Chronology of Events Related to Stanley Civilian Internment Camp: View pages

The diary of R. E. Jones reflects the internees' interest in and excitement at the US Air Force raids on Hong Kong. They are almost the only visible sign they have of Allied action in the war. Not much has been done since the initial attacks of late October 1942, but today is the first of three consecutive days on which the American planes take the war to Japanese Hong Kong.

Details provided by a website devoted to the Sino-Japanese air war:

July 27 Six B-25s of 14th AF, supported by 14 fighters, attack 'targets of opportunity' on Stonecutter's Island after failing to locate a reported freighter in the area.

July 28 Six B-25s of the 14th AF, with an escort of 9 P-40s, bomb Taikoo Docks.

July 29 18 B-24s of the 14th AF, with fighter escort, bomb shipping and dockyard installations. Kowloon and Taikoo and the former Naval Dockyard are hit.

Source:

http://surfcity.kund.dalnet.se/sino-japanese-1943.htm

Note:

I suspect this photo of an attack on Taikoo Docks was probably taken during these raids:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/acstudio/4073566918/

Leading Hong Kong surgeon and Nationalist Li Shu-fan begins his escape.  Because of his prominence he was courted by the Japanese and then watched carefully because of his steadfast refusal to co-operate with them. His departure follows a long campaign to convince the authorities that he's given up politics for a life of pleasure so that they'll relax their vigilance and allow him to prepare for and execute his escape.

Dr. Li had sent help to John Fraser and other interned  friends until it became too dangerous to do so. But he continued to take an interest in Stanley:

I used to go down to Stanley Beach, a few hundred yards from the camp, to observe what I could of the inmates. They kept the place orderly, and conducted themselves well. In course of time I noticed that their outdoor games slackened off, no doubt from loss of energy through lack of food.

Sources:

Escape: Li Shu-fan, Hong Kong Surgeon, 1964, 165-180; Stanley conditions: 144

Birth of Alexander Graham Cochrane.

After narrowly avoiding detection when his sampan is stopped by a Japanese patrol boat, Dr. Li Shu-fan arrives in Free China:

So we waited till dawn . When we stepped onto the beach at last, I stretched my arms upwards and wide and took a deep breath of the free air of China. It was Sunday morning, August 1, 1943 - the day I was to have been sworn in as president of the Sino-Japanese Medical Association, and thus as a collaborationist of the Japanese.

Source:

Li Shu-fan, Hong Kong Surgeon, 1964, 180

Note: See entry for July 31, 1943

Former Prison Officer Leon Blumenthal claims that some sweet potatoes are stolen from his 'garden' outside Bungalow 'C'.

The three accused are all teenagers, but the case is taken seriously by the camp's legal system and a search warrant is issued. I have not been able to find if the case actually came before Sir Atholl MacGregor, who ran the Stanley court, and, if it did, what the verdict was.

Vandeleur Grayburn, Edward Streatfield and Dr. Harry Talbot receive Bibles sent in from Stanley Camp. On August 23, two days after Grayburn's death, the two survivors have their Bibles taken from them without explantion. They are never returned.

Source:

Blumenthal: Undated statement of complaint in HPRO, HKRS163-1-303

Bibles: E. P. Streatfield, Statement, in HK Public Records Office, HKMS100-1-6, 11

Birth of William Bernard Harris.

Franklin Gimson noted in his diary that this was a 'bad-tempered day' because no meat was provided.

There's a meeting in A. W. Brown's room in Block A4. Three Lane, Crawford directors accompany Brown, the company manager, while A.L. Shields, D. L. Newbigging and two others represent Dairy Farm. The two teams are seeking a plan to merge the companys' over-lapping operations after the war and thus elminate the 'hate' that sometimes arose between them. It seems that the prospects are good: Brown claims that the only remaining question is which company is to retail tinned goods. Nevertheless, the anticipated merger won't happen until 1960 when Dairy Lane Ltd. is set up.

A 'special draft' of 14 very senior officers and their batmen (21 in all) is sent away from Hong Kong as a  result of suspicions over their involvement in the BAAG network. It includes the overall commander Christopher Maltby, his number two Cedric Wallis (who was on the brink of an escape attempt) and Henry Barron Rose, the head of the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps. They will arrive at Shirakawa Camp in Taiwan on August 9 and be joined by former Governor Mark Young and his batman on 12 September. Later they will be sent to Japan and end the war at Shenyang in Manchukuo (Manchuria).

Sources:

Gimson: Franklin Gimson, Internment in Hong-Kong March 1942 to August 1945, typescript held at Rhodes House (Oxford), Ms. Ind. Ocn. S222

Meeting: Nigel Cameron, The Milky Way: The History of Dairy Farm, 1986, 142, 174-175

Special draft: Tony Banham, We Shall Suffer There, Kindle Edition, Location  1904

Franklin Gimson notes in his diary that repatriation of all the British would mean willingness to surrender the Colony to the Chinese or the Americans.

Source:

Franklin Gimson, Internment in Hong-Kong March 1942- August 1945, 21b

Birth of Anthony Charles Edward Rex (Reice).

Source:

China Mail, September 15, 1945, 3

The fourth draft of Prisoners of War sent to labour in Japan leaves Hong Kong today when 470 men sail off on the Manryu Maru.

The only officer in the draft is former Stanley internee Lewis Bush. Bush has a Japanese wife and speaks the language fluently. He's allowed special privileges and uses his position to do as much as he can for the rest of the draft.

The men end up in Oeyama and Niigata-Rinko, two of the camps with the worst survival rates.

Source:

Tony Banham, We Shall Suffer There, Kindle Edition, Locations 1928-1953

Note: for more on Bush see:

http://gwulo.com/node/9858

http://gwulo.com/node/14388

Death of former school teacher Marion Potter, aged 81, from lymph adenoma and myocardial degeneration.

Before internment she'd been held in room 203 of the New Asia Hotel.

Sources:

Geoffrey Emerson, Hong Kong Internment, HKUP, 2008, Appendix 3

stanley-military-cemetery-hong-kong.htmlhttp://www.hongkongwardiary.com/searchgarrison/nonuniformedcivilians.html#_Toc43367491

Note:

For further information see

http://gwulo.com/node/16175

http://gwulo.com/node/16214

Birth of Norval Leslie James Willerton. His father was a sergeant in the Hong Kong police.

Sir Vandeleur Grayburn is taken to the Stanley Prison 'Hospital' - a place where there's almost no medical treatment and the rations are even lower than in the cells to discourage would-be patients. The only advantage to being here is that you're allowed to lie down all day and don't have to spend most of your waking hours staring cross-legged at the wall.

He's not put on one of the two twenty-bed wards but into a two-person hospital cell, which he shares with policeman Vincent Morrison, who's serving two years for trying to escape from Stanley. Morrison notices that Grayburn has boils all over his right leg and learns that his temperature is 103.

Sources:

Birth: China Mail, September 15, 1945, 3

Sergeant: http://ebook.lib.hku.hk/HK/HKGS/21019063.pdf

E. P. Streatfield, Statement, in HK Public Records Office, HKMS100-1-6, 10-11

Boils and temperature: Morrison's evidence to war crimes trial, China Mail, April 4, 1947, 2

Commissioner of Police John Pennefather-Evans and Inspector Louis Whant are released from Stanley Prison and returned to the Camp in the morning. They'd been arrested on July 11 and June 28 respectively on suspicion of being involved with either the secret radios or the ration truck message system.

The other arrestees are handed over from the Gendarmes to the Prisons Department and interogated by the public prosecutor (Kogi). For the next two months they'll be held in the ' B' Block of Stanley Prison awaiting trial.

Sources:

Statement of W.J. Anderson in Hong Kong Public Records Office, HKRS 163-1-104, page 16, point 129; George Wright-Nooth, Prisoner of the Turnip Heads, 1994, 177-178

Sir Vandeleur Grayburn is serving the second half of his three month sentence in Stanley Prison. He's been in poor health, suffering from fever and outbreaks of boils, but has received no treatment from the Japanese.

In the morning, Sir Vandeleur feels better. After the evening meal he talks to Police Sergeant Vincent Morrison about his travels in Norway and his brother's time as a tea planter in India. He interrupts the conversation to try and urinate into a tin, but fails twice to do so. He drops the tin and collapses. Sergeant Morrison, himself weak, helps him to bed as best he can. Grayburn apologises - 'That was very remiss of me' - and sinks into a coma.

Morrison spends the night by his side.

Sources:

George Wright-Nooth, Prisoner of the Turnip Heads, 1994, 175

Morrison's evidence to war crimes trial, China Mail, April 4, 1947, 2

Note: Wright-Nooth misdates Grayburn's last illness and death to August 6/7, perhaps following Morrison's misdating of Grayburn's transfer to the hospital to 'the first Wednesday in August'. For more information see

http://brianwedgar.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/wystan-auden-christopher-isherwood-and_4.html

Sir Vandeleur Grayburn dies in Stanley Prison at about 7.30 p.m. The cause of death is debated, but malnutrition, sepsis and medical neglect all played a part.

'Indian Orderly Number 3' ((probably Khader Bux, although other names are sometimes given)) has made four separate attempts during the morning to get medical help for Sir Vandeleur. After his final failure, he cries uncontrollably.

Bux brings Harry Talbot in secretly to see the dying man in the afternoon, but there are no medicines available and it's too late for anything else.

Lady Mary Grayburn (Bungalow D) was not sent for to see her husband for the last time.

Sources:

George Wright-Nooth, Prisoner of the Turnip Heads, 1994, 175

Orderly: Morrison's evidence to war crimes trial, China Mail, April 4, 1947, 2

See also yesterday's entry.

Note:

Wright-Nooth misdates Grayburn's last illness and death to August 6/7.

See:

http://brianwedgar.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/wystan-auden-christopher-isherwood-and_4.html 

The Hong Kong News announces that the Hong Kong Branch of the International Red Cross will stop making cash payments to dependents of Prisoners of war and civilian internees. Instead a home will be established for them at St. Albert's Convent at 43, Stubbs Rd. The home will be called Rosary Hill, and be under the direction of a Swiss national, Mr. Suter.

Source:

Tony Banham, We Shall Suffer There, Kindle Edition, Location 1966

Death of Frederick Percival Lenfesty.

Before internment he was held in room 414 of the Nam Ping Hotel.

Mr Lenfestry had a Channel Islands background.

Sources:

http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/read/CHANNEL-ISLANDS/2000-06/0960763900

http://www.hongkongwardiary.com/searchgarrison/nonuniformedcivilians.html#_Toc43367491

Mrs. S. Mason (Block 4, Room 25P) writes a card to Miss Isobel Wavell in Farnham Common (Buckinghamshire):

Darlings,

We are very anxious for news of you both as we have not had a line up to date.

We are all very well and do hope you are. It's all very worrying, isn't it? Still we are making the most of this extraordinary life. We only hope the fashions are streamlined when we meet again, which we hope will be soon.

You are constantly in our minds, as are also the old times we spent together.

Source:
David Tett, Captives In Cathay, 2007, 149

The first meeting of the third British Community Council takes place today.

The Allies and Italy agree an armistice. Soon Italy will declare war on Germany in an attempt to switch sides, but German counter-measures will be effective and Rome will not be liberated until June 1944 and northern Italy not until shortly before the German surrender. In Hong Kong the Italians move from Allies to enemies. But little changes in fact as they've always been treated with suspicion, and, as most of them are churchmen and working hard to help their starving parishioners, the Japanese allow them to remain uninterned.

Source:

John Stericker, Captive Colony, 1945, Chapter X, page 1

Prince Shimidzu, Vice President of the Japanese Red Cross, and Baron Hiyashi of the Foreign Office visits the Camp. The Prince seems distressed at the overcrowding, and, when he sees a meal, expresses the hope that the Camp will get International Red Cross supplies soon. He asks how many people in Camp are fit; Franklin Gimson tells him there's only one  - a man who was interned in the last few weeks.

Dr. D. J. Valentine, in his capacity as Camp Medical Officer, writes a letter to Sir Atholl MacGregor, the Camp's chief legal authority, concerning the requested post mortem examination of Sir Vandeleur Grayburn, who had died on August 21:

(A)fter a preliminary survey, the Medical Officers detailed for the task came to the conclusion that decomposition having set in to such an extent a post-mortem examination would not assist rhem in reaching a definite decision as to the cause of death.

Sources:

Shimdzu: John Stericker, Captive Colony, 1945, Chapter X, 4

Grayburn: Documents Relating to Proceedings in the Stanley Internmet Camp, HKRS163 1-303

:

Eric Humphreys and George and Ivy Halligan are re-interned in Stanley.

Humphreys and Halligan were taken out of camp to work as technicians in town while living in the French Hospital in Causeway Bay. Today they're returned - but their journeying isn't over yet.

Source:

Archives of the International Red Cross, Geneva:

Zindel to ICRC, General Letter No. 79/43 in BG0/7 07-066.

Three members of the Triads are arrested close to the camp. They are on their way to a rendez-vous at the barbed wire - probably to recieve information to be transmitted outside Hong Kong.

They are accused of being in a forbidden area, but, in spite of torture, they refuse to reveal the purpose of their mission before they are executed.

Source:

F. W. Shaftain's Memoirs, p. 5 at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IFHSG5WKSSBn1fPQJQueH53-UWiThFYP/view

Note:

Shaftain was Director of Criminal Intelligence in the Police in December 1941. Three days after the Japanese attack, he heard of a Triad plan to end the war by massacring the Europeans on the island. He asked some leading Chinese Nationalists to arrange a meeting with the Triad heads, and, in circumstances that have never been completely clarified, arranged to pay them a large sum. As today's entry shows, this bought co-operation during the occupation as well as the abandonment of the massacre plan. There were many different Triad factions in Hong Kong at the time, and, although some supported the Japanese, others, as in this case, became part of the British inteligence network.