Seventy Years Ago Today: A Personal Account

Not long after 2 pm. on October 29, 1943 – seventy years ago today – 33 lives were brought to a brutal end on Stanley Beach.1

32 men and one woman were executed by beheading. Their trial had been held in two sessions on October 19, and the interpreter provided by the court made little effort to convey to the prisoners what was going on, but at one point he did offer a rather feeble English summary of the proceedings. William Anderson, the Stanley Camp Quartermaster and one of those in the dock during the afternoon session, was able to pick up the gist of the accusations:

Anderson’s understanding was that it was primarily to do with the prisoners hindering the Japanese in bringing about a new order in Asia.2

Yes, indeed. They had all done so through contact of one sort or another with the resistance organisation, the British Army Aid Group. Most had been agents, but the one military man who was executed on October 29th, Captain Mateen Ansari of the 5/7 Rajputs, had been a POW in Ma Tau-wai Camp and some of those who died beside him had been caught when a plan to free him was betrayed.

By the end of October 19, 33 people had received the death penalty; the rest, including William Anderson, got 15 years – this was simply a slower death sentence, even when it was reduced to ten later, as conditions in the Kempeitai jails were so bad that British prisoners who came out after two years were barely clinging on to life even though they’d received extra rations both openly and through smuggling. But happily most of this group were alive at the end of the war – although not David Edmondston, the number two at the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, who died of malnutrition and medical neglect in 1944.3

Like so many others my parents made the decision not to pass on the burden of suffering by telling their children about what happened to them during the war; my mother occasionally spoke about the (relatively!) lighter side of things – for example, finding a centipede in her shoe and calling my father to kill it – while my father was occasionally forced by the pressure of emotion to speak about his grimmest experiences.

It was clear to me even as a child that for him the worst time of the Hong Kong war was not the hostilities, with their constant threat of sudden death from the incessant shelling and frequent air raids, but the occupation that followed. And it wasn’t the hunger, the cramped conditions, the lack of decent sanitary and washing facilities, or the restricted life he was forced to lead that had scarred him the most: it was the fear of the Kempeitai.

No wonder. To be arrested by the Gendarmes was to enter a world of deprivation and terror that it’s hard for those of us who have known only peace-time conditions to even imagine. The cells themselves were torment enough: prisoners were packed tightly into rooms far too small for their number, the stench was foul – one or more of them was almost certainly suffering from dysentery – and it was not unknown for newcomers to find themselves forced to squeeze in next to the corpse of a poor wretch who had succumbed to mistreatment and neglect. In the Happy Valley Gendarmerie – where my father would probably have been taken if arrested during his time of greatest risk4 when he was outside Stanley, living in the French Hospital in Causeway Bay and baking bread for the hospitals – no bedding was provided – you had to wait for a cell-mate to die, be transferred or released.5 Some cells had natural light, others didn’t.

The food, as I’ve already indicated, was not enough to keep anyone alive for long: it seems to have varied at different times and in different prisons, but I think that a typical daily ration would be about 12 ozs of rice, salt, and a little vegetable marrow. But the inmates couldn’t expect even this much food to be served regularly: the gendarmes used starvation to ‘soften up’ prisoners, so interrogation would often take place when the last meal was nothing but a distant memory; sometimes longer periods of food deprivation were applied.6 For similar reasons, at least one prison was kept deliberately cold. In most cases prisoners were expected to spend much of the day cross-legged, silent and staring at a wall. Beatings were handed out for the slightest deviation.

And those already enduring these unendurable conditions lived with the pain of previous interrogations and the fear of future ones. I do not intend to describe these hideous occasions in any detail; suffice it to say that a session might begin with a beating (an amazing variety of objects were used for this) and proceed to worse measures if this failed to get the desired co-operation.

It’s probable that most or all of the people who died on October 29 had been interrogated under torture. I argued in a previous post7 that in general the Kempeitai, although brutal, treated ‘European’ prisoners with a great deal of procedural scrupulosity: they were not routinely tortured, but they almost always were if they were suspected of spying, and there’s evidence that the severity and extent of the brutality depended on the degree of involvement in espionage suspected by the interrogators. Most of those dying seventy years ago today were not ‘European’  and those who were, had taken part in activities such as military espionage, the operation of secret radio sets, and the passing on of messages, some of which were from the BAAG.

The 33 who died reacted differently to this ordeal. Two are known for certain to have been unbreakable and to have told their tormentors nothing – I think it highly probable that many more also said nothing of any value to the Japanese, only admitting to what was already known, trying to give the impression of providing information without putting anyone else at risk. We can be sure that, whatever was wrung out of them, almost nobody told everything they knew: there were many people involved in resistance whose activities were known to some of these prisoners, who were never arrested. Only one man is believed to have broken completely and attempted to spy on his fellows for better conditions and in the hope of a reprieve (which was not granted). Those who are certain they would never have done the same may wish to condemn him.

Most of those who died seventy years ago today had been arrested in the period from late April to late June – as far as I know at the moment Charles Hyde was the first and Thomas Monaghan the last, but I have very little information about the arrests of the non-Europeans. The main investigations ended around August 19.8 After that, the prisoners were probably left to await trial and then the carrying out of the sentence.

At about 2 pm on October 29 the condemned were taken out of solitary confinement and assembled inside Stanley Prison. They were refused a visit from a priest, but were allowed five minutes together to compose themselves. Captain Mateen Ansari gave an impromptu talk:

We will die strong and healthy for an ideal; not as traitors but nobly in our country’s cause.9

Wong Shiu Pun, who had worked at St. Paul’s College, led prayers. Then it was time to go.

The prisoners had their hands tied behind their backs and were roped together in groups of three. They were taken to the prison’s administration compound and put into the large prison van.10 They set off on the short drive to Stanley Beach soon after 2 pm; the blinds were pulled down, and the van was followed by two Japanese staff cars.

The American Chester Bennett was briefly interned in Stanley before being released to buy extra food for the Camp. War reporter Hal Boyle tells the next part of the story from Bennett’s perspective:

He gave the note ((a final message to his wife)) to a friendly guard and soon it was time to go. The crowded black van pulled out from the steel gates of Stanley Prison and moved slowly down the rough, narrow road leading to the small bay where British redcoats had planted the empire flag more than a hundred- years before.

As the van passed a number of internees toiling up the slope someone put his face up to the rear wire grill and called out: “Goodbye boys. We shan’t be seeing you again.” ((Believed to be Scott or Fraser.))

At the bottom of the hill the prisoners were forced to dismount and follow a trail winding around the edge of the bay. It must have been torture at every step to Chester Bennett. Rope burns on his left leg had become badly infected, the leg had become gangrenous and needed amputation. But he walked upright and limped only slightly. To all outward appearances he was utterly calm. The prisoners marched in single file to a small clearing. Ringing the hills around them were scores of Chinese gravestones. Before them in the center of the clearing the prisoners saw two trenches dug by Indian warders and knew how they were to die.11

They were all blindfolded. Captain Ansari, Walter Scott and John Fraser were led forward first. The others followed, also in groups of three. The whole business lasted about an hour. The beheadings began, but the executioner tired and the swords lost their sharpness: some of the victims had to be finished off with bullets – some internees heard the shots and believed that the prisoners had all been executed by firing squad. Anne Ozorio describes the unflinching demeanour of Wong Shiu Pun as these dreadful events were playing themselves out:

By the time it came to him the swords were blunt. But he kept praying.12

There was no intention on the part of the executioners to cause their victims additional suffering; just incompetence and indifference.

There were 33 victims in total: seventeen Chinese, eight British, four Indians, one Canadian, one American, one Portuguese, one Eurasian. 32 were male; Lau Tak Oi, the wife of resistance leader David Loie, was the only woman.13

After it was all over, the Indian guards filled in the graves, while the Japanese became very serious, and bowed deeply as water was sprinkled on the graves. Then they returned to the prison for a raucous celebration.14

October 29, 1943 was one of the few war-time experiences my father spoke to me about. He could obviously never forget this day on which he was with Mrs Florence Hyde while her husband Charles was being executed on Stanley Beach. He was, I now believe, part of a quickly improvised plot to keep her from leaving the bungalow: the part of the beach where the executions were taking place would have been visible from the path outside.

My father must also have felt a strong affinity with another of the brave men who went to their deaths seventy years ago today – his fellow Lane Crawford employee Frederick Ivan Hall. Mr Hall was in the company butchery department and at some point was living almost next door to my father in Morrison Hill Road (they probably had company flats). They were both also in the Lane Crawford bowls and cricket teams. And both had married Eurasian women earlier in the occupation.

 

He also knew one of the radio operators in the execution party – either Douglas Waterton or Stanley Rees. He wrongly believed that this man was falsely charged. He was wrong: both Mr. Waterton and Mr. Rees had been part of a team that monitored the news and passed on important items to John Fraser, the co-ordinator of most of the resistance activities in the camp.

The events of that day still haunted my father more than twenty years later. Why bring them back now? There are many reasons, one of them to me absolutely compelling.

While awaiting execution Douglas Waterton scratched a calendar on the walls of his cell – every morning he wrote the date and crossed it out –

‘EXECUTED DATE CALENDER STOPS’.

Mr Waterton also recorded some basic facts:

ARRESTED STANLEY CAMP JULY 7 1943
COURT MARTIALLED OCTOBER 43 AND CONDEMNED DEATH
NO DEFENCE

His fellow prisoner, William John White, did something similar: he inscribed all the names he knew of the condemned with sometimes a little information – for example, after Alexander Sinton’s name he put ‘SD’ for Sanitation Department. 

These men, and I’m sure the 31 others who died alongside them, wanted their story to be told. In the grimmest of circumstances, with all hope of survival gone, they began the process of historical recording that those of us who live in the world made possible by their courage and sacrifice must continue in humility and gratitude. 

1 For some of these people see:

Alexander Christie Sinton

Thomas Christopher Monaghan’s Resistance Work

Charles Hyde’s Resistance Work

Chester Bennett – ‘The American Hero of Hong Kong’

Lau Tak Oi (Gladys Loie)

2 George Wright-Nooth, Prisoner of the Turnip Heads, 1994, 182.

3https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2012/02/13/1944-4-two-deaths-a-move-and-a-release/

4February 1942 to May 1943.

5http://gwulo.com/node/8235

6https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2011/11/16/part-4-of-hal-boyles-series-on-chester-bennett/

7https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2013/08/11/how-did-the-kempeitai-treat-british-civilians-in-hong-kong/

8Wright-Nooth, 1994, 177.

9 Wright-Nooth, 1994, 186.

10Wright-Nooth, 1994, 186.

11https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2011/11/16/part-4-of-hal-boyles-series-on-chester-bennett/

12https://www.facebook.com/groups/308617469269780/

13https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2013/07/17/the-executions-of-october-29-1943-update/

14Wright-Nooth, 1994, 187.

 

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.

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

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

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

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

http://gwulo.com/node/9660

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

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

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

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

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

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

[9] Emerson, 99.

[10] Jones Diary, July 17, 1944.

[11] UBB.

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

[13] UBB

[14] UBB.

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

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

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

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

[19] UBB

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

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

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

[23] UBB.

[24] Emerson, 161.

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

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

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

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

[29] Corbin, 170-171.

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

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

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

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

[32] Emerson, 153.

[33] Ream, 37-38.

[34] UBB.

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

[36] Emerson, 153

[37]UBB.

[38] Emerson, 100.

[39] Gerrard’s diary

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

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

[42] Emerson, 1973, 102.

Thomas and Tanaka (2): The Man In The Photo

In the late afternoon or the evening of December 25 Thomas and the staff of Lane Crawford’s Stubbs Rd. bakery were told to go to the company headquarters, Exchange House[1] in Des Voeux Rd.[2] That evening Thomas helped out in efforts to dispose of as much of the Colony’s alcohol supply as possible, probably at the nearby Gloucester Hotel.[3] And, then, like the rest of the Allied nationals he waited nervously for the next day when the victorious Japanese would take possession of Hong Kong Island.

Thomas discovered quite quickly that the man assigned to take charge of the Exchange Building was a reasonable and even humane one. In the last days of the fighting stories of Japanese atrocities had been circulating amongst the defenders,[4] and, although some were more optimistic than others, everyone knew the dreadful fate that might await them. Years later Thomas remembered Tanaka’s kindness:

My shirt was badlly torn. He told me to go back to my lodgings and get another shirt.

What had happened to your shirt?

I’d had to tear it up to help bind the wounded.

I t was a cold winter by Hong Kong standards, and no doubt the trip back to 82,Morrison Hill Rd. enabled Thomas to gather together other useful items. Perhaps including his high performance binoculars: Tanaka confiscated these at some point, but gave him a chit for them, saying the Japanese army would compensate him for the loss after the war. Thomas never held this against him, telling the story in a wry, ‘but I never got that compensation, you know’ manner.

In September 1946 when Thomas wrote an article for his trade paper The British Baker he was keen to record Tanaka’s behaviour:

During our stay in the main building, Captain Tanaka proved both helpful and generous. Besides ensuring that bread continued to be baked for the hospitals, he gave us cinema shows in the Café Wiseman; these shows usually consisted of European films with an occasional film for his soldiers who were stationed in the building.

Thomas gives Tanaka the rank of Captain, Selwyn-Clarke (see below) the slightly lower one of Lieutenant. The article also notes that Tanaka gave them permission on January 9^th to bake bread for the hospitals and allocated them a supply of yeast.

I know of two other accounts that must be of this Tanaka because both link him to Exchange House. Les Fisher, a Volunteer imprisoned at Shamshuipo, records the arrival of some of his fellow Telephone Company workers at the POW Camp in his 1997 edition of his wartime diary. The Café Wiseman had been the centre of thee Hong Kong telephone network during the battle, so the staff of the Telephone Company were detained there to be joined by Thomas late on Christmas Day. Fisher passes on what he was told by his colleagues:

(They had been) treated well by a Captain Tanaka who was in charge.

The new arrivals also told Fisher about the film shows, and said that they were given ‘good food’ and managed to gather together ‘all kinds of useful tinned stuff and foods’.  Tanaka even gave each of them a bottle of whisky when they were leaving, and Fisher was also able to benefit from this kindness! As civilians they were destined for Stanley Camp, but at the last moment a uniform was found amongst them so they were sent to Shamshuipo instead, arriving on February 23.[5]

The third account is by Selwyn Selwyn-Clarke, the Colony’s Medical Officer, who remained out of Stanley to work on public health:

 One of my first encounters with helpfulness from a Japanese officer concerned the reserve of four-gallon tins of biscuits, made of soya bean and wheaten flour with the addition of thiamine hydrochloride powder (against beri beri) which I had had baked in the leading department-store of Lane Crawford against the anticipated siege. By good fortune the Japanese had put Lane Crawford’s in charge of a certain Lieutenant Tanaka, who allowed me to remove all the tins for distribution to the P. O. W. and civilian camps and to those Chinese hospitals which had not been closed by the Japanese forces.[6]

Selwyn-Clarke adds: ‘Those vitamin biscuits were of real value’. I’ll be describing the complex history of these biscuits, devised by Dr. Herklots and baked by Thomas, in a future post!

The Japanese authorities must have been considering a role for the bakers in the days leading up to January 5 when the vast majority of the Allied civilians were assembled at the Murray Parade Ground before being consigned to squalid hotels and eventually packed off to Stanley Camp. Thomas, his fellow bakers and a team of drivers were kept back and eventually granted permission to start baking on January 9^th. On February 8 Thomas and the others were sent to the French Hospital to join Selwyn-Clarke and his team of doctors and public health workers.

Selwyn-Clarke also records the rumour that Tanaka was later executed for his kindness to the prisoners:

Lieut. Tanaka subsequently disappeared, and rumour had it that he had been removed to Canton and there executed for displaying excessive concern for the Hong Kong prisoners.[7]

This may, of course, be true, but I’m inclined to doubt it. The wedding photo proves Tanaka was still in Hong Kong on June 29, 1942 – on the back of one of the copies he’s specifically identified, along with the other main guests, and this information can only have come from Thomas or Evelina. The Telephone Company personnel left the Exchange Building on February 23, and after that there was no reason for him to have any dealings with internees in Hong Kong. His role was probably accidental in the first place: he took over Exchange House because he was officer in charge of communications,[8] and that’s where the telephone exchange was, as well as the Lane Crawford HQ, bringing the biscuits under his control. British civilians who remained in the city were not treated badly in the early days,[9] and it seems unlikely that in July or sometime after he was killed for actions taken in January and February: actions which, insofar as they are now known, amount to no more than some generous decisions, a few bottles of whisky and the showing of some European films. Kiyoshi Watanabe, the well-known interpreter, performed many acts of kindness for the defeated, and although he was mocked, shouted at and eventually sacked he suffered no physical punishment. Of course, the existence of a rumour of this kind makes it highly likely that much about Tanaka’s benevolence has gone unrecorded, so he might indeed have been punished as Selwyn-Clarke describes– it’s even possible that his attendance at Thomas and Evelina’s wedding was cited in evidence against him. But his execution would have been the kind of thing that Thomas would have mentioned in later years if he’d believed it had happened: it would have been a good example of the incomprehensible cruelty of the Japanese,[10] something he did mention on a number of occasions.

Captain Tanaka reminds us of the importance of remembering that not all Japanese acted badly during the occupation, and some manifested great kindness and compassion.

Note:

For more about Tanaka see https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2012/05/04/another-tanaka-surprise-and-some-speculations-about-the-wedding/

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[1] See  http://gwulo.com/exchange-building

[2] https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2011/10/18/thomas-and-evelina-edgar-in-the-hong-kong-war-a-chronology-1/

[3] https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2011/10/18/thomas-and-evelina-edgar-in-the-hong-kong-war-a-chronology-1/

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

[5] Les Fisher, I Will Remember, 1996, 37.

[6] Footprints, 1975, 74.

[7] Footprints, 74.

[8] British Baker article, viewable at https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2011/10/18/thomas-edgar-some-documentation/

[9] Philip Snow, The Fall of Hong Kong, 2003, 140.

[10] For a caveat, see https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2012/01/22/reality-check-1-the-japanese/

The Reign of Terror (2): Fear in the French Hospital

The beleaguered Allied community in the French Hospital were waiting for the blow, knowing it would fall one day, and the only question was who would be the victims and exactly what shape the retribution would take.

 The Kempeitai were chronically suspicious of all those who’d been allowed to stay in Hong Kong; Dr. Selwyn-Clarke himself was under constant surveillance at his office and at the French Hospital, where he lived with his wife and daughter.[1] Thomas too was living in this hospital, in Hong Kong Island’s Causeway Bay area, a few miles east of the Island’s heartland, Victoria (now Central). Hahn is being ironic, but reflecting what was almost certainly the real view of the Gendarmes, when she refers to the place that was the only home Thomas had as ‘that hotbed of espionage’.[2]

Thomas had been baking bread for the hospitals and living with two other bakers,[3] Sgm. Hammond who’d helped him bake during the 18 days of fighting, and a man called Peacock.[4]  But, according to American repatriate Charles Winter,[5] Thomas and Evelina were planning to live together in the French Hospital after their wedding on June 29, 1942. There’s no reason to believe they didn’t carry out this plan, although whether or not they had a room to themselves nobody knows.

 Thomas must have shared the general fear.[6] He knew that everyone connected with Selwyn-Clarke was an object of mistrust: as Anne Ozorio – a distinguished researcher, who was herself in  Hong Kong during the war – tells us:

 Anyone associated with him in any way, came under suspicion.[7]

 Leslie Macey, who was a member of Selwyn-Clarke’s team, working on public health, remembered years later:

 This eighteen months (Note: from January 1942 to spring or summer 1943) was not very pleasant, we had difficulty in obtaining food and the Japs, who had a very strong spy complex, had us under suspicion the whole time, which was not very good for our nerves, as we were always expecting to be arrested by the local Gestapo at any moment.[8]

Selwyn-Clarke himself constantly told his wife Hilda to have nothing to do with him when the inevitable arrest came; she should look after Mary, their five-year old daughter.

 The Medical Director was not, as the Kempeitai suspected, the leading British spymaster in Hong Kong, but he was running a large humanitarian smuggling operation, largely funded by money raised by the bankers who it had also suited Japanese purposes to leave outside Stanley Camp.[9] Most of this money – which paid for food, medicines and medical equipment which found its way covertly into the camps – was raised by methods the Japanese would have regarded as illegal. Selwyn-Clarke had two influential Japanese ‘protectors’, so the Kempeitai couldn’t just arrest him and try to extort a confessionn from him. But if they could get someone to incriminate him…

 Many if not all of the small group in the French hospital – my guess is that the number was about 25 by January 1943 – would have been drawn into Selwyn-Clarke’s illegal work: John Stericker reports, for example, that radio parts, messages and illegal goods were smuggled into Stanley on one of the Medical Department’s ambulances,[10] and, in his autobiography, the Medical Director himself describes a hair’s-breadth escape when he and two ‘volunteers’ were on a mission to rescue a dentist chair, badly needed in Stanley, from a godown (warehouse) taken over by the Japanese army.[11]

 In that autobiography Selwyn-Clarke criticises the Swiss Red Cross delegate, Mr. Zindel, for being too inhibited by all he’d heard about Japanese brutality to be energetic on behalf of the internees.[12] Selwyn-Clarke himself knew that one day he’d be arrested, tortured and probably executed, but I doubt that he hesitated for one moment before doing what he thought of as his duty, and he obviously expected others to do theirs.

 In any case, the evidence places Thomas even closer to illegal activity than this. According to Gwen Dew, who was repatriated at the end of June 1942, the truck drivers had smuggled in small amounts of medicine when delivering rations.[13] This almost certainly includes the period – January-April 1942 – during which Thomas was baking bread for the camp, and one of these drivers was his best man, Owen Evans.

 Was Thomas’s fear merely of guilt by association, or was he worried about anything that he’d done himself? I don’t know, but it’s hard to believe that anybody in that small group would have been, in Japanese eyes, innocent. If he was asked to help smuggle in vital drugs or extra food for those suffering from malnutrition he would have found it hard to say no. The Thomas who stares out of some of the photos taken in Hong Kong was very different to the gentle, unaggessive man of the 1950s and 60s; he’s a tough man who’s far from left behind his working class origins.[14]

This is a post-war picture – the large man in the centre is E. F. Gingle, who’d been the American cook in Stanley Camp.

 One of Thomas’s few boasts – he was an exceptionally  modest man – was that in his youth he’d been one of the best amateur boxers in the Home Counties, fighting over a hundred times and losing only once. He gave up boxing relatively early, although Evelina used to say that he and two friends were nicknamed the ‘three terrors of Hong Kong’ for their -unspecified –  exploits while drunk!

 It would have been hard indeed for such a man, scared as he was of what might happen to him, to refuse to help when so many others were running huge risks: academics like the ailing literary scholar, D. J. Sloss,[15] for example, who was the first inmate of Stanley camp to receive communications from the British Army Aid Group,[16] or women like Jean Gittins, who unhesitatingly agreed to translate into Chinese a message that was to be sent out of Stanley Camp by a route known to be compromised even though she was warned she’d be executed if the message were discovered.[17] In a previous post I’ve described the courage of the bankers – the other main group of Allied civilians left outside Stanley. These men were the elite of Hong Kong, living in expensive homes on the Peak or other exclusive areas, and if such men were willing to risk agony and death to help their fellows in Stanley Camp, then how could Thomas refuse?

 Something Thomas said years later sums up both his fear and his feeling that as a boxer he should have been tough enough to take whatever came:

Ralph Shrigley, he was a boxing champion, but even he couldn’t stand the torture, he jumped off the Supreme Court roof and killed himself.[18]

 In any case, he believed that guilt or innocence didn’t come into the Kempeitai’s calculations. He thought, for example, that Douglas Waterton knew nothing about the radio for whose operation he was tortured and executed.[19] Although Thomas was wrong as to this matter of fact, others agreed with him as to the principle. The telephone engineer James Anderson who, as we shall see in a future post, experienced the methods of the Kempeitai first hand, soon after the end of the war gave his opinion as to the gendarmes’ modus operandi to his fellow Telephone Company employee Les Fisher:

 According to Andy the Japanese method was simple. When they wished to discover anything which they do not allow, such as contacts with outside, radios, etc, they simply picked up a likely person and tortured him until he gave others away.[20]

 Major Charles Boxer knew the Japanese better than most, as he spoke the language fluently and had actually served with a Japanese regiment for two years before the war. His lover Emily Hahn is speaking:

 Well, if they question me, they question me. I haven’t broken any laws.’

Charles didn’t reply. We both knew that had nothing to do with the case.[21]

 Actually, although the Kempeitai sometimes did work in this way, I’m not aware of many cases where they arrested Allied nationals (Chinese were a different matter) without at least some grounds for suspicion, and they seem to have missed a number of people who they might well have thought to be ‘guilty’ – amazingly, for example, Hilda Selwyn-Clarke was never questioned.[22] But it was the perception that mattered; the belief that anyone could be picked up at any time added greatly to the terror of those caught in the dark world’s fire of occupied Hong Kong.

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[1] Field, 88-89.

[2] Hahn, 405.

[3] Charles Winter letter – see https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2011/10/18/thomas-edgar-some-documentation/

[4] British Army Aid Group List, communication from Tony Banham: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stanley_camp/message/1196

[5] See letter at https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2011/10/18/thomas-edgar-some-documentation/

 [6] The posts on ‘the Reign of Terror’ (Emily Hahn’s phrase) discuss events from Thomas’s perspective; I’ll write about Evelina’s experience separately.

[7] http://www.casademacau.org/Newsletters/2002/1102news.htm

[8] http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stanley_camp/message/491

[9] See https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2011/11/24/in-praise-of-bankers/

[10] Stericker, 180. Some of Selwyn-Clarke’s supplies went into the Camps with Japanese approval, hence the availability of an ambulance ‘route’ for illicit purposes.

[11] Selwyn-Clarke, 75.

[12] Selwyn-Clarke, 71. A balanced assessment of Zindel is given in the new introduction to Geoffrey Emerson’s Hong Kong Internment 1942-1945, the standard work on Stanley Camp.

[13] Dew, 136. Dew says the ‘American’ drivers were involved, but there’s no reason to think she meant to exclude Owen Evans, the only non-American known to have been driving.

[14] See https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2011/10/18/thomas-and-evelina-edgar-in-the-hong-kong-war-a-chronology-1/

[15] As a teenager I became fascinated by the work of poet and painter William Blake; the standard edition of Blake’s ‘prophetic books’, probably the most difficult major writings in English before the twentieth century, was known as ‘Sloss and Wallis’ after its two editors.

[16]Wright-Nooth, 114.

[17] Gittins, 144.

[18 The details of Shamshuipo POW Ralph Shrigley’s death are not fully clear, but it seems that he was arrested and tortured by the Kempeitai in 1942 because it was believed he knew something about escapes from the camp; in 1944 he was arrested again because he had been responsible for burying the regimental colours and other items including  arms when the fall of Hong Kong was imminent. On this occasion, he jumped to his death to escape torture. His wife was an inmate of Stanley Camp.

[19] See https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2011/11/26/he-didnt-know-anything-about-the-news/

[20] Les Fisher, I Will Remember, 240.

[21] Hahn, 330.

[22] Hahn, 407.

A Wartime Romance

I sometimes fancy trying my hand as a writer of popular romance. A short novel perhaps, or better still a film script. How about this for a scenario: Time: the ever-popular background of the Second World War. Place: the exotic and beautiful British colony (as it then was) of Hong Kong.  Action: the sirens whine, the shells whistle and crump, the fires blaze, and amid scenes of great confusion and horror the gallant defenders are overcome.

While most British civilians are suffering the fears and indignities of the defeated, a few are lucky enough to find themselves in the hands of a compassionate Japanese Army officer. He sets the bakers among them back to work, re-opening a small Chinese bakery to make bread for the hospitals. Everyone’s hungry and the Colony’s European population is desperate for the taste of bread; word soon gets round, and queues form – people will pay anything for a precious loaf. The bakers know that they’ll be packed off somewhere much worse if they abuse their position, but one of them refuses to let his friends leave empty-handed and gives them bread for free. While his comrades are remonstrating about the danger he’s putting them all in, a friend steps forward, asking for supplies not just for himself but also for his tenant, a pretty young Eurasian woman….

Everyone in Hong Kong’s been at risk of sudden death from shell or bomb during the fighting, and they all know that nothing can be taken for granted in the brutal new order that’s emerging. Things move fast, and the baker and the young woman are soon romantically involved.

Let’s make them an unlikely couple too, the kind who would never have got together in normal circumstances, but are thrown unexpectedly into each other’s arms by the heightened emotions of war. He’s working class and as English as they come – Hampshire and Berks – while she’s from  a good Macau family and has lived all her life in the south China world.

Their romancing takes place to the backdrop of Japanese soldiers patrolling the streets, tearing down the old English signs and erecting new ones, this time in the languages of the East, while all over the former Colony the message ‘Asia for the Asiatics’ is being drummed into a population that seems terrified at the atrocities going on all around rather than over-joyed at their liberation from British rule.  All this might lead up to a big scene in which the woman is offered the chance of returning to the safety and comfort of her neutral homeland (let’s give her some well-off friends to underline how much she’s sacrificing) but chooses to stay with her man, braving discomfort, slow starvation and the possibility of violent death at any moment.

Skip a few months and zoom into the couple marrying in church, and then standing on the steps for the group photo – the camera picks out a man in a Japanese officer’s uniform – what’s he doing there? – and then follows the couple as they walk off hand in hand, still prisoners but now at least together.

There follow three more years of terror and deprivation. Our hero and heroine, alongside the whole Allied community, are once again staring death in the face – either from starvation or massacre, but they’re saved by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, one of the most terrible events in human history. They stumble out of their prison camp, play their part in the building up of a new world, and manage to hold a difficult relationship together all the way through to the husband’s death bed.

I know, I know these days everyone – romance readers and cinema audiences alike- demand something a bit more sophisticated than that. Why, the plot’s nothing more than a bunch of old-fashioned romantic clichés, stereotyped situations, exaggerated dilemmas and unlikely outcomes.

But that, in sober fact, was the life together of Thomas Herbert Edgar and Evelina Marques d’Oliveira.

They would not have given each other a second thought before the war. They came from such different backgrounds and lived in such different worlds.

Although things were getting more liberal in Hong Kong in the three years before the war, many of the British held on to a mythical view of racial hierarchy which meant that they and the other ‘Europeans’ were at the top of the heap and the Chinese at the bottom – in accord with this pernicious logic, Eurasians, who at least had some ‘white’ blood, were somewhere in between,[1] but probably closer to the Chinese: the Europeans had their own schools, for example, and so did the Eurasians, but those who didn’t have a place were generally educated alongside Chinese.[2] In fact:

Eurasians in a European social gathering created a climate of unease and psychological tension…Even highly educated Europeans reacted strongly against mixed marriages.[3]

Not surprising that there wasn’t much socialising between ‘whites’ and Eurasians.[4]

After their victory, the Japanese published a newspaper the Hong Kong News –  a lying propaganda sheet, but one that sometimes told the truth:

 (The) Eurasian when he seeks employment is classified as a ‘native’ and is required to accept ‘native’ pay.[5]

Evelina knew this for herself: she’d come to Hong Kong to work, something that as a middle class woman she was not expected to do back home in Macao, and before the war she had various jobs in sales. Eventually she rebelled and asked her latest boss to pay her the same rates as the European staff – to his credit, he agreed, but it didn’t change the system.

But race wasn’t the only prejudice in pre-war Hong Kong. There was a strict class hierarchy too, with the bankers and senior government officials at the top, wealthy businessmen not far distant, and everyone else graded according to job, salary, location, accent and so on. From this point of view, Thomas was really little more than a jumped up manual worker. True, he managed the bakery for Lane, Crawford, the most prestigious Department Store in Hong Kong, but he was a hands-on baker, someone who didn’t just tell others what to do but had learnt through a tough apprenticeship to do it all himself. And anyone who cared to enquire about his family would have learnt that he was the son of a domestic servant, later a would-be theatrical landlady, and a soldier-turned-driver. This is a photo of Thomas’s mother with her six children:

Evelina Marques d’Oliveira, on the other hand, came from a distinguished Macanese family. Her grandfather was a judge in Lourenco Marques, and there’s still a street named after him in Macao. Her father, Antonio, was a tea merchant, who took a Chinese wife; she died of TB when Evelina was three, and he later remarried.

Evelina’s best friends in Macao had been three Eurasian sisters, the Leitaos, daughters of a leading lawyer.  When her father moved to Foochow (Fuzhou), a centre of the tea trade on the south China coast, she was sent back to  Macao to be educated privately, probably at the elite Santa Rosa de Lima school. She spoke English and Portuguese fluently, and at some point was to become reasonably proficient in two forms of Chinese. She also acquired secretarial skills, and in many ways her written English was better than Thomas’s.

Thomas had been educated at the local state school and, although a bright boy, had to leave behind his studies and help his family’s finances by getting a job. At first he’d been a clerk in a motor company, but in 1927 – after his dreams of a boxing career ended with a knock-out – he began a three year apprenticeship at a baker’s, which meant long, unsocial hours, full of sweat and physical labour, at first working unpaid to learn his trade.

They had opposing religious beliefs too: Evelina was a Catholic, while Thomas was an enthusiastic Freemason, and therefore regarded as an enemy by the Church, a feeling which he reciprocated.

Thomas on a day out at Mt. Parker in February 1940

Perhaps one thing symbolises most clearly the difference between the two worlds they’d been brought up in. The terraced house close to the river and in the flooding zone, which was all Thomas’s family could afford, was already full with him and his five brothers and sisters, but his parents still found room to cram in paying customers, actors appearing at the nearby Theatre Royal. In contrast, Evelina’s family bought a young girl as a servant under the old mui-tsai system – ‘We treated her well’, she said, many years later. This could have been true; British radicals in Hong Kong hated mui-tsai as a form of slavery, and there were indeed hideous abuses, but in many homes they were treated as part of the family – which didn’t necessarily spare them from long hours of work under a harsh discipline, of course.

You could say that Thomas and Evelina were united only by their relative disadvantages in class-conscious, race-obsessed Hong Kong. And perhaps by one other thing. Evelina was 28 when they met, 29 by the time they married. She’d had boyfriends: perhaps Horacio was one of them…

 …but she was leaving it rather late to get married according to the ideas of the time.  Thomas had been very shy when he was a boy; he sometimes used to cross the road to avoid walking too close to another person, although he’d probably got over that by the time he went to Hong Kong. Nothing is known about his relationships there though.  In any case, when his family heard the news of his marriage they were pleased for two reasons: firstly, it meant that he wouldn’t get himself killed trying to escape, and secondly that Thomas had found a woman who was willing to marry him in spite of his heavy drinking! Before the war he and two friends had been nicknamed ‘the three terrors of Hong Kong’ because of their alcohol-fuelled exploits.

 When the Japanese attacked on December 8, 1941 they were again in very different situations: Evelina’s Portuguese passport meant that she was a neutral, although no-one knew how far the Japanese would respect this. About Thomas though there was no doubt: he was an enemy and, as he was also young (28) and fit, he would be expected to play his part in the British defence.

Most able-bodied young British men had to join the Hong Kong Volunteers, a home guard with a dilettante reputation but which surprised most people by fighting with courage and distinction when the time came, but in October or November, 1938 as the Japanese war with China moved close to the Hong Kong border, Thomas received a letter telling him not to get involved in military training but to concentrate on preparing his bakery for any ‘emergency’. This was the new Lane, Crawford Bakery in Stubbs Rd, opened that year, and hailed in company adverts as the most hygienic in the Far East – disease was another Hong Kong obsession, this one with more reason.

So, almost exactly three years later, when the attack did come (December 8, 1941) Thomas was ready. The first air raid began at about 8a.m., and by that time he’d probably already left his lodgings in Broadwood Road and taken command in the Bakery. He was immediately promoted to Deputy Supply Officer Bakeries, which meant that he was in charge of most of the bakeries in Hong Kong, and he decided to start off by producing all the bread the population needed using the Lane Crawford machinery. If Stubbs Road became too dangerous, he’d prepared for production at some smaller premises in Wanchai, hoping that one or more of them would still be viable.

After the fall of the mainland on December 13 the bakery itself was in the line of fire between the Japanese and British forces. Thomas slept in the office chair, until the staff were given some camp beds. On December 19, the army field bakery in Deep Water Bay was forced to stop work, and Thomas’s responsibilities increased, as he now had to try to make sure that those doing the actual fighting had bread. Those who took the loaves from the bakery to the supply points were very brave men and women indeed. Hong Kong was being constantly shelled and bombed, and, although the Japanese made some effort to avoid civilian areas, there were many casualties. They also knew that the Japanese were not always taking prisoners.There was no water from an early stage of the fighting, so special deliveries had to be made by the Fire Brigade. Eventually there was no electricity either. In spite of everything, the bread went out, as ordered.

As the Japanese moved inexorably westwards from North Point towards the Hong Kong heartland of Victoria, the bakery’s situation became untenable. When it did, on December 21, Thomas moved production to some of the smaller bakeries he’d prepared for the task. These must have been terrifying but exhilarating days for him. He could die or be painfully wounded at any moment, but at the same time he was doing his duty, no matter what, moving around, working frenetically to coax the last ounce of production out of small and old-fashioned bakeries.

Thomas, helped by RASC bakers who arrved on the 23rd after an eventful journey from the south of the island, kept the bread supply coming until December 25 – later known in Hong Kong as Black Christmas – when the defenders were forced to abandon their hopeless resistance. Like the other Lane, Crawford employees Thomas was told to report to the company headquarters at Exchange House in Victoria’s Des Voeux Road, which was to become his first place of internment. He spent Christmas evening pouring away the alcohol stocked by the company’s restaurant- everybody feared what was about to happen, and it would have been foolish to leave around anything that could inflame the conquerors further.

The next morning Thomas woke up to meet the new rulers of Hong Kong for the first time. He was soon to realise that he was lucky: Exchange House was under the control of a communications officer, Captain Tanaka, a fine man whose generosity has been recorded by other former prisoners.  Tanaka allowed him to go to his lodgings to get a new shirt – he’d used the one he’d been wearing to bind the wounded, and it was bitterly cold by now. In the days to come, Tanaka  gave good food to the internees, and even arranged film shows for them.

On January 5 most of the Allied civilians were assembled in squalid waterfront hotels and from there they were soon to be sent off to a large  improvised place of internment on the southern peninsula – Stanley Camp.  Captain Tanaka arranged for Thomas and his fellow bakers to stay in Exchange House and on January 9 he gave them permission to go back to work to help feed the many patients in Hong Kong’s hospitals.

Evelina had a neutral’s passport, but as a Eurasian woman she must have been terrified as the Japanese troops took over. Everyone had in their minds the possibility of mass rape and murder, as had happened after the fall of Nanking. Years later in England she’d speak about her fear of the bombs, and sometimes hide in an understairs cupboard during storms if the thunder got too loud. But there was another, more immediate problem: hunger. Food was hard to come by during those chaotic, panic-stricken days. Luckily Evelina’s landlord (probably Robert Bauder, a Swiss national who like Thomas worked for Lane, Crawford) knew someone who could probably get her something to eat….Some time in January 1942 he took her to the Ching Loong bakery in Queen’ Road, where Thomas and his colleagues were at work, and the relationship began.

On February 8 Thomas was transferred to internment in St. Paul’s Hospital, generally known as the French Hospital, in Causeway Bay, but he continued to bake bread – and to see Evelina. The team of drivers who delivered this bread included an American, Charles Winter, and a Welshman Owen Evans, a man who was unlucky to have been there at all. He was a driver with the Friends Ambulance Unit based in southern China who’d been sent to Hong Kong to rest when war broke out.

It was from the French Hospital that Thomas was married on the afternoon of Sunday, June 29, 1942, a bright, sunny day. Interestingly, that was the very day that the Hong Kong Americans began their journey home. The American and Japanese governments had arranged a prisoner swap, and, while most of the other British were down at Stanley preparing to wave goodbye to their American friends, Thomas was getting ready for his wedding. Many of the people bidding farewell to the lucky repatriates had tears in their eyes, and complex emotions in their heart: sorrow at the loss of friends, happiness that for some at least of their number the ordeal would soon be over, pain that they would have to remain in captivity, and hope that their turn for release would soon come. Thomas must have felt all that, and more.

For he must have been aware that what was happening that afternoon was more than just a wedding. One of the few things from the days before the war that Evelina brought with her when, almost eight years later, she started her new life in England, was this photo, torn from an old passport:

 

Her Portuguese nationality was her only protection against the Japanese soldiers, the one thing that might save her from rape or murder if the behaviour of the victorious army in Hong Kong was anything like what it had been in Nanking.  Did Evelina seize this passport, kept in a place where she could get to it quickly, if she heard a knock at the door during those fear-filled early days of the occupation? Did she clutch it tight whenever she left the house, ready to brandish it if assailed in the street? Whatever protection her nationality gave her, she was abandoning it when she married Thomas.

The American journalist Emily Hahn was another ‘enemy’ civilian outside Stanley Camp at that time. Hahn was pretending to be Chinese, on the basis of having been one of the ‘wives’ of a Chinese poet. A friendly Japanese officer assured her that under Japanese law this marriage gave Hahn her husband’s Chinese nationality.  That may or may not have been true, but it’s certain that after the wedding Evelina’s fate would be linked with that of the English community, most of whom were currently languishing in Stanley.

Why didn’t she just go home to Macao? Hahn tells us that it was still considered safe then[6] and the Government there invited all Macanese to return – the Japanese were happy for them to go, as it meant fewer mouths to feed. The situation there could have changed at any time of course, as the Japanese didn’t always respect Portuguese neutrality, and the Macau Government had to manoeuvre carefully to remain unoccupied. But for most people the security of peace, albeit precarious, would prove preferable to immediate danger and many Macanese took up the offer of refuge .

One factor in Evelina’s decision might have been the plight of the Portuguese refugees who were flooding Macao  in 1942; most of them were living in over-crowded accommodation and on rations if anything worse than those available in Hong Kong. But Evelina had wealthy friends in Macao. In fact, although she probably didn’t know it, the youngest of the three Leitao sisters, her closest friends, also married in 1942. Clementina, a striking beauty, won the heart (it was said to be ‘love at first sight’) not of a baker but  a Hong Kong businessman who was already comfortably situated and was later to become one of the richest men in Asia. But leaving that aside, as probably not known to Evelina when she made her decision to stay in Hong Kong, she knew she could return to Macao and expect the help of the well-off and influential Leitao family. I don’t, by the way, know if her father Antonio was alive at the time. He died relatively young of liver disease but I haven’t yet found out exactly when.

I think the real reason that Evelina stayed in Hong Kong and married Thomas was that they were in love with each other, and she was willing to risk everything so that they could stay together. Years later, when asked why she didn’t go home in 1942, she replied simply, ‘It wouldn’t have been right’.

But, given the decision to stay together,  why actually get married a mere 5 or 6 months after meeting? Looked at from a purely utilitarian point of view, Lena might have seemed safer keeping her Portuguese nationality and it was useful to Thomas having someone who was not considered an enemy by the Japanese. She was working and reasonably free to move around Hong Kong, buying whatever was available with any money she had. ‘Third National’ (neutral) friends like  the Swiss Robert Bauder, prominent in the wedding photo, would have been able to channel small gifts of food through Evelina without raising the suspicions of the Kempeitai (Japanese Gestapo) – some neutrals and Chinese were tortured or even executed for being too friendly to the British.

And one possible  motive can be ruled out: Thomas and Lena were determined that they would not bring a child into the world under such conditions. Evelina was a Catholic, and this ruled out contraception, even if any was attainable.

I think part of the answer lies in the apparent coincidence of the  town group of Americans starting their journey of repatriation on the morning of the wedding day. According to American reporter Gwen Dew, a small group of Americans were told on March 30^th. they were being repatriated. This firmed up rumours that had been going around in February, and at the end of the month the Americans were told that all of them would be going home (Prisoner of the Japs pages 140, 146). Naturally the British began pressing their leaders to try to arrange a similar prisoner swap, and for a time the ever-optimistic internees were hopeful that, as the Camp ‘anthem’ put it, they would soon ‘sail away’ to freedom; my guess is that Thomas wanted to make sure that there would be no doubt about Evelina’s right to board that so-longed for repatriation ship.

But beyond all that, I think that, once again, it was a simple case of loving each other and judging that marriage was necessary if they were to live the relationship in the way they wanted. One or both of them could die at any moment, so they wanted to spend as much time together as possible, and if the end came, they would face it together or at least married to each other.

It must also be remembered that, although Thomas would have seen plenty of examples of the brutal treatment of Chinese in Hong Kong, the British had not been badly handled since the surrender. There were rapes and massacres during and just after the fighting, but since then the British had suffered humiliation and appalling living conditions, but no worse. In fact, given the Japanese suspicion of anyone who showed the British too much friendship, it might have seemed safer to both Thomas and Evelina for her to have the same status as him. She was, after all, a recent girlfriend, and one who could reasonably be expected to go back home to Macao, so why, the  ever -suspicious Kempeitai might have reasoned, was she staying?

I wonder if Thomas and Evelina regretted their decision in the terrible months that began in February 1943?  The Kempeitai launched a campaign against the British community, one of the first acts of which was to arrest and brutally interrogate a woman who was working for Dr. Selwyn-Clarke, who was in effect Thomas’s boss at the French Hospital. Before the end of the year some of the most important figures in the colony had been imprisoned, tortured and in some cases beheaded. Selwyn-Clarke himself faced months of brutal interrogation but never revealed a single thing about the illegal relief activities he’d been at the centre of. Amazingly, he survived the war.

But all that was in the future on that hot June Sunday when their marriage was blessed by Father Riganti, the Rector of St. Joseph’s, a man who had himself known internment – in his case, by the British, who’d arrested him when the Japanese attacked on the grounds that he was Italian and an Axis national.

The three pictures of the wedding that survive tell an interesting story. In the first Evelina and her friends are standing outside the church –St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Kennedy Road. The name of the man she’s with, who was presumably to later give her away, is not known:

After the ceremony, the wedding party posed on the church steps:

A note on the back of one of the different—sized versions of this picture confirms that the Japanese soldier in the second row is Thomas’s old benefactor, Captain Tanaka. As Thomas was no longer under his supervision, he must have kept in touch or at least found a way of sending the Captain an invitation. He’s standing tactfully at the end of the second row, wanting to be clearly in the picture but not to dominate it.

Thomas seems in good shape after six months in captivity. He hasn’t lost much weight yet and he’s in a smart white suit with what look like good shoes.  It wasn’t long after the surrender before some of the people in Stanley were trying to deal with problems caused by crumbling footwear and disintegrating clothing, while in June 1942, in the military POW camp of Shamshuipo his friends in the Hong Kong Volunteers were already suffering the torments caused by diseases of malnutrition like beri beri and ‘electric feet’ (Les Fisher, I Shall Remember, 41). But the emotional realities shown by the wedding pictures are very different.

Evelina is putting on a sweet but not very profound smile, while Thomas’s lips are only slightly raised, the merest gesture towards a sign of happiness. The other two men in the front row, Robert Bauder (second on the left, also in a white suit), and the man holding Lena’s arm in the earlier photo taken outside the church, look rather grim, while the best man, Owen Evans, is hardly smiling any more convincingly than Thomas. Only the bridesmaid on the far left and the Matron of Honour have the kind of expressions expected in the front row of a wedding party.

In the ‘happy couple’ photo, probably taken just afterwards, Thomas has abandoned any attempt at a smile; if anything, he looks angry, while Evelina’s smile has now been invaded by the ever-lurking sense of fear:

They were in love and getting married, but they had no proper home, they were  hungry most of the time, and one or both of them could die violently at any time. And they had no idea when, if ever, all this would come to an end.

Later that year Thomas’s family in Windsor were to receive a letter from Charles Winter, Thomas’s repatriated American colleague. It is hard to imagine the relief and joy this must have brought his parents and brothers and sisters. It was the first news they’d had of him since the start of the fighting on December 8, 1941, the first indication that he was alive and unwounded.

Mr. Winters paints a tactfully reassuring picture of Thomas at work in a Hong Kong in which business was pretty much as usual. And thanks to this letter the family learnt at the same time that Evelina existed and was almost certainly their daughter-in -law!

After the ceremony was there some kind of reception, a pooling of the meagre resources available in wartime Hong Kong? There’s no doubt that Captain Tanaka – who sent the employees of the Telephone Company off to their imprisonment in Shamshuipo Camp with a bottle of whisky each – would have provided something if he could, or that friends and colleagues would have chipped in from their meagre rations. But all that’s known for certain is that Thomas and Evelina returned to the French Hospital, now husband and wife.

Footnote

About ten months later, on May 7, 1943, they were sent to join the rest of the Allied civilians in Stanley Camp; Selwyn-Clarke had been arrested on May 2 under unjustified suspicion of being a spy. They stayed there until the end of the war in August 1945. After more than three and  a half years of terror and privation they were finally free.

And just over five years later, her brain and body still on fire with what had happened in the war, Evelina returned to the French Hospital to give birth to their first son. A few weeks later, the baptism took place.  Robert Bauder was there again, and posed for the camera with the baby in his arms. It was the same Father Riganti who officiated.

 

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[1]Gerald Horne, Race War!, Kindle Edition, Location 830.

[2] Horne, Location 602.

[3] Hong Kong sociologist Henry Lethbridge, quoted in  Horne,  Location 830.

[4] http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stanley_camp/message/388

[5] Cited in Horne, Location, 792.

[6] Marriage and Japanese law: Emily Hahn,  China To Me, 321; Macao safe: Hahn, 368.