9 Jan 1943, Chronology of Events Related to Stanley Civilian Internment Camp

Extract from the article "City in Prison", written by Joseph Alsop, which appears in today's issue of The Saturday Evening Post:

Man, the political animal, being the mixture that he is, there was also much that was stirring to offset the pettiness and the backbiting. There was, for example, Mrs Ziegler, the wise, handsome wife of a medical missionary. She had 10 children, of whom 7 were in the camp. Her husband was in the interior of China. Most people would have been sufficiently appalled by the task of keeping such a brood clean and healthy under Stanley conditions. Mrs Ziegler not only cared for her own; with perfect aplomb and triumphant success, she also directed the diet kitchen, which prepared and distributed the extra rations that we all contributed for the young and the sickly.

Then, too, there was the vast hulk of a man, a retired naval chief steward, who ran the communal kitchen in the building I lived in. Some years before, after saying farewell to his galley on one of the destroyers of the American Asiatic Fleet, he had spent a night of celebration in Hong Kong, and had waked up with his life savings invested in a bankrupt local hotel. He had proceeded to make the hotel a huge success, and was close to being a rich man when the war came to the city. He brought to Stanley his chefs, a large stock of condiments, and a squad of henchmen who might have stepped straight out of a Somerset Maugham novel. One was Los Angeles chiropractor who had been brought to the Far East by a news item about a rich Calcutta Parsi offering a prize of $100,000 for a cure of his back pains. Another, Kanaka Dick, was an aged Hawaiian sea captain who had been tattooed from head to toe while on the beach at Hokkaido, had made a large fortune in the illicit opium trade, and wore the jade bracelet of a leader of the Hip Sing society.

While other people were busy looking out for themselves, the retired naval chief steward and his squad spent the first days of internment cleaning out the kitchen in our building. Before long he was doing miracles with second-grade rice and scrag ends of Buffalo. His language was sulphurous and his formal education had been brief, but he had courage, leadership, humour and and old-fashioned faith in people that put the faint hearts to shame. He kept us in good health and good heart. Although there were others among us who had occupied far more important positions in the outside world, Ed Gingles – for that was his remarkable name – became the accepted chieftain of our house.