Lau Tak Kwong

Lau Tak Kwong was the brother of the subject of the previous post. The Captured Japanese Document1 that summarises one of the trials of resistance workers held on October 19, 1943, describes his ‘crimes’:

The accused LAU TAK KWONG was a fireman in the HONGKONG Gendarmerie. He is the brother of LAU TAK OI. About the middle of April 43 he was visited by LOIE FOOK WING2 who was living together with LAU TAK OI, and asked to help in espionage work against the Japanese on behalf of the British. He promptly agreed. Up to June 1943 he investigated and reported on fire brigade of the Gendarmerie and on the progress made in restoring various kinds of industry in HONGKONG. He also allowed his house to be used as a repository for various secret articles to be passed {to} LOIE FOOK WING.

The Captured Document gives his address as in the Chong Chin Ward, and his age as 38.

He was arrested for these resistance activities, probably in June 1943.

On a Sunday early in August, 1943 he was put in a cell (number 4) in Stanley Prison. His sister was put in cell 35 and John Fraser, the former Defence Secretary, were put in cells close by at the same time, so it’s reasonable to assume that, like them, he’d been previously held in the Gendarmerie in Stanley Village.3

He was tried October 19, 1943 as part of the largest group of agents to appear before the court that day.

The Stanley Military Cemetery Roll of Honour tells us he was the son of Kong Chat Koo of Hong Kong.4

He was executed alongside his sister and 31 others at Stanley Beach on October 29. In spite of what seem to have been his courageous and wide-ranging services I’ve been able to find out no more about him.

1Part of the Ride Papers, kindly sent to me by Elizabeth Ride.

2See previous post.

3George Wright-Nooth, Prisoner of the Turnip Heads, 1994, 172-173.

4http://www.roll-of-honour.org.uk/Cemeteries/Stanley_Military_Cemetery/html/l.htm

Lau Tak Oi (Gladys Loie)

A Japanese Document captured by the British Army Aid Group1 after the liberation of Hong Kong gives a summary of the largest of the three trials of resistance agents held on October 19, 1943; this is what this document has to say about one of the accused, Lau Tak Oi:

The accused LAU TAK OI lived together with LOIE FOOK WING from about April 1940. When, in March 1943, the latter went over to the British organisation in China, as explained above, the former helped to maintain communications with him, well knowing that he was engaged in espionage operations against the Japanese forces.

The Document also tells us Lau Tak Oi was 33 and lived in Lockhart Road.

Loie Fook Wing (David Loie) was perhaps the leading BAAG agent in Hong Kong – another page of the Captured Document states that he set up the ‘Hong Kong Command Post’, an espionage group consisting mainly of former police reservists, in late 1942.

Gladys Lau (or Loie), as she was known to the British, was a former Government nurse, who qualified on December 1, 1932.2 She was also on the 1940 list of midwives.3

It sounds from the Captured Document that she kept in touch with David Loie when he ‘went over to’ Waichow or Kukong in March 1943 to get instructions from the BAAG. However, contrary to ‘as explained above’, there is no clear statement that he made such a trip, and, in any case, it seems likely that, given Mr. Loie’s central role, for which he was posthumously decorated, she did many things that the Japanese never found about or didn’t record.

She was eventually arrested for her resistance work, probably in June, 1943.

She was taken into Stanley Prison and put in Cell 35 on a Sunday afternoon in early August. She was placed in the cell next to William Anderson, the Stanley camp Quartermaster who already been trying to remove an iron rod (formerly used to support hammock hooks) so that he could communicate with that cell. Soon he heard the new female prisoner picking from her end. The second day after she arrived, Mrs Loie deliberately dropped a basin of water in front of Anderson’s cell door and asked to be allowed to clear it up; luckily Anderson was watching from the ‘spyhole’ in the cell door and he was able to hear what she said to him:

Please try to get the rod out. If I cannot speak to some one I will go mad. I have a strong piece of wire and when I pass your cell again I will drop it and kick it under your door.

The third time she passed again the wire was kicked through to Anderson, and two days later the rod was loose enough to allow the two brave and resourceful prisoners easy conversation.

Mrs Loie asked him about her husband– she’d had no news of him since his arrest on May 31. Anderson suggested that as no-one had seen him, he might have escaped; in fact, David Loie had committed suicide on the day of his arrest by jumping from the roof of the Gendarme Headquarters in the former Supreme Court Building. This courageous and determined act made sure that he betrayed none of the people he’d recruited.

She also told Anderson about her own arrest and torture. She’d been in a ‘filthy makeshift cell’ in the Stanley Gendarmerie, so that was presumably where she was interrogated. In the next cell was Hong Kong’s Defence Secretary John Fraser, and she talked to him a lot, mostly about family and friends. She was also able to describe the extraordinary fortitude with which Fraser bore his repeated interrogations.4

She was tried in he first and largest group of BAAG agents on October 19. Her brother Lau Tak Kwong was condemned to death alongside her.

Lau Tak Oi was the only woman amongst the 33 courageous people who were executed on Stanley Beach on October 29, 1943.

The Stanley Military Cemetery Roll of Honour – and presumably the Memorial in the Cemetery itself- lists her as the ‘son’ of Kong Chat Koo of Hong Kong .5 This mistake should be corrected.

1Part of the Ride Papers; kindly sent to me by Elizabeth Ride.

2GA 1939, no. 70, Roll of Nurses (Male and Female)

3GA 1940 no. 52, Roll of Midwives.

4George Wright-Nooth, Prisoner of the Turnip Heads, 1994, 173.

5http://www.roll-of-honour.org.uk/Cemeteries/Stanley_Military_Cemetery/html/l.htm

Wystan Auden, Christopher Isherwood and Vandeleur Grayburn (5): Grayburn’s Story (4): Death

On August 15, 1943 Sir Vandeleur and Edward Streatfield celebrated the completion of half of their sentence. Grayburn was in good health that day, but on the next he complained about a slight fever and a loss of appetite. His condition deteriorated, and on August 18 he was moved to the Prison hospital.1 Khader Bux,2 an Indian warder who was made to act as ‘medical officer’, applied to the Japanese authorities four times3 for a doctor, but none was sent. On his own initiative, and at risk to himself, he took Dr Harry Talbot (who’d been tried and sentenced alongside the two bankers) to see Sir Vandeleur. Talbot saw him in the evening (probably of August 20) and again the following morning.4 On that first occasion, the patient had a high fever and was slightly delirious, and the doctor advised Mr Bux to get sulphonamide tablets; the courageous warder got some smuggled in, but too late to save Sir Vandeleur, who was comatose when Talbot visited him the next day.5

According to Dr Talbot, there were no medicines in the Prison hospital, and Dr. Saito, who was theoretically responsible for the health of the patients, was rarely to be seen. While the Chinese prisoners were allowed to have vitamins sent in from outside, British prisoners weren’t until the last few days of his sentence (which ended on September 30) when a few boxes of vitamin pills were allowed in from Stanley Camp. Rations in the Prison were so low, that malnutrition and eventual death were inevitable if they weren’t supplemented from outside, but according to Mr Streatfield, hospital portions were set at about 2/3 of the general ration so as to make sure that only those who were really sick entered (Dr. Talbot specifies 8 oz of rice and a little marrow as the daily ration).6 It seems that many prisoners went there just to die, making the atmosphere even grimmer.

On Friday morning (August 20) Grayburn felt better. After the evening meal he talked to fellow patient Police Sergeant Victor Morrison (an escaper who’d been quickly recaptured) about his travels in Norway and his brother’s time as a tea planter in India. He interrupted the conversation to try and urinate into a tin, but failed twice to do so. He dropped the tin and collapsed. Sergeant Morrison, himself weak, helped him to bed as best he could. Grayburn apologised – ‘That was very remiss of me’ – and sank into a coma.7

Sir Vandeleur died at about 7.30 p.m. on Saturday, August 21. He was 62 years old. Edward Streatfield wrote:

At no time had he ever been seen by a Japanese doctor. There was no doubt whatever of the great regret of the bulk of the Indian warders and several of them expressed their resentment at the attitude of the Japanese in not affording him qualified medical aid. The ‘M.O.’, in particular, had done everything his limited power and ability enabled him to do.8

Lady Grayburn was not at any time called to see her husband even though she was in Stanley camp which was next to the prison. It seems that the authorities held onto his body all the next day (August 22) and the morning of August 23, perhaps to make it harder to establish the cause of death. Prison officer R. E. Jones wrote in his diary:

Sir Vandeleur Grayburn died in goal am. 21st. Japs made sure his body decomposed enough to prevent investigation & then let C. S. {Colonial/Camp Secretary Franklin Gimson} know this afternoon. He was buried 6.30 pm.

George Wright-Nooth describes the handover of the corpse in some detail:

The body was to be released at 3 pm. A party of police were detailed to receive it. They brought the dead box {the camp’s constantly re-used coffin} along and waited some while outside the prison gates. The gates were opened and the box taken inside….Chinese convicts brought the naked body in a blanket and placed it face down in the box – all very grim and sad. Our men then placed a sheet over the body and took it to the mortuary, an improvised construction made by us in the camp. The body was in a decomposed state and emaciated; death had obviously occurred about two days ago.9

We learn a little more from a notice Franklin Gimson posted on a camp board sometime on August 23. It also contained the first of what was to become a long line of errors about the circumstances of Grayburn’s death:

It is with the umost (sic) regret that I have to report that the death of Sir Vandeleur Grayburn occurred at 7.30 a.m. on the 22nd instant in the Stanley Prison Hospital. The funeral procession will leave the mortuary at the Tweed Bay Hospital at 6.15 p.m. and the funeral will take place at the Stanley Cemetery at 6.30 p.m.

It seems that Gimson was following misinformation provided, perhaps deliberately, by the Japanese, but he soon found out the truth and posted a second notice on the same day:

From later information received, the death of the late Sir Vandeleur Grayburn occurred at 7.15 p.m. On the 21 instant, and not at 7.30 a.m. on the 22nd instant.10

According to Frank King ‘practically the whole internment camp turned out and followed the cortège from the camp mortuary to the graveyard’.11

So much is, to the best of my belief, fact. The question as to what exactly brought about Sir Vandeleur’s death cannot be answered with any great certainty. On September 15, 1943 the Colonial Office wrote to the HSBC in London with news of the death and, basing itself on Red Cross reports, gave the cause as ‘avitaminosis’.12 Emily Hahn, who presumably heard the news a month or so before she left Hong Kong on the Canadian repatriation ship, said that the Gendarmes said ‘with amazing candor that he had died of beriberi’13 (a disease of malnutrition). According to Geoffrey Emerson, there was a medical examination and the verdict was also death from ‘malnutrition’.14 However, a letter from Camp Medical Officer Dr. D. J. Valentine to Chief Justice Atholl MacGregor clearly states that the doctors assigned to the task refused to come to a conclusion as to cause of death because of the advanced state of decomposition (Hong Kong Public Records Office, HKRS 163 1-303).

Hahn refused to believed the gendarmes for two reasons. Firstly, ‘they said it was beriberi, so it couldn’t have been’ and secondly Lady Mary had been ‘sending her husband food in large quantities every week and we have reason to believe he got it’.15 Hahn was ‘inclined to believe’ an opinion she attributes to the Chinese: Grayburn died ‘as an accident after too enthusiastic an “investigation”’ – perhaps under the infamous ‘water torture’. I think this passage is the origin of the myth that Grayburn was tortured to death,16 and somehow an even grislier version of the story reached wartime Shanghai.17 One of the reports submitted to the British Army Aid Group also said that ‘third degree’ was being used on the bankers while they were at Happy Valley Gendarme Station, but, as we’ve seen,18 apart from one occasion when Grayburn was forced to hang by his hands after a chair was kicked away, the two men were never tortured, and the accounts of Streatfield and Morrison establish that ‘the water treatment’ had nothing to do with Grayburn’s death. And, in response to Hahn’s second point, it seems that most of the vitamin tablets Lady Mary sent her husband were returned after his death19, and it’s possible that he didn’t receive most of her food parcels either -many reports tell us that delivery was a matter of Japanese whim. Further, it seems from George Wright-Nooth’s description of the practicalities of smuggling he was only able to get a small amount of food into Sir Vandeleur.20

I think that the ultimate cause of death was undoubtedly malnutrition/avitaminosis/beriberi, but that the proximate cause of his death was given more precisely by the last doctor to see him alive, his fellow prisoner Dr. Harry Talbot. Talbot told a war crimes trial that Sir Vandeleur had been admitted to hospital suffering from boils (Wright-Nooth specifies on his right leg21), and that because of insufficient dressing he was squeezing the boils out himself and the result of this failure to provide proper care was septicaemia (bacterial infection of the blood). There was a second instance of medical neglect when no sulphonamide (anti-bacterial) drugs were administered before the warder’s smuggled ones, as these would have saved him.22 Talbot mentioned ‘about three’ hospital admissions in all for Grayburn, one with dysentery and another with severe boils and claimed that the only treatment he ever received was a little ointment. He told the court ‘I believe he died of septicaemia’.23

In summary, I’d say that it would be reasonable to conclude that Grayburn’s death was caused by septicaemia, brought about by the failure to provide dressing for boils, caused by long-term malnutrition, perhaps aggravated by a weakening of the heart due to beriberi, and only fatal because of further medical neglect.

The trial Talbot was giving evidence to was of Saito Chuichi, the medical officer whose responsibilities included Stanley Prison. The court heard evidence that when C. F. Miles came to Hong Kong in 1945 he still found plenty of drugs in the Colony, a position supported by Hugo Foy, another imprisoned HSBC banker who’d been active in raising relief funds. Mr Foy said he found medicines including thiamine chloride – a treatment for beriberi- in the HSBC Bank Building, which had been taken over and used as Japanese headquarters. Speaking in Dr. Saito’s defence, Kazuo Kogi said that when he heard of Grayburn’s condition, the Medical Officer rushed to the prison and tried to save him, but this isn’t mentioned in any other account. Dr Saito was sentenced to death, but the sentence was later commuted to 20 years, partly as a result of a plea from Dr. Selwyn-Clarke.

Sir Vandeleur’s story is a remarkable one. From his position at or close to the top of Hong Kong society he fell to the same low level as almost every other British citizen: stripped of home and possessions, trying to subsist on inadequate rations in cramped conditions, Although he understandably regretted his losses and the squalid conditions of his new life, this didn’t stop him from throwing himself into the work of raising illegal funds for the relief of his fellow sufferers. When the chance came, he joined the resistance, although he must have known that exposure would mean torture and death.

And what of the undoubted racism I discussed in my first post?24 Well, we know that he shared his wife’s food parcels with Mr. Harry Ching, a Eurasian fellow prisoner,25 and that he was liked by most of the Indian warders in Stanley Prison, one of whom risked severe punishment to try and save him. Edward Streatfield’s evidence suggests he was respected by almost all the warders and prisoners, which tells us something about his demeanour while incarcerated. It also strikes me as relevant that, as an agent of the BAAG, he entrusted his life to its Chinese agents on a regular basis . Pre-war Hong Kong was noted for its class snobbery as well as it’s racism, so I’m struck that Sir Vandeleur’s last conversation was with a Police Sergeant, close to the bottom of that rigid social hierarchy, and that it ranged over personal material.

This is not enough evidence to come to any firm conclusion, but who would have guessed that ‘the King’ of old Hong Kong was capable of so much? And of his commitment to the welfare of others and of his firmness of character and courage there is a mountain of evidence. If we could have been present at that 1938 meeting with Christopher Isherwood and W. H. Auden with which I began,26 how many of us would have had the slightest idea that it would not be the radical and socially concerned young writers but the supercilious old colonialist who would stay at his post and act with consistent heroism when war came? The less than edifying story of how the other two conducted themselves when fascism and militarism engulfed the world in flames I’ll detail in my next post.

I’ll leave the last word on Grayburn with those who knew him. Emily Hahn, who benefitted personally from his generosity during the occupation, wrote:

Grayburn was brave, stubborn, and dignified. As I had reason to know, he was kindly too, although many people would not admit that before the war. I am grateful, and I grieve for him.28

And his fellow HSBC board members, meeting in Stanley Camp after his death, recorded:

In the troubled sea of depression, tension and panic he stood as solid as a rock, and his personal courage and unfailing optimism were an inspiration to all who came in contact with him.

Notes:

1 Frank King, History of the HSBC, Volume 3, 1988, 623.

2 I take the name from the evidence of Kazuo Kogi at Dr Saito’s war crimes trial – China Mail, April 3, 1946, page 3. George Wright-Nooth gives the name as Gholum Mohammed – Prisoner of the Turnip Heads, 1994, 175. It’s also possible that the kind and courageous warder was called Rhemet Khan, who was described at the trial as the chief Indian warder.

3Talbot’s testimony, China Mail, April 3, 1947, page 2.

4King, 1988, 623.

5Talbot’s testimony, China Mail, April 3, 1947, page 2.

6Talbot’s testimony, China Mail, April 3, 1947, page 2.

7Wright-Nooth, 1994, 175. This source wrongly dates these events to August 6 and the death to August 7.

8Cited King, 1988, 623.

9Wright-Nooth,, 1994, 175-176.

10Both notices are reproduced in David Tett, Captives in Cathay, 2007, 299. Jan Morris’s book on Hong Kong continues the tradition of misinformation by quoting only the first notice with the wrong date of death. I’ve contributed to this myself by following Wright-Nooth’s inexplicably inaccurate diary entries in an online chronology.

11King, 1988, 623.

12Tett, 2007, 300.

13Emily Hahn, China To Me, 1986 ed, 394.

14Geoffrey Emerson, Hong Kong Internment, Kindle Edition, Location 1749.

15Hahn, 1986 ed, 394.

16Both Tett and Morris imply that this was the case, and see also https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2013/08/11/how-did-the-kempeitai-treat-british-civilians-in-hong-kong/

17http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=SZc8OohIFeoC&pg=PA78&lpg=PA78&dq=vandeleur+grayburn+friend+star+ferry+shanghai&source=bl&ots=0bv02hFzjH&sig=hqBVUzfQrx9PJ9lvDfEPnB_7Pfs&hl=en&sa=X&ei=NhUnUorABIn07AbegYGwAg&ved=0CEoQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=vandeleur%20grayburn%20friend%20star%20ferry%20shanghai&f=false

18 https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2013/09/01/wystan-auden-christopher-isherwood-and-vandeleur-grayburn-4-grayburns-story-3-in-the-hands-of-the-kempeitai/

19Tett, 2007, 297.

20Wright-Nooth, 1994, 149; 158

21Wright-Nooth, 1994, 175.

22Talbot’s testimony, China Mail, April 3, 1947, page 2.

23Talbot’s testimony, China Mail, April 3, 1947, page 2.

24https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2013/08/23/auden-isherwood-grayburn/

25https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2013/09/01/wystan-auden-christopher-isherwood-and-vandeleur-grayburn-4-grayburns-story-3-in-the-hands-of-the-kempeitai/

26https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2013/08/23/auden-isherwood-grayburn/

28Hahn, 1986 ed., 395.

Wystan Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and Vandeleur Grayburn (4): Grayburn’s Story: (3): In The Hands of the Kempeitai

On March 17, 1943 Sir Vandeleur Grayburn and E. P. Streatfield were arrested at the Liquidation Office1 and driven by car to Kempeitai headquarters 2 where they were put in a room upstairs.

Grayburn must have been deeply worried about the forthcoming interrogations. He had been arrested on a relatively minor charge – after talking to Oda the two bankers had been heartened to learn that it wasn’t even clear that sending money into the Camp was in itself illegal,3 so during the two weeks before their arrest they must have hoped that the authorities would overlook the clandestine method they’d adopted. However, as well as the issue of smuggling, the Gendarmes were suspicious as to the source of funds – as we’ll see, they suspected they’d come from John Reeves, a man they had every reason to hate, and Grayburn certainly didn’t want to reveal their real source, which was probably loans raised by the bankers on the strength of ‘instruments’ that would pay well after an Allied victory. An even bigger secret that needed to be kept was the fact that Grayburn (although not Streatfield) had acted as an agent for the resistance – his BAAG code name was ‘Night’ and he’d been regularly supplying intelligence and smuggling out messages. He’d also been involved, at least as far as giving his approval, in the arrangements for the escape of Fenwick and Morrison (October 18, 1942). If the gendarmes found any of this out, the inevitable consequence would have been prolonged torture and execution.

During the afternoon Grayburn was taken downstairs for questioning; on his return, he told Mr Streatfield that he’d been accused of receiving the money from John Reeves, the British Consul in Macao, a courageous promoter of all kinds of resistance activity. Presumably Grayburn stuck to the agreed story that the money had been provided by conveniently repatriated Americans – some of them had been bankers living at the Sun Wah, so this was plausible.

From the HQ they were taken to a Chinese house and locked in rooms on the opposite side of a landing patrolled by a Chinese guard. Next morning the interrogations began again. At one stage Grayburn was questioned about relations with the BAAG.4 Once again, his denials were obviously convincing.

In a previous post (https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2013/08/11/how-did-the-kempeitai-treat-british-civilians-in-hong-kong/) I’ve argued that the Kempeitai acted with often scrupulous procedural correctness in the treatment of British civilians, and what happened to the two bankers is a good example of this. They were in prison on suspicion of illegal acts, but with a humanitarian not a military purpose, so, in accordance with general Kempeitai policy with regard to ‘white’ British civilians, torture was not used. This does not, of course, mean that the interrogators did not try to put psychological pressure on them, but the worst that either man had to suffer physically was an occasion when Sir Vandeleur was made to stand on a stool, which was then kicked away from under him, forcing him to hang by his arms.5

They were kept in the boarding house six days and allowed to receive two baskets of food, cigarettes, clothes and toilet articles sent by the other bankers in the Sun Wah Hotel.6 This was relatively easy imprisonment, and it must have been a consequence of Grayburn’s status, because I’ve never read of any other British prisoners being held outside a penal institution.

On March 24 things got dramatically worse. Grayburn and Streatfield were taken to the Happy Valley Gendarmerie,7 a Kempeitai station which had once been a French convent school – both the school and the Gendarme Station are sometimes called ‘Le Calvaire’8 The two men were separated and Grayburn was put into Cell 4; as he entered and looked for a space in the crowded cell, one of the inmates moved up to make room for him; this was Henry Ching, the Australian editor of the Colony’s most important English-language newspaper, the South China Morning Post. A courageous anti-Japanese advocate before the war, Mr. Ching had not been interned because he was Eurasian. In 1943 he and other men connected with the SCMP had been suspected of spying, and he was arrested on February 17.9 His account of his arrival in the Gendarmerie gives us a good idea of what Grayburn must have experienced:

On both sides (of the corridor) heavy wooden bars four inches wide by one and a half inches. Have feeling of being in ship’s hold. Much noise of chattering but can’t see the people. Also terrific smell. Realise people are behind those bars. Small door on one side opened and I stoop in. Smell is terrible, but I am relieved. I am not going to be alone…Cell 4 in which I was put has verandah on north side – cloisters……..Only half cell inhabitable. Sanitary arrangements. Half dozen wooden buckets. Store room at end.

Another note from Mr. Ching tells us more about the place where Grayburn began his imprisonment:

Cell 4…(was) a large cell along the western side of the building, separated from the other three cells by a corridor. It held over 30 men and women. On the outside of Cell 4, and separated from it by a wall, was an enclosed verandah. But grills in the upper part of the wall enabled sunlight to enter the cell, and it was possible to look out towards the Yeung Wo Hospital on the other side of the Valley10.

In a smaller cell close by, holding about 10 people, was another British citizen, Cyril Faure.11 He’d not been sent to Stanley, for reasons unknown, and had been working on the Japanese-run Hongkong News. He was arrested the day after Henry Ching, also on suspicion of spying. In his evidence to a War Crimes Trial in early 1947 he described conditions in his ‘filthy cage’; he too noted the dreadful smell – the Indian warders had to hold handkerchiefs to their noses when they entered – and states that prisoners were given only one bowl and one blanket.12 Mr Ching’s son Henry give a slightly different picture of the bedding provision: basing himself on his father’s notes, he tells us that the prisoners were not supplied with beds but slept on the floor, on loose palliases;13 as inmates left, their palliases would be taken over by those remaining who thereby managed to accumulate several and were thus in relative comfort. Newcomers had to sleep on the bare concrete floor as no new palliases were issued.14

At least Grayburn’s cell had some light; in Mr Faure’s there wasn’t enough to catch the lice which infected everyone. He also mentions the inadequate washing facilities – at times there was no water at all – and tells us he lost about half a pound per day.15 Innumerable accounts confirm that the food provided in Kempeitai prisons was extremely scanty in amount and totally inadequate in nutrition, but the people at the Sun Wah were able to find out where the bankers had been sent and, according to Maurice Collis, to send them ‘daily supplies of food and from time to time a change of clothing’.16

It seems that some or all of Sir Vandeleur’s food parcels and clothing came from Lady Mary: the BAAG’s Waichow Information Summary correctly stated that he was at Le Calvaire, though, wrongly as we have seen, claimed he was taken there on March 17, and added:

No visitors are allowed and a boy, sent by LADY GRAYBURN with clothes for her husband, was not allowed to hand them to him personally.

This ‘boy’ turns up on other reports (see below) so the story is probably accurate. Cyril Faure also noted that Grayburn and Streatfield were allowed to receive food from outside, although he himself wasn’t,17 while Henry Ching’s son tells us that Grayburn generously shared these parcels with his father.18.

The two men’s next move was for the better, although it was still into conditions that were, by any normal standards, grim. On April 13, they were driven by car to Stanley Prison,19 where policeman George Wright-Nooth, watching from the internment camp, saw them being brought in – Grayburn chained to Streatfield.20 Here for the first time they were taken before a Japanese officer – previously all the questioning had been carried out by NCOs. They each had a cell to themselves, baths were provided and food parcels delivered.21 Short exercise periods were also allowed, and on the day after their arrival they were again seen by Wright-Nooth, who recorded in his diary that he’d watched the prisoners being exercised – ‘walking round in a circle with hands behind the back’ – and he’d seen Streatfield (‘a tall European dressed in a lounge suit’) and perhaps Grayburn (‘dressed in jacket and shorts’). On April 27 they were joined by Dr Harry Talbot,22 the bank’s doctor and the man who’d tried to smuggle money for them into Stanley. He’d been released, but was re-arrested in Camp.

On June 30 Dr Talbot and the two bankers were taken for trial. Streatfield wrote:

(T)he three of us were taken out of our cells at 8 a.m. and, having been given a bowl of rice to eat, were handcuffed together and taken under an escort of Japanese and Indian warders in a small covered truck into Hong Kong to the Supreme Court.23

In accordance with Japanese procedure, the court did not attempt to establish guilt – they had confessed, the Kempeitai had accepted the confessions, and that was that. The only thing at issue was the sentence . Although no charges were specified, the proceedings obviously related to smuggling money into Stanley.

Their judges were five Japanese officers, and, after some interrogation, the two men were asked if they had anything to say for themselves – an opportunity not granted to the British civilians who were to be tried on much graver charges later in the year. They denied attempting to cheat the Imperial Japanese Army and pleaded they saw no harm in trying to alleviate the situation of Bank and other dependants.24 They were sentenced to three months in prison – time already served not to count, a point that was to cost Grayburn his life.

The sentence was also to be served in Stanley Prison, but now they were convicted the regime was in some ways harsher and food parcels were stopped.25 They were put to work as gardeners which was something most prisoners welcomed, as it gave the chance to have something to do, get out of their cells, and interact with others. Collis tells us that the work was not heavy nor performed at great speed, but that the hours were long: 7.30 a.m to a 10.30 a.m. meal break, and then from 11.30 through to the second meal at 5.0 p.m.

E. P. Streatfield testifies to Sir Vandeleur’s bearing while in prison:

Grayburn from the start commanded the respect of the prisoners and most of the warders, not only on account of his age, but because of the cheerfulness and dignity with which he bore the unpleasantness of his position.26

But how had those left behind in the Sun Wah been reacting to these events? On April 25 the BAAG noted reports of a Sun Wah petition on the two bankers behalf:

The rest of Bankers sent petition to Governor requesting investigation and proper trial. This petition motivated by news that he was at one time put among other criminals and petty thieves.27

Another agent’s report in the same document gives a slightly different account of the petition and provides many more details:

After GRAYBURN’s arrest, he was visited by his boy who was eventually allowed to see him and who reported that he was in with all the other Chinese criminals and thieves and getting rice only to eat.

The boy immediately reported this to EDMONSON {David Edmondston, the HSBC number 2, who was himself arrested on May 24} and a petition was sent to the International Red Cross by the other bank staff. The International Red Cross intervened through the Foreign Office and the Gendarmes were highly annoyed that news of GRAYBURN’s conditions should have got out.

Lady GRAYBURN was then allowed to see her husband and was accompanied by the “boy”. On the way to the prison, Lady GRAYBURN asked the accompanying Gendarme, “Couldn’t something be done for GRAYBURN’s comfort?” He immediately turned round and said, “How do you know how he is being treated?” The boy who was acting as interpreter replied direct saying that he had given the information.

GRAYBURN was given new clothes and it is said that the old ones were lice infested. GRAYBURN was asked one question only by his boy, i.e. “then will you be getting out?”, to which he is reported to have replied, “Me, never.”

GRAYBURN is now getting cold food supplied by the Bankers and clean clothes once a week.

He was reported to be quite cheerful, but STREATFIELD was said to be pretty depressed.

The above story came from a source in very close touch with the Bankers and is believed to be substantially correct. There is no evidence yet of third degree being used….28

Grayburn’s wife, Lady Mary, was obviously a determined woman. The BAAG received contradictory reports about her visiting the Gendarmes: in one, she was summoned on April 5 and grilled for two hours, in another she cancelled a meeting she’d scheduled for April 8 for fear she’d give away too much if subjected to fierce questioning.29 If the second claim is true, it seems obviously sensible, as I think she must have known about her husband’s role as ‘Night’ – the BAAG referred to her as ‘Night Nurse’ because she’d been a matron before her marriage,30 but I don’t think she was herself an agent.

As we’ve seen, she was sending in parcels to her husband while he was in Le Calvaire Gendarmerie (March 24-April 13). Andrew Leiper, a Chartered Bank man living at the Sun Wah, reported that the people there heard by ‘bamboo wireless’ that Grayburn, Streatfield and Charles Hyde (arrested probably on April 21) arrested for arranging finance to send stuff into Stanley. This brought ‘relief and hope’, especially to the two wives (Streatfield was either unmarried or had no wife in Hong Kong), as it was thought this wouldn’t be considered too serious.31. This was true of Grayburn and Streatfield, but not of Hyde, whose resistance activities were numerous and varied, and who had been caught plotting to free an Indian POW from Ma Tau Chung Camp (he was executed on October 29, 1943). In any case, this relief proved shortly lived as no further news of the men was received, although some Chinese said they’d been seen in precincts of the former Supreme Court -32 as we’ve seen this was almost certainly where they had indeed been held.

Emily Hahn reports that Lady Mary went straight to Stanley to work on behalf of her husband after his arrest, but that’s not true – she herself gave the date of May 17 in a letter to her daughter,33 and that’s confirmed by the fact that she was in Bungalow D, which wasn’t opened until May 7, when my parents and 15 others were sent there from the French Hospital.34 She also says she was ‘sent’ to the Camp, but this proved useful as her husband had been in the adjacent prison for five weeks, and she was able to get police officer George Wright-Nooth to smuggle letters and a little food into him.35 Since some time in 1942, Wright-Nooth had been operating a smuggling system with a Chinese man who used the false name Wong for security purposes. Dr Selwyn-Clarke, living and working in town, would smuggle in food to internee leader Franklin Gimson through the daily ration truck, usually in the form of vitaminised chocolate or small biscuits. This food was given to Wright-Nooth, who would then pass on small amounts to’ ‘Wong’ who took it into the Prison, at first for four captured escapers, but eventually Sir Vandeleur and others also benefitted.36 According to Wright-Nooth, Wong was able to smuggle out Sir Vandeleur’s last letter – to Lady Mary – written a week before his death.37 However, as he’s already told us that Wong was replaced by the unsatisfactory ‘Lee’ in early summer,38 he might be misremembering. I’ll take up the story of Lady Mary’s food provision in the next post, as it bears on the controversial question of the cause of Sir Vandeleur’s death.

We have a few glimpses of Sir Vandeleur during his last summer. Some time around July 1, his former cell mate Harry Ching, who’d been released, recorded some news from another SCMP employee in his diary:

{A. M.} Omar {an Indian journalist who’d been in a cell close to Grayburn in Le Calvaire} skinny and health bad…. Was in {prison} again, sent Stanley. Scamp {Dr Selwyn-Clarke} there looking bad. Grayburn and Streatfield bearing up. Grayburn sent regards.

The same entry gives a picture of the prisoners’ day (presumably when they weren’t gardening):

Routine up at 7 a.m. and wash. Sit with arms and legs folded and not move. Breakfast at 9. Six ounces rice and sung. Squat39 until 11 when one hour exercise and can speak to each other. Then squat until 3 p.m. More exercise. Squat. Supper. Bed 9 p.m.40

This cross-legged sitting was something imposed on most prisoners, in theory at least, who were expected to face the wall and contemplate the crimes that had brought them to that pass.

On July 24 he had a boil on his thigh and had to enter the prison ‘hospital’ – the reason for the scare quotes will become clear in my next post. He seemed better on leaving, but he returned three weeks later in the grip of the illness that was to kill him.

Notes:

1 Frank King places the arrests on March 19. I’m following Streatfield’s evidence at a War Crimes trial – China Mail, April 2, 1947, page 3.
2 Thus my source – Maurice Collis, Wayfoong, 1965, 226; presumably the former Supreme Court Building, which was in use as the Kempeitai HQ.
3Frank H. H. King, The History of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, Volume 111, 1988, 622.
4 King, 1988, 622.
5 King, 1988, 622.
6Collis, 1965, 226. See also the evidence of E. P. Streatfield at trial of Sato Choichi, reported in the China Mail, April 2, 1947, page 3.
7 Collis, 1965, 226.
8 Collis (226) wrongly claims the convent was formerly Italian.
9http://gwulo.com/node/15316
10http://gwulo.com/node/8235
11http://gwulo.com/node/8235
12China Mail, January 3, 1947, page 2.
13Straw-filled mattresses.
14https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2013/08/11/how-did-the-kempeitai-treat-british-civilians-in-hong-kong/
15China Mail, January 3, 1947, page 2.
16Collis, 1965, 226.
17China Mail, January 3, 1947, page 2.
18http://gwulo.com/node/8235.
19Collis, 1965, 227.
20George Wright-Nooth, Prisoner of the Turnip Heads, 1994, 157
21Collis, 1965, 227.
22King, 1988, 622.
23Collis, 1965, 227.
24King, 1988, 623.
25Collis, 1965, 227.
26Cited King, 1988, 623.
27WIS #28, April 25, 1943, Ride Papers.
28WIS #28, April 25, 1943, Ride Papers.
29WIS #28, April 25, 1943, Ride Papers.
30Edwin Ride, BAAG: Hong Kong Resistance, 1981, 223.
31 Andrew Leiper, A Yen For My Thoughts, 1983, 170.
32 Leiper, 1983, 170.
33David Tett, Captives in Cathay, 2007, 297.
34https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/note-on-date-of-arrival-in-stanley-and-images-of-places-of-internment/
35Wright-Nooth, 1994, 158.
36Wright-Nooth, 1994, 149-150.
37Wright-Nooth, 1994, 176.
38Wright-Nooth, 1994, 150..
39 i.e. return to the ‘arms and legs folded’ position.
40http://gwulo.com/node/15325

Wystan Auden, Christopher Isherwood and Vandeleur Grayburn (3): Grayburn’s Story (2): Towards Disaster

The Story So Far
In the previous post I described the way in which HSBC head Sir Vandeleur Grayburn, having lost everything in the 18 day hostilities, remained out of internment after the surrender and threw himself into the work of raising funds for the relief of the Allied community. When agents of the BAAG arrived in town in June 1942 he joined the resistance (code name: Night), later declining offers to arrange his escape, mainly because he felt he was doing essential work in Hong Kong.

In the Autumn of 1942 Sir Vandeleur declined a ‘specific offer’ of an aided escape, and two fellow bankers were taken out instead, with Grayburn’s approval and possibly encouragement.1 At 7.30 p.m. on October 18, 1942 T. J. J. Fenwick and J. A. D. Morrison left the Sun Wah Hotel ‘with a Hong Kong basket containing socks, shaving gear, a spare shirt and a quarter of a bottle of whisky and a bottle of Napoleon brandy’. With the help of two skilled Chinese resistance agents and the communist guerillas they arrived at the BAAG advanced headquarters in Waichow on October 22,2 providing there much valuable information on financial developments in occupied Hong Kong.3

These escapes were a triumph for the BAAG, but they left Grayburn having to deal with the tricky situation that resulted. After an initial period of relative leniency, the Japanese reacted strongly to escapes, and one thing that gave pause to those thinking of trying was possible retaliation on the ones who stayed behind.

On November 4 Grayburn sent a message to Arthur Morse, the head of the HSBC in London. I don’t know what he said to Morse, but he included a short optimistic message for his daughter: ‘All more or less well here …tell Elizabeth not to worry’.4 That ‘more or less’ is telling but, on the evidence available to me, it seems that the response to the Fenwick and Morrison escapes wasn’t too unpleasant. On November 7 he sent a message to Douglas Clague,5 a major in the BAAG:

‘Trouble is brewing’ are his first words, and they suggest that either nothing much had yet been done in retaliation for the escapes or that any initial burst of punitive activity had died down. The Kempeitai, he contiued, wanted to pack them all off to Stanley – which would probably have saved the lives of Grayburn and two of his colleagues – but the Foreign Affairs Department and the Finance Department were resisting, because the bankers’ help was still needed. Grayburn estimates that the signing would take another three months and stated that the ‘liquidation’ of the Bank’s assets was nowhere near finished. In my previous post I discussed a message Grayburn received from one of the Japanese ‘liquidators’ on December 10 in the context of the light it throws on the bankers’ conditions during their time outside Stanley. My guess is that the tightening of the rules governing their movements that was conveyed to Grayburn in that message was a necessary concession to the Kempeitai on the part of those Japanese who wanted the bankers to continue to live outside Stanley. In any case, Grayburn had to give his word that no future escapes would take place (‘Have promised no others will leave’) and it seems that each banker was also required to give his personal ‘parole’, which in at least one instance acted as a deterrent to escaping.6

Interestingly Grayburn mentions something that happened in Stanley Camp only the day before – the young men were sent to sleep in the prison for fear of escapes during the an American air raid. I don’t know if he had a system for getting speedy information from Stanley, or if he just learnt about this so quickly through chance. He ends by assuring Clague that ‘otherwise all well with us’.

On the day before that message (November 6) Lieutenant-Colonel Lindsay Ride, the BAAG’s commander, had been in Chunking, where he was asked by the authorities for details of Grayburn’s signing of ‘duress notes’ (see previous post). The British announced several times during the war that these would not be honoured, an impression that was further strengthened after liberation, so much so that some people had dumped theirs in the garbage before the Bank announced a change of heart!7 The notes are now sought after by collectors. In the same document Ride notes that he’d asked Douglas Clague to find out if Grayburn would be willing to escape ‘alone if necessary’.8 This suggests that there were still moves afoot to get Grayburn out, and gives some support to the theory that he was unwilling to leave because this would have left Lady Mary to face Japanese reprisals.

As 1942 slowly gave way to the new year, there wasn’t much rejoicing in the Sun Wah. Banker Andrew Leiper was there:

In our community there was little heart to celebrate Christmas and the advent of 1943 was marked only by a party given for the half dozen children in the boarding-house. They were each presented with a small packet of home-made toffee, for which we had all contributed a part of our sugar ration.9

Grayburn continued the job of maintaining communication with the BAAG and with Consul John Reeves in Macao.10T he Waichow Intelligence Summary of February 12, 1943 notes a message had been received from him estimating that the bankers would be out of Stanley for another 6 months as the signing of the duress notes was very slow. Using the light code common in BAAG communications, he reported ‘No serious damage to our shop so far’ – presumably the Bank building. He notes that the news was good and predicted that Germany would give up before ‘many months’ were over.11 Two HSBC bankers, Charles Hyde and Luis da Souza, were listening to a short-wave radio hidden on the premises of the Indian company Abdoolally Ebrahim12 and this might have been the source of the over-optimistic news.

Emily Hahn believes the start of the Kempeitai ‘strike back’ – the so-called ‘reign of terror’13 – in February 1943 was connected to Chinese puppet ruler Wang Chi Wei’s declaration of war against the Allies.14 In any case, as Philip Snow,15 points out it was systematic, comprehensive and successful, and Grayburn was one of the first trio of British victims.

Grayburn had smuggled funds into Stanley Camp directly twice before: in November 1942 the wife of J. T. Dupuy was sent into Stanley and at some point in 1942 or early 1943 G. H. Cautherley had been allowed to leave camp to be x-rayed at the French Hospital.16 In February 1943 Dr Harry Talbot, a prominent local doctor who’s also worked for the Soong family,17 came to the Hospital for the same purpose. Grayburn, his deputy Edward Streatfield, and their colleague Charles Hyde – probably the most active British resistance worker – all gave him money to smuggle back into the camp; in Grayburn’s case it was 800 Yen for the former nursing staff of the Matilda Hospital,18 an institution he’d financed and now served as a trustee.

The arrest of Talbot was a disaster for Grayburn, but I’ve never seen a source that gives the exact date it happened– I think it was probably on or close to February 20.19 Further, every version of what led to the arrest is a little different,20 but what they all have in common is that Talbot was searched on his way back to the camp and the money was found. He refused to name the people who’d given it to him – Frank King claims he was tortured, but other accounts say he wasn’t – and, on February 23,21 after a few tense days during which the French Hospital was searched by the Navy, Grayburn and Streatfield went to Mr. Oda, the sympathetic head of the Foreign Affairs Office, and confessed, claiming that all the money had been provided by them (I think they must have been anxious to keep Hyde out of the hands of the Gendarmes). They said the money was for bank staff and nurses in the camp. Streatfield denied all knowledge of the source of the funds, while Grayburn claimed it came from the repatriated Americans22 – it seems like this was a common explanation for surreptitiously acquired funds after June 1942!23

The meeting took place on February 23; Oda lectured them on the seriousness of their offence,24 and then let them return to the Sun Wah. He had no choice but to tell the Kempeitai and Emily Hahn believes that before taking action the Japanese in Hong Kong needed to get advice from Tokyo – it was no small thing to arrest the best-known financier in the Far East, and, when the blow fell on March 19, Hahn records that even Japanese civilians were surprised.25

The pre-war ‘King’ of Hong Kong, ‘the Governor’s Governor’, had lost almost everything during the hostilities – his house, his possessions and his job. His health, already undermined by overwork, deteriorated still further under the harsh conditions of the occupation. But he still had what seems to have been a strong marriage, and above all he retained the determination of character that had taken him to the top of his profession. With deeply impressive courage and resourcefulness, he reinvented himself as a raiser of illicit funds for the relief of suffering and an agent of the Hong Kong resistance.

Now he was entering a brutal prison system, and he can have had no illusions as to the consequences if his interrogators ever discovered the identity of ‘Night’.

Notes:

1Frank King, History of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, Volume 3, 1988, 617.
2King, 1988, 618-621.
3George Wright- Nooth, Prisoner of the Turnip Heads, 1994, 153.
4David Tett, Captives in Cathay, 2007, 298.
5http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dc/Letter_from_Grayburn_to_Clague.jpg
6http://gwulo.com/node/15157
7http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=nw1bTZV4BaAC&pg=PA157&lpg=PA157&dq=croucher+grayburn+duress+notes&source=bl&ots=r3-WK2xra4&sig=-hL4gbVDdq9EtjKdtKfwgjjqhJY&hl=en&sa=X&ei=SFYgUtfINIaNtQbsx4C4Aw&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=croucher%20grayburn%20duress%20notes&f=false
8 L. T. Ride, Memo of 6 November 1942 – Ride Papers, kindly sent me by Elizabeth Ride.
9Leiper, 1982, 164.
10King, 1988, 621.
11WIS 18, 12 February 1943, Ride Papers.
12https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2013/06/09/an-indian-company-in-occupied-hong-kong-the-abdoolally-ebrahim-group/
13http://gwulo.com/node/14095
14Emiily Hahn, China To Me, 1986 ed, 386.
15Philip Snow, The Fall of Hong Kong, 2003, 185.
16King, 1988, 621.
17 Hahn, 1986 ed, 389.
18King, 1988, 622.
19http://gwulo.com/node/14038
20Recently a Memoir written by Dr Talbot has emerged, so hopefully a definitive account will one day be possible – http://www.hongkongwardiary.com/
21King, 1988, 622.
22King, 1988, 622.
23Hahn, 1986, ed, 390.
24King, 1988, 622.
25Hahn, 1986 ed., 389-390.

Wystan Auden, Christopher Isherwood and Vandeleur Grayburn (2): Grayburn’s Story, Part 1 – Loss, Relief and Resistance

Note:
A version of this post with public image illustrations can be read at:

http://brianwedgar.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/wystan-auden-christopher-isherwood-and_27.html

Those who called Sir Vandeleur Grayburn ‘the King’ of Hong Kong weren’t far wrong. As well as head of the Colony’s most important business, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, he was (or had recently been) a member of the University Court1 The Exchange Fund Advisory committee, 2The Taxation Committee,3 and the War Revenue committee,4 a JP5 and from July 1941 an Unofficial Member of the Executive Council.6 Probably of much else as well.

In spite of his position at the centre of Hong Kong life, Sir Vandeleur showed no particular foresight in the immediate run up to the war. On Sunday, December 7, 1941 the HKVDC (Volunteers) were mobilised along with the rest of the garrison amid compelling evidence that an attack was imminent. When HSBC employee M. G. Carruthers informed his boss he’d been called up, Sir Vandeleur looked at him in horror and told him he couldn’t go – ‘this is going to blow over’.

He shouldn’t be blamed too much for this: at the start of the month Governor Mark Young and the garrison’s commanding officer Major-General Maltby had joined forces to convince him that if the Japanese started any trouble a naval force would sail up from Singapore ‘and everything would be hunky-dory’.7 On December 2 plans for Grayburn to go with other senior staff to Singapore and set up head office there had been approved, and the Governor appealed to Sir Vandeleur not to leave the Colony as he feared it would have a serious effect on morale.8 He agreed to stay at his post fro a second time – he should really have stepped down in 1940, when it had been planned to replace him with David Charles Edmondston, who’d been appointed Hong Kong Manager in 1936. Because of the serious situation in the Far East, Sir Vandeleur had agreed to stay.9 A minute of the HSBC Board of Directors (meeting in Stanley Camp soon after Grayburn’s death) recorded that he could have retired after a successful term as head of the bank ‘but he chose to remain at his post and see the war through’.10By the time the Pacific War began, some colleagues considered he was ‘rundown with overwork’.11

During the hostilities he was either in the Essential Services Group– someone who was tasked with working at their normal job12 – or perhaps because of his age and eminence simply exempted in order to provide advice and leadership. We know he was at ”the Bank’ (as the HSBC was often called) on day one of the attack (December 8) as Colonel Harry Hughes reported that he went there that day and even Sir Vandeleur couldn’t get him Chinese currency13 On December 11, focusing on the bank’s future in case of defeat, Grayburn requested that the Governor seek an Order in Council to transfer the HSBC head office not to Singapore but London. Governor Young forwarded the request, but pointed out that ‘the contingency is not contemplated’. Frank King implies he still had hopes of holding the Colony at this stage.14

Like everyone else whose house was in a place deemed (sometimes wrongly) to be relatively safe, the Grayburns had their house on the Peak (‘The Cliffs’, no. 355) designated a billet for evacuees from more dangerous or exposed areas. One of his HSBC employees, Doris Woods, alongside her two sisters was amongst them, and Miss Woods tells us that by December 14, in the midst of continuous shelling and regular aerial bombardment, the electricity had failed, they couldn’t listen to the world news, food was running short, and the strain on everyone’s nerves was leading to frequent quarrels. Lady Grayburn was probably still in the house – I can see no reason for her to have been moved – but her husband was likely to have been sleeping in the bank.15 In any case, on that December 14, another air raid started and Doris and her twin sister (and partner in a popular singing duet) ran to take shelter in the pantry, where they sat for hours repeating the 91st Psalm. When the shelling stopped, they emerged and inspected the effects: the front of the house had been damaged and the Grayburns’ private sitting-room was in ruins.16 In a letter dated May 31, 1942 (see below) Sir Vandeleur told his daughter that Cliffs was ‘badly damaged’ and their ‘possessions all gone’.17

The Bank shut at noon on Christmas Day and the staff went up to the mess on the seventh floor for a simple meal; they learnt shortly after of the Colony’s surrender18 (which took place at about 3.15 p.m.). On December 26, the Japanese, under the orders of the former manager of the Yokohama Specie Bank, entered the HSBC building and assembled the staff. Grayburn was questioned at length, and all the banks keys were surrendered and the safes and treasuries sealed.19 The Building itself, ‘Grayburn’s Folly’, became the seat of the Japanese administration.

What happened next is perhaps controversial. Grayburn almost certainly played a leading role in the decision of some bankers, include himself, to stay uninterned and help the Japanese ‘liquidate’ their banks. It’s sometimes said that this decision was made under ‘duress’ but in fact threats to the bankers and their families came later -in spring1942– to force them to sign unissued HSBC banknotes (see below). The initial agreement to stay out was partly to help the Chinese and other uninterned nationals but I think mainly to look after the interests of the HSBC and the other banks whose staff were involved. In any case, refusal to help wouldn’t have stopped the Japanese plundering the banks, and a number of sources testify that, as well as making records of, or at least keeping an eye on, what was happening, the bankers dragged their feet as much as possible.

Both during and after the war, it was Dr Selwyn-Clarke and the team of public health workers he led that bore the brunt of criticism on the grounds of collaboration. This was partly because Selwyn-Clarke, although he did co-operate with the resistance, had an uneasy relationship with it, while, as we shall see, the British Army Aid Group received enthusiastic help from the HSBC staff (although they were disappointed that some of the younger bankers refused to escape and were even unsure about being repatriated because of pressure from ‘seniors’ to remain in Hong Kong, presumably to re-open the Bank quickly after liberation20). After the war, the deaths of the two most prominent HSBC staff, and of one other, executed for resistance activities, and the imprisonment of another HSBC employee and three members of the Chartered Bank, left the bankers effectively beyond criticism. Nevertheless, George Endacott, a distinguished historian, who is clearly sympathetic to those experiencing the dilemmas of the occupation, has written that these people ‘were presumably collaborators and could, and perhaps should, have refused to assist in the handing over of the banks, and gone into Stanley internment earlier than they did’. But he goes on:

But their remaining out enabled them to see that records were preserved and information about accounts and notes in circulation were up-to-date, and this materially assisted the British take-over in 1945.21

We should also note that the Chartered Bank people consulted the Financial Secretary (probably R. R. Todd, who was acting FS on October 9, 194 22) and the bankers of other nationalities (American, Dutch and Belgium) who agreed to stay out did so after consulting their consular staff.23 Our source for this, Chartered Bank employee Andrew Leiper, doesn’t tell us what Grayburn did, but there’s no reason to believe he wouldn’t have got the same advice if he thought it necessary to consult anyone. Accounts both by bankers themselves and those who used their services make it clear how important their work was to the ordinary people of Hong Kong during the chaotic first months of the occupation,24 and, in my opinion, this would have justified the decision even without the contributions made by the bankers to the ongoing relief efforts that will be discussed in the rest of this post. One of the Chinese who benefited from their services noted:

The Japanese cannot do anything in the banks without (British) help. If the British are asked to do something contrary to their sense of justice, honesty and honor, their answer is ‘Send us to Stanley Internment Camp’. Since their help is absolutely necessary, the Japanese have to treat them honourably.25

We know from both Chartered Bank and HSBC sources that their staff bent or broke all the rules of banking to help out, for example, unquestioningly paying to spouses from the accounts of those who’d died.

On January 5 the HSBC bankers joined the rest of the Allied civilian community at the Murray Parade Ground. Those destined for Stanley, 126 of them, were marched to the Nam Ping Hotel, those needed for the liquidation to the Sun Wah. At first the two groups were allowed to mingle, but then the Sun Wah people had their movements tightly controlled (until July, when their situation eased – see below)26

Now the scene was set for the drama that was to play itself out ‘in town’ for the next 18 months. There were under 100 men who met the criteria for internment (healthy ‘white’ Allied civilians) but who were kept out of Stanley, usually with their families, to do essential work, and these men, in some case their wives and in at least one case their children, were going to provide the spearhead of the non-Chinese relief and resistance movements.

The most important of these in this respect was the former Director of Medical Services, Dr. Selwyn Selwyn-Clarke, who was almost the only Briton in the Colony who had a clear vision of his role in the occupation. With the help of a senior Japanese military medical officer who’d been impressed by his racially egalitarian courtesy when he’d visited Hong Kong in the past, he was allowed to stay out and carry on his work – in the short term, the dead bodies scattered around Hong Kong posed serious risks of epidemic disease that would hit the Japanese as hard as any other group, so action was urgently needed. In addition to organising public health measures, Selwyn-Clarke quickly realised that the conditions in Stanley and the POW Camps (primarily Shamshuipo, Argyle Street, Ma Tau-Chung and Bowen Road Military Hospital) were such that a massive relief effort was necessary to prevent large-scale suffering and death.

In the dreadful financial conditions of the occupation, raising the money to pay for food and medicine was a major problem. Some better-off people of all the uninterned nationalities started to give the doctor money directly or to take other personal actions, at great risk to themselves.27 Even sending a food parcel to a friend ran the risk of attracting the attention of the Gendarmes, who were always on the look out for evidence of Allied sympathies. But individual acts of charity were not enough to meet the huge need; what was required was a systematic money-raising campaign, and it was a huge stroke of luck for the beneficiaries that a swathe of Hong Kong’s bankers were out in town to organise it. It didn’t prove to be lucky for the bankers themselves, though, and this group (at its maximum 80, including women and children) suffered more than any other in terms of members arrested, tortured, died or executed.

Sir Vandeleur was almost certainly the leader in the effort to raise money to give to Selwyn-Clarke to buy desperately needed food and medicines for the camps. Like Selwyn-Clarke, the bankers probably started by receiving spontaneous charity – depositors would come into the bank to make a withdrawal and whisper to the cashier to hold back some of the cash for Stanley – but it doesn’t seem to have been long before they started working more systematically to raise funds.

The cashier for these efforts, Samuel Perry-Aldworth28 tells us:

…(David) Edmondston and Grayburn and Hugo Foy….arranged with some of the Indian and Chinese constituents, who were paying in every day to pay off their overdrafts and all that, to divert a bit of it…29

These ‘diversions, proved inadequate, but to explain what happened next I need to remind the reader that on January 9, 1942 Lindsay Ride of the HKVDC Ambulance Unit escaped from Shamshuipo POW Camp with the help of his Chinese employee Francis ‘Chicken’ Lee. Ride and Lee were aided in their escape by communist guerillas. After reaching the war-time Chinese capital Chunking (Chongqing), Ride was able to set up the British Army Aid Group (BAAG), a multi-faceted organisation that carried out a wide variety of resistance tasks in southern China and occupied Hong Kong. The organisation worked closely with the guerillas (who are best known under the name of the East River Column) and depended for the most part on Chinese agents who could move relatively freely in and out of the former colony. In June 1942 the first BAAG agents arrived in Hong Kong. The earliest contacts of which I’ve seen evidence were with men known to Colonel Ride at the University and the French Hospital, but it wasn’t long before agents reached the Sun Wah – the initial contact seems to have been David Edmondston, who also had known Ride pre-war.30

It’s hard to know how much of a risk Grayburn thought he was taking in his ongoing relief work. He might have felt that the Japanese would turn a blind eye to the attempts of the most prominent financier in the Far East to raise money for purely humanitarian purposes, and, as we shall see, the Gendarmes did treat him in a relatively lenient way when they found out (the Japanese liquidators had known for a long time, but, like most Japanese civilians in Hong Kong, they were decent people and did no more than warn the bankers they would not be able to help them if the Kempeitai found out31).But when the agents of the Hong Kong resistance made contact with the bankers at the Sun Wah, he can have been in doubt as to the consequences of getting involved. Nevertheless, in his early 60s and not in particularly good health, Sir Vandeleur became a BAAG agent, code named Night. Now he must have understood that all the prestige in Asia wouldn’t save him from torture and execution if he was caught. And the conditions they were working under were difficult; Leiper says they identified at least one Chinese as having been sent so spy on them,32 and, although they probably weren’t watched as carefully as Selwyn-Clarke’s team, there are likely to have been many more clandestine observers.

It wasn’t long before Grayburn was deeply involved with the BAAG. It seems messages were soon passing back and forth from the Sun Wah on a routine basis. On July 31, 1942 Grayburn sent a message to a Chunking banker through BAAG agent 36 (Lau Teng Ke) asking, ‘Is it possible to draw on you’? Obviously he was hoping to be able to use Chunking funds to supplement those raised locally for the relief work. What seems to have been the same communication asked the British Embassy in that city to ensure the honouring of financial instruments (‘Rupee and Sterling drafts on paper dated 23/12/41’) that the bankers were selling secretly to raise money. After a period of confusion – the authorities in London were aware that the bankers had been signing ‘duress’ notes since the spring (see below) so felt that not all their financial transactions should be accepted – the Rupee and Sterling drafts were indeed honoured.33 Interestingly Grayburn added that the scheme had the approval of Colonial Secretary Franklin Gimson, which suggests that he was able to get messages into and out of Stanley, unless the idea went back to the period before March 13 when Gimson had been interned.34

The full story of the bankers’ work will probably never be known, as neither Grayburn nor Edmondston survived (Hugo Foy kept a diary but so far this has not been made generally available). One thing that’s worth adding, though, is that it wasn’t just the bankers who raised money, as we know that two BAAG agents, the American Chester Bennett and the Portuguese Marcus da Silva arranged loans, guaranteed by wealthy citizens interned in Stanley.35 But I think it’s clear that it was the bankers, under Grayburn’s leadership, who raised most of the cash for Dr Selwyn-Clarke’s work. Another thing we’ll never have much idea of is how many lives were saved and how much suffering was eased.

The bankers kept some of the money for their own relief efforts in the city itself. Conditions in occupied Hong Kong were bad enough at the start, but they began to deteriorate as early as June 1942, and soaring prices soon meant that only the very wealthiest had no worries about feeding themselves and their children. With Edmondston and perhaps others, Grayburn administered a fund to provide illegal loans to distressed Allied nationals who’d not been interned: when Edmondston refused to lend money to American writer Emily Hahn, in protest at her adulterous affair with Charles Boxer, Grayburn lent her the money from his private account.36

While all this was going on, the bankers were liquidating their own banks. In the spring the Japanese discovered a stock of unsigned banknotes, and they set Grayburn and his colleagues to work signing them for their use – ‘unbacked, unlawful, distinguishable only by their serial numbers from the genuine ones’.37 According to Oliver Lindsay, who provides no source for the claim, they were made to sign only 500 a day, half an hour’s work.38

We have a few glimpses of the conditions in which Sir Vandeleur and Lady Mary were living during the occupation. In late May 1942 Grayburn learnt he’d be able send out a letter through a soon to be repatriated American, and on May 31 he wrote one in which he tried to tell the unadorned truth, or a little of it at least, to his daughter Elizabeth:

(W)eight dropped from 200 to 160 lbs. Mary is somewhat thinner. Our cubicle is tiny, we sleep on a single mattress. Had no proper bath since December.

These words were blacked out by the Japanese censor.

A domestic detail did get through:

Mary cooks every Thursday for whole community of 80. Some soup maker!!39

One of the repatriated American bankers, Theodore Lindabury, wrote to Elizabeth himself:

During that time (the Grayburns) were working every day in the liquidation of the Bank and were able, by various means, to secure a sufficient supply of food, other than the rice given by the Japanese.40

The ‘various means’ probably meant buying extra food on either the open or the black market, and Lindabury stressed how lucky they were not to be in Stanley. In spite of this understandably upbeat picture, Sir Vandeleur was seen ‘looking as gaunt and grey as a timber wolf’.41

Other repatriated bankers gave a general account of conditions at the Hotel to journalist Vaughn Meisling, himself a Stanley repatriate. They described the Sun Wah as ‘a fire trap well-stocked with vermin’ and said that many of their number had needed treatment for dysentery, malnutrition and insect bites. They were marched a mile and a half to and from their work every day – the notorious ‘chain gang’ – escorted by soldiers, although after the Americans had left the remaining bankers were spared this indignity. They were often slapped and humiliated by their captors, the worst of whom they called ‘Slaphappy Joe’ because he was never happy except when hitting someone. At afternoon roll call he would box their ears until they learnt to answer in Japanese. My guess is that this was the guard who subjected the bankers to ‘additional indignities’ who Grayburn got transferred by complaining to the Finance Department in March.42 The American bankers often felt they were being sniped at as bullets hit or entered the hotel.43

According to Andrew Leiper, who was in the Sun Wah with two of his colleagues from the Chartered Bank, there was no electricity until March, but when it came it greatly cheered the residents44 – this restoration had been requested by Grayburn at the same time he complained about the guard.45 Before the July easing of conditions, the bankers suffered badly from boredom – it was worse for the women and children who seemed to have been confined to the Sun Wah. The women (all British, Dutch and Belgian as there were no American wives) spent the early weeks cleaning and disinfecting46 what had once been a squalid boarding house which, if it was like most of the hotels used to house Allied nationals before they were sent to Stanley, had doubled as brothel after the pre-war Government had launched a futile drive against prostitution. At first the residents had nothing to read except banking reference books and the Japanese-produced Hong Kong News. The highlights of the week were ‘bath night’ – 6 inches of hot water, so you can see why Sir Vandeleur complained he’d not had a proper bath and ‘rations night’ when Leiper and the Dutch banker Hugo Bakkeren handed out weevil-ridden rice and flour, peanut oil, salt and wong tong47 to representatives of each ‘mess’.48

Emily Hahn tells us that to get away from the Sun Wah, Sir Vandeleur and his wife sometimes visited French banker Paul de Roux, who had arranged a flat for himself at the top of the Bank d’Indochine building. They were also able to take a bath there.49 De Roux was also (or later became) a resistance agent, and on February 19, 1944, he jumped from that flat in order to escape arrest by the Kempeitai.50

More about the lives of the Sun Wah bankers, and about Grayburn’s leadership role, is shown by a development of late 1942. On December 10 he received a note from one of the Japanese Liquidators:

I have to advise you sincerely that all Foreign Officer (sic) of the Bank at present working under the liquidation and their families should refrain from moving about freely on Saturday afternoons, Sundays or any other holidays, especially during the evenings and nights.
Should there be any necessity to go out, permission must first be obtained from the Liquidators.
I wish to emphasize that this is a matter of serious importance and that should one single person get involved in trouble, all the others will suffer the consequences as a result.

The Japanese were often anxious to prevent ‘contamination’ of the Chinese by Allied nationals, and Leiper and others were once ejected from a cinema, but my guess is that this tightening of the rules was a response to the October escape of two HSBC staff, which I’ll discuss in the next post. Grayburn got all the bankers at the Sun Wah to initial the document, having first written on it:

This ruling refers to all times, we are only allowed out for shopping and exercise. French Hospital may only be visited for real necessity not for softball.

The bankers had been allowed very little freedom at first, but in July 1942, as a reward for ‘good behaviour – ironically this was about the time that some of them were making contact with the BAAG – they were allowed passes that gave them some right to move about the town, for example, to shop in Central or to go to the French Hospital ‘in case of need’ or to visit relatives and colleagues there.51 They were also given an allowance of $300 a month for food, probably at this time.52 Weekend ‘excursions’ to the Hospital to visit or take food to any Sun Wah resident there became popular as they provided the chance to get away from the hotel and enjoy a walk in the fresh air,53 and it would seem from Sir Vandeleur’s comment that some bankers also went to take part in the softball games started by one of the American Health Department drivers before his repatriation.

According to postal historian David Tett, whose source was undoubtedly Grayburn’s family Sir Vandeleur ‘took no heed’ of the risk himself, so presumably he ignored his own instructions and continued to visit the French Hospital.54 Andrew Leiper tells us that it was the health workers who kept the bankers ‘in touch with what was happening at Stanley’,55 and, although he’s discussing an earlier period, my guess is that the soft ball and the visits enabled those bankers working for the BAAG to pick up useful information.

Given the hunger and squalor of his daily life and the dangers that he faced, why didn’t Grayburn try to escape from the unguarded hotel? Lindsay Ride, indeed, devised plans for a mass escape of the bankers, but these were over-ruled on political grounds: it was felt that it would be embarrassing to get the bankers out while leaving almost everyone else under Japanese rule.56 But what of Grayburn’s personal attitude to remaining in Hong Kong? In the message of July 31 previously referred to, he wrote:

Staff requests make every endeavour repatriate self as only person who can clarify present situation.57

That, however, referred to an authorised repatriation, and it seems that Grayburn never wanted to try his luck in an illicit escape. This might have been because, as T. J. J. Fenwick and David Edmondston believed, the chances of a tired, 61 year old with gout and general debility getting out of Hong Kong were low. One source claims that his health was so poor at this time meant he never appeared at the bank unless required.58 However, King suggests that his illness might have been part diplomatic – to keep him out of his office where he could do little and might annoy the Japanese.59 Others have suggested he was afraid of reprisals against Lady Mary, which would have been a perfectly reasonable attitude to have taken – one Portuguese escaper had his ex-wife arrested! But it seems that an important, perhaps the main, reason for his remaining was he believed that it was in Hong Kong that he could do most good. Lady Mary later testified:

(W)hile we were prisoners (Sir Vandeleur Grayburn) was repeatedly asked to make his getaway and all plans were made and organized by people in Free China to this end, but he always refused because his argument was that he was doing more good in Hong Kong than he would do if he were away from it.60

Once again Grayburn – now sick, tired, hungry and facing the gravest dangers imaginable – stayed at his post.

Notes:

1GA 1939, no.. 320 .

2GA 1938, no. 807.

3Report of the Taxation committee, SP 1939.

4Report of the War Revenue committee, SP1940.

5GA 1941, no. 521.

6GA 1941, no. 885.

7Philip Snow, The Fall of Hong Kong, 2003, 47.

8 King, 568.

9King, 1988, 403.

10David Tett, Captives In Cathay, 2007, 302.

11Frank King, History of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, Volume 3, 1988, 617.

12See Andrew Leiper, A Yen For My Thoughts, 1982, 8.

13http://gwulo.com/node/9586

14King, 1988, 572.

15See King, 1988, 572.

16John Luff, The Hidden Years, 1967, 136-137.

17Tett, 2007, 291.

18King, 1988, 572.

19 King, 1988, 572-573

20Waichow Intelligence Summary, No. 25, 27 March 1943, Ride Papers.

21G. B. Endacott and Alan Birch, Hong Kong Eclipse, 1978, 240.

22Minutes of the Finance committee meeting for that date.

23Leiper, 1982, 102-103.

24Leiper, 1982, passim; Alice Y. Lan and Betty M. Hu, We Flee From Hong Kong, 2000 ed (1944), 48.

25Lan and Hu, 2000 ed (1944), 48.

26King, 1988, 573.

27Selwyn Selwyn-Clarke, Footprints, 1975, 73.

28There seems to be a photo of him taken in 1961 in the National Portrait Gallery – http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw233947/Samuel-William-Prittie-Perry-Aldworth?LinkID=mp140738&role=sit&rNo=0

29Cited King, 1988, 612-613.

30King, 1988, 614.

31 King, 1988, 613.

32 Leiper, 1982, 169.

33King, 1988, 613-614.

34Some sources give March 11. http://gwulo.com/node/9924

35https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2012/07/23/marcus-da-silva/

36Emily Hahn, China To Me, 1986 ed, 392-393.

37Snow, 2003, 152.

38Oliver Lindsay, At The Going Down of the Sun, 1982, 112.

39Tett, 2007, 291-292.

40Tett, 2007, 294.

41Snow, 2003, 141.

42King, 1988, 574.

43 Billings Gazette, August 26, 1942, page 2.

44Leiper, 1982, 134.

45King, 1988, 574.

46Leiper, 1982, 117.

47Similar words mean both brown sugar and dumplings. My sense is that in Hong Kong WW11 sources it usually means sugar.

48Leiper, 1982, 141.

49Hahn, 1986 ed, 376.

50http://www.france-libre.net/temoignages-documents/temoignages/comite-hk-arnulphy.php

Another account has him die on February 19 in a Kempeitai prison as a result of mistreatment.

51Leiper, 1982, 147-148.

52King, 1988, 574.

53Leiper, 1982, 150.

54Tett, 2007, 295.

55Leiper, 1982, 143. Leiper says that they heard reports about the Kowloon POW Camps ‘from the same source’ .

56King, 1988, 616.

57King, 198, 617.

58King, 1988, 613-614.

59King, 1988, 617.

60King, 1988, 616-617.

Mildred Elizabeth Constance Dibden

Mildred Dibden, was one of nine missionaries on the British Army Aid Group list of ‘Free Europeans’ (people, mainly British, who were not interned at Stanley) drawn up in late 1942.[1]

Miss Dibden was born to George Dibden and Mary Elizabeth Payne in 1905, one of nine children, although one of her sisters was the child of her mother’s previous marriage.[2] The family house near Birmingham burnt down,[3] and she was brought up by a family friend,[4] and attended a boarding school in Ramsgate.[5] Her father emigrated to Canada, and eventually her mother joined him with five of the children, leaving Mildred and three others behind.[6] I’m not a fan of psychoanalytic explanations in historical writing, but it’s very hard indeed not to see the origins of her later devoted commitment to providing a family for abandoned children in these early experiences of loss, disruption and abandonment.

She was an artistic young woman, and planned to be an art teacher, but she seems to have undergone a religious experience while listening to an evangelical preacher,[7] and decided to become a missionary instead. In 1929 she began two years of missionary training at the Bible Churchmen’s Missionary Society Bristol college. The Society was an Anglican organization, had been set up in 1922 after the Church Missionary Society split, and it represented the ‘evangelical’ grouping that believed the parent organization was drifting towards ‘theological liberalism’.[8]

The BCMS sent her to Hong Kong in 1931, but she was forced to return home after contracting malaria, which almost killed her.[9] Nevertheless, this first visit to the Colony was important, as Miss Dibden was struck by the plight of the hundreds of abandoned babies, and she decided to return to care for them. In the 1920s the Hong Kong Government, after much debate, banned the system of ‘mui tsai’, whereby, for a small fee, middle class and wealthy families acquired young girls as domestic servants.[10] Hong Kong from the start was committed to interfering as little as possible with Chinese customs, and the supporters of mui tsai claimed that it was a good way to make sure that young female children from impoverished families were guaranteed food and the possibility of later marriage, but its opponents, who claimed it was selling girls into slavery, prevailed. Whatever the merits of the ban, it meant that even more female babies were abandoned, and Miss Dibden’s work was all the more desperately needed.[11]

She returned to Hong Kong in 1936 and was given encouragement and initial financial support by Dr. Harry Lechmere Clift and his wife Winifred, who operated a medical mission in Kowloon. She started to take in abandoned babies, sheltering them in a number of different locations, including Kowloon’s Nathan Road and the small island of Cheung Chau, 10 km to the southwest of Hong Kong. On November 11, 1936, without organization or guaranteed income, she established her first major operation, the Fanling Babies Home. Most of her income came from charitable donations from Hong Kong evangelicals and supporters abroad, mainly in England and Canada.[12]

The official website of the (now defunct) Fanling Babies Home gives a picture of the Estate they moved to in 1940:

The estate, on Main Street in Fanling, was originally rented from an elderly Chinese landlord who had built {it} to accommodate his family and relatives. Thus in addition to the main house, there were two other smaller houses. Each small house had eight rooms and a kitchen. Lovely gardens surrounded the estate which also had a large yard that the kids could play in as well as many fruit trees.
The ground floor on the main house consisted of five large rooms and three smaller rooms. The upstairs contained seven bedrooms, adjoining dressing rooms and several verandas with a view of the lights of Hong Kong.
Miss Dibden moved 49 children under the age of three from Cheun{g} Chau to Fanling Babies Home in the NewTerritories. Toddlers were housed downstairs while infants were upstairs. The size of the main house easily accommodated a nursery school, dispensary, bedrooms, etc.[13]

We get a glimpse of life at the home in a memoir written by American missionary, Beth Nance:

The staff rescued abandoned babies, primarily baby girls who had been left outside somewhere to die. The organization had not been going very long, so there were no children older than four or five years old. The home was associated with our Evangelical Fraternity Mission and we sometimes visited there. (I remember going on the bus after Ancil was born. Winifred was walking by that time and she was as large as some of the three-year-olds. Winifred was always eager to have new experiences so she was a great explorer. She aroused the astonishment of these rescued little girls, who were so well-disciplined. There were some places where they did not dare to go, and some things they did not touch; but Winifred went anywhere with those little girls behind her. It reminded me of a chicken yard, where one chicken has found something and all the rest of them follow after, squawking loudly. It was fun to watch.)[14]

It seems that some of the Nance family’s congregation helped at the home:

For the young people who were newly saved, and those who were renewing their Christian experience, including the British servicemen, my husband and I wanted to have an outreach program. The young people took an interest in this place for abandoned children. In fact, at our first Christmas in China, that was one of the places we visited. Instead of having a gift-giving party for each other, the youth group gave gifts to the children. I remember a gallon jar of cod liver oil they purchased.
Mrs. Koeppen[15] helped me prepare a meal for the young people. It was a happy Christmas.[16]

They were also helped by non-religious organizations: at Christmas 1940 the St. Andrews Society of exiled Scots threw a party, ‘complete with decorated tree and Santa Claus’, for the babies.[17]

There are a number of photos of Miss Dibden that can be viewed online.[18] My favourite is one showing her with one of the girls she cared for; taken at Christmas, 1939; it speaks volumes for the quality of the relationship between her and her charges.

In the summer of 1940, Miss Dibden decided she needed help to run the Home, perhaps because of the move to the Fanling Estate. Unfortunately the Evacuation Order of June, 1940 not only decreed that ‘white’ women and children should be sent to Australia, but also forbade ‘new’ women to take up residence in the Colony. Miss Dibden applied to be allowed to bring in a young helper, Ruth Little. Perhaps this was because of that move to the Estate on Main Street, rented by the China Children’s Fund.[19]

At her tribunal, Miss Dibden explained that the Home cared for about 65 orphans or abandoned children between the ages of two days and four years. There was no committee, no council, no board and all funds were provided by sympathetic friends within the Colony. She had to take all the decisions. If war came, it would bring an increase in abandoned children. There was nobody to take her place if she fell ill, so Miss Little’s assistance was urgently needed.

The Chairman, E. H. Williams, replied that Miss Dibden should not assume her case had not been considered carefully. She had admitted Miss Little had never been resident in Hong Kong. Miss Dibden came back with:

If you think it is not advisable for Miss Little to come to Hong Kong, would you find someone for me?

Not surprisingly Mr Williams told her she shouldn’t ask such questions, and after consulting other committee members, turned down her application, saying she should be able to find someone locally to carry out the duties she’d described.[20] We need to be fair to both sides: Miss Dibden would have been well aware that the Evacuation Order was widely flouted, and that the wives of some influential men were walking around Hong Kong having got themselves registered as ‘essential’ personnel, sometimes after taking a short nursing course. On the other hand, Mr. Williams and his panel were tasked with judging on the basis of the theory and not the practice of the legislation, and could hardly say, ‘The whole thing’s a farce, do what you want’. But it’s an interesting fact that the same tribunal also turned down Helen Kennedy-Skipton’s request to be allowed to stay in Hong Kong, probably because although she claimed to be American she admitted travelling on a British passport. She stayed anyway, just as Miss Little later entered – a sympathetic official at the Colonial Secretariat allowed her in (she was a partly-trained nurse) and disposed of any talk of Miss Dibden’s own evacuation.[21]

The war began in nightmare fashion for Mildred Dibden and her staff. The Fanling Babies Home was closer than most ‘European’ institutions to the border, and Miss Dibden received an early telephone call on December 8, 1941, the day of the Japanese attack. It was another missionary, Iris Critchell who ran a girls’ home next door. The police had told her that war had broken out and that they were to be ready for evacuation to Hong Kong Island.[22] She got the 35 older children and a nurse into a lorry that was sent for them,[23] but the lorry hadn’t returned for the remaining 54 infants when Japanese soldiers arrived. They were told they’d be shot if they left the premises, precious stores of milk were looted, but at first the women were unharmed. eventually groups bent on rape arrived. Miss Dibden courageously saved Ruth Little from molestation, but she was unable to do the same for the Chinese nurses and amahs. Not for want of trying. A Japanese soldier struck her across the face with a rifle butt when she tried to stop the rape of a young amah. Cots were overturned and a baby was trampled to death. [24]

Happily, the horrors of the first day were never repeated, which is not to say there was not much looting and some brutality. At one point Misses Dibden and Little and an American sent to help them (Lula Bell Hough) were tied up, led away and expected execution. At another Miss Dibden and some of the Chinese staff were brutally beaten by a Japanese sergeant, whose men had just shot the Home’s dog. Everyone, English and Chinese, child, adult and baby, must have lived in constant fear, even on the relatively ‘quiet’ days when they weren’t subjected to insult or injury.

But just before the Christmas Day surrender they found a protector in Colonel Kanamuru, who’d been put in charge of Fanling, who asked to be informed of bad behaviour by his soldiers and sent the Home rice, vegetables and cod liver oil.[25] Later he gave the women some of his own money – it turned out that his sister had received help from a missionary in Japan. Unfortunately he was transferred to the front on January 15, 1942.[26]

Miss Dibden and Miss Little were not interned and managed to keep the orphanage open throughout the war. It’s fair to point out that the Japanese usually respected the work of both protestant and catholic religious personnel, especially when they were providing material aid to the poor. But occupied Hong Kong was a dreadful place, and for Miss Dibden and her staff this meant almost four years of violence, starvation, dysentery and recurrent malaria. They refused to abandon the babies in their care, but it must have occurred to both of the Englishwomen that their lives would be easier and safer inside Stanley Camp. That Miss Dibden and Miss Little should have stayed at their post after the initial violence and continuing hardship of Japanese rule speaks unequivocally of their personal qualities; it seems they only thought about going into Stanley when it seemed it would have been in the interests of the babies for them to do so.[27]

Eventually, after a period in which she herself endured a severe beating and it seemed as if the babies in her care might starve, Miss Dibden was given a food allocation for the Home by the new Japanese civilian administration. But to get it Miss Dibden had to go once a month in person to the government offices in the old Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Building – she couldn’t send a delegate as that would have been disrespectful.[28]

The journey was about twenty miles each way; every month she walked to the Star Ferry in Kowloon and once across the Harbour, on to the Bank, Iris Critchell and Ruth Little taking turns to accompany her, as the only alternative was lorry transport, and that was too unreliable. They return journey was mentally less anxious – they had supplies for another month – but physically more demanding as those supplies had to be carried. Eventually Miss Dibden fixed an old pram and lubricated it with peanut oil so they’d have something to bear the loads.[29]

All this took a toll on the health of the three women in charge. On July 11, 1942 they were admitted to the English ward of the French Hospital in Causeway Bay. Mildred Dibden has to be carried out of the Home on a stretcher. At the Hospital she met great kindness and the ‘reassurance of being with {her} own people’:

To add to the pleasure of that first night in hospital, came a tea tray from {Dr. Selwyn-Clarke}. With his wife and daughter, he was interned in the French hospital on the floor above. Tea with toast and butter. What could be more delicious? was it possible that within six short months such luxury would bring tears to the eyes?[30]

Iris returned to Fanling after about two months, Ruth in the middle of September, Mildred not until November 1.

Later in the war, at a time when once again the babies faced starvation, they were helped by Dr. Arthur Woo, who gave them rice and a letter of introduction to Aw boon-haw, who’d made a fortune from the Tiger balm salve. He gave them the money to start a pig-rearing business which kept them in funds until the end of the war.[31]

After liberation in August 1945, Miss Dibden sailed to England for repatriation leave, and then returned to continue her mission in Hong Kong. However, things started to go wrong. The Estate was bought in 1946 by the Children’s Christian Fund, which took over full sponsorship and operation in 1951.[32] This gave financial stability, but it meant working in a committee structure, with some decisions taken out of her hands – she’d been used to doing everything her way. In 1952, after a trip back to England and an attempt to work things out, weakened by recurrent illness and distressed in mind, she resigned.[33] Nevertheless, in the same year, after starting again in a small way in a couple of bungalows in Ping Shan,[34] she founded a second home, Shatin Babies’ Home, run on the same principles, including an emphasis on ‘family’:

Miss Dibden ran the Home on a disciplined daily schedule which included prayers, play time and schooling. Miss Dibden maintained Shatin Babies Home through mostly local community contributions and giving from abroad. The Hong Kong government also helped by charging a nominal rent on the property.
At one point, the staff consisted of a cook, gardener, several nurse girls, eight amahs and four women teachers.[35]

In 1966 Miss Dibden decided to bring her work in the Shatin Babies Home to an end; the Cultural Revolution had spread to Hong Kong and there had been rioting against proposed Star Ferry fare increases; she rightly feared that there was worse to come, and dreaded a replay of her hideous experiences of the war if Chinese troops crossed the border.[36] After some 50 children had been adopted abroad, she returned to England on August 23, bringing with her 25 Chinese people with her: 21 girl, two boys and a married woman and her husband who was to be cook and handyman.[37] They went to live in Southsea, close to Portsmouth. She continued to raise funds for Hong Kong’s abandoned children.

The Supplement to the London Gazette for June 14, 1966 announced she’d been awarded the MBE for her services to Hong Kong’s deprived children.

Mildred Dibden retired to Tunbridge Wells in 1975, and she died in a care home there in 1987.[38] There are a number of testimonies on the internet to the continuing value of the work she and her successors carried out.[39]

The work of Christian missionaries in China has always been controversial: there was already a debate about its value in late Victorian Britain,[40] and historian Jason Wordie, in an otherwise valuable article,[41] is wrong to dismiss criticism by the tired manoeuvre of putting it down to ‘political correctness’ or to simplistic anti-religious prejudice. My own view is that the good done by the missionaries, who in the nineteenth century and beyond provided China with much of what was available there in the way of western medicine, far outweighed the harm. At their best, they showed a self-sacrificial commitment to helping the poorest members of a generally impoverished population in practical and important ways.

That best is shown by Mildred Dibden.
——————————————————————————–

[1] https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2012/05/24/some-notes-on-the-baag-uninterned-lists-1/

[2] http://boards.ancestry.co.uk/thread.aspx?mv=flat&m=1&p=surnames.dibden

[3] Jill Doggett, The Yip Family of Amah Rock, (1969), 1982, 8. This biography was obviously written with Miss Dibden’s help and with access to her diary, which includes the war years.

[4] http://www.fanlingbabies.com/fanling_babies_home_007.htm

[5] Doggett, 1982, 10

[6] Doggett, 1982, 18.

[7] Doggett, 1982, 20.

[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crosslinks

[9] http://fanlingbabies.com/biographies/mildred-dibden/

[10] My mother’s tea-merchant father in Macao bought one such girl. ‘We treated her well,’ she told me, not necessarily correctly.

[11] http://www.scmp.com/article/691603/out-and-about

[12] http://fanlingbabies.com/hk-orphanages/fanling-babies-home/

[13] http://fanlingbabies.com/hk-orphanages/fanling-babies-home/

[14] http://www.bethnance.com/index.php

[15] ‘A German refugee from Ukraine, by way of Manchuria and Shanghai’ – http://www.bethnance.com/index.php. She moved to Australia in 1950 – http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/99820229

[16] http://www.bethnance.com/index.php

[17] Hong Kong Daily Press, January 1, 1941, page 6.

[18] http://search.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/sse.dll?gl=ROOT_CATEGORY&rank=1&new=1&so=3&MSAV=1&msT=1&gss=ms_r_f-2_s&gsfn=Elizabeth&gsln=Dibden&msbdy=&msbpn__ftp=&msddy=&msdpn__ftp=&cpxt=0&catBucket=p&uidh=000&cp=0

[19] http://fanlingbabies.com/hk-orphanages/fanling-babies-home/

[20] Hong Kong Sunday Herald, October 27, 1940, page 4.

[21] Doggett, 1982, 134-135.

[22] Doggett, 1982, 139.

[23] Doggett, 1982, 140.

[24] Doggett, 1982, 143-144.

[25] Doggett, 1982, 159-160.

[26] Doggett, 1982, 165-166.

[27] E.g. Doggett, 1982, 172-173.

[28] Doggett, 1982, 175.

[29] Doggett, 1982, 175-176.

[30] Doggett, 1982, 178.

[31] Doggett, 1982, 182-184.

[32] http://www.fanlingbabies.com/fanling_babies_home_002.htm

[33] Doggett, 1982, 209-216.

[34] Doggett, 182, 218.

[35] For more on the Shatin home see http://fanlingbabies.com/hk-orphanages/shatin-babies-home/

[36] Doggett, 1982, 234.

[37] Doggett, 1982, 236.

[38] London Gazette, March 10, 1988.

[39] http://www.caawr.com/adoptee-stories/; http://www.hkadopteesnetwork.com/uk/news-blog/a-london-day-out-april-2011-reunion/ For a touching attempt at reunion, see http://boards.ancestry.co.uk/surnames.dibden/1.2.5.2.2.2.1.1/mb.ashx

[40] See Susan Schoenbauer Thurin’s essay on Alicia Little in Douglas Kerr and Julia Koehn, A Century of Travels In China, 2007, (e.g. Kindle Edition, Location 2788). Christopher Isherwood’s often negative attitude to missionaries in the account he and W. H. Auden wrote of their 1938 visit to China, Journey to a War, takes the debate into the period we’re under discussion, and it’s evident in the sometimes polarised accounts of missionaries and priests in Stanley to be found in the internee memoirs.

[41] http://www.scmp.com/article/691603/out-and-about

T’so Tsun-on

Before the war Ts’o Tsun-on played a significant role in Hong Kong society. He was the joint Honorary Secretary of the Victoria League, a body which helped Hong Kong students studying in Britain.[1] He served as Honorary Aide de Camp to H. E. Liet-Gen E. F. Norton, relinquishing the post on March 13, 1941, along with many others – I think Norton left the Colony at this point. He was a senior member of the Hong Kong Police Reserve: the Government Gazette of May 23, 1941 records that he was switched from Adjutant to Senior Superintendent and Officer Commanding Chinese Company with effect from April 9.

He might have been related to the Hon. Doc. Ts’o See-wan (1868-1953), an Unofficial Member of the Executive Council with an interest in Police matters,[2] who’d been awarded the CBE in 1935[3] and was possibly the fourth most important Chinese in the Colony in the years leading up to the war,[4] and the representative of the Chinese community at the coronation of George V1 on May 12, 1937.[5]

Mr. T’so was involved in the resistance during the Japanese occupation. A Japanese document captured by the British Army Aid Group[6] summarises his ‘crimes’ thus:

In June 1942 T’SO TSUN ON, the Superintendent of the Police Reserve Force of the former HONGKONG government, in adaptation to consulting with LOOIE FOOK WING (TN[7] Alias David Loie), the assistant Superintendent of the same Force (who committed suicide at the time of his arrest on 31 May 43)[8] was in touch with the British Organisation at SHIU KWAN,[9] had to gather and communicate various intelligence regarding the military situation etc. of the Imperial army in HONGKONG, the conditions being the guarantee of the life of the Reserve Police Chief at WAICHOW. He gained approval for these proposed objects.

The document adds that T’so Tsun-on communicated these objectives to David Loie, who, towards the end of 1942 set up the beginnings of the ‘Hongkong Command Post’, a British espionage group, consisting of ‘a large number’ of ‘police officers’ (presumably reservists). This began to operate about March 1943:

Their operations finally extended to the P.O.W. Camp at HONGKONG and the Internment Camp for enemy aliens.

In April 1942 T’So Tsun-on summoned a meeting of former Reservists – presumably to set up an espionage network – and at some point thereafter he went ‘into the interior’ to consult British officials. His name is not on the document’s list either of those sentenced to death or to 15 years (later reduced to 10). I wonder if he was ever in Japanese hands? The meeting ‘in the interior’ (presumably Kukong) was in April 1942 and his discussions with Loie in June so he might have left Hong Kong later in the year. I think the key to understanding his fate is that mysterious (to me) phrase ‘the conditions being the guarantee of the life of the Reserve Police Chief at WAICHOW’. He was, of course the Reserve Police Chief, and he tell the BAAG at Kukong that he’d work for them from the base at Waichow? In any case, I can find no other source for his activity during the war or any indication of his death or survival. But, according to the Japanese trial summary, he played an important role in the resistance by initiating the movement among the Police Reservists.
——————————————————————————–

[1] Hong Kong Daily Press, January 27, 1937, pages 1 and 7.

[2] See e.g. Hongkong Telegraph, October 12, 1933, page 4; Hongkong Daily Press, July, 10, 1935, page 8.

[3] Hongkong Telegraph, November 6, 1935, page 4.

[4] Henry Lethbridge, in I. C. Jarvie and Joseph Agassi, Hong Kong A Society in Transition, 1969, 82; 85.

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ts’o_Seen_Wan

[6]Part of the Ride Papers, kindly sent to me by Elizabeth Ride. The complete papers are held at the Hong Kong Heritage Project.

[7] TN = Translator’s note.

[8] David Loie jumped to his death from the roof of the former Supreme CourtBuilding, then the headquarters of the Military Police (Kempeitai) in order to avoid the possibility of betraying others under the torture to which he was being led.

[9] Better known as Kukong.

A Document of August 1945: Thomas, Ng Yiu-cheung and the Sheridan Escape

Philip Cracknell, working in the Hong Kong archives, has found a document written by my father, one that gives us another glimpse of baking in occupied Hong Kong, throws a little more light on the escape of Staff-Sergeant Sheridan, and pays tribute to the role of a man who was to become his life-long friend Ng Yiu-cheung.. Moreover, it opens up the possibility that Thomas was in one of the earliest batches to leave Stanley Camp after the Japanese surrender. In any case, this document will be a good excuse for an early post describing the chaotic and dangerous conditions that meant the vast majority of internees were told to stay in Stanley for their own safety!

Firstly I’ll give the whole document then go through it bit by bit.

Note Titled: Continuation of Report by T H Edgar June 20th 1943

On March 31st Staff Sergeant Staff-Sergeant Sheridan Received an Irish Pass. As soon as he received this we made preparation for him to get away. We sold one case of Baking Powder for HKD600 to raise money for him to go. He left early in May 1942, for Kwang-Chow-Wan from there to walk to Chunking. Sergeant Hammond has since heard that he arrived in England safely. Without help of Ching Loong it would have been impossible for us to have carried on. He gave us every assistance and often when we could not get ingredient hops, flour, firewood etc he supplied them without payment. He never asked for nor received any rent, and any repairs to the ovens etc he paid for himself.
Due entirely to his loyalty we were able to produce bread free of charge to Hospitals and the numerous people outside who sadly needed our help.
Signed by T H Edgar
23-8-45

Now for my commentary.

Note Titled: Continuation of Report by T H Edgar June 20th 1943

Thomas and Evelina were sent into Stanley on May 7, 1943. He wrote almost immediately to his family, the first of his cards or letters to have survived, telling them he’d finally been interned and saying he wasn’t yet working. By May 13, he’d been given the obvious job of baking. It seems that he was asked (or decided) to report to the internees’ leader, Franklin Gimson, about his experiences baking in the occupied city; this report has not yet been located. The continuation under discussion dealt with a particular aspect of this period, the contribution of Mr. Ng.

On March 31st Staff-Sergeant Sheridan Received an Irish Pass. As soon as he received this we made preparation for him to get away.

There were three bakers living in the French Hospital alongside Thomas: Serge Peacock, who had worked for Lane, Crawford before the war, James Hammond and Patrick Sheridan. The last two were in fact military bakers (RASC) but had been ordered to pose as civilians by a Japanese officer, Captain Tanaka, in order to prevent his (Tanaka’s) negligence in not sending them to Shamshuipo POW Camp from becoming known to the Kempeitai (Military Police, feared even by the Japanese). Staff-Sergeant Sheridan was introduced to an Irish family by my mother Evelina (who’d started dating Thomas in early January) and he then got the idea of using his background (he’d grown up in County Cork) to claim to be Irish as the first step in organising an escape – the Sullivans told him that the Irish were being treated as neutrals.

The date of March 31 given for the receipt of a neutral’s pass is a little too early; Staff-Sergeant Sheridan probably got the pass in the middle of April, as the previous passes had been extended to April 15. He immediately confided his plan to the other three bakers, who were all supportive, in spite of the risk to themselves, and made suggestions to help him with the planning. It was Thomas who came up with the idea of selling some baking powder to Mr. Ng – tickets to Kwong Chow-Wan were expensive, and money for the long journey onwards through Free China was also needed.

We sold one case of Baking Powder for HKD600 to raise money for him to go.

Staff-Sergeant Sheridan gives the sum raised as both $500 and $560. According to a post-war interview he gave to The Soldier, the transactions were conducted with the Japanese close by, both men facing torture and death if discovered. The same article says the baking powder and some yeast was ‘borrowed’ little by little from Captain Tanaka’s stores ostensibly to make bread. I’m not confident that the bakers were still drawing on stores under Tanaka’s control, but my other sources don’t clarify this point.
In his escape statement Staff-Sergeant Sheridan described the money as a ‘loan’ and there’s a document in the Ride Papers in which it’s stated that the British Army couldn’t pay back the money because Mr. Ng (wisely!) refused to accept a receipt. It seems as if Mr Ng paid over the odds for the baking powder, or at least that Staff-Sergeant Sheridan was so conscious of the value of the money to his escape, and the huge risk of providing it, that he tried to arrange for an additional payment.

He left early in May 1942, for Kwang-Chow-Wan from there to walk to Chunking.

In fact, the escape began on June 4. This is what Staff-Sergeant Sheridan has to say about leaving the French Hospital that day:

On the morning of 4 June 1942 I am up early, not having slept very well, worrying about many things that could go wrong and knowing the consequences are very serious. Josephine Chan ((One of the students at the French Convent School)) comes and says goodbye and gives me a small photograph of herself. Also her home address in Penang. I promise to write after the war. She has a real good heart and is a loyal and true friend.
After a final farewell, Leung Choy and Tam Tong, two of my Chinese bakers carry my kit and accompany me on a tram to the Wing-On pier at West Point. Although it is nearly two hours before the boat sails, there is an enormous crowd of Chinese waiting. I say goodbye to Leung Choy and Tam Tong and join the waiting crowd.

The other bakers must also have been nervous, worried for Staff-Sergeant Sheridan and themselves. They’d all given advice and presents, and must have been aware that, if caught, he’d have been brutally questioned as to those who’d helped him.
More extracts from Staff-Sergeant Sheridan’s post-war description can be read here: http://gwulo.com/node/13914

Sergeant Hammond has since heard that he arrived in England safely.

This is new information. For cards in and out of Stanley see

From The Dark World’s Fire: Thomas’s Cards From Stanley Camp

Without help of Ching Loong it would have been impossible for us to have carried on. He gave us every assistance and often when we could not get ingredient hops, flour, firewood etc he supplied them without payment. He never asked for nor received any rent, and any repairs to the ovens etc he paid for himself.

An interesting mistake: Thomas gives the name of the bakery instead of the manager and part-owner! In a post-war article for his trade paper, The British Baker, and he paid tribute to the loyalty of the whole staff of the bakery, and perhaps that came into his mind here. There are a number of accounts suggesting that long-term malnutrition had caused confusion and slowness in the minds of some internees and that’s also a possible explanation.
But the question remains: why was Thomas telling Gimson this at all and why at this time? Unfortunately his original statement of June 20, 1943 has not yet been found, so it’s impossible to know what he was adding and what merely re-iterating in August 1945. My guess is that he was hoping that Gimson would find the time to check on Mr Ng’s welfare and make sure he received any help needed. Mr Ng seems to have been a reasonably wealthy man, but after almost four years of war and a predatory occupation the whole colony was close to starvation.

Due entirely to his loyalty we were able to produce bread free of charge to Hospitals and the numerous people outside who sadly needed our help.

On February 16, 1947, the Hong Kong Sunday Herald reported (page 10) that Ng Yiu-Cheung was to be given a Certificate of Merit by the Governor for his role in Staff-Sergeant Sheridan’s escape. A report of the ceremony suggests he lived in Tai Wai in the New Territories.
That reference to the people ‘outside’ who needed help is intriguing. When the bakers began work on January 9, 1942 their bread went to some of the hospitals and to Stanley Camp. The Camp gradually switched to a flour allowance in lieu of this outside delivery and it seems that from then on the bakers were working mainly for the hospitals – different ones at different times perhaps. But Selwyn-Clarke or his agents are often described as giving people bread, and it seems that the dependants of imprisoned Hong Kong Volunteers (usually Chinese ones and hence uninterned) were given a small allowance. The article in The Soldier cited above states that Staff-Sergeant Sheridan and Sergeant Hammond stole some of the bread they were baking to supplement their meagre rations, and I think it’s a racing certainty that Thomas and Serge Peacock did as well. They would have been crazy not to.

Signed by T H Edgar
23-8-45
I think this makes it possible that Thomas left Stanley between August 21 and 23. Although not impossible, it seems unlikely that he would compose a message about Ng at this time unless either he was certain he could get it delivered to Gimson or he was with him in town (three weeks later we know that he was with other ‘essential workers’ living at the Hong Kong Hotel).
Gimson had left Stanley on August 21, leading a small team tasked with establishing a provisional British administration. Orders had been carried from Macao by three agents of the British Army Aid Group, one of who also contacted Thomas’s old wartime boss, Dr. Selwyn-Clarke, who at this time was leading Ma Tau-Chung Camp.
Perhaps the default assumption should be that Thomas wrote the memo in Stanley and had it sent out to Gimson, but his presence in the Hong Kong during the uncertain and dangerous period between the Japanese surrender and the arrival of Harcourt’s fleet on August 30 can’t be ruled out.

The Executions of October 29, 1943: Update

I find it rather sad that, as we approach the seventieth anniversary of their death, there is still no definitive list of the 32 men and one woman executed on Stanley Beach on October 29, 1943 for their role in the Hong Kong resistance. But thanks largely to Tony Banham and Phil Cracknell I think we’ve reached the stage where we know the names of all those who died but are not yet certain exactly who they were. In other words, there are more than 33 names given by plausible sources.
Four of the executed were Indian (Ansari, Ahmed, Grewal and Feroj). A fair amount is known about Captain Mateen Ansari, who was the only non-civilian victim, and, although the information that I have about the other three is scanty, there is no doubt that they were among the 33. The ‘westerners’ are not surprisingly reasonably well documented in English language sources – the Canadian Monaghan, the American Bennett, and the British Bradley, Hall, Fraser, Hyde, Rees, Scott, Sinton, and Waterton. A little is also known about the Portuguese agent, William White
The real doubt is as to the Chinese victims – I suspect that in some cases this is simply due to different sources giving their names in different forms. The list below is the best I can come up with so far. – it’s based largely on Tony Banham’s list, which is in turn taken from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. In brackets I give the form of the name found by Phil Cracknell in his archival research, where it’s significantly different, and I indicate uncertainty as to identity by question marks).

M. A. ANSARI
BASHIR AHMED
CHESTER BENNETT
FREDERICK WILLIAM BRADLEY
CHAN CHO KIT
CHANG YIT CLEVELAND ELROY (Ching Yit??)
CHAN PING FAN (Chen Ping Fan)
CHAN SIN CHUEN (Chan Siu Chuen)
JOHN ALEXANDER FRASER
FREDERICK IVAN GEORGE HALL
CHARLES FREDERICK HYDE
GEORGE KOTWALL (Bujar Kotewall)
LAU KWOK PING
LAU TAK OI (wife of David Loie) (Lau Tak Hoi)
LAU TAK KWONG
LEE LAM
LEE KUNG HOI (Li Hong Ho?)
LEUNG HUNG (‘Jimmy’) (Leung Hong)
LUK CHUNG KIT (Luk Cheung Kit)
MAJID FEROZ (Majed Feroj)
THOMAS CHRISTOPHER MONAGHAN
NARANJAN SINGH GREWAL (Marajan Singh Greywall)
HUBERT STANLEY REES
WALTER RICHARDSON SCOTT
ALEXANDER CHRISTIE SINTON
DOUGLAS WILLIAM WATERTON
WILLIAM JOHN WHITE
WONG SHIU PUN PRESTON (Wong Sui Pun)
YAN CHEUK MING (Kun James, aka James Kim)
YEUNG SAU TAK (Yeung Sho Te??)

There are two names in Phil’s document that aren’t on that list:
CHAN TA SAI
LEUNG KAO

There are two names on the Banham/CWGC list that don’t appear in Phil’s source:

LO WING
YUNG SHAM CHEUNG – aka Cheung Yuen Sam

Naturally I would be grateful if anybody could throw any further light on this matter. It would be good to have an authoritative list by October 29.