Selwyn-Clarke's Prison Bible at Bedales School

Selwyn-Clarke in the War

Selwyn Selwyn-Clarke was a man of strong character and opinions, the first to admit he had none of the British love of compromise. His work as Director of Medical Services before the Japanese attack was sometimes controversial – his nick-name was 'Septic' – but it was undeniably effective. In the matter that concerns us most in this article, his preparations for the medical response to a possible Japanese attack, he was undeniably successful. When the day finally arrived – December 8, 1941 – the system he set up worked far better than could have reasonably be expected, given the overwhelming task it faced, a tribute both to his organisational skills and the courage and expertise of Hong Kong's medical personnel (12).

However, the controversy that had surrounded him in peace, was nothing to the furore he stirred up during the occupation. Probably on the very day of the surrender – Christmas, 1941– he was contacting the Japanese to get their permission to carry on his work as Director of Medical Services under the new order. He believed it was his duty to carry out public health work for the benefit of everyone in Hong Kong, in particular the Chinese majority. The Japanese were convinced by the urgency of the task - the unburied bodies from 17 days of fighting threatened epidemics to which their soldiers would not be immune – and it's said that their own medical director, Colonel Eguchi, had met Selwyn-Clarke on a previous visit to Hong Kong and been impressed by his uniquely aracial courtesy, In any case, Eguchi helped get Selwyn-Clarke and a skeleton staff permission to remain uninterned and even approached the former British Governor, Sir Mark Young, to obtain his consent for the continuation of work; this didn't save Selwyn-Clarke from accusations of collaboration during and after the occupation, but it did mean that his position was legally unassailable (13).

By the end of January 1942 almost all the Allied civilians were in Stanley Camp on Hong Kong's south western peninsula and the soldiers in POW camps in Kowloon. Selwyn-Clarke quickly understood that the dreadful conditions they were enduring, and the even worse ones of the Chinese and anyone else left living in occupied Hong Kong meant that, in order to relieve suffering and save lives, he would need to supplement his legal public health work with 'calculated subterfuge' (14). A group of bankers, who were also kept uninterned to help the Japanese take over the assets of their banks, provided most of the money, while the doctor set up a network of courageous men and women to buy medicines illegally and smuggle them into the camps. There were, in fact few aspects of relief work during the first 15 months of the occupation that he wasn't involved in, but his refusal to aid the military resistance set up by Lindsay Ride after his escape from POW camp in February 1942 led to friction between these two great figures of the Hong Kong war. 

He knew, though, that the Japanese regarded what he was doing as illegal and understood that it was so risky he would one day be caught. It's amazing that he was able to do so many things for so long, but on May 2, 1943 the inevitable happened, and a dawn raid on the French Hospital, where he was living with his wife and daughter, saw his arrest and that of some of his helpers (15).

Selwyn-Clarke in Prison

The Japanese wrongly believed that he was head of British espionage in Hong Kong – as we've seen, he'd refused to have anything to do with military activity, although some of his work would probably have been seen by his captors as coming into that category. He was taken to the headquarters of the Kempeitai (generally and reasonably referred to as the Japanese Gestapo) where he spent ten months in squalid conditions in a tiny underground cell beneath the former Supreme Court building. He was regularly taken out to be brutally interrogated, but he steadfastly refused to incriminate himself or name any of his helpers (16).

After ten months, while under sentence of death, he was transferred to Stanley Prison, which was next to (but not part of) the internment camp where Hilda and Mary were living. The sentence was eventually commuted to three more years, then, in a development that left him 'dazed' he was unexpectedly released on December 8, 1944; the occasion was a broad amnesty to mark the third anniversary of the outbreak of the Pacific War, but it's not known why Selwyn-Clarke was included in it – he speculated that Chinese friends had been at work, but my own guess is that his obvious lack of a sense of racial superiority and his courage under interrogation had won the respect of some of his captors, who were, in any case, always rather uneasy about convicting British civilians without a confession. He was taken to Ma Tau-Wai Internment Camp in Kowloon. His wife and daughter were waiting for him and he spent the rest of the war as this small camp's medical superintendent and, in effect, leader. (17)

The Role of the Bedales Bible

For the first ten months, when he wasn't being 'interrogated', Selwyn-Clarke was held in solitary confinement in indescribable conditions. He needed to draw on all of his resources of character and intellect to survive; a number of prisoners went mad or attempted suicide, most unsuccessfully. One tactic he adopted was to make up stories for his daughter in French and Latin – lest this not be demanding enough he insisted that the words in each language be, as far as possible, cognates (for example ursa/ours in the story of the three bears) (18) Obviously his Bedales education was standing him in good stead, but he knew it would still be valuable for him to be able to draw on the products of other minds too:

...It was a red-letter day when, some five months after my arrest, Hilda at last succeeded, in her own internment in the Stanley camp, in persuading the Japanese in charge there to let her send me a Bible and induce the military gendarmerie ((Kempeitai)) to allow me to have it. (19)

There's a hand-written note that accompanies the Bedales Bible:

This tells a rather different story as to the way he acquired the book: an Indian warder heard his repeated requests for a Bible and the inevitable surly rejections, and told one of Selwyn-Clarke's pre-war almoners (almost certainly Constance Lam, who also managed to get life-saving food into her imprisoned boss), who, the note implies, sent one in to his cell. However, in his autobiography  he tells the story of an Indian guard who told Constance Lam of the refusal of his repeated requests for soap and a handkerchief and tells us that the brave almoner then smuggled in both items through the guard. (20). My guess is that Selwyn-Clarke's memory confused the two incidents – the Bedales note is undated and the occasion of its composition is unknown so it's impossible to know how close to the actual events it was. I'm inclined to accept the version in his autobiography and credit his wife with the Bible and the guard and Dr. Lam with the soap and handkerchief. However, I should declare an interest at this point: in October 1943, the period in which the Bible arrived in Selwyn-Clarke's cell, his wife and daughter were living in Stanley Camp's Bungalow D alongside my parents where they and most of the rest of the uninterned health workers were sent soon after the arrests of May 2, 1943. I love the thought that in 1943 my mother and father might have glimpsed the book I was inspecting, in such different circumstances, over seventy years later!

In any case, having the Bible was one thing, reading it was another:

There was no window and no artificial light, but a dim light filled the communal cell outside mine....At certain times of day the light brightened a little, from a window high up and out of sight in this communal cell. (21)

It was only at those times of day when he could read - the Bedales note stipulates from about 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. He had to hold the Bible in the patch of natural light by poking it through the bars of his cell, laboriously taking in a few words at a time.

And even this wasn't possible much of the time – the guards confiscated the book whenever they wanted to make his life harder and he estimates he had it only one third of the time. Later Hilda managed to get him a complete Shakespeare and a copy of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations as well, but these two were often not in his possession. When he didn't have the Bible, he tried to reconstruct his mother's favourite passages from memory – for example, the 23 Psalm ('Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil') and the thirteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians ('but the greatest of these is charity').  In Stanley Prison, where he was sent after ten months, he had a larger cell and 'the luxury of a window'. (22) Although he doesn't mention the Bible explicitly, it seems that he read from all three of his books when he had them, as well as playing himself at chess using pieces he made from a piece of the newspaper given to the prisoners for an obvious purpose in the latrines.

The Bedales Bible: Other Features

The Bible is stamped to show that it belonged to St.Johns Anglican Cathedral. 

Hong Kong's bishop, Ronald Hall, was out of Hong Kong when the Japanese attacked, but most of the British cathedral staff were in Stanley, including Dean Alaric Rose, who performed some of the camp's weddings, so there would have been no trouble in getting a Bible from this source. 

Another stamp seems to suggest it was originally bought in a Kowloon bookshop. 

There's also an inscription that was almost certainly written after the war – it's most unlikely he had any writing implement during his imprisonment. 

It gives Selwyn-Clarke's prisoner number while in Stanley Prison, his signature - P. S. Selwyn-Clarke was his 'elongated' name: he was christened Percy Selbourne Clarke but during WW1 he changed it by deed poll to Percy Selwyn Selwyn-Clarke to make it easier to identify his mail in a Division with too many 'Clarkes' (23). Clearly he never minded drawing attention to himself! There's also a date, 24. V111 44, which is something of a mystery.

Both the autobiography and the Bedales note state clearly that he received the Bible after about five months in the Kempeitai prison under the former Supreme Court, which would be in or around October 1943. He was indeed in Stanley Prison on August 24, 1944. His second trial – where he had the death sentence lifted and replaced by three more years in prison – was on August 29, 1944 (24)  but it's possible that Selwyn-Clarke misremembered it, although  there's no known reason for him to have associated his trial with his Bible, nor is there any other currently known significance to August 24, 1944.

Selwyn-Clarke's Religious Development and the Bedales Bible

Selwyn-Clarke was brought up a liberal and non-sectarian Christian by his parents, something that was reinforced by his time at Bedales (see above). But like many of his generation his faith in Divine Providence was destroyed by the experience of the slaughter of WW1 (25). His experiences in the next war moved him in the opposite direction: in an interview he gave to Radio Hong Kong in 1973 he claimed that his time in prison had made him 'a bad Christian'. His autobiography, published two years later, gives a rather different story. After discussing the use he made of the Bible during his imprisonment he summarises his religious development:

For twenty-five years I had regarded myself as an agnostic, and I cannot claim that captivity and the valley of the shadow of death made me a good Christian. Nevertheless, a deep change was wrought in me by these experiences. I did not return to the simple beliefs taught to me in childhood, and to a God in whose image man was made. But I did become profoundly aware of something external to myself and yet reachable in contemplation: something – call it what you will, a force or a spirit or a supreme being – that comprehended the principle of goodness and truth and the high quality of love. This became indeed my rod and staff, to comfort and sustain me and I do not see how otherwise I could have survived. (26).

There is no mention of the Trinity and an explicit denial of 'a God in whose image man was made.' Yet the conception of this 'supreme being', particularly the emphasis on 'the high quality of love', does suggest a Gospel influence. Selwyn-Clarke gives the main reason for his abandonment of Christian theism in the face of the horrors of WW1 as being 'the problem of evil': if God is all good how can he not want to prevent such things, if He is all powerful, how is He not able to prevent them? Returning to some form of faith involved understanding that evil was the result of human misuse of Divinely granted free will. (27)

This is not an idea he would have found in The Book of Job or, in any straightforward form, elsewhere in the Bible. I believe that Selwyn-Clarke's religious views – whatever their exact form – were arrived at as an integral part of his Titanic struggle to avoid betraying those who'd trusted him enough to play a role in his relief network, and to keep his sanity in conditions that were driving others to madness and suicide. His Bible is, as far as I know, the only physical object that can witness to this sustained heroism, and it was a privilege to be able to hold it in the Bedales library.

It is also pleasing and appropriate that it is now in the care of his old school, whose role in shaping the character that enabled him to emerge triumphant from the toughest of ordeals he so clearly acknowledged when he looked back on his life a year or so before its end.