Herbert Stuart HILLS [1885-1947]

Philip Cracknell writes on the Stanley Camp discussion list:

[...] One of my friends in Hong Kong - Martin Dewick - advised me to read a book called "By Tank into Normandy" which is a gripping account of Lt Stuart Hills experiences of the invasion and the chase across France to Germany.  The book mentions his family who were long term residents of Hong Kong and who were incarcerated in Stanley Internment Camp. His parents were Herbert Stuart Hills and Edith Attwater Hills.

"My father Herbert was an electrical engineer who had joined Jardine Matheson and Co in Hong Kong in 1910, but had been mainly based in Shanghai. When the Great War broke out in 1914 he joined the Hong Kong Volunteers and later transferred to the Reserve Cavalry in 1916"  seeing action in North Africa and the Middle East. "My father met my mother Edith in the Middle East where she had served as a nurse at Gallipoli and in Egypt. They duly married in Hong Kong in 1919 after my father had returned to the Colony to rejoin Jardine Matheson. Their house was at 29, The Peak , where I was born in 1924. The house was built in 1922"  (Source:  Stuart Hills - By Tank into Normandy)

Herbert was born October 1885. The house referred to above was on Lugarde Road near the intersection with Hatton Road and was heavily shelled during the Japanese attack on Hong Kong. Stuart writes that his father had served in the HKVDC  "as an old soldier , served as a Private with special responsibility for radio communications". 

I did not see Herbert listed as HKVDC in the appendix to "A Record of the Actions"  (Tony?) but I found Edith as a Sister in the HKVDC - VAD (Nursing Detachment). Herbert by this time had become a Stock Broker. In Camp he was billeted in 13/19. He was repatriated by Hospital Ship to NZ in 1945 (Oxfordshire ?) and invalided back to UK in 1946.  He passed away in Dec. 1947 at the age of 62 no doubt as a result of the privations endured during his time in Stanley Internment Camp. 

Edith as a VAD came into Camp later and that may explain why she was billeted (different billet but same block) in 13/53. She died in 1974 aged 91. They had three children  Helen (1922), Stuart (1924) and Peter (1926). Stuart writes about Stanley "in recording it all later, my mother could only write that for the three and a half years we remained there the less said about those years the better. When they were finally released , my mother resembled a skeleton and my father was in an even more terrible condition suffering from tuberculosis and beri beri among other things".  "My sister Helen and my mother had gone by ship to Australia in Oct 1941 to stay with my aunts - when my mother returned to Hong Kong in late November 1941, my sister stayed on in Sydney. She decided to risk returning to England on the blue funnel Line vessel Ulysses, but the ship was torpedoed off South Carolina. She and other survivors were picked up by a destroyer" eventially returning to UK where she joined the WAAF". " My mother was a very keen bridge player".  "My mother nursed in Rosary Hill and St Teresa's Hospital, both of which were bombed and shelled. My mother was in fact lucky to survive. During the fighting  she nursed a Japanese soldier, who died of his wounds, but she made sure he was properly buried, wrapped in the Japanese flag . When the Japanese took over the hospital at the end of the fighting , my mother, the doctor and ward sister were tied up and taken down to the courtyard becuse the Japanese suspected the dead soldier might have been murdered. Machine guns were trained on them while the body was disinterred, and only when the Japanese saw the body wrapped in the flag did they accept what had really happened and released my mother and the others. My father was taken  immediately ....to Stanley Camp  but my mother was allowed to continue nursing at the hospital  for about 6 months before joining him there". (Stuart Hills  "By Tank into Normandy")