Sunday, February 9, 2014

72 years ago: Hong Kong's wartime diaries

72 years ago: Hong Kong's wartime diaries

10 Feb 1942, R. E. Jones Wartime diary

Posted: 31 Dec 2011 05:38 AM PST

Book / Document: 
R. E. Jones Wartime diary
Date of events described: 
Tue, 1942-02-10

Got power on today. Cold & damp. Nothing worthy of note. Japs told firmly re Convention & Int. Camp rules.

10 Feb 1942, Barbara Anslow's diary

Posted: 08 Jan 2012 05:54 PM PST

Book / Document: 
Barbara Anslow's diary
Date of events described: 
Tue, 1942-02-10

Food terrible today.

Assistance wanted in hospital - office work, and I'm to start tomorrow, feeding there.

Electric lights on.

10 Feb 1942, Chronology of Events Related to Stanley Civilian Internment Camp

Posted: 18 Jan 2012 03:57 AM PST

Book / Document: 
Chronology of Events Related to Stanley Civilian Internment Camp
Date of events described: 
Tue, 1942-02-10

Second death in Camp, this time from dysentery: John Oram Sheppard, a freight agent with Canadian Pacific, aged 63. Before being sent to Stanley he and his wife were held at 177, the Peak.

 

Morris 'Two-Gun' Cohen is taken from the room in the Kempeitai Prison where he was being held with 7 others. He's put in a basement room with nothing in it but an empty gasoline tin that serves as a lavatory. He spends his time thinking of answers to the questions he knows are coming. (See also entries for Feb 2 and Feb 11.)

 

Professor Gordon King, who has been allowed to remain living at Hong Kong University to fulfill his medical commitments, begins his successful escape to Free China.

 

So does Jan Marsman. He wakes at dawn, drinks coffee, and dresses so he looks like a Chinese at a distance. The nephew of a Chinese friend who's helped him plan the escape arrives at 8.30. They leave town and walk fifteen miles up and down mountain sides. They come across a Chinese man in coolie costume sitting beside the road; he is, in fact, a well-known scholar and now an underground leader. He leads them 'a long and devious way', as they have to skirt villages regularly visited by Japanese patrols or inhabited by pro-Japanese Chinese. Eventually they arrive at an abandoned schoolhouse where a payment is made to the agents of the guerillas and he's handed over to them. In the schoolhouse he finds Gordon King. The escape party is six people: Marsman and his friend's nephew, a distinguished Chinese man,  a Russian, Gordon King and his Chinese 'bodyguard'.

Sources:

Death: Geoffrey Emerson, Hong Kong Internment, 2008, 186; http://www.geni.com/people/John-ORAM-Sheppard/6000000014690930625 (this source gives his employer as the Pacific Mail and Stemaship Co.)

Cohen: Charles Drage, The Life And Times Of General Two-Gun Cohen, 1954, 291-2

King: Tony Banham, We Shall Suffer There, 2009, entries for February 10, 1942

Marsman: Jan Marsman, I Escaped From Hong Kong, 1942, 191-196
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