Cecil Harcourt, head of the military adminstration, sends out letters thanking those who sent food, money and other necessities into the camps.
One is received by Melitza ('Lila') Pio-Ulski, piano teacher and wife of George Pio-Ulski, the leader of the orchestra at the Hong Kong Hotel before and during the occupation. They had not been interned because of their Russian nationality.
Like almost all those who helped relieve the POWs and the internees, Mrs Pio-Ulski did so even though she had very little herself - at one point she was reluctantly forced to kill and eat her hen for want of anything else to feed the family. In addition, sending parcels to anyone but a spouse or relative was a risky business as anyone who did so was automatically suspect as a 'British sympathiser'. Some people were arrested and even tortured for this. It seems probable that Mrs. Pio-Ulski sent in parcels through the Japanese, but she is believed to have thrown parcels over the wire into the Kowloon Camps; this undoubtedly increased the risks she was running.
Parcels were not only important in supplementing the meagre rations in Stanley and the POW Camps, but they helped keep up morale by showing the inmates they hadn't been forgotten. This was recognised as early as August 29, the day before Harcourt's fleet landed, in a letter sent out by the chief officers of the forces in Hong Kong, all of them POWs themselves, which thanked Mrs Pio-Ulski and the other senders of parcels and stated that they'd undoubtedly saved many lives and 'prevented the complete breakdown of the physical and mental health of large numbers'.
Another recipient is American author Emily Hahn, who worked with Selwyn and Hilda Selwyn-Clarke to provide both legal and illegal relief to the camps.
Sources:
Pio-Ulski: The complete text of the two letters can be read at
http://pio-ulski.com/?page_id=12
Hahn:Ken Cuthbertson, Nobody Said Not To Go, 1998, 295
Note:
It is now known that Ms. Hahn also worked for the British Army Aid Group, the British-led resistance organisation, a fact understandably left out of her 1944 memoir China To Me and unknown to her biographer.