70 years ago: Hong Kong's wartime diaries

Death of Camille Tweed Denton, daughter of Ivy Denton, aged two months.

In what is possibly the first attempt by the British Army Aid Group to contact Stanley, Lindsay Ride sends a message to Jardine's taipan D. L. Newbigging ('Buggins'). The message is written in a deliberately confusing form based on nursery rhymes, children's games and poetry, but the meaning is clear: Newbigging is being offered a horse in the 'LIBERTY STAKES' - the possibility of an escape.

Drs. Newton and Hargreaves are transferred without warning from Argyle Street POW Camp to Stanley. Dr. Eddie Gosano is Portuguese and hence a neutral so he's allowed to go free. He soon leaves for Macao where he'll help to care for the huge number of Hong Kong refugees and establish a private medical practice. But he also takes over as head of the Macao branch of the British Army Aid Group when Joy Wilson - whose husband's a police officer in Stanley - decides to escape into Free China.

U. S. State Department report on Stanley Camp, dated June 6, 1942:

It appears there was some informing from within the camp. It is difficult to explain in any other way the unerring discovery of several radio sets, field glasses, and other objects concealed by internees….Although three Japanese women who were interned as British subjects and a number of Eurasians were naturally suspected, there is good reason to believe that at least one of the more vicious informers was a woman of British birth. The Americans also had their quota of informers, but being a more compact community had the situation better in hand.

The three Maryknoll Sisters released from camp yesterday (Mary Clement, Mary de Ricci and Mary St Dominic) go to get their ration cards.  They find Caine Road very much changed:

{It} was no longer what it used to be, without any of its previous excitement, but just like one of the other 'dori' ((streets))...in the occupied colony. On the streets, English signs aand prints were removed or painted over. The miserable begged for food. In a corner, there was 'a poor woman crying with hunger and eating some scarps she had salvaged from a grbage pile'. Not far away, 'two men, too weak to stand, were lying in the street crying piteously to passers-by for help.'

Sources:

Death: China Mail, September 15, 1945, page 3

BAAG: Edwin Ride, British Army Aid Group, 1981, 164-16

Three doctors: Isaac Newton Diary, page 87; Eddie Gosano, Hong Kong Farewell, 1997, 43, 26

Report: Greg Leck, Captives of Empire, 2006, 347

Maryknoll: Cindy Yik-yi Chu, The Maryknoll Sisters in Hong Kong, 2004, 56

Note:

See also April 2, 1942. Geoffrey Emerson gives Camille Tweed Denton's date of death as July 7.

Barbara Anslow also gives June as month of death, and as cause of death 'inanition'.

http://gwulo.com/node/11321

Greg Leck's list has June 6 and the cause as 'marasmus' (623).

Note:

The information on which the State Department report is based was presumably provided by the Israel Epstein escape party.