometimes wondered why, with one exception, they were all American. (The exception, Thomas and Evelina’s best man, the Britisher Owen Evans, had early worked as a volunteer ambulance driver in the Sino-Japanese War, so he was an obvious choice).

It seems that Americans had already taken over transport duty during the fighting (December 8-25) because the network was in danger of collapsing due to the defection of many Chinese drivers, some of whom were fifth columnists, perhaps infiltrated into Hong Kong by the Japanese amongst the hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Sino-Japanese War who flooded into the colony after the conflict came close to the Hong Kong border in late 1938. Others probably didn’t see why they should risk their lives driving through shell fire and air raids for a racist imperial system. In any case, the defections left many gaps to be filled.

In a report to the American consul general in Hong Kong, quoted in the Miami News of September 13, 1942,[2] N. F. Allman, Provost of the American Internees’ Council at Stanley said:

During the war the transport of the medical department very soon began to fail. Likewise, the transport of the food control. The transport of both these departments was virtually taken over, reformed and kept going by American civilian volunteers.

Not all the Americans who worked with Selwyn-Clarke after the surrender were in place during the fighting, but it seems that some of them were, and there was already a ‘tradition’ of American drivers. It seems that although Americans are not absolutely forbidden to join foreign militaries (at least not today[3]) they are strongly encouraged not to, so voluntary service as a driver was obviously a popular option for those who wished to play a part in the defence of Hong Kong. They would have been particularly welcome because before the war the military had refused to withhold Europeans from the Volunteers to act as drivers, claiming that the length of the line they had to guard meant that not a single man could be spared for this service (M. F. Key, cited in John Luff, The Hidden Years, 1967, 134).

Charles Schafer remained behind to the last minute in Hong Kong to help wind up the affairs of the China National Aviation Corporation, a Chinese airline, but also an affiliate of his company, Pan Am. As the Japanese stormed into Hong Kong, CNAC managed to get a few transport planes into Kai Tak airport (all the planes there had been destroyed on the ground) and ferried many important Chinese politicians and officials, including Madame Sun–Yatsen, to safety in Chungking.[4] When Kai Tak Airport was finally destroyed by the British, any possibility of escape for Shafer disappeared. He caught the last ferry from Kowloon to the Island and joined a British medical detachment.[5] After the surrender he continued his association with the Medical Department, ending up working in Dr. Selwyn-Clarke’s team:

He (Selwyn-Clarke) immediately contacted the head of the Japanese medical service and offered the full support of his staff. He asked for passes for the doctors and for the truck drivers who would supply food and fuel for the hospitals and these were granted.[6]

In another deposition, he referred to himself as part of ‘Selwyn-Clarke’s motor corps’.[7] It seems that these drivers might have delivered wood as well as bread and medicines.[8] The Miami News article also has them moving hospital patients and driving Red Cross trucks (although whether these trucks belonged to the Red Cross before they were used by this team is another question).

Shafer and fellow driver Albert Fitch were involved in a daring piece of smuggling when the Americans were repatriated. The leader in this operation seems to have been John Morton. Thanks to these men (and unnamed helpers) the entire financial records of the Hongkong Bank’s last day of operations before the Japanese takeover were hidden in a typewriter and taken out of Hong Kong. Morton, Shafer, Fitch and other Americans preparing for repatriation gave a list of items they wished to take with them onto the ship to Mr. Oda of the Japanese Foreign Affairs Department. Most of the items were chosen so as to guarantee refusal – camers, trunks, radios and so on. They rightly reasoned that having said no so many times, Oda would nod through typewriters. The group purhased some identical models, and John Morton carefully secreted the Bank records – ‘typed on the thinnest onion-skin paper you could imagine’ – inside his. At one point, all seemed lost when a second round of searches led to the confiscation of all the typewriters on the grounds that Fitch had put some carbon paper into his and the typing visible on this was thought to contain coded messages. Luckily they found Mr. Oda who managed to over-ride the Army confiscators and just before sailing they saw a tug  transferring the typewriters on board:

Albert Fitch was, I think, as young as I was, but he was impetuous. He wanted to go right down and demand the typeriters, right then; but we restrained him.

Five days later the typewriters, hidden records intact, were restored to them. (Alan Birch and Martin Cole, Captive Years, 107-110)

Florida resident Eugene Pawley was another driver who was formerly with the CNAC and found himself stuck in Hong Kong. Rather surprisingly, he didn’t have high enough priority to get on the CNAC evacuation flights so was forced to stay behind in occupied Hong Kong.[9] This lack of priority is a little surprising because Eugene was the brother of William Pawley, the President of CNAC. With William and the third brother, Edward, he was involved in the setting up of the famous ‘Flying Tigers’ unit of American airmen, volunteers who helped the Chinese resist the Japanese in southern China until America itself entered the war.[10] Edward Pawley and his wife Idah were friends of the writer Emily Hahn, who mentions them a number of times in her memoir China To Me.[11] Eugene Pawley arrived in China in 1939 and after repatriation in late June 1942 eventually headed the China Desk for the Office of Strategic Services.[12] William Pawley became Ambassador to Brazil after the war; he seems to have been involved in promoting CIA (successor to the OSS) covert operations against Castro, and one conspiracy theorist has even suggested he put up the money for the assassination of John Kennedy!

It seems that another CNAC employee Max Lessner, who’s not in Gwen Dew’s list, was also a driver, but one who was allowed to leave for Macao in March.[13] Lessner was a Rumanian with business experience in China who eventually became Pan American’s airport manager at New Delhi.[14]

A fourth driver, Carl Neprud, was born in Coon Valley, Wisconsin in 1889. His old university,Wisconsin (class of 1912) provides some general biographical details:

(Neprud) was taken into the Chinese Maritime Customs in 1913 with which service he has been connected ever since. He has been stationed in different parts of China and held different posts such as appraising commissioner in Shanghai, tariff secretary and more recently, (since the war) as liaison officer between occupied and unoccupied China.[15]

The same source tells us a little about his work during the war:

During the war he and his group supplied First Aid for civilians (and soldiers in many cases) so he got to the front lines rather frequently…Living in a strong granite building on the waterfront he was across the bay from the Japs on the mainland, and at one time counted 14 Jap “hits” on the front of his building.

The description of the events after the fighting suggests that he wasn’t the only one of the American drivers to have been working for the Red Cross during the fighting:

After the surrender as the Jap army of occupation moved into Hongkong, Neprud and other members of his committee were allowed to operate for the relief of the civilians, as the Jap military had no machinery set up to care for civilians.[16]

It seems that the June 29/30 repatriation came as no surprise:

 Neprud early had the feeling that the American civilians would be repatriated soon, because the Japs would want their own people back. In each drive the Japs would pick a land wherein English was spoken, and their own people who had lived in America would be tremendously useful in translating documents.

But it seems there was still more to Carl Neprud. The St. Petersburg Times for October 24, 1943 reported:

As an agent of the Chungking government for several years, Neprud disguised himself as a city health service ambulance driver when the Japs invaded Hongkong for fear that he would be recognized.

So Neprud was one of those who hoped to get out of Hong Kong before the Japanese discovered who he was. My guess is that Eugene Pawley felt the same way, as he must have been nervous about the possibility of the occupiers getting to know of his family’s connection with the Flying Tigers.

Neprud continued his association with the Nationalist authorities:

 A Chungking agent for commercial and financial affairs in the Orient, Neprud is still representing the Chungking government at Washington, D.C., studying tariff and trade matters.[17]

This article in the St. Petersburg Times reports Neprud’s 1943 plan to drive the Japanese out of China with 500 planes. [18]

He was appointed to Economic Cooperation Administration[19] Mission to Austria in October 1951 and died in October 1976.[20] His daughter became a pioneer woman stockbroker.[21]

These drivers (with the exception of Lessner) are mentioned by Dew but not in Thomas’s 1946 article in The British Baker, which might mean that they were not very involved in delivering the bread he was baking in the Qing Loong Bakery. I’ve not as yet been able to find out any more than is contained in my original post about his best man, Owen Evans. Another American, Charles Winter, in the letter he wrote to Thomas’s parents, mentions his pre-war work with the Medical Department, but I’ve not been able to find out in what capacity. He might have been one of the ‘committee’ (see above) who worked alongside Neprud in the fighting and continued to drive for the Health Department after the surrender. I can find no other trace of  Dr. Robert Henry. Thomas calls the latter ‘Dr. Henry’ and the first name comes from Gwen Dew (and is confirmed by the Miami News article). Emily Hahn mentions ‘Dr. Jim Henry’ as President of the American-staffed Lingnan University, but it’s unlikely to be him. Research continues, and I’d love to hear from anyone who has more information about any of these men.

Update:

Elizabeth Ride has kindly sent me a June 1942 letter from her father, Lindsay Ride, the founder of the resistance organisation the BAAG, to Dr. Court, a contact in the French Hospital. In it there is an interesting reference to two of these drivers:

Will you kindly tell the bearer where he can find GENE PAWLEY and ALBERT FITCH who are supposed to be driving supply trucks. I have a message from Ed Pawley who wishes his brother Gene to come out…

Colonel Ride goes on to urge Court to make up a party with the two Americans and assures them they’ll be well looked after. But by this time the Americans were on the brink of repatriation, and Court never ‘came out’. He wasn’t one of those arrested at the French Hospital on May 2, 1943, though, so it seems that his contacts with the BAAG remained undetected.

Another document supplied by Elizabeth Ride confirms that only Dr. Henry, Charles Winter and Owen Evans delivered bread to the hospitals. It also contains something about Owen Evans that’s so interesting it deserves a post to itself.

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[1] https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2012/03/30/thomass-work-3-outside-stanley/

[2] http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2206&dat=19420913&id=MQYtAAAAIBAJ&sjid=T9QFAAAAIBAJ&pg=4602,2075440

[3] http://travel.state.gov/law/citizenship/citizenship_780.html. John Luff (The Hidden Years, 179) claims American men were legally forbidden to serve with the Hong Kong Volunteers, which may well have been the case as the conscription order of July 1940 was undoubtedly nationality specific. The current US position seems to be that their nationals are liable to call-up under the laws of any country they’re resident in, but should do their best, within the law, to avoid such service.

[4] Charles Drage, The Life and Times of General Two-Gun Cohen, 1954, 285; //http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_National_Aviation_Corporation

[5] http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2206&dat=19420913&id=MQYtAAAAIBAJ&sjid=T9QFAAAAIBAJ&pg=4602,2075440

[6] Quoted in Alan Birch and Martin Cole, Captive Years: The Occupation of Hong Kong 1941-45, 1982, 24.

[7] http://www.cnac.org/schafer01.htm

[8] http://www.cnac.org/schafer01.htm

[9] http://www.cnac.org/wings_over_asia_v1.pdf

[10] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_D._Pawley

[11] E.g. 180-181 (1986 ed.).

[12] http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=wRY7DPPKYXcC&pg=PA101&lpg=PA101&dq=eugene+pawley+oss&source=bl&ots=7SD-CKK6sA&sig=9bpdtGTIWsF0itIo8SF9a1aVpAM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=SJWGT4-0Bo_98QPmz-XvBw&ved=0CDsQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=eugene%20pawley%20oss&f=false

[13] http://www.cnac.org/lessner01.htm

[14] http://www.cnac.org/lessner01.htm

[15] http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/UW/UW-idx?type=goto&id=UW.v44i2&isize=text&submit=Go+to+page&page=104

[16] http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/UW/UW-idx?type=goto&id=UW.v44i2&isize=text&submit=Go+to+page&page=113

[17]http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=888&dat=19431024&id=BrtSAAAAIBAJ&sjid=En0DAAAAIBAJ&pg=2501,1979906

[18] http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=888&dat=19431024&id=BrtSAAAAIBAJ&sjid=En0DAAAAIBAJ&pg=2501,1979906

[19] An organisation involved in implementing the Marshall Plan.

[20] http://scdb.swem.wm.edu/wiki/index.php/Carl_Neprud

[21] http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1988-04-26/news/8801260452_1_shanghai-japanese-school-board

Thomas’s Work (5) The ‘Siege Biscuits’

In a previous post[1] I’ve described Thomas collaboration with Dr. Geoffrey Herklots in the baking of a nutrition-rich ‘siege biscuit’ designed to help the population of Hong Kong withstand a siege of three months:

With the enthusiastic co-operation of a master baker and after about thirty trials, it was found possible to make a hard siege-ration biscuit from this meal and whole wheat flour. Each biscuit, which weighed half an ounce and cost half a cent, contained more than a man’s daily requirements of available iron, two biscuits enough nicotinic acid to prevent pellagra and four {biscuits} enough thiamin (sic) chloride to prevent beriberi on a polished rice diet.

After the surrender, Selwyn-Clarke was given permission by Captain Tanaka, the officer in charge of Lane, Crawford, to take and distribute these biscuits.

One of my first encounters with helpfulness from a Japanese officer concerned the reserve of four-gallon tins of biscuits, made of soya bean and wheaten flour with the addition of thiamine hydrochloride powder (against beri-beri), which I had had baked in the leading department-store of Lane Crawford against the anticipated siege.[2]

As the biscuits were clearly still in the hands of Lane, Crawford, my guess is that they were stored in the ‘big Lane and Crawford food warehouse’ from which volunteer lorry driver Gwen Priestwood picked up food to deliver during the fighting.[3]

Selwyn-Clarke had access to a supply of these biscuits. In October 1942 he was told about two Canadian missionaries who had avoided internment and were living in their flat in  Kowloon. He sent a representative, Miss L.,  to visit them:

Miss L. proved hesrelf to be as capable as she was charming and had come prepared to help, bringing with her some bread and a few ‘siege biscuits’. These biscuits had been compounded by a British dietician before the war, and were supposed to be sol nutritious that two biscuits would supply a man sufficient sustenance for a day.

F. D. & H. F. Collier, Covered Up In Kowloon, 1947, 68

However, one of the few certain things about the later history of these biscuits is that Selwyn-Clarke didn’t get all of them. Just before Thomas and Evelina were moved from the French Hospital to Stanley, those in the Camp had a surprise; former Colony hangman R. E. Jones recorded this in his diary for April 21, 1943:

1 lb. vitamin biscuits issued. The Japs gave them to us but they were ours in the first place & have been allowed to go musty. A rats (sic) nest was found in one tin.

In fact, the Japanese seem to have a huge supply of these biscuits:

The Hong Kong Government had prepared large stores of these in readiness for a lengthy siege, but the capitulation had come so quickly that few of them were used until later, when the Japanese put them on sale. Afterwards they were sold off readily, the price rising up to six yen per pound.

Colliers, 1947, 68

Dr. Herklots tells us that the siege biscuits had been sealed in petrol tins,[4] but these had obviously been removed and stored without proper protection.

Did any of these biscuits fall into the hands of the internees themselves? Yes, Dr Herklots tell us that more than two hundred of those petrol tins were smuggled into Stanley (p. 5 ‘Food and War in Hong Kong’). However, it’s not always possible to know if references to biscuits are to these, as there were at least two other kinds of biscuit in the Camp. Firstly, the Red Cross provided biscuits, which, both before and after the spring 1944 re-arrangement of the ration system, were part of the payment to those internees who did extra work.[5] Secondly, the Camp bakers, including Thomas of course, baked biscuits inside the Camp using soya flour, and it is these that are most difficult to separate from the ‘siege biscuits’. We’ve already seen that Selwyn-Clarke believed the ‘siege’ biscuits to be baked from soya bean flour, while according to Herklots (who’s more likely to be correct) the flour was whole wheat mixed with fresh peanut oil. This suggests that we can’t necessarily trust those accounts that talk about soya bean biscuits.

Rations in Stanley Camp were bad enough, but those in Stanley Prison were so low and lacking in nutrients – just rice, salt, and if the prisoners were lucky a little vegetable matter – that anyone not receiving supplementary food, as was the case with Chinese prisoners without well-off friends outside, soon succumbed to one of the diseases of malnutrition. Allied prisoners were luckier: their wives or the Camp authorities were always willing to send in food. But sometimes there seems to have been a blanket ban on such parcels, at other times they were accepted but not delivered. Sir Vandeleur Grayburn and his deputy David Edmondston both died of malnutrition (and medical neglect) while in the Prison, Grayburn after a relatively short time,[6] and even after extra food was smuggled to him (see below).

Banker Andrew Leiper was held in Stanley Prison from January/February 1944 until June 1944, when the Allied prisoners were transferred to Canton, and he records that in late May 1944 the seven internee prisoners were allowed to receive ‘small packets of food’ from the Camp. These packets – ‘wrapped in coarse paper bags’ – included ‘two small soya bean biscuits’. The extra food ‘undoubtedly helped to save our lives’.[7]

Thomas mentions these beans, which he used to make bread:

From time to time we managed to get maize and Soya beans which we roasted and added to the dough, obtaining the best results by using ¼ oz. to 4 oz. flour.[8]

But there’s no reason to believe that he and the other bakers didn’t bake biscuits with this flour too, even this early. As we’ll see below, they certainly did so in 1945.

William Anderson, who was arrested on June 28, 1943[9] and taken to Stanley Prison the next day,[10] states that had ‘Vitamin biscuits’ and ante beri-beri pills sent daily into him from Stanley while in prison but didn’t always get them.[11] It’s possible that he was sent the ‘siege biscuits’ before Leiper joined him in Prison, but it’s also possible he was referring to the same soya biscuits, which were a useful source of Vitamin B.

Anderson and Leiper had these items sent in legitimately: police officer George Wright-Nooth smuggled in supplies to Sir Vandeleur Grayburn and four policemen who’d been imprisoned after a failed escape attempt. These foods included ‘vitaminized chocolate’ – itself smuggled in on the ration truck by the courageous Leung Hung[12] – and ‘small biscuits’. Chocolate and biscuits had the advantage that they were easily concealed and left nothing behind (tins, for example) that the prisoners would find difficult to conceal.

The only clear indication that the internees managed to get their hands on some of the siege biscuits – either by smuggling or through legitimate channels – is provided by Block 9 Quartermaster George Gerrard.

In late March, 1945, the Camp authorities started to prepare for an Allied landing on Hong Kong Island. They realised that this would obviously mean an end to the rations the Japanese sent into Stanley, and that, if they were lucky enough not to be killed outright, they would be strictly confined to Camp so that they couldn’t offer any assistance to the attacking forces. The Camp had already suffered accidental casualties from  American bombing, so measures were taken to prepare to meet problems caused by armed conflict as well as to ensure some kind of food supply. R. E. Jones ‘s diary gives us glimpses of this process:

March 22, 1945 1^st. aid kits being prepared in Camp districts.

March 24 1^st. Aid, Salvage & demolition squads being formed in each block in case of emergency.

March 25 Emergency rations issued to Blocks (1 Tin meat, 38 biscuits & 8 multi-vit. Tablets. North in talk reckons on things happening here between now & end of April.

 Mabel Redwood – who knew Evelina well from their joint involvement in Catholic activities in Stanley – tells us a little more about these biscuits:

 Over a period of time, each kitchen gradually built up a stock of gritty biscuits, made by mixing dry ground rice with soya bean flour, baked hard. These were to be our iron rations, and not entrusted to individuals….Each of us had to hand in an empty tin of stock size, which was filled with biscuits, then the whole block’s supply was put under lock and key in the block.[13]

 As Block 9 quartermaster, George Gerrard was directly involved in these preparations:

28 March, 1945 (W)e are making preparations in case there should be a landing here and food difficult to obtain during the first few days. I have taken charge of a tin of mutton per head and tins of {siege}[14] biscuits equivalent to 38 biscuits per head also other biscuits are being made in camp…

This does seem to imply that there were two kinds of biscuit, one baked in Camp, the other outside. But Thomas seems to suggest that he didn’t see the siege biscuits again until after he’d left Stanley:

 (T)he biscuits when we came out of Stanley Internment Camp in 1945 were in excellent condition…. [15]

This might indicate that the biscuits weren’t available for testing until after he’d left the camp. However, it’s also possible that he was referring a little loosely to the period that followed the Japanese surrender when the internees were technically free but forbidden to leave Stanley because of the very real dangers that would have awaited them in town – Japanese soldiers who refused to accept the surrender, looters, the absence of any organised services and so on. We do know that some biscuits, either ‘siege’ or soya bean flour, were released at this time. Barbara Anslow was kind enough to provide me with her memories of this issue:

Thank God these biscuits weren’t required under siege conditions, but they were issued to us after news of the Jap surrender but before the Fleet arrived 2 weeks later – they were very very hard, but still much appreciated. [16]

But Barbara Anslow too is unsure as to the source of these biscuits:

In the last year in camp, when it seemed likely that the Allies might try to re-take Hong Kong, arrangements were made to store ‘siege biscuits’ in case the camp was cut off from food supplies. 

Perhaps these were some of the supplies Selwyn-Clarke was able to appropriate from Tanaka, but it’s more likely they were made from rice in our kitchens by your Dad!  Each separate block was given a small supply, which was somehow kept under lock and key (two keys, I believe, so that the issue had to be sanctioned by two separate trusted internees).   

 

---

[1] https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2012/03/12/thomass-work-1/

[2] Footprints, 1975, 74. See also man in

[3] Gwen Priestwood, Through Japanese Barbed-Wire, 1944, 7.

[4] G. A. C. Herklots, ‘Food and War inHong Kong’, Nature, March 6, 1946.

[5] Geoffrey Emerson, Hong Kong Internment, 1973, 97.

[6] See:

https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2012/01/20/the-reign-of-terror-conclusion-on-the-stanley-peninsula/

https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2012/02/13/1944-4-two-deaths-a-move-and-a-release/

[7] G. A. Leiper, A Yen For My Thoughts, 1982, 203-204.

[8] Unpublish manuscript of article in The British Baker, September 1946.

[9] George Wright-Nooth, Prisoner of the Turnip Heads, 1994, 160-161.

[10] China Mail, April 4, 1947, page 2

[11] China Mail, October 17, 1945, page 2.

[12] See https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2012/03/31/alexander-christie-sinton/

[13] Mabel Redwood, It Was Like This, 2001, 179.

[14] Gerrard’s writing is difficult and the transcription was a heroic task; the word transcribed ‘seize’ here is presumably ‘siege’.

[15] Unpublished manuscript of British Baker article.

[16] http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stanley_camp/messages/1228c

‘Sail Away’ – the Stanley Camp Anthem

Barbara Anslow’s diary for July 25, 1942 records:

 Grand concert on Bowling Green.   Good new song – ‘We’re going to sail away, sail away etc.

It’s no accident that the song appeared just then: the American internees were repatriated on June 29/30, and the British were dreaming of following them. Lourenço Marques in Mozambique was neutral territory where they would switch from a Japanese to a western (in the case of the Americans Swedish) ship to take them home.

‘Sail Away’ quickly became the Camp anthem, a popular choice to end concerts. I think it was written by the Reverend Cyril Brown. Some accounts refer to Betty Drown as providing vigorous piano accompaniment, while others credit her with the composition (e.g. Alan Birch and Martin Cole, Captive Years, 1982, 48).

Sail Away

 We’ve seen your Stanley’s sights these many days & nights,

For England home & beauty how we pine!

We’re fed up now with roaming through graveyards in the gloaming,

But soon we’re going to leave it all, & we’ll gladly say, ‘Goodbye’.

We’re going to sail away, sail away

We hope internment here will end some day.

We want to go, tho’ we’ve got no dough

Yet we’re yearning to see the land that we love so.

We’re going to sail away, sail away,

And that and when this Camp embarks

There’ll be happy hearts and free

When we’re putting out to sea,

Afloat on a boat on the way to Lourenço Marques.

We’re ready for the trip, we can quickly pack our grip,

Our luggage is quite light & somewhat small,

We’ve lost our goods & houses, & we’ve lots of other grouses,

But still we’ve got our health & strength, so we haven’t lost our all.

We’re going to sail away etc.

Though we’re anxious soon to start, ‘twill be rather hard to part

With friends we’ll leave behind in loved Hong Kong.

But one day they’ll be learning they can look for our returning,

Who knows? Perhaps the time of waiting really won’t be long.

We’re going to sail away etc.

This number ends our show, but just before you go,

We’d like to day ‘Good Night’ & so to bed,

And if you’re feeling weary or just a little dreary

Remember there are sure to be some brighter days ahead.

We’re going to sail away etc.

 If you liked our last refrain

We’ll sing the song again,

Afloat on a boat on the way to Lourenço Marques.

‘My Generation’/Summary of Thomas’s Story

My generation – the so-called Baby Boomers – grew up in the relatively peaceful and democratic world won by the tremendous efforts and sufferings of those who had defeated the Nazis and their Japanese allies. At the end of the war, this generation returned home, and with yet more sacrifice of their immediate comfort, created a system  that looked after our health and welfare  and educated us for free (in my case until the age of 21). Because of the long economic ‘boom’ that began in the early 1950s few of us suffered the poverty and hardship that had been the fate of most human beings in previous history.

 So, quite naturally, in the mid-1960s we rose up and almost universally complained about how badly we’d been treated!

 In the 1980s I was part of a performance poetry group in the south east of England. We adopted a ‘cabaret’ style, very different from the sedateness of the usual ‘poetry reading’. In this poem, written in 2012 but adopting this style, the lines in italics are spoken by a Baby Boomer, the counterpointed lines in ordinary print as if by Thomas Edgar. They summarise his ‘story’ during the war years – there are a few plausible assumptions, but  most of it is documented elsewhere on this blog.

 The Baby Boomer’s lines are, of course, from the classic Who anthem ‘My Generation’ (1965), except for the concluding demand to get out of the way of the emerging superior type of humanity (the Baby Boomers, of course) – that’s from David Bowie’s  ‘Oh You Pretty Things’ (1971). They should be imagined delivered with a suitable arrogance, accompanied by much self-important strutting around the stage.

 My Generation

People try to put us down just because we get around…

 On December 8, 1941, the day the Japanese attacked Hong Kong, I was appointed Deputy Supply Officer Bakeries. By the end of the fighting I was baking for the entire civilian population of Hong Kong Island and for the armed forces. For the first week of the war I slept on my office chair, after that I was given a camp bed.

 Ain’t trying to cause no big sensation…

 After the Japanese captured the mainland, the bakery was caught between our own guns and those of the enemy. On December 18 they landed on the Island, and on December 21 the bakery became too dangerous to continue operating. I moved the staff  to five smaller Chinese bakeries and tried to keep production constant.

 Just talkin’ ‘bout my generation…

 For the whole eighteen days of the fighting Hong Kong was being constantly shelled and bombed from the air, the food supply was in chaos and people were starving. A friend brought his lodger to see me to ask if I could her get some food. She was a pretty woman, half-Chinese, half-Portuguese, and we got on well together, even though most British people didn’t approve of relationships between whites and Eurasians in those days.

 My generation, baby, my generation.

 Hong Kong surrendered on Christmas afternoon. I was told to go to my company headquarters and wait for the next day, when the Japanese would take control of Hong Kong Island. We were all scared as we’d heard that some of our men who’d surrendered had been massacred during the fighting. And I was worried for Evelina because everyone knew that many women would be raped. But we were separated now and I didn’t know if I’d ever see her again.

Luckily the Japanese officer in charge of our building was Captain Tanaka, who treated us well, although no-one was allowed to enter or leave for 13 days. Then I was allowed to start baking bread for the hospitals.

 Why don’t you all fade away…

 In late January most of the other British and American civilians were sent to Stanley Internment Camp, but I stayed out and carried on baking. I saw Evelina again and we soon realised we were in love.

 Don’t try and dig what we all say…

We were married on June 29, 1942 and Captain Tanaka was one of the guests. We went to live together in the French Hospital. There were about 20 of us British there, bakers and medical workers, and our leader was a doctor called Selwyn Selwyn-Clarke.

 Things they do look awful cold…

 I was happy to be with Evelina, and things weren’t too bad at first. Not for the British at any rate. But I couldn’t stand what they were doing to the Chinese. You’d see them beaten or killed in the street for trivial offences. Many of them just fell down and died of starvation. Sometimes I saw the Japanese rounding them up and putting them in junks and sinking them for target practice.

 Hope I die before I get old…

 At the start of 1943 we were getting more and more scared as the Japanese police thought we were all spies. They started to arrest some of the Chinese and Eurasians working with us. They tortured them to get them to say that Selwyn-Clarke was a spymaster, but he wasn’t, and they couldn’t make them lie. He was smuggling food and medicine to our people in the Camps, but he wasn’t spying.

 My generation, just talkin’ ‘bout my generation.

 They came for Selwyn-Clarke early in the morning of May, 2, 1943. They arrested some other doctors too. They shut down the hospital for five days while they searched the whole place. Nobody was allowed in or out. Evelina and I were terrified. We all were.

 On May 7 they sent 18 of us into Stanley Camp. I felt safer for the moment, but I was still worried Selwyn-Clarke would tell them that I’d committed some kind of crime – all of us had done things that the Japanese had forbidden. But soon after we arrived in Camp I was cheered when the Red Cross delivered a card from my mother – it was the first news I’d had of my family for two years.

 We shared a tiny room in Bungalow D with another couple. We hadn’t had much to eat back in Hong Kong, but there was even less food in Stanley. It was good to be amongst British people, though, and the camp was in a beautiful place by the sea and we could walk around and visit our friends as much as we wanted.

 My generation, just talkin’ ‘bout my generation.

 They tortured Selwyn-Clarke for months but he never admitted anything. We were living in the same bungalow as his wife and daughter. They called her ‘Red Hilda’ before the war, but by the end of it all her hair had turned white.

 On the day before our first wedding anniversary the police started arresting people in Camp.

 They said that there were secret radios in Stanley, and that some people had been sending out illegal messages using the lorry that brought in our rations. I was scared because I was baking again and the flour I used came in on the lorry. They took people to Stanley Prison where they tried to get them to confess and to name anyone else involved.

 On August 6, 1943 Sir Vandeleur Grayburn, the head of the HKSBC, died of malnutrition in that prison. He was one of those left in town and he’d been arrested in March for smuggling money into Stanley to help the people buy extra food and medicines. Lady Mary Grayburn was another one living in Bungalow D. She didn’t see her husband before he died.

 On October 29 they executed some of those who’d been arrested. It was on a beach near the camp. Mr Frederick Hall, who’d played bowls in the same company team as me, was beheaded for sending messages through the ration lorry. Mr Charles Hyde was beheaded on the same day. He’d been arrested in town for sending money into camp and being in contact with the Hong Kong resistance. I was with his wife at the time of his execution. She also lived in Bungalow D.

In February 1944 they stopped sending meat and flour into Stanley. I began to make bread out of rice.

On September 7, 1944 Mrs Hyde died of bowel cancer, but everyone said it was because of what had happened to her husband. Lady Grayburn adopted their son, Michael, and we all tried to keep going.

Early in 1945 Evelina got ill and needed an operation. At the time we were living on filthy rice and vegetables with an ounce or two of fish. I’d sold all my valuables in camp so I had some money and I managed to buy Evelina a boiled egg on the black market. It gave her a little more strength to recover.

Some people were always talking about what they would do after Camp and how they would live. I never did that because I got friendly with a Formosan guard and he told me we’d all be shot the day the Allies landed on one of the main Japanese islands. Anyway, they stopped sending us fish in February and I reckoned we’d all starve to death before 1945 was over.

 The thing that saved us was the atomic bomb. Without that we’d  never have walked out of Stanley Camp.

 Most of us had lost everything and Hong Kong was a complete mess. We started again and built the place up as fast as we could. It took me months to get the bakery working. I wasn’t allowed to go home until the summer of 1946, one of the last to be given leave.

When the boys were born we decided not to talk to them about the war. We wanted to put that behind us and not upset them. I don’t know if that was the right decision. Brian seems very angry all the time and we don’t talk much.

 Let me make it plain:

You gotta make way for the Homo Superior.

You gotta make way for the Homo Superior.

The Purposes of this Blog (1)

About six months ago I had a dream. I was with my mother in the front room of a building – in typical dream fashion it both was and wasn’t Bungalow D in Stanley Camp. There were large glass doors, perhaps leading to a veranda, and we could see beyond that, but nothing out there was clearly visible.

I told her something about Stanley that made us both cry.

Thomas’s Work (4): Baking In Stanley

Getting There

 On May 5 diarist R. E. Jones recorded that 18 people were on their way to Camp from the French Hospital. This means that the Japanese must have taken a decision quite early in the process of searching the Hospital in the wake of Selwyn-Clarke’s arrest that most of the Allied nationals interned there were not involved in what they genuinely (but wrongly) believed was the Medical Director’s espionage ring. Two days later, on May 7, at about 2 p.m. the 18 arrived and began their lives as dwellers in Bungalow D.

I’ve never seen an account of their journey from Causeway Bay, but my guess is that what they saw was pretty much the same as the scenes observed by banker Gerald Leiper who made a similar trip a month or two later:

The journey to Stanley was like a visit to some forgotten scenes of childhood, where everything, although recognisable, had changed.

The previously densely crowded streets of Wanchai were almost deserted. From Stubbs Road junction we continued our lonely progress through a landscape where only the occasional isolated Chinese could be seen on the hillside. On the rising approach road to Wong Nei Chong Gap, and on the reverse decline, the dense vegetation had encroached on the road from both sides, and at several places the road had disappeared under a carpet of lantana and other creepers.

The ruins of houses previously occupied by friends were barely discernible through the thick mass of jungle growth which engulfed them, and the only sign of human life was at Repulse Bay where a few Japanese officers were seen playing baseball in the grounds of the hotel.[1]

This suggests that Thomas and Evelina’s route would have been along the Wong Nai Chung Gap Road (passing the block of flats opposite the racecourse where they would live after the war) and down Repulse Bay Road to Stanley.

 If Thomas had been allowed to send any cards to his family in England from the French Hospital, they have not survived. Once in Camp, he rushed to take advantage of a scheme whereby the internees were allowed to send a letter, pre-dated to April 30, to enable another letter to be sent at the end of May.[2] Significantly, he came nowhere near to using the 200 words permitted.[3]

My guess is that he was still in terror as a result of the arrest of Dr. Selwyn-Clarke, who’d in effect been his boss for the last 15 months; but, for whatever reason, he didn’t have much to say. He got the card off so quickly that he hadn’t been assigned work, although there can have been little doubt what he was going to do now that he’d finally arrived in Camp

Food in Stanley: An Overview

 The bulk of the food consumed by the internees was provided by the Japanese; rations needed to be supplemented, and there were various means available: ‘gardens’, food parcels from friends in town (sent at the risk of torture and imprisonment), Red Cross parcels, the canteen, and, increasingly, the black market. The rations included flour until January 29, 1944[4] when the food sent in changed, either as a result of the transfer of Stanley from civilian to military control or the disruption of food supplies to Hong Kong caused by American action, or both.

Baking

In an earlier post I discussed Thomas’s situation at the end of June 1943, when a number of arrests were made in Camp, two of them because the men involved were canteen workers and part of a system of messages taken in and out of Camp by the ration lorry.[5] Although inextricably part of the ration system, Thomas might not have collected the flour himself:

Each morning the ration lorry drove into the camp and volunteers carried the large sacks of supplies to the various locations to be distributed.[6]

This source goes on to tell us that some of these ‘volunteers’ took the opportunity to steal part of what they were delivering. The food was delivered to a garage near the former Prison Warders’ Club.[7]

I don’t know for sure where Thomas baked his bread. There seems to have been a large kitchen in the Indian Quarters, and the Dutch, Norwegians and most of the smaller blocks had their own, St. Stephen’s and the Bungalows being served by a kitchen behind the College main building.[8] My guess is that Thomas worked in the last named. In August, 1944, the electricity supply in Stanley was cut off because of American bombing of Hong Kong, and was never reliable thereafter. The firewood ration was cut from 1 to 0.8 catties per day, so the Camp kitchens amalgamated.[9] As Emerson tells us that the ‘Victory tart’ (May 1945, see below) was baked by the St. Stephen’s bakers it was presumably this kitchen that was kept open.However, wherever it took place, baking does seem, as Emerson suggests, to have been organised on a block basis:

No. 10 block bakers busy making buns and cakes.[10]

Thomas tells us that he built his final oven in Stanley on the hot air principle. This implies that he built a series of ovens while in Camp. He describes this last one: 

 The last oven that we built I tried to make on the Hot Air principle, and although we had no cement, the top of the firebox being a manhole cover and the bottom of the oven roof tiles, our wood consumption was 6-ozs. for every 1-lb. of bread.[11]

Soon after the war, the Colonial Secretary Franklin Gimson left Hong Kong for London. In his farewell message he praised his fellow internees for their ingenuity and resourcefulness in using the scant materials available to them in Camp;[12] Thomas’s oven sounds like a good example of what he had in mind! On April 10, 1945 R. E. Jones notes ‘new baking oven’, and this might be the one Thomas describes. Jones, who was a prison officer and the Colony hangman before the war, and became one of the handymen in Camp, simply writes ‘baking oven’ as part of the next day’s entry, which possibly means he put some finishing touches to it.

In any case, Thomas tells us (see below) that the doughs had to be left overnight, and this suggests, if I’m right in thinking that bread making was block-based, there must have been at least one oven for each block.

At first the flour issue was 4.22 ozs per internee:

We made 4 –ozs. into bread, the remainder being used for kitchen work. We made straight Doughs (sic) until the flour was about 9-12 months old. After this the doughs used to go slack over night so I started using the sponge principle using 1/8 of the flour in the sponge and once again produced quite a good loaf. After the flour was two years old when the flour was added in the morning we had to mould it straight away as the dough used to crack and have a sour appearance. We could not cut down our sponge time as we had to be in our rooms before 8pm. and we could not leave them till 8am.[13]

Some times they managed to supplement the flour:

 At one time we managed to obtain rice polishings which we added to the bread at the rate of 1/8 oz. to 4 oz. flour. From time to time we managed to get maize and Soya beans which we roasted and added to the dough, obtaining the best results by using ¼ oz. to 4 oz. flour.[14]

Writing for his fellow bakers, Thomas doesn’t need to explain the reason for this practice: rice polishings provide crucial B Vitamins.[15] The deficiency of these vitamins in the diet caused much agony and some deaths in the POW Camp at Shamshuipo and were a constant problem in Stanley (see below). Soya beans were a form of much-needed protein and also contained other nutrients, being a particularly good source of potassium.[16] But they too had B vitamins, so when four policemen who’d spent two years in Stanley Prison for a failed escape attempt were released suffering from chronic malnutrition, they were treated with bran and soya beans in the camp hospital.[17]

George Gerrard tells us that on December 24, 1944, ‘soya bean flour’ was the basis for the breakfast congee, so it’s possible that not all of was turned into bread. But it’s not clear if Thomas’s soya bean flour was the stock being sold by the canteen ‘which we appreciate so much and goes so well with our rice and in our tea’.[18]

The flour issue lasted until early in 1944:

We produced bread until 29 January 1944. Then all flour, meat and fish to the camp finished.[19]

Thomas makes a similar claim in a letter home written soon after liberation.[20]  He’s not surprisingly right about the flour, and the re-appearance of meat towards the end of the war he probably judged as too small-scale to be worth mentioning. But he’s strangely wrong about the fish: there’s plenty of evidence that fish, albeit of low quality and in small amounts, was on the internees’ menu for another year or so.[21]

Diarist R. E. Jones provides evidence that the flour issue ceased one day earlier than recorded by Thomas: on January 28 he noted ‘no flour issued by Japs today’, and on the 29:

Military have taken over rationing from F.A.s {the Japanese Foreign Affairs Department} which explains no flour or sugar.

On January 30 he reported that ‘most blocks made rice biscuits’; however, ‘we’ (presumably his block, had a reserve of flour so got a half bread ration. and on the 31 that 8ozs of rice were issued in lieu of bread. This is further evidence that baking was organised in blocks.

The significance of the end of the flour ration is brought out by George Gerrard; in his diary ‘review of the week’ entry made on January 30, 1944, he wrote:

The Japs have stopped our flour ration (4 oz.) so our bread supply has gone west. They have given us an extra ration (4 oz.) of rice but that doesn’t compensate for the loss of the flour and consequently bread.

But, as so often, this was both good and bad news:

‘(O)f course the loss of the flour for bread is a serious business for us.

 However, it gives us the assurance that all is going well with our cause when the Japs cannot replenish stocks.[22]

In any case, once the flour ration was discontinued, Thomas’s experience making rice bread at the French Hospital came in useful:

After flour finished in the Camp we made a substitute bread from rice flour (ground in the Camp on Stone Mills). Although not very good it was better than nothing at all.[23]

 It seems as if some of at least of the stone mills were provided, after the end of the flour issue, by Mr. Zindel of the Red Cross.[24]

Former internee Barbara Anslow was kind enough to provide me with memories of this bread:

The Japs only sent flour into camp for a relatively short period.   During that time, the daily small bread roll was the highlight of our day!

When the flour supply stopped, the rice rations were ground and we each had a slice of rice bread every day: in fact it was more tasty than the roll and almost nutty in flavour.[25]

Anslow also records that the kitchen staff brought round the rolls daily to people’s rooms.[26]

 Dr. G. A. C. Herklots and The Yeast Prophylaxis

Life in Stanley was a daily struggle to get food and to stay healthy. Those with special skills were called on to give everything they had to help their fellow internees: medical personnel were frequently and rightly praised for their outstanding efforts, and working with them Dr. Geoffrey Herklots, not a doctor but a marine biologist with a broad and practically applicable range of scientific knowledge. Thomas had collaborated with him in pre-war days, trying to come up with a ‘siege biscuit’ which would be palatable to all races and contain the full daily requirement of basic vitamins.[27]

In the early days of Stanley, Dr. Herklots had been elecetd on to the Temporary Committee that ran the Camp until Colonial Secretary Franklin Gimson were sent there in March 1942. (G. B. Endacott and Alan Birch, Hong Kong Eclipse, 1978, 351.)  He lived with other medical staff in what had previously been a leprosarium (leprosy isolation unit), impressing them with his ability to keep cheerful under all circumstances although scaring them during the months he kept a poisonous bamboo snake in a glass-fronted biscuit tin beside his bed.[28]

Edith Hansom gives us another glimpse of Herklots:

A particularly intelligent internee named Mr. Geoffrey Herklots, a marine biologist, had a great knowledge about plants, and especially wild fruits and other bush cuisine. Mr Herklots gave generously of his time, teaching us what we could and couldn’t eat from the local berries and roots we found deep in the ground. I paid a great deal of attention to his instruction and was amazed to learn about the different vitamins and minerals contained in the plant life around the camp. This interesting and useful information enabled us to find a little extra to eat.[29]

Thomas’s brother, Wilfred, who was in contact with Dr. Herklots in 1985 and also had access to an article written by him and published in the Mass Education Bulletin of March 1946 states that Herklots former associate Mr. S. Y. Lin smuggled vitamin rich shark oil into Stanley. I’ve not been able to locate this article, but this story is plausible: other sources[30] state that shark oil was sent in via the Red Cross, but the provision of food, money and medicines through both ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ sources was a familiar one during the Hong Kong occupation.

At the end of the war he emerged with a plan to rationalise and improve Hong Kong’s fisheries. In the spirit of post-war reform, he was able to put it into effect: S. Y. Lin was able to help him improve the measures he’d devised in Stanleyby reporting on structures imposed by the Japanese in one of the few positive manifestations of their rule.[31]

Thomas helped Herklots to grow yeast cultures, a valuable source of the B vitamins needed to ease the suffering of the chronically malnourished. His manuscript gives no date for this work, but Geoffrey Emerson discusses a yeast prophylaxis that began in August 1943 that sounds similar to the one outlined by Thomas.[32] {Note: the prophylaxis actually began in late June or early July and was organised by Dr Kenneth Uttley: http://gwulo.com/node/18290} They used part of the tiny issue of flour made by the Japanese (potatoes when that wasn’t available), boiled it up and added hops, left it to mature for 48 hours, added more boiling water and scalded flour, and 24 hours later they had yeast.[33]

Again in conjunction with Dr. Herklots we experimented with six cases giving them doses of 2-oz. yeast (Hop) daily and in every case they showed an improvement. Thereafter 1-oz. yeast became a daily issue to the Camp.[34]

They were using a stranded (or ‘immobilised’) ambulance, to which only Herklots had the key, as a laboratory.[35] As a result, the rapid increase of beri beri was slowed and new cases held to 1-2% of the population. The general yeast prophylaxis lasted until August 1944 when electricity was cut off.[36]

 Christmas 1944

The Camp always did its best to mark major festivals, even in the desperate conditions of the long winter of 1944-45. Thomas writes:

(We made for Christmas 1944 and New Year) a loaf for the people from an emergency stock that the Camp had managed to save. This flour was then nearly four years old. The wastage, weevils etc. was 3-5%. The Australian flour had kept a lot better than the American flour and the wastage was lower. The colour of the dough and bread being greyish and even in a very hot oven we had difficulty getting colour on the crust.[37]

Geoffrey Emerson tells us that the loaf was a quarter pounder, [38] and Quaker missionary William Sewell remembered it well:

From its last remaining stocks the camp also gave each of us a small loaf of real bread. The flour was pre-war and decidely musty. Even the weevils in it had died of malnutrition, yet it tasted as good as rich plum-pudding. we realized again that the true Christmas is not a matter of commercial enterprise. (Strange Harmony, 1948, 158).

It seems from  George Gerrard’s diary that it was actually issued on Chistmas Eve:

We have also had a flour and bran loaf issued to us today, the first bread we have had since early in the year when the flour stock ran out.[39]

However, Gerrard was a block quartermaster, so it’s possible that it was distributed to the internees until the next day. Gerrard also records the possibility of a rice flour ‘loaf’ being issued on Christmas Day itself as one of the ‘extras’.

R. E. Jones doesn’t mention Thomas’s bread: he’s too bust listing all the other excellent food that was served up that day! Most people had kept something from the Red Cross parcels distributed in September,[40] so the internees celebrated Christmas well. I suspect that most of them knew that, one way or the other, it would be their last in Camp.

Baking this loaf seems to have been the kind of challenge Thomas was referring to when he praised the help given by RASC baker Hammond at a time when ‘all the ordinary principles of bread-making had to be abandoned’.[41] Yeast in this final period in Stanley, when flour was no longer provided and the hops seem to have run out, was made from potatoes and taros (bean root).

The Victory Tart

In May 1945 the bakers at St. Stephen’s produced a ‘Victory tart’ for the camp in celebration ofGermany’s surrender:

This was made of ground rice with a large red ‘V’ coloured with mercurochrome.[42]

Thomas doesn’t mention this, but he must have been involved.

Conclusion

As I’ll explain in a future post, the British community of ‘old Hong Kong’ tends to get a bad press both before and after the war. Not surprising: whatever virtues it might have had, it was also racist, narrow and obsessed with hierarchy. It would, of course, be nonsense to claim that everything changed with the 1941 Christmas Day surrender, but the civilians in Stanley Camp and the ‘civilians in uniform’ in Shamshuipo did show a remarkable ability to leave behind their privileged pre-war lives and use what few resources they had available to survive. Thomas’s work before and after he entered Stanley forms a small part of this story.

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[1] G. A. Leiper, A Yen For My Thoughts, 1982, 173.

[2] https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/note-on-date-of-arrival-in-stanley-and-images-of-places-of-internment/

[3] Gerrard Diary, entry for Saturday, May 1, 1943. This diary and that of R. E. Jones is available to members of the Yahoo Stanley Group:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stanley_camp/messages

The Jones diary is being published day by day on Gwulo:

http://gwulo.com/node/9660

[4] Unpublished manuscript of an article Thomas wrote for his trade paper, The British Baker, in September, 1946: hence UBB. Viewable at https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2011/10/18/thomas-edgar-some-documentation/

[5] https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2011/12/22/reign-of-terror-6-first-wedding-anniversary-stanley-camp/

https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2012/03/31/alexander-christie-sinton/

[6] Allana Corbin, Prisoners of the East, 2002, 153.

[7] Geoffrey Emerson, Hong Kong Internment, 1973, 82.

[8] This account is pieced together from, Emerson, 1973, 98-99, Corbin, 164, and George Wright-Nooth, Prisoner of the Turnip Heads, 1994, caption to illustration facing page 81.

[9] Emerson, 99.

[10] Jones Diary, July 17, 1944.

[11] UBB.

[12] China Mail, September 14, 1945, page 2.

[13] UBB

[14] UBB.

[15] Rice polishings: ‘the inner bran layer of rice rubbed off in milling and used as a source of thiamin, riboflavin, and niacin’ – http://www.merriam-webster.com/medical/rice%20polishings

[16] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soybean#Nutrition

[17] Jones, Diary, June 20, 1944.

[18] Gerrard diary, entry of Feb 27, 1944.

[19] UBB

[20] https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2011/10/21/two-pre-war-letters/

[21] e.g. Emerson, 1973, 99.

[22] Gerrard diary, entry made on Sunday, February 13, 1944.

[23] UBB.

[24] Emerson, 161.

[25] http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stanley_camp/messages/1197

[26] http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stanley_camp/messages/1228

[27] https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2012/03/12/thomass-work-1/

[28] Bill Ream, Too Hot For Comfort, 1988, 37.

[29] Corbin, 170-171.

[30] Chronology, in the possession of Brian Edgar.

[31] Philip Snow, The Fall of Hong Kong, 302-303; and:

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=IPgdfT3k2doC&pg=PA22&lpg=PA22&dq=herklots+lin+hong+kong+war&source=bl&ots=c26bEXSPnm&sig=Hg_PIfJaFOi92KPyxERAv7yK2rY&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Wfl7T4GIBYzb8gPw-bmSDQ&ved=0CCIQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=herklots%20lin%20hong%20kong%20war&f=false

For a little more on Herklots see http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stanley_camp/message/1205

[32] Emerson, 153.

[33] Ream, 37-38.

[34] UBB.

[35] John Stericker, A Tear for the Dragon, 1958, 191; Ream, 38.

[36] Emerson, 153

[37]UBB.

[38] Emerson, 100.

[39] Gerrard’s diary

[40] https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2012/02/17/1944-4-red-letter-day-george-gerrard-and-rudolph-zindel/

[41] Article by Thomas in The British Baker, September 1946, viewable at https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2011/10/18/thomas-edgar-some-documentation/

[42] Emerson, 1973, 102.