Franklin Gimson writes to Mr (later Colonel) Hattori, head of the Foreign Affairs Department, in an attempt to 'define, clarify and limit' the degree of personal responsibility that the Japanese Authorities are now placing on members of the British Community Council for the reports and advice they give as members.
Source:
Geoffrey Emerson, Hong Kong Internment 1942-1945, 2011, 197
Today is the second anniversary of the attack on Hong Kong. There's a ceremony at the Japanese War Memorial on Mount Cameron.
At sundown Shinto priests carrying flaring torches conduct sacred rites designed to protect the spirits of the dead from evil. The sword master Kurihara buries a sword said to be 500 years old.
Source:
http://gwulo.com/japanese-war-memorial
Note:
See also December 8, 1942.
The sword may or may not still be there. The source above includes a history and discussion of this issue.
Franklin Gimson sees Florence Eileen Hyde in the evening and finds that she's taking the death of her husband 'very philosophically':
She feels however, that it was lack of foresight on the part of others that was responsible for the Japanese discovering what he was doing. Actually what he was doing I refrained from enquiring just as she refrained from giving information.
Charles Hyde had in fact been engaged in a wide variety of relief and resistance activities before his arrest in April 1943. What cost him his life was indeed the lack of 'foresight' of another British Army Aid Group agent who inadvertenly gave the Japanese information which led to his arrest for his role in a plot to help an Indian prisoner of war escape.
Source:
Franklin Gimson, Diary, Weston Library, Oxford, p. 40 (recto)
Selwyn Selwyn-Clarke is still being held in a Kempeitai cell in the Supreme Court:
Day and night he lay on the filthy concrete floor of his 6'/2x5 feet cell wearing nothing but shirt and trousers and crawled over by cockroaches from a nearby latrine - conditions particularly revolting to a hygiene loving medical man and at their worst in the damp heat of a Hong Kong summer. In this loathsome spot, his legs painfully swollen with beriberi, he passed his fiftieth birthday on 17 December 1943.
Source:
Mervyn Horder, The Hard-boiled Saint: Selwyn-Clarke in Hong Kong
(viewable at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2550548/pdf/bmj00606-0034…)
Douglas Ford, Hector Gray and Lanceray Newnham are together in a condemned cell at Stanley Prison. Ford is doing his best to care for the other two, who are seriously ill.
Lieutenant H. C. Dixon, who is awaiting trial, is carrying out cleaning duties in the corridor; he is struck by the way in which, inspite of his knowledge that today has been set for the executions, Captain Ford has made the interior of his cell meticulously neat. Dixon recives last requests from Lieutenant-Colonel Newnham (who wishes that his love be sent to his family) and Captain Gray (who asks that if possible his remains and his silver watch should be sent home), but he's then hustled away by warders. Soon after the guards come for the three condemned men.
The guards try to tie their hands behind their backs, but Ford successfully protests that his two companions are too weak to walk without his help.
They are driven in a van to one of the beaches on the south side of the island - probably Big Wave Bay - where they are tied kneeling with their backs to three wooden crosses.
All three will be awarded the posthumous George Cross for their refusal, under prolonged torture, to reveal anything about the resistance in the POW camps.
See also July 10, 1943: http://gwulo.com/node/19506
Sources:
Raph Goodwin, Passport to Eternity, 1956, 188-190;
http://www.cwgc.org/find-war-dead/casualty/2815357/NEWNHAM,%20LANCERAY%20ARTHUR
http://www.stephen-stratford.co.uk/jap_pows.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hector_Bertram_Gray
Note:
Goodwin gives December 19 as the date of execution, but most sources give today.
Christmas 1943 was not so good {as 1942}. Residential Kowloon had just undergone its worst air raid of the war and planes were overhead nearly every day. Every other house in Tsimshatsui was housing a bomb that had failed to explode. The Gendarmerie reign of terror was touching the Christmas celebrating communities. Christmas at Stanley Goal was far worse than at the internment camps. There was little food and no medicinal alcohol. The news was much better. Nerves were very much on edge and the great majority had discovered that familiarity breeds contempt. The best way to express the latter feeling was by snubbing all invitations for Christmas Eve.
Franklin Gimson disagrees: he feels that the day was spent in a religious rather than a festive spirit, though he admits the internees made the best of the rations provided. He claims that there was a general air of bonhomie noticeable among all.
In any case, Stanley does its best to celebrate: 'a spice loaf was turned out by the camp bakeries as a special treat' and the Japanese are asked for something extra and at the last minute donate a little margarine and some tins of beans.
Sources:
Wartime Christmases: China Mail, December 25, 1945, page 2
Gimson: Diary, December 25, 1943 (Weston House).
Loaf, Japanese: John Stericker, Captive Colony, 1945, Chapter X, page 7
Birth of Jeanette Madeline Clarke.
Source:
China Mail, September 15, 1945, 3
Note:
The semi-official list in the China Mail reads Wright-Brown, Clarke Jean.
For a possible explanation for the apparent presence of two surnames, see Barbara Anslow's diary for today.
Red Cross Delegate Rudolf Zindel makes his monthly visit to Stanley, interviewing 58 internees on 'various current subjects'. He notes that because of the timely arrival of fresh British funds he was able to pay the usual monthly allowance of M. Y. 25 to 2, 393 (British) internees just before Christmas, and that the camp authorities also approved a grant of M. Y. 3,000 to the Stanley Camp Nutritional Relief Fund.
Zindel also paid M. Y. 25 to the 13 Americans remaining in Stanley.
Source:
Zindel to ICRC, General Letter No. 8/44, January 21, 1944 in Archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross, BG017-07-066 (Geneva)
Reflections on the second year
1943 has been a grim year in some ways: the camp has continued to be over-crowded, the rations never enough to keep away an agonising sense of hunger and – if a post-war China Mail is to be trusted (see Chronology, December 25, 1943) – by the end of the year everybody has started to get on everybody elses' nerves. And the constant fear that makes up the generally unacknowledged background of the internees' lives now has precise and terrible shapes: at different times in the year internees report hearing the horrifying screams of Chinese men and women being tortured in Stanley Prison and on three occasions in 1943 the Gendarmes have come into Stanley and taken away some of its inhabitants (see June 28, July 7 and July 11). On October 29 a period of rumour comes to an end and some internees watch as 32 men and one women are taken out of the prison by van and executed on Stanley Beach - it's not clear if the executions are in or just out of sight of the camp. On November 2 the names of 6 internees and Charles Hyde, whose wife and child are in camp, are posted on the notice board – Chester Bennett, a former Stanleyite, is omitted. All have died for their role in the resistance, either in camp or in town. The Stanley resistance is almost broken by these events, although it will never quite disappear.
As 1943 draws to a close, every part of the camp contains men and women anxious for or mourning their loved ones, but it seems that the Bungalows at the Stanley Village end of the camp are suffering disproportionally, because it's here that most of the people sent in from town in the wake of the spring 1943 arrests are living (see Chronology, May 7, Jones Diary May 19, July 2, July 16). Bungalow D, home of Florence Hyde and Michael Hyde, also houses Lady Mary Grayburn whose husband died of malnutrition and medical neglect on August 21. In the same small Bungalow lives Hilda Selwyn-Clarke and her daughter Mary: Dr Selwyn Selwyn-Clarke was arrested in town on May 2, and is still in Stanley Prison, while close by in Bungalow 'E' are Kathleen and Mary Edmondston, the wife and daughter of David Charles Edmondston, who was arrested later that month. The Bungalows will suffer again, early in 1944.
The deaths and imprisonments are not just a personal or a local loss: Dr Selwyn-Clarke had been active from the start in promoting the internees' interests: he was the one who suggested the healthy and attractive Stanley location for their camp, and, as soon as he realised the conditions they were living under, he began to organise a comprehensive network to procure food and medicine and smuggle it into the camp. Vandeleur Grayburn and David Edmondston, the two senior bankers at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, led the money-raising effort that funded this work (and Chester Bennett after his release from camp was also active in helping the internees in both legal and illegal ways). With Grayburn, Bennett and Hyde dead, Edmondston in prison and the rest of the bankers in Stanley, the relief effort is continuing, but on a much smaller scale.
But something amazing has also happened in 1943, something perhaps noted with quiet satisfaction by a few workers at Tweed Bay Hospital but not realised by the majority of internees: in spite of the dreadful conditions and the appalling rations, fewer people have died in 1943 than 1942.
According to Geoffrey Emerson's carefully compiled figures, 1942 saw 30 deaths, aside from that of American diplomat Russell Engdhal, who died in an accident (see May 14/15, 1942). In 1943, leaving aside the internees executed for their role in the resistance and Sir Vandeleur Grayburn, who died of the dietary and medical regime in Stanley Prison, only 17 people died. It doesn't seem as if the higher rate in 1942 has anything to do with wounds received during the hostilities: it's possible that the first internee to die, Charles Bond (Chronology, January 29, 1942), had his demise hastened by his ill-treatment as a civilian during that period, but the fact that his was the only death in January, that there were two each in February and March, but 4 in April and five in May suggests that generally speaking the December fighting played little or no role. Perhaps it was more a case of those whose health was worst dying because of the harsh conditions of the early months in camp. Many former internees claim that mental attitude was important to survival, so perhaps there were also some deaths because people couldn't adjust to the starvation rations, the over-crowding, the deprivation of goods and services and the loss of freedom. I've suggested elsewhere (http://gwulo.com/node/14063) that the period from July 1942-June 1943 was the best time for the internees, with no executions, extra space after the departure of the Americans and the rations as good as they ever were going to be, and perhaps this is also borne out by the mortality figures (which will worsen in 1944).
Whatever the reasons for the sharp fall in deaths from 'natural causes' that marked 1943, it's worth reflecting on the question of the camp mortality rate in general. Internee leader Franklin Gimson later claimed that the overall death rate was actually lower than would have been expected from a similar population in peace time, and, although this is impossible to prove statistically, the death rate was low enough to make this a plausible idea. Given the nature of life in Stanley, one is forced to ask 'Why?'
The first reason is one pointed to by former internee Norman Gunning in his book Passage to Hong Kong: the harsh conditions in camp actually saved the lives of those who were drinking, eating and smoking themselves to death in the period leading up to the war! It's a sobering thought: free consumption in conditions of prosperity is if anything more dangerous to one's health and even life than being forced to half-starve on rice infested with mouse droppings, a small slice of dubious bread, and a meagre portion of watery vegetables while cutting down on (or abandoning) smoking and drinking.
The second reason is less surprising: Stanley had an unusually high ratio of medical personnel to potential patients. Most 'white' British doctors had remained civilians so were interned in Stanley, a large additional contingent of nurses arrived in the summer of 1942, and something that had rightly been controversial before the war actually turned out in the internees' favour: a number of women, often with prominent husbands, evaded the 1940 Evacuation Order by taking a nursing course and getting labelled an 'essential worker'. True the courses were short and perhaps not over-demanding, but they did ensure that even more people had some degree of medical knowledge.
After the war, the former Stanleyites looked back on the performance of their doctors, nurses and hospital assistants with justified pride. They worked with only the most basic equipment, and not always that. They were often reliant on drugs smuggled in by Dr. Selwyn-Clarke and his network, or by other courageous people. They were as hungry, scared and frustrated as anyone else, all factors that make concentration on demanding medical procedures more difficult. Yet never in the whole literature of Stanley Camp as far as I know it have I read that a single person died because the staff of Tweed Bay Hospital failed to provide the best care possible under the circumstances.
Note:
The list of deaths in Stanley is to be found in Geoffrey Emerson, Hong Kong Internment 1942-1945, Hong Kong University Press, 2008, 186-188
Stanley Camp becomes The Military Internment Camp. But the Japanese military will not take full control for some time, and when it does the internees will not be treated as POWS, which seems to be what some worried relatives back in the UK fear when they get to hear of the new name.
Franklin Gimson likes the camp production of Laburnum Grove, noting in his diary that it contains 'more decent humour than is usually to be found in modern drama'.
Source:
Franklin Gimson, Internment in Hong-Kong March 1942- August 1945, 43
News from 49,000 Far East captives
A further batch of about 49,000 postcards and letters from prisoners of war and civilian internees in Japanese hands has reached Britain within the last few days and been delivered.
Approximately 56 per cent, of the mail came from camps In Thailand (Siam), and about 15 per cent, from Java and Sumatra, the remainder being from camps In Japan, Hong Kong, occupied China, Korea, Formosa and Burma.
Source: Daily Mirror, page 2
Death of retired army officer Ernest Dudley Matthews, a former minor counties cricketer.
Source:
https://cricketarchive.com/Berkshire/Players/158/158781/158781.html
Birth of Daphne Esther Culver to Phyllis Culver and William Frank Culver, a merchant who had come to Hong Kong in 1925 as a prison officer.
Arrest of banker Hugo Eric Foy. {See tomorrow's entry and discussion}.
'Towkay' King tells Franklin Gimson of the arrest of HSBC banker Hugo Eric Foy. King does not know the charges.
It's probably no coincidence that the Commissioner of Police John Pennefather-Evans also comes to see Gimson today and gives him the names of those suspected of informing to the Japanee:
The list is a long one and naturally gives rise to conjecture as to the safety of anyone in camp.
Source:
Franklin Gimson, Diary, Weston Library Oxford, entry for today
Note:
The nature of the charges has never been clarified. Foy, like almost every other banker was involved in illegal relief work, but the only HSBC staff to be taken for this were Vandeleur Grayburn and Andrew Streatfield in March 1943. It's possible his arrest had something to do with the taking of the Chartered Bank officials which occurred a little later.
Foy will be sentenced to ten years in prison, transferred to a jail in Canton and be brought back to Hong Kong at the end of the war, re-joining his family in Stanley on August 23, 1945.
It's possible that William Cruickshank of the Chartered Bank is also arrested today. Gimson makes no mention of his arrest until February, but then links his case with Foy's.
Uninterned French escaper Raoul de Sercey will give a long interview to the British Army Aid Group in the spring of 1944. The BAAG summary of his account of Stanley includes the following:
Parcels
Latest regulations dated 13 Jan 44 allow one parcel per head weekly. ((See comment from Barbara Anslow below.)) This is limited to 5 lbs weight. Clothing can be sent. The Red Cross can send in bulk, and does so regularly in accordance with requests made by the internee supply committee headed by Mr NEWBIGGIN.
De Sercey also comments on the general state of health of the camp:
Source stated that the general health conditions were satisfactory until the beginning of 1944. Then the bread ration was cancelled. Source said that as the general health ofthe camp had improved with the issue of bread in 42, he presumes it will lower from now onwards. Red Cross reported an increasing number of T. B. cases, and several cases of blindness.
Technically it was a flour ration that began in April/May 1942 and ended in early 1944, but de Sercey may well be right to stress the importance of wheat bread. The bakers continued to bake after the ration ended, but now using rice.
Sources:
De Sercey: Ride Papers, KWIZ 51/1, sheet 5 (kindly sent me by Elizabeth Ride).
Note:
Gaston Marie Raoul de Sercey, the younger brother of a count, remained free in Hong Kong because the French were counted as neutrals. From the start he took great risks to send parcels to colleauges and friends, and he was one of the courageous people who continued to organise relief after the arrest of Dr Selwyn-Clarke and members of his network on May 2, 1943. More information:
https://jonmarkgreville2.wordpress.com/2012/08/27/the-free-french-in-ho…
Death from cancer of Grace Rose Smith, aged 75. Mrs. Smith, who was blind, had a daughter and grandson in camp.
Source:
Philip Cracknell at http://battleforhongkong.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/stanley-military-cemete…
James O'Toole in Shamsuipo gets a postcard:
PC from Alan ((Barwell)), he's quite well but thinner.
Source:
Diary of Staff-Sergeant James O'Toole: http://www.far-eastern-heroes.org.uk/James_OToole/html/dairy_1944.htm
Ellen Field organises a concert in Rosary Hill Red Cross Home.
She sings 'There'll Always Be An England' to an appreciative audience. The Japanese officers present applaud politely and show no sign of understanding. Nevertheless there are no more concerts.
Source:
Tony Banham, We Shall Suffer There, 2009, entry for today
Edith Hamson writes to her sister:
Dearest Alice,
Christmas over and we are into the new year still keeping cheerful and hopeful. [The rest was censored]
Love to all of you.
Edith
Source:
Allana Corbin, Prisoners of the East, 2002, 237
Sir Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, shocks the House of Commons with a statement on Japanese treatment of POWs and internees.
He talks about conditions in both the Northern and Southern areas, the first including Hong Kong:
His Majesty's Governemnt are reasonably satisfied that conditions generally in this area are tolerable, though...the scale on which food is provided is not adequate over long periods to maintain the health of prisoners. I should add, however, that conditions in Hong Kong appear to be growing worse.
He goes on to detail a number of Japanese atrocities, including their actions before and after the torpedoing of the Lisbon Maru:
Conditions on board were almost indescribable. The prisoners were seriosuly overcrowded. Many of them were undnernourished and many had contracted diphtheria, dysentery and other diseases. There was no medical provision; and the sanitary arrangements were virtually nonexistent. Two of the prisoners in one hold died where they lay and no attempt was made to remove their bodies.
On October 1, 1942 the ship was torpedoed:
The Japanese officers, soldiers and crew kept the prisoners under hatches and abandoned ship forthwith, although she did not sink until 24 hours later. There were insufficient life belts and other safety appliances on board. Some of the prisoners managed to break out and swim to land. They were fired on when in the water. In all, at least 800 prisoners lost their lives.
Source:
Hansard: http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1944/jan/28/japanese-treatment#S5CV0396P0_19440128_HOC_9
Note:
A few hours later the Canadian Prime Minister King made a similar statement in the Canadian House of Commons about the treatment of Canadian prisoners.