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

Death of Cyril Conway Shilton, aged 58 at Tweed Bay Hospital.

Source:

http://www.hongkongwardiary.com/searchgarrison/nonuniformedcivilians.html

Dr Siegfried Szarfstein-Ramler is arrested in town. The reason isn't known, but he's taken to Central Police Station. He's held for about 27 days, and beaten by a Gendarme. He gives medical treatment to Gendarmes and prisoners, and he sees signs of torture on the prisoners. He will be present when a member of the HKVDC jumps to his death to avoid further torture.

Source:

China Mail: July 10, 1947, page 2; August 2, 1947, page 11

Two families of the Dutch bankers interned about a year ago get into a fight over space allocation in their room. One of the men will be summoned before the camp court on May 25 and accused of punching the other repeatedly in the face. But there are counter-claims of assault and the court's judgement has not been preserved.

Source:

Hong Kong PRO, HKRS163-1-303

Almost three weeks after it became known in Stanley, the (London) Daily Mail publishes an article based on an interview with Sir Arthur Blackburn. It is an upbeat but largely accurate account of life in the camp that must have gone some way to ease the minds of relatives distressed by the 1942 reports of atrocities in Hong Kong:

Stanley Camp has been a triumph for the internees. The 3,000 people - 2,600 British, the rest American and Dutch - have made it into a well-governed town....

The Camp has its own courts. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Sir Atholl Macgregor...(has) heard civil cases and has even made a decree nisi in divorce proceedings. For the police courts, magistrates have passed sentences for theft.

Clergymen in the camp hold services and solemnise weddings. There is a school for the children, and there is a hospital. Several babies have been born in the camp.

Cooking teams provide hot meals twice daily. Labour parties do woodcutting, building, scavenging, and road repairs.

Others distribute food, mend shoes and cut hair.

Three communal councils are in charge, with block supervisors to keep order. Much of the heavy work is done by British members of the Hongkong police force.

This is all pretty much true, but of course it disguises the daily reality of hunger, the difficult and squalid living conditions, and the occasional uprush of terror at the possibility of individual arrest and torture or of a general massacre.

The article goes on to describe conditions in the first three months - when Blackburn was in Stanley - and, although it is quite correct to say that almost everything improved thereafter, its statement that 'Overcrowding and food were the big problems at first' might well have given the impression that rations in 1944 were adequate and the internees had plenty of space! It seems that whoever wrote the letter informing a correspondent in camp about the interview knew its contents well: the rosy picture Blackburn painted was (wrongly) believed by some internees to have been an attempt by Franklin Gimson to signal to the British Government that there was no need to get the internees repatriated from Kong Kong.

Source:

Daily Mail, May 24, 1943, p. 3, 'Judge Has Court in Prison Camp'

George Byrne, Professor of Chemistry at Hong Kong University, suffers a fatal heart attack while grinding rice flour for the cake for his sixtieth birthday. He never believed he would survive internment.

His wife Ethel is also in Stanley, and in early 1945 she will later have to bear the second blow of learning of the death of her son Brian, a former arts student at Hong Kong University, in action in Burma.

Sources:

Source:

Peter Cunich, A History of the University of Hong Kong, Volume 1, 2012, 408.

Les Fisher in Shamshuipo:

I have just sent Y10 to Andy in Stanley. If he is not in Stanley, or prison, I shall get it back, but if does get it I shall see his signature. I am very worried because of the long silence.

In fact James Anderson is in Stanley Prison, arrested on July 7, 1943 for his role in operating an illegal radio (see http://gwulo.com/node/12347)

Source:

Les Fisher, I Will Remember, 1996, 124

Former Stanley internees John Power and his wife Mary are arrested at their house in Kowloon's Granville Road..

The arrests of spring 1943 and the subsequent imprisonments and executions hampered but did not destroy the resistance in town. Between May and July 1943 most of the uninterned British nationals who weren't arrested  - mainly bankers and health workers - were sent into Stanley, but the British Army Aid Group continued to have a network of Chinese agents, and Chinese people, appalled at the brutality of the occupation, continued to come forward. They were supplemented by recruits from other nationalities, and the records show French and Indians, as well as Hong Kong Eurasians, joining in late 1943 or 1944.

John Power was Irish, and Irish neutrality was the reason he and Mary were released from Stanley after initial detention there. At some point he began to carry out underground activity, including listening to English-language radio broadcasts and passing on the news. One of his associates was arrested on June 16 and eventually gave his name under torture.

When the Kempeitai came to his house, they arrested him even though his radio was officially licensed - 'castrated' so it couldn't pick up British or American broadcasts - it's possible he got the news by tuning into nationalist programs from Chungking, or he might have had, as others did, a hidden attachment that restored the radio's full tuning capacity. In any case, he was 'guilty' of passing on the news - the Japanese had not been concerned about knowledge of the war in Europe until D Day (June 6, 1944) after which they treated anyone caught passing on information with the utmost severity. Mr Power was almost certainly engaged in other underground activities too.

Both John and Mary Power suffered brutal interrogations. She was released on September 6, 1944, he died in prison as a result of this mistreatment.

Source:

China Mail, April 17, 1947, page 2

Note

Another account suggests that Mrs Power might have been taken away the next day - China Mail, May 23, 1946, page 8

Death of M. J. Flaherty of the Hong Kong Police from Hodgkin's lymphoma.

Source:

Barbara Anslow Diary entry June 22, 1944

George Wright-Nooth, Prisoner of the Turnip Heads, 1994, 214-215.

Note:

Wright-Nooth, supported by Eric MacNider's diary, places the death on June 23. However, I have followed Barbara Redwood's dating, as she was working at Tweed Bay Hospital, and because R. E. Jones's diary tells us that Flaherty was buried on June 23, and, given the fuss about his coffin referred to by Barbara, it seems certain he died the day before.

Wright-Nooth tells us that Flaherty was unwilling to be buried in the usual Stanley way: wrapped in a sack and placed in a coffin with a re-usable sliding bottom to avoid wasting precious wood. His wife got L. R. Nielson to go round the camp buying up doors with money she'd made from the black market. He bought more doors than necessary and kept the surplus for firewood. A special coffin was made, Flaherty's stiffening body was forced into his best suit and placed in it for several hours for friends to pay their respects. All this seems to have been done during June 22, and the burial took place on the 23rd.

As doors were deemed communal property and not therefore sellable, Nielson appeared before a camp tribunal. I read about his case in HKRS163 1-303, and, because I didn't at that time understand the background, failed to make a note of the verdict. But I think he was acquitted.

Charles Henry Goodwin of the Hong Kong Police dies today, aged 44. He was one of a number of policemen who married their Chinese girlfriends in a mass ceremony at St. John's Cathedral on Boxing day 1941. His wife, formerly Kwong Yuet of Kowloon, was accepted into Rosary Hill Red Cross Home.

George Wright-Nooth's diary entry describing the kitchen system in 1944 mentions Goodwin:

Sergeants Goldie and Goodwin are the chief cooks for our quarters...Goldie is the better of the two. However, Goodwin always produces his meals on time.

Sources:

http://www.qaranc.co.uk/bmh_bowen_road_hong_kong.php

George Wright-Nooth, Prisoner of the Turnip Heads, 1994, 128