Category Archives: Stanley Camp

July 23, 2012 · 7:26 am

Marcus Alberto da Silva

The concluding moments of the trial played themselves out according to the best Hollywood clichés: the packed courtroom – even the corridor was full of people  waiting to hear the outcome –  the excited ‘ripple’ of reaction at the verdict, which meant the judge had to threaten to clear the court, the rush to congratulate the acquitted man… His co-defendant was duly declared innocent too, in spite of having fled in the middle of the trial (his current whereabouts were unknown).[1] It was a suitably dramatic ending to a trial that had gripped Hong Kong in late July and early August 1950. This was strange. The case was a complex one and the subject matter not particularly compelling: an alleged conspiracy to procure false evidence in an accidental manslaughter charge. Yet on the day when the ‘first accused’ appeared in the dock the account of his cross-examination was spread over three pages of The China Mail.[2]

The reason for this interest was that this ‘first accused’ was Marcus da Silva, arguably the colony’s most prominent lawyer, and, for those who cared to cast their minds back to those dark days, a war hero, who had courageously smuggled money into Stanley, spied for the British Army Aid Group, and then steadfastly resisted the violent attempts of Colonel Noma’s Gendarmes to make him incriminate himself and others.

Mr. da Silva died six years after his acquittal, at the age of 48; before the coming of the internet his story had effectively disappeared from public view but now the outlines at least are visible in contemporary newspapers from both Hong Kong and the United States.

Marcus Alberto da Silva was born on March 1, 1907 and educated at St. Joseph’s College. He was admitted to practise as a solicitor in the Supreme Court in 1930[3] and he joined Mr. D’Almada Remedios, who was then a partner with Mr. Leo D’Almada senior.[4] From 1933 onward he operated a one-man practice. He stayed in Hong Kong after the surrender, remaining uninterned because of his Portuguese nationality.

On September 23, 1945, shortly after his return from Free China at the end of the war, he was asked – or volunteered – to make a broadcast over Hong Kong radio to try to persuade people to charge a reasonable price for the goods and services they provided – the Government was aiming to restore something like pre-war prices to the Colony after the massive inflation of the Japanese occupation. In the course of his broadcast Mr. da Silva gives a general picture of occupied Hong Kong that’s very much in tune with all the other accounts in English, of the grimness and the terror of this period:

Then – Hong Kong by night was a dull, drab blot against a duller, drabber night sky.[5]

‘Fear’ and the ‘cracking of the whiplash’ were, he told the listeners, the weapons of Japanese rule:

 (E)ach and every one of us walked around Hong Kong furtively looking over our shoulders, afraid to talk, afraid to whisper – every vestige of freedom – that inalienable right of every human – taken from us.[6]

But Marcus da Silva hadn’t allowed this fear to stop him from acting. In late 1942 he approached the American Chester Bennett, who had agreed to forego the June 29 repatriation in order to remain in Hong Kong to help the Stanley internees with the purchase of extra food. Bennett had also been smuggling money into the camp and the Portuguese solicitor wanted to help:

Chester I want something to do. I want to help. I know you didn’t get out of Stanley for your health. Bennett gave him a grin and replied, ‘Marcus I’ve been waiting for you to come to me. I knew you would.’ And the big American businessman and the dark energetic little Portuguese lawyer teamed up to get money into Stanley.[7]

What follows – based on interviews with Bennett’s wife and da Silva himself – is important testimony as to methods used to raise money and smuggle it into Stanley:

They did it by having Chinese guards on food trucks entering the camp bring out promissory notes from people of standing in the community. Bennett and Da Silva would then take these notes to rich Indian and Swiss merchants and asked them to advance Jap military yen in exchange  for promissory notes, pointing out that when the  Allies won they would be worthless anyway.[8]

 Most accounts I’ve read focus on the work of the uninterned bankers in raising relief funds, and it takes nothing away from the courage and resourcefulness of men like Grayburn and Hyde to realise that Chester Bennett and Marcus da Silva were active in this field too. Here’s the rest of Boyle’s account of their smuggling technique:

Da Silva would collect the money and put it in a small basket swinging from his arm – (figure illegible- perhaps 40,000) to 50,000 dollars at a time – and walk boldly past Jap soldiers to a book store around the corner. Bennett would be waiting in the rear of the bookstore. He would take the money to another rendezvous and they’d smuggle it into Stanley by putting it in the bottom of lard cans. This went on for several months They got hundreds of thousands of yen in to helpless internees – money that was translated into food and kept them going.[9]

Bennett had been a spy as well as a smuggler, working with Charles Hyde and collecting shipping data and either relaying the information by messengers or by sending it aboard a Chinese junk which pulled out of the harbour and passed it on over concealed shortwave radio.[10] Da Silva naturally wanted to join in these activities too, but I’m not sure from Boyle’s account how far this had happened before their arrest. A shocking development threatened their ability to do anything at all.

Some time in April they were brought news of Hyde’s arrest: a Chinese secret agent employed by the Gendarmerie came to Bennett:

‘The Japanese have prepared a blacklist in Hong Kong of people they suspect,’ he warned, ‘and you and Da Silva are both on it. You had better stay under cover.’ [11]

In an astonishing act of bravery, the two men discussed the situation and decided to ignore advice to go into hiding and then escape from the Colony: they reasoned that the internees needed the money they were sending in, and that the shipping information was too valuable to the Allied cause for them to stop. They understood that their arrest was now only a matter of time, and they knew that torture would follow and death would be the most likely outcome.[12]

Instead of going into hiding they decided to tighten and intensify their operations. Da Silva agreed to take over the main burden of Hyde’s espionage work while Bennett concentrated on smuggling funds to internees. The lawyer felt that the espionage ring had been too loosely organised and set out to tighten it.

In April 1943, not long before their own arrest, they designed an ambitious three-pronged resistance program and sent it off for approval by higher authorities. They planned to set up an intelligence section to gather information about the movement of shipping in and out of Hong Kong, to incite resistance among the local population against the Japanese –  partly by arranging the assassination of Chinese and Indian agents of the Kempeitai as a warning to other traitors –  and to retain the loyalty of Indian troops being used to guard the Canton railway by raising enough money to secretly provide each soldier with ten yen a month  to buy cigarettes.[13]

By 1946 Marcus da Silva had come to think that the enterprise was always doomed:

I believe now that it is impossible for Europeans to conduct espionage successfully by themselves in a predominantly Oriental community occupied by other Orientals…It is too easy for them to check your associates and torture them into giving you away.[14]

Before they received a reply as to their three point plan, both men were in prison.  At 7 a.m. on May 14, 1943 Marcus da Silva was arrested at his residence,[15] and later on the same day the Gendarmes came for Chester Bennett.   In his 1945 radio broadcast Mr. da Silva said a little about his experiences as a prisoner, held in a tiny cell in Mongkok Gendarmerie:

In May 1943 the Jap gendarmes took me in as a political suspect for a period of two months and they gave me everything they had in the way of tortures and beatings.[16]

He wasn’t exaggerating; to start with, he was whipped and accused of getting false Portuguese papers for his neighbour George van Bergen (also arrested on May 14) so that he could remain at large and act as a British spy,[17] a charge the solicitor denied even after the war. Howard Torr – a notorious Chinese assistant of the Kempeitai – tried everything he knew to break Da Silva, but he refused to admit to anything or to incriminate anyone else.[18]

He was also accused of being a British spy himself and in contact with Colonel Lindsay Ride; when he denied everything he was burnt above the right knee with a hot poker and subjected to other inhumanities. When Torr threatened to bring in his younger brother Carl and his (Marcus’s) family, da Silva pointed out that he and Carl had been friendly with Torr before the war, and that the Chinese had even been an ‘occasional client’ of his.[19]

It was his religion – presumably Roman Catholicism – that kept him going during this unimaginably dark time. In his 1945 broadcast he said that in his suffering he almost came to feel that there was no God – ‘almost’ because without that belief ‘it would have meant sheer madness, the madness and insanity of blackest despair’. There are, indeed, a number of accounts of people driven to insanity by the squalid cells, the meagre rations and the brutality to be found in a Kempeitai prison. Others sought refuge in death.

Mr. Da Silva won his freedom in a remarkable way; unfortunately the details are not fully clear, but the general picture can be pieced together from a number of accounts. Boyle’s is the most straightforward: after all efforts to break him had failed, a Chinese Gendarme – presumably Torr – offered him his freedom for $5,000. The solicitor smuggled out this information to his wife, who approached Mr. Hattori, the Japanese head of the Foreign Affairs Department, who ordered da Silva’s release and the arrest of the Gendarme.[20] Colonel Noma, the head of the Gendarmerie at the time, gave a different version at his post-war trial for war crimes: he claimed that he’d ordered da Silva’s release because of insufficient ‘proof’, and that he refused an application for his re-arrest for the same reason. He took responsibility for the escape of this ‘very important spy’ and said so in a report to the Governor General.[21]

Another piece of the jigsaw is supplied by American author Emily Hahn in her autobiographical China To Me (1986 ed.,  417-8) Ms. Hahn, writing originally in 1944, tells us that she can’t give the full story, and it seems that Marcus da Silva’s name might have been one of the things she left out. In her account, Howard Tse (aka Torre/Tore/Tau/Tse Chi – I think the accounts that use these names are all about the same man), the Chinese Gendarme who tortured Mr. da Silva, had been terrorising the Portuguese community by arresting men and making their families pay bribes to get them out. These releases did actually happen, except in two cases in which Hahn thought Tse/Torre harboured old grudges – perhaps something had occurred to annoy him during the social and business encounters mentioned above, or perhaps Hahn was wrong and Torr knew that, unlike most of his other victims, Mr. da Silva really was a member of the resistance. In this account, it was Hahn who took details of Tse’s activities to Hattori – the Portuguese were the charge of the Foreign Affairs Department – and urged him to act.  Hattori was a decent man who did what he could for those he was responsible for, but he was understandably scared of the Gendarmes. Hahn pressed him and eventually, with great reluctance, he ‘went to bat for the Portuguese’, steadfastly staying at the wicket until the match was won. Tse fled and ‘his little private extortion prison’ was emptied. My guess is that both Mrs. Da Silva and Emily Hahn urged Hattori to act, and that Noma’s account, self-serving although it undoubtedly was, is probably also true: Hattori was a civilian with zero authority over the Gendarmes, who were a branch of the Army, and only someone as senior as Noma could have released Da Silva against the will of Tse’s Japanese ‘patrons’ in the Kowloon Gendarmerie. In any case, it seems that Torr ended up in prison, where he nevertheless continued his pro-Japanese activities.[22]

Whatever the details of his release, in November 1943 Marcus da Silva fled with his family to Macao. I don’t know if his escape had been planned long in advance, or if it was a response to the assault on the Portuguese community that began at that time: Charles Henry Basto was arrested on charges of spying on November 1 (he was executed the next year) and Portuguese bankers began to be seen by the Stanley internees in the grounds of Stanley Prison some time before Christmas.[23] In any case, his flight came just in time. The Japanese soon realised they’d made a mistake in releasing him and sent four agents to Macao on a fruitless mission to kidnap him and bring him back.[24] Eventually, the solicitor made his way to the safety of Free China.

The escape was organised by BAAG operative Mr. William Chong, who took him out along with another prominent Portuguese citizen, probably Leo D’Almada, Marcus da Silva’s old boss:

They both are very famous people in Hong Kong which I never met them before, I don’t know who they are because I wasn’t in Hong Kong long enough to know them, so I brought them out…to safety but I, my job, I never ask them for their last name. I never tell them who I am or what I am doing. All they know about me is “Bill” and they, ah, I don’t know this person is Leo and the other one’s Marcus da Silva… So they are very important people in Hong Kong. They were…captured by, tortured by the Japanese, and they escaped, and my job, I brought them home…[25]

After his escape, Marcus da Silva sent a messenger to Mrs. Bennett suggesting she accompany him to the safety of Macao, but she declined, and was arrested in 1944 on suspicion of continuing her husband’s activities. She survived, and both she and Mr. Da Silva acted as witnesses in war crimes trials.

Mr. da Silva returned to Hong Kong from Kunming on September 9, 1945 and joined the British Military Administration as Prosecutor on behalf of the Crown in the cases of those accused of treason and collaboration. He had worked as a one-man practise since 1933, and he resumed this a few months after his return. At the time of his arrest in 1950 he’d built up an extensive practice with twenty staff [26]

In February 1946 he was given the honour of leading for the Crown in the committal proceedings that launched the Colony’s first war-related trials. Six men were involved, including the notorious George Wong (executed), J. J. Richards (15 years), and a Swiss man, a Red Cross official to boot, [27] – the accusations against a neutral European made the case an international sensation at the time (charges against this man were withdrawn under an amnesty, but Mr. da Silva, again appearing for the Crown, made it clear that he was still considered guilty, and the next week he was deported for life from Hong Kong). Two Chinese Gendarmes, So Leung and Tsui Kwok-ching, were accused of a number of outrages, including taking part in da Silva’s own torture.

As this and the subsequent trials – both for treason and for war crimes – proceeded, Marcus da Silva played a prominent part as prosecutor and as witness.  And then, in the strange reversal with which I began this account, he appeared in the dock himself, accused, along with film director Shao-Kwai Tam, of conspiracy to bribe a witness to give false evidence in the case of an actress, Cheung Dik-chan, accused of manslaughter as a result of a driving accident. The trial opened on July 24, 1950.[28] Appearing for Mr. da Silva was H. G. Sheldon, once a thorn in the side of Franklin Gimson in Stanley Camp, but now a pillar of Hong Kong’s legal establishment. The man Mr. da Silva was charged with attempting to bribe was disgraced Hong Kong policeman William Henry Cowie – variously described as a rogue, a rat and a man of evil reputation[29]– and Sheldon seems to have had little difficulty in destroying his credibility as a witness, and with it the Crown’s case. It seems that Marcus da Silva had a number of influential enemies in the legal world, or so Sheldon suggested, hinting that his client had been set up. Perhaps that had something to do with his hot temper: at one point he apologised to the court for a former outburst,[30] and I get the impression of a man of huge energy and dynamism who might seem rather intimidating to anyone standing in his way. It’s sad that the last years of Mr. da Silva’s life were darkened by this allegation, but the trial ended with his complete vindication and the resumption of his distinguished post-war career.

Marcus da Silva became ill at the end of 1955, but insisted on carrying on his work.  He died at St. Paul’s (‘the French’) Hospital in Causeway Bay on Monday, February 20, 1956. Two days later tributes were paid at a special sitting of the Full Court. The sub-headings of the China Mail report speak for themselves: Able Advocate-Sheer Hard Work- Great Courage-Penetrating Mind-Strong Personality-Wonderful Man-Rare Combination.[31] Acting Attorney-General Arthur Hooton, who had prosecuted him in 1950, said that no man ever worked longer hours – 80 hours were not a full working week to him – and that he never came into court unprepared as to either facts or law.

He was a man of indomitable courage, who had insisted on carrying on the fight during the war even when he knew the odds were completely against him. It’s not surprising he always expected to beat his illness and get back to work.

[1] China Mail, Saturday, August 5, 1950, page 1.

[2] August 1, 1950, pages 3, 4 and 13.

[3] China Mail, February 22, 1956, page 10.

[4]Hong Kong Telegraph, December 19, 1930, page 14.

[5] China Mail, September 24, 1945, page 2.

[6] China Mail, September 24, 1945, page 2.

[15] China Mail, June 26, 1947.

[16] China Mail, September 24, 1945, page 2.

[17] China Mail, June 6, 1947, page 2.

[18] China Mail, March 8, 1946, pages 1 and 5.

[19] China Mail, March 8, 1946, page 5.

[21]China Mail, February 12, 1947, page 3.

[22] George Wright-Nooth, Prisoner of the Turnip Heads, 1994, 260.

[23] G. A. Leiper, A Yen For My Thoughts, 1982, 189-190.

[26] China Mail, August 1, 1950, page 3.

[27] China Mail, February 20, 1946. For the withdrawal of charges see China Mail, April 18, 1946 pages 2 and 5, and for the deportation, April 24, 1946, page 2.

[28] China Mail, July 25, pages 3 and 11.

[29] China Mail, August 2, 1950, page 3.

[30] China Mail, August 3, 1950, page 11.

[31] China Mail, February 22, 1956, paged 10.

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Filed under British Army Aid Group, Charles Hyde, Chester Bennett, Hong Kong WW11, Portuguese in Hong Kong, Stanley Camp

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July 1, 2012 · 3:49 pm

Frank Angus (and a note on the Angus family)

One of the best documented of the workers who stayed out of Stanley to help Dr. Selwyn-Clarke with his public health measures – and in all or almost all cases with his humanitarian smuggling – is Frank Angus.

Mr. Angus seems to have acted as Selwyn-Clarke’s ‘front of house man’ and general assistant. Ellen Field, who’d avoided internment by claiming to be Irish, had a husband and father in Shamshuipo, so she naturally did all she could to get food to them. During the fighting she’d been helped by a couple of Canadian soldiers, and on her visits to the Camp she was moved by the plight of these men who’d come to Hong Kong so recently that in most cases they had no friends or lovers to ease the harsh conditions of military internment by gifts of food and other essentials. She’d heard about Selwyn-Clarke’s relief work, so decided to try to enlist his assistance in her plans to help them out:

I would need a personal interview. I knew that Frank Angus, a former school friend was attached to the skeleton staff which together with Dr. Selwyn-Clarke was exempted from internment in order to do welfare work under Japanese supervision.

I went along to his office, on the top floor of the former National City Bank Building.

‘Anything I can handle?’ asked Frank pleasantly, when I was shown into his office.

‘No, Frank,’ I answered stubbornly – ‘I must see Doctor Selwyn-Clarke himself!’

‘Well,’ said Frank smiling, ‘in that case I’ll see what I can do.’

He came back in a few moments to say that the Doctor would see me.[1]

In 1957 the National City Bank Building was on Queen’s Road Central between Ice House Street and Duddell Street.[2] The meeting was the beginning of a fruitful collaboration between two extraordinarily courageous and resourceful people.

The Colliers, two Canadian missionaries who remained out of Stanley due to a mix-up, were told about Selwyn-Clarke by a Norwegian colleague, interviewed by one of his assistants – almost certainly Dorothy Lee[3] – and helped by the doctor to get a pass that allowed them to leave the flat in Kowloon where’d they’d been effectively prisoners. Round about October 1, 1942, they needed to see him in person and went to his office:

The doctor was not in and we had to wait a couple of hours for his return, but he had a young Englishman as office assistant who made the time pass quickly and pleasantly for us. He gave us very much news of the outer world which we had not heard and told us much about the conditions in the various internment camps. He had himself been released from Stanley to help Dr. Selwyn-Clarke but was so thin and pale that we imagined he could have hardly endured the camp conditions much longer.

From him we learned much of the splendid work that Dr. Clarke was doing and the terrible handicaps under which he was working, flouted and hindered by the Japanese, who were all the time suspicious of him, or jealous of every effort he made to relieve the sufferings of the soldiers and civilians in the camps.[4]

Frank Angus played an important role in these efforts:

(H)e {Selwyn-Clarke} kept with him a youngster called Frank Angus.

And Frank would come over and I would hand him ten thousand dollars and  just put it on the passbook, ‘ten thousand’. I didn’t know who it came from. Then he would bring in receipts for mosquito netting, blankets, peanuts, rice, and anything he could get hold of. Some of the stuff was (put) into sand bags and taken by the ladies of the bank up to Bowen Road Hospital. Some were sent to Kowloon where people like Sophie Odell and Susie Potts would take it on and deliver it to the hospitals there….that went on all the time we were in the Sun Wah Hotel.[5]

Frank Angus was sent to Stanley probably on May 7, 1943, alongside Thomas and Evelina and 15 other people from the French Hospital.[6] He lived with his mother and brother in Block A1, Room 10. There are two glimpses of him in camp in the sources available to me. The first is from the autobiography of Dr. Selwyn-Clarke himself. The Medical Director was brutally tortured after his arrest on May 2, but he steadfastly refused to incriminate a single person, withholding all information about Frank Angus’s money couriering activities and the myriad other things that had gone on in that brave network of humanitarian smugglers. He was eventually imprisoned in Stanley Goal next to the internment camp:

In the last few months of my imprisonment I myself became too ill to take any exercise, or move without assistance. Once in a while, a guard would help me to a concrete plinth just outside the cell-block, to sit for a short time in the sunshine. The plinth was visible from a hill in Stanley camp beyond the prison-wall, and there a watch was kept for my appearance. So soon as I was seen, the watcher would run as fast as he could to the bungalow where Hilda Mary shared a very small room,[7] used in peace-time by a Chinese Amah, with Margaret Watson, my chief almoner and our dear friend. Mary would be hurried to the hill, where two brothers, Ginger and Frank Angus, would pretend to throw her from one to the other to make her laugh. Her joyous laughter came to me over the prison wall and did me a world of good.

Finally, on May 7, 1945 Barbara Anslow recorded a piece of camp bartering:

Bought 4 ozs. tomatoes from the Anguses for a pound of rice.

 Barbara confirmed in a recent note that this was from Mrs. Angus and both her sons, and gives Frank’s age at his time as 36.[8]  It’s probable that the Angus’s had a ‘garden’ in which they grew the tomatoes, and even on day in which rumours of German collapse and of Hitler’s death circulating in Stanley the ordinary business of getting something to eat had to go on.

Towards the end of the war, he was obviously planning to set up in business on the arrival of peace, as he asked Barbara Anslow to be his secretary in a new venture; the offer was declined. A shipping manifest shows him returning to England in 1957, possibly on leave, and giving his address as teh Effingham Golf Club.

Frank Angus died in Sydney in 1987.[9]

Note on the Angus Family

Frank’s brother Herbert Alexander (‘Ginger’) and his wife and mother are on a Stanley Camp Roll that was probably drawn up about June 1942; Frank himself isn’t there, so he was taken out of Stanley before that, perhaps back in January or February. On January 1, 1946 Herbert was honoured for ‘services during internment’,[10] probably on account of work he did in the office of Franklin Gimson, the leader of the internees. In 1947 he was awarded the OBE for ‘conduct and devotion to duty in Stanley’.[11] After the war he married an Australian woman, Sue. In the late 1950s he became the director of the Hong Kong Government Commerce and Industry Department, a position he held until 1962. [12] At some point he was awarded an MBE.[13] There’s a story in Emily Hahn’s China To Me[14] about Mrs. Angus having been the object of the attentions of a Japanese soldier soon after the surrender. Hahn gives her age as 65 and doesn’t give a first name; she appears on the Camp Roll as Mrs. M. (in fact Mathilda[15]) Angus, and Barbara Anslow gives her age (presumably in 1945 – see below) as 72 but this is certainly the same woman: Hahn also tells us that ‘Chrissie Angus’ had her wrist watch stolen by a Japanese soldier, who gave her a can of peas in exchange, and this must be her daughter, Christina. Mathilda and Christina were also present at a terrifying New Year’s Eve celebration at the home of the Weill family, which was interrupted by a group of perhaps Formosan ‘camp followers’ masquerading as Japanese soldiers, who tied up some of the participants, including Christina, while they searched the house, slapped Mrs. Weill, and made threats. Christina married the architect W. W. C. Shewan, and she appears on the Camp Roll as his wife, profession ‘secretary’.  She died in the late 1970s; another brother, George, a field company engineer with the HKVDC,[16] died in Nagoya POW Camp in Japan on January 29, 1945[17]. George’s wife, Hilda, a nurse, was also in Stanley. Finally, Mathilda’s husband Peter, an inspector with the Hong Kong Police, had died in 1925 at the age of 51, and she herself died on October 1, 1947.[18]

Note:

This post was updated with information kindly supplied by Barbara Anslow and Phillip Cracknell:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stanley_camp/message/2176

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stanley_camp/message/2178

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stanley_camp/message/2177

[1] Ellen Field, Twilight in Hong Kong, 1960, 86-87.

[4] F. D. and H. F. Collier, Covered Up In Kowloon, 1947, 69-70.

[5] Testimony of S.W.P. Perry-Aldworth, cited in Frank King, History of the HKSBC, Volume 3, 1983?, 613.

[7] Bungalow D6. Thomas and Evelina were in D1.

[11] China Mail, April 16, 1947, page 2.

[14] Emily Hahn, China To Me, 1986 ed., 287; 297-299.

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Filed under Hong Kong WW11, Selwyn-Selwyn Clarke, Stanley Camp

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June 14, 2012 · 10:45 am

Final Massacre (3): Fears in Stanley

In previous posts I’ve discussed the fear of a final massacre that existed in all of the Far Eastern POW and internee camps as the war drew to a close. In this post I want to discuss this fear as it existed in Stanley.

 In fact, the idea that the Japanese might one day spare themselves the burden of feeding and guarding the prisoners by killing them didn’t have to wait until 1944 or 1945 – it occurred to some people at least even before the fighting was over:

 One day we were ordered to march outside and congregate in the compound. We’d heard that mass executions had already taken place at other internment facilities, and no explanation had been given for this assembly. Were our lives about to be ended, too?[1]

In fact, they’d been summoned to witness the humiliation of a group of Canadian soldiers marching into captivity.

The same fear existed from the very start of the internees lives in Stanley. On Saturday, February 14, 1942, less than one month after arriving in Camp, Barbara Anslow recorded in her diary:

Morning off from work, but had to spend it all being searched at Stephen’s Prep. School grounds by the sea. 

 Years later she provided this explanation:

 Japs got us all lined up, near where we first landed in Stanley.  There were armed soldiers all round us. We wondered if we were to be massacred, or sent off somewhere.  In fact, Japs used our absence to search through all the accommodation, presumably looking for wireless sets, weapons etc….[2]

Barbara Anslow describes a general search; Edith Hamson from Bungalow A tells us about an ordeal that seems to have been limited to the Bungalow dwellers:

 (T)here armed guards stormed into our room. They were fearfully angry and ordered us outside…I wondered what was in store for us. I tried to make sense of the events developing around us, but my thoughts were becoming irrational from fear.[3]

 The inhabitants of Bungalow A and the other Bungalows are driven into a valley, where, surrounded by grim-faced guards, they’re told to stand and wait. Some women start shrieking ‘Lord, have mercy!’:

 I looked up, and appearing on the hills around us were more guards, armed with larger guns mounted on tripods. They were pointing straight at us. Some people became hysterical, others began to cry, almost everyone was praying…I felt we’d been condemned without committing any crime. Was this to be a senseless mass execution? Would we be buried in a mass grave? We braced ourselves, expecting the worst, expecting to be showered with bullets at any moment, but nothing happened. Every second was agonising. If this was to be our end, let it happen.[4]

 After hours standing in the hot sun, they returned to their bungalow to find it’d been thoroughly searched. On Thursday, November 4, 1943 diarist R. E. Jones wrote ‘Bungalows being searched?’ and perhaps that was the day on which the Hamsons’ terrifying experience took place.

 If the fear existed from the very start, some people were at least able to turn it to good purpose:

‘As we might have been machine-gunned down at any time,’ recalled one interviewee, ‘we had the nerve to do things we’d never attempt normally…The freedom from pressure to behave in a modest and responsible way, to be for  a brief moment whatever they wanted, was a memorable, liberating experience for many of these women.[5]

There’s no doubt that the anxiety intensified as the war drew to a close: some internees believed, as did Thomas and Evelina, that the massacre would take place when the Allies landed on one of the main Japanese islands,[6] others expected it when the occupiers needed all their forces to defend Hong Kong against attack. Many, no doubt, thought that it would be triggered by whichever of these events happened first.

We know that the internee ‘government’ made plans to feed and shelter themselves during an Allied attempt to retake the colony. Food was stored, air raid tunnels dug, trench latrines allocated for disposal of bodies, and so on.[7] I’ve never seen any mention of plans to resist a final massacre but I believe they must have existed. On the final page of a hand-written introduction to the typescript of his camp diary internee leader Franklin Gimson wrote:

Secret plans were formed to meet any contingency which was thought might arise when the Japanese were forced to evacuate Hong Kong….(I)f hostilities had again broken out in the island, the fate of the internees was one on which it would have been morbid to contemplate.[8]

 In spite of what this passage might seem to suggest, I’m certain that Gimson, a man of huge courage and an unswerving sense of his obligations as the senior British official left in Hong Kong, was not put off from doing his clear duty by the fear of falling into a morbid train of thought! The massacres that occurred at the end of the Hong Kong fighting – one of the worst was in the territory of what was to become Stanley Camp – hung over the internees and made them realise what might happen to them if the fighting was renewed,[9] but they also showed how difficult it is to kill large numbers of people outdoors without leaving at least a few survivors. It was Gimson’s duty to ask someone with a military or police background to draw up plans to maximise the number of escapees – if only, as in the case of Bandoeng POW Camp[10] so that the story of what had happened to the men and women of Stanley Camp could go out to the world carried in as many hearts and minds as possible. Any plans for resistance would, of course, have been highly secret, as success, even of the modest kind envisaged here, depended on the Japanese being taken by surprise. I think we get a few glimpses of such preparations.

 The Camp was full of live ammunition left over from the bitter fighting that had taken place on the Stanley Peninsula in December 1941, and there were more subsantial items than bullets lying around too; on November 11, prison officer R. E. Jones risked his life by slipping through the barbed wire to retrieve a gun.[11] This was probably the special mission given him the day before by the Commissioner of Prisons,  J. L. Wilcocks. This gun might have been to help in future escapes, although none actually took place, but it seems likely that such weapons – and there was at least one other gun in Camp[12] – featured in the plans for a desperate resistance to any attempt to massacre the internees, especially as it seems that the Stanley ‘armourers’ were also collecting hand grenades and machine gun bullets, which were unlikely to feature in escape plans.[13]

 In any case, some internees felt that evasion was the best option in the event of impending mass doom and looked for places where they could hide in the event of an attempt to round-up the internees:

 There was also in the back of the minds of most of us what would happen in the event of a land attack on the Colony. We were sure that the Japanese would without hesitation, qualms or remorse try to exterminate all of us in the various camps. We in the mess did look around for possible places to hide. The choice was not great.[14]

 In the early spring of 1945 there came a development that ratcheted up the fear:

 We observed the activities of Japanese working parties on the nearby hillsides where they were building what appeared to be gun emplacements. From their position, the camp experts declared, they could only take guns which faced our location. Although others scoffed at this, there was the uneasy thought that our captors just might intend to wipe us all out if an attack came.[15]

 We know from George Gerrard’s diary that such work was going on in late March 1945:

 The Japs are preparing funk[16] holes or machine gun nests all along the coast covering the beaches in the event of an attack or a landing….Blasting into the rocks goes on all night and day…[17]

The sound of these preparations, also recorded by R. E. Jones, made a sinister backdrop as March came to an end. The starving, ragged internees, half-demoralised by three and a half years of confinement in overcrowded conditions, faced an intensified terror.

 Thomas and Evelina, like so many of the prisoners of the Japanese, believed that their lives were saved only by the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima andNagasaki. Ten days after the dropping of the first bomb, news of the surrender was confirmed in Stanley, and there was naturally a huge sense of relief:

There had been rumours that we would not be handed over alive by the Japanese but would be taken into caves and machine-gunned. So when we heard that Japan had capitulated there was a great sense of relief, as well as a feeling of some incredulity.[18]

But the fear didn’t come to a complete end with the sudden Japanese surrender in mid-August.

Barbara Anslow writes:

{There was an} agonising 2 week gap in Stanley from the day we were told the war was over until the arrival of the British Fleet.   Those 2 weeks seemed to go on forever, and we couldn’t help wondering if the war really was over, and what would happen to us if the ‘surrender’ was suddenly revoked…[19]

Hong Kong policeman Norman Gunning had heard rumours that the Japanese were going to kill all the internees when the Allies ‘set foot on Japanese soil’, and he also refers to the ‘extremely tense and anxious days’ between surrender and the arrival of  Rear Admiral Harcourt’s fleet on August 30.[20]  Harcourt’s first official act was to drive down to Stanley and visit the internees. Prison Officer Bill Hudson began a long and deeply moving letter to his wife and family while waiting for Harcourt to arrive:

 My Darlings,

 I don’t know how to start this letter, I have so much to say – and I want to say it all at once.  Well my Sweethearts – thank the Lord we have pulled through successfully.  I never for one moment thought we would lose the War, but I had a horrid feeling they would do something to us.[21] 

Even now he can’t bear to spell out the terrible outcome he feared. Perhaps Mr. Hudson’s mind would have been even more uneasy if he’d known that Harcourt was about to make an initial landing with only 550 men![22]

 On arrival at Stanley, Harcourt presided over a ceremony in which the flag of every nation represented in camp was raised. The war really was over, although for the time being most of the internees were told to stay in camp for their own safety. Eeventually, they would stagger back into the world of freedom and responsibility outside Stanley, carrying with them a vivid and ineradicable memory of everything they’d experienced during their internment. Perhaps ‘memory’ is the wrong word: it implies a relegation of its content to a past that’s over and done with, and it puts the focus on things that actually happened. But few  situations in the unfolding of post-war life could ever have been as real and as encompassing as those fears of something that actually never took place, a final massacre of everyone in Stanley Camp.

[1] Allana Corbin, Prisoners of the East, 2002, 111.

[4] Corbin, 191-192.

[5] Bernice Archer, The Internment of Western Civilians Under The Japanese 1941-1945: A Patchwork of Internment,  2004,  136-137.

[7] George Gerrard’s diary is a good source for these preparations. It’s available to members of the Yahoo Stanley Group:

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

[8] Franklin C. Gimson, ‘Re-occupation’, Internment in Hong-kong (sic) March 1942 to August 1945, Rhodes House, Ms. Ind Ocn. S222.

[9]For the effect of the massacre of Australian nurses on Banka Island on the psyches of those who knew about it – there was one survivor – on their own fate, see http://www.awm.gov.au/journal/j32/nelson.asp

[10] https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2012/02/26/final-massacre-2-tenko-gets-it-right/

[11] Jones diary, November 11, 1942. Gwulo is publishing the diary day by day: http://gwulo.com/node/9660

[14] George Wright-Nooth, Prisoner of the Turnip Heads, 1994, 191.

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

[16] The transcription reads ‘junk’ but R. E. Jones calls them ‘funk holes’, which was probably the name used by the internees generally. Jean Gittins describes them as ‘shelters and fox holes’ – Stanley: Behind Barbed Wire, 1982, 148.

[17] Gerrard Diary, entry for March 28, 1945.

[18] Mutal Fielder, in Derek Round, Barbed Wire Between Us, 2002, 173.

[20] Norman Gunning, A Passage to Hong Kong, 2009, 155, 158.

[22] China Mail, September 15, 1945, page 4.

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April 30, 2012 · 12:52 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

arrived safely at Hongkong hope be home soon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

am very busy getting bakery into working order.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[5] Clark, 61.

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

[7] Clark, 99.

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

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

[10]Clark, 100.

[11]Clark, 48.

[12] Page 2.

[13] China Mail, September 11, 1945.

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

[16] Chronology, 1985.

[17] China Mail, September 14.

[18] Page 6.

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

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

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

[22] Page 4.

[23] China Mail, October 3, 1945,

[24] Page 6.

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

[26] Page 1.

[27] Post War Letter, 2, below.

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

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

[31] Chronology, 1985.

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

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

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April 7, 2012 · 4:38 pm

‘Sail Away’ – the Stanley Camp Anthem

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

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

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

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

Sail Away

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

For England home & beauty how we pine!

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

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

We’re going to sail away, sail away

We hope internment here will end some day.

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

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

We’re going to sail away, sail away,

And that and when this Camp embarks

There’ll be happy hearts and free

When we’re putting out to sea,

Afloat on a boat on the way to Lourenço Marques.

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

Our luggage is quite light & somewhat small,

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

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

We’re going to sail away etc.

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

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

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

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

We’re going to sail away etc.

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

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

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

Remember there are sure to be some brighter days ahead.

We’re going to sail away etc.

 If you liked our last refrain

We’ll sing the song again,

Afloat on a boat on the way to Lourenço Marques.

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April 4, 2012 · 8:56 am

Thomas’s Work (4): Baking In Stanley

Getting There

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Food in Stanley: An Overview

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

Baking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At first the flour issue was 4.22 ozs per internee:

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

Some times they managed to supplement the flour:

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

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

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

The flour issue lasted until early in 1944:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edith Hansom gives us another glimpse of Herklots:

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Christmas 1944

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Victory Tart

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

.

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

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

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

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

http://gwulo.com/node/9660

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

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

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

[9] Emerson, 99.

[10] Jones Diary, July 17, 1944.

[11] UBB.

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

[13] UBB

[14] UBB.

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

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

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

[19] UBB

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

[23] UBB.

[24] Emerson, 161.

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

[29] Corbin, 170-171.

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

[32] Emerson, 153.

[33] Ream, 37-38.

[34] UBB.

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

[36] Emerson, 153

[37]UBB.

[38] Emerson, 100.

[39] Gerrard’s diary

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

[42] Emerson, 1973, 102.

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February 29, 2012 · 8:52 am

Thomas and Captain Tanaka (1) An Unpopular Name In Hong Kong

The first family member to take an interest in Thomas’s wartime experiences was his younger brother. Soon after Thomas’s death in January 1985 he interviewed Evelina, contacted other ex-internees (including Dr. Geoffrey Herklots, who worked with Thomas on issues of food and nutrition before and during the war) and drew up a provisional chronology. His annotations to this chronology suggest that Thomas and Evelina had suffered a degree of isolation in Camp because they were not ‘early settlers’: they were sent to Stanley on May 7, 1943, when most internees had been there for about 15 months. Thomas had spent most of this time in the French Hospital, baking bread with two other bakers for the Hong Kong hospitals, Evelina joining him after their wedding.

His brother’s notes hint at another reason that the couple might have experienced some problems in Stanley. At the top of this page is their wedding photo, taken on June 29, 1943 at St. Joseph’s (Catholic) Cathedral.

The Japanese officer in the second row is Captain Tanaka.  There are passages in his brother’s chronology that give me reason to believe that Thomas’s closeness to a Japanese officer might have led to some suspicion on the part of his fellow internees. But there is also confusion, that I think must have originated in Stanley Camp, as to who Captain Tanaka was.

Some people seem to have thought that Thomas’s wedding guest was Major-General Tanaka Ryosaburu, whose 229 Regiment were responsible for massacres during the 1941 invasion. At his war crimes trial  in 1946 the court decided that, ‘The whole route of this man’s battalion was littered with the corpses of murdered men who had been bayoneted and shot’.[1] He was sentenced to death, later commuted to life, and eventually to 20 years.

There was another prominent man of that name in Hong Kong: Lieutenant Tanaka Hitoshi. According to military historian Oliver Lindsay, this man was a guard at Shamshuipo.[2] He rose to the rank of Chief of the Information Bureau of the POW Camps and Commanding Officer at Argyle Camp. This Tanaka was to get three years for his wartime activities.

And any early prejudice against Thomas might have been strengthened in late 1944 the internees might have become aware of another man of that name who was later to face charges of war crimes, Tanaka Hisakazu.

This Tanaka was a commander in Chinaa and also Governor-General of Hong Kong from December 1944, was a war criminal who was sentenced to death by hanging (Allies) and by shooting (Chinese). It was the Chinese who got to carry out the sentence.[4]

It’s probably no accident that soldier’s wife Jean Mather, looking around for the name of the Japanese commandant of Stanley having forgotten the real one, hit on ‘Colonlel Tanaka’[3]. When Thomas and Evelina entered the camp the internees’ would definitely have known of one Tanaka who was to be tried as a war criminal, might possibly have heard mention of a second, and, in 1944, would almost certainly have become aware of a third. No wonder if they looked on a British citizen who would invite a ‘Tanaka’ to his wedding with distrust!

At least three Japanese officers called Tanakas in Hong Kong, and all three war criminals!

But none of these was the man at the wedding.  In  my next post and I’ll bring together all I’ve been able to find out about this Tanaka.

 

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February 22, 2012 · 1:57 pm

Final Massacre? (1) – Evelina and Thomas Resign Themselves To Death

Brian didn’t become really interested in Stanley until after a trip to Hong Kong in 1996 during which he made many visits to the Military Cemetery and was allowed by the School authorities to wander round the grounds of St. Stephen’s Preparatory School. He tried to get into the Prison, and a friendly guard at the barrier gave him a number he could ring to ask permission. He made the call from the nearby phone booth, and the understandably baffled staff of the Prisons Department passed him on from one person to another until his money ran out.

 When he returned to England, he was eager to find out as much as he could about Evelina’s experiences. By this time she was not a good ‘witness’: she couldn’t remember very much – she was in her mid eighties – but didn’t like to say so, preferring to answer inaccurately rather than admit ignorance. But one day Brian knew she was telling the truth. He’d been reading about the way some internees kept up their spirits by making plans for their life once they were freed from Stanley:

 What did you and dad plan to do after the war?

 Evelina’s answer was quiet, matter-of-fact but not without emotion:

 We never made any plans. Your dad was friendly with one of the Formosan guards. He told him that the Japanese were going to shoot all the internees the day the Allies landed on Japanese soil.

 So you never thought you’d leave Stanley?

 No. We expected to die.

 Evelina and Thomas always believed that their lives were saved by the Atomic bomb. Many of their fellow POWs and internees felt the same: the belief in a final massacre was widespread in all the Asian Camps. Some thought, like Evelina and Thomas, it would come the day that the Allies landed on the main Japanese islands. Not only would the Japanese want revenge for this violation, but they would almost certainly want to bring all their soldiers back to defend the homeland. Shooting their prisoners would make emotional and practical sense. Others felt that the danger would come when the Allies attacked the country or the area of their imprisonment. With every soldier needed to try to beat off the assault, why would the Japanese waste manpower guarding their enemies? Or food feeding them?

 No-one who had been their prisoner for four years had any doubts that they were capable of such a massacre.

 Perhaps the best thing to do was to be like Evelina and Thomas and resign yourself to death.

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February 17, 2012 · 3:35 pm

1944 (5) Red Letter Day – George Gerrard and Rudolph Zindel

In a previous post I discussed a few of the many psychic mechanisms which enabled the internees to survive their experiences.[1] In this one I want to focus on something that had both ‘mental’ and ‘physical’ effects: the presence in the Camp of a number of people who were both fair and generous when it came to the great issue of food distribution. Everyone in Stanley knew one thing, however much they tried to deny to themselves that they knew it: there was no guarantee that they’d live long enough to be liberated because they were slowly starving to death and there was no way of knowing if the end of the war would come before their bodies gave out. This meant that any food given to another and any opportunity to get food for yourself that wasn’t taken, whatever the cost to your fellow internees, might be literally fatal. Whatever the exact date of liberation, there were always going to be people who would have lived if it had come a week or a month earlier; perhaps even those whose wasted frames gave up the struggle on the day itself, people who would have survived if they’d managed to get just a few hundred extra calories into their starving bodies…

 So it’s not surprising that there was plenty of selfishness in Stanley plenty of mean-spiritedness, and a substantial amount of outright theft – it was said you couldn’t leave anything edible lying around, not even communion wafers! One individual made himself so unpopular through his ceaseless concern for his own interests that at the end of the war Franklin Gimson had him put into custody for his own protection.[2] What is perhaps surprising is that most people seem to have pulled together, looking after their own interests and those of their family without harming others, and helping out their fellow internees where possible. And there were in Stanley a number of individuals who did more.

 Shipyard clerk (probably manager would give a better idea of his role) George Gerrard was a big man: before the war he weighed sixteen and a half stone. But when he was released, the years of internment had seen him shrink to a mere six and a half stone– 91 pounds. One might be forgiven for assuming that he was one of those unlucky people who didn’t have friends outside to send him parcels, or that he was a rather lazy individual who never got to the ration queue early enough to get a fair share of the scanty food being doled out. In fact, I’ve never come across an internee who got so many parcels – and when ex-Stanleyite Barbara Anslow read his diary, she was astonished at the number he received and found her mouth watering at the thought of all that precious food![3]

 Gerrard is one of those largely unknown heroes of Stanley who made an important contribution not only to the stomachs but  also to the spirits of everyone; it was partly due to people like him that most people did make it through to August 1945. Without men and women of such generosity and rectitude Stanley could have degenerated into a Hobbesian ‘war of all against all’ in which the strong survived and the weak went to the wall. Gerrard’s many parcels came from his Chinese former workmates (who risked imprisonment and torture to send them) but he scrupulously shared them with his fellows. Even when they sent him in money, he usually passed some of it on. Perhaps even more importantly, he was quartermaster for his block but he never used his position to get extra food: partly because of his huge weight loss he had to be repatriated on a hospital ship.[4]

When the internees first entered Stanley, cooking seems to have been done on an individual, family or small group basis, but eventually things became more organised. The Camp was divided into ‘west and ‘east’ regions with a Kitchen for each. The ‘west’ region consisted of St. Stephen’s School and the Bungalows, with a kitchen behind St. Stephen’s.[5]  Bungalow D actually ate with Gerrard’s block (9)[6] of St. Stephen’s so that might well have meant he was in charge of issuing rations to Thomas and Evelina.

 One of the responsibilities that Gerrard must have enjoyed the most – for his own sake and that of others – was organising the distribution of the Red Cross parcels of September 1944. Unlike the ones sent to individuals by uninterned friends, these were distributed equally to all adults in Camp.

 On Sunday 17, September 1944 Gerrard wrote:

 The big news for this period is that the Canadian Red Cross parcels have actually arrived and are now in our hands and some of the contents in our tummies and Boy Oh Boy are they good.

September 14 was the day that the parcels were given out (from 3 p.m. onwards).  I like to think that it was Gerrard who handed Thomas and Evelina their parcels. Whoever it was, this was a red letter day for them and their fellow internees. They were living mainly on rice and vegetables at this time – no meat since February, 1944 and only an ounce or two of fish. The typhoon of July 22 had further disrupted food supplies.[7]  Gerrard’s fellow diarist, the colony’s former hangman Raymond Jones, gives a grim picture of deteriorating conditions: on September 4 he tells us that the ‘daily average of vegetables is 9.5 oz. fish not enough to be worthy its reckoning’. He ate a good meal on September 8 (‘fried liver’ – one of the occasional returns of meat to the 1944 diet), but on the next day no rations arrived, so the cooks had to make do with what they had, resulting in ‘poor meals today…hungry as hell tonight’. When the rations did finally arrive, at 8 p. m., they were ‘veg only’. On September 11 fish was sent in but ‘so rotten most of it had to be buried immediately’. No wonder he writes on the same day, ‘Hurry up you US blokes’.

 Later in the September 17 entry Gerrard lists the contents of each parcel: powdered milk, butter, jam, tins of salmon, corn beef, sardines,  a packet of tea or coffee, chocolate, prunes, raisins, pepper and salt, some cheese, a cake of soap….And everyone got two parcels (with a third to come on Thursday, September 21). Even though the parcels had been in Hong Kong for over a year and the dried fruit and chocolate were mouldy, this was a wonderful gift.

 The happiness of most of the starving internees that day can be imagined. George Wright-Nooth wrote on September 15:

 Though really tired I did not sleep during the whole of yesterday. The arrival of the parcels made me restless and excited. Geoffrey and Lance could hardly sit still….The first thing I did, and so did the others, was to eat my chocolate, at least one slab of 5 oz. It was delicious and I found it more satisfying than two of our ordinary meals (doubles); it filled me right up. How Geoffrey and Lance managed two slabs I do not know.[8]

 Gerrard reported:

 The powdered milk does grand for congee in the morning, the biscuits with jam are top hole, the chocolate is just rapidly disappearing….

 According to Geoffrey Emerson, Gerrard’s claims were wrong in one respect: he stated that the parcels would help ‘for the time being at least’ fight beri beri and pellagra, two diseases caused by deficiency of B Vitamins: Emerson points out that the contents didn’t actually provide many foods rich in B1.[9] Luckily there were some bulk supplies in the 1944 delivery, including multivitamins and synthetic B vitamins. Gerrard records that the first multivitamins ones were given out on October 1 and they tasted like ‘burnt rubber’.  Eventually, though, the vitamins and thiamine ran out, leaving whatever yeast was available as the only possible treatment.

 I wrote that ‘most’ of the internees were happy for good reason. Gerrard comments on the Camp mood after the issue of the third parcel:

 This issue we easily made and all are more or less pleased, tho’ in a camp like this it is impossible to please everyone, some of course are perpetual and impossible grumblers. To give them the Kingdom of Heaven wouldn’t be more than some expect.

 Judging by his diary, Gerrard was a good-tempered man, so it’s easy to imagine how sorely he must have been tried in the course of his thankless task as block quartermaster. But, in spite of these grumblers, most people were pleased: ‘everyone much happier’ states Jones on ‘parcel day’ and on the day after he writes ‘What an immense difference a little extra and better food makes’.

Parcel sending wasn’t the only service the Red Cross provided for the Stanleyites and the POWs in Shamshuipo and the other camps. It also carried out the distribuion of the £10,000 a month sent by the British government to the internees. The money, amounting to about 20 yen per adult, began to arrive in February 1943.[10]  The Government had no way of knowing that massive inflation in Hong Kong was reducing the value of their gift hugely as the months went by – but on June 22, 1944 Gerrard recorded receipt of the ‘very welcome’ 20 yen and it was probable only sometime in 1945 when there was almost nothing in the canteen and what little there was had become unaffordable that the gift became almost valueless. And it was the Red Cross who were mainly responsible for getting cards and letters in and out of the Camps, and who provided occasional gifts to help equip the schools.

 It’s possible that even the mills on which Thomas ground rice to make bread were provided by Mr. Zindel, the Hong Kong Red Cross representative.[11] Rudolph Zindel, a Swiss businessman, was nicknamed ‘Swindle’ by some internees, who believed he was making little effort to help. There is a vigorous defence of Zindel in the introduction to the book version of Geoffrey Emerson’s thesis, and I think Emerson makes his case conclusively: Zindell did everything he could, at some risk to himself. A couple who unofficially represented the Red Cross in Borneo were executed as spies, along with 24 others said to have helped them, and Zindel himself was under investigation.[12] It would have been easy for him to lose his head, very difficult indeed for him to do much more for the internees.

 Sadly Thomas took from his Stanley experiences a lifetime’s prejudice against the Red Cross. He must have learnt from family letters that his mother was sending him parcels though that organisation, parcels he never received. His rather scanty ‘collected correspondence’ from Camp shows that this upset him, as on a couple of occasions he asks his mother not to send anything.[13] Of course, the failure of those parcels to arrive in Stanley had nothing to do with the Red Cross, but were caused by Japanese theft and obstructionism, or perhaps simply by the disruptions caused by war. Without the work of Rudolph Zindel and those who funded and supported him from afar there would have been much more misery and death in Stanley and Shamshuipo (see next post).

George Gerrard ended the war with a wasted, suffering body (see 1944 (6): The Darkest Winter, forthcoming). But his spirit was undimmed. His diary ends on August 19, soon after liberation. On that day friends from Hong Kong were allowed to enter Camp, and a fellow dockyard worker and his two sons came, bringing gifts. The last words of George Gerrard’s diary are these:

He brought us bananas, sugar, tea, cooked meat and buns which I divided out to our lads here in the room.

In ordinary times such a distribution would mean little. But these weren’t ordinary times: this act of sharing was the work of a big man who’d shrunk to below 100 lbs in weight, and who, even amongst a malnourished and sick population, was about to be selected as ill enough to require repatriation on a hospital ship. In his response over almost four years to the harsh conditions of the Japanese occupation George Gerrard – an unassuming man whose diary was written for his wife, not for ‘posterity’ – revealed himself to be a man of exceptional quality. In the middle of what Quaker missionary William Sewell considered to be the general moral deterioration of the last years in Stanley he retained his unselfishness and generosity of character to the end.

[2] George Wright-Nooth: Prisoner of the Turnip Heads, 234, 240, 247.

[3] http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stanley_camp/message/1138

[4] Information from Andrew Gerrard: available to members of Yahoo Stanley Group – http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stanley_camp/messages

[5] Allana Corbin, Prisoners of the East, 2002, 164.

[6] Gerrard diary: May 8, 1943; July 29, 1945.

[8] Wright-Nooth, 134.

[9] Geoffrey Emerson, Hong Kong Internment, 1973, 151.

[10] Emerson, 1973, 160.

[11]Emerson, 1973, 161.

[12] Emerson, Kindle Edition, Location 719, 728.

[13] Cards dated 30/9/43 and 12/4/44.

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February 13, 2012 · 7:14 pm

1944 (4): Two Deaths, a Move and a Release

1944 was not marked by ‘big’ events like 1943 (the Kempeitai ‘strike back’, leading to the arrests in Camp, the death of the HKSBC chief Sir Vandeleur Grayburn and the executions on Stanley Beach) or 1945, but there were some significant happenings. In this post I focus on two deaths and a release.

David Charles Edmondston was one of Grayburn’s senior assistants, the Hong Kong manager of the HKSBC. According to Emily Hahn, Edmondston at the start of the war was  ‘a funny man with a mustache, and a bit of a pot’.  Hahn’s book China For Me portrays him as a petty and spiteful moralist, who took against her because, in his eyes, she lured Major Charles Boxer away from his wife and then become the mother of his baby without even having the decency to marry him. But this representation of Edmondston has to be treated skeptically: Hahn didn’t go out of her way to be scrupulously fairly to those who annoyed her during the Hong Kong war.[1]  What’s certain is that Edmondston was in prison because he’d joined the other bankers, left outside Stanley mainly for Japanese purposes, in a courageous operation to raise money to help their beleaguered fellow citizens in the Camps.[2]

He was arrested on May 24 1943.[3]  The fact that the water torture was used in questioning him[4]   might mean that the Japanese suspected him of spying or at least listening to a secret radio and passing on the news, as they didn’t usually torture Allied nationals unless some such crime was involved (although an ordinary ‘interrogation’ was hard enough). He was tried on October 19, 1943 and sentenced to ten years in prison.[5]

According to Japanese medical officer Sato (or Saito) Shunkichi he first entered the Prison hospital in May 1943 suffering from indigestion. He was eventually discharged but frequently returned for treatment for colitis, beri beri and dysentery. He was finally admitted with a carbuncle that covered the whole of the back of his neck.[6]

Dr. Harry Talbot examined him and later stated that continual sepsis contributed to his death.[7] Sato, defending himself at his post-war trial, claimed that he’d administered various appropriate treatments, but Dr. Talbot stated that Edmondston had received no help from the medical officer, and this is supported by the banker’s own statement, two days before his death.

Image: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205086921

Just before Edmondston died his wife Kathleen and his seventeen year old daughter were called in from Stanley Camp to see him. He was so emaciated she didn’t recognize him and his state was such that no meaningful communication was possible. The Japanese refused to allow a doctor to enter the Prison to inspect him, but did allow drugs to be sent in. The injections came too late. He died –  of malnutrition, sepsis and medical neglect – on August 29. He was 54.

File:David Charles Edmondston Headstone.JPG

Image: Wikimedia, at http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:David_Charles_Edmondston_Headstone.JPG

The other man whose death I want to write about could hardly have lived a life more different to that of a banker with the HKSBC, whose senior officials were expected to set an appropriate tone for pre-war Hong Kong..

There have been only three Englishmen who were made generals in the Chinese army: one was the Gordon who died at Khartoum– he had previously been known as ‘Chinese Gordon’. The other two were in Stanley Camp, although neither was there at liberation. One of them, Morris ‘Two Guns’ Cohen, an English adventurer, whose life is the subject of a proposed film,[8] was released as part of the second exchange of prisoners on September 22/23, 1943. The other died in Stanley.

 Frank ‘One Arm’ Sutton celebrated his sixtieth birthday on February 14, 1944. He wrote in his diary:

I am young no longer, ambition to take the world by storm has passed me and gone. I remember my many failures. I flee from life and do not pursue it, as formerly….Enthusiasm in starting each new job and brushing aside all obstacles is not wholehearted. What’s the good? comes too easily to my mind.[9]

He’d had an eventful life:  born to a Lincolnshire parson in 1884 and educated at Eton and London University, he’d been a South American railway builder before the war, and lost an arm to a hand-grenade at Gallipoli. He was lobbing  back time-lag hand-grenades  into the Turkish trenches but after successfully returning six he fell foul of one that had cunningly had its fuse shortened, and it blew his right arm off at the wrist. The thrower, a huge Turkish soldier, leapt into Sutton’s trench to finish the job with his bayonet. Sutton, with no weapon and only his left arm,  managed to deflect the bayonet into his thigh. There followed a desperate struggle rolling in the dust during the course of which Sutton was almost knocked out by a rock– it was thrown by a fellow British soldier but failed to find its target and hit Sutton on the head instead. The Turk managed  to get on top of the semi-comatose Englishman and was strangling the life out of him when Sutton groped around with his one remaining hand and managed to locate a Gurkha kukri, which he plunged into his assailant’s throat. As the struggle ended, Sutton noticed he’d bitten off the other man’s ear. (I am not making this up – someone else may be, probably Sutton himself, but not me![10]).

How could such a man not go gold mining in the frozen wastes of newly Bolshevik Siberia? And how could he have avoided being asked to re-organize one of the Red navies?  Next he decided to try his luck in war-torn Republican China, seeking to interest one of the rival war-lords in the products of his fertile military inventor’s imagination, and in his own martial skills. The Chinese general who was besieging Sutton and summoned him to negotiate terms of surrender should have known that the resourceful but not overly scrupulous Englishman would shoot him before making a James Bond like escape. Sutton eventually became a general for China’s famous ‘Old Marshall’ Chang Tso-Lin. He made and lost three fortunes in the course of all this.

Sutton was billeted in Block 4, Room 18, billeted with seven others. He was severely overweight by this time, and his mutilated arm made it impossible for him to sleep soundly in any position but flat on his back; the result was massive and re-echoing snoring. Sutton, to the immense gratitude of his roommates managed to get hold of a tennis ball and had it sewn into his pajama jacket so as to make it impossible for him to sleep on his back. Then he taught himself to get a decent night’s rest on his side.[11]

That story shows that at least some of the determination and courage that had marked Sutton’s life were still with him at the start in Stanley. Sadly these qualities were worn down. His decline after that despairing birthday entry was ‘shockingly rapid’ and Drage puts down his death to ‘slow starvation’ undermining ‘not so much his superb physique but his always vulnerable emotions’.[12]

He was put on a ‘Special Diet’ but to no avail, and he was eventually admitted to TweedBayHospitalwith ‘beriberi, avitaminosis and bacillary dysentery’ – Drage suggests a simpler diagnosis would have been ‘hunger and heartbreak’.[13] Mrs. Anslow, who was nursing in Tweed Bay Hospital at the time, agreed, saying he died from ‘malnutrition and despair’. The end came at 10 a.m. on October 22 of that terrible year 1944. He asked for his clothes to be divided amongst his fellow prisoners,[14] a much needed final act of charity.

My guess is that an event towards the end of the year marks the date when Thomas began to feel that he would most probably escape the Kempeitai.[15] In the Camp ‘Log’ held at the Imperial War Museum[16], next to the names of Mrs. and Miss Selwyn-Clarke it is recorded that they were ‘removed 6.12.44’.

Hilda and Mary Selwyn-Clarke had been living, with their friend Margaret Watson, in the tiny room 6 of Bungalow D.  Thomas and Evelina were amongst the probably 8-10 people in room 1. They’d arrived with the Selwyn-Clarke’s on May 7, 1943, after Hilda’s husband had been arrested by the gendarmes early on May 2 under suspicion of being the head of British espionage in Hong Kong.  In fact, he didn’t get involved in military matters but had been operating a medical smuggling ring, and it’s most unlikely that Thomas had stayed completely clear of its work in the fifteen months they were all in the French Hospital  together.[17]

 Selwyn-Clarke heroically resisted 10 months of brutal torture. After that he was held in solitary confinement, at first under sentence of death, then with a ten year prison term. But, out of the blue, he was released, for reasons which have never been clarified.  Two days after the ‘removal’ of  Hilda and Mary he was visited in his cell by the advocate- general who had been at his trial and Colonel Tokunaga, the head of all the camps in Hong Kong, and told the rest of his sentence had been remitted, and he would be interned in a small civilian camp – 600 people, who would be under his medical care:

 The sense of relief was almost too much for me. I felt completely dazed…[18]

 When he arrived at Ma Tau-wai Camp in Kowloon Hilda and Mary were there to meet him:

 The emotion of this reunion can be imagined, though I fear it must have been something of a shock for Hilda and Mary to be presented with a ragged, bent and emaciated figure, white-haired at fifty and with a long white beard, and this after only nineteenth months of separation.[19]

That day was joyful for the Selwyn-Clarke family and it also meant that Thomas need no longer fear actions from his time in the French Hospitalwould lead to his arrest. And six days later the parcels sent by the Canadian Red Cross were distributed!  (see next post). There seems little doubt that the week or two starting on September 8 was the best period for Thomas and Evelina in 1944, perhaps in the whole of their internment.

 Most people kept at least one item from these parcels to help make Christmas Day special. Then the hunger returned, and, as the harsh winter weather conducted the inhabitants of Stanley inexorably into the new year, it got worse.

Everyone realised this would be their last year as captives. There was no way the emaciated bodies that shuffled listlessly around Camp could take another twelve months  of such starvation. Either they’d be freed in 1945, or the hunger that had been with them since the Japanese attack in those long ago days of December 1941 would finally kill them. There was another possibility, though, and a dreadful one.

 As Thomas’s fears of the Kempeitai and their methods of interrogation began to recede, they were replaced by images of  a new horror. Would the history of Stanley Camp end with a final massacre?

[1] Emily Hahn, China For Me, 271-273, 392-393. For a rebuttal of Hahn’s portrait of Hilda Selwyn-Clarke, see James Bertram, The Shadow of a War, 1947, 81. Margaret Watson’s comments on Hahn in Susanna Hoe, The Private Life of Old Hong  Kong, 1991, 227 are revealing.

[3] China Mail, April 9, 1947, page 2.

[4] China Mail, January 9, 1947, page 2.

[5] George Wright-Nooth, Prisoner of the Turnip Heads, 1994, 180.

[6] China Mail, April 12, 1947, page 2.

[7] China Mail, Friday, April  3, 1947, page 2.

[8] http://www.movieweb.com/news/doug-liman-directing-two-gun-cohen-biopic

[9] Charles Drage, General of Fortune, 1973 ed., 259

[11] Drage, 257.

[12] Drage 259.

[13] Drage, 259.

[14] Drage, 260.

[16] IWM, Misc 932.

[18] Selwyn-Clarke, 93.

[19] Selwyn-Clarke, 93.

  

 

   

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