70 years ago: Hong Kong's wartime diaries

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Wife to French Hospital to see Mrs May ((mother of Arthur May)) who operation varicose veins. She has breakfast tea and two slices bread with nothing on it. Tiffin and dinner rice and beans or greens. Plain tea at 4.

Garden poor so far. First tomatoes. Six pounds sweet spuds from one bed. Price $1.30 in market. Rationed salt at 20 sen to be .36 of catty per person per month. No meat in market for days. No fish either.

Population figures December end.

• Japanese 1,546 families with 4,002 people.
• Chinese 235,110 families with 972,146 people.
• Third Nationals 2,247 families with 7,264 people.
• Estimated small islands population of 29,295. Based on rice cards. Apparently no decrease which surprising.

Early in month loud explosions at night Kowloon side but no flashes to explain. Many rumours. Allegedly bombs Taipo and plane over Central. Paper says rumour of submarine in Lyemun because of explosions and shrapnel landing in Shaukiwan not true. Claims old fortifications being demolished with explosives.

No flour for Eurasians. Portuguese have theirs. They checking our list, referring it to District Offices. Pat Brown says trouble is Eurasians going as Chinese for rice. Crossed off list if discovered.

Extract from the article "City in Prison", written by Joseph Alsop, which appears in today's issue of The Saturday Evening Post:

Man, the political animal, being the mixture that he is, there was also much that was stirring to offset the pettiness and the backbiting. There was, for example, Mrs Ziegler, the wise, handsome wife of a medical missionary. She had 10 children, of whom 7 were in the camp. Her husband was in the interior of China. Most people would have been sufficiently appalled by the task of keeping such a brood clean and healthy under Stanley conditions. Mrs Ziegler not only cared for her own; with perfect aplomb and triumphant success, she also directed the diet kitchen, which prepared and distributed the extra rations that we all contributed for the young and the sickly.

Then, too, there was the vast hulk of a man, a retired naval chief steward, who ran the communal kitchen in the building I lived in. Some years before, after saying farewell to his galley on one of the destroyers of the American Asiatic Fleet, he had spent a night of celebration in Hong Kong, and had waked up with his life savings invested in a bankrupt local hotel. He had proceeded to make the hotel a huge success, and was close to being a rich man when the war came to the city. He brought to Stanley his chefs, a large stock of condiments, and a squad of henchmen who might have stepped straight out of a Somerset Maugham novel. One was Los Angeles chiropractor who had been brought to the Far East by a news item about a rich Calcutta Parsi offering a prize of $100,000 for a cure of his back pains. Another, Kanaka Dick, was an aged Hawaiian sea captain who had been tattooed from head to toe while on the beach at Hokkaido, had made a large fortune in the illicit opium trade, and wore the jade bracelet of a leader of the Hip Sing society.

While other people were busy looking out for themselves, the retired naval chief steward and his squad spent the first days of internment cleaning out the kitchen in our building. Before long he was doing miracles with second-grade rice and scrag ends of Buffalo. His language was sulphurous and his formal education had been brief, but he had courage, leadership, humour and and old-fashioned faith in people that put the faint hearts to shame. He kept us in good health and good heart. Although there were others among us who had occupied far more important positions in the outside world, Ed Gingles – for that was his remarkable name – became the accepted chieftain of our house.