Diary pages from this date

In morning, we were given a quarter of an hour to pack and get out of the hotel, then marched down Des Voeux Road.  ((I wore most of my clothes, with blanket strapped bandolier-wise across me.  Passed Nanking Hotel and saw Olive and colleagues hanging over the verandah watching.))

Then boarded top-heavy Macau steamer and set out for Stanley.  It could have been lovely - such a beautiful day,  ((We sat on top deck and enjoyed the trip and the freshness after being so long cooped up in hotels; not only ARP personnel, also other groups.  How envious I was of ginger-haired Bridget Armstrong and brother John, aged about 10 and 8, because their mother was always handing them thin little biscuits with marmite on during the journey.))
 
Our boat too big to go right up to the jetty at Stanley, so we had to clamber over the side of the ferry on to the side of the junk - then jump into the body of the junk.  Poor Mrs Grant who weighed over 15 stone, cried from the side of the ferry that she just couldn't make the transfer, but somehow she did.  ((Mrs Kathleen Grant was the mother of one of my Govt. colleagues Rosaleen - R had married shortly before the Jap attack; she was a VAD at Bowen Road Hospital.))
 
From jetty a path across beach led to a steep bank, near St Stephen's Preparatory School. Dorothy Holloway, a fellow Govt. stenographer, was at the top of the bank extending a helping hand to  every one as we made the last leap up to flat ground.  When she saw Bonnie Penny who was just in front of me, she told her that her mother Mrs Robinson was already in Stanley.  I deliberately avoided asking Dorothy if she knew if my mother was also here, so as not to be disappointed too soon if she wasn't.

Our ARP leaders thought we should try to find accommodation in the school and took us there but some one said we couldn't stay there so out we marched, and followed crowds making for group of buildings up on a plateau... when suddenly I heard a familiar voice - and there was Mum! Called out to her, and went stumbling over old tins and rubbish heaps, so wonderful to see her again.

She and I tried to tell each other all our experiences.. Mum started a dozen different stories, and I didn't hear the ends of any of them for weeks afterwards.  ((She had come into camp previous day with nurses and civilian patients from Queen Mary Hospital, and had bagged a place for me in the prison officers' Married Quarters' on the plateau - 4 blocks forming a quadrangle in the middle.   We were thrilled to be sent to live in these good-looking, cream-coloured buildings, having dreaded much worse after the Chinese hotels... we were all so happy to have somewhere clean and fresh to settle in that day, and so marvelous to be near the sea; it didn't seem to matter that there was practically no furniture.))
 
Mum's billet was only temporary as the other occupants  were keeping spaces for friends and relatives expected any day... these actually arrived on the same ferry as I did, so now the room was grossly overcrowded, but as Mum and I couldn't find any spaces in any other rooms, we spent my first night there anyhow, me in a wicker chair, but in the early morning I crept into Mum's camp bed with her until it gave an ominous crack, so I got out and curled up in the chair again.  I couldn't get used to the peace and quiet after the noises of the environs of the Tai Koon Hotel.  There was just the sound of the sea like the rustling of tinsel.  From the window I could see the superb sunrise – exactly like Billie Burke when she materialised as a fairy in The Wizard of Oz.  Mum has had a bad time and has lost a lot of weight.

((The regular nurses (as distinct from members of the Auxiliary Nursing Service like Mum), were given billets on the top floor of Tweed Bay Hospital within the camp, a small emergency hospital which had been used during the battle; here the nurses' beds were jam-packed together, incredibly overcrowded.

These nurses had prewar lived in accommodation beside Queen Mary Hospital, so were able to bring in many of their own possessions.  When they had packed, they told Mum and the other auxiliaries to help themselves to anything left in their flats.  So Mum acquired some extra clothes.

Tweed Bay Hospital was a stone's throw from the sea, about 100 yards from the Married Quarters.  The office and the kitchens and operating theatre were on the ground floor, also a men's ward.  On the first floor there were women's wards and another male ward.))

I was transferred to Stanley Camp on the 21st. January.

In Tokyo Premier Tojo Hideki makes a speech to the Japanese House of Peers outlining war aims. If Burma and the Philippines submit to Japanese hegemony, they'll eventually get independence. But areas like Hong Kong and Malaya which are 'absolutely essential for the defence of Greater East Asia' would be held under Japanese rule.

In Hong Kong today is a day of movement for most of the  civilians.

The majority of those interned in the waterfront hotels are sent by boat to an improvised camp on the Stanley Peninsula.

Jean Mather:

Early on the morning of January 21, we were assembled outside our hotel. Our crocodile was formed, and way down the road on either side we could see sections of the civilians marked for Stanley Camp....Clutching the bundles, which had accumulated, the processions under armed guard filed slowly down towards the pier. There was much ribaldry as the lines caught up or passed other groups headed the same way. The usual marching songs were rivalled by lewd rugger ditties....

Gwen Priestwood, having failed to execute a planned escape the day before the Murray Parade Ground registration, was on her way to Stanley too:

A small boy of five or six...walked along in front of me. He wore a blue overcoat, and from its belt hung everything his mother thought he would need: an enamel mug, a spoon, a knife, and fork, a small chamber, scissors, an enamel saucepan and other things. His mother walked beside him, a light curtain pole over her shoulder, with an assortment of bundles hanging on it....

After an unpleasant journey - 'We were almost elbow to elbow. Many unfortunates were being seasick' - Jean Mather and her mother arrive in Stanley Camp. They are amongst the lucky ones: they like the four women they are to share with, they are told that the bathroom has a shower that works until 8 p.m., and their balcony has views over beautiful Tytam Bay.

Future Camp Secretary John Stericker has an easier voyage:

We were packed tightly into boats until they became not only overloaded but top heavy. Fortunately we struck very calm waters and after following the coast for two hours we arrived at the small jetty below the high fortified peninsula at Stanley. This was a name that was to become engraved on the hearts of most of us for the remainder of our days.

He sees that most people are heading for the Warders' Quarters, but decides it's worth walking a bit further to the St. Stephen's College buildings. With a couple of friends he is able to 'grab' a room overlooking Stanley Bay and he eventually comes to realise how lucky they are:

Each little room, about fourteen feet by ten, contained the luxury of two or three iron hospital beds and some articles of furniture. Moreover our troops had left behind masses of plates, cutlery and other useful utensils. 

Back in Hong Kong, Phyllis Harrop hears how bad conditions are:

I met Doctor Rambler ((probably Siegfried Szarfstein-Ramler)) this afternoon. He had just returned from Stanley and reports conditions are terrible. Very little water, and in some places none at all, no sanitary arrangments, no furniture and no cooking utensils. Houses have been thoroughly looted and damaged just as they have been elsewhere on the island.

But the Allied civillians have no choice about going. Wenzell Brown arrives late in the afternoon. He notices Chinese workmen still putting 'barbed-wire entanglements' into place.

Bill Ream also arrives on this day, but as he was at Queen Mary's Hospital, he was taken direct to Stanley by bus. He takes a suitcase full of his luggage and a few blankets, and is later amazed to hear that the Americans seem to have been able to take so much more. He and a friend from the Hospital, Jack Johnston, find a room with camp beds in the Main European Warders' blocks, but have to move out to make room for two families with children. They leave the camp beds, and sleep on a corridor floor for the night.

But before that they eat their first meal in Stanley Camp:

Some food was provided for us in the evening....My diary records 'some rice and a small portion of a fishy mixture and some soya beans for the evening meal.

(O)n 21 January 1942, with the majority of internees in the Camp, bedded down with one meal digested, Stanley Civilian Internment Camp had become a reality.

Geoffrey Emerson

Sources:

Tojo: W. G. Beasley, Japanese Imperialism, 1987, 235

Mather: Jean Mather, Twisting The Tail Of The Dragon, 1994, 28-29; 31; 33-34

Stericker: John Stericker, A Tear For The Dragon, 1958, 149, 151

Priestwood: Gwen Priestwood, Through Japanese Barbed Wire, 1944, 42

Harrop: Phyllis Harrop: Hong Kong Incident, 1943, 120

Brown: Wenzell Brown, Hong Kong Aftermath, 1943, 96

Ream: Bill Ream, Too Hot For Comfort, 1988, 35-40

 Bird's Eye View: The Civilian Experience So Far

The experience of Hong Kong's 'white' Allied civilians so far can be divided roughly into three stages:

1) the fighting (December 8-25) - civilians have different experiences according to their roles and those of their loved ones; most of them start in their own homes and end either there (perhaps with others who have been forced to join them), in someone else's home, in a 'concentration point' such as their workplace or one of the big hotels;

2) the Japanese takeover (December 26-January 5) - most civilians stay where they ended up during the fighting, move to a safer house or to a hotel, or are told to report to their place of work;

3) internment in one of the waterfront hotels (January 5 -21) - although a fair number of civilians avoid this stage, the majority are kept in crowded and unpleasant hotel-brothels with inadequate food, air and opportunities for exercise. The substantial number who ended stage 2) at the Kowloon Hotel stay there, and there are also about 100 people who were first held at the former refugee Camp at North Point and then moved to St. Paul's ('the French') Hospital. Both these groups - perhaps more than 500 in all - live in similar conditions to those on the waterfront.

On January 21 it becomes clear that these stages are preliminary to what will become the main setting for the wartime experiences of almost all these people: Stanley Civilian Internment Camp. (For some exceptions see January 31, 1942, 'Bird's Eye View'.)

Up until now the future Stanleyites have been in sub-groups: with family and friends, with strangers thrown together by the war, sharing a hotel room with others in their groups, but now most of them are together, and while no two individuals will react to Stanley in the same way, there are to be important common elements in their experience of internment.

A small British party has gone ahead to prepare the Camp for the arrival of the rest of the internees, but they haven't been able to do much more than bury some of the bodies left by the desperate fighting at Stanley (and, according to some sources, look after their own and their friends' interests). So in the first few days the newly-arrived camp-dwellers must create living spaces that will be reasonably safe and clean (and, to a very limited extent, comfortable).

Then a grim battle begins to take shape: it becomes clear that the Japanese will send the internees rations enough to keep them alive but not much more: from the start most of them are losing weight and strength, and the medicines made available are not nearly adequate to treat the problems that soon begin to arise. There are periods when the rations improve, and people even regain some lost weight, but the basic trajectory of their bodies is downwards. And not just of their bodies: most people are sent to Stanley between January 21-23, and they take with them what they think to carry (those who come in later are forewarned and usually bring in a little more): this deteriorating collection of objects, plus the ones they find in the camp, supplemented by whatever the Red Cross, the humanitarian smugglers or the blackmarketeers manage to get in, is what most internees will have to rely on to provide the material basis of their lives over the next next three years and eight months.

In addition to this intense physical deprivation, almost everyone has to face the psychological difficulty of confinement, in in adequate space, sometimes with a random group of strangers. It's a long time before anyone hears from family back home, and trips to see husbands in the POW Camps are never arranged. Some women are mourning husbands killed in the fighting, and almost everyone's lost at least one friend. And in the background the constant fear of what the captors might do.

Can individuals, families and communities withstand these conditions? If they ever walk free, what kind of people will they have become? The battle to survive, physically and spiritually, will test every internee to the limit.

((The following text is not dated, but other accounts put the move to Stanley on this day:))

We were then ordered out onto the streets and marched to the sea wall, where the oldest looking launches were awaiting to transport us to Stanley Peninsula, where we would be out of the way.

Again we were at the end of the line, and while we waited for our turn to be put on a launch, I saw a Japanese soldier beat a Chinese to death with a bamboo pole.  He seemed to be thirsting for blood, and I was terrified that he would do the same to Owen.  There was another Japanese soldier who had a golf club in his hand, who was making for an old Chinese woman who appeared to be in a rice queue.  He swung his golf club with all his might at the back of her head and she fell like a stone.  Thank goodness we moved on after that and were put on the launches, herded like cattle.  We reached Stanley, where it was a "free for all" to find somewhere to live.

Stanley consisted of the prison warders' quarters, several bungalows, and a college.  Five thousand of us had to find accommodation!  We five (Carmen, Mary, Alec, Owen, and myself) found a room with a mother, father, and daughter, in what was known as the married blocks, which had been occupied by the European staff of the prison, and was really the headquarters of the camp where all the administration was carried out.  There was little or no furniture anywhere, as the whole place had been looted, so we had to sleep as best we could, all eight of us.  There was a double bed in the room and the parents and daughter slept in that; I slept on the floor on a none too clean mattress with Alec and Owen, Mary and Carmen did their best to share a camp bed.

While we were all trying to settle ourselves, an old piano was found in one of the flats, which was brought down onto the lawn outside, where someone started playing all the old songs that everyone knew, so all joined in a "sing-song".  The Japanese could not understand this; we had been defeated, and here we were singing for all we were worth!

3000 & 5811 caught opening locks in C Hall with pieces of wire (when reported for this offence under our management before the war 3 day R & W). The Japs hung them upside down for an hour or more & then beheaded them. Somewhat bloody but very effective. Barrett would no doubt be please (sic) to hear about 5811.

((David: I guess '3000 & 5811​' were two of the prisoners at Stanley Gaol, and  'R & W' means 'rice & water' as a punishment.

I don't know who the Barrett is. I supposed he'd have been a fellow prison officer, but I don't see any Barrett on the List of Prison Officers in 1940.))