70 years ago: Hong Kong's wartime diaries

Arrest of Sir Vandeleur Grayburn and E. P. Streatfield.

They are driven from the Liquidation Office to a row of barricaded off ouses on the race course side of Ventris Road - Streatfield thinks this area is being used as a divisional Kempeitai headquarters. They are taken into one of the houses Grayburn is interrogated that afternoon and accused of getting money from the Macao Consul, John Reeves - this would make the offence much more serious in Japanese eyes.

About 7 p.m. the two bankers are taken out of the house and they find a 'boy' with food, clothing, washing and shaving materials and cigarettes sent by their colleagues in the Sun Wah. Then they're moved to a large Chinese house just outside the barricade where they're locked in rooms on the opposite side of a landing patrolled by a Chinese guard. They'll be kept here six days and allowed to receive two baskets of food, cigarettes, clothes and toilet articles sent by the other bankers in the Sun Wah Hotel.

Loved ones in the United Kingdom know little or nothing of these events and the arrests that have preceded them or are about to take place, although they are now receiving some information through the Hong Kong Fellowship. For obvious reasons, the newspapers can't tell them much about what's going on in occupied Hong Kong, and the occasional articles aren't usually very illuminating:

Hong Kong: pay decision

Definite news has been received regarding nearly 95 per cent, of those originally reported missing at Hong Kong, says the War Minister in a written reply.

It is presumed that the others are dead, and the Minister does not think it justifiable in these cases to continue indefinitely the special extension of allowances, due to expire on March 31.

The allowances will continue to April 30, with pensions afterwards in certain cases.

Sources:

Grayburn and Streatfield: Statement of E. P. Streatfield in Hong Kong Public Records Office,  HKMS100-1-6; Maurice Collis, Wayfoong, 1965, 22; Evidence of E. P. Streatfield at trial of Sato Choichi, reported in China Mail, April 2, 1947, page 3; Frank H. H. King, The History of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, Volume 111, 1988, 622

Newspaper: Daily Mirror, March 17, 1943, page 2

Note:

Frank King places these arrests on March 19. He states that the two bankers were taken from the Liquidation Office.  (622)