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

Birth of William Richard Worrall at Tweed Bay Hospital to Captain William Roy and Raquel Worrall.

Mrs Worrall had lost her first husband, Horace William Bonner, who was killed in the fighting at Overbays on December 22nd, 1941.

William 'Dick' Worrall will enter the Hong Kong Police and be awarded the Colonial Police Medal (now Overseas Territories Police Medal) in 1992.

American bombers and submarines are taking a heavy toll of Japanese shipping and generally this causes difficulties for Stanley Camp. But today they get a pleasant surprise: the shortage of coal in occupied Hong Kong means that the electricity supply has become so unreliable that the freezers at the Dairy Farm cold storage facility aren't working so the Japanese send in the pheasants. On the 23rd they'll get more of the same and on the 25th patridge will be served. 

A most welcome addition to the boney fish that replaced meat in February.

David Charles Edmondston, Hong Kong manager of the HKSBC, dies in Stanley Prison of malnutrition, sepsis and medical neglect. He was 54.

He was arrested on May 24 (or May 3), 1943 and interrogated under torture, most probably either about his role in raising money for the British community and smuggling it into Stanley or about his contacts with the resistance or with Consul John Reeves in Macao. He was tried on October 19, 1943  and sentenced to ten years in prison.

According to Japanese medical officer Sato (or Saito) Shunkichi he first entered the Prison hospital in May 1943 suffering from indigestion. He was eventually discharged but frequently returned for treatement for colitis, beri beri and dysentery.

He was finally admitted with a carbuncle that covered the whole of the back of his neck.

Dr. Harry Talbot examined him and later stated that his continual sepsis contributed to his death. Sato, defending himself at his post-war trial, claimed that he'd adminstered various appropriate treatments, but Dr. Talbot stated that Edmondston had received no help from the medical officer, and this is supported by the banker's own statement, two days before his death.

Just before Edmondston died his wife Kathleen and his daughter Mary were called in from Stanley Camp to see him. He was so emaciated she didn't recognise him and his state was such that no meaningful communication was possible. The Japanese refused to allow a doctor to enter the Prison to inspect him, but did allow drugs to be sent in. The injections came too late.

Sources:

Date of trial: George Wright-Nooth, Prisoner of the Turnip Heads, 1994, 180

Age: http://www.roll-of-honour.org.uk/Cemeteries/Stanley_Military_Cemetery/html/e.htm

All other details: Reports of War Crimes trial in the China Mail:

January 9, 1947, page 2

April 3, 1947, page 2

April 9, 1947, page 2

April 12, 1947, page 2

Note:

When Edmondston's body was taken into Stanley, Dr. K. H. Uttley carried out a post-mortem, finding that death was caused by beri-beri and nutritional anaemia. The camp doctors took such investigations very seriously - they refused to come to any conclusions about Vandeleur Grayburn because his body was too decomposed when they recived it - so this is likely to be reliable.

China Mail, April 4, 1947, 2

I'm rather confused about the 'sepsis' at the moment as both Dr Talbot in his brief post-mortem report and Vincent Morrison in his war crimes evidence say the large carbuncle on the back of Edmondston's neck had healed (Morrison adds it had left a star-shaped scar.) Perhaps there had been further carbuncles, More research necessary!

The University of Hong Kong's Professor Gordon King has been working in Free China since his escape in February 1942. Today he sends a message to the British Colonial office:

In the view of the Vice-Chancellor, Mr. D. J. Sloss, who is still under Japanese confinement in Stanley Camp, Hong Kong, it is necessary to decide whether the future scope of the University is to be mainly a local one, and limited chiefly to the training of subordinate officers for the Hong Kong Civil Service, or whether it is to count as an expression of British policy towards China and the Far East. In the past the University has existed without subsidy from the Imperial Government and has been too poor adequately to fill the wider function, yet too large and cumbersome economically to fulfil a purely local purpose. It is essential to consider and decide for which of these two functions the future University is to be planned.

Duncan Sloss and the other imprisoned members of the University Senate have continued to discuss two visions of the University's function - 'local' versus 'Far Eastern'. This question had proved controversial before the war and would not be finally settled for some years after it.

But it's interesting that even after the apparent destruction of the British Army Aid Group's operation in Hong Kong in the spring of 1943 Sloss was still able to smuggle messages out of Stanley. Presumably a degree of organisation remained, or was reconstituted.

Source:

Clifford Matthews and Oswald Cheung, Dispersal and Renewal: Hong Kong University During The War Years, 1998, 401

Note: see also the entries for July 16, 1943 and November 30, 1944.

Note 2: One source (see comment beloiw) says that Sloss sent a message about the University's future through one of thee Canadians repatriated in September 1943. This is an alternative to his having used a continuing BAAG route - but I still believe that such continuing contacts existed.

Florence Eileen Hyde dies of cancer. More than one internee believes that her tragic death is in part due to her husband's execution on October 29, 1943. Her young son, Michael, is adopted by Lady Vandeleur Grayburn so continues to live in Bungalow 'D'.

Florence Hyde gravestone.jpg, by brianwindsoredgar

Birth of Veronica Ann Reddish.

Cecil Reddish is a police inspector. His wife Anna ('Dolly') a Gibraltarian. In his diary, discovered long after his death, he wrote:

We're surviving on two bowls of rice a day, usually full of weevils. The pig-swill they call soup turns my guts over! Less than 48 hours after Veronica's birth, Anna has to join the rest of us and stand for hours in the pouring rain. I can't bear to see my beloved Dolly and our baby daughter suffering like this. We're starving. I don't know how much more I can take.

Mr. Reddish weighed six and a half stone on liberation, and was never able to recover his health and work again; he died in 1964 at the age of 54, killed by the TB he contracted in camp.

Veronica offers a summary of the effects of internment on her father's later life:

My father was always very anxious. For him it was the loss of his career, and his future and a bit of dignity too. What he had planned for himself he hadn't been able to achieve because of the prisoner of war camp and his illness.

Source:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hometruths/japanpowdiaries.shtml

Note:

As far as I can make out, Veronica and her two sisters were interviewed for the BBC radio programme Home Truths, probably in 2006. Their mother, Anna, was still alive and 89 years old at that time.

The three sisters feel that discovering their father's wartime diaries helped them come to terms with difficult experiences in their childhoods.

The Canadian Red Cross parcels - two to each internee - are distributed.

These are excellent parcels, and there are enough of them to give out another one on the 21. ((For the contents see R. E. Jones's entry for today.))

In town in it's the first anniversary of the setting up of Rosary Hill Red Cross Home for uninterned and largely destitute British dependents. Delegate Rudolf Zindel marks the occasion with an off-the-cuff speech at dinner:

Today a year ago, the first batch of "Dependants" came up here. They were taking a chance and the rest of you after them were taking a chance. It has perhaps not been an easy year, neither for you, nor for the Administrative Staff, nor for me, but I do hope that you will agree with me that from the point of view of most of you, we did, everything consided, the right thing in moving up here.

In this connection, you will remember that before you came here, I promised you cramped accommodation and modest food both in quantity and quality; I leave it to you to judge whether I kept my word. If more could not be done for you with the money at my disposal, I would like you to remember that from the very same funds with which the Home is kept going, I have to do what I can for the Prisoners-of-War and Civilian Internees in Stanley. I would fail in my duty, and also you would not expect it from me, should I divert one Yen from the Prisoners-of-War and Internees to this "Home" than is absolutely necessary.

I doubt that Zindel believed that last sentiment for one moment. In any case, he will be criticised for spending too much money on Rosary Hill at the expense of Stanley, a charge he denied.

Source:

Rosary Hill: Ex-Tempore Adress GIven by Mr. R. Zindel...on the occasion of the first Anniversary of the opening of the "Rosary Hill" Red Cross Home...' in Archives of the International Committe of the Red  Cross (Geneva) BG 017 07-068

Death of John McCullum Broom, Second Officer on SS Mausang. 

After a period of mental disturbance, Mr Broom died of beri-beri and malnutrition.

Source: 

Philip Cracknell,  at

http://battleforhongkong.blogspot.co.uk/

Death of Winifred Eveleyn Dabelstein, age 39.

Dabelstein gravestone, by brianwindsoredgar

Source:

Geoffrey Emerson, Hong Kong Internment, 2008, 188

Note:

There was a Lionel Arthur Dabelstein in the HKVDC.

Mrs. Cryan comes to see Franklin Gimson this morning. She complains that she left a pair of shorts to dry on a line, and on her return she found they'd been thrown into a corner with the zip fastener and the area around it cut out.

No-one has any idea who was the culprit, but Gimson feels that the crime is a symptom of the current 'extraordinarily low morale' of the camp. He has been warning about the deterioration of morale, and this is proof - albeit in an unexpected form - that he was right.

Source:

Franklin Gimson, Diary, Weston Library Oxford, p. 103 (verso)