Chronology of Events Related to Stanley Civilian Internment Camp: View pages

The POWs in Shamshuipo receive their first Red Cross parcel.

It comes at a time during which diphtheria is regularly claiming lives and almost everyone is ill with one or more of the diseases of malnutrition.

The effect can hardly be exaggerated; for some, it's a literal life-saver - when Jean-Paul Dallain gets his he's too weak to open it, but the contents eventually set him on the road to recovery. 

For everyone it's a powerful experience. 'Blackie' Verrault writes in his diary tonight:

I just ate a chocolate bar and cried doing it.

Some men will never receive another parcel.

Source:

Nathan Greenfield, The Damned, 2010, Kindle Location 4279-4293

A Tasmanian newspaper (the Hobart Mercury) reports that a list of Hong Kong civilian internees can be inspected at the Red Cross Information Bureau in Hobart. It also cites a report to the London Colonial Office from the Red Cross delegate in Hong Kong ((Rudolf Zindel)) saying that he visits Stanley regularly and conditions are 'satisfactory.'

Vandeleur Grayburn head of the HKSBC, receives a notice from the Japanese Liquidator with today's date:

I have to advise you sincerely that all Foreign Officer (sic) of the Bank at present working under the liquidation and their families should refrain from moving about freely on Saturday afternoons, Sundays or any other holidays, especially during the evenings and nights.

Should there be any necessity to go out, permission must first be obtained from the Liquidators.

I wish to emphasize that this is a matter of serious importance and that should one single person get involved in trouble, all the others will suffer the consequences as a result.

Grayburn got all the bankers at the Sun Wah Hotel to initial the document, having first written on it:

This ruling refers to all times, we are only allowed out for shopping and exercise. French Hospital may only be visited for real necessity not for softball.

Source:

David Tett, Captives in Cathay, 2007, 295.

Note:

I assumed at first that Sir Vandeleur was using 'softball' as a metaphor for casual social interaction, but I've discovered from an unpublished account written by Staff-Sergeant Patrick Sheridan (kindly sent to me by his daughters) that the American Charles Winter organised softball games involving Allied internees and some remaining pupils of the French Convent school in the grounds of the Hospital. So it seems that these games continued after the American repatriation and Sir Vandeleur was speaking literally.

Mr. E. McDermott, a photographer, and Mrs. M. McDermott have a girl, Margaret Lilian.

Rosamund Judah (Block A2 Room 24) sends combined birthday and Christmas greetings to a friend in Shamshuipo:

To Pte Philip Samuel (British)

Prisoner of War

Shamshuipo Camp

Seasons Greetings!

Many happier returns of December 23rd.

Love from

Rosie & Keach

Source:

Birth: China Mail, September 15, 1945, page 3; Stanley Roll

Card: for sale on Ebay

Note:

The McDermott family are listed as Irish on the Stanley Roll, so presumably in Camp by choice.

Death of Samuel Lillicrap aged 53. He formerly worked for the Hong Kong Bowling Alley.

Source:

Geoffrey Emerson, Hong Kong Internment, 2011, 186

The first Christmas in captivity and a year since the surrender - a day of great emotion.

Outdoor carol singing goes ahead (see yesterday's entry). A choir tours the Camp singing close to each block in turn, and also outside the hospital to welcome Janet Carole Sallis, who's born today.

All church services are held outdoors. Catholic mass is celebrated in a large natural grotto between the hospital and the 'American' blocks. There's a small manger  - consisting of an old vegetable basket and a borrowed doll - next to the makeshift altar (a slab of concrete jammed into a natural rock). The familiar scene and the memories of the previous Christmas's fighting move many to tears.

The children get presents:

On the first Christmas in camp the informal welfare committee sent gifts from Hong Kong to all of the children...

Committee chairman Selwyn Selwyn-Clarke also sends Christmas decorations.

Another group sails away to Shanghai. This includes Reuters correspondent Bill O'Neill (G.P. Murphy takes over as head of the Irish Commitee), the Begley family (Australian), the diplomat Sir Arthur Blackburn and his wife - and at least 20 others.

In town prices have been rising rapidly and food is growing scarce. Banker Andrew Leiper reports there's little seasonal spirit in the Sun Wah Hotel: 

In our community there was little heart to celebrate Christmas and the advent of 1943 was marked only by a party given for the half dozen children in the boarding-house. They were each presented with a small packet of home-made toffee, for which we had all contributed a part of our sugar ration.

But Japanese interpreter Kiyoshi Watanabe does his best for the bankers and their families:

I will always remember his visit on Christmas Day, 1942. He joined four of us in singing carols, gave us a solo rendering of 'Holy Night' in Japanese, and contributed to enhancing our meagre diet.

The Hong Kong News publishes a bumper issue to celebrate one year of Japanese rule. But proof is provided that the Chinese population are less than happy to be 'an important part of the Co-prosperity Sphere of Greater East Asia':

Hong Kong might show its appreciation by displaying a more adavnced conception of its political and civic duties, by way of qualifying for graduation as a part of the Japanese Empire'.

Sources:

Carols, choir, services: Mabel Winifred Redwood, It Was Like This, 2001, 148

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

Presents: William Sewell, Strange Harmony, 1948, 124

Decorations: John Stericker, Captive Colony, 1945, Chapter V111, page 9

Shanghai: Tony Banham, We Shall Suffer There, 2009, Kindle, Location 4576

Leiper: Andrew Leiper, A Yen For My Thoughts, 1982, 164

Watanabe at the Sun Wah: H. Hawkins, former Mercantile Bank manager, quoted in Liam Nolan, Small Man Of Nanataki, 1966, 74-75

Hong Kong News: pages 2,13

Maryknoll Sisters Mary Christella and Mary Eucharista, who stayed behind to help Fathers Hessler and Murphy (see September 12, 1942), are released from Camp some time between Christmas and the end of January. Sister Mary Eucharista described the situation outside:

Their truck passed Wanchai, and they noticed the absence of cars or buses on the road. At the foreign affairs office, the Sisters received temporary passes and applied for regular passes. In the beginning, Mary Eucharista was not sure how much freedom she could have though she was released. Soon, she realized that, 'if you walked alone as if you were sure no one would question your right to do so, there was much less danger of being troubled than if you looked the least bit uneasy or frightened.' Only once when she was out on the street she was asked for her pass. There were more damages of war in Wanchai than Central. The further 'along the water front toward St. Paul's Hospital and North Point, where the Japanese made their first landing on Hong Kong, the more war scars there were.' On  the Kowloon side, it was a tragic scene. As described - 'Shells of once lovely houses now stand stripped of doors, window frames, floors, not to mention furniture.'

It's a grim picture of a crime-ridden, neglected, dying city - one which tallies with almost every other description of the occupation. Nevertheless, as the new year begins, the 100 or so 'white' Allied civilians still living in Hong Kong - most of them health workers at St. Paul's Hospital or bankers at the Sun Wah Hotel - are still probably a little better off than the internees in Stanley, as they have a small degree of freedom and access to a larger black market to supplement supplies. One of the bankers, Andrew Leiper, reports that about this time (December 1942 or January 1943) they use the excuse of needing a reserve of workers because of illness to get 6 of their fellows out from Stanley 'so that they might benefit from our slightly better conditions'. They try to get 6 men out from Shamshuipo too, but the Kempeitai are furious: these men killed many brave Japanese and shamefullly surrendered - they will not be released.

Sources:

Maryknoll: Cindy Yik-yi Chu, The Maryknoll Sisters in Hong Kong, 2004, 58-59

Bankers: Andrew Leiper, A Yen For My Thoughts, 1983, 158-159

Members of the Medical faculty of Hong Kong University discuss the future of the University 'on the hillside beside the entrance to Tweed Bay Hospital'. They agree unanimously that schools of dentistry and tropical medicine and hygiene will form part of the post-war University.

This leads to a meeting of the Univesrity's Senate at which Dr Lanchester will present the dentistry propsoal in more detail. The Senate will make no immediate decision but set up a sub-committee to look at the whole question of the University's reconstitution.

Source:

Peter Cunich, A History of the University of Hong Kong, Volume 1, 2012, 409, 540

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.