70 years ago: Hong Kong's wartime diaries

Arrest of Hong Kong News staff member C. M. Faure.

He's taken to Happy Valley Gendarmerie and held in a filthy 'cage'.

He's not charged for 6 months, but then is accused of being a spy and threatened with death. Eventually he's sent into Stanley.

Today or about this date two other former members of staff of the South China Morning Post, editor Henry Ching and A. M. Omar were also arrested on charges of spying.

M. L. Bevan copies into his Stanley diary an advert from the Hong Kong News, now the only English-language paper:

GENUINE PREWAR PATENT Medicines incl. Vitamin, Yeast, Calcium, tonics, eyc. against malnutrition etc. suitable for internees. List on application. Post Office Box 371 Hongkong.

Bevan makes no comment but I think he suspects, as I do, that the people offering pre-war status and a 'tonic' to the internees are the British Army Aid Group, who are fishing for would-be escapers.

Sources:

Faure: Evidence of C. M. Faure at trial of Noma Kennosuke, reported in China Mail, January 3, 1947

Ching and Omar: http://www.scmp.com/article/433573/through-war-years-bloodied-unbroken

Diary: M. L. Bevan, IWM, 5231{BEVAN} 58132

Note: the second source gives the period of imprisonment as three months for all three men. Mr. Ching had to spend two months in the Nethersole Hospital recuperating.