70 years ago: Hong Kong's wartime diaries

At a Temporary Committee meeting, Lancelot Forster reads out a memorandum regarding the establishment of a school in Camp. Professor Forster subsequently chairs an Education Committee which meets weekly during internment. 

Sources:

Forster: Geoffrey Emerson, Hong Kong Internment, 1973, 18

Bird's Eye View: Stanley and 'Old Hong Kong'

By general consent, the Americans made a much better job of setting up their part of Stanley than the British, who seemed mired in shock, selfishness and squabbling. (1) But the British soon realised that they were there to stay (for a period at least – the hope of a speedy reconquest took a long time to disappear) and began to get themselves organised – the Japanese were generally content to set the rules, send in the rations and leave the internees to sort out most other things themselves. One of the most remarkable things about the way they set up Stanley was the fact that within a couple of months many of the most apparently ingrained features of 'old Hong Kong' had been swept away. The internees realised that the new conditions demanded new structures, so they created them. 'People make history, but not in circumstances of their own choosing': Marx's dictum could hardly have a better exemplification.

Old Hong Kong was a dictatorship run by the Governor – true, there were some democratic elements, the most powerful of which was the simple fact that His Excellency came under pressure from so many different angles (the British Foreign and Colonial Offices, the British ex-pats, the other 'Europeans', the ordinary Chinese, the elite Chinese and so on) but at the end of the day, his word was law. Within three days of arriving in Stanley, a Camp Temporary Committee was elected. (2) No doubt the democratic example of the Americans had its influence, even though in some accounts their own elections led to effective but authoritarian and corrupt government! (3) Another factor was the unpopularity of the previous Hong Kong Government, already tarnished by pre-war scandals and now blamed, no doubt unjustly, for what was seen as the failure to provide effective military resistance.(4) It was also significant that the Colonial Secretary, the newly arrived Franklin Gimson, and most of his senior officials weren't sent into the camp with the other internees, so an alternative administration had to be devised anyway. Only two Government officials were elected to the Camp Temporary Committee. (5)

The Temporary Committee - which we see in action today - did its job of getting things started, extended its life to deal with the crisis created by the Chinese Supervisor, and then abolished itself. New elections in February saw eight members elected to represent the various 'blocks' of the camp; later six members were elected from the camp as a whole, but this experiment was not repeated. (6)

While this was going on, Gimson and some of the former Government personnel were being held in the Prince's Building in Victoria (Central), and he either came into meetings himself or was represented by Defence Secretary, John Fraser. When he arrived in Stanley, believing that as His Majesty's representative in Hong Kong (the Governor Mark Young was never in play after the surrender and was soon sent out of Hong Kong), he should take over the running of the camp, he met huge resistance and had to manoeuvre to assert his authority. On March 28 he was forced to accept a 'power- sharing' compromise. (7) He did eventually succeed in gaining a strong grip on the camp's administration, but Stanley retained strong democratic elements in its government, with regular elections and a vigorous public opinion that couldn't be ignored completely. Those elections could produce surprising results: one of them saw, in defiance of both the old sexism and the arrogant dismissal of 'colonials', an Australian woman chosen as 'head' of one of the administrative blocks the camp was divided into. (8)

It wasn't just in its relative democracy that Stanley Camp differed from the Hong Kong that gave it birth.

In the years before the war, an influential element in the Government had been moving towards the idea of greater welfare provision for the poor, (9) but it would be fair to say very limited progress had been made by December 1941 in a Colony that had failed to introduce an income tax. But welfare was provided on a fairly wide scale in camp, although obviously in circumstances of great difficulty.

Universal free primary education was not introduced in Hong Kong until 25 years after the war. It became a reality in Stanley at an early stage – in fact, as today's Chronology entry signals, before the end of February 1942 classes from kindergarten to senior had started to run. (10) An International Welfare Committee, chaired by Margaret Watson, was set up 'almost immediately' to try to help those who had come into the camp with nothing. (11) In fact, Stanley for the first couple of years operated pretty much as a communist society: 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs'. (12)

People were expected to do whatever they could ('from each...'), and as many of the skills needed to run a peace-time society were no longer necessary, they had to develop previously neglected talents, like our diarist R. E. Jones who starts to write music and adorn people's few possessions with pleasing lettering. Every family was rationed according to the number of its members not its position in the rigid pre-war hierarchies ('to each...'). Children were specially looked after, as were the sick and the ailing – either in Tweed Bay Hospital or through the specially prepared food in Laura Ziegler's Diet Clinic. (13) Extra food for the sick was funded from canteen profits. The IWC which paid for the food, also used this money to buy sewing thread and glasses and to repair shoes. (14) The crown of this welfare activism was the provision of excellent medical services under extremely difficult conditions at Tweed Bay Hospital.

It's easy to miss an important fact: Stanley was extremely egalitarian. Old Hong Kong was, in the words of Philip Snow, a society in which everybody tried to look down on everybody else (15) and this all-pervasive sense of hierarchy was reflected in the gradation of material rewards and the (generally) unofficial 'zoning' of residential areas according to status and race. No doubt much of the imagination of superiority continued in camp - perhaps it even intensified in a place where people had so little other than their illusions about themselves - but it wasn't reflected in camp provision. According to one source, Franklin Gimson had a valet, (16) otherwise position in the old hierarchies mattered little. Defence Secretary John Fraser queued for his rations with everyone else, and his state of health in 1942 or early 1943 doesn't suggest he was getting anything extra. (17) It seems that the old elites received few favours with regard to accommodation – having a friend on the Billetting Committee was another way to improve your lot in camp, but having once lived on the Peak cut no ice. Bungalow D, re-opened in May 1943, saw Lady Grayburn, Mrs Pearce and Hilda Selwyn-Clarke, all of whose husbands had been on the Executive or Legislative Councils, living side by side with ordinary bakers, public health workers and their wives. (18)

Philip Snow sums up the situation of the old elites in the new order:

Social standing now counted for less than physical stamina and the resourcefulness necessary to procure additional food supplies. (19).

True, those who had been wealthy sometimes managed to cling on to a little of their privilege - the first supervisor C. L. Cheng is said to have taken bribes for special treatment - but soon new elites arose, on a basis which had little to do with pre-war status. The nouveaux riches were those with Chinese or neutral friends outside camp who were able to send them food parcels and willing to take the risk of being branded a British sympathiser by doing so. Some of the old elite got parcels, certainly; but so did ordinary Hong Kongers like diarist George Gerrard, a man of obviously high personal qualities who regularly received gifts (which he shared with others) from his former Chinese work colleagues. (20) But the super-rich of Stanley were the black marketeers. A well-connected man who became one of postwar Hong Kong's wealthiest citizens has been claimed as one of them, but the best documented case is of an ordinary prison officer who was said to have bundles of bank notes in his room. A former butcher also did well.

The notorious racism of old Hong Kong, which was slackening its pernicious grip in the immediate pre-war years, was weakened still further by conditions in Stanley, where it became obvious to some people at least that resilience and generosity bear no relation to skin colour or country of origin. Historian Gerard Horne, who rarely misses a chance to exaggerate 'white' racism in Hong Kong, reports that some internees complained that if Eurasians were kept out of camp, there would be more food for everyone else. Horne rightly points out that the Japanese sent in rations according to the number of internees, so fewer would have simply meant less food. (21) However, he leaves out two important things. Firstly, exactly that point about lower rations being supplied if the Eurasians were expelled was made in camp, by a Eurasian internee responding, to the sound of 'cheers from the many prisoners standing in line', to a racist in a food queue. (22, italics mine) Secondly, there was a perfectly reasonable objection to the presence of Eurasians in Stanley: the camp was dreadfully crowded before the American repatriation, and Eurasians were allowed to choose whether or not they entered, and, if they left, there would have been more room for everyone else. This was discussed by the camp committee, which, quite rightly in my opinion, allowed the Eurasians to stay. (23) Still, Henry Ching, who was present during the war years, reports that some Eurasians voluntarily left Stanley because of racism, (24) so it's important not to go to the other extreme and underplay the continuing bigotry.

In summary: Stanley in these early days was run by the British insofar as they had power in a largely democratic way, and later combined authoritarian government with strong democratic elements. It was highly egalitarian in its provision of goods and services, extra benefits generally being awarded on the basis of need rather than social standing. The elites that did arise were not the same as those that had existed pre-war, although there was some cross-over.

However, racism, although less widepsread than before, persisted in both official and unofficial forms, and never came anywhere near vanishing. In other ways the old ideological order continued – women were by no means allowed an equal role in the running of the camp, for example, and the men elected to positions of authority tended to be those who had had some status before the war.

No doubt most of the changes were the result of circumstances rather than ideological commitment, but it's instructive to note how quickly people can abandon old ideas when the situation demands it. Or, more pessimistically because some things didn't change, how stubborn certain forms of group arrogance can be even when faced with evidence that amounts to incontrovertible refutation. (25)

Sources:

1. See e.g. George Wright-Nooth, Prisoner of the Turnip Heads, 1994, 89.

2. G. B. Endacott and Alan Birch, Hong Kong Eclipse, 1978, 207.

3. There's a balanced assessment of Bill Hunt, the American leader and the most influential figure in the early months of the camp, in Norman Briggs, Taken In Hong Kong (Briggs calls Hunt 'the Brain').

4. For the unpopularity of the Government, see e.g. Philip Snow, The Fall of Hong Kong, 2003, 135.

5. Geoffrey Emerson, Hong Kong Internment, Kindle Edition Location 459. According to Endacott and Birch there was only one Government official in the first 13 elected – 207.

6. Endacott and Birch, 1978, 208.

7. Snow, 136.

8. Dorothy Jenner – see http://gwulo.com/node/12323

9. See Leo F. Goodstadt, ”The Rise and fall of social, political and economic reforms in Hong Kong, 1930-1955′, Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Volume 44, 2004.

10. Emerson, Location 2985

11. Endacott and Birch, 209.

12. Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, Part 1, 1875.

13. See e.g. Gwen Dew, Prisoner of the Japs, 1943, 128.
14. Emerson, Location 2149, 1923.
15. Snow, 2.
16. Emerson, Location 529.
17. Fraser queuing: Jean Gittins, Stanley: Behind Barbed Wire, 1982, 143; health problems: Li Shu-fan, Hong Kong Surgeon, 1964, 142.
18. For a brief discussion of the class composition of Bungalow D, see http://brianedgar.wordpress.com/2013/01/07/bungalow-d-dwellers/
19. Snow, 135.
20. Gerrard's diary can be read by members of the Yahoo Stanley Camp Group - http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/stanley_camp/conversations/messages
21. Gerald Horne, Race War!, 2004, 91.
22. Allana Corbin Prisoners of the East, 2002, 165.
23. For the source and a general discussion of Horne's analysis of anti-Eurasian racism before and during the war, see http://brianedgar.wordpress.com/2013/02/05/gerald-hornes-race-war-1-the-eurasians/
24. http://www.rhkrnsw.org/publictn.htm ('Internment of Civilians').
25. For Maltby's praise of the 'superb gallantry' of the Eurasian Volunteers see http://www.britain-at-war.org.uk/WW2/London_Gazette/hong_kong/ And for the activities of one Japanese-German woman in Stanley, see  http://gwulo.com/node/18501. It wasn't just the Eurasians of course: all ethnic and national groups had provided ample evidence of the worthlessness of stereotypes (particularly negative ones) long before the war came to an end.

Birth of Barbara Hume at the Tsan Yuk Maternity Hospital. Her mother, Kathleen, was taken from Stanley for a caeserean, which was performed by Dr Gordon King.

Note: there is some uncertainty about the date of Barbara's birth - click on her name for details. I have followed Eric MacNider's diary in assigning it to today.