Forgotten Souls
Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Studies Series
Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Studies Series is designed to make widely available important contributions on the local history, culture and society of Hong Kong and the surrounding region. Generous support from the Sir Lindsay and Lady May Ride Memorial Fund makes it possible to publish a series of high-quality works that will be of lasting appeal and value to all, both scholars and informed general readers, who share a deeper interest in and enthusiasm for the area.
Other titles in RAS Hong Kong Studies Series:
Cantonese Society in Hong Kong and Singapore: Gender, Religion, Medicine and Money
Essays by Marjorie Topley, edited and introduced by Jean DeBernardi
The Dragon and the Crown: Hong Kong Memoirs
Stanley S.K. Kwan with Nicole Kwan
Early China Coast Meteorology: The Role of Hong Kong
P. Kevin MacKeown
East River Column: Hong Kong Guerillas in the Second World War and After
Chan Sui-jeung
For Gods, Ghosts and Ancestors: The Chinese Tradition of Paper Offerings
Janet Lee Scott
Forgotten Souls: A Social History of the Hong Kong Cemetery
Patricia Lim
Hong Kong Internment 1942–1945: Life in the Japanese Civilian Camp at Stanley
Geoffrey Charles Emerson
Public Success, Private Sorrow: The Life and Times of Charles Henry Brewitt-Taylor (1857–1938), China Customs Commissoner and Pioneer Translator
Isidore Cyril Cannon
Reluctant Heroes: Rickshaw Pullers in Hong Kong and Canton 1874–1954
Fung Chi Ming
Resist to the End: Hong Kong, 1941–1945
Charles Barman, edited by Ray Barman
The Six-Day War of 1899: Hong Kong in the Age of Imperialism
Patrick H. Hase
Southern District Officer Reports: Islands and Villages in Rural Hong Kong, 1910–60
Edited by John Strickland
Watching Over Hong Kong: Private Policing 1841–1941
Sheilah E. Hamilton
FORGOTTEN SOULS
A SOCIAL HISTORY OF THE HONG KONG CEMETERY
PATRICIA LIM
Hong Kong University Press
14/F Hing Wai Centre 7 Tin Wan Praya Road Aberdeen Hong Kong www.hkupress.org
c Hong Kong University Press 2011
ISBN 978-962-209-990-6
All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Printed and bound by Paramount Printing Company Limited, Hong Kong, China
To my grandchildren, Suzannah, Daniel, Natalie, Eve and Zoe with love
Contents
Foreword
ix
Preface
xi
Introduction: The Hong Kong Cemetery, Its Position and History
1
Section I: An Introduction to Early Hong Kong
Chapter 1: The Early Settlers, the First Opium War and Its Aftermath
30
Chapter 2: Events Affecting Hong Kong as They Involved the Lives of
People Buried in the Hong Kong Cemetery
59 Chapter 3: How Early Hong Kong Society Arranged Itself
73
Section II: The Early Denizens of the Hong Kong Cemetery, 1845–1860
Chapter 4: Merchants, Clerks and Bankers
92 Chapter 5: Servants of the Crown
113 Chapter 6: Professionals
143 Chapter 7: The Merchant Navy
158 Chapter 8: Tradesmen, Artisans and Small-Scale Businessmen
183 Chapter 9: Beachcombers and Destitutes
211 Chapter 10: Missionaries
214 Chapter 11: The Americans
235 Chapter 12: The Armed Forces
242 Chapter 13: Women and Children
269 Chapter 14: The Chinese and Their Position in Relation to the Europeans 286
Section III: Years of Consolidation, 1861–1875
Chapter 15: Victoria City and Its European Inhabitants
298 Chapter 16: Hong Kong Society in This Period
321 Chapter 17: Hong Kong Becomes Cosmopolitan
349
Chapter 18: Government Measures and Their Effect on Society 364
Chapter 19: Changes Taking Place outside the Government 389
Section IV: The Turn of the Century, 1876–1918
Chapter 20: Chapter 21: Chapter 22: Chapter 23: Chapter 24: Chapter 25: Chapter 26: Chapter 27:
Chapter 28:
Appendices:
Notes Age of Empire
418 The Disasters of These Years
442 The Old Residents Section in the Hong Kong Cemetery 452 Industry at the Turn of the Century
475 The History of the Freemasons in Hong Kong
483 The Chinese in the Hong Kong Cemetery
495 The Eurasians
512 Other Nationalities: The Japanese and Russians Buried in the Hong Kong Cemetery
522 The Second World War and Its Aftermath
531
1. Time Line of Hong Kong History
543
2. Sources 546
3. Glossary
548
551
Bibliography
577
Index
587
Foreword
The first thing to say about this book is that it is long overdue. That is by no
means meant to be a negative reflection on the author. On the contrary, she is to be congratulated for filling so well such a large gap in our historical knowledge of
some of the people who contributed to the early success of Hong Kong. So many of those people, leaders of the community as well as the virtually unknown, were laid to rest in the Hong Kong Cemetery in Happy Valley that, taken together, they almost amount to a social history of Hong Kong’s early years. And this is exactly what Patricia Lim has given us.
It would have been much easier simply to prepare an alphabetical listing of the names that feature in the Cemetery, and give brief biographical details of each to the extent these were available. But the author was not satisfied with this easy option. Instead she has applied a significant amount of thought, research and imagination to weave the entire story of Hong Kong’s early years consistently around the inhabitants of the Cemetery.
Whilst the story of Hong Kong’s foundation as a British colony has been told many times, it appears here as a necessary backdrop to the story of the individuals that then unfolds. And this is where this book truly shines as being a unique contribution to our knowledge. Many of the passages of history that are described might be very familiar to us already, and we know that a number of people died in the course of these events. But to be given details of exactly who these people were and where they are buried has the effect, if I may be forgiven for using the expression, of bringing many of the stories to life. Furthermore, reading about some of the Cemetery’s inhabitants emphasizes just how many people from different backgrounds ended up not being able to return to wherever home was as their lives were cut short here. The author is at pains to point out, however, that the Cemetery’s occupants do not necessarily represent a complete cross-section of even the expatriate community of Hong Kong. Those who were rich enough managed to go home to Europe or America to enjoy their fortunes, whilst those who lacked the means could not afford to be remembered by a grave in the Hong Kong Cemetery. Hence, what remains is a predominantly middle class population, with a fair sprinkling of military people as well.
Patricia Lim gives us a good account of the lives of these people, not just their deaths. As one of her sources, she has given credit to the Carl Smith Collection at the Public Records Office. In this respect she is but the latest in a long line of historians and writers who have benefited from the meticulous research of this widely respected and much loved former honorary vice president of the Society. Time and again, this unique collection of record cards opens doors to researchers and throws light on areas that might otherwise have remained in darkness. Like Patricia, we remain immensely grateful to this man and his work.
The Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch and Hong Kong University Press are very proud of what they have achieved so far with the Studies Series. More and more people, both here and abroad, are finding that Hong Kong and its unique history and culture provide a rich and fascinating field of study. An increasing number of schools are including the history of our city and its surroundings in their curricula, for which we should be able to take some credit. We will continue to bring to the public original works that will enhance this area even further.
The publications in the Studies Series have been made possible initially by the very generous donation of seeding capital by the Trustees of the Clague Trust Fund, representing the estate of the late Sir Douglas Clague. This donation enabled us to establish a trust fund in the name of Sir Lindsay and Lady Ride, in
memory of our first vice president and his wife. The Society itself added to this
fund, as have a number of other generous donors.
The result is that we now have funding to bring to students of Hong Kong’s history, culture and society a number of books that might otherwise not have seen the light of day. Furthermore, we continue to be delighted with the agreement established with Hong Kong University Press, which sets out the basis on which
the Press will partner our efforts.
Robert Nield President Royal Asiatic Society, Hong Kong Branch October 2010
Preface
I have written this book in the hope that it will fan interest in Hong Kong’s social history and inspire others to continue where I have only just begun to scratch the surface. Where mistakes, inaccuracies and misstatements occur or where opinions might lack balance, the fault is wholly mine. But I would never have begun this project without the enthusiasm and support of my friend and long-time committee member of the British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia, Sue Farringdon, now Mrs. J. Doble. She inspired me to look more closely and methodically at all the tombstones at the Hong Kong Cemetery and then made the journey to Hong Kong in order to assist me in the task of recording them. Both B.A.C.S.A. and the Royal
Asiatic Society, Hong Kong Branch, have generously given me financial support.
The late Reverend Carl Smith was my second inspiration. I visited him at his Mei Foo flat and watched him consulting his card index in order to provide me with much needed help and realized that his index was the perfect tool to help flesh out the names inscribed on the headstones and monuments in the Cemetery. I would particularly like to thank Angela Scrimshire and Penny Robbins, who both spent time reading, sorting out and commenting on the early chapters and pointed me in a more logical way forward. Ko Tim-keung has helped and supported me from the early days of recording and mapping the Cemetery. He helped enormously by using his knowledge of Japanese and of Hong Kong’s history to write Chapter 27 on the Japanese buried in the Cemetery and has been very generous and helpful in allowing me to use interesting and relevant pictures from his collection. I would also like to thank Cliff Atkins who has helped me a lot by taking on so competently much of the work needed to produce a useful database of the graves in the Hong Kong Cemetery, freeing me to work on the book. I owe a debt of gratitude to Dr. Colin Day for not only editing the book but also taking many of the best photographs of particular graves in the Cemetery, and also to Dr. Patrick Hase for his careful reading and helpful comments on the book. I would also like to thank the Hong Kong Public Records Office for their friendly support over the years of research. I would like to thank Dawn Lau and say how much I appreciate her patience and professionalism in shepherding this book on its way to publication.
Many people have kindly allowed me to make use of their pictures free of any charge. They include Martyn Gregory, Dennis Crow, Wattis Fine Art, the Hongkong & Shanghai Banking Corporation and the Hong Kong Museum of Art. I would like to thank them for their generosity.
I would like to thank Richard Morgan of the Hong Kong Police who so generously allowed me to use the results of his research which added interesting new dimensions to the work. Lastly but by no means least, I owe a lot to my family for their steadfast support and in particular to my husband, Poh Chye, who has given me his backing and help throughout.
Introduction
The Hong Kong Cemetery, Its Position and History
In the midst of the concrete sky-scrapers that line the noisy bustling streets of Hong Kong lies an unexpected oasis of peace and quiet. This hallowed ground is arranged in a series of terraces cut into the thick, tree-clad undergrowth that scales the slopes of the hill. The Hong Kong Cemetery contains the main source material for this book. The Cemetery overlooks the Happy Valley racecourse to the front and at the back is bounded by the skyscrapers of Stubbs Road. This area contains a small ecosystem that has changed little over 150 years. It is a safe haven for birds, bats and butterflies. On one day in October, nineteen species of butterflies were recorded in just two and a half hours and on that evening, over a short three-hour period, two very rare moths were among the twenty-eight species found.1 Its trees speak of its age and colonial past and include spectacular Australian gum trees, tall palms as well as magnificent local specimens. The elegant Norfolk Island pines used for making masts for sailing ships were brought here from Norfolk
Hong Kong Cemetery at the junction of sections 12A, 17, 18 and 11A.
I.2. A wooded view across the Cemetery showing the Norfolk Pine trees.
Map: An aerial view of the line of cemeteries facing the Racecourse at Happy Valley, in order going from bottom left to just before the Aberdeen Tunnel (top right): 1. Muslim Cemetery 2. Roman Catholic Cemetery 3. Hong Kong Cemetery. The Parsee Cemetery and Hindu Temple are further up Shan Kwong Rd.
Island, an island not much bigger than Hong Kong, where the descendants of the Bounty mutineers were moved from the overcrowded Pitcairn Islands in 1856. The
magnificent West Indies mahogany tree at the top of Section 11A is unique in Hong Kong and was crowned king of the trees in Wan Chai in 1997.2 The oldest classical fountain in Hong Kong sits in the heart of the Cemetery.
The approximately seven thousand graves which constitute the main source material of this book have been mapped and recorded. If a visitor wants to find a particular grave, it should be possible. Wherever a deceased inhabitant of the Hong Kong Cemetery is mentioned, his or her name has been typed in bold and followed by three numbers in square brackets separated by slashes. The numbers stand for the section, row and number in the row where that particular grave may be found. Those graves mentioned as being in St. Michael’s Roman Catholic Cemetery, the Parsee Cemetery or the Jewish Cemetery will have to be left to the ingenuity of the readers, if they want to locate them.
The Hong Kong Cemetery, which in the course of its history was also known as the Protestant Cemetery and the Colonial Cemetery, lies in Happy Valley opposite the oldest racecourse in Hong Kong and at the centre of a long line of cemeteries. To its right as you look up the slope are the Roman Catholic and Islamic cemeteries opened in 1848 and 1870 respectively. The Catholic cemetery provides an interesting contrast to the Hong Kong Cemetery next to it. It seems as if no-one was turned away. The more egalitarian approach of the Catholic Church is obvious. Whereas the Protestant cemetery is calm, dignified and usually deserted with plenty of space round each grave, the Catholic cemetery is so crowded that it is impossible to reach the end of a row without stepping on graves. The Portuguese, Chinese and British Catholics lie huddled side by side without distinction. That the Catholic cemetery is more deeply integrated into the present day society of Hong Kong is shown by the numbers of visitors who arrive to lay flowers on the graves of their loved ones. The visitors are numerous and generous enough in their floral offerings to keep two stalls of flower sellers in business, whereas no flower seller sits outside the Hong Kong Cemetery.
To the left of the Hong Kong Cemetery is the Parsee Cemetery opened in 1852 and beyond that the plot of land granted to the Hindus in 1880. Since the Hindus cremate their dead, it has been used as a temple. At the head of Happy Valley at 13, Shan Kwong Road, tucked in behind a Buddhist school and temple is the Jewish Cemetery which was opened in 1855.3 Near the Muslim mosque above Hollywood Road, a cemetery was opened early on to cater for the Indian
Muslim dead. This cemetery remained open until 1870 in which year the last of
the Happy Valley cemeteries was formed, for the Muslim dead, to the right of
the Catholic cemetery. That the Chinese were the only people left unprovided for in the early days of
Hong Kong’s history was typical of the government’s attitude towards the majority
race. They were then in the colony uninvited, on sufferance and for limited amounts
of time for money-making purposes only. It was not up to the government to cater to their needs. A letter to the Friend of China dated July 1850 underlines the government’s attitude to the needs of the Chinese in early Hong Kong:
Romanists, Protestants, Zoroastrians and Mahometans have each their allotted places for interment; not so the Chinese who may bury their dead anywhere. On the hills immediately westward of Taipingshan burials of Chinese are of daily occurrence; indeed I am induced to draw your attention to the subject by seeing this morning such a grave being opened within a dozen yards of Queen’s road.
This, Mr. Editor should not be; the locality from its healthfulness may hereafter become one of much desirability for European residences and then in desecrating the graves to erect them, the Chinese may act on precedent
and strike at the head and front of the offending.4
This extract shows how the Chinese majority were relegated to the bottom of the pile where rights of interment were concerned. Even the reason given for the need for a Chinese cemetery assumed that the Europeans had the right to appropriate Chinese burials sites at will for their own use and it was only because the exercising of this right could lead to friction that the Chinese needs
were considered. The precedent alluded to here is the occasion when, in 1849,
D’Amaral, the one-armed governor of Macau, was pulled from his horse and speared to death by Chinese men. He had ordered a road to be cut through the Campo which interfered with the Chinese graves. 5 The area referred to in the
above extract was probably the popular unofficial area for Chinese burials along Fan Mo or Cemetery Street which was renamed Po Yan Street in 1869 when the Tung Wah Hospital was built there. In fact the first designated Chinese burial
ground was opened in 1856.6 The usual reason given for the lack of a need for a Chinese cemetery was that
when the Chinese became sick in a life-threatening way or died in Hong Kong, arrangements were made for their transportation back to their clan villages. There they could be nursed back to health or buried according to the proper rites among their clansmen. But given that the Chinese population in 1850 was said to
be about 32,000 and the death rate in the region of 3 percent (approximately 960
deaths in a year), if only 10 percent of those dying had made no arrangements for their repatriation to China, there would have been ninety-six corpses a year to be buried haphazardly in any suitable spot. 7
Happy Valley
The name Happy Valley was given to the area before the Cemetery was opened. Perhaps it was so called because it was considered the most fertile and prettiest
place on the north coast. Lieutenant Orlando Bridgeman, of the 98th Regiment
of Foot in Hong Kong from 1842 to 1843, described it:
There is only one spot in the whole of the island that has a tree on it. It is called Happy Valley, and is certainly a pretty spot. The rest of the island is one barren rock and perfectly devoid of all vegetation.8
The choice of Happy Valley as the site of the cemeteries can be blamed on the mosquito. It was at first intended to be the principal business centre of
I.3. A view across Happy Valley before the racecourse was built, c. 1845. (By courtesy of Wattis Fine Arts).
Hong Kong. In a lecture given by Rev. James Legge at the City Hall in 1872,
reminiscing on his long sojourn in Hong Kong, he recalled his first sight of Happy Valley in 1843:
There were to be seen only fields of rice and sweet potatoes. At the south
end of it was the village of Wong-nei-ch’ung [Yellow Mud Creek] just as at
the present day, and on the heights above it were rising two or three foreign houses, with an imposing one on the east side of the valley, built by a Mr Mercer of Jardine, Matheson and Co’s house. All these proved homes of fever or death, and were soon abandoned.9
John Ambrose Mercer [11A/6/3], who abandoned his house in Happy Valley,
was one of the first fifteen justices of the peace chosen by the governor, Sir Henry
Pottinger, ‘to represent the leading merchants of the earliest period of the colony’. 10 He died of fever in August 1843 while he was preparing to build a new house on the
waterfront at Wan Chai. His obituary ‘bewails the loss of a truly kind-hearted man’.
The deadly fever was then attributed to poisonous vapours arising from the newly disturbed earth rather than to the bites of the swarms of mosquitoes which rose up from the swampy rice-paddy:
The prejudices of the Chinese merchants against the fungshui [geomantic aspects] of the Happy Valley and the peculiarly malignant fever which
emptied every European house in that neighbourhood almost as soon as it was tenanted caused the business settlement to move gradually westwards.11
And so in the words of Major-General d’Aguilar:
Happy Valley was as suddenly deserted as it was inhabited. Crumbling ruins overgrown with moss and weeds attested on every side to the vain labour of man when he contends with nature. And the Happy Valley restored to its primeval stillness has been converted into a cemetery.12
The Beginning of the Racecourse
The Happy Valley racecourse came into being about ten months after the Hong
Kong Cemetery had opened. In 1845 ‘the deadly Wong Na Chung [Happy Valley]
was drained and the cultivation of rice forbidden’. 13 This left the ground free for other uses. The first references to the racecourse date from early in 1846. A
meeting was held at the house of Archibald Carter of the German firm of Hegan
& Co. to consider measures for converting the valley into a riding ground. Gilbert
Smith who was in the chair offered to approach the governor to ask for the grant
of a lease for a term of years.
Notwithstanding the great improvements lately made in the roads of the Colony, during a great part of the year these are so hard as to be greatly prejudicial to a horse constantly exercised on them. Besides the number of foot passengers is such as to render it highly dangerous to put a horse to a quick pace: while the nature of our climate renders this not only a favourite exercise, but at many times almost the only one which can be indulged in.
The undertaking therefore is one that cannot fail to be most beneficial to the
health of the community as well as a source of innocent amusement, and we
feel confident will be supported by the voice as well as the contributions of
the public.
So work commenced on a public recreation ground subscribed to by the community for the purpose of galloping their horses so that ‘next winter Hongkong will have a race course and racing and other national and manly recreations will be introduced into the youngest British colonial possession’.14 The
first race meeting was held there at the end of 1846. Samuel Gurney Cresswell, a
midshipman on HMS Agincourt, wrote in a letter to his parents:
Hongkong is very gay now. There are races on the 1st and 3rd of December and a race ball on the 4th. I have to ride a flat race on a most beautiful horse and a hurdle race on a very mere little pony…. I have a great deal of work to do getting ready for the races, exercising horses, getting jockey caps, whips, etc.15
Thus began the unusual closeness of the race track with its concomitant gambling to the row of cemeteries which over the years was to surprise so many of the visitors to Hong Kong. As one visitor, who climbed the hillside within the grounds of the Hong Kong Cemetery to better overlook the racecourse, remarked:
But truly looking down from this point, it is a strange combination to see the semicircle of cemeteries and mortuary chapels, just enfolding the race-course, and as it were, repeating the semicircle formed by the Grand Stands!16
The banning of rice cultivation in Happy Valley in 1844 and the subsequent
compulsory purchase of their land deprived the Chinese of Wong Nai Chung of
their livelihood, making them beggars in their own land. The once prosperous village, whose Chinese school in 1845 was the second largest in the colony with twenty-five pupils to Victoria’s twenty-six, continued as a living indictment to
colonial rule until the village was finally pulled down. In 1845, Captain Richard
Collinson of HMS Plover wrote home to his father that ‘the government apparently doesn’t care about the Chinese at all’.17
The Wan Chai and Western Cemeteries
The Hong Kong Cemetery was not the first cemetery in Hong Kong. Two older cemeteries in Wan Chai, one Protestant and the other Roman Catholic, were
situated in the area now occupied by Sun, Moon and Star Streets. In August 1841, a full year before Hong Kong was formally ceded to England in the Treaty
of Nanking on 24 August 1842, John Mylius of the Land Office announced in the
Canton Press:
A piece of land to the eastward of Cantonment Hill having by Government been allotted as the ground for burial of the dead Europeans and others, Notice is hereby given that persons burying their dead in any other unauthorized place will be treated as trespassers.18
It seems that the above notice was necessary because people were burying their dead wherever they found a likely spot, such as the slopes of Happy Valley. One of those buried in an unauthorized cemetery was Commander William Brodie [11A/5/4] who died on 17 June 1841
aged fifty-six. He was buried ‘in the new cemetery in Happy Valley, Hong Kong’, 19 four years before the Hong Kong Cemetery as we now know it was opened.
He must have been relocated to the old Wan Chai Cemetery, as his chest
tomb was among those moved from there to be reburied in the Hong Kong
Cemetery in 1889. Brodie’s grave is one of the earliest monuments in the cemetery. It dates from the year before Hong Kong was officially British. Dr. Edward Cree, surgeon on HMS Rattlesnake in the First Opium War, described Brodie’s death in his diary:
I.6. Commander Brodie’s coffin being carried into Happy Valley for burial. (By Dr. Edward Cree.)
Soon after daylight James Brodie came to tell me that his father was delirious, so I crawled out of bed and into his cabin, and found the poor old Commander shouting violently and apparently shortening sail in the midst of
a storm. I was too ill to do anything for him and sent for Robertson [Assistant Surgeon HMS Hyacinth]. Soon after he became comatose and the fine old sailor and good-hearted man breathed his last.20
Due to the ravages of malaria, dysentery and other diseases little understood by the doctors of the time, the high death toll among the civilians and the garrison
alike meant that the first cemeteries in Wan Chai soon filled up. Already in 1844
thoughts were turning towards a new cemetery. An article in the Friend of China in July 1850 summed up how the decision was taken to open the new cemetery in Happy Valley in the interests of public health, and also to use a second cemetery in
an area of West Victoria already containing soldiers’ graves:
At the close of 1844 and in the early part of 1845, leading members of the Council, then regaining their strength after serious attacks of summer sickness, had under serious consideration the best means of averting disease in future seasons. Amongst other of the causes of sickness, no inconsiderable weight was attached to the burial of corpses within the town precincts. The result of the deliberations of the Council was the public announcement that it had been resolved,
1.
That the burial ground of the East of Victoria should be in the Wong-nei-
chung Valley.
2.
That the burial ground at the West of Victoria should be the one formerly
used by H.M. 55th Regiment: and consequent on the resolutions so announced, burials in the old grounds were altogether forbidden, much we believe to the annoyance of the Procurator of the Roman Catholic Mission … who had just completed some rather expensive cuttings and the erection of a large cross on the site intended as a cemetery …
4. That the burial ground in Victoria West shall be surrounded by a ditch and
a bank and in Victoria East by stone walls.
The article continued:
The walls of the burial place have been duly built in the East; but — no ditch
— no bank — mark the site of the Western Cemetery; and soon the spot,
where lie the remains of so many of the gallant 55th, will be known to but few.
The appointment of a particular place for burials in the West has proved in
short a nullity.21
As was predicted, this Western cemetery, with its many soldiers’ graves, disappeared early on. The botanist and plant collector, Robert Fortune, who passed this spot in 1848 and again in 1851 on his way back to England with his collection of tea plants, described the desolate scene:
A fine road leading round the island … passed through the place where they had been buried. Many of their coffins were exposed to the vulgar gaze, and
the bones of the poor fellows lay scattered about on the public highway.
No one could find fault with the road having been made there, but if it was necessary to uncover the coffins, common decency required that they should
be buried again.22
It might be suggested that the reason so little was done to maintain the Western
cemetery was related to the very low status that the common soldiers, who were buried there, were accorded in the social structure of the day.
The Hong Kong Cemetery
Before the Hong Kong Cemetery opened, Governor Sir John Davis authorized the fees payable for burial there. Five shillings and sixpence or three rupees
went to the sexton for digging a grave of not less than five feet in depth. A $15 ground fee was levied from all those who died possessed of $15. Those who did
not possess this sum were buried as paupers ‘in a separate nook’. Only the armed
forces were exempted. On top of this, a charge of $50 was made for a monument
though, according to an editorial in August 1851, upright headstones were not taxed.23 The sum collected for 1851 amounted to 91 pounds, 13 shillings, nearly enough to pay the total educational outgoings for the same year which amounted to a mere 103 pounds, 6 shillings and 8 pence.24 The above article regarded the ground fee as a payment for the privilege of dying a Protestant, since the Roman Catholics, having bought possession of their ground, never levied charges unless the deceased family wanted to erect a monument, when fees were paid according to the size of the plot desired.
The new tax aroused anti-government sarcasm. Boy Jones wrote in a letter to the Friend of China about how he was under the council table when the taxes were decided on.
I am able to inform that the ‘Death Tax’ was inflicted, not so much for the
direct purpose of raising revenue, as to deter people from dying without just cause, which has been found during the past years of the Colony to have depreciated considerably the value of Crown lands…. Council had reason to believe that many parties died on purpose to have virtues they never possessed in life transmitted for posterity on hewn granite; it was further stated that
others die for no other purpose than to fill up the present ground and put the
government to the expense of opening up another place of sepulture.25
A Very Sick Man wrote in asking the cost of a funeral in Hong Kong as compared to Macau. The editor replied:
We have a dim remembrance of a tax upon the grave itself, another upon
the tomb, another upon a hearse — ordered from England, we believe on Government account — another upon the stones of which the tomb is
built, and some other trifling exactions for the use of a mort-cloth etc. We
should say that the charges paid directly or indirectly to government for a
gentlemanly funeral would be about $100; as the hearse has not yet arrived
probably a little less.26
The work for a new cemetery was carried out and the carriage road round Happy Valley necessary for funeral processions completed by March 1845. The Hong Kong Cemetery opened soon after.27 A mortuary chapel was erected in the same year and the Cemetery was placed under the charge of the colonial chaplain who kept a register of burials.28 The maintenance costs for the Cemetery were borne by the government as
part of the ecclesiastical establishment. The first
burial record book to survive dates from 1853,
with the first grave number given being 807.
Nine of the earliest headstones, not counting
those removed in 1889 from the Wan Chai
Cemetery, date from the first year of operation, 1845. The earliest found is Thomas Doherty [9/17/7], a mate of the SS Pekin, one of the first of the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigator Company ( P. & O.) steamers to visit Hong Kong. He died at sea on 16 March. He was followed in April by David Davidson [9/14/2], the assistant surgeon on the hospital ship, HMS Alligator, and Henry Cropper [9/12/12], a commission agent.
Those graves that have survived from the nineteenth century are predominantly from the middle and lower middle classes. The rich merchants aimed to retire in good time to enjoy their wealth back in ‘the old country’ and the top civil servants had their passages home paid by the government, so could leave the colony when they fell sick or grew old. Thus fewer merchants and top government officials are found buried in the Cemetery in proportion to the number of people who can be ascribed to the middle class. For example, no governor died in office. The only death of a close relative to a governor was that of Felicia Robinson [18/10/3], the wife of Sir William Robinson, who died of undiagnosed sprue soon after giving birth to her baby son in 1894.29 In the same way, no heads of the major mercantile houses, none of the Matheson family or Dent & Co., are buried there and the Jardine house is represented by just one nineteen-month-old baby, who died in May 1852. Almost the only well-known merchant buried there from the early years is William Forsyth Gray [9/18/20], who was thrown from his horse in January 1850 while practising for the races. The merchants could afford a healthier lifestyle and when illness threatened they could leave by the next available boat.
The poor Europeans, who included the soldiers of the garrison, sailors from the merchant navies of a number of different countries, policemen and paupers were buried in nameless graves
only
distinguished by small numbered granite markers.
In the surveyor general’s report of 1855, for instance, among the 152 burials for the past year, it was noted that 31 paupers, 4 destitutes and 3 Russians (perhaps prisoners
of
war) were buried, none of whose graves now exist. 30 By 1865, the Cemetery was thought I.8. Numbered marker stones, Section 20.
to be approaching capacity. The China Mail declared: ‘The time must come for the existing cemetery to be closed and the dead taken elsewhere for burial. The Protestant Cemetery is now nearly full and every little corner is being made use of’. 31 In the mid-1860s, a bandsman in the 20th Foot Regiment writing home
confirmed this. He wrote that Happy Valley was:
crammed with the graves of Europeans who have succumbed to the diseases of the unhealthiest country in the world. The graves of the soldiers
are numbered. And, when the last one was buried, on his grave was 5373,
showing the number who have died here since the city was garrisoned by the British.32
Yet not one grave exists for any soldier below the rank of sergeant before the
mid-1860s. The first headstone of a soldier, of the 2nd Battalion, 9th Regiment, dates from 17 March 1865. It appears that, when the Cemetery seemed to be filling up, the graves unmarked by headstones were dug up and their remains
disposed of, leaving fresh ground for new burials. Charles St. George Cleverly, the surveyor general, admitted as much when he reported in 1861 that there
were difficulties in expanding the area of the Cemetery, the soil in the new areas
being ‘excessively rocky and hard to excavate’, making it very difficult to dig graves. He continued:
I will however take such measures as may be necessary to provide sufficient
accommodation and in the course of a few years, it may be possible to work the old areas unprotected by gravestones over again, as is done, I understand in other tropical climes.33
The number of soldiers dying in Hong Kong was of considerable embarrassment to the government who disliked the bad publicity on the subject in the British press. Perhaps they welcomed the opportunity to dislocate the numbering system which made it clear to anyone visiting the Cemetery exactly
how many had died, not while fighting, but of common diseases in Hong Kong.
Thus, the men and women from the earlier periods now represented by grey granite headstones consist almost entirely of the various layers of the Protestant and Non-Conformist middle class.
The Monuments in the Hong Kong Cemetery and Their Imagery
1845–1859
The Protestant ethos is clearly shown particularly in the design of the earlier
gravestones and it makes this cemetery very different from St. Michael’s Roman Catholic Cemetery next to it. In short, and much oversimplified, the Protestants
believed that God had got lost among the ritual, symbolism and imagery of the Roman Catholic Church. They wanted a simpler religion that spoke to
its people directly through the Word of God in the Bible and not through the
intervention of pictures, statues, vestments and priests. The lower the church, the simpler were its symbols, decorations and rituals. This cemetery was the burying ground for all shades of Protestantism, including the lower church Lutherans, Presbyterians, Methodists and Baptists who were brought together in the Union Church, founded in 1843 by Rev. James Legge, whose wife, Mary Isabella Legge [9/17/9] and baby daughter, Anne Murray [9/17/10], are buried in the Cemetery.
The design of the headstones changed dramatically over the years charting changes in religious practices, fashion, wealth and
I.9. Early headstones, Section 9.
the way death was viewed. From 1842 up to the mid-1860s, beside a handful of monuments raised by particular ships or regiments or to commemorate well-loved doctors, two main types of monuments remain: granite chest tombs, for those who wanted to make a statement and who could
afford the extra $50 tax to the
government, and headstones. I.10. Early chest tombs, Section 11A.
The great majority of headstones are starkly simple with either rounded or sharply triangular tops cut from the local granite. In this period of seventeen years, only four graves have been found whose headstones were not cut from granite. Two much revered missionary wives, Mary Isabella Legge and Anna Johnson [9/16/12], and two Americans, one a merchant, Samuel H. Rich [9/14/15] and the other a sea captain, Captain Elias Elwell [9/14/14], have marble headstones brought in from elsewhere. Anna Johnson’s headstone is decorated with a book
to emphasize the importance of the sacred scriptures. Where headstones have
carvings, the motifs seem to have been carved without much thought having been
given to their significance. Some of these motifs almost look as if they were left to
be decided by the Chinese craftsmen, who altered Chinese motifs, such as the bat, to suit the tastes of their Christian clients. Even the symbol of the cross was rare in
early days. The first crosses in the Cemetery seem to be that on the tomb of Bishop
Joseph Smith’s son, Andrew Brandrum Smith [7/28/6], who died in 1854, and one commemorating the death of Odiarne Tremayne Lane [13/4/3]. A handful of headstones have a simple Latin cross carved in the top quadrant like that of John Smithers [40/4/7]. The plain simple headstones seem to say that death was too frequent, the deceased are colleagues rather than beloved relatives, and that the decency of a proper Protestant burial was more important than remembrance in a place like Hong Kong where few wanted to stay for any length of time. This conclusion is also borne out by the comparative rarity of epitaphs and the number of stones on which it is stated that they were erected by friends or colleagues of the deceased rather than relatives.
In the early years of the Cemetery, the frequency of death was something
no-one wanted to think about. A sergeant in the 59th Regiment, James Bodell,
who attended the races in Happy Valley, perhaps summed up the general feeling about the Cemetery in his memoirs: ‘I always considered the Race Course was in the wrong Place, as the Sight of the Grave Yard generally dampened my Spirits and took all Pleasure away at these Races’. 34 Equally, the attitude to the Cemetery seems fairly cavalier. Men could joke about such places without it being considered in bad taste. For example, a quirky notice appeared in February 1844, in the ads column of the newspaper, the Friend of China:
A gentleman having purchased a lot of land, unsuitable for building purposes is anxious to form a Joint Stock company for the formation of a Cemetry
[sic]. It must be evident to the weakest men that the contemplated project
will prove a safe investment, as the Grave Stones are already in a plentiful supply upon the lot and only require engraving and should it not succeed, there is every reason to suppose, that only 15% will have to be paid on its abandonment. For particulars, enquire at the office of Messrs. Quirk,
Gammon and Snap, Saffron Hill where a Map of the lot may be seen and the
largest stones (suitable of course only for Mandarins) are given on the plan…. Having enumerated the advantages, we have only one drawback to mention: that no Gentleman can be buried here until he makes a Road up to it, and brings his own Earth to cover him.35
The cemeteries in early days appear to have been regarded more as functional spaces reserved for the decent and healthy observance of the rites of burial, whether the dead were Protestant, Catholic, Christian, Jewish, Muslim or Parsee. The mystique of sacredness which was connected to wealth, nationalism and empire seems to have been a later Victorian development. A letter to the Friend of China from the sexton F. Drake in April 1849 shows the lack of respect paid to the
European dead when he wrote that he had ‘long been desirous to suppress an evil’. He asked the readers to pardon his ‘humble intrusion’ and related the following:
On the morning of Friday last, when performing my usual duties in the Burying Ground, I unexpectedly discovered that the feet of horses had left many impressions on that part of the ground where it is scarcely possible for an animal to expand a limb without resting on a grave! I hastened to learn the cause and by whom the unpardonable trespass had been committed, but the unintelligible coolies, therein employed, and who are perpetually cautioned to prevent cattle, dogs etc. (as also are two printed notices on each side of the
entrance door, sufficiently conspicuous and respectful to attract the organs of
the most indistinct observer) could only inform me that some ‘Mandarins’ had
been guilty of the offence.36
The path between the Cemetery and the racecourse was narrow and men out exercising on horseback in the early mornings had no compunction about taking their horses into the Cemetery grounds and over the graves when they wanted to pass the slower members of the fraternity. As late as the mid-1860s, it was reported that until recently the colonial chaplain was in the habit of turning in his ponies to graze there.
Furthermore cemeteries were often neglected. A letter in March 1857 to the
China Mail complained of the state of the Roman Catholic Cemetery. The editor, after visiting the site, was clearly scandalized:
In one open grave were the coffin and the winding sheet though the human remains which they had contained were gone. The bottom of the coffin was
barely three feet from the surface of the earth…. The ground is apparently just as it was when granted to the Catholics nine or ten years ago for burial purposes and the rude huts at the entrance are without doors or windows, every vestige of woodwork, if there ever was any there, having been removed…. A few cartloads of soil from the neighbourhood, with a sprinkling of grass-seed would quite change the aspect of the spot and at least give it a semblance of a Christian burial-place.37
Then in May 1857, the China Mail reported on the state of the Wan
Chai Cemetery:
The condition of the Old Protestant Burial Ground … is said to be in a shameful state — the tombstones capsized, some broken, and others carried away by the Chinese for building purposes; while the ground is strewed with
filth and with skulls and other relics of mortality.38
In an article on the Protestant Cemetery in 1865, the editor complained that the south end of the Cemetery, where the soldiers were buried, was still unwalled twenty years after the decision that it should be enclosed had been taken. The author noted that few in the colony took an interest in preserving or beautifying the cemeteries of Happy Valley. He made a rather unconvincing plea for a better
level of care on the grounds that the Valley may become ‘our final abode, and our
relatives may possibly come to shed a tear over our graves, recall the memory of what we were and grieve over our loss’. Neither this article nor respect for
the dead galvanized the authorities into taking action. The Western Cemetery disappeared, and in the old Protestant Cemetery at Wan Chai only forty-eight
monuments of those buried between 1842 and 1845 still remained in good enough
condition to be moved to Section 11A of the Hong Kong Cemetery in 1889.39
1860–1880
The majority of headstones in the 1860s and on into the 1870s followed the earlier
Protestant guidelines. They are easily distinguished from the earlier headstones by their larger size and the more complicated patterns for their tops, as is shown by the one commemorating Sarah Barton [4/8/8], wife of Zephaniah Barton, opium inspector for Dent & Co.
The headstones displayed greater skill on the part of the carvers. Many were now edged and a number, particularly to lost wives, had heart-shaped inscription panels with side pillars. A new design had a fleur-de-lis at the centre of the top and curled side edges, as is seen in the headstone of Jane Bonnett [5/3/20]. More examples of crosses are found, both in the form of crosses carved into the top quadrant of headstones and of standing crosses such as that to Eliza Dalziel [5/3/29], the wife of the agent for the P. & O. shipping line, who died in 1866. A very impressive cross was raised in 1866 over the tomb of the Basel missionary, Anna
I.11. Headstone in memory of
Reiniger [5/3/17]. As the century progressed
Sarah Barton, d. 1867, wife of
into the 1870s, a number of different kinds of
Zephaniah Barton of Swatow,
crosses can be seen, including the Celtic cross, merchant for Dent’s and opium inspector at Hong Kong. A typical
the Latin cross and the Armenian cross which is
headstone of the type used in the found over the grave of Avietick Lazar Agabeg 1860s. [8/19/4], the first Armenian to be buried in the Cemetery, in 1876. A new model of tombstone, a low cruciform type, became increasingly popular in the 1870s with more than ten examples. A number of grave plots, such as that of R.S.R. Fussell [5/3/1], were now enclosed with granite surrounds and metal railings. Although granite was still the most common stone, the late seventies saw a small number of larger and more expensive monuments built of red or black marble.
1880–1920
By 1909, the governor Sir Henry Blake could describe Happy Valley as ‘A flat
oval, around which the hill-sides are devoted to a series of the most beautifully kept cemeteries in the world. Here Christian and Mohammedan, Eastern and
Western, rest from their labours while below them … every sport and game of
England is in full swing’.40 Some time before the turn of the century, the grounds of the Cemetery were remodelled on a garden design in the latest European fashion. This remodelling made the Hong Kong Cemetery very different from
the other cemeteries in Hong Kong. It featured flowering trees, winding paths,
spaciousness and a fountain in the classical style.
This new style of burial ground had earlier become popular in England, where there had been an awakening to the importance of public health issues. The crowded old churchyards in the large new towns had become unsanitary. People were aware as they walked to church of horrid smells that emanated from the burial plots. This led to the formation of a National Funeral and Mourning Reform Society with the aims of making burial sanitary and encouraging moderation and simplicity. The first of the new kind of garden cemetery was the Pere Lachaise Cemetery founded on the outskirts of Paris in 1803. This cemetery inspired the huge garden cemeteries established outside big towns in England, among the first being All Soul’s Cemetery, which was founded in 1832 at Kensal Rise in North-West London.
By the closing years of the nineteenth century, the old Protestant guidelines that stressed simplicity and lack of symbolism seem to have disappeared. The headstones had become typically high Victorian with a number of new motifs.
I.12. A photograph taken in the 1890s showing that the Hong Kong Cemetery has been remodelled in the style of a garden. (By courtesy of Ko Tim-keung.)
Motifs More Commonly Found on Late Victorian Graves in the Hong Kong
Cemetery and Their Meanings
Motif
Acanthus leaf
Anchor or Capstan
Caliper and set-square Cherub Clover Conch shell Columns: Broken
Columns: With urn and shroud
Grapes One hand Two hands
Ivy
Lily Palm Urn
Symbol of
Peace in the Garden of Eden; the plant was thought to grow in paradise. Hope anchored in Christian belief which death cannot change. Freemasonry. A soul soaring heavenwards. The Holy Trinity, also of Ireland. Baptism and pilgrims. A person who died in the prime of life (the age being indicated by the length of the column)
The person was buried in that place.
The Last Supper and Christ’s blood. God’s helping hand stretched to guide us to him. Matrimony and the couple’s hope that they will meet in the next world. The evergreen nature of ivy symbolizes immortality and victory over death won by the
Redeemer. Clinging ivy symbolizes fidelity and
friendship. Purity. The peace of resurrection and life eternal. Death.41
Innovations in the use of symbolism were generally first used on the tombs of dearly beloved wives or deeply mourned children. For example, by the late Victorian times, angels and cherubs were beginning to appear. Other than a very small apology for an angel on the headstone of Sophia C. Boxer [9/18/15], wife of the chief storekeeper of the naval yard victualling department in 1860/66? (old, worn inscription), the first cherub that has been found dates to 1873, and is seen on the headstone commemorating the death of two infants, Helen and Mabel Speechly [7/16/13]. The first full-sized angel must have seemed daringly papist to contemporaries. It adorned the grave of Andrew Millar [23/9/1], plumber
to the government as well as gas fitter and general contractor who died in 1890.
Although cherubs became more usual as memorials to much loved children, angels remained uncommon.
The presence of a picture of the deceased on the headstone first appeared in 1876 adorning the headstone of Peter Petersen [8/21/1], a Swedish tavern keeper with a Chinese wife. This artist’s impression on porcelain of J.A. Straube [12A/3/9], who died in 1928, is an interesting example. It indicated that the person responsible for erecting the headstone was almost certainly Chinese and was following the Chinese custom.
The wealthier and more settled population wanted to remember and honour their dead in a way the earlier generations in Hong Kong had had neither the inclination nor the money for. An explosion in the number of types and the size of monuments seems to date from the 1880s, a time when the size of the population and the wealth of the colony were increasing. Large imposing crosses became common like the one over Theophilus Gee Linstead’s [8/12/1] grave. A number of pedestal tombs can be seen, such as the one to mark the grave of Captain Paul Kupfer [8/13/5] of the Imperial German Navy, which is topped by a magnificent eagle poised for flight. Scrolls unrolled over flowery boulders. Relatives of the deceased seem freer to use their own initiative to create new designs for their memorials. For example, when William Dolan [5/2/8], the doughty, old timer who
had been making sails at Whampoa
and Hong Kong for forty years or more, died in 1885, his rugged indestructibility was remembered in a large solid block of granite. The amount and intricacy of the carving also increased.
Epitaphs were more frequent and longer. Hong Kong was now more firmly embedded in the wider embrace of the British Empire, both administratively and culturally. It seemed that those burying their loved ones, besides having more money, now also had faith in both the continuity of Hong Kong as a small part of the empire and of the Cemetery in which they had buried their loved ones. The old, rather cavalier view of death had now given away to a more patriotic and nationalistic view of a piece of ‘sacred’ ground that symbolized the sacrifice and suffering of those who had assisted in the building of the empire and died far from home. Intrepid lady travellers stopped off at Hong Kong to report back to the homebound in Britain on the wonders of Britain’s outposts. Mrs. Gordon Cumming writing in 1879 described the Cemetery as: ‘This silent God’s acre’. 42 Major Henry Knollys praised it as ‘the saddest and most beautiful acre in the British Empire; the so-called Happy Valley’.43
Yet, at a time when its name was changed from Protestant to Colonial Cemetery and its ‘sacred nature’ was being stressed, the Chinese and Japanese were building for themselves positions of economic strength in the colony from which they could wield their power and they were demanding to bury
their dead in the Public Cemetery. When the question of the burial of non-Christians in the Hong Kong Cemetery arose in 1909, some members of the
European community objected to their funeral services, citing in particular the
custom of lighting joss sticks and firing of crackers at the graveside as disturbing
to the peace of the place. Although nominally the land had been put aside for Protestant burials and placed under the care of the colonial chaplain, the
Cemetery grounds were not consecrated until 1910. They were maintained at
public cost and were therefore public property and open to all tax payers. There was nothing in the ordinances to stop the burial of non-Christians. Over the turn of the century some Chinese and a larger number of Japanese non-Christians found their way into the Cemetery. The controversy burst out into the open when Chan Yui Tong applied to the sanitary board to purchase four new grave sites so that he could set up a family grave to include the two wives and son of his father, Tsai Kwong, chief interpreter of the Supreme Court.44 The new
Christian Cemetery Ordinance of 1909 proposed that the Cemetery should
be enlarged and that a certain portion of the Cemetery should be set aside for Christian interment. Lau Chu Pak, part-owner of the Hong Kong Telegraph and member of the sanitary board, objected to the racial overtones of the proposed ordinance, and the Telegraph took up the case:
The fact of the matter is that this sort of petty municipal legislation is all of a piece with the policy of the Government in reserving special lands for the bon ton of the Colony. First, they decree that in life the Chinese should not live in
the vicinity of the Peak and now in death the Chinese are not deemed fitting
occupants of lairs in the public cemetery…. The Colonial or Protestant — or whatever fancy name anybody might wish to call it — the public cemetery of Hong Kong is maintained out of the rates and taxes provided by the residents in the Colony. It is no more a private institution than the public gardens. No sect or body has a right to say that it has any particular claim on the domain, as far as we can make out, all have an equal right to interment.
The Telegraph continued in the same editorial asking:
Are the Chinese and Japanese to be relegated to the slums of paradise while
the ‘hupper suckles’ [upper circles] loll and lounge on the grassy swards of
the golden river, secure against the intrusion of the vulgar rabble.… It is incredible to believe that all this pushing for precedence and squabbling for place will follow us to the next world.45
The final passing of the ordinance was followed by a dedication service held at the Cemetery in March 1910 by the Anglican bishop, assisted by the clergy of other denominations, of that portion of land set aside for Christian burials. Most of the later Japanese graves are now found high up the hill in the more isolated sections 34, 35 and 36, and the majority of the Chinese graves in the equally distant sections 1 and 2.
By the twentieth century, the style of monuments was being influenced by the art deco movement. Concrete was taking the place of granite. Many White Russian refugees, fleeing the Bolshevik revolution down through Siberia to the port of Harbin, continued their journey south to end their days in Hong Kong. The cross of the Russian Orthodox Church can be found in all parts of the Cemetery. There also exists a rare example of the Nazi swastika on the headstone of Paul Kurt Brohmann [16F/15/2] who may have been serving on one of the German naval vessels when he died in 1934.
The above paragraphs greatly oversimplify the huge diversity in the styles and the architecture of the tombstones and monuments found in the Hong Kong Cemetery.
I.16. Monument in memory of Paul Kurt Brohmann. Note the small Nazi swastika in the top of the picture.
Source Material
The Hong Kong Cemetery will be used as an important source material and is supplemented by some significant names from the Catholic, Parsee and Jewish Cemeteries, in order to bring to life the differing kinds of people who made up Hong Kong’s society over the decades and to show what shaped their thoughts,
hopes and fears. By fleshing out the names found on the tombstones, by using the
newspapers of the day together with material from the cards that make up Carl Smith’s collection at the Hong Kong Public Records Office and contemporary travellers’ tales, one can begin to recreate the way of life of these people in the hope that this will bring new insights. The Hong Kong Cemetery is at first sight an amazing repository of history, since in theory all the early Protestants and Nonconformists were buried there. In fact the Cemetery has certain drawbacks from the point of view of the historian. Firstly, it could be hoped that the headstones would show a representational proportion of the various classes that lived in Hong Kong in any particular decade. But, as has been shown, the Cemetery is predominantly a middle-class enclave in which the very poor and very rich are under-represented. Thus, the emphasis will of necessity be on the middle class, who make up the bulk of the burials.
Secondly, when the Aberdeen Tunnel was built in 1976, cemetery ground
was appropriated and more than three thousand graves were moved or consigned to the ossuary. It seems that, when this was done, the graves of the officers in the armed services and those serving on merchant navy ships were relocated to different sections, whereas the graves of little known civilians were sent to the ossuary, thus upsetting the balance between army, merchant navy and civilians. Those in the ossuary have their names and dates inscribed on their pigeon-holes, but they lack all the extra information that is found in the inscriptions on headstones, so it is difficult to allocate to them an occupation and a place in society. This means that the information from the Cemetery is less representative than it might have been.
With these two provisos, the Cemetery remains an invaluable source of
Hong Kong history. It enables us to build up an idea of the makeup of those people, mainly from the middle classes, who settled, if only for a time, married and raised children there. From these threads, it is hoped that a picture will emerge of how Hong Kong changed direction, grew and branched out from the blustery little seaport, dealing mainly in opium in its early years, to an important international city.
For lack of much other material, the newspapers of the day constitute an important and much used source. However a caution is necessary in interpreting what they show about society. Firstly, certain newspapers catered to particular readers and showed certain biases. For example, the Friend of China while under the editorship of William Tarrant was clearly biased against the establishment. Tarrant had lost his job in the government when he exposed the alleged corruption of Major William Caine and his comprador. He continued for a number of years to carry on a personal vendetta against the establishment in the pages of his newspaper. Even before Tarrant assumed ownership of the paper in 1850, the perceived biased outlook of the Friend of China had led to the founding of a second newspaper, the China Mail, which was backed by money from the merchant elite and was therefore more sympathetic towards their point of view. Secondly, the newspapers were written and published for profit and sensational stories, especially if they involved well-known people in the community, sold more copies. This aspect was compounded by the court reports which inevitably portrayed men in a negative light, since they were being accused of some misdemeanour or loss of control which perhaps, had we more facts on which to judge them, was out of character for those individuals. As these reports are now often the only remaining source of information on certain individuals, they may paint a rather bleaker picture of the people and the period than is warranted.
Section I
AN INTRODUCTION TO EARLY HONG KONG
Chapter 1
The Early Settlers,
the First Opium War
and Its Aftermath
Death and life, the theme of this book, is a reversal of the usual order because the book begins with death, the tombstone and then looks backwards in order to breathe life back into the faded and forgotten names that are so difficult to decipher on the old grey granite stones. It attempts to shed light on the lives of these men, women and children who people the terraces of the vast Hong Kong Cemetery. It aims to put them back into the surroundings they were familiar with and among the friends they spent time with. It looks further back to the factors that formed the society they lived in and brought forth their hopes and fears. Hopefully, a picture of an older version of Hong Kong will emerge that underlies our modern Hong Kong, influencing its development in subtle and often little understood ways.
The social history of the early settlers in Hong Kong has been largely ignored. They have been dismissed as a small, troublesome and corrupt group of between
about five hundred and one thousand men, rather fewer than the typical roll call
of most schools in Hong Kong now. It may be asked why the way in which the early colonists ordered their society has any importance in the larger view of Hong Kong history where recently and rightly the emphasis has been on teasing out the facts that shed light on the history and progress of the Chinese majority who made their home in Hong Kong. It seems though to me that there are two reasons why their lives should be looked at more closely.
Firstly, the early settlers in their lack of comprehension and their distrust of
the Chinese race were at least partly responsible for relaying to Britain the cliches
of the inscrutable, mysterious and inherently untrustworthy Oriental which so
coloured the way the Chinese were regarded in the West. They helped to pave
the way in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for the ‘us’ and ‘them’ way of interacting with and studying the Orient, with the superiority of the ‘us’ faction as a sine qua non assumption. The knowledge that was being busily acquired by the colonists gave the governments back in England a handle in their dealings with the ‘them’ of their colony on the outskirts of China. It coloured the way the politicians back in Britain decided on their diplomatic paths in their dealings with
the Chinese Empire. In fact, it coloured East-West intercourse and the course of
history both in Hong Kong and in the wider context of the Far East through the nineteenth century and beyond. As Edward Said says:
The Orient was viewed as if framed by the classroom, the criminal court, the prison, the illustrated manual. Orientalism, then, is knowledge of the Orient that places things Oriental in class, court, prison or manual for scrutiny, study, judgement, discipline or governing.1
Secondly, the path that the government took in Hong Kong was determined by the early experiences of the European settlers. The way it developed, without being subjected to the usual democratizing influences, was due to the particular circumstances that arose in Hong Kong. Perhaps part of the reason for the lack of a viable opposition to autocratic rule by the governor together with his carefully chosen Executive Council, backed by military power, lay in the fragmentation of society where small groups were set against each other. This layering pushed the various groups and sub-groups of European settlers so far apart that it was almost impossible for the cliques or layers to combine forces and Hong Kong governors in the nineteenth century were, by and large, able to divide and rule. On the few occasions when the whole community, including the Chinese, came together, as in October 1844, to oppose Sir John Davis’s attempt to impose registration and a poll tax on the entire population, the governor was soon forced to climb down and amend the legislation.2 But even at that early date, the merchant body wrote a letter to the papers, signed by forty-four of their leaders, indignantly denying the governor’s insinuation that they had ‘colluded’ with the Chinese: ‘Not one of them had the slightest idea that the Chinese intended closing their shops or leaving work’. 3 The early relationships between the English and the Chinese, largely based on the fear and distrust of the few in the face of the potential for trouble of the many, meant that at this time it was almost impossible for the two races to come together to oppose the government. Unlike in the other colonies, the early settlers found no better class of Chinese on whom they could devolve the responsibility of looking after their own people as they did in Malaya or India, where the British ruled through the local kings or princes. For these reasons perhaps, power was kept throughout the nineteenth century firmly in the hands of the governor and his administrators and backed by a large military presence. Meanwhile the neglected Chinese majority left largely to their own devices were forced to form their own organizations to cater to their needs.
Those early members of Hong Kong society buried in Happy Valley were members of a very small and distant society living in an environment full of dangers. Their health was at risk from little-understood diseases. Their possessions and even their lives stood in danger of being snatched away by dangerous Chinese outlaws engaged in robbery and piracy. It is the aim of this book to explore such questions as to why they took the huge risks, leaving their
homes and families to seek new lives in the Far East, what influences they brought from the West and what peculiar circumstances and events in Hong Kong shaped
the kind of society they attempted to build in their new home. From this, it is hoped that insights will emerge as to the kind of society that evolved here.
The City in the Early Years
In 1845, the year in which the Hong Kong Cemetery was opened, the city of Victoria was only three years old. The northern slopes of the Peak at whose feet it lay were stark and bare, denuded of all vegetation by generations of grass
cutters from the mainland. The first sight of Hong Kong by those arriving at the
port was of barren mountain sides. The tiny European population, numbering a
1.1. Hong Kong 1857. (Illustrated London News, 14 March 1857.)
mere 501 men and 133 women not counting the garrison, clustered in Victoria, as Central was then called.4 They ranged mostly along Queen’s Road between
Central and Wan Chai,
with the wealthier merchants leaving their assistants in their
1.2. Hong Kong. An early engraving.
merchant houses by
the sea and retiring up the hillside to large bungalows surrounded by gardens. The Europeans were hugely outnumbered by the Chinese population. In 1845, those Chinese who
had been registered, numbering 15,800 men and 3,290 women, crowded into the
lower bazaar, the higher area of Tai Ping Shan and along the banks of the stream that cut across Hollywood Road and ran into the sea where Central Market now stands.5 These figures do not include the many unregistered visitors to the island. A further 4,100 Chinese were living in traditional villages mainly on the south side of the island which they had inhabited for generations. The imbalance of the sexes both among the European and Chinese inhabitants of Victoria is very striking. It points to an unsettled, male-dominated society where the tavern and the brothel
flourished. In 1845, according to government sources, only twenty-five Chinese
family homes existed in Victoria, yet already there were twenty-six brothels.6 The port attracted many nationalities as can be seen from the fact that aliens
and resident strangers accounted for another 409 residents. These would have
included Malays, Lascars, Parsees, and Manila men from the Philippines.
Victoria had sprung up in the first three years in a burst of enthusiasm and a
scurry of buildings that took everyone by surprise. Captain Richard Collinson, in a letter home dated 22 February 1844, wrote:
Our city of Victoria … has been built almost in a day. If you leave it for a
month, where you left a rock, you find a drawing room furnished in the height
of Indian luxury … and a road where there was twenty feet of water.7
At the end of 1845, the Seamen’s Hospital had been erected and an Ice House
Company established selling ice at four cents a pound to subscribers and five cents to non-subscribers. The Freemasons had inaugurated their first lodge. There were
two competing newspapers in the colony, the Friend of China, begun in 1842, and its young rival, the China Mail which started in February 1845. The latter aimed at a less anti-government and more upper-class readership. The Hong Kong Club was being built and was due to open in 1846. Anglican Church services were being still held in a mat-shed while plans were being approved for a cathedral, but the Roman Catholics, the Nonconformist Unionists and the American Baptists had
all erected permanent chapels or churches and the Muslims had built a mosque.8
The town itself spread along
Queen’s Road following the line
of the beach for about a mile from
just west of Central to Wan Chai
with the garrison barracks area cutting between the two. Victoria looked towards the sea to a much greater extent than present day Central does. The goods being unloaded at piers along the waterfront would be dragged straight across Queen’s Road into the waiting godowns. On any one day, about thirty visiting brigs, barques, schooners or steam ships would be anchored in the harbour together with visiting ships of the Royal Navy and two or three permanently anchored opium-receiving ships. Many of the vessels arriving at Hong Kong would have carried opium.9
The capital, Victoria, displayed all the raw earthiness of a frontier town. Open drains made the air smelly, particularly above Tai Ping Shan where there were flat drying fields on which the night soil of Hong Kong was deposited to allow the liquid to trickle down the hill before the dry solids were exported to Kowloon as fertilizer. Pigs and pariah dogs wallowed on hot days luxuriating in the ‘blue liquid mud’ of the creeks where the streams ran down to the sea. 10 Goats and cattle wandered freely along the roads, destructively nibbling at the newly planted trees. In 1849, No Goat Sucker wrote to the newspaper, the Friend of China, complaining that the goats had reached plague proportions and suggested that ‘the policemen should be allowed to practise their muskets upon them, powder and shot to be supplied by subscription’.11
The fleet of anchored vessels were served by a small army of sampans that
tied up beside the Chinese fishing fleet near the Central Market.12 Whole families
of boat people lived on these boats, and the cries of their babies added to the
nightly cacophony. The fishermen spent:
all day mending seine or curing fish but the moment the morning gun fires,
there is such a clamour — such a rattle of bamboo on the gunwales of boats
(to induce the fish to go quietly into the nets) that … sleeping in the locality
indicated is absolutely impossible.13
Then, at sunset, the men on the Chinese junks chin-chin Jos paid their devotions to the gods by beating gongs and tom-toms and letting off crackers. Sleep was
made more difficult by:
those merciless unmuzzled dogs … who all in one grand chorus disturb the
night with their barking … fighting and howling until daylight dawns when
the howl is augmented by the shrill notes of the cock aided and abetted by the geese and turkeys in a neighbouring poultry yard.14
Noise at night was a persistent problem. George Strachan, architect and also editor of the China Mail, and James Brown [10/8/3], solicitor, both resorted to violence. Strachan was fined $15 in the summer of 1851 for assaulting an unfortunate journeyman silversmith who continued to beat out his silverware after midnight. In a consequent letter signed A Monument of Patience, he asked why braziers, tinkers and cobblers were permitted to work through ‘the silent vigils of the night’. He continued: ‘The tombstone cutter’s chisel is at work through the
whole night, and it is hardly a figure of speech to say that every blow cuts a letter
in his neighbour’s epitaph’. He was then woken at early dawn by the cries of the hawkers selling ‘one lychee, a pineapple, a leg of a dry duck, a slice of white poultice
[probably rice porridge or congee] or raw pork’. 15 Brown was fined $25 for ‘violently
assaulting a Chinese bookmaker in his own shop because he was disturbed by the beat-beating of a shoemaker occupying part of the same shop in what was meant to be the silent watches of the night’. 16 Drunken singing from the taverns, which disregarded the regulation 11 p.m. closing times, caused further annoyance: ‘Every evening one’s ears are assailed with the beastly songs and carousings of the customers of these dens of iniquity’. The carousing was not confined to the
lower ranks. Inebriated officers of the 18th Royal Irish Regiment smashed eight
house lamps along Queen’s Road including those of Messrs Markwick [10/8/2], Franklyn [13/9/3], Winniberg [40/2/3] and Maclehose [9/9/9] and were urged to own up and pay up.17 The officers of the Ceylon Rifles Regiment, in their mess in D’Aguilar Street, were only restrained from loud singing into the small hours by a direct order from the governor himself. By day Queen’s Road was thronged by hawkers, who were jostled by drunken soldiers and sailors. The chaos was made worse by ‘furious riding’, the subject of many letters of complaint: ‘At the time the streets are most crowded, there they are, riding their tits (horses) helter skelter, three or four abreast, no man saying them nay’. 18 The writer alleged that people had been trodden under foot, seriously injured and even killed.
The lack of understanding between the races in this period meant that each race looked after their own in their own way and there were few points of contact. The authorities were completely taken by surprise when a gunpowder factory blew up in Shau Kei Wan killing several Chinese. The China Mail observed: ‘It is carried on by desperadoes … and their only customers have been pirates, smugglers and outlaws’.19 Legislation was hastily introduced banning the making or selling of gunpowder on Hong Kong Island.
Between 1845 and 1850, Hong Kong was hit by a downward spiral that
could have led to its demise. When in 1851 a huge conflagration destroyed most
of the little wooden shacks in the Chinese part of Victoria, the editor of China Mail exclaimed sadly: ‘Hong Kong is a place of so little note that if the whole of it had burned the other day, the world at large would have cared but little for it’. 20 Although the China Mail put forward interesting proposals for the Great Exhibition of 1851 in the Crystal Palace, which give us a picture of the more
important and flourishing Chinese enterprises in the colony at that time, nothing
came of their proposals. The paper had suggested sending a portable model of a stone quarry, with the tools used to extract the stone. Joss making, at Aberdeen, would make an impressive exhibit with its carved, gilded and painted joss sticks together with a model of a joss house. A third proposal was to demonstrate Chinese skills found in the bazaar at Victoria with examples of porcelain painting and quilt making which would show a model of two men carding the cotton and making the quilts together with the finished products.21 In the end:
The only exhibits representing Hong Kong in that fair temple of the world’s commercial competition at Hyde Park consisted of a tiny pagoda, a jade cup and two silver race cups … and a North China walking stick…. How very little was thought or known of Hong Kong at this time even by those in authority in England is evidenced by the fact that the Royal Commission of the International Exhibition of 1851 gave no place to Hong Kong as a colony.22
Factors Affecting Early Hong Kong and Its Society
The First Opium War: 1840–42
The events leading up to the First Opium War and the conflict itself are important
in that they led to the foundation of Hong Kong and influenced the mindset of its residents. The merchants, who derived a greater part of their profit from an illegal trade in opium, were well aware that, with each transaction they made, they alienated themselves further from the Chinese authorities and made war more likely. In order to give a brief background to the lead-up to the war, the events will be described focusing on the part played by John Slade [11A/6/6] who died in August 1843 and whose chest tomb is among the earliest graves in the Cemetery.
Slade was personally involved in the quarrel over the open import of the semi-legal drug, opium. Though banned earlier by the emperor, the opium trade had in effect been allowed to continue so long as stiff duties were paid. The
situation changed in 1839 with the arrival of Commissioner Lin Tsu-hsu with a
new mandate to end the trade in the drug. Its continued import into China after
this date culminated in the First Opium War and the annexation of Hong Kong by Britain. The decline and final demise of the East India Company in 1834 left a
power vacuum with no obvious British representatives with whom the Chinese authorities could negotiate. Its place was taken by the ‘country’ merchants, the name given to those who had been trading on their own as opposed to under the auspices of the East India Company, and trading to a large extent in opium. The trade in opium, carried on by these robust believers in ‘free trade’ had grown from approximately 5,000 chests a year in the years 1801 to 1820 to 30,000 chests in 1836. The use of the forbidden drug had increased in China to such an extent that it was
said that, ‘A son of the emperor himself died in his very palace from the effects of the excessive use of opium. He [the Emperor] was totally unable to exclude the
drug even from his own palace’.23 Mandarins both smoked opium and dealt in it,
and made enormous profits from it. The country merchants, Dr. William Jardine
and his partner, James Matheson, together with the Dent brothers, were the principal importers. A clash between the traders and the Cantonese authorities was
inevitable. Slade was in Canton on and off from 1816, trading and learning Chinese
and for a time in the employ of the East India Company. He also edited the weekly
Canton Register, the newspaper established by Matheson in 1827 to disseminate
the principles of free trade and oppose the prolonging of the East India Company monopoly.
1.5. Chest tomb in memory of John Slade, editor of the Canton Register.
The Early Settlers, the First Opium War and Its Aftermath 39
In 1835, when Lord William Napier suggested that the British merchants in Canton needed a united front to form a medium of communication between themselves, the superintendent and the Chinese Hong merchants, a British Chamber of Commerce was established and Slade became a founding member.24 In March 1839, Commissioner Lin ordered all opium to be surrendered to him for destruction. In a dramatic standoff, business was brought to a standstill; communication with Macau and Whampoa was cut off. The foreign merchants were in effect prisoners in the factories. Since the departure of Dr. Jardine to England, Lancelot Dent was considered the leading foreign merchant. Lin had good reasons to believe that he was still harbouring 6,000 chests of opium. When told that only 1,037 chests had been offered up for burning, Lin sent the two leading Hong merchants, Howqua and Mowqua, with their buttons of rank torn from their hats and chains round their necks to demand that Dent appear in person before him. It was decided among the merchants that he should not comply and this refusal to appear resulted in a withdrawal of the servants, fresh water, and food from the Canton factories. Dent, moved by the plight of his trading partners, Howqua and Mowqua, with whom he had been on the best of terms for many years, wanted to obey the command to give himself up. The members of the Chamber of Commerce feared that he would be thrown into prison and held hostage for the rest of the group and that his life might be in danger. Whereupon Robert Inglis, a partner of Dent & Co. who could speak some Chinese, said that he would take Dent’s place and asked for three Chinese-speaking volunteers to accompany him. Slade courageously volunteered as did Samuel Fearon, the first coroner in Hong Kong, and Robert Thom, who later became interpreter to the governor, Sir Henry Pottinger. Not knowing whether they would face imprisonment in a Chinese jail or even death, the four presented themselves for examination. The Chinese officials, who examined these merchants, ‘were so struck with admiration of the bravery of the four Englishmen, that, after briefly examining them, they allowed them to return to the factories unmolested’. 25 The immediate crisis was averted. Slade died in Hong Kong on 2 August 1843.
The Descent into War
This first sustained and menacing attack on the opium trade continued after Commissioner Lin finally collected and destroyed 20,000 chests of opium.26 The British merchants, after refusing to sign a bond of good behaviour, retreated en
masse to Macau. Their merchant fleet left Whampoa for the anchorage between Kowloon and Hong Kong, where they were watched by Admiral Kuan’s fleet of war junks. The situation was further inflamed by the death of a Chinese villager
in a drunken quarrel between a group of villagers from Tsim Sha Tsui and some British sailors. This led to the British refusal to render anyone up to Chinese authorities for execution and the ensuing refusal by the Chinese to provide
supplies of food and water to the British fleet. The first shot was fired in Kowloon Bay by Captain Henry Smith on 4 September 1839. Dr. William Jardine back in
London provided Palmerston with a ‘paper of hints’, a blueprint of the measures he considered necessary to bring the Chinese government to a more pro-British
stance. It is even said that he offered to lend the government the Jardine Matheson opium clippers as an auxiliary fleet.27 Sixteen warships and four thousand troops were dispatched by Lord Henry Palmerston, British prime minister 1855–58,
1859–65. After the arrival of the Expeditionary Force in June 1840, the war began
in earnest.
A group of the earliest graves brought from the former cemetery in Wan
Chai and found in Section 11A of the Cemetery are memorials to some of the
soldiers and sailors who died in the First Opium War either from their wounds
or from fever, dysentery or other
diseases. One of the first graves in
the Cemetery is that of Lieutenant Benjamin Fox [11A/3/16] of HMS Nimrod. He died on 25 May 1841 when his leg was shattered by a cannonball while he was leading one of the assault parties sent to take the high land to the north of Canton.28
Another monument was erected by the officers of HMS Cornwallis [11A/3/1], the vessel on which the Treaty of Nanking
was signed on 29 August 1842,
which regularized the status of Hong Kong as a British colony. It commemorates three officers.
According to the inscription on the memorial, Lieutenant William Atcherley died in 1842, at ‘Yong Tso Kiang’, probably an alternative spelling for the Yangtze River. In 1841 the British fleet sailed up the Yangtze River with the
object of capturing Nanking. On 13 June, they anchored off Woosung close
to present day Shanghai. As they continued to move up river to Chin-kiang-foo, where the Grand Canal crosses the Yangtze River, the Chinese batteries opened fire: ‘The fire of the Chinese was severe and well directed…. On our side, one officer, Lieutenant C. Hewitt (Hewet on inscription), Royal Marine, and one seaman were killed’. 29 The third officer included on the inscription, Major James Uniacke, also of the Marines, was assisting in the taking of the town of Chin-kiang-foo on 16 July 1841 when he became a victim of sunstroke:
Here it was that the gallant Major Uniacke, R.M. [Royal Marine] fell from the effects of the sun and in the list of casualties of the day no less than sixteen
men are included who died from the same cause.30
He was buried on:
the fairy-like Golden Island in the centre of the river with its tall pagoda on top and its sides covered with temples, gardens and trees.31
The sun continued to take its toll on soldiers:
1.8. Golden Island, Chinese artist, c. 1850. (By courtesy of Martyn Gregory, cat. 78, p. 81.)
The men in one regiment (98th Regiment) were kept standing in the sun buttoned up to their throats with stiff leather stocks and heavy shakos, three
day’s provisions and sixty rounds of ammunition, till a dozen of them dropped in the ranks from sunstroke.32
Another monument in this early group commemorates Lord Richard Pelham Clinton [11A/3/14] of HMS Harlequin whose body was committed to the deep off the Gulf of Siam in May 1842. The Expeditionary Force suffered more losses from sickness than from battle. Another six-sided monument erected by officers of the 55th Regiment [11A/3/15] commemorates five officers who arrived in June 1841 and fought through the war but all died later from malarial fever in Hong Kong. After occupying Amoy and then Chusan, the regiment was involved in the battle at Chin-kiang-foo, described above. They formed a storming party using just three ladders to scale the walls unnoticed by the Tartars (Mongol soldiers):
When at last they were seen, there was a desperate fight as the Tartars rushed against them with great fury and from the gardens below a galling fire. Many
of our men dropped, but at last they forced the Tartars back.
As the British forces drove them back, the Tartar army finally assembled in the centre of the town:
where their general had harangued them, and exhorted them to die for their country rather than submit to the hated barbarians. They had first rushed into their homes and slaughtered their wives and children, then joined their
general to fight to the last man.33
When the 55th Regiment returned to Hong Kong in January 1843, it suffered
badly from outbreaks of fever. It is recorded that:
scarcely anyone escaped the fever and the mortality was so great that, at
the end of the year, (1843) out of a total strength of thirteen officers and five hundred and fifteen men, four officers and two hundred and thirty-eight men
had succumbed to the epidemic.34
It is therefore probable that Captain A.H.S. Young, Ensign L.H.C. Rogers, Ensign J. Campbell and J.R. Macgrath, whose names are inscribed on the monument, were the four officers mentioned above who died of fever. Captain T. de Havilland had been a military magistrate at Chusan, the island at the mouth of the Yangtze River captured and administered during the war by the British forces. On his return to Hong Kong he was lent to the Hong Kong government to act as assistant surveyor and a member of the lands committee. He was assisted by Charles St. George Cleverly in completing the planning and surveying for the town of Victoria. He died on 6 September 1843 of the prevailing fever aboard the HMS Judith Allan. 35
Indian troops made up considerably more than two-thirds of the Expeditionary Force and many of the officers who died during the First Opium War were from Indian regiments. Lieutenant Oliver Ankatell [11A/5/9], who died in July 1841, had set out from his home in Winchester one year earlier to take up his appointment as ensign in the 37th Regiment, Madras Native Light Infantry.36 After a successful campaign in Canton, this regiment returned to Hong Kong, where it was decimated by fever and dysentery caused by the primitive and unsanitary conditions in the barracks. Captain Arthur F. Bevan [11A/5/1], who died in October 1842, and Captain Henry Harriot [11A/14/1], who died in December of the same year, served with the 39th Regiment of the Madras Native Light Infantry. Lieutenant Francis Beavan [11A/5/2] and John Theophilus Boileau [11A/6/4], who both died in November 1842, were attached to the Bengal Volunteers, Boileau as assistant surgeon to the Bengal Establishment. This must have been an early use of the forces of one colony to wage war for Britain against another country. The regiments of Madras Native Light Infantry and Bengal Volunteers were both in action at the siege of Canton. The gallantry of the Madras Native Light Infantry was recognized in the words of the commanding general: ‘They nobly upheld the high character of the native army’.37 But there was also a darker side to the war. The Hindi word lut, or loot, as it became in English spelling, is said to have entered the language after the taking of Tin-hai, the capital of Chusan: ‘A more complete pillage could not be conceived…. The plunder ceased only when there was nothing to take or destroy’.38
The pillaging and the huge losses in battles such as that at Chin-kiang-foo go some way to explain the humiliation and bitterness felt by the Chinese in their defeat. There could be little hope of improving relationships between the two
Opium Wars while the Chinese were waiting for their moment of retaliation and
the European traders continued to use China’s weakness to expand their trade in opium. By 1850, opium imports into China were at least double what they had been in the year of Commissioner Lin’s ban.39 The Treaty of Nanking was ratified in 1843. It ended the war, made the trade in opium legal and established Hong Kong as a British colony. Thus the founding of the colony of Hong Kong was closely bound up with the ever-increasing trade in opium and a constant reminder of the defeat and degradation of the Chinese.
The merchants knew that many Europeans opposed their trade. For this reason, it was important for them to have a strong lobby in Parliament to counteract any moves to curtail their trade. In the early days, the merchants found it more useful to their trading to seek position and power in London rather than
to involve themselves in affairs concerning the governing of Hong Kong. It could
be suggested that the kind of trade in tea, silk and opium in which the merchants were involved, which ranged along the entire coastline of China, meant that these powerful traders had wider interests and saw Hong Kong more as a safe bolt-hole than as a colony needing their ability to guide its early years. There were a number of complaints in the newspapers that the merchants held themselves aloof from the day-to-day problems associated with governing the tiny young colony.
Relationships between Europeans and Chinese in the Aftermath of the First Opium War
In the early Victorian years, the misunderstandings and breakdowns in relationships between the Chinese and the Europeans at all levels of society set up a pattern of dislike and mistrust between the two races that can be seen to have coloured the way Hong Kong was governed over the next century. A number of factors worked together to bedevil relationships. The determination of the merchants to break down the barriers to free trade in the Chinese Empire put them on a collision course with the Qing government. The British and American traders, headed by Jardine Matheson & Co., wanted an end to controlled trading through the designated treaty ports as set out in the Treaty of Nanking. Meanwhile a small number of merchants helped by corrupt mandarins flouted the customs and excise rules by selling their goods (especially opium) without paying duty and beyond the bounds of the treaty ports. Furthermore, the Chinese were slow and obstructive in conforming to some of the terms of the treaty, such as the one which allowed foreigners free access to the city of Canton, citing as an excuse their inability to protect foreigners wandering inside the city walls. In the meantime the larger body of merchants called for free trade.
The Chinese Imperial government could not accept the terms of the Treaty of Nanking imposed on it in 1842, regarding it as an unfair treaty and an attempt to weaken the empire and limit its sovereignty. China bided its time and set about strengthening its armed forces hoping to reverse the situation in an inevitable confrontation at a later date. In the meantime China continued the previous policy of isolating the foreign barbarians in the treaty ports and as far as possible limiting their contact with the Chinese. They feared that the foreigners would contaminate the Confucian ideals which regulated the society. In line with this policy, it was forbidden on pain of death to teach the Chinese language to foreigners. A debased ‘pidgin’ (meaning ‘business’) language had sprung up which allowed overseas merchants to communicate with the Chinese. The European community was largely only able to communicate with the Chinese in pidgin and were despised by the Chinese gentry for their woeful ignorance of the Chinese language and culture. They in turn despised the Chinese, for their simplified pidgin ‘Chinglish’ which they often labelled as puerile, and for being a benighted heathen race, whose lack of Christian moral principles made them inherently untrustworthy. Neither side saw the necessity to communicate with or understand the other and each side drew apart to entrenched positions based on the beliefs of both parties in the superiority of their own culture and belief system. The ability to speak and understand Chinese was considered by the British as a positive drawback to their usefulness as officials. The editor of The Friend of China was able to write:
Now it is next to an impossibility to master the Chinese language under a ten year’s residence and the time taken up in the study of it, detracts from other equally important avocations; whilst it is an astonishing fact that the close attention absolutely necessary, when the study is once begun, entirely untunes the mind for the business of everyday life.41
At the level of the ordinary Chinese people, suspicion and dislike of the foreign barbarian were particularly strong in Canton and the mob violence created
flashpoints, any of which could well have led to a renewal of conflict. An editorial
sums up the mood in Canton:
The hostile feeling of the lower and it is said even of the higher classes towards outside barbarians has in no degree diminished since the termination of the late war. Indeed it is the opinion of the oldest residents that at no time has there been so little security of life and property…. In former days the insolence of the population was kept within certain bounds — their superiors
asserted that foreigners were a debased and cowardly race merely suffered to traffic at Canton from the benevolent feelings of the Emperor. The delusion
was flattering to natural vanity and it was cherished until foreign bayonets were glittering on the heights that command the city and foreign artillery had silenced the forts which they vainly believed rendered the entrance to the river impregnable…. It cannot be doubted that a remembrance of this increases
the rancour nor will the severe punishment that has so recently been inflicted
at all tend to soothe the public memories. A desire for revenge will be created and more than ever are foreigners in danger of attack. It is painful to imagine such a dreadful calamity as the destruction of the factories by an infuriated
mob and the sacrifice of valuable lives in the defence of property but such an
occurrence is by no means improbable.42
The daily contact between Canton and Hong Kong meant that everything the next day and the Hong Kong residents would have known of those living in Canton certainly by name if not personally. A riot that occurred in Canton on the
8 and 9 July 1846 was already known by rumour in Hong Kong when the arrival of the steam ship Corsair on the 12 July confirmed the fears. The mob attacked with stones breaking into one of the factories and the foreign community was forced to
open fire killing thirteen and wounding twenty. One American and one German
were severely wounded and a Parsee had his leg broken. The small British community felt dangerously isolated:
It seems that the English are left unprotected alike by their own Government and the local authorities, in the midst of a population comprising some of the most lawless and desperate in China who add to their other dangerous qualities, an implacable hatred of foreigners.43
The sense of isolation felt by the small European community in Hong Kong at this time was increased by the fear engendered by living in the midst of an overwhelming majority of approximately nineteen thousand Chinese on whom they depended for their existence.44 The Friend of China questioned the government on why it had allowed hundreds of Chinese to settle along the banks of the nullah above Victoria and asked whether the registrar general had
sanctioned the sheds or registered the occupants as men fit to live in the colony. It
continued: ‘Let us remember that at this moment there are thousands of bad men among us who only lack courage to butcher every European on the Island.’45 The general feelings of fear and dislike for the Chinese mob were heightened in Hong
Kong by the influx of lower-class Chinese coolies in search of work or of gain by
less reputable means:
Less than one mile from Victoria, there is in the course of formation a
native village with hundreds of inhabitants. These men can be seen flocking
to town in the morning with bamboos over their shoulders, as if porters seeking for employment — they wander about during the day, make their observations and return at night to rob. Strangers in Hong Kong express their astonishment at the number of idle, suspicious looking men seated in the public roads, gambling and quarrelling; they cannot imagine how they gain a subsistence — it is by theft.46
The dangers were brought closer to home in December 1847 by the murder
of six Britons at the village of Hwang Chu Kee and the spread of animosity to
Whampoa. In 1848, the Chinese refused to allow the burial of a dead foreigner
from a nearby ship:
The body was taken on shore for internment on Dane’s Island, when the Chinese assembled in large numbers, armed with hoes and other agricultural implements, with the intention of attacking the party who had landed to bury their deceased comrade. Before the violence of the mob they were compelled
to retreat leaving the coffin on the ground, where it lay until the following day
when some Coolies were hired to dig a hole and cover it over.47
The Friend of China was already talking of the inevitability of another war in 1850 when it declared:
We are no peace society man … however if war is to shake his torch over the
Chinese empire, we for one shall not express any regret, as we have for some time looked upon it as an inevitable necessity forced upon us by a long career of treachery and cruelty on the part both of the Governors and people of China. But if war is to come, let it not come in the shape of a buccaneering excursion along the northern coast of China. Let the place that has seen our humiliation, see our triumph, and let that triumph exhibit itself in the shape of something that may be written in the annals of China, as a never to be forgotten lesson to Chinese statesmen on the dangers of duplicity. Such a lesson will be the cheapest and most merciful in the end.48
To understand the prejudices of the men who lived in Hong Kong in the years
between the two Opium Wars and are buried in this cemetery, their lives must be
looked at with this background of suspicion, intimidation and isolation in mind.
Ideals of Society That the Emigrants Took with Them from England
Memory of the British Social Order
The inscriptions in the Cemetery give us the names and dates of its denizens but
we are left to discover what role each one played, and how he or she fitted into the
young society. In order to understand the kind of social set-up that evolved in the early years of Hong Kong history, it is useful to look at three of the factors that
influenced these early settlers. The first was the sometimes nostalgic memory of
the British social order the settlers had left behind them:
The British Empire has been extensively studied as a complex racial hierarchy (and also as a less complex gender hierarchy); but it has received far less attention as an equally complex social hierarchy or, indeed, as a social organism, or construct of any kind.49
It is from the social point of view that one would like to show Hong Kong’s European society as it developed over the nineteenth century. David Cannadine suggested that the British Empire was ‘the vehicle for the extension of the British social structures, and the setting for the projection of British social perceptions, to the ends of the earth — and back again’.50 The settlers wished to replicate what they considered best in this remembered social order.
At a time when the industrial revolution was a new, little understood and a rather fearsome phenomenon, the British abroad looked back with nostalgia to the traditional settled society of the rural landed squires, who in theory ruled in a Christian and paternal manner over their estates with the help of the clergy. The squires looked up in their turn to their social superiors, the aristocracy, who wielded political power in London and held most of the important posts in the government under the reigning monarch. An article describing this idealized concept of society in Britain was printed in a Hong Kong newspaper. Entitled ‘Family Life in England’, it was written by a Monsieur Florentino who had visited
in 1849. It was a society where everyone knew their station in life. The article
copied from an English periodical described the way some settlers viewed the society at home:
Everyone is content with his condition. The valet remains a valet; the farmer is content to remain a farmer. Their ambition is confined to ameliorating their material condition … to passing from a small establishment to a large, from the antechamber of a baronet to the saloon of a lord; but everyone remains within his sphere, and has no desire to emerge from it…. In short, the demarcation of classes is so deep in England, the hierarchical sentiment so innate, that the coachman of a high family treats his stable boy with the same haughty disdain that is exhibited by his master to himself. Equality of condition is unknown in this country…. The aristocracy make amends for their power by the luxury which they display…. You can form no idea of the improbable, the ridiculous sums of money that are squandered by the English on their jewellery, their tables, their liveries, and their studs.51
The view held by the British of their social organization which stretched round their empire can be summed up by the following quotation:
Britons generally conceived themselves as belonging to an unequal society characterized by a seamless web of layered gradations, which were hallowed by time and precedent, which were sanctioned by tradition and religion, and extended in a great chain from the monarch at the top to the humblest subject at the bottom…. It was from that starting point that they contemplated and tried to comprehend the distant realms and diverse society of their empire.52
An article entitled ‘Liberty in England and on the Continent’ further disseminated this idea:
In Britain of all the countries in the earth, the nobility have the most power.
The king or queen is but the keystone of the aristocracy…. When we behold
elsewhere the frightful tyranny which Radicalism sets up, we can understand the mischief it would do to England if ever it were triumphant; and we are inclined to regard the aristocracy which there exercises such strength, as one of the necessary guarantees for freedom.53
Thus, on the sparsely inhabited island of Hong Kong, the colonists felt themselves free ‘to replicate the layered, ordered, hierarchical society they believed they had left behind at home’.54
Although a number of emigrants believed that they would create for themselves a similar kind of social hierarchy to the one which they regretted leaving behind, many also hoped that, in this newer society, they could achieve a status that they would never have aspired to in their native land. They had left their
homeland in order to better themselves socially as well as financially. Materially better off members of the community would vie for the social position that they
considered their new wealth should buy them. This led in Hong Kong, as also in India, to a preoccupation with status. This vying for social status and ‘precedency’ often began even before arrival. Those travelling via India on the P & O. steam
ships would have certainly felt its influence. An army officer on board the Nemesis in 1859 described how: ‘Ladies (real ladies! — ladies of Indian officials many of
them!) squabbled and fought like schoolboys for precedency at table and for berths; and even Mrs. Commissioners and Mrs. Generals lost their tempers — but never forgot their rank’.55 While emigration was seen as a way to escape poverty, to make money and to rise above one’s present station, what was emerging in Hong Kong seems to have been rather a rigid, status-bound social order that was ruled by ‘precedency’. The clash between these two conflicting models was bound to lead to tensions and anomalies which would make it harder in a small place like Hong Kong for those wielding power to exclude those who rose up through the ranks of the society to challenge them for a place in the sun.
Feelings of Superiority and National Pride
Among the colonists, there existed a conviction that the kind of social order they were bringing with them to Hong Kong was superior to anything they were likely
to find in the country they considered settling in, and that spreading their newly gained scientific knowledge and their religious beliefs could do nothing but good.
Colonization, they proclaimed:
will be fraught with unmixed good not only for China itself, but for our beloved country, other enlightened nations of the west and mankind at large
— so true is it that knowledge like water will find its level and the moral and social improvement of any portion of the family of man must benefit all and
hasten that glorious day when knowledge shall cover the earth as the waters cover the seas.56
The earlier defeat of Napoleon by the British at Waterloo had given the
British a strong feeling of national pride. It should come as no surprise then that,
when the first newspaper the Friend of China needed material to fill its pages in
January 1845, it published the names of every officer in every regiment who had
fought in the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. The British victory in the First Opium War over the technologically inferior Chinese troops had boosted this feeling of
pride and superiority to new heights. Even the names given to the local taverns bear witness to this sense of national pride: Britain’s Boast, Albion, Britannia, The British Grenadiers The British Queen and
Fortune of War, among others. Whoever
buried Nathaniel Beard [16Ci/3/7], master of the British ship Gundreda, thought it worth recording that he died ‘at Victorian Hong Kong’ and furthermore that they took the trouble to import the stone from England for his memorial. The inscription proudly announces: ‘This stone hewn from
an English rock / typifies his solid worth’.
The superiority of the British as seen at sea, on the battlefield and in the fields of science and technology, had been demonstrated and the superiority of their religion was taken as self-evident. The irony contained in the opening address in the Friend of China must strike all who read it today:
A year has scarcely elapsed since the British flag was unfurled on this island,
evidence de facto of it being henceforth a part and parcel of the widespread British Empire, that Empire on which the sun never [sic] sets and with whose aggrandisement is linked the regeneration social and moral of China.57
According to the naval officer, H.T. Ellis:
The more your downright John Bull is isolated in foreign society so much the more resolutely does he wrap himself in national prejudices and
endeavours to bring everything within his influence to a condition as purely
English as possible.
He continued:
Irishmen and Scotch are of a more cosmopolitan disposition. They fall more readily into the ways of the places they visit.58
This perceived difference is interesting in view of the contributions to Hong Kong’s
success made by generations of Scotsmen.
The Reasons for Emigrating from Britain
People emigrated from Britain in the early years of Victoria’s reign to escape the unemployment and poverty that were partly due to the massive growth in
population, which had doubled between 1780 and 1836 and in Ireland exploded from less than 2.5 million in 1753 to more than 6.5 million in 1821.59 Those people settling in Hong Kong in the early years of Queen Victoria’s reign left behind them
in Britain a rough, tough and deeply divided society. A.N. Wilson sums up early
Victorian society as a:
ruthless, grabbing, competitive, male-dominated society, stamping on its victims and discarding its weaker members with all the devastating relentlessness of mutant species in Darwin’s vision of Nature itself.60
That governments should be held responsible for the wellbeing of those they ruled was totally against the beliefs of the laissez-faire economists of that time:
The years 1837 to 1844 brought the worst economic depression that had ever afflicted the British people. It is estimated … that more than a million paupers
starved from simple lack of employment.61
Even for those who could find work, wages were pitifully low.
Emigration to the colonies was seen as a way of alleviating poverty and distress and was actively encouraged by the landed classes from the royal family downwards. Queen Victoria herself gave five hundred pounds to help finance the emigration of unemployed needlewomen from London to Australia where, it was argued, that they would make good wives for the large number of unmarried white men. 62 Sixty-four companies as well as members of the Hong Kong community, for example in 1853, were prevailed on to contribute $1,366.20 to the Society for Promoting Emigration to Australia from the Highlands and Islands of Scotland.63
Influences on Hong Kong from Colonial India
Indian Regiments Doing Garrison Duty in Hong Kong
The Madras Native Light Infantry were among the first of a long list of Indian
regiments to be stationed in Hong Kong to do garrison duty.
Seven British officers, three wives, and two children from Indian regiments are buried in the Cemetery in the years between the Opium Wars.64 This compares to four officers, two regimental doctors, one wife and six sergeants from British regiments. The Ceylon regiment suffered particularly heavily with the death of five officers. Conditions for the Indian regiments were often worse than for their
1.10. Madras Native Light Infantry. (Illustrated London News, 1857.)
English counterparts since they were given whatever accommodation was left over after the British soldiers had been housed. Besides the usual malarial fever, they suffered from beri-beri, suggesting that fruit and vegetables were lacking from their diet. Dr. Robert Austin Bankier [13/1/1] wrote in an article on the disease:
It prevailed epidemically among the Gun Lascars or Madras Artillery quartered at Hong Kong in 1852, and proved fatal; and a great number of the
crew of the P. & O. Company’s ship, ‘Fort William’, lying in the harbour were recently attacked with this affection and some deaths occurred.65
Indian policemen were first brought to Hong Kong as early as 1844 by Sir
Henry Pottinger. The acting superintendent of the police, Captain J. Bruce, previously of the 18th Irish Regiment, formed an Indian night guard of twenty-
five ex-soldiers to be stationed at short intervals along the length of Queen’s Road. From then until after the Second World War, Hong Kong was never without
its contingent of Indian police, many of whom stayed on to open businesses, reinforcing Hong Kong’s multinational image. An intriguing headstone is found in Section 13 dedicated to Alexander Randeen [13/5/5], late steward to Messrs. Jardine, Matheson & Co. Randeen died in August 1866. He is described as a native of India and remembered for his faithful service. The Jardine Matheson establishment in Causeway Bay employed a number of Indian nationals for security purposes and also as servants in the house. Only one Indian policeman is buried in the Cemetery. Samuel Baboo [2/2/10] died on 19 March 1913, aged seventy-four, having served over forty-five years in the Hong Kong Police during
which time he presumably converted to Christianity. Because of their greater familiarity with Indians, born of a century of British involvement in India and the many personal links between colonists in Hong Kong and in India, the European settlers placed more trust in Indians than in the local Chinese.
Sir Henry Pottinger and Major Eldred Pottinger, His Nephew
This familiarity with India and the mode of operating there is clearly seen in the careers of Sir Henry Pottinger, the first governor, and his nephew, Major Eldred Pottinger [11A/3/10]. Sir Henry Pottinger, born in County Down,
Ireland in 1789, had been made a lieutenant of infantry under the presidency of Bombay in 1809. He then resided for many years at the Indian courts of rajahs
as a political agent of the East India Company. Even his face showed the mark of a long sojourn in India. The Friend of China remarked: ‘No person who has seen him will forget his oriental countenance’. 66 From 1809 to 1840 he had made his reputation in India, winning his knighthood there. In 1841 he accepted Lord Palmerston’s invitation to go to China as plenipotentiary and chief superintendent.
Pottinger’s dealings with the Amirs of Sind undoubtedly influenced his reactions
to events in China, as can be seen by his reaction to the treatment of Mrs. Noble, a victim of the shipwreck of the Kite. She had been forced into a bamboo cage and paraded in the streets. ‘It was the outrage to Mrs. Noble. In his long experience, no white woman of the Raj had been so abused. He now faced an enemy even more barbarous than the Sind Amirs’.67
Like his uncle, Eldred Pottinger had made his reputation in India. His life reads like a story written for a Boy’s Own Annual. The East India Company sent
him off alone, aged twenty-four, to reconnoitre and map the Northwest Territory,
now part of Pakistan. Finding himself under siege in Herat in November 1838, he took successful command of its defences against the Persian army. He was then proclaimed hero of Herat and as a reward sent as agent to Charekar in Kohistan, where he was again besieged by rebellious tribesmen. After another heroic but unsuccessful defence, he and a fellow officer escaped to Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, where the British were under attack. The two officers, both wounded, Eldred with a ‘ball in his leg’ and his fellow officer, Haughton, with one arm newly amputated, managed to escape the siege, cross the enemy lines and join their countrymen by pretending to be Persians. Eldred arrived burning with fever and Haughton had to endure a second amputation. Once in Kabul, the British envoy having been murdered, Eldred reluctantly negotiated terms with the Afghans for the withdrawal of the British forces. During the retreat the army was massacred and Eldred taken prisoner:
1.8. A portrait of Major Eldred Pottinger by Duncan Beechey.
The sympathies of the [Hong Kong] community were powerfully aroused at
the news of the Cabul disasters, and a public subscription was immediately
raised (October 13th, 1842) for the relief of sufferers in Afghanistan.68
While a prisoner, Eldred persuaded his captors to change sides and, by the time
he was relieved, had set up an administration to govern the local tribesmen.
In 1843, Eldred arrived in Hong Kong. He was a taciturn man. It was said of him: ‘You might have sat for weeks beside him at table and never discovered that he had seen a shot fired’.69 But weakened by the wounds he had received in India, he caught the prevalent malarial fever and died on 15 November 1843, still aged only thirty years old. ‘The whole community was in mourning when one of the heroes of Cabul, Lieutenant Eldred Pottinger, the brother and expected successor of the Governor, died at Hong Kong’. 70 Eldred’s life makes a colourful and fascinating story in itself. But it also reminds us that Hong Kong was a relatively late addition to the British Empire. By the time it had been acquired, an imperial ethos and a system of colonial administration in other parts of the British Empire
were influencing the attitudes and actions of administrators sent to Hong Kong.
The Parsees
The fact that the Parsees were allotted the tract of land next to the Hong Kong Cemetery for the burial of their dead in Happy Valley as early as 1852 shows that
they were an influential and well-regarded minority group. They originally came
from Persia but, since being expelled from that country in the seventh century, had built up very successful businesses particularly in Bombay and Calcutta. Dr. William Jardine, while still a young surgeon on the Brunswick, was captured off the coast of Ceylon by a French ship and became a prisoner of war until the
French vessel was driven ashore by bad weather at the Cape, South Africa, where
he was exchanged. With him during these trials was a young Parsee, Jamsetjee
Jejeebhoy, who became a lifelong friend and business partner.71 Jejeebhoy traded in cotton and opium and built ships.
He owned a fleet which included the Good Success, one of whose captains, Thomas Dumayne [9/13/7], is buried in the Cemetery.72 Jejeebhoy was also responsible for building the admiral’s ship, HMS Calcutta, whose figure-head represented a very fierce-looking Jejeebhoy himself. The memorial [11B/9/3] to Calcutta’s dead sailors is one of the most striking in the Cemetery. Jejeebhoy
was one of the first Parsees in India to be created a knight bachelor in 1842. His
experiences with the British merchants there paved the way for a number of Parsee families to build trading connections with Canton, where they became so strong a group that they owned their own cemetery on Dane’s Island. In 1861, John Fryer, newly arrived principal of St. Paul’s College, gave his impressions of
this group in his first letter home:
The Parsees come next in point of number and importance, after the English but before the Portuguese, Americans, Germans, French and Arabs. They
are a fine looking race of men, bearing a strong resemblance to the ancient
Jews. Their complexion is very brown however and they wear a long black beard…. They are a very wealthy class of people and are considered excellent subjects. In fact they may be said to be but a very little behind the English.73
Linguistic Influences from India
The Indian influence brought to Hong Kong the rupee, which was declared one of the official currencies by Sir Henry Pottinger. The Parsees brought the local term ‘shroff’, meaning money-taker. A Parsee family, with the surname Shroff, can
still be found in the Hong Kong telephone directory and a number of members of this family lie buried in the Parsee Cemetery. The word ‘coolie’ came from the Hindustani quli meaning hired servant. Bungalows in Victoria were built to tested Indian designs and even named after Indian towns like Patna Lodge on Caine Road. The word ‘bungalow’ is derived from the Hindi bangla meaning
belonging to Bengal. Fear of the harmful effects of the tropical sun and that very
British head protector, the topee, a specially designed pith helmet to keep the rays of the sun from striking the head or neck of the wearer, originated in India.
Lunch in Hong Kong was always known by the Anglo-Indian term ‘tiffin’. ‘Chit
or chitty’, the voucher issued to record payment due, was derived from the Hindi citthi, meaning note or pass. ‘Nullahs’ or storm drains were constructed after the Indian fashion to take away the typhoon torrents. ‘Punkahs’, copied from houses in India, were oblongs of light cloth stretching the entire length of a room. They were pulled on the outside of the room by ‘punkah wallahs’ and created a cooling breeze in the drawing rooms and dining rooms of the colony. Another word, ‘boy’, is often considered a denigrating and derogatory term used to describe the head servant of a household, who would normally have reached a mature age. It was in fact a corruption of the Hindi, bahi, 74 denoting body servant and major domo.
With all these examples, it seems clear that influences from Imperial India were
readily absorbed in Victorian Hong Kong.
Chapter 2
Events Affecting Hong Kong as
They Involved the Lives of People Buried in the Hong Kong Cemetery
The Turning of the Tide in Hong Kong’s Affairs
For a short time after the Treaty of Nanking, the colony flourished, but by the late 1840s it looked for a time as if Hong Kong might cease to exist. Its fearsome reputation for ill health had spread and few expatriates were willing to put their lives at risk by settling and investing in the colony. The wave of robberies and piracies had added further worries. The hoped-for higher class of Chinese merchants had not materialized to any substantial degree, probably frightened away by Hong Kong’s reputation for being anti-Chinese and the rough justice meted out to the Chinese by the police and magistrates.
Three interlocking events summarized briefly below, however, changed the course of Hong Kong’s history: the wave of emigration to the countries of
the New World, the discovery of gold in California and the Taiping uprising all
contributed, during the decade from 1850 to 1860, to setting Hong Kong on the path to success and prosperity. In each of these events those people living in Hong Kong, and now at rest in the Cemetery, played important roles.
Chinese Emigration
Since the abolition of slavery in 1833, the British Navy had policed the coasts of
Africa to such good effect that nations such as Peru were forced to look elsewhere for their labour force. Where better to look than to China with its hordes of work-
hungry poor? By the end of the 1840s the shipping of contract labour to North
and South America and the West Indies was in full flood. A large number went
voluntarily, but many thousands were kidnapped and abducted by unscrupulous agents or sold to them by poverty-stricken relatives. The coolies themselves were not always blameless and many, having accepted engagement money, failed to turn up at collection centres. The labour agents employed at the centres received
a capitation fee for every coolie delivered to the coast, which in 1853 stood at $3
per head. The coolies were kept in virtual imprisonment in a series of wretched barracoons along the coast while waiting for ships, and suffered great hardship and cruelty on the long voyages to the Americas.1 As a result there were a number
of revolts on board ships. For example, John Fortunatus Evelyn Wright noted the
arrival of the French ship Albert, whose captain, two mates, cook and passengers had all been murdered by the coolies on a previous passage from Cum-sing-moon to Callao, Peru. He alleged that the coolies had been shamefully treated, flogged and given short allowances of food.2 In early days much of this trade was centred in Hong Kong, materially adding to the wealth of anyone with the capital needed to procure a suitable vessel. The condition of coolies, held in barracoons
in Hong Kong and shipped from there across the Pacific Ocean, was so bad that
in 1855 a Chinese Passengers’ Act was gazetted, prescribing certain standards of food, accommodation and medical attention. This resulted in much trade going elsewhere or in ships leaving the Hong Kong harbour with the legal number of passengers, but then picking up more outside Green Island.
Two names from the Cemetery are linked to people engaged in monitoring this human trafficking. The first are the Austin-Gardiner brothers. Charles Mildmay Austin-Gardiner [13/3/3] was born at Demerara, British New Guinea, and died at East Point in 1862 and Hugh Percy [13/3/3], the third son, died in 1858 aged eighteen. Their father, John
G. Austin-Gardiner, came to Hong Kong in 1853 as the immigration agent-general for the government of British Guiana.3 He succeeded through the
influence of the Protestant missionaries
in obtaining the consent of a number of
Chinese families from Tsuen Wan to leave for Demerara. ‘As many as 2,756
respectable Chinese women were with their husbands and children shipped from Hong Kong’. 4 Austin-Gardiner later joined the Hong Kong government
and, in 1868, succeeded William Mercer as colonial secretary. The second name is William Gee, who is listed in the 1862
Jury List as a member of the same emigration agency. His daughter Mary Carr Gee [7/29/9] died in 1860 aged seven months.
Wherever these Chinese emigrants settled, Chinatowns grew up and
Chinese businessmen often from Hong Kong supplied local traders with dried
foods, clothing and Chinese medicines. This growing trade brought profits to the
community of Chinese merchants who congregated round Nam Pak Hong Street
(later renamed Bonham Strand West) and Wing Lok Street and also benefited
Hong Kong.5
The Finding of Gold in California and Australia
Rumours flooded back to Hong Kong of the fortunes to be made from gold and
the opportunities for employment created by the growth of San Francisco and the building of the Trans Continental Railway and caused great excitement in Hong Kong. Dr. Benjamin Lincoln Ball, a visiting American dentist, reported: ‘I was
shown the curiosity of $12,ooo in gold dust, so called though consisting of gold pieces or fragments…. Wonderful stories are told about the California gold and
incredulously listened to here’. 6 A doctor, in his letter to his father dated March
1849, added further details:
Large quantities of gold have arrived in Hong Kong and the shopkeepers here are making large profits sending off whole cargoes of all kinds of
miscellaneous article. Upwards of fifty persons have already left for this gold
country and several, who have returned again for supplies, bring the most marvellous accounts, — such indeed as one can scarcely believe were it not for the specimens of the precious metal which they bring and the amount of money they spend now after being away but a few months.7
Thousands of Chinese and many Europeans took ship in the hope of making their fortunes. Ships to carry them were at a premium and every vessel on the coast was pressed into service. The newfound wealth in California spawned a trade in all kinds of necessities including tools and frame houses that could be assembled on the spot. Besides this kind of goods, Chinese women and girls were
transported often against their wills to work as prostitutes. John Wright recorded
in his diary seeing the Ann Welch at anchor in the ‘Lye Moon Passage’ ready to start for California with 260 passengers.
Amongst them were thirty females being taken down as speculation as prostitutes. One of the girls had just jumped overboard so determined was she not to go…. She was picked up … but was so earnest in her entreaties that she gained her point and was put ashore. Not so another poor girl who leapt into a boat that was alongside and in the jump was very much injured by falling on her side. I should have liked to have seen this poor girl put on shore but she was kept fast.8
The Taiping Rebellion: 1851–64
This terrible rebellion that caused such an immense upheaval in Chinese society and had such serious consequences for the Imperial government, began in the hinterlands of Hong Kong. It coincided with a time of rising population and eroding value of the silver currency at least partly caused by the opium trade. These two factors led to poverty and unrest which was particularly pronounced in the countryside of Guangdong. An idea of the disruptions can be gathered from the following editorial in the China Mail:
A friend lately returned from a trip down the West Coast and whose
information may be relied on, informs us that the whole of the districts known as San-ooy and Sun-ning are in the hands of a numerous body of Ha-kas who are committing the most barbarous outrages. They have got possession of the towns of Hoi-ping, Yun-ping and Chaong-sha, and about ten days ago were
only ten miles off Quong-hoy, from which place the families were endeavouring to fly, but were prevented by the authorities, who detained them in order that
the males might assist against the banditti. The atrocities committed by this body of men are frightful to relate: men, women and children are massacred; whole families of children, and women above the age of thirty have been put
into houses alive, and the houses set on fire: while all the young women and
girls are detained as captives. The Ha-ka women, who are a very hardy set, are said to have joined the men in large numbers and have even gone so far
as to have shaved their heads like the males. When glutted with carnage and
satiated with plunder, they were formerly in the habit of retreating to their strongholds among the hills where the soldiers never ventured to follow them; but latterly they have become daily more formidable, both in numbers and
daring and now place the mandarins at defiance.
The shipwrights employed in the building-yards in the Colony, being nearly all from the disturbed districts, lately chartered the steamer ‘Eaglet’ to bring their families to Hong Kong; but were prevented and such of them as had gone home for that purpose were detained to assist in repelling the enemy. 9
One immediate consequence of the social unrest, however, was beneficial for
Hong Kong. A number of merchants, whose livelihoods were threatened by the rebels, moved their businesses and families there, rapidly increasing the percentage of ‘respectable’ Chinese of the kind that had long been desired but previously had mostly shunned the port.
Three people buried in the Cemetery are connected with the Taiping
rebellion. Worn Chinese characters in a far corner of the Cemetery are inscribed
on a simple granite headstone with a curved top. This memorial is to Hung Chuen Fook [2/4/28], one of the Taiping rebel leaders or ‘princes’ as they termed themselves. He was the nephew of Hung Hsiu Chuan, king of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, and had fought in the Taiping army. A granite Latin cross remains as a memorial to a British volunteer formerly from the Royal Navy who achieved the rank of colonel in the Taiping army. Alban Mountney Jephson [38/4/14] returned to Hong Kong after the defeat of the Taiping and ended his
days in Hong Kong in September 1871 while working for the Naval Yard.
2.2. Headstone in memory of Alban Mountney Jephson, colonel in the Taiping army.
Ranged on the imperial side in the conflict was another volunteer, George Clayton [20/19/3], a captain
from the 99th Regiment. He
fought in the Anglo-Chinese force known as the Ever-Victorious Army and died at Kowloon in August 1863 ‘from the effects of a wound received, whilst gallantly acting as a volunteer with the Anglo-Chinese force under Major Gordon R.E’. Major Gordon was later to become famous as Gordon of Khartoum after battling the dervishes there.
Hong Kong before the Second Opium War
By 1855, Hong Kong had reached a watershed in its political development. It seemed as if two paths lay open, one leading to a more open, democratic society and the other leading to a political stalemate, with the power remaining in the hands of the governor and the civil service, backed by the merchants.
Sir John Bowring came to Hong Kong as governor with the reputation of being a reforming radical and a follower of Jeremy Bentham. He was also a brilliant linguist and president of the Peace Society but was already considered past his peak, being sixty-two when he arrived in 1854. His age and background
were against him in his troubled and onerous tenure as governor. James William
Norton-Kyshe quotes a passage in which he is described as: ‘like other parvenus, assuming an official importance which is highly ridiculous’.10 The gibe of ‘parvenu’ refers to his modest family background in the wool trade in Exeter. Nevertheless, political reform and the achievement of some form of representation in the councils
seemed possible. In 1849, a memorandum had asked for increased representation,
and suggested the setting up of a municipal type of government. Earl Grey had replied that, in principle, the British government had no objection, but he could not pronounce upon the question until a distinct proposal was submitted.11 By
1851, the justices of the peace had proposed that, as a first measure, the police force
should be placed under the control of a municipal committee, ‘in a similar mode to that obtaining in an English borough’. 12 A scheme was suggested in 1851 to put this
proposal into effect on the condition that the expenses of police should be met by
an adequate local tax. This condition led to its rejection. The previous governor, Sir George Bonham, had doubted the practicality of such a scheme in Hong Kong since ‘men of standing, engaged in their own absorbing pursuits would possess neither time nor inclination to devote to the interests of the public’. 13 Bowring made a further proposal in 1855: that the colonial government be made more representative by reforming the Legislative Council. Five members should be elected for three years by an electorate composed of all holders of land with an
annual rental of at least ten pounds sterling. The qualified electorate would have
consisted of sixty-nine British, forty-two Chinese and thirty other nationalities. The secretary of state in England opposed the proposal on the grounds that ‘The Chinese have not yet acquired a respect for the main principles on which social order rests’.14 Two events in the second half of the decade combined to rock Hong
Kong to its foundations and negate efforts to make the society more democratic. The first was the Second Opium War. The second involved a series of bitter fights
and scandals within the government that culminated in the recall of Bowring, the dismissal of the attorney general, Chisholm Anstey, and the dismissal from government service of the only man who could communicate with the Chinese, Daniel Caldwell [19/1/1].
Public Scandals
It is difficult in a short space to convey the lack of restraint, the back-biting and
the bitterness that arose from a series of very public scandals that convulsed the community during the years 1856 to 1861. The fact that the news of the internal
dissensions took precedence over news of the progress of the Opium War points
to the importance they assumed in the minds of contemporaries. A psychologist would be needed to fathom the mind-set of the principal players in the series of events that were acted out in the local and British press and brought the Hong Kong government to a state of paralysis and Governor Bowring to his knees. The China Mail attempted to analyze the problems:
The Colony has got in to a suspicious, morbid, unhealthy state in which every man is apt to suspect his neighbour…. In small isolated communities, where there is scarcity of proper excitement and amusement and no great
pressure of competition as at home, the natural instinct for strife is gratified chiefly by assaulting the character of one’s neighbour or else offering devout attention to his wife. Hong Kong being in the first stage, officials here are
especially liable to assault; and the evil has been aggravated by the conduct
of a portion of the mercantile community who affect to take no interest in the colony and who take advantage of this affectation to shirk their duties and
gratify their resentments.
How far this is a fair assessment of the situation is now difficult to tell. A further
factor may have been the uncertainty and insecurity of life in the colony, at a time when misfortunes such as illness, robbers, pirates and bankruptcy lurked ready to pounce on unsuspecting settlers. The catalyst for this unseemly spate of public scandals, Chisholm Anstey, was described in the China Mail as the ‘affliction’ that had been sent to Hong Kong. He was said to have combined ‘the simplicity and honesty of an angel with the ferocity of a demon and the recklessness of a lunatic’.15 Anstey arrived in January 1856 ‘in a diabolical frame of mind’16 to take on the post of attorney general. This is not the place to discuss the turmoil of these years but a brief summary of events is given in sequential order below.
1.
Anstey attacked the chief magistrate, Charles Batten Hillier, for his lack of legal competence.
2.
Anstey attacked the new chief magistrate, W.H. Mitchell, for an alleged misdemeanour in his capacity as sheriff.
3.
Anstey provoked a riot by the heavy-handed way he implemented the Buildings and Nuisances Act, both summoning offenders in his capacity as auxiliary constable and then fining very heavily those summoned to appear in court before him.
4.
Anstey accused the chief justice John Walter Hulme of drunkenness despite his having been cleared of the charge a few years earlier (1847–48).
5.
Yorick Murrow of the Daily Press was found guilty of libelling Sir John Bowring. Murrow was fined and sent to prison for six months, where he was lodged in debtor’s prison. He continued to attack the government from prison.
6.
The acting colonial secretary, Dr. William T. Bridges, was accused of
corruption in regard to his relations with the opium monopolist whom he was advising in his private capacity as a barrister.
7.
Anstey instigated an enquiry into the conduct of Daniel Caldwell, registrar
general and protector of the Chinese, by declining to sit on the bench with him as a justice of the peace, citing Caldwell’s long connection with a notorious
pirate, Wong Ma Chow, and his involvement in speculations in brothels and
brothel licences.
8. William Tarrant, owner and editor of the Friend of China, was accused of libel by the lieutenant governor of the colony, Major William Caine. He was
defended by Anstey who had already been suspended from being attorney general. He was found guilty and sent to prison. Questions were asked in Parliament. The British premier newspaper, The Times, complained about Hong Kong:
It is always connected with some fatal pestilence, some doubtful war, or some discreditable internal squabble; so much so that, in popular language, the name of this noisy, bustling, quarrelsome, discontented and insalubrious little island, may aptly be used as a euphonious synonym for a place not mentionable for ears polite.
The article continued:
Any attempt to deal judicially with these congeries of intrigues, accusations and animosities here in England must signally fail…. It is the case for a dictator.17
These scandals would have been of little importance to the history of Hong Kong if they had not, when united with the fear of the Chinese mob, reinforced views, both in England and in Hong Kong, that the governor needed to be in a position of great strength with the backing of the merchants and armed forces if he
was to be effective. The political aspirations of those who would have liked to see
a more democratic kind of government that would have given a voice to the rising
middle classes and even perhaps the richer Chinese, were set back indefinitely.
The animosities and bitterness evoked by the scandals led to some soul searching. The editor of the China Mail blamed the lack of education and narrow interests of the leaders of society combined with the competitiveness of a community that lacked the civilizing outlets of a more settled community:
With wealthy men alone at the head of society, there springs up a system
of ruinous competition. Since everyone is reckoned by his wealth, there is a constant display of luxury and would-be magnificence: well enough for those who can afford it but disastrous to those who cannot.… Alas for this unfortunate place! There are none of the safety valves by which the extra and dangerous steam of life can escape, and the common engine go its way more easily and more safely. There is neither great space of land, nor diversity of occupation, nor civilized neighbours into whose country a trip can be made. There are none of the thousand civilizers that walk side by side with a man during his life’s journey in Europe; and above all there is no female society.18
The Second Opium War: 1856–60
The mood in Hong Kong, at the end of 1856, is captured by Dr. William Maxwell Wood, surgeon on the USS San Jacinto who established a hospital for wounded American sailors on the slopes of Wan Chai just above Ah-lum’s E-Sing bakery:
Arrived in Hong Kong, we found the place in great anxiety; most of the British force was up the river. There had been rumours of a general massacre and burning of the city by the Chinese who, even in that English town,
were in overwhelming masses. The $100 value on foreign heads still existed;
the ‘Thistle’ (a packet-boat) too, had been captured and burnt; and the
opportunity for plundering the city alone invited to conflagration, so that each
day closed in apprehension as to what might happen before morning, and every day seemed to bring news of some unexpected tragedy. The inhabitants
2.4. Camp of the Sikh Cavalry at Kowloon. (Illustrated London News, 6 October 1860.)
felt more unsafe than if upon a savage frontier, because to treachery and ferocity were added the resources of a great empire and the devices of a partial civilization.19
The mood was not improved
when, on 15 January 1857. Dr. William Wood was urgently called for. ‘On both sides of the long ward the men were suffering violent
and distressing illness and all naturally in a state of great alarm’.20 The cause of this distressing illness was the bread baked by the E-Sing bakery. A large quantity of arsenic had been added to the dough and some four hundred Europeans, as well
as the American sailors under Wood’s care, had eaten the arsenic-laden bread for
breakfast. ‘The medical men of the Colony, whilst personally in agonies through
the effects of the poison, were hurrying from house to house, interrupted at every
step by frantic summons from all directions’. 21 In the panic, no-one had warned the governor, whose family were badly affected: ‘It left its effects for some days in racking headaches, pains in the limbs and bowels etc. In my family, my wife, daughters, three guests, my private secretary and myself, besides several servants, ate of the poisoned bread’.22 Arsenic is said to have got into Lady Bowring’s lungs
and she died of the effects soon after in Devonshire. Luckily the amount of arsenic
added to the bread was too large so it induced vomiting instead of death. Rev. James Legge, who himself ate the bread, ‘soon getting rid of all the noxious matter through violent paroxysms of sickness’, thought that ‘had Ah-
lum [the owner of the bakery]
been caught at once, he would have been lynched beyond a doubt’.23
The sombre and anxious mood was not lightened by the special supplement of the China Mail of 25 March 1858 which devoted over five pages to the Indian mutiny and the massacre at Cawnpore and the fact that those troops destined for Hong Kong were being diverted to India.
The Second Opium War demonstrated that the Chinese authorities had learnt a lot about Western military expertise from the First Opium War. The opposition was more serious, the casualties worse and the British suffered their first major defeat at the hands of the Chinese at the battle on 25 June 1859, when
they tried to break through the Chinese defences at the mouth of the Pei Ho River
to force their way to Beijing. It was the heaviest defeat suffered by the Royal Navy
throughout the entire nineteenth century, ‘with a casualty list exceeding that of the
Battle of St. Vincent against Napoleon in 1797’. 24 Whereas in the First Opium War
only a handful of sailors are commemorated in the Cemetery, in contrast a total of at least 168 sailors are mentioned by name on monuments raised in memory of the
dead from individual ships in this Second Opium War. Among the twenty-four
individual headstones to those who lost their lives in the war, William Thornton Bate [13/8/7], captain of the Royalist, was one of those whose death brought home to the community the seriousness of the situation.
A popular commander and a good officer, he had been in Hong Kong since arriving on HMS Clio at the time of the First Opium War and had even conducted services in the cathedral in the absence of the bishop. He had been instrumental in surveying parts of the China and Borneo coastlines. The captain was respected and liked by the entire community. An officer was overheard saying about Bate,
‘My pluck is quite different from Bate’s. I go ahead because I never think of danger;
Bate is always ready for a desperate service because he is always prepared for death’. His death in the attack on the walls of Canton
is described by George Wingrove Cooke,
correspondent of The Times newspaper:
Several high-ranking officers were assembled in a small mud-built cottage outside the walls of Canton. The area
was under heavy fire. It was necessary
that someone should cross the open patch ... and look down into the ditch, to see where the best point, for placing
2.7. Headstone in memory of Captain
the ladders would be. Captain Bate
William Thornton Bate R.N.
at once volunteered to go…. Bate had run across the open patch and was looking into the ditch when a shot traversed his body.25
Dr. Anderson and his coxswain, who saw him fall, braved the gunfire in an attempt to rescue him, but it was too late: ‘The stricken man never spoke again’. His funeral, together with that of a midshipman Henry Thompson [20/16/6], is described in the diaries of another midshipman, Samuel Gurney Cresswell. Thompson, aged seventeen, was killed under the walls of Canton and, according to the inscription on the monument to the sailors who lost their lives while serving on HMS Non Pareil, ‘His body is interred beneath this monument’. Cresswell described the scene at the funeral:
The afternoon was lovely, the magnificent bay like a polished mirror, all the ships in the harbour had their flags at half-mast. H.M.S. Tribune’s barge had her band on board, and towed a cutter with the body, the coffin raised well
above the gunwale and the sailors pall (Union Jack) drooping gracefully over
the coffin and boat. Then another cutter with the remains of the poor little
midshipman. As they left, the ‘Dove’ and the ‘Tribune’ commenced firing minute guns, the barge and cutter passed down the two lines of boats pulling very slowly, the band playing the Dead March of Saul…. All the troops and marines were fallen in to receive and join the procession ashore. The Bishop
read the funeral service, the volleys were fired over the grave, and we looked
into the narrow home of the gallant fellow that four days before had been on board my ship full of health and vigour.26
Captain Bate’s epitaph reads: ‘Mark the Perfect Man and behold / the upright for the end of that man / is Peace’. Bate is also remembered in a plaque on the outside of the cathedral wall on the left-hand side if one is facing the cathedral doors. Three young midshipmen are also buried in the Cemetery, two of whom, Henry L. Barker [10/5/5/] and E.C. Bryan [10/6/1], died at the running battle of
Fat-shan Creek in June 1857. The Royal Navy were aiming to capture or destroy
the mandarin junks at anchor there. The youngest sailor to die in the war and be buried in the Hong Kong Cemetery is fourteen-year-old Vincent Edward Eyre [20/16/5], a midshipman from the Calcutta. In addition to these memorials is the massive monument raised to the Brigade of the Royal Marines [21A/1/7] to commemorate the marines who fought in the war. Their losses totalled 243, of whom 214 were privates. The number of wounded is listed at 220 men. The list of the dead includes the aging Dr. Turnball, chief surgeon of the Expeditionary Force, who was decapitated in Canton after going to the aid of two wounded soldiers.
Individual graves of army officers who lost their lives in the storming of the walls of Canton on 28 December 1857 include three from the 59th Regiment. Ensign T.F. Bowen [4/10/8] was hit by a gingall ball which pierced his chest, coming out close to his spine. Poor Lieutenant Frederick Hacket [4/8/3] had his head cut off. The third, Lieutenant James Cockell [10/1/4] died earlier on board HMS Fury. Two unfortunate officers died in an operation to exact retribution for firing on the flag of truce that had been taken to Namtow at the request of the governor. Captain W.F. Lambert [4/5/3] was climbing the town walls when he was hit and mortally wounded ‘by the accidental discharge of a firelock by one of their own men’ as they crowded up the ladder after him. The second, Ensign Robert Danvers [9/3/4] of the 70th Bengal Native Infantry, was also hit by a bullet from one of his own men, a gun lascar, when about to re -embark.27 He was described in the notice
of his death in the China Mail as a ‘hero of Quebec’.
Chapter 3 How Early Hong Kong Society Arranged Itself
So as to make sense of the society as it manifests itself in the Hong Kong Cemetery, it is necessary to have a clear idea of how the men and women who made up the early society judged themselves and others and allotted ranks and degrees. The ordering of society in early Hong Kong proceeded on two levels, the formal and informal. The two levels proceeded side by side, categorizing and
fixing the inhabitants’ position in ‘That appointed chain, / Which when in cohesion it unites, order to order, rank to rank, / In mutual benefit, / So binding heart to heart’. 1 When this English ideal of hierarchical structure was translated to Hong Kong society, the community there lacked both the numbers needed to interact and the backing of landed wealth and culture that bolstered the rankings back in Britain. The result was a lack of acceptance of people’s rankings, which turned ‘the cohesion that unites order to order’ on its head. The society the colony generated seems by any standards to have been peculiarly fractured and fractious. A Petty Juror in a letter to the Friend of China posed the questions concerning the formal and informal ranking system that will be addressed in this book:
Can you tell me, Sir, how is it that some persons are addressed Esquire and
others plain Mister? Can you tell me the necessary qualifications for a special
juror and also for a common juror? Can you tell me the qualification for a Justice of the Peace? Can you tell me what constitutes the gentleman-ship of an enterer or a rider at the Hong Kong races?2
The Formal Level
The formal level followed rules which already existed. A known and promulgated system for ruling the colonies had grown up over more or less a century of British
rule in the West Indies, Canada, Australia, India and Ireland. According to
David Cannadine, ‘The regime established in Dublin in 1800 provided a pro-
consular prototype for what was to evolve on the imperial periphery, in India, in the dominions of settlement and eventually in the dependent empire’.3 At a formal level, the hierarchy of government in colonies like Hong Kong had the governor at its apex representing Queen Victoria. He was bolstered by all the pomp and ceremony that went with the position of the representative of the monarch, Queen’s birthdays, Queen’s pardons, birthday honours’ lists, processions, special
dress and so on. For example, on the Queen’s birthday on the 26 May 1859:
The ships in the harbour were all dressed out in colours…. At twelve to the minute the larger British men-of-war gave a salute of twenty-one guns in thundering style…. In the evening there was a grand review on the Parade-ground of the troops in the garrison…. The troops, European and Indian drawn up in a long red line with their colours decorated with garlands … presenting a front which the Chinese will not easily forget.4
The governor had the sole authority on the formal side to say who should or should not be given any particular rank. Under the governor were the justices of the peace who were always addressed as the ‘Honourable’ and were chosen from the ranks of the elite merchants and civil servants by the governor. In Hong Kong, this appointment was almost entirely honorary, the holders being only in the early years occasionally required to sit on the bench. Sir Henry Pottinger had set the precedent when, in June 1843, hoping to gain the support of the merchants, he had appointed almost the entire merchant class to the rank, in a list which included forty-three names. A further division was introduced when ‘unofficials’ were elected or chosen from the ranks of the justices to sit on the Legislative Council. As a small sop to those paying taxes and therefore demanding representation, Sir George Bonham allowed the justices to elect two of their members. The
subsequent choice of justices in November 1849 by the governor did not improve
the cohesion of the community:
When Sir George selected fifteen of the unofficial Justices of the Peace,
summoned them to a conference, and thenceforth frequently consulted them collectively or individually, he virtually created … an untitled commercial aristocracy. Unfortunately this select company had no natural basis of demarcation. Merchants, formerly of equal standing with some of the chosen
fifteen, resented their exclusion from the charmed circle. Hence, particularly in summer 1850, the epithets of flunkeyism and toadyism were freely applied
to the attitude of the Governor’s commercial friends. Even among the latter, there arose occasionally acrimonious questions of precedence at the gubernatorial dinner table. Moreover the gradation of social rank thus originated in the upper circles reproduced themselves in the middle and lower strata of local society, which accordingly became subdivided into mutually exclusive cliques and sets.5
At the time of this division, about nine leading storekeepers who styled themselves citizen householders as distinct from the merchants and professional men were piqued at being excluded and questioned why their views should be entirely overlooked when they considered that they had the time and the will to attend to public business. They addressed a memorial to the governor:
Your memoralists have no intention to question your Excellency’s right to select the magistrates of the colony…. Of the ten individuals whose names appear on the Circular, one is a government official, two at least are non-residents and three are merchants’ clerks; and however personally respectable each may be, we take leave to say that the magistrates of the Colony ought not to be made up of either of these classes, so long at least
as there are inhabitants equally respected and well-qualified who have long
been permanent residents in the Colony and are necessarily interested in its welfare.6
This memorial did nothing to check the steady decrease in the power and
influence of the citizen householder class in Hong Kong.7
The second formal distinction in the ranks of Hong Kong society was in the choice of jurors, whose names were promulgated in the general jury list which up to 1855 was nailed to the door of the Supreme Court. All men over twenty-one and
under sixty who earned more than $500 a year, understood English and were not
mentally deranged or criminals were eligible.8 This list was notoriously inaccurate and controversial. For instance, the China Mail complained of inappropriate choice in October 1848, when a tavern barman was called as juror to sit on the jury in a trial of an Englishman for piracy and murder. This barman had previously been brought before the magistrate for disorderly conduct at the Central Police Station. The magistrate had on that occasion decided that he should be sent to the Seamen’s Hospital, since the prisoner appeared to be temporarily insane from
the effects of drink.9
The list of jurors was further subdivided when a number considered of higher rank were picked out by the governor as ‘special jurors’ to serve in the High Court of the Admiralty. By 1851, this court had been abolished but the distinction remained. In the same year, a new jury ordinance was brought in,
dropping the property qualifications and widening the list of eligible jurors to include, ‘Every male person who in the opinion of the Sheriff and the Governor
may be classed as “one of the principal inhabitants of the colony”.’10 This
vaguely worded classification left the final decision as to who were the principal
inhabitants very much in the hands of the civil service and governor. Those eligible for jury service were listed alphabetically with their occupation and place of residence. The male European population fell in this way into five formal categories, members of the Legislative Council, justices of the peace, special jurors, jurors and those not listed who were not considered respectable enough or whose knowledge of English was not considered good enough to be called for jury service. After the new jury ordinance of 1852 had been introduced, the Friend of China still criticized the jury lists:
Of the one hundred and forty-four names of persons written down as eligible for service a full one sixth … are not so; some being dead, others for years absent from the colony, two or three under age, and incapacitated by reason of ignorance of the English language not so small a number.11
In the first jury list to survive, that of 1855, thirty special jurors were named
of whom three were German, one Jewish and one Portuguese, as against 103
ordinary jurors. The first Chinese to be included in 1858 was Wong Shing, listed
as a printer at the London Missionary Society. He had been educated at the Morrison Education Society School and was to become one of the great pioneers
in Chinese journalism. By 1859, a new jury ordinance was introduced into the
Legislative Council which provided that special jurors should be exempt from serving as common jurors. The China Mail commented: ‘It was well enough for old clerks when turned into youthful partners to get their names placed on the Special Jury List, just as the weaker of them assume black hats in order to bolster
up their new dignity’. He continued that the ordinance for the first time conveyed a tangible benefit: ‘Hence it is of importance that some intelligible principle should
be followed in making the division’. 12 He went on to show the anomalies that existed, that for example Mr. Costerton, the manager of the Mercantile Bank, was a common juror while Mr. Reid, the sub-manager, was a special. It can be seen
that in the years of the first period, the principles on which the division of society
should proceed were being worked out and principles and systems of division
becoming clearer and firmer among the expatriate community
The Informal Level
The informal system of stratifying society was part of the ‘baggage’ that was ingrained in the minds of the settlers long before they arrived on these shores. In Hong Kong as in England, the upper and middle classes were drawing apart from those below them under the guise of gentility or respectability. The same kind
of delineation between the various strata and definition of where individuals and groups stood in the fledgling class structure was taking place in Hong Kong. The
existence of innumerable cliques dividing the inhabitants from one another is very well documented. H.T. Ellis wrote in 1855:
The English residents of Hong Kong, like many other small communities, are divided by exclusive feelings which rendered society far less agreeable than it might have been had better understanding existed among them. As each little coterie was headed by its own particular lady patroness, it was a
difficult matter to find any half-dozen who would meet any other half-dozen,
without their evincing mutual marks of contempt or dislike.13
Alfred Weatherhead, in a lecture on Hong Kong delivered in 1859 after
two and a half years working for the Hong Kong government as acting deputy registrar and later as a clerk of the Supreme Court, summed up his view of the prevailing class distinctions:
One would naturally be inclined to suppose that sojourners in a foreign country far removed from the endearing associations of home, away from their kindred and old connexions would cling more closely together — that the absence of family ties and early intimate associations would lead them instinctively to combine more readily for mutual interest and social enjoyment
— that petty class distinctions prevailing to such an absurd extent among ourselves, so destructive to real happiness and freedom would in great measure be obliterated abroad and that kindly feelings and genial social impulses would rule…. Unfortunately the very reverse of all this obtains.
The exclusiveness, jealousy and pride of ‘caste’ that have been so long and so justly attributed to our English brethren and sisters in our Indian possessions attain even more luxurious growth in China. The little community far from being a band of brothers is split up into numerous petty cliques or sets, the members of whom never think of associating with those out of their own immediate circle. All sorts of fanciful, yet rigidly defined distinctions exist and scandal, detraction and calumny under the slang term of ‘gup’ (gossip) prevail to a frightful extent.14
Significantly, some of the founders of Hong Kong society, among them old and respected members, were in the process of being excluded from the ranks of the elite on the grounds that they belonged to the category of traders or professionals rather than that of merchants. They included John Cairns, owner and editor of the Friend of China and Thomas Ash Lane, one of the founders of
Lane Crawford’s store. Problems arose from the difficulty of separating merchants
from retailers. As Ellis said: ‘Though some were called merchants and others storekeepers, such was the undercurrent of retail speculation that it was hard to define where one batch ended and the other began’.15 Some attempts were made to reverse the trend. A drama society was proposed as early as December 1844. Dramaticus in a letter to the Friend of China asserted that:
Society is cooped up in small knots of clans and cliques, unknown and uncared for by each other. There is an evident apprehension of contamination in any attempt at concentration or gregariousness…. I have been a resident of Hong Kong from its birth and the conviction is strong upon my mind that much of the sickness and mortality has been ascribed to the climate which might more properly be imputed to ‘ennui’ and the thousand natural results of dissipation and disgust.16
The Victoria Theatre was leased for the showing of plays. The society was
not without its critics who feared that drama would have a corrupting influence on
the minds of the young. The editor of the Friend of China counteracted:
The habit of indulging in scandal, malice and hatred is not to be acquired from the works of Shakespeare or Sheridan — where, if such vices are brought forward, it is only to expose them — and we uphold that a true lover of legitimate drama will never be uncharitable towards his neighbour.17
Not much had changed seven years later when it was suggested that dancing might promote social harmony. After a particularly successful fancy dress ball, the
commentator on the function reflected:
A nice little meeting every third or fourth week for dancing and music, such as are common in continental countries, would be a source of pleasure and enjoyment and would tend much to bring forth out of all the little cliques and patches of society which now exist, a better feeling among all parties; and would further bring out and foster those little amenities of social life in which the society of this island is wanting.18
Where on this social ladder each settler belonged was obviously of crucial
importance to the social wellbeing and prospects of those involved in, what seems to us, an unedifying scramble for position. For this reason it is important to examine the process of allotting each arrival a position in the community. The informal method of examining, judging and slotting the newcomer into the existing social order occurred soon after his arrival and depended on a number of factors which themselves gave rise to hurt feelings and bitterness. First there were introductions. It was important to arrive bearing as many introductions as one could:
I would strongly impress on auditors thinking of going (to Hong Kong) the ALL-IMPORTANCE of good introductions — the more the better and if possible couched in terms warranting personal and domestic intimacy. You must not expect to win your way upwards in society as at home or imagine
that good breeding and external qualifications will secure you good standing
or favourable reception…. You take up a certain position at the outset in
which you will be fixed for years…. It is not unreasonably taken for granted
that you had some cogent reason for leaving home not likely to recommend you if known.19
The fact that Hong Kong was known to be an unhealthy ‘hole’ lent a suspicion that colonists, choosing to make it their destination, had probably left England
under a cloud or had been paid off by their families to seek their fortunes abroad
for reasons that were seldom flattering to themselves. A doctor, for instance, leaving England to save himself from ‘utter ruin’, in a letter to his father, confessed that he had got into debt and had besides felt obliged to marry a girl who was bearing his child:
There is one alternative left and I must embrace it at all hazards though you must admit it is a dreadful one for me; but I hope that by making such a
sacrifice you will believe my determination … to receive your forgiveness.20
Letters of introduction, which demonstrated the bona fide of the person carrying
them, were an open sesame to the upper echelons of society.
On his arrival in Hong Kong, this same doctor wrote that he has not yet met the general to whom he had an introduction: ‘It is necessary here to enclose your introductory note with your card and residence and then wait until he calls upon you or sends you an invitation’. 21 It took time to get organized. Having arrived
with letters of introduction, the first social duty was to get calling cards printed
using the socially acceptable engraved plates brought from England: ‘Ladies and gentlemen having Engraved Plates can have them printed neatly and expeditiously at the Office of the paper’. 22 Then those people who were reckoned to be within one’s particular social circle were called on. If the newcomer considered himself a gentleman, the first port of call would be the governor where he would leave his card and inscribe his name in the special book. This made him eligible for invitations to dinners or garden parties or other social events organized by the governor. After that, he would call on those he had introductions to and on the wives of his colleagues at work. His card would be conveyed to the lady of the
3.1. The importance of connections, Lieutenant Frederick R. Hardinge [9/6/1], d. 18.12.1856 of dysentery, proclaims his credentials on his headstone.
house by a servant. After looking at the card, she would decide whether she was ‘at home’ to the caller or not. If his standing was exalted enough, he would be encouraged to put his name forward to be balloted on by members of the Hong Kong Club, membership of which would settle his place among the elite of Hong Kong. The importance placed on the ritual of calling was remarked on by a disapproving visiting American:
These little communities, nevertheless, are subject to iron laws of etiquette, any infraction whereof, either purposely or through ignorance, makes society tremble to its foundations. A custom, which refers particularly to strangers, has been transplanted here from India, and is now in full force. The newly-arrived, unless he wishes to avoid all society, must go the rounds of the resident families and make his calls. The calls are returned, an invitation to dinner follows in due course of time, and everything is ‘en train’ for a footing of familiar intercourse.23
It is necessary to ask next on what criteria the caller would be judged as worthy of the particular level of society to which he aspired by those he called on. He would be rigorously examined for signs of his background and breeding and here it would be useful to mention names within his home circle to give provenance to his being from a good family. Then he would be scrutinized as to his dress and education. Did he come from one of the accepted public schools and
have a proper acquaintance with Latin and Greek? Was he attired as a gentleman
should be? A visiting American doctor, when noting that, as a small concession to climate, white jackets with simple ribbons were allowed to be worn at balls, made a pertinent comment on the subject of British dress in the tropics:
It requires a great struggle in John Bull to throw down those starched
barricades which flank his chin and protect his whiskers. In Calcutta, even
in the dog-days nothing less than a collar, rigid as a plank, and a black cloth dress-coat is tolerated. Verily, the Saxon clings to his idols with a pertinacity which we cannot sufficiently admire. Make a certain costume the type of respectability with him, and he carries the idea all over the world.24
Besides dress and education, the type and level of the position filled by the caller or, if from the armed forces, his rank would need to be considered. A doctor in a letter home described in very disapproving terms how rank could be a
significant factor: Only last week a first lieutenant of H.M.S. ‘Melampus’ called upon one of the
merchants but his card was returned and a message sent down to him by a servant that Mr. — did not receive anyone below the rank of Commander.25
This system of discrimination, used to weed out ‘undesirable’ newcomers or would-be members of the Hong Kong Club without the proper qualifications, gave rise to hurtful opportunities to administer snubs which would cause long-rankling divisions and the formation of opposing cliques.
Typical of the process was the way in which John Fortunatus Evelyn Wright
arrived and settled into Hong Kong society.26 Having had to retire early from the Royal Navy after a bout of African yellow fever left him with one leg shorter than the other, he obtained a post of fourth clerk in the post office through the
influence of a family friend, the Marquis of Clanricade. He arrived in June 1849. Not feeling confident enough of his position, he waited until the following April
to leave his card on ‘His Lordship, the Bishop and his Lady’. His cards must have been acknowledged, because, in September 1850, he recorded: ‘Paid calls. Mrs
Staveley [the wife of the general in command of the garrison] like Mrs Smith [the bishop’s wife] is a perfect lady, what a treat to converse with such people in a place like Hong Kong. Finished my calls by seeing Mesdames Gaskell, [Solicitor’s wife] Jamieson [wife of Captain Charles Jamieson of the opium-receiving ship] and the Johns [sea captain and his wife]’.27 In May 1850 he sent his letter of introduction to the new commanding general and received an invitation to dine and subsequently an invitation to a ball. It was not until he had been in Hong Kong for eighteen
months that he met the chief magistrate, Major William Caine, an event he
thought worthy of recording as the sole entry for the day in his diary.28 He never
mentions coming into contact socially with any of the merchant class. Wright’s place in the community seems to have been fixed among the middle-class group
that included the lesser civil service clerks, the professionals, ships’ captains,
commissariat storekeepers and the upper ranks of the tradesmen. Wright made
friends, found lodgings, dined and went on hiking, shooting or boating trips with groups from among these men.
A clear illustration of the layering of society in Hong Kong and its origins in British society was given in the following accounts of the ball for 280 people organized by the officers of HMS Agincourt in February 1845, which followed a regatta. The naval surgeon, Dr. Edward Cree, described the occasion:
3.3. A watercolour of the regatta organized by officers of HMS Agincourt by naval surgeon Dr. Edward Cree.
All the beauty and fashion of Hong Kong on board the ‘Agincourt’; about forty ladies and four times as many men…. At six dinner, but only half, about 140, could sit down at one time, although the table extended the whole length of the main deck. After dinner dancing commenced on the quarterdeck,
which was prettily decorated with flags of all nations, chandeliers of bayonets, variegated lamps, transparencies and flowers. On the poop were card-tables …. Altogether the affair gave great satisfaction and will serve to bring Hong
Kong people together. Everyone was asked, but one or two stuck-up ladies imagined they were too good for the company, and stayed away, but they were not missed, as they are old and ugly. The belles of the party were Miss Hickson and Miss Bowra.29
The officers had obviously cast their nets wide to find enough of that rare commodity in Hong Kong, ladies, to make a good party. Miss Hickson was one of the three daughters of a naval sub-storekeeper working under the chief storekeeper Mr. MacKnight, and Miss Bowra was the daughter of a ship’s chandler. Neither of these pretty girls would have merited an invitation if the ball had been held in
England. When the different strata that made up the community did meet, as at
the Agincourt ball, it was a matter for comment. Thus, in its reporting, the Friend of China felt obliged to apologize for the breakdown of the usual social barriers at the ball. The reporter noted:
their readiness to drop, for the happiness of all, those vain and petty distinctions that make society cramp its usefulness and engenders nothing but prejudices and dislikes. Living on an island, where no house existed four years previously, it would have been melancholy, where they are so nearly equal in position, to have witnessed the assumptions of fastidious claims, that are so constantly and necessarily thrown aside by the noblest in Europe from the motive that all might be contented and happy in their relative ranks of life. At county race and regatta balls, horticultural meetings and assemblies for charitable and humane purposes, the Duchess sits beside the citizen’s wife and feels no descent from her proud and honoured place and confers by so
small a sacrifice a boon on her gratified companion.30
Flunkeyism and toadyism were the names given to the overly deferent behaviour to those above them of underlings who strove for position and advancement in this layered society. There was a jockeying for preferment in the everyday life in the colony that shows how far removed life in Hong Kong was from the ideals of the Victorian utopia, which envisaged a hierarchical society whose ordering was accepted by its members. An editorial headed ‘Flunkeyism’ stated that this jockeying was:
inseparable from Colonial society; the smaller the community, the more
remarkable is the habit…. The observer has a beautiful field for observation
in Hong Kong. There is this excuse for official Flunkeyism; it is too often essential to the prosperity of those who indulge in it. A deference to their superiors in office either promotes or retains them…. Besides Flunkeyism has created an artificial rank which is dear to the official. It places him in a position to which he has no other claim; at Government House he takes precedence over those who are far above him in intrinsic rank.
Among the mercantile portion of the community and among those who care little for little-greatness there is less Flunkeyism…. Unfortunately it is so often wedded to insolence that it provokes observation. It is remarked of real gentlemen that, while they despise toadyism, they are never insolent… the smiles of colonial greatness can neither run them into insolence to their inferiors nor into unbecoming humility of demeanour towards their nominal superiors.
The distinctions which have been created at Government House — the
attempt to establish a Court — are too ridiculous to give serious offence….
Let him inspect the scale of precedence which is established at the Court of
Samuel the First, [Governor Sir George Bonham] and ask could Mr. So-
and-So feel angry because he was seated nearer the Aide de Camp than Mr.
Who-is-He.… It is because merchants have no fixed rank, but the head of
a department in this Barrataria has; the merchant gives way although the
official, possibly, would be very glad to exchange his colonial appointment for a desk in the merchant’s office. It is because merchants have no fixed rank that
they frequently take such high rank among the genuine aristocracy. Theirs is the rank of character, of wealth, of integrity. In a free country like England scarcely a year passes that does not see a new title — the formation of a new house. The house of a Peel or of an Ashburton is the result of successful commerce — of commerce allied to great moral integrity and various qualities which, at the bar, in the army, or in the senate would ensure its possessor of an honourable distinction.31
This extract seems to suggest that a number of the officials in the civil service were not considered worthy of the place to which they aspired among the ranks of merchants. They lacked the necessary qualities that would put them on par with the merchant aristocracy in the eyes of Hong Kong society.
This ordering of the society of early Hong Kong extended into the realms of the Anglican Church where there existed a system of pew allocation in the newly built St. John’s Cathedral according to which seats were carefully allotted from front to back depending on status and wealth until well into the twentieth century. The church depended for its income on the subscriptions that were paid by worshippers for their seats which were allocated by a church seating committee:
The Church it appears regulates precedency in this little community. The Governor and Lieutenant Governor face the altar in the front row; behind
the first sit the Civil establishment according to their supposed rank — then
a few merchants; behind them are ranged some military of the high degree
— then a few more merchants and other persons. The trancepts [sic] and
wings, we presume, are so regulated by some canonical standard known only to the spiritually enlightened. It must be understood, however, that while the members of the government are provided with prominent seats without any reference to price (in the shape of a subscription) the other sitters are
accommodated according to the amount contributed. One firm (three or four
partners of which are Members of Parliament), has subscribed two or three hundred pounds to the building — it ranks below heads of departments in the Colonial service; other firms and individuals are ‘planted’ according to the sum that they could be prevailed upon to ‘stump up ’…. Some absurd and funny enough stories are current of the jealous struggle for front seats and the rival claims to precedence; and if they were all related to boxes in the theatre we would possibly make room for them.32
The position of each person’s seat in church demonstrated clearly for all to see the wealth or standing of each member of the congregation. Everyone knew exactly who gave precedence to whom and who could with impunity look down on whom. The carefully chosen members of the Cathedral Seating Committee met once a year to sort out disputes and slot newcomers into an appropriate seat.33 The Chinese members of the Church of England took their place at the back or more likely attended native churches.
The Church of England contrasted sharply in this matter with the more democratic and cosmopolitan approach of the Roman Catholic Church where a lower-ranking congregation joined together in no particular order as for instance
at the consecration of the first Catholic church in 1843:
Here were men of every colour, the jet black negro, the deep brown Bengali, the light brown Madrassi, the tawny Chinese etc. robed in every variety of oriental costume. Two small knots of British, who with their fair complexions, high cheek bones, blue eyes and light hair, formed a strong contrast. Round the pillars stood or knelt groups of soldiers of the 55th Regiment from the wilds of Connemara and the mountains of Scotland; sepoys and native artillerymen from India mixed among Portuguese, Italians and other foreign seamen. Nor must the ladies be forgotten for in European costume there were seven or eight present.34
Further clues to the ordering of society in nineteenth-century Hong Kong can be found in the way people are addressed in the Cemetery, in the pages of the Blue Books and in the local newspapers. Those from the upper ranks of the merchant houses and the civil service, who were considered as belonging to the top tier of Hong Kong society, merited the appendage ‘esquire’, and so were eligible, like
the landed gentry back in Britain, to be chosen as justices of the peace. Officers
in the army and Royal Navy, who considered themselves on par with, or perhaps even above, the merchants and civil servants by virtue of their ancestry back in England, relied on their background, regiment and rank to give them status. The regiments were clearly ranked in terms of prestige, those of the foot coming for instance above the Royal Artillery which ranked above the Royal Marines and, below all these, came the officers of the Indian Army. Officers or their parents had paid a sum of money for their ranks which accorded with the prestige of the chosen regiment. The Indian Army regiments like the Ceylon regiment were free and attracted for example the sons of impecunious clergymen.
Coming next in the social scale were those who had come from the non-commissioned officer ranks. They were addressed by the title ‘Mister’. The warrant officers from the army and navy who ran the various military stores and successful self-made men, old China hands and auctioneers, were considered worthy of this title. Next down in the scales were the tradesmen and then the skilled workmen such as plumbers and carpenters and such who were nominated by Christian name plus surname. At the bottom of the pile were the less than respectable, the common soldiers and sailors, the police who were largely recruited from the ranks of the armed forces and the ex-merchant seamen and drifters who washed up on the shores of Hong Kong and were known as beachcombers. These unfortunates were usually addressed by surname only. In an account of the findings of the Supreme Court, for example, under the heading of ‘Extortion’: ‘Two European policemen, Patterson and Swimmer and a Chinaman also in the police force were arraigned on the above charge’.35
This ordering of society was echoed to a certain extent in the inscriptions engraved on the headstones in the Hong Kong Cemetery. Merchants and high- ranking civil servants had the letters esquire or esq. after their names. Examples include Alexander Scott [11A/6/5] and John Ambrose Mercer [11A/6/3], who both died in 1843, the same year that they were appointed justices of peace by Sir Henry Pottinger. The title ‘Mister’ was more rarely used on the headstones and often signified a non-commissioned officer connection. Mr. W. Ball [10/5/1] was conductor of the Madras commissariat establishment and Mr. James F. Norman [9/2/6], commissariat assistant storekeeper. Mr. P.H. Spry [9/17/15] was paymaster to HMS Wolverine and Mr. Mansoon T. Sturgess [9/16/3] master of HMS Espiegle. Mr. James Brown [10/8/3] was a solicitor in William Gaskell’s office. Mr. William Sword Ash [9/16/11] was a young merchant’s clerk from Pennsylvania. The majority of the headstones however are more egalitarian in death, giving the person’s Christian name and surnames minus any title. The size and elaborateness of the memorial and the carving on it seldom give a clue to the
person’s status. Many of the imposing early chest tombs that one would expect to house merchants, civil servants or officers from the armed forces, in fact provided room for the bones of those from a much lower degree in the community. Chest tombs have been recorded that belong for instance to the chief gaoler, a Polish hotelier, an assistant at Lane Crawford, a sergeant in the army and an ex-soldier who ran a livery stable. It must have given great pleasure to the relatives of such people, many of whom came from the humblest backgrounds, to be
able to afford such ostentation in death.
Hong Kong could not have been an easy or relaxing place to live in. Perhaps two verses from a long anonymous poem entitled ‘Ye Band Playeth’ and published in the Friend of China in August 1860 will give the authentic flavour of the time. It describes the parading in carriages and sedan chairs that took place each evening along Queen’s Road and around the parade ground near St. John’s Cathedral:
Tis five by the clock;
The Parade at Hong Kong Is dotted with groups, Of undoubted ‘bon ton’.
…
A stiff looking race,
Who seem out of place;
And whose pedigree one would have trouble to trace.
How it alters one’s grade,
When a million one’s made,
By spec in a mine or the opium trade.
If you’ve no objection, we’ll make quick dispatch Of this curious assemblage, this tropical batch, Of creatures who come from all parts of the globe.
What for? What to do? If their feelings we probe,
We should find that it is not for Glory or Fame,
But for want of the dollars that most of them came.
Of course we’ll except the fair dames, who no doubt,
Were tempted by love not by gold to ‘come out’.
They know nothing of Malwa, of Patna and teas, But are simply contented to live at their ease: A hard thing to do in a place like Hong Kong,
Where few can remain at their ease very long.
And now in a word,
We’ll sum up the herd,
Of Chinese, Portuguese And respectable, staid and long coated Parsees.
And I’ll finish by saying to those in the trade
Steer clear of Hong Kong, you’ll not miss its Parade. There’s many a place in a more favoured land
Where, without being broiled, you may list to a band.
Rest contented with little: for gaining much wealth
Will not compensate you for losing your health.
So if you’d improve both your health and your race, Bolt as soon as you can from this feverish place.36
Few were happy to accept their assigned place, which was largely anyway determined by money, and there seems to have been a jockeying for status and advancement on the part of those determined to rise, and an equal determination on the part of those at the top to guard their privileges and keep their group select.
3.5. The military band playing on the parade ground. (Illustrated London News, 15 August 1857).
Section II
THE EARLY DENIZENS OF THE HONG KONG CEMETERY, 1845-1860
Chapter 4 Merchants, Clerks and Bankers
Who were the different groups of people who made up the cliques and coteries of this colony? How did they live and how did the groups differentiate themselves
from each other? These are the questions that will be addressed in the following chapters. Table 1 sums up the occupations, of the 332 civilian denizens of the Hong Kong Cemetery from this period whose occupations are known. Table 2 shows
how 157 military personnel found in the Cemetery during that period were divided
among the services.
Table 1 The Occupations of Civilians Who Died 1845–60 Men Women Children Total
Merchants & Bankers 14 1 1 16
Civil Servants 19 7 9 35
Professionals 18 4 3 25
Merchant Navy 72 10 15 97
Tradesmen 14 3 5 22 Tavern Keepers 5 3 -8
Missionaries 3 6 7 16
Artisans 4 --4
Totals 149 34 40 223
Table 2 Military Personnel Buried in the Hong Kong Cemetery 1845–60
Navy 38 – – 38
U.S. Navy 24 – – 24
Army 43 12 22 77
Commissariat 3 4 11 18
Totals 108 16 33 157
It has been impossible to place another thirty-three civilians in categories since nothing has been found out about who they were or what they did. The first table represents the best estimation that can be made. Some headstones are close to being illegible and guesswork has been involved. Some names, like John Smith, could stand for more than one person and it is difficult to assign them occupations with any exactitude. Some men changed their occupation, for example from merchant sailor to barman, during their time in Hong Kong and have been assigned to the occupation for which they were best known. Many professionals, especially doctors and lawyers, acted as civil servants and at the same time had private practices. The tables are more useful viewed as an indication of the strength according to the numbers of the various groups than as an exact scientific tool.
It must also be borne in mind that the death rate was exceptionally high among the lower rank soldiers during these years but no headstones exist for any soldier below the rank of sergeant, so the common soldiers and sailors who died in Hong Kong cannot be included. When the names of those listed on the various Royal Navy monuments to particular ships between 1845 and 1860 are added up, they total 288 mostly lower-ranking sailors. Between these years, when these sailors are added to the naval officers favoured with headstones, the number of sailors who were killed or died of disease in Eastern waters totals 326. This list includes the following monuments, the number after each name being the number of those from that ship who are commemorated as having lost their lives in the period 1845–60: HMS Calcutta, 50; HMS Columbine, 20; HMS Scout, 13; HMS Serpent, 4; HMS Sans Pareil, 31; HMS Sampson, 20; HMS Sybille, 22; HMS Tribune, 24; HMS Winchester, 108; HMS Bittern, 11. This again is an underestimation of the true numbers, since at least three other monuments exist where the names of those killed have either disappeared from the monument due to weathering or been omitted altogether as in the inscriptions on the monuments commemorating the ships, HMS Nankin and Cleopatra. There were also a number of ships that buried their dead at sea and left no monuments. The number of civilian men buried during the period 1845 to 1860 only adds up to 145. From these figures, it can be seen that the number of deaths among the ordinary sailors, and probably soldiers too, must have been far higher than the number of civilians who died in this period.
Another indication of the strength of the various groups at that time is to look at who paid taxes and how much the various groups paid in property tax to the government. Two articles in the Friend of China, one written in 1851 and the other in 1852, shed some light on this subject. The first article divides the community as follows:
The Hong Kong civil community numbers some three hundred and fifty
individuals. Rather more than a third of them are trades people — less than a third are merchants and their assistants — a sixth of the whole are civil servants — a ninth are ecclesiasticals and the remainder are of the class, ‘professionals’. 1
This count would not include of course women and children or those groups not owning property who were not liable to taxation. The second article analyzed the gross rent paid on all houses and markets and includes the police rate paid to the
government which it said amounted in 1852 to 57,000 pounds sterling.2
Annual House Rental Inclusive of Police Rates
Paid by the Chinese 30,000 Pounds Paid by house owners in the European and foreign community 12,000
(including the Bank and the P. & O.) Paid by merchants and commission agents 8,000 Paid by the Hong Kong Club, hotels and taverns 2,000 Paid by English storekeeping premises 1,600 Paid by merchants with businesses along the coast or in Canton 1,000 Paid by merchants doing business with California and S. America 1,000 Paid for by missionaries 1,000 Paid by houses where the whaling ship business is transacted 500
TOTAL 57,100
As can be seen, a significantly large share of the annual rental was already being paid by the Chinese whose influence on governmental matters was still negligible. The above figures have been given as written in the articles without any attempt to
verify the information and are more usefully read as indications.
The Merchants
Starting at the top, the universally acknowledged, undoubted aristocracy in Hong Kong were the partners of the older and more successful merchant houses. First and foremost among them were the partners belonging to the houses of Jardine, Matheson & Co. and Dent & Co. The lifestyle of the merchant elite provided
the inspiration and touchstone for all those below them. While the merchants
never stinted themselves when it came to luxuries, they were equally open-handed when appealed to by those in want. Many widows and fatherless children had their passages home quietly paid by, for example, the Jardine partners without any hope of a return. If the merchants receive short shrift in this book, it is because so few of them were buried in the Cemetery that they do not really come within its scope, except as a yardstick for comparison when looking at the other groups. As Osmond Tiffaney commented early on: ‘The young man has but one profession to choose, that of merchant; of lawyers, there are fortunately none, physicians are already thick as locusts and for ministers, he knows no-one would listen to him’. 3 It is therefore important to understand exactly what the rest of Hong Kong’s European population admired and aspired to.
The merchants buried in the Hong Kong Cemetery during the years
1845–60 accounted for 9.5 percent of burials, but this figure is misleading if it
is taken to be proportional to their representation in the population. The more important merchants eluded death in the colony and were able to retire to spend their declining years in their estates back home. The only example of the death and burial of any member of Jardine, Matheson & Co. in the Cemetery is one nineteen-month-old baby. Robert Jardine Perceval [9/4/9] was the son of Alexander Perceval, a member of the Jardine family who arrived in Hong Kong as a clerk in 1850, becoming a partner in 1853. By 1862, after a stint in Canton and Shanghai, he headed the firm and in that year was made an unofficial member of the Legislative Council.4 He became the first president of the newly formed Chamber of Commerce. His little son, Robert, died in May 1852, and is buried in a very large chest tomb considering that he was such a small infant.
Out of the ten remaining listed merchants, which includes one wife of a merchant, to be buried in the Cemetery, seven were either foreigners, or from other treaty ports, or were visiting merchants. Henry Lehmann Esq. [9/12/5] from Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, was a member of the firm, Reiss and Co. He died aged twenty-eight in July, 1846. Samuel Rich [9/14/14] from Boston, Massachusetts and a partner of the firm, Rich & Co., was clearly a visitor. He died on the morning of 28 April 1846, while staying at the British Hotel. Henry William Rushton [9/12/4] from Liverpool died in July 1847 just three months after his arrival on the Braganza. James Crooke [9/16/13] was a commission agent from Canton and Charles Bateson [10/4/2], who worked for Holliday and Wise, had been travelling between Canton, Shanghai and Manila as a clerk
for the firm from 1846 to 1857, the year when he died, and had spent little time in
Hong Kong according to the records. The inscription on the chest tomb of Henry Davis [10/7/4] describes him as: ‘for some years resident in Canton’. He had been
a clerk to Wetmore & Co., moving to Moul & Co. and was in Canton from 1847 to 1857, the year of his death from apoplexy. His address was listed in his probate file as late of No. 3, Minqua Hong, Canton and ‘now residing at fifty-seven and a
half, Praya, Macau’. It is clear that these eight merchants, buried in the Cemetery, contributed little to the social life of Hong Kong. Mary Potter [9/18/21], the one
lady alluded to earlier, was the wife of a Shanghai merchant, Daniel Potter. With only one known exception, none of the members of that influential group whose
names would include Jardine, Dent, Gibb and Lyall are present in the Cemetery. They lived healthy lives in the peaceful, gardened luxury of Mid-Levels, well above the hurly-burly of Queen’s Road, from where they could overlook and influence the life of the colony and then retire home to Britain when threatened by illness or advancing age.
The one exception was William Forsyth Gray Esq. [9/18/20]. He had been in Canton since 1836 as a member of Dirom, Gray & Co. and moved to Hong Kong in 1843, where he lived until his death in January 1850. His
name was among the first batch of forty-three merchants chosen by Sir Henry
Pottinger to be justices of peace. He died from a fall when practising on the racecourse for the races which were scheduled for the next day. Quoting from his obituary in the paper:
The melancholy death of Mr. W. F. Grey [sic] has cast a gloom over society.
On Thursday afternoon his body was carried to its place of rest followed by a large number of the inhabitants, including the Governor and Lieutenant
Governor of the colony and many Naval and Military Officers…. Before them
was the spot where two days before the deceased met the accident which deprived him of his life; and where at that very moment, if in life, he would have been participating in exhilarating and active amusements. Mr. Grey was connected with China for a long term of years and was endeared to the foreign community by his many virtues. Spirited, full of generous impulses, and a leader in all manly sports, he was practically a man of peace, ever ready to reconcile difficulties, he never fomented them. He has left a beautiful character to be cherished by his friends; we may add he leaves a blank in
society which will not easily be filled up.5
Particularly in early days, there was no a clear cut dividing line between merchants and tradesmen. Writing in 1856, the Royal Navy officer, H.T. Ellis, described this indefinite dividing line: ‘Though some were called merchants and others storekeepers, such was the undercurrent of retail speculation that it was hard to define where one batch ended and the other began’. This was particularly the case because ‘a little private pidgin possessed irresistible charms and the grandeur of their [the merchants] position was not sufficient to deter them from competing secretly with their fellow colonists who were openly in business and consequently beyond the pale of “good society”.’6 Two notable characters who stood on the borderline between the two groups were John Burd [20/17/5] and Nicolay Duus [20/7/1]. They are examples of traders who came to be accepted into the elite society of the merchants after becoming consuls. Burd was made consul for Denmark in 1847 and in the next year, for the first time, was listed in the Hong Kong Almanac and Directory as a merchant with an address at 85 Queen’s Road, his Danish partner, Lange, being listed as absent in Bali. Burd was a redoubtable Scottish sea captain, who had sailed a Danish ship, Synden, to the Far East, arriving in 1838. The next year he was joined by his wife, who arrived on the John o’Gaunt from Liverpool. Burd was one of the first residents in Hong Kong when he took premises in 1842 at No. 1, Albany Godown, from where he advertised that he could store goods and merchandise of all descriptions in spacious and secure granite warehouses. He seems to have traded throughout the Far East
with special links to Bali. As early as 1843 he was advertising ‘Bally’ rice and coffee,
Manila cordage, Singapore planks, anchors and chains, Bengal chutney and dhal, and Swedish coal tar and pitch. By 1846 he was letting out ‘convenient tenements
at $15 a month’, and ‘those two-roomed houses lately occupied by the Ghaut
Serang, well calculated for a sailor’s boarding house’. The Ghaut Serang was the organization which arranged lodging for Lascar sailors temporarily staying in Hong Kong and paid a yearly tax to the government for the privilege. Burd’s
business must have flourished, as by 1851 he was letting the whole or part of a large
commodious house previously used by the Freemasons as a Masonic hall. Burd died in February 1855 of a liver complaint, aged sixty-one years.
Nicolay Duus became consul for Norway and Sweden in 1857. He may have
made his way to Hong Kong via the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa. In the list of members of Zetland Lodge, he put his nationality as Dutch, though elsewhere he is listed as Danish.7 He was another very early resident in Hong Kong. In April 1843 he was advertising that he has been authorized ‘by His Excellency, the Commander-in-Chief of Her Majesty’s Land Forces in China, to receive all packages addressed to the Officers or Messes of any regiment employed in the late war’. Duus bought and sold lorchas and traded in a wide variety of goods including patent toilets, Holland’s gin, Java coffee, copper sheathing, ships’ stores and a large variety of wines, sherry, champagne and port. In 1845, he was advertising that ‘goods stored in dry brick insurable godowns will be sold on commission or forwarded to Macao or Canton in insurable colonial lorchas, commanded and partly manned by Europeans ’. From 1845 until 1848 he formed a partnership with the American trader, S.B. Rawle, as general and commission agents. Duus was first listed as a merchant in the Hong Kong Almanac and Directory
for 1848 and by 1855 he had risen into the ranks of special jurors in the jury list for that year. In 1850 he was living 4.2. Chest tomb of Nicolay Duus, merchant.
with his wife and several children in a bungalow overlooking the nullah.8 By 1860 two sons, John and Edward Hercule, were working for the well-known houses of Dent & Co. and Lindsay’s respectively. Nicolay Duus died in December 1861. His wife and son tried to continue the family business but soon sold out to their German ex-book-keeper, Alexander Lubeck.
As often happens, the elite status of the merchants provoked negative reactions from some of those below them in wealth and rank. A well-respected doctor complained in his letter home that he had little time for them:
They are unreasonable [in their complaints and grievances] and would
make you laugh amazingly at the amount of pride and self importance which many of them exhibit. Most of them have come out here very young and consequently with a very limited education — money is all they toil for or hope for and when they get it their conceit is ridiculous…. They really consider that the whole mercantile interest of Britain to be concentrated here and consequently take most extraordinary views of really unimportant occurrences for which in nine cases out of ten they have only their own pride and folly to blame.9
The Clerks in the Merchant Houses
From this period, two Scottish clerks belonging to Jardine, Matheson & Co. are buried in the Cemetery, William Walker MacIver [9/17/19] and John McCurrie [20/5/7]. MacIver is an example of how young and relatively uneducated the clerks could be when they began working for the merchant houses, giving some substance to the complaints of the contemporary press that merchants, who had begun their careers in Hong Kong as clerks, had had little education and were ignorant of the outside world. MacIver arrived in 1843 on the John o’Gaunt. 10
When he died aged twenty in 1849, he had already been six years in Hong Kong.
He could only have been barely thirteen when he left his school and native town of Stornoway on the island of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides in Scotland for the last time to make the journey to Liverpool and take ship for Hong Kong.
John McCurrie, who died in November 1851, aged thirty-four and lies in a chest tomb in a peaceful corner of the Cemetery shaded by jasmine trees, was a younger son of a chief from the Isle of Arran. He was listed in the 1850 Hong Kong Almanac and Directory as underwriter and general auctioneer for Jardine Matheson at East Point and had his own shroff, Atim.11 He was reported as auctioning goods, including port and tea, in October, only weeks before his death. During a fire in March 1851, the China Mail praised the good service of the fire engine from Jardine’s which was worked by ‘Mr. Currie’s own Lascars’. This engine had three times the distance to travel, but arrived at Victoria before those of the military or the government. According to the obituary notice, McCurrie had been in charge of the Jardine warehouses at East Point for several years.
One young clerk from Philadelphia, William Sword Ash [9/16/11], the nephew of John D. Sword from Canton, was fifteen when he sailed for China in 1846 on Captain Drinker’s ship, Candace. After just over a year working and learning Chinese in Canton, in April 1848 he made the trip down the Pearl River to Hong Kong on the schooner, Paradox. The schooner capsized in a squall and poor young Ash was drowned with several others. His body was found on a nearby island a few weeks later and transported to Happy Valley for burial, a sad end for a promising young man of only seventeen years.12
The clerks in the merchant houses seem to have combined high living in their company messes, where the food and wine were of the very best quality, with intense boredom. Albert Smith, an impresario, arriving in 1858, recorded his impressions during his stay in a diary. His opinion of the clerks belonging to the
major firms in Hong Kong was not high:
The young men in the different houses have a sad mind-mouldering time
of it. Tea tasting considered as an occupation does not call for any great employment of the intellect and I never saw one of the young clerks with a book in his hand. They loaf about the balconies of their houses or lie in bamboo chairs, smoke a great deal, play billiards in the club where the click of the ball never ceases from earliest morning and glance vacantly at local papers.13
In another passage he deplores their lack of interest in anything that concerned the Chinese or their culture:
I was more than ever impressed with … the most remarkable ignorance of every feature and phase of Chinese life peculiar to the ‘Commercials’ here. The almighty dollar in its relation to tea, silk and opiums is the only study or source of thought with them. And what they can possibly do to get through the day beyond smoking and tea tasting is to me a matter of the most incomprehensibility.14
H.J. Lethbridge, in his introduction to Albert Smith’s book, suggested that Smith’s contempt for the ‘commercials’, as he calls them, dated from his stay in Paris where he acquired his anti-bourgeoisie attitude. But enough writers and newspaper articles reflect the same view as Smith to make one feel it was based on reasonably good grounds.
The Bankers
Archibald Dunlop [9/8/14], who died in October 1851, is the only banker from the early period found in the Cemetery. Dunlop, who arrived in Hong Kong in 1845, had worked as an accountant for over thirty years with the Oriental Bank. He spent his last seven years in Shanghai where he was so highly esteemed as a Freemason that his lodge installed a stained glass window in the Shanghai Cathedral in his memory. He was one of the very few men that the Friend of China deemed to merit an obituary: ‘His loss to the establishment, at this juncture, will doubtless be a severe one’. 15 The first bank to set up in Hong Kong in 1844 was the Bank of Western China, later known as the Oriental Bank. The bankers
in Hong Kong were accorded the privileges of the elite. In fact bankers continued to enjoy a status well above their fellow bank managers in England, who were much more likely to be classed as tradesmen. The position occupied by bankers was defined in the Friend of China when Charles Stuart left on promotion to become manager of the Bombay Branch:
In Mr. Stuart’s successor … we shall hope to find a gentleman only about as well qualified as he was to take station in our Colonial Society; — a station
midway as it were between the Members of the Government service and the Mercantile and (if it may be so expressed) the rising branch of the community of Victoria.16
The Merchants’ Outlook and Their Wider Reputation
The merchants by virtue of their wealth and their long experience in China were in no doubt about their rightful place at the top of the social pyramid. Alexander Matheson, in Macau, writing to James Matheson in Hong Kong in 1844 remarked:
I am disgusted beyond measure just now at finding from Cleverly [surveyor general] that Davis [Sir John Davis, Governor] has named all the streets in
Victoria after his personal friends — many of whom have never been in China
— never perhaps out of England — and not even a lane has been called after a merchant, tho’ the merchants have been the makers of the place. Just fancy ‘Shelley Street’ named after a swindler etc. etc. How much more natural, Jardine Street, Dent Street, Gibb Street, etc., would have sounded. No! the
devil a dollar shall I lay out in Hong Kong except for the sake of a profitable
investment.17
But they never considered Hong Kong as their home. The taipans, like the Indian nabobs before them, were consolidating their wealth with a view to strengthening their power base back in Britain, underpinning it by acquiring large landed estates which would allow them to gain representation in Parliament. They knew that a growing number in Britain disliked the trade in opium that was the basis for their wealth. Already, by 1844, according to the Friend of China: ‘If we do not err, there are fifteen or more members of the House of Commons deeply interested in the welfare of Hong Kong and some of them are closely connected in business with firms from this colony’. 18 Furthermore, their interests were closely tied to Canton, where historically they felt they belonged, and much of their business was transacted there or in the other treaty ports. Hong Kong was seen as a bolt-hole if relationships with the Chinese deteriorated. For example, in January and
February 1847 a number of the main merchants with houses and establishments
in Hong Kong were in Canton setting up the Canton British Chamber of Commerce. The committee members included David Jardine, John Dent, Joseph Edger, Richard Gilman and John Wise.19 This meant that the merchants took less interest in matters pertaining to Hong Kong’s local affairs. They do not seem to have been prepared to put much time or effort into solving the problems of the
colony or in standing up to the governor, except where their interests were heavily at stake. It is worth quoting from the Friend of China in October 1848, where the editor tried to set out some of the reasons for the lack of ‘public spirit’ among the merchants. The editor set out his objections and feelings as follows:
It is true in Hong Kong it has been common for the executive to treat such
matters with great indifference acting as if they held the delegated power of
absolute despotism and not as representatives of a constitutional monarchy. Equally true is it that the inhabitants have bowed to the yoke and that, from lack of public spirit of one or two influential men to take a lead in public matters, the British community has truckled to encroachments which would have been resisted by the free populace of any penal settlement…. In Hong
Kong the influence of the resident merchants is paramount. Without their
approbation and active concurrence, a demonstration of feeling by petitioners or otherwise would be unavailing. The apathy exhibited by this class may be
difficult to explain. Some no doubt are engrossed in their mercantile pursuits
and have neither the time nor the inclination to give attention to public matters. Others have lived so long in China and came so young that they forget there are public duties incumbent upon every member of society in a free country.20
When, in 1850, the same paper suggested the formation of a town council for
Hong Kong on the lines of that being established in Shanghai, the editor again bemoaned the apathy of the merchants in matters not connected to trade:
The members of the large firms naturally expect to hold most of the prominent public positions, which confer honour, but they are not always
willing to give to their offices that share of attention which it demands.21
When the merchants felt their interests were threatened, they could combine with devastating power and efficiency, as they did when, led by John Dent, they defeated
Sir John Bowring’s ‘darling scheme’ to create a promenade stretching from Central to Causeway Bay to be called ‘Bowring Praya’. In Sir John’s own words:
One of the peculiar difficulties against which the Government has to struggle
is the enormous influence wielded by the great and opulent commercial houses against whose power and in opposition to whose personal views it is hard to contend.22
If a municipal council had been established at this early stage, it would have provided a more powerful platform for local views and might have curbed the powers of the governor and his civil service.
For the most part, the merchants came East to make money and to stay healthy for long enough to allow them to spend it at leisure in their retirement back home:
Men who have landed with scarce a dollar, by enterprise, industry and
patience have in a few years been enabled to carry home sufficient to enable
them to live in luxury all the rest of their lives, to build palaces and astonish their old friends and to take with them vast camphor trunks and cargoes of curiosities and copper-coloured complexions.23
There seems to have been a rather aggressive element among the traders of the Far East. The China Mail, which targeted the mercantile community in Hong Kong for its readership, would seldom criticize them. However, the editor had this to say about the merchants in Malaya and their dealings with the Malay Sultans:
We must next contrast these [the Sultans] with a burly independent
trader, eager after gain, probably not over-scrupulous about the means of obtaining it, ignorant of native character and heedless of native customs and etiquette…. The European is loud, contemptuous and abusive; the Malay cool and vindictive.24
The description of the European traders given here could perhaps have also applied to a few of the European merchants in China. In April 1846, Charles Spencer Compton, a mercantile assistant with Jardine, Matheson & Co. and ‘a hectoring sort of man, noted for his repeated acts of violence towards the Chinese’, knocked over the fruit stall in Canton belonging to a hawker he considered too noisy and, three days later, attacked a man, dragging him into the foreign quarter and beating him. He provoked a riot but, when summoned to the Consular Court and fined, the merchant community in Canton and Hong Kong rallied behind him. Sir John Davis, though appealing to London, was forced to back down.25
Towards the end of the period, John Fryer, in his first letter home after his arrival
in 1861 as principal of St. Paul’s College, painted a less than edifying picture of the wealthier British there.
The English are generally rich, proud, worldly-minded, money-making aristocratical people. Having come here to make money it is all they seem to think about, except their own pleasure, which is not always of a sinless description, as the cemeteries testify…. Dress is carried to great excess. About six o’clock when the sun sets all the year round, they come out, dressed up regardless of expense, and parade the streets and public walks in their sedan chairs…. At church there is a display of aristocracy and fashion.26
It is not really surprising that such men were rather reluctant to give time and thought to serious matters of constitutional directions and government policy pertaining to the place in which they considered themselves to be only temporarily domiciled.
How the Merchant Classes in Hong Kong Lived
On the other hand, the open-door hospitality and generosity of the merchants never ceased to impress visitors to Hong Kong especially when they were met with such a high standard of living:
I doubt if there be another class of men, who live in more luxurious state than the foreign residents in China. Their households are conducted on a princely scale, and whatever can be had in the way of furniture, upholstery or domestic appliance of any sort to promote ease and comfort is sure to be found in their dwelling. Their tables are supplied with the choicest viands the
country can afford, and a retinue of well-drilled servants, whose only business
it is to study their habits, anticipate all their wants…. The expense of keeping
up such an establishment is, of course, very large; but so also are the profits
of a flourishing commercial house, and this easeful and luxurious mode of life, while it tends to preserve health in a climate hostile to the Northern race, furnishes a solace, sensuous though it may be, for the want of those more
enlightened recreations which a civilised land affords.
Bayard Taylor gave the following explanation for the luxury and lordly hospitality,
which he had first encountered in India:
The custom originated long ago in the isolation to which the foreign merchant was condemned, and the infrequency of visitors from the distant land, which he had temporarily renounced. Then all the houses were open to the guest and the luxury which had been created to soften their gilded exile was placed at his command.27
The merchants in Hong Kong seem to have copied the lifestyle and standards they had grown accustomed to in the British factory at Canton. The East India Company had catered as far as was possible to every comfort that the company servants could want in order to compensate them for living in the very restricted
grounds of the factory area. Alfred Weatherhead, deputy registrar general from 1857 to 1859, in a talk on Hong Kong given after his retirement from the government
there, said that going East was like a kind of bargain ‘in which you barter away a certain portion of your existence for the sake of passing the remainder in greater pecuniary comfort — health for gold’. 28 The merchants could increase the odds of remaining healthy by picking the kind of lifestyle that would ‘promote cheerfulness
of temper’. Weatherhead summed up this lifestyle as follows:
We must lead a moderately bon vivant sort of life with every appliance of
comfort and luxury, with rare and choice wines, with ices and punkahs with carriages and traps with houses furnished in every style of elegance, with servants who understand our wants and attend to them…. Luxury, kept on all sides within the limit of excess is the secret of health in the East.
That the upper class way was successful in evading the clutches of death in the colony is shown by the remarkable absence of the better known merchants and civil servants from the grassy terraces of the Hong Kong Cemetery.
Even as early as 1845, the living space in Hong Kong was being divided out according to wealth, with the heads of the merchant houses forsaking their company houses along the shoreline to move up the hill. The company houses continued to accommodate the young unmarried clerks in communal messes.
These houses included in their grounds the offices and warehouses of the company
and to live there felt too much like living over the shop, especially if the merchant
had a wife and children. The bungalows, built by the elite of the merchants and civil servants on the slopes of the Peak, overlooked the harbour . The tradesmen and lower-ranked civil servants continued to cluster along Queen’s Road, where the rents were cheaper.
The expensive, detached bungalows of the grander merchants were surrounded by lush private gardens. Insulated
4.3. The Pagoda House, home of the Dent merchants, by Dr. Edward Cree. from the sun by deep
verandahs, these houses would contain sizeable drawing rooms, dining rooms,
bedrooms, and bathrooms with water closets that flushed, even if they were not
connected to main drains.29 There would be living quarters for the servants and stabling for horses and carriages. Their entrances were guarded by gate keepers and they were given suburban names like Glenealy, the house of Archibald Campbell, a partner in Dent & Co., or Rosehill, the house of Robert Dundas Cay, the registrar general, or Greenbanks owned by C.J. Braine, another partner in Dent’s. The garden at Greenbanks, near the centre of Victoria, was written up in the Gardener’s Chronicle of March 1849. It had been stocked in 1845 with rare plants transplanted from the celebrated garden of Mr. Beale, an ardent collector of Chinese plants in Macau. A path through a winding shrubbery led to an orchid walk where the orchids were kept cool by shady bamboos. Above this were banks
of myrtles, gardenias and oleanders. A large collection of flowers in pots, prettily
painted in Chinese style were arranged on each side of the broad terrace in front of the mansion. To one side a flower garden was arranged in the English style around a lawn with a ‘cool house’ for shading delicate plants from the sun and ‘dashing rains’.30
The furniture that graced living rooms would be in the latest fashion.
Brussels carpets covered the floors. ‘Reclining chairs in crimson purple morocco
which adjusted themselves to the posture of the sitter’ and ‘unrivalled couches,
sofas and ottomans with horsehair cushions wooing balmy sleep’ to the ‘fortunate possessors’ could be bought
from William Franklyn’s
warehouse. Besides these, he stocked mahogany dining tables and sofa or card tables
in rosewood. A bookcase filled
with learned leather-backed tomes such as the History of British India in five volumes, or
a panoramic history of the English kings and queens would lend an air of culture to the rooms and books such as Watt’s Divine and Moral Songs and ‘elegant church services and prayer books’ showed their piety. The pictures on the walls
might include views such as Windsor Castle or Scottish highland cattle. The rooms would be lit by ornate chandeliers of richly cut opal glass filled with candles.
Cupboards, locked with Chubb’s celebrated patent detector locks to safeguard
the contents from the Chinese servants, were filled with ornate dinner services and
sets of cut glass for drinking white wine, claret, champagne or liqueurs. Jewellery and gold would be kept in treasuries with granite walls or in sturdy tin boxes
nailed to the floor to make it difficult for thieves to cart them away.
These wealthy men liked to dress according to their status in the latest fashion which was often unsuitable for the Hong Kong climate. Gentlemen
donned ‘a close fitting starched shirt, a silk tie, the double collar of a waistcoat and the double collar of a coat or of a tight fitting white jacket’, as well as tight-fitting
breeches. There was a tendency in society:
to lay down strict rules [on matters of dress] in defiance of the requirements
of comfort and health, merely to suit those who have nothing else than their strict observance of little punctilios to raise them above … the level of the mass of their fellow-men.31
Kid gloves and fancy velvets for waistcoats together with satin cravats and stocks
could be bought from Monsieur Dupuig at his establishment on Wellington
Street. Ladies could order dresses with crinolines of the latest fashion made up
from the finest cashmere, silk or muslin. Caps worked with lace and ribbons could
be ordered for the house, and for outdoors fashionable bonnets and Royal Maud shawls were imported from England. In July 1852, to keep up with the dictates of fashion, Mrs. Marsh, the milliner, was even advertising that she had received from the ship Malta, ‘two splendid Bloomer Costumes complete with hats and feathers’. To mask the smells of Hong Kong there was an assortment of Her Majesty’s toilet perfumes to choose from and for the faint-hearted, ‘inexhaustible smelling salts and aromatic vinegars’.
Much of the food eaten by the upper classes of Hong Kong was imported from England and the advertisements show that living on the edge of China had very little effect on the diet of the colonists. They imported York hams and kegs of butter, ox tongues and cheddar cheeses, pickles, and tart fruits as well as jams and jellies. In 1854, MacEwen & Co. was advertising real Scotch oatmeal, tapioca and asparagus in tins. There seems no end to the number of importers
advertising every possible kind of drink from fine aerated lemonade from the house
of Schweppes & Co. to Glenlivet whisky.32 The number of servants employed to look after a household seems wildly
extravagant by modern standards. According to Alfred Weatherhead, the very
least needed included a cook and his assistant, two house coolies to clean the house, two young boys to work the punkah, a boy to run errands, a gardener to look after the grounds, security men to man the gate and two chair coolies to each chair so the number of chair coolies would depend on the size of the family.
This adds up to at least thirteen staff. Dr. B.L. Ball, the American dental surgeon
visiting Hong Kong who stayed in the merchant establishment of Rawle, Duus & Co., had this to say on the subject of servants:
I determined at first that I should not have any servant. I noticed yesterday
at breakfast that there was one behind every chair but mine; some fourteen in all…. I thought it needless for each one to have a servant to wait on him and preferred to wait on myself rather than ask anything of such repulsive looking characters. However I soon found that it was not easy without them. I found my boots went without blacking, that my mosquito net was full of
mosquitoes, that everyone but myself had a cup of coffee in the morning, that
no water was taken to my chamber, that there was no-one to bring me a cup of tea in the evening, that I needed a boy to get me a tailor, a washer-man, a boatman etc.
He bowed to pressure and hired a ‘boy’, remarking in his diary three days later:
A servant here is considered as indispensable as a hat or coat…. He is at your beck and call at all hours. If you dine with a friend your boy goes to wait on you and there he takes his place behind your chair at table.33
For this kind of service in 1848 a boy would be paid $6 or $7 a month.
Households were so arranged that the merchant and his wife played little part in their regulation:
All the management of the household is in the hands of native servants. The ‘comprador’ furnishes the necessary supplies — for which he generally obtains a fat commission — the butler regulates the internal economy.34
The comprador did more than manage the household and procure the servants. He acted as banker to the family and company: ‘Strangers deposit with him their specie and check on him when they want money’. 35 He also was responsible for paying all the household or company bills. A chit system operated whereby the wealthy never carried money. The currencies of Hong Kong were very complicated. Those recognized as legal tender included Mexican dollars, Austrian silver eagles, rupees, pounds sterling and Chinese cash. The Austrian and Mexican dollars had often been cut and needed to be weighed. It took
4.5. A group of compradors employed by European hongs, 1860s. (Courtesy of Wattis Fine Arts.)
training for a shroff to detect counterfeits. The Chinese cash coins for very small
transactions were threaded through the central hole onto heavy, unwieldy strings for transport. The comprador system led to clear distinction between those who could afford a comprador and those who could not. Those with compradors would sign a chit in a lordly manner for any goods or services they required. The chit would be presented for payment to the comprador who would take his normal cut from the amount paid out. The less wealthy carried money and did their own bargaining, bringing them more into contact with the Chinese providers and with the numerous ways in which they might be cheated. A visitor described how quickly the credit-worthiness of a newcomer hiring a sedan chair would be generally known:
The bearers make it their constant study to find out the habits of the European residents, so that a new-comer only requires to be about a week in the place, and it is ten chances to one, should he be dining out, and hail the first chair to take him home, the chair-coolies, without a word spoken on either side, will land him in front of his domicile. Nay, they have learned more; they already know something of his personal character, and whether
they ought to trust him and accept the paper he offers.36
For their leisure, the men turned to sport and the Hong Kong Club. This was the age of the horse in Hong Kong. Riding was the main form of exercise and a daily evening parade along Queen’s Road was enjoyed by all those who could afford to keep horses and carriages. Horse-drawn conveyances of many kinds including barouches and phaetons were advertised for sale. The government paid an allowance per annum of twenty-five pounds sterling to those civil servants it considered needed a horse to carry out their official duties. This was at a time when a Chinese police constable employed by the government was paid twelve pounds ten shillings a year. 37 In 1852, a visiting Russian civil servant describes the club and the promenade:
At six o’clock in the evening the whole population pours out of doors
along the seashore, along the avenue — Officers on foot and on horseback,
businessmen, ladies make their appearance. On the meadow near the Governor’s house music is playing.
The Hong Kong Club, a stately building opposite the courthouse, kept its membership select:
The Club is a type of superlative palace: its founders spared no expense to impart … the same opulence that is customary in London Clubs. A number
of big halls with windows facing the bay, a verandah, fire places, windows set
in marble; bronze and crystal everywhere, excellent mirrors, elegant furniture, everything brought from England…. Then you’ll order dinner and pay three times what it costs right nearby in the tavern.38
Participation in horseracing and cricket, both extremely popular, was effectively commandeered by the upper classes and organized by clubs and committees. The sums needed to provide for a family in the manner considered necessary to demonstrate to Hong Kong’s society that the provider was a member of the elite precluded many from attempting to join the circle. Those civil servants who aspired to join the upper echelons often found their means inadequate and some seem to have supplemented their salaries in ways which did not bear too close scrutiny.
Chapter 5 Servants of the Crown
The civil service in this period (1845–60) has been divided into four rather arbitrary categories which range through the ranks of local society from the governor at the head of the pyramid down to the police constables and gaolers at the bottom,
who were so poor that they could not afford a gravestone. The top group includes
heads of departments and their deputies and the consular service who considered themselves to be part of Hong Kong’s elite. The second group consists of the clerks who worked under the heads of departments. The third group is made up of
the ushers, bailiffs, police inspectors and head keepers at the goal and their family
members. These men seem to have come mainly from lower ranks of the army and were often illiterate, but were considered respectable members of the community.
They were well enough off to find wives for themselves, unlike the fourth and last
group which includes police constables and turnkeys. Their status was so low
and their pay so bad that they only stayed on until they could find a better job, and often made up for the lack of pay by flagrantly corrupt practices.
The Top Civil Servants
Civil servants of this class were given passages back to Britain when sick or retiring so relatively few died in Hong Kong. Fifteen civil servants, or members of their families, who can be said to have come from the top group, are to be found in the Hong Kong Cemetery. They consist of six civil servants, one member of the
consular staff, three wives and six children of civil servants. Those buried in the
Hong Kong Cemetery from the early period come from a variety of backgrounds. John Pope, Isabella Dyce Cay and Julia Hulme represent the more orthodox backgrounds. The rest include one German missionary, one Portuguese of mixed blood from Goa (buried in the Roman Catholic Cemetery), one Italian and one soldier’s son from the island of St. Helena whose career as a government servant will be examined in due course.
Julia Hulme [11A/13/1], the daughter of Chief Justice John Walter Hulme,
died of fever in 1845 just five months after their arrival. She and her father were members of the shipload of civil servants who accompanied the governor-to-be, Sir John Davis. Julia probably witnessed the quarrels between Sir John Davis and her father, which perhaps accounted for the Hulme family being left behind at Bombay on the pretext that there was no room for them on the ship. They arrived in Hong Kong one month after the governor. The later quarrels over the position of the judiciary, as opposed to the legislature, in the colony may have been made worse by personal dislike and bitterness engendered on that voyage to Bombay. Julia was spared by her death from ever knowing how close her father came to disgrace when
he was suspended from office. In November 1847, after the suspension of Chief
Justice Hulme on grounds of habitual drunkenness: ‘The whole British community
(apart from the officials) left their [calling] cards at the Chief Justice’s residence’
and a ‘sympathizing address’ was signed by 116 residents.1 Those 116 represented almost all the respectable citizens in Hong Kong, including tradesmen. The community also presented the chief justice with a gold snuff box and saw him
off on board ship with a champagne breakfast. When in the enquiry, Hulme was
vindicated, the Friend of China commented:
The eye of envy, hatred and malice followed him into the privacy of domestic life. At his own hospitable table or that of his friends, the spies of the worthless persecutor were near at hand to note every action and every word, which with ample embellishments were duly reported and ultimately embodied in a private despatch to the Foreign Secretary. No doubt the clique were under the impression that their poison had been administered cunningly — that the knife had been driven home in an artistic manner. But the wicked are not always successful; their secret schemes are brought to light and they are covered with shame.2
This scandal, in which Sir John Davis was backed by Major Caine and other civil servants, deepened the rift that was opening up between the government and the other sections of the community, isolating the civil service.
Thomas Scales [11A/13/2], a little-known lawyer, was appointed locally as postmaster general. His appointment is an example of weaknesses that arose from the difficulty of finding suitably qualified and able local candidates to fill vacancies from the limited pool of talent in Hong Kong at that time. He was so
vilified and hounded by the press for the inefficiency of his office that in 1845 he
committed suicide. His final undoing reads like a farce. A box containing dispatches from the governor was sent by the colonial secretary to Scales with orders for a receipt. The postmaster refused to receive the box and, when it was presented a second time, threatened to cane the coolie who had brought back the box. A sergeant’s guard was then sent with orders to present the box again at the window and, if it was again refused, to break open the doors and extract a receipt. After another refusal:
No doubt delighted with his
commission the gallant sergeant
stormed and carried the Post Office
capturing the Post Master General himself. Poor Scales discovered when the Irish Sergeant’s hand was on his thorax and ‘Sign the receipt or come to Government House, you blackguard!’ thundered in his ear that he was a very small man indeed.3
In this fashion the receipt was signed. On 24 July 1845, Scales was suspended from
office. He committed suicide one week later. Besides highlighting the sensitivity of the position of postmaster general at a time when every man wanted to be first to
receive his mail, this incident also illustrates the use of the soldiers on government business in the early years of the colony.
John Pope Esq. [9/16/14] and the Scottish registrar general, Robert Dundas Cay, were both chosen for their posts by the governor, Sir John Davis, before he left England, and both men arrived in the colony in 1844 on the same boat as the governor. Robert Cay buried his wife, Isabella Dyce Cay [40/3/1] and one infant son also called Dundas, in the centre of the largest plot for an individual grave in the entire cemetery. John Pope filled the post of civil engineer and clerk of works in the surveyor general’s office. He was the nephew of Sir William Cubitt, the eminent civil engineer. To a large extent, it is to him we owe the designs for the cathedral and the Government House. Fever carried him off in December 1847, in his twenty-seventh year.
116 Forgotten Souls
The problem of finding local talent to fill vacancies led to the appointment of an unusual assortment of people into government service. Karl Gutzlaff [13/8/4] was a German missionary who had been secretary and interpreter to Sir Henry Pottinger and had been put in charge of the administration of justice on the island of Chusan, which was occupied by the British during the First Opium
War. He later became registrar general in
the Hong Kong government. In his own estimation, Gutzlaff was a missionary
first and foremost, and only a civil servant
so that he could earn the funds he needed
to carry out his missionary designs. He will therefore be discussed later among
the missionaries.
The clerk of the councils and chief clerk of the colonial secretary’s office,
Leonardo d’Almada e Castro, was a Portuguese from Goa. This efficient and
loyal civil servant entered the service of the Crown as early as 1836 and had ‘a long and honourable career of more than thirty-eight years in the Public Service of this Colony’. 4 Although the government found his service of great value, Castro encountered considerable prejudice from the British community. A letter to the
editor in 1847 asked why ‘this Portuguese family’ should be allowed to ‘fatten on
English gold’. The writer complained that, being a Roman Catholic, he might at any time receive absolution for breaking his oath, and that, as an alien ‘by nation
and position [he] is unfit for the important and confidential office to which he
has just been appointed. And furthermore, he neither speaks nor writes English correctly’. 5 The editor of the Friend of China was in agreement with the letter
writer. Castro died in January 1875 aged sixty and is buried in St. Michael’s
Roman Catholic Cemetery.
Eliza Lena [9/1/9], who died in October 1848, was the wife of an Italian member of the government, Alexander Lena, who had spent many years in the British merchant navy. He had served in Charles Elliot’s expedition and won a commendation from the commodore. He joined the government in 1842, as
assistant to the harbour master, Lieutenant William Pedder R.N., and in May
1846 he was appointed to command two gun boats against the pirates. The editor of the Friend of China
commented: ‘With much experience
of the navigation among the islands, he has a perfect knowledge of the native character and habits and will be less liable to be deceived by appearances than a stranger’. 6 He was promoted to assistant harbour
master with duties in Whampoa in 1847 but retired due to ill health in 1849. A letter to the Friend of China, signed by twenty-one captains of
merchant ships at Whampoa, praised
the way he had carried out duties ‘of a most troublesome and irksome nature’. He was thanked by the sea captains for his judicious treatment of their crews and his ability to preserve peace and quietness among the large mass of shipping under his control.7
The only other headstone to family members of a high-ranking civil servant belongs to two of Charles Batten Hillier’s children, Ann Eliza Hillier [9/8/18] (d. 1847) and Hugh Charles Hillier (d. 1856). Charles Hillier, who had arrived in Hong Kong as second mate on a cargo ship, was befriended by Major Caine and given the post of assistant magistrate in 1843. He served in the administration for thirteen years, during which time he married the daughter of the famous missionary, Walter Medhurst, a member of the team who had translated the Bible into Chinese. Hillier proved his worth in the battle against crime though, like Major Caine, he was hampered by his lack of any kind of training in law. Never classed among the corrupt element, Hillier was highly praised in his farewell address:
An independent, painstaking and conscientious official is so great a rarity
that the departure of such a one from a limited community like Hong Kong is severely felt. Mr. Hillier whose uprightness and integrity as Chinese Magistrate was so great that both natives and foreigners reposed
almost unlimited confidence, the Chinese especially have lost a warm and steadfast friend.8
He was honoured on his departure by the Chinese, who formed a long procession to escort him and his wife to the harbour. Men carried two splendid sedan chairs, such as were used in religious processions for the gods, one chair containing a basin of water and the other a looking glass implying that his character was as pure as water and as unstained as glass. The procession wound its way down to the harbour, on their way ‘notifying the Chinese population of their irreparable loss’. Hillier left to become consul in Thailand. Sadly, in October 1856 a few months after being appointed, he died of dysentery on board the U.S. ship, Don Quixote. Mrs. Hillier was left with less than one thousand pounds sterling on which to support herself and her four young sons, demonstrating to the civil and consular service in the Far East that integrity did not provide the wherewithal to look after the needs of those left behind.
The problem of finding local talent to fill posts needing specialist skills in early years led to a number of soldiers being co-opted to act in civilian posts. One such was Captain William Cowper [20/17/3] of the Royal Engineers who, according to the inscription on his chest tomb, ‘was killed while on active service
before Canton’ in December 1856, at the beginning of the Second Opium War.
In his dispatch Admiral Michael Seymour praised Cowper as a gallant and capable soldier of great assistance in identifying and remedying the weak spots in the British position. Cowper had acted during the absence of the surveyor general, Charles St. George Cleverly, on sick leave in Britain as deputy surveyor for the government. He wrote the report on the Bowring Praya fiasco of 1855, on which occasion the merchant elite had blocked the governor’s attempt to take back waterfront property in order to build a boulevard facing the sea along
the entire length of the harbour from Western to Causeway Bay. The Friend of China in its obituary talked of ‘the sadly undeserved unpopularity he had earned by implementing the necessary but unpopular policies of the Sanitary Ordinance’. It quotes him as saying: ‘The community appears to think I had a pleasure of enforcing its provisions, but what have I had to do with the matter more than carrying out the orders of others?’9
Daniel Richard Caldwell
Daniel Richard Caldwell [19/1/1] is a fascinating, enigmatic, and ultimately
admirable character about whom it is extremely difficult to know if one is writing a fair account. Was he coloured or white? Was he a corrupt swashbuckler, or an
able man much maligned by his enemies and competitors in the government? Although Caldwell died well outside the time-frame of this chapter and
cannot be counted in its statistics, he was very much part of the society of this
period. No account of the period can be given without his inclusion in it. Caldwell
was present in Hong Kong
from its very inception, made
it his home and died there. He
highlights the difficulties and
pressures that a Hong Kong
civil servant faced in the early
years. Caldwell shows how an
adventurer in Hong Kong could
rise through the ranks but, at the
same time, become embroiled in
a web of corruption. His story
is unique in that he managed to
rise above the accusations and
animosities that surrounded him
and overcome the entanglement
in which he became so deeply
enmeshed, to die wealthy and
respected by all classes of society,
but especially by the Chinese.
The account of the life of this man
shows how low pay and a small
regard for the personal needs of
the servants of the Crown affected those in the civil service in China. It will, it is
hoped, deepen the reader’s understanding of the kind of society he lived in. The facts acknowledged by himself as true are that he was born in St. Helena
and moved to Singapore when five or six years old. It is alleged that his father was
a common soldier, perhaps in St. Helena as part of the guard sent to ensure that Napoleon could not escape his island exile. G.B. Endacott, in his Biographical Sketch-book of Early Hong Kong, classified him as ‘a man of mixed blood’, but
John Wright, who was a good friend and godfather to one of his sons, described
him in his diary as ‘slim but well built with peculiar largish blue eyes which the natives cannot at all understand’. The blue eyes would seem to make it unlikely
that he was Eurasian. Wright went on to say:
He is a most amusing, good-tempered person, sings a good song, tells capital yarns maintaining at the same time a most unassuming, gentlemanly bearing. His common name among the Celestials is ‘Jam Quie’ which literally means, ‘Conjuring Devil’.
According again to Wright, Caldwell enlivened one dinner party he attended
with ‘some very clever juggling performance’.10 From this diary and other sources, Caldwell comes across as a very likeable, hospitable man who was exceptionally knowledgeable about many aspects of life in Hong Kong. He enjoyed entertaining friends and visitors to Hong Kong to boat trips or dinners enlivened by dancing, bagatelle or games of forfeits. Albert Smith, the impresario, on his visit to Hong Kong recorded in his diary:
At six thirty to dine with Mr. Caldwell passing one of the most agreeable evenings with his family that I had spent at Hong Kong. Mrs. Caldwell is Chinese and the little children speak in the language. At ten I went out with him, armed for a prowl about the low quarters and saw a wonderful deal.11
Daniel Caldwell was the head of a large family. Those buried in the Cemetery include his wife, Mary Ayow [23/4/1], his third son, Richard Henry [10/7/1] who died in July 1858 aged two, one daughter and his brother-in-law, Charles Barton [9/9/8], husband of his sister Sarah, who is described as of Mildenhall, Suffolk and
late of Singapore. Barton may have been a ship builder or a chandler in Singapore and was perhaps the same Charles Barton who owned a tavern in Penang.12 Their
little daughter, Euphemia, is buried in the Protestant Cemetery at Macau. When his brother, Henry, was forced to flee prosecution for fraud in Singapore, Daniel
helped his family settle in Hong Kong using his influence to help his brother become a solicitor. Later Caldwell assisted this same brother to make a sudden exit from Hong Kong to Macau to escape his creditors. Daniel Caldwell seems
to have been a committed Christian and devoted father. He and John Wright
were confirmed together in August 1851, by Bishop George Smith at St. John’s Cathedral and soon after, he married his Chinese ‘protected girl’, Mary Ayow, in church. She had been his wife according to Chinese marriage rites for the previous
13
seven years.
Caldwell admitted to a wild youth misspent in Singapore until he was thrown out by his family in 1834 and fled to China. There he commanded an opium cutter owned by Captain Innes and manned by Chinese, which smuggled opium in the Pearl River delta. He was well paid, spending freely on women and high living. Illness eventually drove Caldwell back to Singapore, where he joined the commissariat department of the British Expeditionary Force. During Charles Elliot’s expedition to Chusan in the First Opium War, he came to the notice of Major Caine on account of his extraordinary language abilities. He could speak good colloquial Malay, Portuguese, Hindustani and Cantonese. When Major Caine became chief magistrate in Hong Kong, he recommended that Caldwell be retained as interpreter to the police court. In 1844 on the arrival of Chief Justice Hulme, Caldwell became interpreter to the Supreme Court as well, adding $400 to his salary to give him a total of $712 a year. This newfound wealth made it possible for him to take Mary Ayow as a ‘protected’ Chinese girl and begin building a large family house.
In 1847, noticing the double pay, the authorities in England cut Caldwell back to one salary. This unexpected loss of income at a time when he had taken on large commitments pitched him into bankruptcy and the debtor’s gaol. His language skills were so desperately needed that an agreement was worked out with his creditors and Caldwell was offered his old post back on condition he resided at the Central Police Station. In 1849, he became acting superintendent of the police but by 1855 he had become disillusioned with government service. When he was refused an increase in salary, he resigned complaining that, ten years and many children later, he was still not earning what he had in 1845. A contemporary said that Caldwell saw little hope of advancement:
Mr. Caldwell’s marriage into a Chinese family is incompatible with what is according to the Governor’s notion of society. Hong Kong has an order
of chivalry known as the Justice of the Peace degree. Mr. Caldwell may be Superintendent of the Police but he is not permitted to hold a commission in that order.14
Having left the government, Caldwell turned to an old associate, Wong
Ma Chow, who, it was said, had once saved his life. He took a share in a coastal lorcha. This friendship with someone who was later found guilty by the Supreme Court of being an associate of pirates and triads, was to prove Caldwell’s undoing. Ma Chow had long been feeding Caldwell with information on pirates, almost certainly with ulterior motives. Caldwell’s successes in the capture and subsequent successful trials of a number of pirates were mainly due to this information. They gave him the reputation of being the only policeman with the ability to achieve real results. His superior, Charles May, was left in the shade. Perhaps this was one reason why May became an implacable enemy, and pursued Caldwell’s downfall with such vigour. Two of May’s charges rested on his word alone, namely that Caldwell had informed him that he belonged to a secret society and that he had told May that, although he would not take bribes, he would not object to his wife doing so. May owned a row of ramshackle houses in Lyndhurst Terrace let out at exorbitant rates to brothel keepers, so his animosity could not have been due to principles nor to a concern to root out corruption in the colony.15 Caldwell
would have been wise to distance himself from Wong Ma Chow. Instead, on his
conviction on piracy charges, Caldwell fought to get his friend better conditions in prison and a reduction of his sentence and, in addition, took Ma Chow’s wife into his own home after his conviction. He was nothing if not loyal, sparking rumours of deeper involvement.
Caldwell certainly used his position in the government to carry out his own
agenda. For example, in March 1859, he went so far as to persuade the authorities
to authorize him to take HMS Cruiser to bombard the city of Namtao in order
to compel the town to make reparation of the sum of $4,500. This sum was the
amount which had allegedly been stolen from a passage-boat he had an interest in.16 How far he was guilty of the corruption he was suspected of, and on which later charges were based, one does not know. Two enquiries both failed to
prove the bulk of the charges. The charges in the first enquiry were certainly not
designed to spare his feelings. Charge number four, of the nineteen, accused him of being in ‘an alliance with some of the worst Chinese in this Colony through his wife, — a Chinese girl from a brothel’. 17 Caldwell’s downfall as a result of
the enquiries would surely have followed had he not been a Freemason. He had
formed strong bonds of brotherhood with other masons including Dr. W.T.
Bridges, barrister and acting colonial secretary, who conveniently happened to ‘accidentally’ burn the papers found by May in Ma Chow’s house in the course of a raid. These papers were said to have detailed the financial transactions that passed between Caldwell and Ma Chow and, had they been produced, might have proved the charges against him. In the second enquiry of 1861, under Sir Hercules Robinson, Caldwell was cleared of all but three of the thirteen
charges brought against him. In brief, it was finally asserted that he was unfit for government office by reason of his past associations with pirates and that, while
acting as government licenser of brothels, he had speculated in brothels, and on these grounds he was dismissed.
The Early Consular Establishment in China
This service was set up after the First Opium War to administer to the needs of
the Europeans in the newly opened Treaty Ports of Canton, Foochow, Amoy, Ningpo and Shanghai and to attempt to ensure that the activities of the seamen and others were kept within the bounds of legality. The consulars also liaised with their Chinese counterparts to smooth out disagreements as they arose. Three members of this group were buried in the Hong Kong Cemetery during this period: one secretary, one wife and a baby. Charlotte Hertslet [7/5/18], the wife of Frederick Lewis Hertslet is the first, dying in May 1850, in Amoy. Frederick Hertslet was recruited during Sir Henry Pottinger’s time and obtained his
position when his father, a sub-librarian at the foreign office, pointed out that he
had not had a pay rise for four years and had a large family to provide for. He had begged a China appointment for his eldest son. 18 Frederick was posted to Amoy as senior assistant accompanied by his second wife, Charlotte. She died in 1846,
aged twenty-six, five days after giving birth. The foreign office medical certificate,
avoiding indelicate precision about ladies’ illnesses, stated that Mrs. Hertslet had
suffered ‘several very serious attacks of complicated disease’. Soon after, Frederick proceeded to England under medical certificate which stated that, ‘further time
in China would be fatal to him’. 19 The other early recruit to the consular service was Odiarne Tremayne Lane [10/4/3], a cousin of Sir John Bowring, brought out to Hong Kong as his private secretary. Bowring obtained an appointment for Lane, at the age of nineteen, as second secretary at Canton but the unfortunate young man only survived two years. In 1856, soon after the factories had been burnt down, he had the misfortune to be killed by a falling wall which only just
missed Charles Winchester, the consul
for Ningpo and the admiral, Sir Michael Seymour.
The third burial from this period is the two-day-old baby, John Robert Morrison Milne [9/8/17], grandson of the pioneer Protestant missionary, Rev.
William Milne, who had founded the
Anglo-Chinese College in Malacca in
1819. The baby’s grandfather had been a
shepherd and then a carpenter’s Cpmsi;ar servoceapprentice in Aberdeen, Scotland, before becoming a Congregational
missionary in Malacca. Rev. William Milne, the baby’s father, had been part of
the mission in Macau where he learnt Chinese. His appointment to the consular service was backed by members of Parliament belonging to the Evangelical Party. Hammond, the permanent secretary, agreed to his appointment on condition
that he abstained from missionary pursuits, ‘which must materially influence the
Chinese people’s social habits and might … tend to engender angry feelings’. 20
William Milne died five years later still in office.
In early years, the consular service members were drawn from the same circle as the civil service and were often interchangeable.
The offer of a job to the son of
a civil servant was a means of rewarding loyal government officers by providing for their sons. The sons of Major Caine and Charles Hillier were both given appointments in the service. Up to 1860, the consular service was manned by candidates chosen by patronage, though latterly those who had attended the Chinese language classes at King’s College, London were usually given preference. Monetary constraints due to inadequate salaries meant that most consuls seem to have led lives of quiet frugality. It must have worried them that no provision was made for their families should they die in the service. For example, poor Mrs. Connor, who was still a minor and had been married less than a year when her husband died, was left destitute and pregnant in China.21 The only concession to widows was to provide their passage back to the U.K.
Civil Service Clerks
Three clerks from the middle ranks of the civil service dying in these years are present in the Cemetery. They include Donaldson Selby [11A/11/9], William Barnicot [16Cii/3/4] and George Napier [16Cii/8/7]. Selby, the first of the three to die, in September 1853, was sent out from England to be chief clerk in the treasury. He arrived in Hong Kong in August 1853. Soon after, he was ‘attacked
near the Gap by three Chinese and had some difficulty in defending himself with
his walking stick’.22 He survived in Hong Kong less than two months, dying at his residence in Queen’s Road. His tombstone inscription includes the coveted title
of esquire, and the words: ‘On Her Majesty’s Civil Service’. William Barnicot,
who died in February 1860, aged twenty-four, worked in the Colonial Secretary’s
Office. His carved and edged headstone gives him an air of respectability.
George Napier arrived in 1842 from Singapore, where he had been born, and worked at first as a clerk for Gemmell & Co. in Canton. Napier joined the civil service in Hong Kong in 1849 as clerk of works in the surveyor general’s department. He is known to have been in charge of the Hong Kong Cemetery. In May of that year the sexton wrote to the Friend of China praising his efforts:
The present condition of the Grave Yard is chiefly attributable to the Honourable Mr. Napier’s zealousy, whose gentlemanly courtesy and daily attention some time since for upwards of two months, has if possible stimulated my exertions to keep it in that state, which the heart of an Englishman should ever dictate.23
Napier was listed in the Blue Book of 1855 as an acting clerk in the
registrar’s office with a salary of two hundred pounds sterling a year. In 1859, he
left the civil service to work for Lane Crawford, the auction house, emporium
and ship’s chandlery. John Wright recorded a shooting expedition with him and
the lawyer, William Gaskell [16Cii/7/14]. Shooting was a pastime universally
enjoyed by anyone who could afford a gun. Wright described a morning’s
shooting with his friends:
Up at 3.30 for the shoot…. The shooting was excellent on Mr. Napier’s part. He shot eight brace of snipe, Mr. Gaskell one brace and Mr. McKnight
ditto. I fired a good many times but shot nothing. Snipe shooting is deuced
hard work in these climates always being up to ones middle in mud and water
in the rice fields.24
One wonders what the Chinese farmers thought of the sport. Napier’s circle
of friends like Wright’s included the well-to-do tradesmen, as is shown by his will. He died in May 1861 and left his money in two equal shares to William Lane,
‘storekeeper … in charge of the business of Lane Crawford’, perhaps a relative of Thomas Ash Lane, the founder, and Douglas Lapraik, founder of the Douglas line of shipping, who was also to get his horse and pony. His saddle and bridle
went to the Basel missionary, Rev. William Lobscheid, and his ring to William Tarrant, owner and editor of the Friend of China. His will also specified that his boy, cook and cook’s mate were to get an extra month’s salary.25
5.8. A shooting expedition in Hong Kong, c. 1850, Chinese artist. (By courtesy of Martyn Gregory, cat. 77, p. 67.)
The Lifestyle of the Civil Servant Clerks
The fortunes and experiences of this middle group of civil servants come to life in
the pages of the diary of John Fortunatus Evelyn Wright. He knew and enjoyed
the company of a large number of people buried in the Hong Kong Cemetery, including his closest friends, Dr. William Aurelius Harland [10//3/3], Henry Fletcher Hance [4/1/1] and Daniel Caldwell [19/1/1]. In his diary, he described his daily social round and leisure activities. In each case, the people involved are
named, giving us a detailed picture of the leisure activities of Wright’s wide circle of friends and acquaintances. Wright is shown as gregarious and well liked. His
diary is particularly interesting in that this circle of friends included not only his fellow clerks in the civil service, but also doctors, lawyers, the top tradesmen
and officers from the merchant navy, with all of whom he seems to have been on an equal footing. In November 1850, he went to live with William Gaskell, the
solicitor, who that year had been made proctor of the Vice-Admiralty Court. Rats must have been a very prevalent nuisance for on 1 December of that year soon
after moving in, Wright complained: ‘Last night a rat came to my bed and had
a nibble at my head and about two hours later returned to dig his teeth into one
of my toes causing it to bleed’. It does not sound like a promising start. Wright’s circle of friends did not include the merchants, high-ranking officers or the top civil
servants. St. John’s Cathedral and Zetland Hall, the Freemason’s headquarters, provided the two focuses for his life. He attended church twice on Sundays and also went to Union Church to hear Rev. James Legge’s sermons. At the same time he was working his way up the ranks of the Freemasons He spent Christmas with Harland and even assisted him ‘in amputating a man’s leg who was under the influence of chloroform’. 27 There being no dentists in the colony, Harland pulled three of his teeth without anaesthetic.
Wright particularly enjoyed hiking with his friends over the mountains and may have helped Hance and Harland with their collections of flora and fauna. Both Hance and Harland have a number of local plants named after them.28 At this time the population of Hong Kong was so small that Wright was able to record:
I walked back over the mountains with nothing but my straw hat and my boots on. I found this much the coolest dress. Of course I knew we should meet with no strangers. I did not hesitate to show my friends my proportions … and if judges of beauty the sight must have done them good.29
He carried on a flirtation with the wife of an absent captain whom he describes as ‘a
rough old fellow’ and got caught up in the gossip:
Not at all happy in consequence of the cruel people here thinking that I go
to see Mrs. Wild too often. I will go and see her. God bless and protect and
make her happy. Could not resist calling for a short time today.30
When Mrs. Wild gave birth to a son she christened him Edward Wright Wild and asked John Wright to be the godfather.31 He occasionally confessed in his diary to consorting with Chinese girls and when one, Assai, had a baby, he called
five days running and gave her what amounted to about half a month’s salary.32 The child died on the fourth day and he did not mention her again. Wright showed that he was well aware of the dangers of drink: ‘Poor Smart, [an assistant at Dent & Co.] — he looks much altered…. A man with an excellent berth but the bottle is his bane. What a number of persons kill themselves in this place with drink’. He managed to persuade his fellow clerk in the post office to give up
drink: ‘Got Mr. and Mrs. Hudson to become teetotallers for six months, capital thing because both parties, particularly Mr. are sots’. 33 He saw many friends and acquaintances fall sick, some to die from their illnesses. The civil service clerks who became ill did not, like their heads of department, get free sea passages.
When T.W. Marsh, a colleague in the post office, fell sick, he had to turn to the
Freemasons for help with his passage home. In a lodge of emergency they agreed to assist him to the tune of two hundred pounds sterling. Dr. Rowe, whose will
Wright witnessed, was not so lucky: ‘What an alteration in a man in only two or
three days since I last saw him. He is nothing but skin and bones and his body all covered with sores’.34 He died the next day.
Wright only once mentioned socializing with the Portuguese in the colony.
He attended a ball given by Mr. Grandpre, the deputy police superintendent at that time, and commented, ‘A number of Portuguese ladies there who all looked nice and dressed most becomingly — I had not the least idea so many nice looking females were in the place’.35
Wright’s reactions to the Chinese are rather mixed. He was ready to accept
Mary Ayow, the Chinese wife of his friend, Daniel Caldwell, of whom he said: ‘Mrs
C. is an exceedingly well-behaved person and not without proper dignity’. 36 He was happy to escort her to the theatre and became god-father to one of her sons.37 The plight of the coolies, who displayed ‘considerable content and happiness under miserable and trying conditions’, moved him to admiration. He also admired the patient quiet way his servant dealt with him over the accounts. The Chinese
certainly display the greatest patience on all occasions. Our cook for instance, who comes up with me to settle our daily account is most mild but as deep as a fox. Often I get in a great rage with him about the reckoning, telling him that he is wrong in his total, all of which he hears very quietly and, on going
over the items again, I invariably find myself to have been wrong.38
But when he suspected his servants of stealing a watch and chain, which had cost him over a month’s salary, he immediately accused them of theft and took them to the police station, writing in his diary: ‘They won’t confess, the beggars. All
the servants in prison and nobody to take care of the house’. When the servants
were released from prison and came back to collect their belongings, he wrote: ‘I had the pleasure of giving them a good thrashing, not to do them any harm, just a lashing with a cane to make them servile again’. 39 Yet, when the head of
the post office, Mr. Hyland, ill-treated his servant, Wright strongly disapproved:
‘Mr. Hyland knocked his boy down, kicked and ill-used him in a most disgraceful manner, because the boy had not heard him order his tiffin’. 40 Wright himself succumbed to tuberculosis and had to go back to England in 1854, where he died shortly after his return.
Lesser Civil Servants
This group mostly worked in the non-commissioned officer role in the police or
the prison service, the two services then being almost indistinguishable. They were mostly ex-soldiers of lower-class origins and had worked their way up from
humble beginnings to become respected citizens in a far-off colony. Their births,
deaths and marriages were recorded in the press and their chest tombs and granite headstones show their comfortable economic worth and pride of rank. Two members of the group are buried in large and costly chest tombs: James Collins [11B/5/7] and Elizabeth Clifton [13/9/4]. Collins, an ex-sergeant from the army,
was the first head gaoler in Hong Kong and earned a wage of only $15 a month.
He died aged forty-three leaving a ‘large family and a number of friends to deplore his loss’. 41 His wife Elizabeth lived on until 1853. His must have been one of the
earliest appointments as when he died, on 7 June 1849, he had held his post for
upwards of seven years.
Samuel Clifton had arrived in Hong Kong by 1846 when he married Elizabeth Quin who was probably the daughter of James Quin mentioned in the
paragraph below. Originally from the 67th Regiment, he left the army to work as
a clerk for the police establishment. He was promoted in 1850 to deputy police inspector but lost his eldest daughter, Emma Elizabeth [13/9/4] in 1845 and his wife, Elizabeth in December 1850 aged twenty-nine years. Clifton by then was listed as assistant superintendent. In 1852, he married again to Miss Fanny Jones, the granddaughter of Brigade-Major Charles Jones of the Royal Hussars, and had four more children. A number of property deals were recorded in Clifton’s name and he was obviously respected by members of the European community.42 For instance, James MacLehose, an inn-keeper, named him as trustee for his wife and children in his will. Clifton must have been a burly man of considerable strength. Thomas Steele, a tavern keeper who had been sentenced to twelve months for wilfully stabbing several men, had escaped gaol with two other men. During the recapture, Steele put up the most determined resistance. ‘Nor did they succeed
in putting him in irons until every man near him, the sheriff included had received
blows from him, when he was knocked down by Inspector Clifton’.43 On another occasion, he was called to deal with an infuriated Chinese steersman of a passage boat. The steersman had slashed one member of his crew wounding him severely
and driven the rest below and was intent on smothering them by flinging stinkpots
(gl.) into the hold:
On going alongside Inspector Clifton found the miscreant in the act of lighting the fuse of another of those dangerous missiles: but, with a blow of
his staff he managed fortunately to divert it from its intended destination,
and with another well applied stroke on the forehead, he sent Mr. Steersman overboard.44
In 1854 Clifton went to Shanghai at the head of one hundred ex -soldiers to form a police force for the British concession there. However, he was later indicted for fraud and
5.9. Chest tomb in memory of Elizabeth Clifton,
extortion. Perhaps he took there
wife of Assistant Superintendent of Police Samuel the ways of policing he had learnt Clifton and of their daughter, Emma Elizabeth.
in Hong Kong. His son, Samuel Clifton [42/2/4], who died in Hong Kong in
February 1874, proudly proclaims on his headstone that he was ‘of Shanghae’. Members of the Clifton family remained in Shanghai up to the Second World War when they left for Australia.
The others members of this group include James Quin [16Cii/7/20], Michael Ryan [11B/2/13], Robert Goodings [9/4/7], John Smithers [40/4/7] and members of the family of James Jarman. Quin, the first to die in 1851, had been a colour sergeant in the 53rd Regiment. He married a widow, Mary Maitland, at the Government House in 1845 and decided to stay on in Hong Kong. He was employed as second clerk in the magistrates’ court. Surprisingly, he must have been illiterate as he signed his will ‘by his mark’, before dying of smallpox.45 He appointed Samuel Clifton to be his executor together with William Morrison [13/6/6], the colonial surgeon. Quin’s son, on leaving Hong Kong, attained the rank of captain in the Indian Army and then transferred to the Bombay police. In 1862, Quin returned to Hong Kong as superintendent of the police force. Michael Ryan of the 57th Regiment was clerk of the High Court when he married Elizabeth Knight in August 1846. He died aged twenty-six years and two months.
Robert Goodings had been a sergeant in the 98th Regiment. He left the army to become a policeman and rose through the ranks to become in turn, clerk, usher, gaoler and finally, in 1854, head keeper of Victoria Gaol. It seems that he too was illiterate as he marked the register with a cross when he married Mary Anne Marsh [9/17/1] in 1844. He buried her in 1856. Her headstone also commemorates the death in 1847 of a baby son, Collingwood. Mary Anne died giving birth to the last of her six babies and the baby also died soon after. Goodings’s pay as head gaoler was 125 pounds sterling a year with his wife getting 12 pounds 10 shillings to act as matron. Goodings married a second time, to Mary Roe, the widow of his friend, James Roe, and had another baby before succumbing to dysentery at the age of thirty-three. If his obituary is to be believed, he must have joined the army as a drummer boy at the very young age of thirteen because it says he ‘had for upwards of twenty years been the servant of the home and local Governments in various capacities’. The gaolers were chosen in the early days from among the police constables but they were under-paid, untrained and since they could speak no Chinese, enforced the obedience of the prisoners largely by brutality. The prisoners formed chain gangs as they worked making the roads needed in the colony. John Fryer, principal of St. Paul’s College, in his first
132 Forgotten Souls
letter home wrote that he heard ‘every hour or two, a long heavy clanking of chains as a great gang of prisoners go past in the road, carrying heavy burdens. They make them work very hard on the roads’. 46
James Jarman is unique in the Hong Kong Cemetery for organizing the only family plot encircled by a low granite surround. This encloses the headstones of his first wife, Sarah Jarman [9/6/7] who had died at the Central Police Station in 1856, and three of his children, James and Mary Eleathia [9/6/6] and Anne Jarman [9/6/8]. In 1857, he had married his first wife, the widow of John Thomas Mitton [9/9/10], a gaoler. Sarah died in 1856 aged twenty-six. Jarman married a second time to Mary Grey and went on to have six more children, four of whom survived. He also worked his way up
through the ranks of the police, becoming a deputy inspector in 1853. In 1857, he was appointed appraiser of the Supreme Court47 and in March 1859 was receiving fifteen pounds sterling extra a year as inspector of weights and measures. In 1863
Jarman was placed in temporary charge of Victoria Gaol. Questions were being asked in the papers as to why he had been so often passed over for promotion. One gets the feeling that his lowly background and lack of education blocked his prospects. In the course of a career in the Hong Kong Police of over twenty years
he was poisoned by the arsenic in his morning toast; he personally arrested Wong
Ma Chow, the alleged pirate and triad boss; and he was shot by an old friend, the auctioneer, James Brooks, whose grave in the Cemetery may be one of those that are now illegible. Brooks had been confined to his room for some days and Jarman went with Mr. Thompson, the chemist, to visit him. They were greeted on entering by Brooks in dishabille leaning over the banisters and pointing a
Smith and Wesson revolver straight at them. The poor man labouring under some terrible delusion of the brain (probably delirium tremens) fired a shot which passed
close to the chemist’s head and lodged in Jarman’s left shoulder. Brooks was taken to hospital where his guilty feelings at wounding an old friend in such a manner impeded his recovery.48
The ill effects of too much alcoholic intake were pervasive in the colony and Jarman was no exception. In 1869 he retired on pension. In his application to retire he confessed: ‘Failing health now compels me to resign. Tropical climates have rendered the use of stimulants necessary’. He asked for a passage to England for himself and his family. The official reply was that he could only be offered one-third of the passage money as his service to the colony ‘was not altogether meritorious’. 49 Jarman seems to have had a raw deal. In July 1869, he finally left the colony in receipt of a pension ‘which does not by any means total up to a very formidable amount’. Perhaps his services were more appreciated by the Chinese community. They presented him with a gold medal then worth $200 and an address on a long silk scroll, signed by seventeen of the oldest and most respectable merchants and stamped by the seals of the fifty-six long-established hongs ending with the words:
With fragrant tears we see you leave your post
And think what tedious years you here have lost;
May fortune, peace and happy joys attend you
In generous measure, and may God defend you.
As the China Mail declared, few police officers could boast the possession of such a certificate.
John Smithers and his brother Thomas were among the more successful of
these minor officers. From chief usher and bailiff in 1850, he rose to become clerk
of the Supreme Court and sexton of St. John’s Cathedral with special permission
to live at the court house. He invested money in the bakery set up by William
Emeny. In January 1856 he inserted a notice into the Friend of China that: ‘Trees,
plants and flowers for the adornment of the burial ground at Wongneichung will
be gratefully received’. So some of the magnificent older trees in the Cemetery may owe their present splendour to Smithers. Thomas, who drowned when a police boat capsized in a typhoon in 1850, was a respected inspector of the police seconded from Scotland Yard. After his death, John inserted a notice into the
134 Forgotten Souls
paper thanking the public for their generosity to Thomas’ widow and children. John married Caroline Cakebread in 1852, with Robert and Mary Anne Goodings as his witnesses, and had four children. In turn he was witness with Robert and Mary Anne Goodings when James Jarman married Sarah Mitton on the death of her first husband, John Thomas Mitton. This group of mainly ex-service minor officers in the Hong Kong civil service were a closely united group who socialized together, supported each other and intermarried. They and their families had made Hong Kong their home and they seemed content with their lives and status. They would have been unlikely to achieve as much if they had returned with their regiments to Britain.
Police Constables and Turnkeys
In Britain, the police took for granted public consensus and generally agreed
norms of social behaviour. But due to fears of unrest and instability, a different model of policing was established in Hong Kong which affected the way the force
here developed and their role. ‘A colonial government, forcibly superimposed
from outside, is undemocratic by definition, and likely to face violent resistance,
at least initially. Therefore it is necessary to emphasize the coercive power of the police’. 50 The Hong Kong Police Force in early days was largely drawn from the ranks of the regiments stationed in the colony and their training was that of soldiers. They carried guns which they were quite capable of using. Their ranking system was based on the army model and they lived in messes not unlike in the army. Such men would have had few qualms about the use of force. It cannot have helped that in early years their authority, especially over soldiers,
was questioned. When two soldiers of the Royal Irish Regiment were arrested for causing an affray in a tavern in 1847, it appeared in evidence that ‘the soldiers
called out that they might do as they pleased, that according to the orders
[from Major General d’Aguilar] they received in barracks, the bloody Peelers [policemen] had nothing to do with them’. 51 In this case the authority of the civil service was asserted and the soldiers punished in court.
In the Hong Kong Cemetery, the absence of graves of certain classes such as policemen and turnkeys is significant. It denoted their poverty and low status in society. They could only afford the granite marker of the pauper’s grave with no inscribed headstone. During the fifteen years of the early period, the headstones of only two turnkeys and one police sergeant have been found. In 1850, John Thomas Mitton [9/9/10] was transferred from the police to the prison. He was one of the very few policemen to remain in the force for a number of years, and to gain the respect of the community. He married Sarah Warwick who, after his death, went on to marry James Jarman. Mitton died in September 1852 aged only twenty-three. The first and second turnkeys earned twenty-four and fifteen pounds sterling a year respectively.52 The low pay of the turnkeys must have contributed to venality in the gaol. In 1855, Robert Goodings found the padlock to the storeroom had been broken and $90 of the prisoners’ money had disappeared. Goodings was sued by a seaman named Clark, who had deposited the best part of nineteen pounds sterling with him. The case was dismissed but the judge suggested that the government reimburse the sailor. There was obviously suspicion that one of the turnkeys was involved. The second gaoler in the Cemetery is John Hannay [10/1/5], a military turnkey, who died in August 1858. He has the distinction of being the oldest person to die in the first period at the age of sixty-seven, if his faded inscription has been correctly read. The only other man found in the Cemetery belonging to this group of men is John Warner [7/7/19] who joined the police from the 98th Regiment. In 1846, he married Maria Whittim, signing by his mark and became a police sergeant. Perhaps the fact that two of the above were married and one had affiliations with the military explains how, among all the police constables, they alone came to be honoured with headstones.
The ‘stuff’ of which the police force was composed was seen by the large majority of Europeans as being ‘of the most wretched quality’. In 1850, it was said that the pay of policemen was ‘very far below what the humblest require in this colony; so that steady men only accept the situation in the hope of something else casting up’. The author of this letter to the China Mail who signed himself Idler continued:
But to the class generally, the chief objection is their readiness in yielding to
the temptation offered by the many public-houses; and many deaths among
our European constables here, I am certain, are to be ascribed to the excessive indulgence in ardent spirits, a great portion of what is sold by the low tavern-keepers being of the most abominable and deleterious description.53
The police force of the time was largely made up of discharged soldiers, Portuguese from Macau and anyone else who could be persuaded to work for very little money and under bad conditions of service. For example, the editor of the China Mail in 1848 remarked on the ‘most cruel and ill-judged system’ where, because pay was stopped during illness and hospital expenses were charged to the patient, ‘police seldom report themselves sick until disease has obtained ascendancy’. 54 The turnover was exceptionally high. Forty-nine soldiers had been discharged from 98th Regiment in 1846, to serve as policemen. Eight years later not one of them still remained in the force. Policemen would rarely have been able to marry due to their low pay, low status and the shortage of women in the colony. The lifestyle that their salaries forced them to lead would have been a barrier for any respectable woman contemplating marriage. Their inability to find wives meant that this class of men were driven to find solace in the brothels where they caught and spread the very virulent venereal diseases that weakened their resistance to illness. The will of James Sullivan, Police Constable No. 21, shows all too clearly the paucity of personal possessions among the police.55 When Sullivan died he bequeathed to his friend, James Ashby P.C. No.12, one cloth cap, one straw hat, two pairs of shoes, a box with some cloth shirts, a fork, knife, spoon and plate, and one bed with bedding and curtains. He signed his will with his mark. The list in the Hong Kong Gazette for 1856 of those who died intestate showed one policeman, Bernard Whelehan, as leaving only $1.84, whereas a tavern keeper, J.C. Ryan, left a respectable total of $517.97. It is hardly surprising that the police left the force to become tavern keepers.
The demoralized state of the police force is shown by the frequent dismissals and prosecutions of policemen. For instance in a short period of time in 1847, James McGowan was dismissed for being drunk on duty fourteen times. James Bryne was found lying drunk under the police office verandah while on
duty. He had already been reported twelve times for misconduct. He was jailed
for one month and fined $10. Arthur Robertson was sentenced to ten days in prison and a $20 fine for being asleep at his post while guarding a prisoner under
sentence of death.56
Norton-Kyshe quoted a perhaps somewhat exaggerated article from the Straits Times to give an example of the poor turnout of the Hong Kong European police:
Until the middle of last year, the clothes of the men were for the most part ragged, greasy and patched; many had the legs of their trousers so short that the whole of the ankles were visible; some wore boots in one of which they could have put both legs … their boots moreover were old and shabby, the toes or heels of the men protruding through the leather….57
The police were supposed to wear their number on their collars but these were often not visible for various usually nefarious reasons.
The low pay combined with lack of training and the fact that they were in a position of power and able to ‘squeeze’ the Chinese, meant that a large number of the police force were corrupt. Brothel keepers and the owners of gambling dens paid off the police as a matter of course. A constable named Randolph, when charged with extortion and demanding money with menaces in August 1856, said in his defence that it was the usual practice for the Chinese to pay $10 or $5 for their release whenever they were arrested by the police for gambling.58 The behaviour of these petty officials must have made the port seem anything but welcoming to the Chinese.
Little was done to stem these corrupt practices. The method of collecting the tax and police rates from the Chinese households seemed designed to invite ‘squeeze’.
Policemen are furnished with papers in Chinese having the number of the
house or shop written in English; these papers state the tax is five percent,
but neither is the valuation given nor the amount of assessment specified.
The police have thus a carte blanche which they can fill up according to their
own notions of the property.59
The superintendent, Charles May, who had been sent from Scotland Yard to head this force consisting of English, Indian and Chinese policemen, never learnt a word of any other language in the twenty years he was in Hong Kong. Like their leader, few of the European or Indian police could speak Chinese. Besides this, many of the European police were also illiterate. A notice quoted in the Friend of China which had been posted in Victoria shows the educational shortcomings of even the sergeants:
Near Wast Peint, Notice 27th Febuary — There is a Stray Paney with bridle
sadle — in the pound at the Market station if Claimed it will be giving by A
Plying to the inspector of Palice. Signed J.S. Wildiame, Sejt. Palice. (sic)60
The turnkeys, chosen from the ranks of the police, were little better. Security in Victoria Gaol was so lax that in 1850, three prisoners escaped by finding a convenient bamboo ladder, which they had placed against the prison wall, and climbing out. They were recaptured dead drunk in town. When prosecuted for jail-breaking, they argued that they had had every intention of climbing back in again unnoticed.61 It was the Queen’s birthday and they had merely wanted to drink to her health.
The Problems of the Civil Service in Hong Kong
The administration of the first governor, Sir Henry Pottinger, which had to rely
on locally recruited talent and had to borrow on occasions from the army, had a
makeshift air. When Sir John Davis, the second governor, arrived from England
in May 1844, he brought with him on the same ship a colonial secretary, a colonial
treasurer, a court registrar, a civil engineer, and his nephew, William Mercer, to
act as his private secretary. He also brought with him a warrant to appoint Major
William Caine, who was already chief magistrate, as sheriff and provost marshal
of the Supreme Court. The Hong Kong colonial civil service could be said to have been born on the day Sir John and his entourage arrived. The cost of securing
Hong Kong as a colony does seem very high. When 250 pounds sterling a year
seemed a reasonable salary for a police inspector seconded from London, a total
cost of 35,876 pounds sterling for the year’s salaries for civil servants seems high.
This sum increases considerably when the costs of supporting a garrison of around a thousand men is also taken into account.62 Taking the list of civil servants from the Blue Book of 1845, there was one civil servant for approximately every nine
members of the public, and two soldiers for each one of the roughly five hundred
Europeans on the island. Perhaps this willingness to subsidize the garrison and civil service of such a small island shows how valuable it seemed to the authorities in England to have a base on the fringes of China.
Few men of the quality that would command respect among the settlers were prepared to take up the offer of a position in Hong Kong. It was so insignificant a place and had such a bad reputation for ill health in Britain that ambitious men of the type sought were not attracted to take up posts there. Sir John Davis, a former superintendent in the East India Company, who came from a family of nonconformist woollen merchants from Exeter, would not have been accepted as a member of the British aristocracy. Yet, it was rumoured that he was only induced to accept the post of governor when the offer was sweetened by the promise of a knighthood and six thousand pounds a year, which was three times as much as the president of the United States was currently earning.63 No qualified lawyer could be found who would accept the position of chief justice until the salary had been raised to the unprecedented height of two thousand pounds a year. The only civil servant who could perhaps command the respect of the merchants was the colonial secretary, the Honourable Frederick Bruce, son of the Earl of Elgin. He was considered too valuable to waste on Hong Kong and after not much more than a year in the territory was promoted to be lieutenant governor of Newfoundland.
The arrival of Sir John Davis and his entourage seems to have had a very
divisive effect on the Hong Kong community. It sparked what E.J. Eitel termed
‘gradations of social rank which became subdivided into mutually exclusive cliques and sets’. 64 The determination of the governor and his top civil servants to take their place among the elite of the society does not seem sufficient explanation for the seemingly unreasonable dislike that Davis generated in the minds of the merchants and traders of Hong Kong. This can be seen, for example, in a letter Alexander Matheson wrote in November 1844 from Macau to Donald Matheson saying:
You are quite right to have as little as possible to do with Mr. Martin [colonial secretary], or in fact any member of the Govt. The only return you can look
for are insolence and ingratitude.65
An article in the Friend of China in January 1850 attempted an explanation of this dislike from the point of the tradesmen who felt that their position in the community had been downgraded. The editor quoted an article in the British press by Edward Gibbon Wakefield: ‘The general applicability of which … cannot fail to strike our Hong Kong readers’. The article described how:
like the caste of Brahmins, they [civil servants from Britain] hold themselves
apart from the rest of the community and immeasurably superior to it … they
do not belong to the community at all but resemble the official class in India
which exclusively governs but does not settle.
Further it argued that these bureaucrats:
agree in thinking that colonists or settlers, people who come out all that way to improve their condition by their own exertions, are an inferior order of beings and they stick close together in resisting all attempts on the part of the
settlers to become officials, to get a share in governing the colony.
He complained that the civil servants used the patronage at their disposal to bolster their positions and to hold themselves together in a
family compact.… The jealousies and rivalries and hatreds which belong to poor human nature but which in well ordered societies are subdued by various
restraints break out uncontrolled amongst officials of a bureaucratic colony.66
Some of the men chosen by Sir John Davis from the few local candidates
available to fill posts in the civil service turned out to be rogues and did nothing to raise the reputation of the fledgling service. One such was Charles Holdforth.
He was alleged to have come to Hong Kong to elude justice in Australia for horse stealing.67 He first secured a junior clerkship and was then offered the post of coroner in place of the popular voluntary sheriff, Edward Farncomb, who had opposed certain government measures. Next he was made sheriff. In that post, he managed to get the long-serving government auctioneer, Charles Markwick, dismissed from his position in favour of the more pliable George
Duddell, and together they proceeded to work various scams. When he finally
took his departure for California, he was so fearful of being arrested that he hid himself in the bowels of the ship. His career in Hong Kong had shown ‘how an under-official of the Government could with the fostering care of his patrons in a few years accumulate a large fortune’. In California, he was brought before the Supreme Court of San Francisco for fraud. The authorities there no doubt
thought: ‘They had an ordinary rogue to deal with and not the ex-Sheriff of Hong
Kong’. 68 Another bad choice was Adolphus Edward Shelley who gave his name to Shelley Street. He came from India with a letter of introduction from Lord Stanley on the strength of which he was made the auditor general. Davis in a private letter to Lord Grey accused him of being ‘dissipated, in debt, negligent, guilty of falsehood, and quite unfit for high office’. 69 The presence in the service of this kind of adventurer was another factor that militated against the men in public service gaining the respect of the community.
For these reasons, the civil servants had an uphill task in their fight to maintain their positions as representatives of the Queen in Hong Kong’s hierarchy. Being in competition with the merchants and feeling it necessary to demonstrate their equal status by lavish entertainment and high living, they often found themselves in financial difficulties and turned to questionable methods of raising the necessary cash. It was strongly rumoured that a number, including Major Caine, resorted to money-lending at grossly inflated rates of interest.70 The temptation to augment their salaries in order to cope with the demands of their social position was often overwhelming. An undercurrent of corruption that lowered the reputation of the civil service at this time seems to have permeated the administrative hierarchy from top to bottom. The Song of the Squeeze, published in 1902, could just as well have been written for this period:
Let moralists chatter and spout;
Your chance with avidity seize,
One hand in front for the chapel plate,
The other behind for the squeeze.71
The opposition of the merchants to the government hardened when Davis attempted to recoup the costs of the establishment by imposing taxes, charges on services and an annual police rate based on property. He also created monopolies such as that for the sale of opium in the colony which he then farmed out to the highest bidder. The community blamed him for the downturn of the economy in the late 1840s. In 1847 an editorial in the Friend of China claimed that: ‘Many of our friends are so disgusted with the mismanagement of this colony that they are giving up in despair’. It listed fourteen facts which it said afforded conclusive proof of the ‘falling state of affairs’.72
The Hulme affair in 1848, when Chief Justice Hulme was sent home in disgrace accused of drunkenness, worsened the already isolated and vulnerable position of the civil service, and perhaps caused its members to turn inwards against each other. The backstabbing and in-fighting among the members of the government became so bad that by the mid-1850s it seems to have almost paralyzed the government. In a letter to the China Mail, on the subject of the founding of St. Andrew’s School, Paternus wrote:
A school of the kind proposed by you has been wanting for years…. The plain truth is that in Hong Kong nothing of a public nature which may be for the
general benefit can be brought forward by one party without being opposed
by another; not because the good of the object is denied or can be denied but solely because it has been proposed by Smith and not by himself. So long as such a feeling exists, it serves us right to be taxed to our hearts’ content; having our harbour blockaded by pirates if not occupied by them; being made to pay extravagant prices for the necessities of life and so on.73
For a time, it seemed a real possibility that an alternative and cheaper form of administration could be introduced into Hong Kong in the place of the cumbrous and costly administration set up by Sir John Davis. The newspapers pressed for a municipal type of government headed by a mayor and corporation on the lines of those being set up in England to administer the new towns such as Birmingham. This model was in the process of being adopted in Shanghai in the 1850s. The then secretary of state in London had agreed to a modified form being tried in Hong Kong. That this did not happen seems to have been partly due to the
indolence and lack of interest of the merchants and partly to the lack of an effective
voice in other sections of the community who would have liked to push such measures through. The scheme was against the interests of the civil service and opposed by them since, under such a scheme, some would have been replaced by local volunteers.
Chapter 6
Professionals
Doctors, lawyers, architects and newspaper editors are included in this group. All four professions while continuing to practise privately at this date, moved into and
out of government service as needed. The conflicts of interests that arose from this
anomaly underlay some of the scandals that rocked the colony in the later years of
this period. For example as mentioned earlier, Dr. W.T. Bridges, a barrister, was
in his private capacity representing the Chinese opium farmer in an enquiry into malpractices at the same time that he was acting as colonial secretary. At this period, professionals did not enjoy high status in society. They moved in much the same circle as the second echelon of civil servants and the wealthier tradesmen. They lived in modest houses around Queen’s Road, D’Aguilar Street and Hollywood Road.
Only three lawyers are found in the Hong Kong Cemetery from this period. The charges for their services were high, particularly to the Chinese who needed their help to defend themselves from little understood and sometimes unfair cases brought against them in court. Most lawyers made good money and had the necessary funds to pay their passages back to Britain if illness threatened. The first to be buried in the Cemetery was James Brown [10/8/3], a solicitor of the Supreme Court and public notary. He was articled to William Gaskell [16Cii/7/14], who practised in Hong Kong from 1846 to his death in 1868, by which time he must have been one of the longest practising professionals in the colony. Brown was admitted locally in 1855, becoming a partner in the firm Gaskell & Brown in 1857, but he died in the same year, aged thirty-five. He was one of the first hundred men to volunteer for military training in the face of the Russian threat in 1854. He himself was prosecuted and fined $25 for flogging an unfortunate Chinese bookbinder. The bookbinder happened to share his shop with a shoe-maker whose night-time tap-tapping had disturbed Brown’s sleep.1 The second lawyer, John Day [20/19/1] from Milverton in Somerset, who died in September 1858 aged thirty-nine from an attack of acute dysentery, was a barrister from the Middle Temple. He arrived in Hong Kong in 1855. He was asked to be
examiner in the first Caldwell inquiry and then, in August 1857, was appointed
attorney general. According to his obituary he kept aloof from colonial matters and was therefore all the more trusted for his ‘common sense, legal acumen and gentlemanly feeling…. It would be well if we all considered how mean, how miserable our petty strivings for wealth, influence and position are, and sought more singly to live worthy lives’.2 The heartfelt finishing lines of the obituary sum up the editor’s feelings about animosities that plagued the colony at the time of his death. Day was succeeded by Frederick Green [4/7/7], another practising barrister, who first joined the government from the private sector as deputy
attorney general in 1855. Illness had affected the performance of Day’s duties and
on his death ‘the vast mass of documents to be dealt with and arrears of business were passed over to Mr. Green’. He may have been overwhelmed by the amount of work because only three months later Green resigned on the grounds of ill health and died in February 1862.
The only architect from this period, Thomas Larkin Walker Esq. [10/5/2], has a fine carved headstone that must have impressed John Smithers [40/4/7], the sexton, whose headstone is an almost exact replica. Walker, who had a
private practice, was co-opted locally to act as deputy surveyor when the surveyor general, Charles St. George Cleverly, was absent on leave recuperating from illness. He was responsible for the surveyor’s report in the Blue Book of 1856. In May 1860, he was nominated by the governor to sit on the board of cathedral trustees together with the colonial
secretary, William Mercer, Cleverly, and
Henry Kingsmill, a barrister, whose wife, Frances Kingsmill [40/5/4], is buried in the Cemetery.3
A short account of the profession of journalism is included here because of its importance in the colony, although no journalists from this period are found in the Cemetery. John Carr, the second editor of the Friend of China, described the position occupied by journalists in Hong Kong society:
6.1. Headstone in memory of William Gaskell, d. 29.12.1868.
Here we have three newspapers, Mr. Shortrede is the proprietor, editor and publisher of the ‘China Mail’ and on the Petty Jury List; ranking as a tradesman. Mr. Carr, proprietor and editor of the ‘Friend of China’, is a petty Juror for the same reason; having been lately publisher of the paper. Mr. Cairns, former proprietor of the ‘Hong Kong Register’, was on the same list for the like reason, Mr. Strachan, now printer and publisher of the last named paper, is on the Grand Jury and Mr. Mitchell, the editor, is a Grand
Juror and Justice of the Peace. We do not mention this as envying these
Gentlemen’s position or from any desire to become candidate for municipal honors, but in the hope that when the privilege of governing ourselves is granted we may not be excluded from giving our vote to the man we may think most able to administer funds, of which we subscribe to a portion.4
This extract is particularly interesting in that it shows the anomalous status of the editors, somewhere between the tradesmen and the civil servants. It also shows the importance placed on ranking as shown in the pages of jury list. A. Shortrede, whom
John Wright described as ‘a fine looking fellow and what is better, a noble mind’, 5 was the son of the sheriff of Roxborough in Scotland and was closely linked by family ties to Sir Walter Scott. Shortrede had learnt the printing and publishing business in the hope that he could publish Scott’s novels. When ‘disastrous circumstances
attending the latter years’ of Scott’s life made this hope impossible, he decided to go east. He had three brothers in the East India Company. In the last few years of his life, Shortrede achieved the social distinction of membership of the Hong Kong
Club. W.H. Mitchell is another professional who was co-opted by the government
as assistant magistrate, sheriff and coroner while still publishing and editing his paper, the Hong Kong Register. He resigned from the government in 1858 in the face of the attacks on his integrity by Attorney General Chisholm Anstey.
Doctors were primarily looked on as either surgeons, saw-bones as they were
called, or druggists. William Maxwell Wood, a ship’s doctor on board the USS
San Jacinto, lamented: ‘My Chinese acquaintanceship was neither numerous nor aristocratic: neither was my English. I belonged to a profession which was socially of low caste with both people’.6 The scientific leap forward that led to an increased measure of respect for doctors was only just beginning to make itself felt. But the prevalence of disease in Hong Kong gave doctors an added importance and added
vulnerability: ‘When Dr. Harland died of fever in the year 1858, it was noticed that
he was the fourth Colonial surgeon who had fallen victim to the climate’. 7 The
146 Forgotten Souls
four colonial surgeons, Dr. Francis Dill [20/5/6], Dr. Peter Young [16Ci/6/4], Dr. William Morrison [13/6/6] and Dr. W. Aurelius Harland [10/3/3], all died within a twelve-year period of malarial fever thus underlining the dangers associated with visiting their patients as they made their rounds.
All four combined private practice with government service and only in the case of Dr. Morrison was the clash of interests publicly questioned. Though strongly denying it, Morrison was accused of neglecting his government duties to prisoners in Victoria Gaol, because he was too busy seeing his wealthy private patients.8 Morrison shares with Dr. Harland, who succeeded him as colonial surgeon in
1857, the honour of having two of the most spectacular monuments in the Hong
Kong Cemetery and also perhaps the most appreciative epitaphs. Morrison’s declares that he was: ‘Deeply and universally regretted’. Harland’s went further: ‘He
was admired for his attainments / as a scientific enquirer, Trusted / for his skill as
a Physician / Beloved for his many noble qualities as a man’. E.J. Eitel echoed this feeling when he wrote: ‘No event in Hong Kong was mourned so generally and so deeply as the death of Dr. Harland.9 Dr. Francis Dill, appointed in 1844 as the
first colonial surgeon, has a large chest tomb tucked away in a quiet corner of the
Cemetery under the branches of a jasmine tree. In his obituary he was described as being ‘remarkable for his kind and forbearing disposition’ and as ‘a steady and warm-hearted friend’. He was the son of an Irish parson and had been a surgeon on the East India Company ships. He is likely to have been the surgeon of the same name on the Atlas, who looked after John Robert, the young son of the missionary, Robert Morrison, when he was sent back to England after the death of his mother in Macau in 1821.10 A compassionate man moved by the desperate plight of destitute sailors who fell sick while in Hong Kong, Dill was a driving force behind the founding of the Society for the Relief of the Sick Destitute . The
first meeting, in July 1846, took place in his
house. According to the Friend of China,
this was the first attempt to raise an annual
fund for charity in Hong Kong.11 Dill also helped Chief Justice Hulme disprove the charges of being a habitual drunkard which had led to his recall to England. He testified that the rolling gait of the chief justice was caused by his bad varicose veins and not by drink.
Dill was succeeded in October 1846 by Dr. Peter Young, who shares a headstone with his brother Dr. James Young [16Ci/6/4]. The two Scottish brothers may have been the sons of Dr. F.H. Young, a naval surgeon, who was among the founders of Hong Kong Dispensary
later to become known as A.S. Watson
& Co. It opened its doors within a few months of the British occupation of the island in a temporary mat-shed on Possession Point and served as a dispensary for the soldiers and sailors of the British Expeditionary Force. Dr. James Young, a druggist, was put in charge of the new buildings for the Hong Kong Dispensary. He became an elder of the Nonconformist Union Chapel.12 Following the death of his wife, after only seven months of married life, he left Hong Kong to become a medical missionary in Amoy. He died in 1855 at Musselburgh near Edinburgh.13 Dr. Peter Young came out to Hong Kong on the East Indian Company steamer, Nemesis, as the ship’s surgeon.14 During the capture of the heights above Canton in March 1841, the wounded were brought down to Nemesis where ‘they received every attention from the surgeon … and particularly from Mr. Peter Young, who was then on board merely as a volunteer’.15 On returning to Hong Kong, he was
appointed a member of the Committee of Public Health in 1843. With the money
raised by a public subscription and additional help from Jardine, Matheson &
Co., a Seamen’s Hospital of fifty beds had been built. Dr. Peter Young was put
in charge, giving his services free of charge. He resigned from his post of colonial
surgeon in 1847, and died in October 1854.
The visiting American dental surgeon, Dr. Ball, gave us a glimpse into the lifestyle of the third colonial surgeon, Dr. Morrison, when he described how ‘Dr. M’, unlike the other doctors who take sedan chairs,
usually appears in a low carriage drawn by a pair of handsome Chusan ponies. His boy rides with him, holding an umbrella over his head and takes care of the horses in his absence, being obliged continually, with a cloth, to
drive off the flies which torment them’.16
Ball also described how, like so many others, Morrison had been burgled. The robbers managed to extract his gold watch and some old and valuable family silver from bedroom where, at the time of the robbery, the doctor was sound asleep.17 Morrison had a cherished plan to build a sanatorium on the Peak for sick
servicemen. After his death the project was finally carried out, but the sanatorium
was abandoned after a short time, due to the number of men hospitalized there succumbing to dysentery. Morrison died in October 1853 aged forty-one of an abscess on his liver, leaving a wife and four children.
Dr. William Aurelius Harland [10/3/3], the son of a physician in Scarborough, graduated with honours from Edinburgh University in 1845 and
arrived in Hong Kong in the same year. He ran a private practice with offices in
Stanley Street. Harland invited a Chinese scholar to share his house and teach him to read Mandarin. He was thus able to devote time to the study of Chinese medicine, showing a respect for Chinese culture not often found among his fellow colonists. He succeeded Dr. Peter Young as resident doctor at the Seamen’s Hospital in 1854. According to his obituary, he spent his happiest years as surgeon
there since it gave him plenty of time to devote to his studies and he was indifferent
to money. In 1848, he performed the first operation in Hong Kong using anaesthetics. It was on an Indian whose arm had been crushed in an accident on board his ship and had to be removed. Previous to this, men who needed surgery still faced being tied down and dosed with heavy draughts of alcohol to deaden the pain.
The chloroform, (about two drachms) was poured upon a large piece of sponge, the outer part being covered with oiled paper to prevent evaporation. The patient being placed on a bed in the horizontal position, the sponge was applied to the mouth and nostrils and he was told to inhale it and in about three minutes he became quite insensible.18
The operation was then carried out. Dr. Harland was assisted by Drs. Young, Balfour and Dill and two surgeons from the Royal Navy, one of whom was Dr. Edward Cree whose diary has been quoted earlier.
Harland’s appointment as colonial surgeon in 1853 shows the importance of patronage at this time. It was obtained for him by his father, through the good offices of the Duke of Newcastle. Harland had suffered bouts of malarial fevers for some years before his death. In November 1850, John Wright reported in his diary: ‘Dr. Harland very unwell. He informed me that he had tumbled down in a fit just as he had finished breakfast’. 19 He died suddenly in September 1858, of what was described as ‘congestion of the brain’, brought on by exposing his head to the full rays of the sun. He had been fishing off Green Island with some friends and jumped overboard for a swim. However a different explanation was given by
E.J. Eitel, who said that he ‘died of fever contracted while charitably attending on the Chinese poor’. 20 His obituary, one of the longest ever given by the local newspapers, speaks of his unselfish devotion to friends, his modesty, his talents and his manly worth. ‘The presence of such a man — of high intelligence, actuated by no selfish or unworthy aims, and thoroughly acquainted with the wants and failings of the Colony, — was itself valuable’. 21 On his death, at the age of thirty-four, he bequeathed his natural history collection to Scarborough Museum in Yorkshire. This included his collection of shells, insects, birds and marine life. He left his herbarium, botanical books and instruments, and his double-barrelled gun to his friend, the botanist Henry Fletcher Hance. His three gold watches went to his family in England. His three silver cups, house, furniture and land (Inland Lot 504), with ‘all the money in my possession’ went to his Chinese housekeeper, Leong A. Yung. She must have meant a great deal to him.22
Besides the four colonial surgeons mentioned above, no fewer than nine other doctors, if the doctors from the armed services are included, are buried in the Cemetery. They include Dr. William Lorrain [40/4/6] who is buried with his wife Jessie, and Dr. George Brice [20/3/4]. Dr. Lorrain is mentioned by the
Russian naval officer, Iosif Antonovich Goshkevich, as having a large collection
of shells gathered during his travels in America and India.23 He was the doctor who alerted the public to the horrors of what was then dubbed by the local press
as ‘The Black Hole of Hong Kong’ after he found Ah-lum, his family and fifty of
his workmen incarcerated in a tiny room with no facilities. Ah-lum was the owner
of the bakery in Wan Chai which sold the bread laden with arsenic to almost the
entire European and Indian population at the beginning of the Second Opium
War.
Dr. Brice, a Scotsman from Edinburgh, died in 1862(?) aged forty-two.24
He lived on a chop-boat at Whampoa for many years, tending to the needs of sick
sailors from the vessels anchored there. In 1853, a portion of the chapel room of
the Whampoa Bethel had been partitioned off at the request of the residents so
that wards could be erected to accommodate sick or wounded sailors, the chapel congregation having dwindled to three or four persons. On the departure of the 25 He
American, Dr. Gregg, Dr. Brice took charge of this small hospital space. escaped with his chop-boat to Hong Kong at the beginning of the Second Opium
War. Brice is one of the few men who married his Chinese ‘protected girl’, Yearn
Anow. The wedding between him and Yearn Arrow took place in the seamen’s
floating Bethel at Hong Kong in March 1859. His little daughter, Winefred [sic] Astor, who died one month after her father in 1862 and is commemorated with him on the headstone, must be among the earliest Eurasians buried in the Cemetery.26
Three naval surgeons, David Davidson [9/14/2], Robert Bankier [13/1/1], Henry French [13/8/1] of HMS Winchester, and the four army surgeons bring the total of deaths among doctors to thirteen. Dr. Bankier had been in Hong Kong certainly since May 1842, first as surgeon on board HMS Blenheim when at a court-martial he gave evidence in favour of a certain Lieutenant Christopher that he had fallen down, not as alleged by the prosecution as a result of drink, but in an epileptic fit. He was later in charge of the Royal Navy hospital ship, Alligator and after that the Minden. The principal medical officer to the forces,
John Pullin Hawkey [20/4/4], died in 1854, aged fifty-six. Dr. Thomas O’Flaherty Esq. [16Cii/6/24] of the 59th Regiment followed him to the Cemetery in 1855. Dr. William Orr [4/5/2], also of the 59th Regiment, and Washington T. Pitton Esq. [10/4/1], staff assistant surgeon, both died in 1857. Two family members of the army surgeons also died. In October 1848, the death of Henrietta Ferguson [20/8/6], the wife of the deputy inspector general of hospitals, was recorded of whom it was said, she was ‘much esteemed by all who had the pleasure of her acquaintance’.27 Dr. Dane, chief staff surgeon for the army, lost his little daughter Eva Dane [9/7/1]. It would appear that being a doctor was a highly risky occupation.
The Medico-Chirurgical Society
By modern standards it would seem unthinkable that doctors should not come together in learned societies for the purpose of furthering medical knowledge. Yet, in the climate of the society in Hong Kong, it seemed almost miraculous that they
could do so. Writing about the Medico-Chirurgical Society in the Almanac and Directory of 1848, William Tarrant congratulated the doctors on their ability to
unite in the cause of better medicine:
In a small community like Hong Kong distracted by cliques and party feelings with the additional incitements on the score of professional rivalry, it is hardly possible to suppose that a small body of men could isolate themselves and
remain united for a sufficient length of time in the enjoyment of such cordiality
as would serve to ensure the promotion of a common object.
The society was founded in May 1845, when eleven medical men met at the house of Dr. Francis Dill. At its height, seventeen doctors were members. At regular meetings, lectures were given on subjects of topical interest. The members of this society seem to have been very forward-looking:
In the spirit of purest philanthropy and in accordance with the views of the founders of this Institution, Dr. Hobson in June 1845, proposed … the formation of a Medical School for the instruction of Chinese youth in the knowledge and practise of this benevolent profession.28
Dr. Benjamin Hobson, a medical missionary and the first secretary of the society, had to leave the colony to take his ailing wife back to England after the death of his baby son, John Abbay Hobson [11A/3/7]. Jane Hobson died within sight of Dover. The climate of opinion was changing and Hong Kong had to wait another thirty-five years for Dr. Hobson’s vision to come to fruition. The good work that this society accomplished was short-lived, an illustration perhaps
of how the frequent deaths or departures from Hong Kong of key members made it very difficult to run this kind of a small society. By
1847 the society was languishing. Dr.
Harland and Dr. Bankier decided to widen the society’s membership and aims, and changed the name to the Philosophical Society. In January
1847, this in turn was reconstituted as the Asiatic Society of China, which was re-founded in 1950 and is now flourishing
under the name of the Royal Asiatic Society.
The Illnesses Faced by the Doctors and Their Responses
Life in Hong Kong was at best precarious.29 Death in its many forms came often with great suddenness. The colonists had to deal with a whole range of unpleasant illnesses ranging from smallpox, cholera, dysentery and malaria to boils, prickly heat, conjunctivitis, worms and venereal disease. At this time, the great advances of medical science had not yet taken place and the treatments of these various diseases were both daunting and often useless.
The connection had not yet been made between the mosquito and malaria. The ‘deadly remittent and intermittent fever’ which killed so many were thought to be caused by the disturbance of the soil during the cutting of roads and digging for the foundations of houses:
During the rainy monsoon a fearful pestiferous gas is emitted from the soil which, if it does not produce fever and speedy death, has the result of enervating both body and mind.30
Dr. Benjamin Ball, the visiting American dental surgeon, reporting on the suddenness with which this fever terminated life, wrote:
On the day we landed, a man stopped here at the hotel, breakfasted as usual, was afterwards taken ill and went to the hospital and at six in the afternoon, he was dead and buried. He was, however, intemperate in both eating and drinking. On the next day, eleven persons and nine on the succeeding one fell victim to the disease and were buried on the days of their death.31
A contribution to the Dublin Magazine for July 1848 described the course of the fever:
The temperate and intemperate become alike the victims of this dreadful fever which generally commences with a slight headache and gradually increases until the whole head is so sore that no part can bear its own weight or pressure on the pillow. The body becomes so weak and enervated that the patient is forced to assume a recumbent posture, and the fever rages to an incredible degree. The eyeballs are in such excessive pain that light can ill be endured and yet the closing of the eyelids is intolerable.32
The poor sufferers were treated with purgatives, cooling lotions and the ‘application of leeches to the burning temples’.33 The early garrison regiments such
as the 59th Regiment were decimated by fever.
Every day at this time … three dead bodies put into the Hearse at once and
four men of a Fatigue Party with side arms [escorted them], at quick march, off to Happy Valley’.
So many died that the uniforms of the deceased, which had cost five pounds
sterling to be docked from the soldiers’ wages, now fetched only five shillings.
Shakos & coatees got among the Chinese and you would see Dozens of them parading about in full Soldier dress, many of the Shakos became footballs for the Chinese and other Pedestrians.34
The second most common cause of death was dysentery or cholera, the two being not clearly differentiated. The methods, advocated to avoid or cure these
diseases, could have made little difference. The colonial surgeon, Dr. Chaldicott, praised the efficacy of flannel:
Flannel next to the skin and especially in the shape of a bandage round the
abdomen has been fully recognized by Indian Medical Officers, especially as
a preventative of those fearful diseases — Cholera and Dysentery.
He strongly recommended that every soldier should be ordered to wear one ‘round the abdomen night and day’. 35 To wear such bandages in the heat of the summer would have been extremely unpleasant besides being pointless. In an article written at this time, Cholera, Its Prevention and Treatment, the author recommends a mixture of mustard and salt to be taken every ten minutes to induce vomiting followed by thirty drops of tincture of opium to be given in a glass of brandy and water. It also strongly recommends the use of an embrocation of heated turpentine to be rubbed over the bowels and extremities
to which the addition of one part of laudanum [morphine] would be an
important improvement.36 If this was not to hand a mustard poultice should be placed on the stomach and bowels. Another suggested cure for cholera involved ice and champagne. According to the article, a man who consumed forty pounds
of ice with his champagne was cured. When John Wright visited Mr. Hudson,
the P. & O. clerk, he reported: ‘The poor fellow looks very ill — the night previous he had eighteen leeches on his stomach’. 37 History does not relate if Hudson survived.
Professionals 155
The sun was considered extremely dangerous as a cause of sickness to be avoided by the prudent at all times, as is shown by two verses quoted from a poem published in the China Mail:
I am the Sun of Hongkong
Who is there that knows not my power? When I dart forth my rays, I set brains in a blaze,
And then mortals dread the death hour; They sicken — they pine — and they die — No skill can their being prolong; And I laugh in my heart as I watch their vain art — For I am the sun of Hongkong!
And when in the earth they are laid, And silenced their cries and their groans, Rich feast shall the worms then make on their forms, And house in their marrowless bones! And the beetle shall clatter his wing, And drone forth the funeral song, And in triumph I’ll wave my beams o’er the grave — For I am the Sun of Hongkong!38
Great care had to be taken to guard against its rays. During the summer, ladies only ventured out of doors in the early morning or the cool of the evening. Men were considered stronger but they came in for constant warnings against exposing their heads to the sun:
During the warmest day this month we noticed four Europeans passing along with their umbrellas closed and under their arms, the thermometer at the time
91 degrees in the shade, and the sun near the meridian. Is it to be wondered at,
that such folly in many instances is not rewarded with sickness?39
In a letter to young soldiers, a non-commissioned officer of the 18th Royal Irish
Regiment warned:
Never expose your self to the sun unnecessarily. Some unthinking men run
out bareheaded to bring in a belt, a flannel or a cap case that may be drying in
the sun. You cannot do so with impunity.40
But a more real and potent danger to the lives of the European community was drink. Men at all levels of society, but in particular those at the lower end of the
social scale had a tendency to indulge as a way of grabbing at the fleeting happiness
born of forgetfulness, which banished the stresses and fears to which they were daily subjected. A doctor, signing himself M.D., writing to the Friend of China on the question of keeping healthy in Hong Kong, recommended: ‘Temperance in the hot season particularly from Ardent Spirits’, and then went on to say: ‘The
water system I consider to be equally bad [as spirits]; neither are good for the
European constitutions which require supporting during the unhealthy months’. 41 He advocates substituting beer or wine for water and spirits. The local water could
not safely be drunk, so his advice was widely taken and beer and wine were quaffed
as if they were water for the purpose of quenching thirsts. Rev. J. Lewis Shuck in a report from Hong Kong on the American Baptist Mission there wrote:
You have doubtless heard much of the sickness of Hong Kong. It is true that disease and death have committed great havoc here but I can see no evidence of its being insalubrious…. The great mortality was owing to causes in no way connected to the climate. Intemperance, exposure to the sun,
damp dwellings and filthy streets have occasioned sickness but the common
cause has been the free use of vinous and fermented and distilled liquors. In
fine I ascribe the deaths not to Hong Kong fever, there is no such malady,
but to ‘imprudence fever’. 42
The fear of disease and the tendency to drink are nicely bracketed by John Wright in two adjoining diary entries for June 1849. Soon after arriving, he went by boat
to Happy Valley:
a very inappropriate name, a portion of it being the Protestant and Roman Catholic burial grounds which consecrated spots have a surprising number of tombstones — gave one a feeling of anything but happiness. Drank too
much and was sick. Bought a case of gin off the carpenter of the ‘Protomelia’. 43
In fact Wright on the whole stayed clear of drink.
Again the sudden death of Lieutenant George Dawson [16Cii/6/25] and his wife Maria on the same day shocked the society as is recorded in the newspaper:
One of those frightening events occurred last week tending to throw
over society its deepest shade of gloom. We refer to the sudden deaths of
Lieutenant Dawson of the Ceylon Rifles, and his amiable and much loved
partner (neither of them five and twenty years of age) both of whom were at
the ball given at the Clubhouse on Monday 26th Ultimo and on the following
Saturday were side by side in the cold narrow grave in Wong-nei-chong.44
Wright gave us further insights in his diary. She was:
a ladylike and interesting person … and dotingly fond of her husband but … he thought very little of her and a great deal too much of the bottle — O that horrid poison.45
She died of malaria and he of delirium tremens. The sermon preached at their
funeral at St. John’s Cathedral was on the fleetingness of life. A great incentive to
drunkenness was the cheapness and easy access to shamshoo, a Chinese rice wine concocted from ethanol, nitrates and alcohol.
The lowest class of Chinese, the very lepers who cripple about the street, have in their huts for sale a deleterious spirit known among users as ‘Samshoo’. To Europeans — particularly in warm weather — this spirit is positively
poisonous; nothing has been more clearly ascertained than the effects of this horrid drug — fever, stupor, apoplexy, congestion have carried off hundreds
of fine healthy young men who indulged in it only once. It is so cheap that a man may get drunk for a penny…. Chinese boats are continually stealing under the bows of ships at anchor and the poison is introduced among
seamen ignorant of its influence.46
Besides excessive drinking, the easy access to women in the many brothels that had sprung up in Hong Kong meant that venereal diseases were rife, further damaging men’s health and lowering their immune system’s ability to cope with infections. The work of the doctors was not easy and the hidden, and as yet unidentified, dangers to which they were exposed lent a heroic quality to their attempts to restore their patients to good health.
Chapter 7 The Merchant Navy
No less than seventy-two officers of merchant navy vessels and ten of their wives and fifteen of their children who died in this period are buried in the Hong Kong
Cemetery, bringing the total to ninety-seven souls. A little under half of the civilians buried in the early period, whose occupations are known, served with the
merchant navy. Of the seventy-two officers, twenty worked for the P. & O., thirty-
one are described on their headstones as masters or captains of their vessels or
as master mariners, fourteen as officers of the ships and seven as engineers. The
ninety-seven men, women and children from this time found in the Cemetery and connected with seafaring have been divided into six main sections in this chapter. The undoubted aristocrats of the merchant navy were the captains of the tea and opium clippers who raced for so many years across the oceans between China and London, taking the new season’s tea to Britain and loading up with opium in
Calcutta on their way back to the China Coast. The twenty officers serving the
P. & O. came second in terms of social importance. The next category includes
the captains and officers of ocean-going ships linking Hong Kong with the ports
of the Americas, Australia, India and Europe. This is followed by the owners,
captains and officers who had charge of the locally based fleets of river steamers
and the opium hulks. The marine surveyors are then included in a brief section and finally an attempt has been made to show something of the experiences of merchant seamen when ashore in Hong Kong.
Victoria Harbour was at the very centre of Hong Kong’s attraction and contributed more than anything else to its growing importance. It was a safe, well-sheltered, convenient anchorage and very beautiful. In 1860, John Thompson, the photographer, waxed lyrical about its beauty:
I have seen the hill capped with a wreath of pearly cloud with a fringe of rose-pink or gold, and the edges of the stone buildings beneath gilded with sunshine looming through the deepening gloom. The islands in the distance seemed like ruby clouds resting on the horizon, while near at hand a tangled forest of masts and spars rose up darkly against the face of the sky. The harbour was ablaze with light, broken by the sombre hulls of the ships, or the picturesque forms of native craft, with their huge sails spread out like wings to catch the evening breeze.1
The constant traffic up and down the China Coast, to Amoy and Shanghai, to the Americas, Australia, India and the West meant that captains, officers and sailors of the merchant navy in port formed a shifting body of men who were at the same time an integral and essential part of Hong Kong’s society, whether they based themselves in Eastern waters or plied the longer routes from the ports of Europe and the Americas. They were the life blood of early Hong Kong, responsible for providing the merchants with their goods and bringing to the port the drinks, foodstuffs and furnishings considered so necessary to the European’s way of life. They also spawned the ships’ chandlers and repair yards and gave work to blacksmiths, carpenters and sail-makers. They provided custom to the taverns keepers, many of whom ran boarding houses with accommodation for up to forty sailors alongside their taverns.
The Captains of the Tea and Opium Clippers Owned by the Merchants
Like the merchants, few of this class of men died in Hong Kong. The only headstones known to be linked to the opium clippers come from a rather later date, although they must have been active during this period. The handsome marble headstone to the late Captain James Downie [38/1/5] of the Chinaman lies prostrate on its back. Downie was a Scotsman from Rosehearty, Aberdeen. He is likely to have captained other clippers before being put in command of the Chinaman, a clipper of 668 tons built in Greenock, Scotland in 1865, and owned by the Park Brothers.2 He died in 1868 aged forty-eight leaving an estate of only
$1,183. Another link to the opium clippers in the Cemetery is through an infant,
Archibald McMurdo [20/13/4]. He was the son of Robert McMurdo, who became famous as the captain of one of the earliest opium clippers, the famous Red Rover, a barque of 255 tons. It belonged to the Jardine, Matheson & Co.
fleet which pioneered the tea/opium run between London, Calcutta and Hong
Kong. Robert McMurdo went on to become a marine surveyor in Hong Kong in 1860 and acting harbour master in 1866. The reputation of this group of men puts them among the elite of the sea captains:
There were a few men, who held the necessary qualities of a tea-ship commander, whose endurance equalled their energy, whose daring was tempered by good judgement, whose business capabilities were on par with their seamanship, and whose nerves were of cast iron.3
The captains often came from the Royal Navy attracted by the high pay. An officer serving on a famous clipper, Falcon, bought by Jardine Matheson in 1836 wrote:
Among the officers were many sons of clergymen who, after a period of active service afloat, would retire to succeed ultimately to their father’s livings or to practise at the bar, not a few finding their way into Parliament.4
The American tea clippers that started arriving in the mid-1840s revolutionized the design of these vessels. By 1852, the races between the clippers taking tea back to London had become an annual event that provided great excitement
7.1.a and b. Headstone in memory of Captain James Downie of the opium clipper, Chinaman, d. 10.3.1868.
as well as high profits for the winning clipper, who could then charge a premium for arriving first with the tea. Everyone gambled on the results and the stakes were high. The period from 1850 to perhaps 1865 was the heyday for the American and British clippers.
The enduring influence on Hong Kong of the captains of opium clippers was secured through their progeny. Two such captains had sons who made their marks in Hong Kong. Captain Ryrie commanded Jardine Matheson’s Cairngorm and later the Flying Spur in the annual tea races between Hong Kong and London. His son, Phineas Ryrie [23/8/6], held the record when he died for being the longest surviving resident in Hong Kong, and was a member of the Legislative Council for twenty-six years. Captain Andrew Shewan commanded Lammermuir and later Norman Court, also for Jardines. His son, Robert Shewan [12A/3/14] and great-nephew, William Thompson Shewan [12A/3/10] are buried in the Cemetery. It is said that Andrew Shewan kept his wife in Shanghai, which accounted for his impatience to get back to China. The many achievements of Robert Shewan in the field of business will be discussed later in this book.
The Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company Line
The seamen of this company buried in the Cemetery during these years served on vessels that constitute a roll-call of its early steamers, the Lady Mary Wood, the Erin, the Pekin, the Rajah, the Formosa, the Norna and the Ganges. Unusually for the time, they range democratically from lowly seamen, like James Wing [16Cii/7/21], a fireman, and John Jones [16Cii/7/23] up through the ranks of the officers to William Sparkes [16Ci/5/11], chief engineer of the Granada. The list of
P. & O. officers continues to the very top of the company with the second person
162 Forgotten Souls
to be commander in Hong Kong, Maximilian Fischer [20/16/8] and his wife, Caroline [20/16/9], who lie side by side in large chest tombs.
Maximilian Fischer was an old China hand who had long been established in the New French Hong in Canton. In 1844, he was listed
under Fischer, Willis & Co.,
Commercial and General Agents and connected with
Bates, Willis & Co., merchants
of Liverpool, Victoria and Canton. In 1850, Fischer became agent for the P. & O. in Canton, taking over
in 1855 from Robert Walker, as commander in Hong Kong. He was firmly
established among the merchant aristocracy, his three daughters all marrying
merchants. His wife, Caroline died in 1859, but Maximilian continued to live in Hong Kong until he died in August 1872 at the age of seventy.
The wife of Fischer’s successor, George Stanley Brooks, lies in a distant, leafy corner of the Cemetery. Mary Brooks [40/5/7] married George Brooks in May 1858, only to die eleven months later when she was just twenty-eight. The list of employees also includes three boilermakers, the earliest being John Treen [11B/6/6] who died in February 1849, and a clerk, Hugh Cross Gibson [40/1/2]. Esther Lambert [7/16/5] was the baby of an employee of the company.
Her father, William Lambert, may have been a sergeant in the 95th Regiment.
By 1842, he was living in the Canton Bazaar with his wife, and by 1855 had been
recruited as a P. & O. clerk and sent to Shanghai. In 1857, when Esther died, the
family were back in Hong Kong still working for the P. & O. and living in Spring Gardens. In 1866, Lambert was summoned by his neighbour, Narcaxio Simmons,
for throwing stones at his verandah in Wyndham Street. His address shows that
he had risen in the ranks of Hong Kong society.
It was a momentous occasion in August 1845 when the P. & O. initiated a regular service between Hong Kong and England and advertised in the Friend of China that it aimed to take no more than fifty-four days from Hong Kong to Southampton. The sailing ships of that time were taking between four and six months to cover the same route. Even so the long, complicated route that it recommended emphasized the distance of Hong Kong from Europe. Today it would be almost impossible to find anywhere on earth that would take fifty-four days to reach, yet in 1845 this journey was a milestone in speed, safety and simplicity. The journey is described in the company advertisement under the heading ‘Steam to England’:
After calling at Singapore and Penang, the ‘Lady Mary Wood’ will proceed to Ceylon where she will be met by the ‘Bentinck’ Steamer which will receive her passengers, mails and cargo, and will convey them to Suez. From Suez, the Passengers will be taken across the desert to Cairo in the Egyptian Transit Company’s vans in about 24 hours, including stoppages for rest and refreshment at Station Houses. From Cairo there are powerful Steam Boats on the Nile for the conveyance of Passengers to Atfeh where the Mahmoudich Canal Passengers Boat will come alongside to receive the Passengers and they will then be towed down the Canal to Alexandria by a powerful Steam Engine. From the latter city, passengers, mail, etc. will be conveyed to Southampton by either the ‘Oriental’ or the ‘Great Liverpool’. 5
Benjamin Cook, a young man who was going out to work in Singapore in April 1854, described the desert crossing:
After a splendid breakfast served to us by a waiter who, truly, rejoiced in the name Ali-baba, we set off in a caravan of small omnibuses on a remarkably well organized journey eastwards across the desert to Suez. The vehicles, mounted on two tall wheels, carried six passengers three abreast under a canvas roof. Although resembling both in appearance and comfort rather
grand bathing machines, their open sides at least afforded a fine view of the
passing scenery. Each was drawn by two mules in the shafts and two horses on ahead which were changed every five miles, and at every fourth stage, about three hours, the passengers were refreshed at dilapidated inns.6
The fare for the entire journey in 1845 was quoted as $912 for a man and more for a
woman as women were considered to need extra care and attention. This included steward’s fees, food and table wine, the transit through Egypt and three hundred- weight (336 lbs or 153 kg) of personal luggage. No single piece of baggage could
be longer or heavier than what would fit on the back of a camel. For this price the
accommodation was described as: ‘on the most extravagant (we were going to
write gorgeous) scale, affording all the comforts and luxuries of a floating tavern to 130 passengers’. But, at these prices, only civil servants and officers from the armed services, whose fares were paid for them, and merchants could afford to travel by
steamer to Britain.
Before the advent of the P. & O., the mail was dependent on wind and weather and at the mercy of uncharted waters and pirates. Many letters were lost and those that arrived could take anything up to six months. An editorial in January 1845 laments:
Much disappointment is felt at the non-arrival of the September and October mails which have been delayed beyond all precedent since the overland route
was established. London mails are now five months old, nor from Bombay or Calcutta have we later intelligence than the 7th or 14th October. In
consequence the whole mercantile community have been kept in a state of suspense regarding the tea market at home precisely at the season when the herb is being brought forward for shipment.
The cause of this long delay was rumoured in Hong Kong to be the start of a new war between Britain and France. Prince de Joinville was said to be blockading the Straits of Gibraltar and the Friend of China speculated that ‘We might expect a visit immediately from the French fleet now at Manila which would find rare pillage here among the sycee boxes’.7
Even the commencement of the P. & O. steam ship service in Hong Kong was hampered by the non-arrival of letters from England. In late July 1846, the agent, Mr. Ryan, the first commander of the company, apologized on the pages of the Friend of China for his inability to quote details of fares for the first steamer which planned to leave for Britain in August, saying that the April post had been misdirected to Singapore ‘and that he is every hour looking for them’. Finally on 17 August 1845, Captain Richard Collinson was able to report in a letter home:
To the agreeable surprise of the whole colony in came the ‘Lady Mary Wood’ with the 24th June mail positively only seven weeks from England which is the shortest passage ever known. Now it is to be hoped a new era has commenced in China and we may bid farewell to mails lost and mails delayed
— to clippers reported and clippers detained and to that atrocious Post-Master General at Bombay.8
Captains and Officers of Other Ocean-Going Vessels
The importance of this group to the economy of Hong Kong can be gathered from the fact that no less than fifty-two ship captains, officers and engineers in this early period are buried in the Hong Kong Cemetery. The expertise, courage and ability to navigate in all conditions, often in uncharted seas, of these captains of sailing ships drew a great deal of respect for their toughness and skills, particularly as most Europeans in Hong Kong at that time had had to entrust their lives to such men. They also brought to distant Hong Kong the familiar
foodstuffs, drinks and so on the expatriates craved for. The international make
up of the merchant navy captains and mates is demonstrated by the range of countries from which they came. Other than those from Britain, the Americans and the Dutch were the most numerous with seven members each. They were followed by three from Germany and two from Denmark. Of the thirty-two
British officers counted, five were from Scotland, four from the Channel Isles and
three from the North of England.
In 1853, Henry Lovett [9/8/4], captain of the Arratoon Apcar, had only just left the Hong Kong harbour for Calcutta when his vessel was taken over by the Chinese portion of his crew which consisted of eight Chinese sailors and two Chinese carpenters, the rest being Bengali Lascars. These Chinese sailors-turned-pirates were assisted by two Chinese passengers. Coming aft with very sharp square choppers, they met and dispatched the second mate and threw him overboard. They then surprised those sleeping in the captain’s cabin. They included Dr. Thompson, surgeon of the Lady Mary Wood, Mr. Smith, the captain of the Jardine opium clipper, Red Rover, and a seventeen-year-old relative of Captain Lovett. It is surmised that they jumped overboard and drowned, as they were never seen again. The Chinese escaped in the captain’s gig, taking whatever they could lay their hands on. The gunner of the ship slept through the attack and, when he woke up, he found the badly wounded captain asking for water, ‘with a severe cut in his abdomen whence his bowels were hanging out’. The poor man expired soon after.
The Arratoon Apcar was brought back to Hong Kong by the Lascar members of its crew. Lovett had been defended to the end by his British bulldog, which was found alive but ‘cut severely across the nose and hip’. He was put up
for sale for $50 by Lovett’s executors, a lot to pay for a dog, at a time when a gold watch and chain had cost John Wright $23.9 Lovett must have been an unlucky man. Two years earlier he had suffered from another not uncommon misfortune.
The ship Ardaseer, under his command with a cargo from China, was destroyed
by fire and sank off the coast of Penang. The crew managed to escape in life boats
and were picked up by the Bremen ship Leibnitz. 10
The international flavour of the oceans as well as the despotic power of captains aboard their own ships is illustrated by the following contemporary account given by James Ross. He had paid for passages for himself, his wife and four children on the Sarah Moers from Sydney to San Francisco at the cost of 150 pounds sterling, on condition that the vessel did not stop at any Pacific Ocean
island for more than three days. On the fifth day at the island of Rotahma, Ross complained to the American captain, Joel Woodberry, about the delay. In Ross’
own words:
The answer he [the captain] gave me was, ‘You d---d son of a b----d, if you
interfere with what I call my duty, I will put you on the island’…. After being brutally maltreated, I was taken, tied and bound hand and feet … and then I was hauled up to the main rigging and kept there for two hours. They rigged a purchase to the main yard in order to lower me into the boat, and when I was over the side of the ship, they let the fall go by the run, which caused me to fall heavily into the boat, breaking two of my ribs; … I was lying with my head on the thwart, the Supercargo … with the heel of his boot he kicked out my teeth, then rowed me to the shore and threw me on the beach and left me there tied and bound as I was. The native chief of the Island asked what he should do with me; the Captain said, ‘Kill the son of a b---d. Cut his
head off’…. I had on board at the time money and property to the amount of
twenty-eight thousand dollars. My wife and four children were taken away
by the captain. I was on the island for five months. For the last two I had no
clothes to wear when Captain Stewart of the ‘Jane Lucy’ called at the island and most kindly gave me passage to the Feejee Islands, and from there I got passage to Sydney … and there I got funds to proceed to San Francisco …
thinking to find my family there.11
In the meantime the Sarah Moers had been wrecked on the coral reef of the next island it visited. Everyone including Ross’ family was saved and brought to Hong Kong. Poor James Ross took ship to Hong Kong and arrived only to find that his family had stayed for three or four months ‘and during that time my daughter
had been married to a serjeant of the 59th Regiment by the name of James Bodell,
and that my wife had bought his discharge and that they had all left for Australia’. The wedding took place on 14 October 1854 ‘and a grand turnout it was’. As the wedding party passed the barracks, the regimental band turned out and played
Haste to the Wedding. 12 Ross met Woodberry again in Macau and in the ensuing fight Woodberry was knifed in the groin with his own knife and later died. Ross
was acquitted of murder on the grounds of self defence.13
Owners of River Boats
Three companies had regular boats plying the Pearl River and linking Hong Kong, Canton and Macau. Two were based in Hong Kong. The Hong Kong,
Canton & Macao Steam Packet Company was begun in 1847, when the
merchants were given to believe that the P. & O. had not the slightest intention of sending out steamers as it considered that river traffic was entirely outside its line. That being so, Jardine, Matheson & Co. contracted for two steamers, which were duly named the Canton and the Hong Kong and set up the Hong Kong, Canton & Macao Steam Packet Company to run them. This company, headed by Jardine Matheson, was the first shareholding venture on the coast. The shareholders included, with very few exceptions, the most influential members of the community in the three ports. Jardines were deeply disapproving when the P. & O. opened a river route with two more steamers and, to make matters more confusing, named one of their steamers Canton. The third river route was owned and run from Macau by James Bridges Endicott [11B/1/1]. He was born in 1815 and was a direct descendant of John Endicott, who went out with the Pilgrim Fathers to North America in 1628 and then became the
founder and first governor of Massachusetts. James Endicott crossed the Pacific
as mate on an American tea ship. After being shipwrecked near Java, he made his
way to Canton where he was employed by the American firm of Russell & Co.
to take charge of their opium-receiving ship, Ruparell, which was anchored at Cumsingmoon in the mouth of the Pearl River.
In 1851, a now more affluent James Endicott decided to move on and become respectable. He terminated his arrangement with his Chinese protected girl, by whom he had had five children, moved to Macau and found himself a mail- order bride. Brave Miss Ann Russell came out from England and married him in October 1852. They proceeded to have five children, two of whom, Rosalie and Fidelia, are buried in the Protestant Cemetery at Macau.14 In his diary, Captain George Henry Preble described Mrs. Endicott and her sister, Miss Russell:
The latter has just arrived from England. It is said she comes out to get married just as her sister did ‘to order’. Notwithstanding Mrs Endicott is amiable and charming and a truly domestic woman and Captain Endicott, rolling in fat, drew a prize when he got her.15
Endicott began a steamer service on the Pearl River, with the Spark, a little
steamer built in John Couper’s yard at Whampoa. He was also a co-founding member of the well-known ships’ chandlers, Thomas Hunt & Co., at Whampoa
with his American colleagues, Thomas Hunt and J.B. Cook. John H. Cook [13/2/1], who came from Salem, Massachussetts, and died in Hong Kong in November 1865 aged twenty-four, is likely to have been a member of J.B. Cook’s family.
Captain Endicott seems to have got hold of the golden spoon at last. He has been here many years without making more than a respectable livelihood but the last year his little steamer ‘Spark’ has been making him
$2,000 daily, and every speculation he has attempted has been transmitted
into the precious metal.16
Preble surmised that Captain Endicott had made a fortune of two or three hundred thousand dollars which he invested in more ships and then in docks. In this way, the capital gained from the opium trade was channelled first into a shipping line linking Hong Kong, Canton and Macau, and then into the Union Docks in Hong Kong of which Endicott became a director.
That the passenger steamers plying the river were also used to transport opium was shown by the bitter complaints of the passengers. The incommoded passengers complained that the steamer:
left Canton at 6a.m … for Hong Kong via Macao, touching at Cum-sing-moon to deliver a little cargo. Having delivered the little cargo she took on board a little more — say 250 chests of Opium which blocked up not only the whole of the cabin but every spare spot on the upper deck also.
The nine passengers who had paid the full fare of eight dollars each for the use of the cabin were forced to sleep on deck. ‘For a party, who may not be used to open air accommodations, there may be a prospect of brain fever by sleeping on deck’.17 In February 1857, the Queen, another of Endicott’s steamers with about 120 chests of opium, was seized by pirates on the way to Macau. Mr. Osmund Cleverly was a passenger. In the attack his thigh was fractured by grape-shot. After shooting two pirates, he escaped by throwing a chair out of the cabin window and leaping out after it, having first had his wounded thigh bound up by the Chinese lady passengers. He was picked up by a passing lorcha after one and a half hours clinging to the chair in the water.18
Commanders and Officers of River Boats
This third group of officers was much more closely linked to the social life of Hong
Kong as they usually lived in the city. Four men in this category are buried or have
wives or children buried in the Cemetery. They include William Soames, who arrived in Hong Kong in 1847 and commanded the Canton, the steam packet-boat belonging to the Hong Kong, Canton & Macao Steam Packet Company. He buried two young daughters, Fanny Augusta [13/7/1] and Annie Kate Soames [13/7/4] in the Hong Kong Cemetery. He was typical of the river captains. His knowledge of the local waters and the haunts of the pirates was legendary and made full use of by the Royal Navy in their pirate hunting expeditions. A letter to the Friend of China entitled ‘Fair Play’ expressed the general feeling of annoyance that Captain Soames had been given no share in the prize money allocated for the
defeat of the pirate fleet of Shap-ng-tsai:
It is generally known … that Mr. William Soames … by his intimate
knowledge of the coast, judgement and ability as a pilot, accompanying on board H.M. ships … rendered invaluable service to the expedition in question. Poor Soames, so long known and deservedly respected by the foreign community in China is not even named to my Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty.19
Captain Soames’ high standing in the community was shown when, in 1851, he married Ann Louisa Stubbs from Sidney. The merchants, David Jardine, George Lyall and Captain Farquar MacQueen of the Fort William, the P. &
O. opium-receiving hulk, acted as witnesses. Soames rose to become a long-
serving commander of the P. & O., only resigning in 1875 after a record thirty-
eight years of service in the merchant navy in Hong Kong. He died in 1884 in
Notting Hill, London, a rich and successful man leaving $22,000 to his daughter,
Annie Kate.20 The above-mentioned letter ‘Fair Play’ continued by naming another captain equally respected:
Captain Jamieson of the P. & O. Steamer ‘Canton’ was likewise reported to have rendered signal assistance to H.M. brig, ‘Columbine’ when after a
hard night’s running fight against Chui-Apoo’s pirate squadron, the men of
H.M. brig were tired out and unable to sustain themselves at their guns, but
Mr. Jamieson seems likely also to experience the same reward of cold official
neglect as Captain Soames.
Finally the officers of the Royal Navy ships involved clubbed together and bought
silver breakfast services for Daniel Caldwell and Captain Charles Jamieson, and Captain Dalrymple Hay of the Columbine presented a gold snuff-box to Captain Soames.
The Spark was the first of the steamers built locally and owned by Captain James Endicott. It celebrated its commencement of service by a round-the-island trip with a large party including the governor. The steamer anchored in Tytam Bay for a ‘feu de joie of champagne corks’ and a cold collation.21 Its passage provoked verses from a resident, more used to the silent, wind-driven sailing ships:
What screaming, screeching shrieking, in the dark
From that rattling, roaring, reeking, ranting ‘Spark’
Gongs and guns and ghosts are listening to the revel —
While she’s whirring, whirling whistling like the devil!
Truly when they cross the Atlantic, Yankee boys
Make the very ocean frantic with their noise!
A baby, Wilhelmina Mary de Castilla [7/12/15], is buried under a small granite slab in the Cemetery. Her father was the dashing Captain Henry de Castilla employed by Captain Endicott to captain the new steamer. Her mother
was the daughter of John Couper, the P. & O. carpenter at Whampoa, brought
from Aberdeen to organize the upkeep and repair of their steamers. Castilla was described by Albert Smith as ‘a No. 1, piecey-man’. He had a reputation for the good food and wines served on his ships:
In the cooking stakes we yield the palm to our hospitable friend, Captain Castilla. To those who wish to know what Yankee cooking is, we recommend a trip or two to Macao or Canton in the ‘Spark’. 22
In 1854, there was an
attempt by pirates to take
over the Spark. As reported in the China Mail:
Upwards fifty men took passage on board the steamer on her last trip from
Canton, it is believed with the intention of rising upon and overpowering her crew and so securing the rich cargo of opium and treasure she was to take in at Cumsingmoon.23
Luckily, when the steamer went first to Macau to drop off Endicott, Castilla, suspecting some plot, anchored in the inner harbour where he could easily call for aid. The gang of pirates, realizing their plot had been uncovered, then rushed
ashore in sampans leaving behind two sacks filled with swords and daggers. From that time onwards, the ship was crewed by Portuguese or Manila men. Commanders of other vessels were not always lucky enough to foil such plots. The precautions taken against pirates on river trips were described by Albert Smith: ‘At dinner, guards were placed at the cabin door and on deck with swords and loaded guns and revolvers. We also kept our own on the seats and tables near us’.24 Endicott’s next ship, the Fei Ma or Flying Horse, was also built at Couper’s dockyard and commanded
by Castilla. In 1856, this steamer was attacked by Chinese and, unlike the Thistle whose entire crew was killed by Chinese braves, managed to escape. The chief officer of the Fei Ma, George Clarke Lawson [16Cii/7/31] from Whitby, Yorkshire, died in March 1858 and lies in the Cemetery. He may have been on
board when the steamer ran the gauntlet of fifty-three Chinese Imperial junks at the beginning of the Second Opium War. A passenger described the encounter in
the China Mail:
The ‘Fei Ma’ was hulled eleven or twelve times and the shot flying overhead informed us that they came from heavy guns. At one time I gave up all for lost…. Captain Castilla, however, took the helm, full-power steam was put on and three of Nankin’s [20/8/4] men dragged our little bow gun about [some sailors from the Nanking happened to be aboard]. Six or seven men belonging to the same ship kept up a sharp fire with their Minie [sic] rifles…. Gradually we left the ‘gallant’ fifty-three behind us after being under their fire for at least
twenty minutes. Mercifully none were hurt…. There were two ladies on board who behaved in the most courageous and determined manner, refusing to go below and claiming to risk the same dangers as ourselves.25
By 1870, Castilla, like his employer Endicott, had become a wealthy director of the
Union Dock.
Captains of Opium Hulks
Old Indiamen were often transformed into stationary, floating warehouses known as hulks which were anchored at Hong Kong, Cum-sing-moon Island, Whampoa or one of the treaty ports. A newspaper article on the opium trade in 1849 gave the
following information:
At this present moment there are twenty-nine vessels permanently moored
at the different stations on the coast; of the number, five belong to American
firms, and seven to Indian merchants (Parsees), the others are English. These vessels are not under the protection of English or American law, — their traffic is nominally contraband by the laws of China, — they are but poorly armed, and could not (perhaps dare not) resist seizure did the Chinese
authorities find it convenient to capture them.
The article continues with a clear indication as to the firms involved and the kind
of captains they picked to command these vessels:
The firms engaged in the opium trade are wealthy and of long standing; as
a rule, the partners are men of education and integrity. In the selection of their captains they exhibit a sound judgement, none but men of good repute almost ever being put in command of an opium receiving vessel. It is perhaps fortunate that the trade is closed to needy, reckless adventurers by the enormous capital which is required to carry it on.26
These hulks were run like businesses and were manned with a staff of shroffs (gl.) and clerks who attended to their affairs.
Five captains and one chief officer in charge of opium-receiving ships have been recorded in the Cemetery if one includes Captain Endicott. The earliest, Captain John Wills [11B/6/3], was the late chief officer of the Anonyma at Whampoa in 1851 when he shot himself in the head ‘while temporarily insane’. 27 According to the Friend of China, his predecessor, Captain Schmidt, had also come by his death very suddenly: ‘He fell lifeless from his chair without a word. At the time he was feeding a favourite paroquet’.28 Another member of this group is William Henry Doller [16Cii/7/34], master of the Sassoon Family who died in October 1855, aged twenty-five years. The Sassoons, who came to China from Baghdad, were the first Jewish family to make their mark in the Far East.
Captain Charles Jamieson, who has been included earlier as receiving the
silver breakfast set from the Royal Navy officers in thanks for his assistance in their
battles against piracy, buried a baby boy Henry Charles Jamieson [20/14/2] in the Cemetery. Charles Jamieson arrived in China from London in 1836 on the Earl of Balcairns. 29 He became master of the P. & O. steamer, Canton, thus beginning his career in Hong Kong as a river captain. By 1852, he was established at the little island of Cum-sing-moon off Macau on the Bombay with his wife, Mary. In 1858, Jamieson anchored his own opium-receiving ship, the Circassian, in the
Hong Kong harbour, giving the command to his friend, William Kent Stanford,
who had been clerk with Jamieson on the Bombay from 1852 to 1854, and had then joined the John Adams. Jamieson established himself on shore as an inspector of opium. He took a lease on the spacious house and offices, lately occupied by
the merchant, Joseph Edger. In 1859 he auctioned off ‘eight strongly built cargo
boats now and recently plying in the harbour now moored at John Burd’s wharf’. Perhaps the proceeds were to pay for the expenses of establishing himself on shore. Thus Jamieson moved from river boat captain to captain of an opium hulk
to finally becoming the owner of a hulk.
Captain Farquar MacQueen [13/9/2] was an old East India Company captain, brought out from England to command the P. &. O. Company’s opium hulk, Fort William. The company needed a receiving ship because the holds of its passenger liners were filled with such a weight of opium that it sometimes slowed the vessels down. Much indignation was caused by parcels being left behind in Bombay to make more space for opium. The Pekin, for example, in 1853 was carrying 1,565 chests of opium.30 According to the epitaph on his monument, Captain MacQueen was born in a manse in Applecross, County Ross, New
Brunswick, Canada. The first record we have of him dates from 1838, when he was
captaining the Honourable East India Company ship Vansittart and his wife gave birth to a son off the coast of Singapore.31 Mrs. MacQueen joined her husband on the Fort William in 1850, bringing with her a daughter, two sons and a niece. Then in October 1851, a pitch pot overturned in the seaman’s galley of the hulk,
ignited and started a fire, which rapidly spread to the mat roof of the ship. The wind spread the flames from stem to stern and soon the main mast was well alight. In the panic to escape the flames, poor Mrs. MacQueen suffered a miscarriage. The family and the crew lost all their worldly possessions in the fire.32 However the community in Hong Kong came to their rescue and the ship was repaired. In September 1853, Maria, their only daughter, was married from the refurbished Fort William in St. John’s Cathedral to a Royal Artillery officer, Captain Hugh Archibald Campbell. Two years later in October 1855, MacQueen collapsed in an apoplectic fit on board the Fort William and died. In the following year his younger son, David MacQueen [13/9/2], who shares a memorial with his father, also died aged only nineteen. It must have been with a heavy heart that Mrs. MacQueen left Hong Kong to retire to England.
One monument commemorates the death of George Chape [10/4/4], master mariner from Berwick-upon-Tweed, who died at sea on a voyage from Saigon to Hong Kong in 1860, aged forty-six. Chape was already sailing the China Seas in 1845, when he was listed as master and owner of the barque Starling. He is unusual
in that he was a master of an opium-receiving vessel on the Woosung River near
Shanghai. The 230 ton barque Masdeu was owned by the Parsee Portuguese partnership of Cowasjee Sapoorjee, Lungrana. Chape kept a ‘protected’ woman, by whom he had two boys, George and William Chape [6/6/21], born in 1857 and 1859, respectively. The boys were sent to the Diocesan Home and Orphanage.
William is recorded as having been baptized in 1864, which would fit the dates. In 1874, his brother, George, described as half-caste, was apprenticed as a tailor to
Lane Crawford by the Diocesan Home. The boys’ mother must have outlived the two boys because the headstone to the two sons was erected by ‘their loving and sorrowful mother’. One only hopes that
some of the large estate of $6,425.35 left by
Captain Chape went to her.
The last to be buried among these captains of opium-receiving hulks is Walter Toms [40/1/5] who died aged thirty-one in December 1858, and was buried in a handsome chest tomb with his wife, Margaret. He was master of the receiving ship, Cama Family, anchored off Cum-sing-moon. The vessel was owned by the Cama Company in Canton, a Parsee firm. Toms was a Devon man from Ilfracombe. It is difficult even to imagine what the daily round of life would have been like for wives such as Margaret Toms, Mrs. MacQueen or Mary Jamieson, who were prepared to followed their husbands to the other side of
178 Forgotten Souls
the world, living and giving birth, as Mary Jamieson and Margaret Toms did, on opium-receiving ships stationed at Cum -sing -moon in the 1850s. One son, Richard Toms, settled the estate. Another son followed in his father’s footsteps. A further memorial exists in the Cemetery to a grandson,
James Edward Toms [43/3/1], born at Shanghai, the son of Captain J.Y. and Hannah Toms. He was
four years old when he died in 1876 on his parent’s vessel, the Bonny Dunkeld on the Canton River. The Bonny Dunkeld is listed as an opium clipper built in Aberdeen in 1863 and under command of Captain J.Y. Toms.33
Marine Surveyors
The marine surveyors comprised a small but influential group of very weathered and experienced sea captains. Two family members from this group are found in the Cemetery. Sara Ann Rickett [5/3/34]
died in 1857, aged just twenty. She was
the second daughter of John and Grace Rickett. John was an old-timer, who had arrived in China from Manila in 1831, and worked for the Honourable East India
Company. He had lived in Macau from 1837
to 1845 where he was a member of the team surveying the harbour. On the removal of the chief superintendent’s office to Hong Kong, he was appointed government agent in Macau. He came to Hong Kong in 1846 and for a time was secretary of the Hong
Kong Club, after which he worked from 1847 to 1860 as marine surveyor. He
was one of the original ninety-nine volunteers and became a justice of the peace in 1855 but, perhaps saddened by the death of his daughter, resigned in 1860 and retired to England. Margaret Heaton [40/4/2], the wife of a second marine surveyor, Captain G.H. Heaton, died in December 1856 aged thirty-nine and is buried in a substantial pink granite chest tomb. Both these families lived comfortably up the hill away from the noise and bustle of Queen’s Road. Albert Smith visited Captain Heaton and described his home as ‘A charming house and garden with thick foliage over the walks and a rill of water gurgling through the grounds with an open bathing place surrounded by cane matting’. 34
Merchant Navy Sailors
Those in Transit Using the Boarding Houses
The fact that in this period so few gravestones remain to commemorate any merchant seaman below the rank of engineer speaks clearly of the low status of
common sailors. When one considers that seventy-two captains and officers have
headstones in the Cemetery and that those of a lower rank were more vulnerable to drink and disease, the number of seamen from the merchant navy who died in Hong Kong must have numbered in the hundreds if not thousands.
The crews of visiting ships were often discharged in Hong Kong and stayed in the boarding houses, until they could find a berth on another ship. A letter to the editor signed ‘Everybody’ in June 1857, complained that from ten to twelve daily,
the steps of the Court House, are quite blocked up by seamen, black, brown and dingy white, who won’t move for you, and cover the steps with a
disgusting decoction of tobacco juice, old quids [from chewing the tobacco]
and the skins of mangoes, lychees etc.35
Osmond Tiffaney probably had these men in mind when he wrote:
Scapegoats and scoundrels from the purlieus of London, creatures that only
missed Botany Bay [the penal settlement in Australia] by good fortune, were
to be found in the town of Victoria, lording it over the natives, many of whom were more respectable and respected than they had ever been or ever could
be. Low Wapping dock loafers who had never at home put their heads into
decent houses, would swagger along three or four abreast, elbowing quiet men out of their way, and replying to a word with a blow.36
For the lowly sailor, life ashore was full of dangers. They were preyed on by crimps and boarding-house keepers. In 1854, the Friend of China regretted that:
notwithstanding the attempts of the Government to improve the seamen,
shipping and boarding house business … impudent loafers from shore [were] going off to vessels directly they arrive and persuading men to desert.37
A crimp, or runner as they were called, would be paid per head for the number of sailors he managed to lure into the clutches of a particular boarding-house keeper. The sailors were then exploited by the keepers, who enticed them to drink in the tavern they owned and introduced them to brothels for a fee. All sailors staying in Hong Kong were at risk of being intoxicated in the taverns and infected in brothels. In 1854, a coroner’s inquest described how a sailor from the John N. Gossler had met his death ‘by falling into the water in a state of beastly intoxication’. His friend and shipmate had nearly met the same fate. After visiting the tavern ‘he recollected nothing until he found himself swimming in the water and a Chinaman trying to lay hold of him and save him from drowning’.38 After the
unfortunate sailors had been fleeced of their money, they would be turned out to
sleep rough about the town and scrounge a living, often by begging or sometimes even by shipping out on Chinese pirate ships to the embarrassment of the Hong Kong establishment. A never-ending problem was what to do with sick and destitute sailors who were unable to return to sea.
Sailors Who Stayed on in Hong Kong to Man Local Lorchas
One class of sailors stayed in Hong Kong and manned the locally registered square-rigged vessels and lorchas. The Hong Kong Gazette of 23 January 1856 listed forty-eight such vessels as registering in the previous year, twenty-nine of which were owned by the Chinese and eighteen by Europeans. The Gazette of 1856 recorded twenty-nine men with English-sounding names, five with Portuguese names and thirteen with Chinese names as captains of these boats. This group of men was not considered respectable. None are buried in the Cemetery, or at least no gravestones survive. The newspapers of the time do not list their births, deaths or marriages. Sixteen of the listed British masters of these local lorchas were working for Chinese owners. They would perhaps have been the only Europeans in the colony working for Chinese employers. These Chinese-owned lorchas were
issued, in the words of the government notification, with ‘Certificates of British
Registry granted ex favour according to the opinion of the Honorable, the Acting Attorney General’. It also seems likely that many such vessels went unregistered
and that a number of European sailors worked on them in the capacity of officers
or crew. It was by no means unknown for these men to work on or even to captain pirate ships. The Friend of China reported in November 1852: ‘A pirate lorcha with some Europeans or men dressed as such is said to be prowling about the mouth of the Bogue on the look-out for unfortunates’. 39 A wounded man called Fenton brought in by some Chinese admitted to:
having for some time past been engaged on board one of the lorchas sailing
under the English flag, licensed to run salt on the Canton River and about
the coast: and also that, whilst on board, several piracies were committed into which he was coerced into participating as a matter of course.40
Two such captains were Tom Roberts and T.B. Blackhead. Roberts’ father, John, was an ex-naval cooper who had kept the Britannia Tavern from 1846. His youngest sister, Mary Primrose Roberts [16Ci/3/11], who died in 1863 aged almost twenty, is buried in the Cemetery. By 1851, John had made enough money to sell the tavern and open a cooperage and boatyard at West Point. Blackhead must have been the son of the German owner of a ships’ chandlery, Frederick Schwarzkopf, two of whose children, Charlotte [7/26/1] and William Murrow [7/26/2] both died at about six months of age.
In 1854, Tom Roberts was praised for his efforts in rescuing some of those wrecked on the Pratas shoals in an expedition that also throws light on some of the excesses of the coolie trade to the
7.16. Headstone in memory of Mary Americas: ‘The name of Thomas Roberts, Primrose Roberts, d. 29.9.1863.
the humble shipwright from Westpoint, the immediate saviour of the lives of
upwards of one hundred and thirty people is deserving of being recorded’. The lorcha Victoria had set out when no-one else was willing to go to the rescue of two ships in trouble. Having rescued the crew and passengers from the Topaz, the little Victoria had to pass the wreck of the Hygeia. This ship of 420 tons was a former
Danish brig, but had been lying on the mud at Whampoa for two or three years as an opium-receiving hulk and had been condemned as unfit to put to sea. Even so, over five hundred coolies had been boarded just off Green Island. When Hygeia was nearing the Pratas, pieces of hull were seen floating alongside and the vessel began to fill with water. About 100 passengers managed to reach a sandbank, the remaining 390 clung to the wreckage.
When ‘Victoria’ with only half a dozen casks of water to supply one hundred
and forty-seven souls on board passed near to the ‘Hygeia’, the unfortunate creatures could be seen on the broadside of the hull … and on the jib boom, evidently without a grain of food or a drop of water, — and this under a burning sun. The horrible sight as described by a female passenger … is a harrowing tale. ‘It was dreadful enough’, she says, ‘to see upwards of a hundred people on the Pratas Sand Bank ravenously devouring green mulberry leaves, chewing rank grass and sucking the warm blood of the boobies and sea gulls that came within their reach; — but for nearly four hundred to have no hope; — the moan of their fearful cry for help sounding low on the breeze — and no help to give — it was horrible!’41
This account of the plight of the unfortunate passengers on the Hygeia was described in a letter to the Friend of China written by one of the rescued lady passengers.
Chapter 8 Tradesmen, Artisans and Small-Scale Businessmen
From the very early beginnings of Hong Kong, adventurers and others who
stopped off on the island attempted to seize the opportunity to make money and
establish businesses. Those who happened to reach such a distant island were on the whole tough and in some cases unscrupulous men. Many had a sea-faring background. Hong Kong was from the start international with a strong element of Scottish and Irish adventurers. Americans, Germans, French, Scandinavians and even a Pole, to say nothing of Parsees, Jews and Arabs, were to be found running businesses with very mixed fortunes. This is the first group whose descendants could be classified as becoming Hong Kong belongers. Some of the surnames crop up again and again down through the generations. A number were intelligent
men, who understood local conditions and cared about local affairs. The owners
of auction houses and stores for example were mostly respected married men yet, during this period, they seem to have been increasingly excluded from political
influence and downgraded to the class of tradesmen. This denial of influence was made clear in an article in the Friend of China dated September 1849:
We have two leading classes who claim all public honours, — we allude to
the heads of departments in the civil service, and the partners in mercantile firms — or those, who, according to local regulations, are classed as real
merchants by the members of the old firms. There is a third class gradually
increasing in number and wealth: by birth, profession and education, many of
this class are equal to the other classes yet they have little influence. It is this third class, members of the learned professions, [doctors and lawyers] agents,
auctioneers and the higher class of storekeepers which usually contain the most intelligent portion of the community…. But in Hong Kong as yet has no
public [recognition].1
The loss of status and influence of the tradesmen may have been a factor in robbing Hong Kong in the early years of a middle-class opposition that might
have acted as a makeweight to balance the power of the governor and his Legislative Council.
Auctioneers and More Important Storekeepers
Auctioneering was seen as so profitable that Sir John Davis slapped on a $50
licence fee and a 2.5 percent levy on all sales. According to the 1848 Almanac:
On average not less than ten sales are advertised every week, conducted by eight persons who hold licences; Opium, Long Cloths and Cotton Twist ... invariably realize excellent prices.
Shipping goods and furniture from England was slow, uncertain and costly. The locals were happy to bid for the goods and chattels of those who had died or departed.
Besides the above kind of goods, there was a brisk turnover in ships, houses and all kinds of furnishings, with the auctioneers claiming 5 percent of the price reached. Ninian Crawford, of Lane Crawford, auctioned for example the contents
of the Government House when Sir John Bowring left in 1859:
8.1. Auction of English goods at Canton, after C. Wirgman. (Illustrated London News, May 1858).
All the valuable property of his late Excellency, the governor, including carriages, horses, plate, linen, to be sold without reserve. Chinese compradors, boys and all sorts and conditions of domestic servants crowding in to invest the money they have pigeoned out of their unfortunate masters. Parsees, Mohamedans, Consuls, store-keepers, merchants, diplomatic servants, officers and editors, all invading the precincts of Government House to buy or ‘makee look see’. — running about with hats on; some smoking cigars; invading the most private apartments; totally unmindful of the dignity of the place; examining critically into bedrooms, presses, coffee pots and China vases; reckoning their chances and dollars…. Seventeen
hundred and fifty dollars for the carriage and horses as they stood before the
door, and knocked down to a foreigner both in country and religion.2
The auctioneers also kept general stores, buying in bulk from passing ships and
auctioning off the goods or selling them from their stores.
In this period, the main tradesmen include Charles Bowra, Thomas Ash Lane and Ninian Crawford, William Franklyn, Charles Markwick [10/8/2], James Smith [10/5/5] and George Duddell.3 Thomas Ash Lane and Charles Bowra were their acknowledged leaders. Messrs Bowra & Humphreys was listed
as first in size among the auctioneers and ships’ chandlers in 1848 and was then
the only company to have its own water boats selling water to ships at anchor. By 1850 they had become auctioneers for the Royal Naval Department. Lane was an old China hand related to Edward Lane, a butler at the East India Company factory in Canton, who was reputed to have previously been the Scottish master of
a sailing ship trading with China. His partner in Lane Crawford, a firm which still flourishes in Hong Kong to this day, was Ninian Crawford, a number of whose
progeny lie in the Cemetery. Ninian Crawford gained his experience as a clerk in the firm of John Holmes [9/19/2], who was formerly a schoolmaster sergeant of the 98th Regiment. Holmes had left the army to set up as storekeeper and wines
and spirits dealer with his friend Bingham. A large chest tomb commemorates the death of two small boys, Alfred and William Franklyn [13/9/3] who died respectively in 1843 and 1845. They were
the sons of the auctioneer, underwriter and storekeeper, William Franklyn. He had been an officer in the Royal Navy. Like other storekeepers, his interests were
multifarious. He advertised himself as general commission and shipping agent, auctioneer and wine and spirit merchant. He was the first owner of the Corsair,
which was then captained by William Soames, besides acting as agent for the
schooner, Alpha, described as being ‘well manned and armed’, and ‘running between Hong Kong, Macao or Capsingmoon as required, carrying cargo, opium, treasure and passengers at most moderate terms’. Franklyn was also listed as the owner of the Victoria Daily Advertiser and Shipping List, as well as taking third place in the 1848 list of ships’ chandlers and general stores. He auctioned anything from ships and houses downwards. The variety of goods offered for sale in his auctions was bewildering. Among the goods advertised for auction by him were a Sydney bay mare, gunpowder in barrels, as well as 2250 shank bones
and 2960 ox horns, floating wicks, assorted sauces and a type of ship known as a wherry named John Gilpin which had won the pulling race at Whampoa in the previous year. But Franklyn eventually got into financial difficulties and in 1853 he
had to sell up, after which he left Hong Kong for Macau.4
Charles Markwick [10/8/2] by contrast was a rougher type. He had lived in Canton and Macau for at least thirteen years before moving to Hong Kong. He and his brother Richard came to Canton in 1826, when their father became steward to the East India Company factory. In 1846, Charles was appointed auctioneer and appraiser for the Supreme Court. In his ‘card’ in the Government Gazette of 1856, he described himself as ‘Government and Supreme Court Auctioneer and Appraiser, and general storekeeper of Queen’s Road, established
in 1843’. Dr. B.L. Ball described how he dined with Markwick in March 1849:
He lives alone in bachelor glory with only his servants round him. There were several friends present and a finer spread table I have not seen in this country. I remarked this more for the reason that he is a man of so little show and pretension. The dishes were numerous with a profusion of meats and viands and various wines; and the silver plate was massive and handsomely wrought.5
Two days later, Ball attended an auction held by Markwick of the jewellery and other belongings of ‘that notorious murderer and pirate, Chui-a-poo’. Ball bought the earrings and anklets belonging to Chui-a-poo’s wife. Markwick’s attitude to the Chinese can be ascertained from his generally low opinion of his servants, as illustrated by this description of his four Chinese servants who had decamped. He had advertised in the Friend of China and offered a reward of $100 to get them back:
Assigh — Mr. Markwick’s servant, about 23 years of age and about 5ft. 6in.
high. Dull and sulky countenance, speaks English indifferently.
Assam — Cooly, about 5ft. 8 in. high and about 20 of age very active in his movements.
Ahone — Cooly about 5ft. 7 in. high, 25 years of age. Dark complexion, slow
and dull, speaks English.
Ahoon — Boy about 13 years of age, slightly made, brother to coolie Assam.6
In 1850, Markwick married Sarah Ann Hoare, the widowed daughter of
an old friend, J.B. Watson, but she died just two years later. Watson has been
described as a ship’s chandler, auctioneer, ship’s biscuit baker and general storekeeper. He had also run the Rising Sun Tavern.7 Watson’s wife, Charlotte Devereux Watson [20/12/3], died in January 1866, and lies in the Cemetery watched over by a kneeling Virgin Mary holding a large cross. This must have struck contemporaries as a very Papist monument. Charlotte fell from the balcony of the Stag Hotel, which had been run by her husband for the previous seven years, and was instantaneously killed. After the tragedy, he passed the deeds of the hotel to Joseph Viney [5/3/38] who died in August of the same year aged twenty-
nine. John Wright described Mrs. Watson as an amiable, kind-hearted woman
and says of the couple: ‘They are about the plainest man and wife I have met since in these latitudes, the gentlest and the happiest’. 8 When Markwick died, he left half his estate to Sarah’s brother, Charles
Markwick Watson. The families obviously
remained close. Charles Markwick’s life ended violently when a servant opened the door of his house to his murderer in April
1857, betraying his master for the offer of a share of the booty they would find in the
house. The sick old man was strangled in his bed and the servant decamped to China with money and valuables. Markwick had, by the time of his murder, lived in China for thirty years and was a respected old resident aged sixty-two years. The registrar general, Daniel Caldwell, with the assistance of a
8.2. Monument to Charlotte Devereux,
Royal Navy gunboat, pursued the servant
wife of J.B. Watson, d. 31.1.1866.
to his native village. They obtained his surrender by taking the village headman hostage and threatening to bombard the village.9 The servant was then taken back to Hong Kong and hanged.
As early as August 1843, James Smith [10/5/5] teamed up with James Brimelow Smith, who was running the Hong Kong Inn near the Lower Market. By 1845, the two Smiths were advertising themselves as ships’ chandlers, wholesale and retail wine merchants and commission agents. They continued to
run the tavern and, in 1847, James Smith, who was described as a publican and
was also keeping a boarding house, was found guilty of concealing a deserting sailor. Their business was built up slowly as extra capital became available. In 1844, the two Smiths opened a soda water manufacturing plant. In 1845, they were advertising paints, turpentine and canvas together with superior old port, sherry,
claret and champagne. By 1847, they were selling fresh Jordan almonds, French
plums, Yarmouth bloaters and even the essence of smoke in tins for the curing of beef, tongues and ham. By 1852 they were stocking luxuries like chocolate in tins and Lundyfoot snuff. In the Almanac and Directory for 1850, Messrs Smith & Brimelow take second place in order of seniority among the auctioneers with three employees. In October 1855, James Smith and his partner were auctioning, among other goods, four six-pounder and two four-pounder guns, thirty-two piculs of shot and fourteen muskets with bayonets. It was an acknowledged fact that the pirates re-equipped through the auction houses of Hong Kong. In that year also, James Smith became one of the representatives on the highly popular committee to oversee the running of St. Andrew’s School, established in 1856 for the education of European and Eurasian children in the colony whose education until then had been almost totally neglected.10 Smith died in July 1857, aged sixty-five, leaving $5000 to Harriet Brimelow Smith and $5000 to John, her son, surely
the sign of a happy and successful partnership. The marble inscription on his handsome chest tomb calls him: ‘One of the oldest residents in China and much
admired and respected’. To us living in a much longer-lived age, it is difficult to appreciate how old sixty-five must have seemed at that time.
George Duddell, after whom Duddell Street in Central is called, was known for his love of gain and his willingness to come by it by whatever means that were at his disposal. He was a rough character little troubled in his dealings by conscience. His actions were not calculated to improve the image of the auctioneers. His sister, Martha Beazley [9/4/12], who seems to have lived with him, was the widow of Thomas G. Beasley late of the Indian Army and Royal
West Indian Mail Service. Duddell arrived in 1844 and stayed for the next thirty years. By 1845, he had taken on the opium farm for a fee to the government of $8,520
but dropped it after a year, when he found he lacked the means of enforcing his monopoly.11 He had also bought three lots of land in the first Crown land sale at West Point.12 When in 1844 rice growing in Happy Valley and So Kon Po Valley
were forbidden, the thirty-seven acres of land in that valley had been purchased
by the government, drained and divided into five farm lots. At the land auction in 1846, Duddell bought one lot and by 1857 had acquired all five lots and is said to have established a coffee farm on the land.13 In the 1846 Gazette and Almanac he is listed as a building contractor. He took part in a pernicious system of arranging overly low contracts, which put the unwary Chinese into debt, and then taking them to court.14 By 1849 he was the third largest landholder in the colony having twenty-five lots, four of which he had bought from the impecunious and feckless
government auditor-general, Adolphus Edward Shelley, for the ridiculously low sum of one pound and ten pence sterling.15 According to the Gazette and Almanac for 1850, Duddell had again increased his sphere of interests. He was listed as agent for the Ice Company, owner of Victoria Theatre, general and sheriff’s auctioneer, livery stable keeper and shipper of Malay, Lascar and Bengali seamen. He had also acquired a reputation as a dangerously reckless rider:
On Wednesday evening last, ten minutes to eight, the Queen’s Road was
thronged with people taking their accustomed walk. Suddenly the road was cleared as far as the eye could discern … to allow a well-known person to pass along at a furious pace — a pace equal to that usually seen on Victoria racecourse. It was impossible for the blind, the cripple or children to get out of the way of this furious rider…. For years the person complained of has been in the habit of galloping through the most densely settled part of town from the Ice House16 to the head of the Lower Bazaar [Central Market].17
He was not just content with galloping horses. A letter signed ‘Pedestrian’ to the Friend of China complains of:
the very dangerous amusement that Mr. Duddell is permitted to practise in the Public Road — i.e. that of breaking horses. Last evening he was driving
furiously a Poney [sic] harnessed to an Omnibus and in his career passed
close to our respected Governor and Lady in their carriage as well as another carriage containing two Ladies.18
The writer asked why the constables, who ought to have apprehended him,
looked on with mirth or indifference. Duddell was not too choosy about the manner in which he came by profit.
It was hinted that he acquired his right to be sheriff’s auctioneer from Charles Holdforth, the sheriff, by a monetary consideration.19 He and Holdforth worked hand in glove, knocking lots down cheaply to themselves and reselling them at a profit. This questionable practice came to light at the auction of the barque, Louisa, when the Chinese version of the notice about the auction put the time at two hours after the English version so that, when the Chinese turned up to bid, Duddell had already knocked down the vessel to himself at a very low price.20 He
was ordered by the government to re-auction the barque. In personal affairs, he
seems to have been equally self-seeking. He aroused the anger of the community in 1850 by his callous behaviour towards his coachman, Sharp, who had fallen ill.
When ‘he begged Mr. Duddell to excuse him from trying to break in two horses
as he was far from well’, he received an unfeeling reply. Duddell refused to visit him or send a doctor, merely replying to emissaries: ‘Tell Sharp to go to the devil
and shake himself’. When the poor man was delirious, Duddell applied to the
committee of the Society for the Relief of the Destitute Sick for a free place for him at the Seamen’s Hospital where Sharp died half an hour after admittance.21
Duddell remained in Hong Kong adding to his fortune until 1870 when he
retired to Brighton. In that year, part of his land was resumed by the government for a civil hospital, but he made so much fuss about the amount of compensation owing to him that the hospital was not built on that site. Instead the land was added to the Botanical Gardens to increase its size.22
The Lifestyle and Status in Society of the More Important Auctioneers and Storekeepers
This successful group of auctioneers and tradesmen mostly lived above their stores in comfortable stone built houses along Queen’s Road. The partners inserted particulars of their births, deaths and marriages in the local newspapers and dealt extensively in property.23 They sat on juries and their signatures are found
on documents such as the valedictory address to the chief justice, John Walter
Hulme, before his sudden departure from Hong Kong in 1854. In 1851, Charles Bowra collected subscriptions from among his colleagues to cover the cost of ‘a
grand display of English fireworks to take place at the Parade Ground, the first
ever witnessed in the Colony’. It cost 20,000 pounds sterling and consisted of ‘sky rockets, roman candles, crimson and green fires, wheels, suns, tourbillons, balloon shells, pyramids, etc’.24 The display, which had to be ordered from Britain nine months in advance, was intended as a demonstration on the part of the tradesmen of their solid worth and loyalty towards Her Majesty the Queen, on the anniversary of her coronation.25
The dividing line between this class and some of the lesser merchants seems to have been somewhat arbitrary. The activities of the two groups were not very different. Fletcher & Co. was advertising for sale superior Russian cordage26 and Holliday & Wise, all kinds of wines and Italian salad oil.27 Drinker & Heyl were selling pickled tongues in half barrels, Kennedy’s Boston water crackers in tins, sperm candles and Winchester soap among other goods.28 The partners of these companies qualified as merchants. Yet Franklyn, who dealt in luxury goods and
claimed officer class breeding, was classified as a tradesman and did not get an invitation to, for example, the Agincourt Ball. It is clear that it was during this first period that the sheep of Hong Kong’s society were separated from the goats, and
once classified as a tradesman it was very difficult to make an upward move. When
A. Shortrede, editor of the China Mail, wrote in the paper, belittling Franklyn’s position as that of a mere tradesman, Franklyn replied in a letter defending his right to a better position in society but to no avail:
I cannot see upon what grounds he [Shortrede] assumes so much superiority,
his position being that of any other man in business, earning his bread as a book and print setter and printer — yet he says he feels the degradation of its being supposed that he could be in the company of such persons as myself except in the way of business.
As the son of an officer of her Majesty’s Navy and the near relation of several
others in the same service, I have yet to learn as far as birth is concerned from whence he derives his exalted position. As to my occupation at present I leave that to the judgement of those who know me, having been a resident in China nearly seven years … and having held situations of trust and responsibility, I am better known as to conduct and character to the community than himself, especially to old residents.29
It is worth looking more closely at how the class lines were being drawn. Hong Kong looked to England for its example. There too, at this time, the boundaries that separated one class from another were being redrawn and tightened. An article from The Spectator reprinted in a Hong Kong newspaper
summed up the differences between the present and the previous generation:
Obstinate sceptics may occasionally be met who doubt whether the mass of society is more intelligent and moral in this generation than the generation which preceded it; but no one can deny that it is vastly more genteel. Acquaintances are cut with whom our fathers would not have scrupled to associate; occupations are shunned in which they engaged without scruple — and all on the score of gentility.30
This kind of tightening of the distinctions that separated one group from another was echoed in Hong Kong. A particularly telling example was the rudeness
with which George Duddell was treated by the officers of the 59th Regiment, which showed all too clearly the officers’ contempt for the tradesmen, whom they
considered as being almost beneath their notice. On the occasion of a theatrical entertainment given by the above regiment,
Mr. George Duddell … finding a seat empty, occupied it and declined to
vacate it at the peremptory order of the officer, … who said it was reserved
for the officer’s friends. By his direction, Mr. Duddell was forcibly ejected from the theatre and out of the barrack gate together with two soldiers of the Engineers who civilly remonstrated in Mr. Duddell’s favour.31
The chair on which Duddell had seated himself, ‘like much of the other furniture’, was in all probability his own property lent to the Regiment from his own theatre for the occasion. Further down in the same editorial, the writer described how:
One of the ‘Coolie Justices’ [justices of the peace who were considered by the Friend of China at that time to be under the thumb of the governor] was present on the occasion, and appealed to by Mr. Duddell, who first
called him by name, but finding ‘there’s none so deaf as he who will not hear’,
touched him on the shoulder, and called on him to bear witness to the assault
— to which he replied he would have nothing to do with the matter.
This particular justice of the peace had sided with the military in assigning to Duddell an inferior status.
The appearance of new dividing lines was much disliked by the editor of the Friend of China. When two classes of tickets were issued, $3 for unreserved seats and five for the more expensive seats, for a performance of the Amateurs in Duddell’s theatre, the editor of the Friend of China disapproved strongly:
The seats are common to all — nor does a Peer of the realm feel his dignity hurt by sitting next to a tradesman and his family. The arrangements for this concert are new and novel, intended we presume to gratify the porcelain pride of some upstart aristocrat, who in his own silly mind, would feel degraded by sitting near the earthenware integrity of those who may not rank with the magnates of this little island…. Any approach to exclusiveness in public among those who are not far removed from the same rank of life is objectionable and ought to be discountenanced.32
Sports were considered particularly character building and important in the formation of that important Victorian British virtue, manliness:
The sports and pastimes of England are not only the cheap defence of the nation but the cheap physic too. So my brave lads seize your cricket bats, your race whips, your oars or your guns, put your hearts into the sport while you are at it and hang care and the doctor. So says — your father, JOHN BULL.33
Yet in the name of respectability, the tradesmen and lower classes of Hong Kong were effectively barred from participation in events at the cricket ground and
on the racecourse. Even the Victoria Rowing Club, founded in October 1849, specified in its rule book that anyone wishing to join had to be proposed by no less than five members.34
By 1851, the organization of horseracing had become the exclusive sport of the upper class. It was organized by a race committee composed of two merchants, one civil servant and one naval and one army captain. The rules for horseracing in
1848 included for the first time a clause stating that:
No person was allowed to enter or ride but officers of the Army or Navy, Members of the Club or Gentlemen nominated and seconded by any two Members of the above named bodies being Subscribers to the Race Fund, the parties thus being proposed and seconded becoming subscribers and being accepted by the Committee.
When in 1851 a tradesman tried to enter and ride his horse in the February races,
even though he had been duly proposed and seconded, his entry was refused. Letters of indignation were written and a tradesman cup was proposed to which the governor, Sir George Bonham, was said to have headed the list of subscribers
with a donation of $25. A letter written by A Lover of Sport complained that:
It is certainly not with an idea of improving the Colonial studs that the races take place but merely to gratify the ridiculous love of show that wealth always wallows in…. Such rules could never have been countenanced in any other Colony.35
There was no mention of a tradesman’s cup in the programme for the Hong Kong races published in February 1851. Also in 1851, the price of entrance tickets to the
grandstand was raised from $5 to $6, well above what the less well-endowed could afford. In 1856, H.T. Ellis related a story illustrating the social divisions in sporting affairs. A storekeeper whose wife was a milliner (it could have been Henry Marsh)
requested permission from the race committee to enter a horse in his own name but was absolutely refused:
because only ‘gentlemen’ were admitted to this privilege…. ‘Well’, said this
honest dealer in wearables and other necessaries of life … ‘I don’t see the great
difference. Ee sells ‘ams, I sells ‘ats’.36
The former parade ground became free for recreational use in 1851. It was located next to the present Legislative Assembly, on the waterfront in the area now known as Chater Garden. The way this piece of land was hijacked by the elite as a cricket pitch for use by an exclusive cricket club further demonstrates how the
division between tradesmen and elite was being effected. The elite wanted a cricket
ground so that those enthusiasts among them would be saved from making the troublesome journey to Kowloon, where they had previously played on the sandy foreshore. A public meeting was held to decide the issue. Significantly, James Smith and Thomas Ash Lane, who had been chosen to represent the tradesmen of the colony, were absent, though whether this was by their own choice is not known. By the time the editor of the Friend of China had arrived at the public meeting, the decision to turn the parade ground into a cricket pitch had been taken and a very animated discussion was in progress about the rules for the admission of members of the community to ‘partake in the lively recreation of cricket’. The barrister, Dr.
W.T. Bridges, later to become acting colonial secretary,
was desirous of keeping cricketers somewhat select. For his part he had played with ‘Tom, Dick and Harry’ at home and he wouldn’t mind doing the
same here — but still there was a limit to all things and he thought the ‘new-fangled’ system of ballot as good a mode as could be adopted if anything like respectability was to be kept up in our social system. If he intended to black ball any one he would tell the party of his intention without mincing the matter. (An old resident who was sitting pretty close to the learned gentleman remarked — too truthfully — that there were a good many here who would do nothing of the kind, and who rejoiced in the possession of such an instrument as a black ball to do their neighbours irremediable mischief.) As to the remark which had fallen from one gentleman — about the different classes in which Society was divided in Hong Kong — Mr. Bridges had to say that in arranging the Committee, particular regard had been paid to the selection of gentlemen who well represented those different classes. The Chairman himself, and Mr. Antrobus, (Merchant) were presumed to represent the Civil professions; — Captains Lodder and
Chadwick those of the army, and Messieurs Smith and Lane [neither of whom were present] the trades people of Victoria; there could certainly be no objection to such classifications.37
In this manner the tradesmen found themselves outvoted on the committee and excluded from membership of the Cricket Club, unless they happened to be brilliant cricketers. The Friend of China refused to print the official report of the meeting since its editor was ‘unwilling to believe that those proceedings represent the wishes of the bulk of the community, in the matter of a place for public recreation’.
In a later article, the editor talked of the disgust of a large number of citizens. He suggested that many would have preferred a spacious shrubbery with garden plots and, ‘a pretty little fountain with granite images of Chinese cupids — grotesque arbours a la Chinoise — a small lake in the centre’. He would have liked to see a curds and whey, ginger beer and soda water house next to the barrack yard, with a real European pastry cook and a part of the sea locked in for public bathing. This, he said, would help as a step towards healing the divisiveness of
the ‘complained-of class society, respectable people of all different professions and
ways of getting a living, so having an opportunity of getting acquainted with each other’. 38 Needless to say, the opposition expressed in an editorial in the Friend of China to this public area being used as a cricket pitch, which sided with the
tradesmen, had no effect on the outcome of the matter.
The effects of how people were classified when they applied, for example to become members of the Hong Kong Club, is shown by the words of the gentleman who talked of the ‘irremediable harm’ that could be dealt to an individual by the casting of a black ball against his name. It categorized the applicant for membership openly and unequivocally as not part of the elite. This dividing line between the elite and the rest was made more obvious as more clubs and societies were founded. The Hong Kong Club opened in 1846, with the aim of ‘promoting a general community of feeling among the Mercantile Residents and between the members of the various branches of Her Majesty’s Service stationed in Hong Kong’ and admitted its members by ballot, two black balls in a ballot of ten excluding a candidate. The entrance fee was $30, two months’ pay for a police constable, with a subscription of $4 a month. The high subscription rate and fear of being blackballed precluded all but the elite from attempting to join. But some societies such as the Society for the Relief of the Destitute Sick had difficulty in attracting men from the upper echelons of the merchants who were often absent from the colony visiting their branch offices in China. Regular attendance at meetings was necessary and the local knowledge that would enable members to sort the deserving poor from the other applicants for aid. This left the door open for the up-and-coming to make their mark on the community. When men like Douglas Lapraik, or the recently arrived Jewish merchant, E. Cohen, were invited or elected onto the committee, it was a clear indication of their having gained acceptance and a higher level of respectability in the community.
The cliquishness of the society in Hong Kong, the lengths to which men were prepared to go to preserve their own particular patch of privilege, and the bitter feelings that were engendered in the minds of those who were being excluded, may have been partly due to the fact that the differences between the classes were often very minor and based more on wealth than on birth or education.
Small-Scale Businesses
Shopkeepers
One step down on the social scale from the auctioneers stood the shopkeepers. Among these men in early days the Scottish family surnamed Just was probably the
wealthiest and most influential. Like Thomas Ash Lane and Charles Markwick,
they were old China hands. They had owned a watch and chronometer shop in Canton and had dabbled in the opium trade. The sailing ship, Swift, belonging to Leonard Just Senior had been searched for opium by the Chinese police as early as 1838 and he had been compelled to pay several thousand U.S. dollars in hush money. 39 The family had moved from Canton in 1843 to set up shop in Victoria. It was as an apprentice in the shop of Leonard Just Junior that Douglas Lapraik, a fellow Scot, learnt his skills as a chronometer and clock maker. In 1851, the year in which the fifteen-year-old Donald Just [13/8/5] died of cholera, his grandfather, the senior Leonard Just, retired to England and the younger Just left clock-making for a secure job with the military medical department. The elder Leonard was one
of the few of this group, who, when he wanted to retire, could afford to pay the
passage back to Britain. However he died at sea on board the Land o’ Cakes. In the same year, Leonard Junior was attacked by three Chinese on Queen’s Road in the vicinity of the Murray Barracks but fended them off ‘with a sword stick providentially in his hand at the time’.40
The Justs’ Scottish apprentice, Douglas Lapraik, had left Britain in 1839 aged twenty-one to further his fortunes in the East, spending time in Macau where he met and made friends with Leonard Just Junior. He must have been a man of huge personal charm and ability. He is one of the few men to progress up through the ranks of society from apprentice to merchant. By 1850, Lapraik had opened his own clock and chronometer shop in D’Aguilar Street. By making friends with merchant navy officers, acting as their agent in Hong Kong and allowing them to use his address for their letters when absent from Hong Kong, he increased his sphere of influence. It seems that Lapraik smoothed his upward path by joining societies and working on the various committees in which the merchant class took little interest. In July 1851, Lapraik won a special vote of thanks for his efforts at fund-raising as a committee member of the Society for the Relief of the Destitute Sick.41 By 1855, he had become a special juror, and by 1859 was being described on the jury list as a merchant. By 1860 he was in partnership with John Lamont, owner of a ship-building yard at East Point, in order to buy land in Aberdeen with a view to opening the first dock there. He had also by then bought the first of the eight steam ships he eventually acquired which formed the Douglas Line. Lapraik built himself Douglas Castle at Pokfulam, now a hostel for Hong Kong University, and donated the clock that was installed in the clock tower in Pedder Street, before retiring aged forty-eight to the Isle of Wight, where he married, but died soon after.42 In 1849, he helped inaugurate the Victoria Regatta Club to encourage rowing and sailing. The club was open to those below the rank of merchant and its early meetings often took place in his house. His progress through the ranks of Hong Kong’s society was proof that upwards mobility was possible, and that at this time keeping a Chinese ‘protected woman’ was no bar to popularity. Lapraik was universally liked and admired, both by those below him and by those above him. He had the reputation of being a staunch friend and generous benefactor to unfortunates such as shipwrecked sailors desperate for a handout. Perhaps being a Scot made his upward path easier, as Scots, who were to be found at every level of society, were usually ready to help each other.
A small group, who belonged among the ranks of the tradesmen, worked
in the apothecary trade as druggists. Dr. William Preston, whose wife, Caroline [9/9/7] died soon after arriving, took over at the Hong Kong Dispensary when Dr. James Young left in 1850 for Amoy. In 1856, Dr. Preston auctioned his furniture and left China, handing the dispensary over to John R. Spence [9/6/3] who was from Dundee and had been an apothecary for many years in the establishment of Duncan Flockhart in Edinburgh. Preston seems to have come back to Hong
Kong and worked there under Dr. Thomas Boswall Watson, the founder of the present day Watson chemist chain. During this period, the Victoria Dispensary,
which is still to be found in Hong Kong, was managed by the Portuguese Joao
8.3. Paddle steamer of the Douglas Line. (Courtesy of the Maritime Museum, Hong Kong.)
J. Roza Braga, the forefather of the well-known Braga family. Five family descendants are to be found in grave number [11B/11/1]. Other shopkeepers present in the Hong Kong Cemetery include John Lemon [9/2/7] who, with his brother James, opened a bookbinding
and stationery shop in Wellington Street. John
Lemon was a Freemason and among the first hundred volunteers for military training.43 In 1853 he married Charlotte Mills, a hat maker, and set her up in business. In 1855, he sold his business to a Thomas Spence and worked instead for the China Mail.
Before the arrival of the Europeans in Hong Kong, horses seldom penetrated to the coastline of Southern China, the tracks over the mountains being too narrow and rough for riding. Many local Chinese had probably never seen a horse. Goods for trading were all brought by sea, or over the hills by men with carrying poles. The lack of local experience with horses, together with the very limited communication between the Europeans and the Chinese, meant that the merchants preferred to use European vets and farriers. In 1851 Henry Marsh, whose son may possibly be Edward Marsh [12A/10/10], set up a veterinary forge in Wellington Street and sold oats, a range of saddles, bridles, whips and ‘patent India rubber speedy cut boots’. A saddler, harness maker and coach trimmer, James Adnams, whose baby granddaughter Grace Caroline Adnams [38/6/1] is buried in the Cemetery, received his training at Lawrie & Co. of Oxford Street, London. By 1845 he had set up in Canton Bazaar in Hong Kong and advertised that he had ‘every description of gigs and carriages’ for sale. He also had a stock of white and brown top boots suitable for postilions, sword belts, scabbards and silver, brass or copper spurs. One wonders how many merchants really did keep postilions to ride behind their carriages dressed in top boots. Several smiths, including David Anderson, set up in Hong Kong, advertising their horse-shoeing services. Anderson had a smithy in Spring Garden in partnership with a Mr. Perkins, where it cost $2 a day or $1.50 a set of shoes to get horses shod. In spite of the high cost, he did not get rich. According to the advertisement for the auction of Anderson’s goods after his death, his sole possessions consisted of a portable writing desk, a bed, an elderly couch, an old percussion pistol and some articles of clothing.
One example of the type of small businesses that were set up in Hong Kong at this time involves an English man, Mr. Holmes, probably an ex-soldier, who had set up as a small-time sausage maker among the Chinese shops in the Lower Bazaar. The reporting of a court case he brought against two former friends, Turner and Thomson, gives us a glimpse of this type of person in Hong Kong. According to Holmes, the men had consumed thirty-nine pounds of his ‘sassingers’ without paying. The reason that Turner came to eat sausages at Holmes’ house was in the words of Turner: ‘They’se kicking up such a row in my house that I’ve come here to get a quiet meal o’ victuals’. Holmes further reported: ‘He has asked me to send for beer and I did so and now I wants payment for it’. He produced a book of accounts but could not read what was written and when asked the meaning of certain hieroglyphics in the book said: ‘Oh! them’s pounds,
your worship — its my mark that’s all’. When he failed to convince the court of
his truthfulness, he referred to his wife: The old ‘ooman, if she was here, could tell you all about it’. Poor Holmes who pleaded that he was ‘on his oath’, had his case dismissed, one of the defendants, saying contemptuously: ‘Your oath’s worth nuffin’. 44 Most businesses of this sort were small scale and transient, the owners either dying or leaving for better prospects elsewhere.
One path to respectability in Hong Kong was to find employment as a clerk or storekeeper to one of the big auction houses. Some of the clerks to the larger storekeepers obviously achieved their goal. Milton A. Harsant [9/3/10] and his brother Frederick May Harsant were employed by Charles Bowra as storekeepers, and Charles W. Horder [40/2/4] was a book-keeper for Lane Crawford at the time of his death. Horder is buried in a grand chest tomb of the
kind in which one would expect to find a prominent merchant. They were all three
listed as jurors. Frederick was listed as a juror and storekeeper for Bowra & Co.
every year from 1856 up to 1869.
Hotel Keepers
An American passing through Hong Kong in 1849 was dismissive on the subject of
shops in Hong Kong and his experience of hotels could not have been a happy one:
The shops in Hong Kong are of the most wretched order, there being no rich natives on the island, the Europeans being supplied from several shops kept by English, and in which the wares of London are retailed at enormous profits. But the ravening wolves most successful in Hong Kong are the hotel keepers. Their houses are of the first order, overrun with rats and mosquitoes, and they manage to charge more and give less than any other ‘publicans and sinners’. 45
One of the better ones was run by a Pole, Henry Winniberg [40/2/3], who was listed as a juror from 1855 onwards. He had arrived by steerage from Sydney on the Corsair in 1846. Winniberg bought a house from the P. & O. and converted it into the British Hotel which included a fashionable billiard room. In the same year, he married Jane Tregarthen Curnow, the daughter of a merchant navy
captain from Penzance, Cornwall. William Tarrant described the hotel as being
conducted on a small but respectable scale. It failed to flourish because of ‘the small influx of visitors who do not take up their quarters at the Club House’.
When Dr. B.L. Ball arrived in Hong Kong, he stayed at Winniberg’s hotel and
described dinner time there:
We amused ourselves by looking at the servants. They were Chinese boys
with bald heads and long braids hanging down their backs. They wore white frocks, long stockings and slouching pants.46
By 1860, Winniberg was combining running the hotel with the business of
importing and selling wines and spirits, besides his wife’s Victoria Millinery
business. He was a Freemason and one of the first ninety-nine volunteers. His wife
demonstrated to Hong Kong society his worth and respectability by providing him with a large and expensive chest tomb with an enigmatic inscription: ‘And the
light shineth in the darkness and the darkness did not comprehend it’. Winniberg
must have had great faith in his wife’s ability because, at a time when it was very unusual to do so, he left her as sole executrix of his will.
Another hotel keeper was the ambitious H.E. Hoey, whose eleven-year-old daughter, Mary Ann Hoey [9/5/10], and presumed relatives, George and Mary Elizabeth Hoey [9/5/6], are buried in the Cemetery. Little Mary Ann lies in a large and costly chest tomb. In 1853, H.E. Hoey married Mary Anne Maclehose, the widow of James Maclehose [9/9/9] publican. Maclehose’s tavern, the
Fortune of War Tavern, and the collection of curious and extraordinary articles,
put together by him and destined for a museum, fell into Hoey’s hands. Mary Ann died just two years later. In the following year Hoey used his newly gained
wealth to buy Victoria Hotel where he opened ‘a first rate billiard room’ with three
tables. In 1858 he commenced business as an opium boiler for home consumption and for export, which business he carried on in his hotel office. He was taken to court by the opium farmer, Chun Tai Kwong, resulting in terms being worked out between them for a partnership. Hoey had the means of acquiring information from the sea-faring men who visited his hotel, and worked as detector and informant concerning unlicensed opium aboard ships for Chun, who in
exchange granted him a sub-licence to boil opium for the fee of $100 a month. But
government enquiries into the workings of the opium monopoly led Chun to lose the monopoly and as a result Hoey found himself in financial difficulties. These landed the poor man in the debtor’s prison where he unsuccessfully attempted suicide by ‘use of a revolver and a razor’. The China Mail commented unfeelingly, ‘If men in their anxiety “to do business” and enjoy life, plunge into losses for which they are unequal, they must take the consequences’.47 By 1861, when he sold one of his properties to Charles May, he had already moved to Kanagawa in Japan.48
Artisans
Those men involved in the repairing and building of ships formed a well-respected group of skilled men, whose names are for the most part found in the jury lists. Most prominent among them was John Lamont, a Scottish ship’s carpenter from Aberdeen, who was set up by Jardine, Matheson & Co. with his own slipway in East Point as early as 1843, where the company’s barques and clippers could be looked after and repaired. Slim and bronzed with humorous grey eyes, Lamont always wore at least one item of Scottish tartan and spoke such broad Scot that no-one understood him when he first arrived. He, like Douglas Lapraik, had settled in Hong Kong with a Chinese ‘protected woman’. He was also one of those rare men who were able to move in any society and seemed equally at home
whoever he happened to be with. In February 1843, he launched the first Hong
Kong built ship, the 80-ton Celeste. One must admire such a man who could overcome all obstacles, get on with everybody, and create for himself a happy loving home life with his two young boys and their Chinese mother.
Another Scot from Aberdeen was John Couper, or Cowper as it was sometimes written. He had been selected by the P. & O. help bring the docking
facilities at Whampoa up to the standard required by its iron-clad steam ships.
It was no small undertaking for a humble ship’s carpenter to transport himself and his family across the world to a strange new life on a chop-boat on the Pearl
River. He was already in his fifties and naturally spoke no word of Chinese. The
docks, where he was to act as overseer, were owned and run by local Chinese families. Couper did however have in-depth experience as a ship’s carpenter and was noted for ‘his placid temper and ability to instruct’. He was soon joined by his wife, daughter, and son, John Cardew Couper, also a ship’s carpenter. The chop-boat consisted of a roomy house surrounded by decking with its own roof garden complete with trellises, bougainvillea and other plants. The houseboat had its own servant quarters and punts were provided for expeditions ashore.
John Couper established himself as a much esteemed father figure among the Chinese workers. In the meantime his son, John Cardew, teamed up with a Whampoa elder, Ah Moon, who, in his will, left his family dock to John Couper Junior. In 1851, John Couper moved his chop-boat to be close to his son’s dock so as to help him and together they built the first genuine dry dock in China, as opposed to the mud-bottomed docks used by the Chinese. This was a colossal undertaking for two lone ship’s carpenters from Scotland using local materials and helped only by Chinese workers who had never seen a dry dock before. The sad end to John Couper Senior is related in chapter 13.
8.5. Whampoa Dockyard showing the Couper family houseboat. (By courtesy of the Maritime Museum, Hong Kong.)
Other early members of this group are Alexander Badenoch [11A/10/1] and Charles Barton [9/9/8]. Badenoch was a shipbuilder from Banffshire with connections in Singapore who died aged twenty-eight in 1844. Barton, already mentioned as brother-in-law to Daniel Caldwell, owned a ship-repairing yard. He employed a Scottish blacksmith, George Dickson [16Cii/6/10], a native of Greenock, who died in 1860 aged forty-six. Two sail-makers, Thomas John Irwin [10/1/7] who worked for William H. Sutton, and William Dolan [5/2/8] of Spring Gardens who had come from the shipyards of Whampoa, were probably old sailors. Dolan continued to work in Hong Kong as sail-maker, hotelier, storekeeper and manager of a ship-building and sail-making yard until he died in December 1885. Robert Duncan, a sail-maker and Scotsman, typified this rough tough ex-naval breed. When his cook absconded with $200, he collected Police Constable Jenkins from the police station, and set off in a boat to intercept the cook whom they reckoned would have taken the first fast boat to Macau or China. When they attempted to board a passenger boat off West Point, the fourth they had searched, those on the boat were so terrified by their appearance, such was the reputation of some of the Europeans in Hong Kong, that the passengers all jumped overboard and five subsequently drowned. A Chinese who was on the way to the funeral of his uncle testified in the inquest as follows:
They called us to stop and immediately fired two muskets at us, not content
with this, they came on board and commenced beating the passengers with
the butts of their rifles; this so frightened the passengers and me in particular
(never having been in the service of an Englishman) that I jumped overboard with the other passengers. The men in the sampan chased us when we got into the water and commenced beating us with oars …49
A verdict of manslaughter was returned at the coroner’s inquest against Duncan and the policeman. The other passengers who were rescued and gave similar evidence at the inquest seem a particularly harmless lot and the absconding cook was not among them. They included several carpenters, a musician and two cooks.
Tavern and Boarding-House Keepers
Eight tavern keepers or their wives from this period are found in the Cemetery. The taverns aroused many complaints. The Friend of China said of them in 1849:
Many of the public houses in Hong Kong are intolerable nuisances
— we speak with feeling on the subject, having the misfortune to live
opposite to two of them. We are free to declare that during last summer
the neighbourhood was disturbed almost nightly by an uproar in these dens which seldom subsided before two or three in the morning. In warm weather, with the windows open, sleep was out of the question as the songs were heard distinctly and we can say only that it was fortunate they did not go farther than a bachelor’s bedroom.
The paper considered the licensing system, as it was applied, without any scrutiny of the men seeking licenses, to be at fault:
The fact is undeniable that about the low public houses in Hong Kong have congregated a number of idle Europeans (assuming the garb of seamen) having no ostensible means of earning a livelihood, and with these men the European police appear in close alliance. So long as a publican’s licence
is granted to any man who can raise $100 and the peace of the town thus sacrificed to raise revenue, the evil will exist.50
Ambitious ex-soldiers and ex-sailors often began their civilian careers in the
police force and then moved on to become barmen. When they had saved the requisite $100 for a licence they opened taverns. Recourse to taverns and brothels
provided almost the only pleasurable recreations open to the poorer sections of the European community. The habits of the soldiers and sailors when on shore leave ensured that grog shops flourished, even if the problems of keeping the peace between drunken, quarrelsome men and extracting money from inebriated
patrons called for tough publicans ready to fight:
The keepers of these grog shops might be mistaken for respectable members of society were it not for their bull-dog battered and damaged countenances, which betray sundry evidence of recent bruises and black eyes, received in taking the change out of their customers.51
A letter to the papers about tavern keepers from A Sailor’s Friend asserted that ‘most if not all were low adventurers’ who had arrived in Hong Kong ‘in pauper conditions’. It said that men without sixpence in their pocket who had set up taverns, ‘more resembling pigsties’ were able to leave in one or two years for England or Australia where they could ‘enjoy their ease’ on the money they had made.52 One such was J.C. Ryan of London Tavern. After having his house broken into, he inserted an advertisement in the Friend of China offering a reward of $100 for the recovery of the items stolen. These included two gold watches
made in Liverpool, six gold rings, one gold snake chain, two sets of studs, one diamond and the other gold, four gold watch guards and a pair of gold earrings. The list indicates how much spare cash he had to spend on luxuries. Ryan combined boarding-house and tavern keeping with crimping and was described by the Friend of China as ‘shipping master of this place’ on the occasion of his death by drowning, when the small schooner he owned, the Jim Crow, overturned in a squall.53 Incidentally, he was sued by the Chinese boat builder for the cost of building the boat, but won the case at court which was not surprising at that time. The tavern and boarding-house keepers were not above making money from
arranging contests and taking bets, for example on cock-fighting in Tai Ping Shan: ‘These cock fighters profess to be Christians but do worse than heathens. They meet and fight every Sunday and bet largely; afterwards they get into squabbles and dirk [stab] each other’. 54 Even so the tavern keepers of Hong Kong had a certain pride in the elevated position that their money could buy them. Under the leadership of Mr. Suaicar, of the Pilot Boat Tavern, an ex-Royal Navy boatswain who also owned a small schooner, they formed a small flourishing community which showed its spirit. The Friend of China was asked to insert in the paper a description of a masquerade ball held by Mr. and Mrs. Suaicar for his brother publicans. The ball was held to show:
that although in a middling class of life, our innkeepers although much despised by some parties have so much self respect as to conduct themselves with gaiety. Dancing was kept up until a late hour when the evening’s enjoyments were crowned by an excellent supper provided by our lady hostess, Mrs Suaicar.55
Only two tavern keepers buried in the Cemetery achieved the respectability of having their names on the jury lists in this period. They were James Lindow [16Cii/7/16] from Manchester who ran the National Inn and Henry John Carr
of the British Inn, who continued to run taverns until he finally died in 1874,
the oldest innkeeper in Hong Kong. Carr’s first wife, Eliza Steavens Carr [13/8/6], died aged twenty-two. He went on to marry twice more. George B. Jones [9/16/10] from Lambeth, London was the keeper of the Fortune of War
tavern. His executor was George Perkins who worked in the American-owned ship-building yard, Emeny and Frazer. His headstone, which was erected by his brother, proclaims that his death was regretted by a numerous circle of friends. He died in 1848 aged twenty-eight. Other tavern keepers and wives buried in the Cemetery include John Rice [9/4/2] and Eliza Mulholland [7/8/19], wife of Thomas Mulholland, both of whom were from County Down, Ireland.
Mulholland opened the Wellington Inn in the Circular Building in 1846. John
Rice, an ex-mariner, ran the Empire Tavern. In 1852 he took George Duddell to court
demanding the refund of $200 paid in advance
as rent for premises that were burnt down in the great fire of 1851. He became respectable enough to make the jury lists from 1863 to 1866.
James Maclehose [9/9/9], who is listed among the first ninety-nine Hong Kong Volunteers, ran the Commercial Inn in partnership with the saddler, James Adnams. His money-making abilities were shown by the fact that he was able to commission a Chinese stone mason, Man-chong, to produce a life-size statue in marble of Queen Victoria for $120, a large sum of money. 56 Not satisfied with the likeness to the queen, Maclehose refused to pay the unfortunate mason and was taken by him to court where the plaintive lost his case. Although he dismissed the claim, the judge did say that the workmanship was as well as any reasonable contractor could have expected. Maclehose planned to branch out as ‘Curator, Collector and Curer in China and Japan’ for the Indian, Australian, Chinese and Japanese Museums and was prepared to purchase ‘every description of Natural and Artificial SPECIMENS OF REAL INTEREST, both ancient and modern’.57 But only one month later, in August 1852, he died of
fever and dysentery. He left $1,500 to his wife Mary Ann. This represented a large sum when board and lodging in a respectable house cost $30 a week.58
The success of Richard and Elizabeth Neil [9/5/11] makes their story an interesting example of what a man from the lowest level of society in England could achieve in Hong Kong. Richard Neil joined the army in December 1834. He came from the county of Leicester, where he described himself as a framework knitter. He may have been among those who joined the army because they had been put out of work by the knitting machines in the new factories. He was discharged from the army in 1846, one of the forty-one men who volunteered to
stay on that year and serve in the Hong Kong Police Force. Neil first came to the
notice of the authorities when he was involved in a raid on the merchant Joseph
Edger’s bungalow at West Point, a part of which was in use as a police station.
The raid on 22 April 1844 was described in a report by Captain J. Bruce, superintendent of police, to the governor and then sent on to Lord Stanley in London:
About half past 12 o’clock last night, Sergeant Neil in charge of the station at Mr. Edger’s hearing the dogs barking went out to see what was the matter. The man on watch and the sergeant soon saw some men coming along the high road and they went down (imprudently) only with their sticks …. On going along the ramp which leads to the gate, Private Hogan was suddenly dragged
by a hooked spear off the footway down
the scarped side … The Sergeant then
hastened back, turned out his men and
called Mr. Edger. This was scarcely effected when it was perceived that the
men had mounted to the top of Mr. Edger’s godown and were breaking in the roof…. It is thought there were about 150 men engaged in the attack. The
party, taking up a commanding position on the ramp, opened fire, after which
the robbers remained at least ten minutes during which time about twenty
shots were fired by the Police.59
In the aftermath of the raid, one dead Chinese, two long ladders and eight twenty-foot spears were found besides a severely wounded Private Hogan. A search was made of all the Chinese houses in the vicinity which included an examination of the feet of the inmates to see if any had just returned home, ‘but none exhibited marks of having been recently abroad’. Shoes were then a luxury that this class
of Chinese could not have afforded. The governor, Sir John Davis, in a report to
Lord Grey in England commented:
While I rejoice that the attempt in question proved abortive, I am more
convinced that a Chinese Police can never be trusted in this Colony. If not actually collusive with their countrymen, they have not the resolution to do their duty in case of emergency.
Hogan was married to Richard Neil’s sister, Annie. After Hogan died partly due to the wounds sustained in this attack, Annie married James Corrigan [9/13/3], who was chief engineer on the P. & O. steamer, Sir James Forbes, which connected Hong Kong with Canton and had a daughter by him. He died in October 1858, after a long illness, during which he was unable to work, leaving his widow ‘much involved’. When she was unable to afford the fees for a second class burial, John Smithers, the sexton, wrote a letter to the governor on her behalf pleading: ‘It would be an act of Charity if His Excellence orders a pauper fee only to be paid’.60
Richard Neil left the police in 1847 to run the Albion Hotel with James McLaughlin and, when that partnership was dissolved, he became a livery stable keeper. Neil died in 1858. He and his wife are buried in a large chest tomb that must have given great satisfaction to his sister Annie, who probably erected it. After Corrigan’s death, in June 1859, Annie accepted a proposal from John Patrick Martin, a Scotsman. He had been married to Elizabeth Martin [9/18/13] in 1845 and had taken her back to his house in the Canton Bazaar. She had died less than a year later aged twenty-three, from dysentery. At that time he was still a storekeeper for the commissariat. By the time of his second marriage, John Patrick was an independent businessman running his own ships’ chandlery and bakery in Queen’s Road. He had also taken over a second chandlery business run from a chop-boat on the Canton River. One year after his wedding, in 1860, he shut up his store in Queen’s Road and left Hong Kong to join the army commissariat on
the Northern Expedition at the time of the Second Opium War.61 When John
Patrick came back from the war, he was rich enough to buy the Oriental Hotel on the Praia Grande, Macau. Thus, Annie Martin nee Neil rose from being among the poorest of the poor in England to become, by way of three marriages, a respectable manageress of the family hotel. She had rivalled her brother in upward social mobility and outlived him.
Chapter 9 Beachcombers and Destitutes
By 1846, some kind of action was felt necessary to provide a minimum of support for this class of underdog, and the Society for the Relief of the Destitute Sick was founded:
Here as is usual elsewhere, there is a portion of the inhabitants who have come to the colony in the hopes of bettering their fortunes. It may be that their own imprudence has been the chief cause of their want of success in the onward struggle of life, but that matters not. It is among this class — destitute, too often dissipated, and sometimes without even the necessaries of life — that disease commits its greatest ravages … Those who have neither money nor friends are thrown upon the government, and too often an
admittance [to hospital] at Government expense is delayed until the fever has
done its work and sometimes an admission is refused, the applicant not being
considered a fitting object, and death is inevitable.1
Unemployed merchant seamen, policemen who had been dismissed from the police force for various offences often including drunkenness, and those who fell into debt drifted downwards into this group of unfortunates. This is where for example Police Constable John C. Smith would have probably ended up. It was reported
in 1847 that he had enlisted in the police four days previously and been drunk on three of them. He was dismissed and fined $20;2 likewise, Police Constable James Macreary, formerly of the 98th Regiment, was brought to court for sleeping at his
post the previous night. He had been dismissed before and this was the seventh report of misconduct since his reinstatement. He was found to be too drunk to make his appearance in court and again dismissed from the police force.3
In its report at the first annual meeting, the Society for the Relief of the Destitute Sick had helped twenty members of the destitute class, ‘and there is every reason to believe that but for this benevolent institution many of them would have died in the extreme of misery’. At the same meeting the scheme was extended to cover female applicants, to an amount not exceeding fifty cents per day.4 By 1851, 206 destitutes had been relieved, including 41 new cases that year. According to Charles Batten Hillier, the magistrate, more than half the applicants were seamen: ‘Much of this sickness and misery and a great deal of vice arose from the habits induced by the relation of seamen and crimps’.5 Two examples are given below of the downward path that could lead to destitution and a pauper’s grave.
The claustrophobic atmosphere of the island with little in the way of amusement and nowhere much to go to escape its constraints, the high cost of returning home and the risks involved in business here, all increased the temptation to drink one’s way to oblivion. A prime example of this was a local tradesman, Frederick Funck, who may possibly still lie in an unmarked pauper’s grave in the Cemetery. He had owned one of the largest stores, stocking everything from
ladies’ wear to anchors. When on the verge of bankruptcy, he literally drank
himself to death in June 1848, leaving behind a wife and baby son in dire straits. The report on his inquest describes how his death came about:
He with three Europeans sat down to a drinking bout in a tavern on the previous Monday, and continued at it day and night till Saturday, by which time they had consumed two dozen of Brandy, one dozen of Rum, and above a dozen of Beer and Cider. Deceased then had an attack of delirium tremens, under which he expired. Verdict — Deceased came to his death by delirium tremens, caused by excessive intoxication.6
The most talked-of pauper known to be buried in the Hong Kong Cemetery must be P. Caulincourt McSwyney, though whether his bones remain to this day in the grounds is a matter of conjecture. He was reported to have been a graduate from Dublin University of undoubted ability and arrived in Hong Kong as early as 1842, an adventurer and atheist from Sydney. He and the sheriff, Charles Holdforth, could be said to exemplify the element of corruption that ran through the civil service in early days. From being clerk to Major Caine, he was promoted in 1844 to deputy registrar general. Ejected from that post for ‘blunders’, he was permitted to practise law, signing himself barrister, solicitor and attorney-at-law. An article on legal pettifogging does not mince its words: ‘The mischief this man did to the colony in its earlier days is almost incalculable. In connection with other
parties … swindling and barefaced robbery were perpetrated to an extent difficult
to be conceived’. According to the same article, his career was brought to a close
because: ‘no respectable person would be seen within a hundred yards of his office
… From lawyer he turned to opium dealer and it is said made quite a fortune at speculating’. 7 When it came to marriage however, it was McSwyney who was taken in. A wily Chinese lady, Aho, represented herself as the widow of a rich Fukien merchant with property in Canton. After signing the customary Chinese marriage documents, McSwyney was taken to Guangdong and introduced to the lady’s ‘brother’ who purported to be an extensive tea dealer whose business would be shared with his new brother-in-law. He was shown a large house belonging to the family. On returning one year later to collect the rents due on the house,
McSwyney was astonished to find that the occupier knew nothing of Aho or her
brother. Returning to Hong Kong in a rage, he abused his wife, turned her out of his house and charged her and her servants with stealing his property. Aho, who had been detained in prison, made out a case that all the objects found in her possession were presents given to her by husband and, there being no proof to the contrary, she was discharged by proclamation before her trial.
In 1849, McSwyney became an insolvent debtor. He was accused of gross dishonesty and fraud in issuing a false statement and returned to the debtor’s prison: ‘Deprived of the means of subsistence and shunned by everyone, he contracted dysentery and was forced to beg an admission to the Seamen’s Hospital … where he died [on 21 December 1850] without a friend and received the funeral of a pauper’. The editor drew the moral: ‘The profoundest knowledge, the greatest talents are as nothing when wanting in the great essential — PROPER MORAL PRINCIPLES’. 8
Chapter 10
Missionaries
In this first period one cannot help but wonder at the missionary fervour that led men to bring their wives and children to China, sacrificing their lives on the altar
of their missions with a seeming lack of concern which to us appears irresponsible. Three groups of missionaries stand out in the early years of the colony as being of
particular significance. They are the London Missionary Society which under Rev.
James Legge founded the English Nonconformist Union Church, the American missionaries, and Karl Gutzlaff’s Christian Mission which led to the arrival in Hong Kong of the Basel Mission, the Berlin missionaries and the Mission of the Rhenish Church.
English Nonconformist Union Church Missionaries
To understand the background of these early missionaries in Hong Kong one
must look back briefly to Dr. Robert Morrison and Rev. William Milne, the two men who inspired so many. They had been sent out in 1807 by the London Missionary Society (L.M.S.) to be the first Protestant missionaries to China. The
Nonconformists, including the Presbyterians, the Congregationalists and the Baptists, had united in Britain under the umbrella of the L.M.S. in order to pool
their resources and send missionaries into the field. Dr. Morrison worked in the
East for twenty-seven years ‘extending the kingdom of the Blessed Redeemer’. 1
Among the considerable achievements of Robert Morrison and William Milne
were the founding of the Anglo-Chinese College in Malacca, the compilation and publication of a first dictionary of the Chinese language and the translation of the Bible into Chinese. Morrison lived and worked for many years as interpreter and translator to the British East India Company in Canton and was known and admired by the British merchants, especially the Nonconformist Scots like
William Jardine. He died in Macau in 1834 aged fifty-two and is buried in the
Protestant Cemetery there.2
In the following year, Morrison’s son, John Robert, and a group of friends and admirers among the foreign community in Canton set up the Morrison Educational Society (M.E.S.) with the aim of founding schools where Chinese boys could learn the English language and gain a grounding in Christianity in order to
lay the axe to the root
of these long standing and deep -rooted evils (heathenism and idol worship) to revive, develop and cultivate long dormant mental energies by introducing as many youths as possible to the sources of moral elevation that are found in English Literature and Science.
It was thought that, within a space of not many years, such schools would exert a
great influence in overcoming native prejudices and clear the way for
a more cordial intercourse between the Chinese and foreigners … The diffusion of knowledge by means of schools … will disabuse the people in their notions of the outside barbarians; since the exclusive wisdom in which they pride themselves must then stand the test of an enlightenment their fathers never dreamt of.3
In 1838 a second society was founded, the Medical Missionary Society (M.M.S.), which would follow in the footsteps of Dr. Morrison and Dr. Colledge to open medical clinics for the Chinese such as they had opened in Macau, and so link missionary work with Western medicine. Free medical attention would be provided so that the gospel could be preached to patients at a time when they would be prepared to listen, thus overcoming the hostility of the people. The yearly subscriptions paid by the merchant members of the M.E.S and the M.M.S. would enable them to carry out their mission.
Both societies received grants of land in Hong Kong as early as February 1842, and Sir Henry Pottinger became their patron. Together they started to build
a large house on Morrison Hill in Wan Chai. Dr. Benjamin Hobson, who had
been sent out from Britain by the London Missionary Society, opened a clinic and hospital at the foot of the hill. Rev. Samuel R. Brown moved the M.E.S. school from Macau into the purpose-built house on Morrison Hill. Brown, who had been recruited by the Society to run their school, had formerly been a professor in the New York Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb. He had immense faith in the effects of the total immersion of his Chinese pupils in the language, culture and Christian life of the household. Beside the Browns and the Hobsons,
the household included the families of the Rev. William C. Milne Junior, and his wife, Frances Williamina, and John Robert Morrison Junior, who was working
for the governor, Sir Henry Pottinger, as interpreter and Chinese secretary. The school may have also included the sons of some merchants among its pupils. Certainly an older boy from the school is commemorated in the Cemetery: Vere Pallett Harris [11A/12/2], the son of a Manchester merchant, died in the house in November 1843 aged fourteen years.4
The three missionary families mentioned above all lost baby boys in the early years: Robert Morrison Brown [11A/5/6], died in January 1844 aged nine months, John Abbay Hobson [11A/3/7] departed this life in April 1843. These two baby boys are commemorated by almost identical square, stepped granite stones, the only difference being that John Hobson’s has lost its bevelled covering stone. Then, in 1846 John Robert Morrison Milne [9/8/17] died aged only two days. Life cannot have been easy for the mothers of these babies. They were catering for a household of some forty-four people including thirty-two Chinese schoolboys, and teaching in the school, besides caring for their own children. To add to their trials, in May 1843 the household was attacked by robbers: ‘The robbers drove all the inmates from the house of which they had possession for two hours only decamping at daylight’. 5 The household was forced to take refuge in the hen-house, where the ladies were able
to staunch the flow of blood from two spear
thrusts to the legs of Samuel Brown. The
Hobsons, the Browns and John Robert Morrison all lost possessions. The Great Seal of Office belonging to the governor was also unaccountably in the house at the time and taken by the robbers. Finding nothing else of much value to take, the robbers vented their frustration by breaking down the doors and windows, cutting
up the beds and setting fire to the piled-up clothes.6 The health of both Jane Hobson and Mrs. Brown suffered from the stresses
and strains of life in Hong Kong. Jane had to be taken back to England, but
died at sea in sight of the white cliffs of Dover. Dr. Hobson, while on holiday in
England, found himself a new wife. He married Rachel Morrison, the daughter of Dr. Robert Morrison. The couple returned to the East but, from then on
concentrated most of their missionary efforts in Canton, where Hobson did much to popularize Western medicine by his writings, such as the Treatise on Physiology published in May 1854. The Browns left Hong Kong in 1847 because of the ill
health of Mrs. Brown. They took with them to Connecticut six of the older boys from the school, thus beginning an educational connection between China and America and, in particular, between China and Yale College that was to become
very influential in spurring the later reform movement in China. The remaining
boys were sent to Rev. James Legge’s Anglo-Chinese College.
Rev. Dr. James Legge (1815–97) is a very interesting character who does not seem to fit the orientalist mould as described by Edward Said. As Anthony Sweeting says: ‘His manifest respect for Confucian tradition and his refusal to treat Chinese Culture in general as some sort of passive and inferior “other” makes Legge stand rather apart from his contemporaries’. 7 As a young man, he had been inspired to follow in the footsteps of Rev. William Milne, who came from Legge’s home town of Huntley near Aberdeen. After training, he and his young bride, Mary Isabella Legge [9/17/9], the daughter of a Scottish pastor, joined Rachel and Benjamin Hobson on the Eliza Stuart to sail to China. Legge spent his early years in the missionary field at the Anglo-Chinese (Ying Wah) College in Malacca. In 1843, he moved the college and seminary to Hong Kong. His many great achievements over the long years from 1843 to 1876 in Hong Kong and also, after he had been appointed the first professor of Chinese at Oxford, were perhaps partly due to his lifelong habit of waking up at 3.00 a.m. and working for twenty out of twenty-four hours each day. In 1845, with the help of Hobson, he founded the Union Chapel as well as a chapel for Cantonese speakers. His active ministry there as the first pastor included work among soldiers, sailors and convicts. His sermons were well received and influential enough for the subject of them in the coming weeks to be published in the local papers. His yearly sermon addressed to the clerks and assistants of the colony for example was often commented on
by the papers. Young men such as John Wright, the diarist and post office clerk,
found it worthwhile to attend the Union Church as well as the cathedral. Legge was among those who became disillusioned with the impediments to working as a missionary in Hong Kong and asked the L.M.S. directors repeatedly for permission to move to Canton, going so far as to declare in 1852: ‘If we had the work of 1842, 43, and 44 to do again, we should not think of establishing ourselves in Hong Kong as we have done’.8
In Hong Kong, Legge began his lifelong work, translating the Chinese classics into English, which endeavour he considered crucial to his mission. Many
of these first scholarly translations have not yet been improved on, in spite of some
criticisms from later scholars. Legge believed that only an understanding of each other’s cultures could bring about that meeting of minds that was necessary for the spread of Christianity in China. He explained his attitude to Confucianism in relation to Christianity:
So shall missionaries in China come fully to understand the work they have to do; and the more they avoid driving their carriage over the Master’s grave,
[the grave of Confucius] the more likely are they soon to see Jesus enthroned
in His room in the hearts of the people.9
But Legge’s life in Hong Kong was to be a constant battle against ill health, reversal, and disappointment. In November 1845, he was so ill with dysentery that he had to leave for England, returning only in the summer of 1848. His fourth child, Anne Murray Legge [9/17/10], died from a lingering illness only two months after their return to Hong Kong. His school and seminary were considered a failure by 1851, and he was forced to close them.
His wife’s household duties must have overtaxed her strength. She wrote
to the L.M.S. that it was very difficult to find time for letter writing: ‘what with
our own family duties and the domestic care of both boys and girls, in all thirty-eight young men and children, and our almost constant stream of missionary visitors’.10 In October 1852 Mary Isabella Legge died, aged only thirty-two, while giving birth to a stillborn son. She had been suffering from recurring bouts of diarrhoea and sickness. Dr. Hobson had tended her and Mrs. Hobson and Helen Chalmers [23/3/4] were at her deathbed as well as James Legge and
two of their three surviving daughters. At the funeral, Rev. Dr. William Dean of
the American Baptist Missionary Union
‘offered an impressive prayer’ over her grave.
The Friend of China commented on the rank and number of people attending Mary Isabella Legge’s funeral:
Although the deceased was by principle and education a dissenter, and the wife and daughter of eminent dissenting ministers, we observed among others giving testimony of their esteem, his Lordship, the Bishop of Victoria, together with his Excellency, Her Majesty’s Plenipotentiary, the
Chinese Secretary [Karl Gutzlaff] and the Colonial surgeon [Dr. Morrison] and several other officials.11
This seems to show that the Legges may have been admired and respected for their work and their sincerity, but the Church of England held sway in the social scale. Mary Isabella Legge had been teaching several girls and their care was passed to Helen Chalmers newly sent out by the L.M.S. Her husband, John Chalmers [23/3/4], wrote back to the London Missionary Society, fearing that it would be too great an undertaking for Helen with her short experience in the East and lack of knowledge of the Chinese language. The Chalmers both spent the rest of their lives in Hong Kong. A family monument [23/3/4] commemorates Helen who died in 1897 and John who died in 1899 and their son, James Legge Chalmers, who died in 1914 when a commissioner in the Chinese Maritime Customs, as well as a grandson, Peter J.N. Stewart, a journalist in Hong Kong
who died in 1978.
Perhaps James Legge’s most important contribution to Hong Kong people lay in the field of education where he believed that a practical general secular education which was not backed by any particular religion or sect should be
available to any Chinese who wanted it. In this he was influenced by the failure
of his seminary. He felt very differently about his school which remained an inspiration for him:
From first to last the pupils amounted to seventy boys. The progress made
by the mass in their studies was considerable. Nearly a third of them made a profession of Christianity. Very few of them have disgraced that profession while several have adorned it. They have shown great strength of principle, maintaining integrity and holding a quiet onward course of consistency and usefulness. I believe there are few schools in England of which the results, so
far as comparison of widely different conditions can be drawn, have turned
out more satisfactorily.12
After earlier and unsuccessful attempts to persuade Sir John Davis to sanction the founding of a free school such as already existed in Singapore and Penang, Legge
played a major role on Hong Kong’s Education Committee from 1853 to 1857 and
then on the Board of Education from 1860 to 1865 to bring this dream to fruition. It was in this role that he inspired the first headmaster, Frederick Stewart [23/5/7], and helped guide the Central School towards maturity.
The American Missionaries
The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (A.B.C.F.M.) and the Baptist Mission were active in Hong Kong from its earliest days. The Boston-based A.B.C.F.M. was the first and largest U.S. mission to focus on preaching overseas. It was formed out of an alliance, later to break down, between the Presbyterian and the Congregational Churches in the United States. Its
teaching was deeply influenced by the New Haven Theology which taught free
will, individual responsibility and self reliance through hard work, ideal virtues in an era of frontier dreams and westward expansion.13 Dr. Dyer Ball, who was among the first missionaries to come to Hong Kong, was deeply committed to self-improvement through education, having already founded a successful school in Charleston before leaving for the Far East, and was also a trained doctor.
He had married Lucy Mills in 1827, when he was attending lectures at the New
Haven Theological College. The couple had left New York for China in 1838 arriving in Hong Kong from Macau in 1843 in the hope that Hong Kong would prove healthier than Macau. It did not, and Lucy Dyer Ball [11A/5/7] died in June 1844 at the age of thirty-seven. She was followed by two of her small sons, Mills Bridgeman [11A/3/13] who died aged two at Macau in August 1844 and Frederick Joseph [11A/3/12] who died aged five just over one year later, leaving
Dr. Ball at nearly fifty years old with two small daughters to bring up. In Hong
Kong, Ball joined forces with the missionaries sent by the American Baptist
Mission, Rev. J. Lewis Shuck and Dr. William Dean and together they opened a
chapel on Queen’s Road in July 1842, a school in 1844 and a Chinese Teochiu (Chiu
Chau) church and a dispensary in Sheung Wan market.14
The very first missionaries to arrive in Hong Kong were the Shuck family. The Shucks left Macau for Hong Kong in March 1842. J. Lewis Shuck agreed to edit the Friend of China and the Hong Kong Gazette for the first year of publication in return for board and $50 a month. The first edition of the paper was issued on 22 March of that year under the editorship of Shuck and James White. Henrietta, in a letter home, wrote that she was one of the first women to reside in Hong Kong and that she was quite satisfied with her life there in spite of their being ‘deprived of many comforts and of society’. 15 Henrietta Shuck [11A/3/9], the daughter of Rev. Addison Hall of Virginia, had married J. Lewis Shuck in 1835 when only seventeen. She left almost immediately for China and gave birth to her first son in Singapore, leaving soon after with her newborn baby for the nineteen-day journey by sailing boat for Macau. In 1838, Henrietta was gravely ill and nursed back to health by a Mrs. King. Henrietta is described as a typical missionary wife with her hair swept behind her ears in braids fastened together at the nape of her neck, and wearing a voluminous, dark, long-sleeved dress fastened down the front with plain fastenings, a wide white collar and a white apron over the dress. When she walked with a group of missionaries across Hong Kong Island in 1839 on a prospecting trip, Henrietta became the first known Western woman to set foot in Hong Kong. Although the First Opium War brought devastation and death to the cities it touched in China, the Shucks saw it as ‘a means of opening the eyes of these blind and ignorant people’. Henrietta wrote in a letter to her father: ‘Doors are flying open and missionaries carrying the bread of
life are entering’. In 1842, Dr. and Mrs. Dean came from Bangkok to join the Shuck family.
While Dean concentrated his missionary efforts among the Teochiu, his wife
helped in the Shuck household. Theodosia Dean [11A/3/6] was Dean’s second
wife, the first having died and been buried in Singapore. Theodosia Barker had come out to Macau in 1837 as a young girl of seventeen, sent by the British Female
Education Society to help in the school for blind Chinese girls set up by Mary
Gutzlaff, the second wife of the German missionary Karl Gutzlaff. It was said that Theodosia had left the Gutzlaff household due to the treatment she had received at the hands of Mary Gutzlaff to live with the same Mrs. King who had nursed
Henrietta Shuck back to health. According to a letter from the F.E.S.: ‘Most undue influence was used to persuade her to marry Mr. Dean, contrary to the
known regulations of the Society, as a more agreeable expedient to Mrs. Gutzlaff than her remaining in Macao under another roof’. Theodosia was the first of the
missionary wives to die when she caught smallpox from one of the Chinese girls being educated by them in the girls’ school and living in the household. She died in March 1843 aged only twenty-four years. Her starkly Nonconformist epitaph was: ‘Let me die the death of the righteous’. Dean left to take his two small daughters, Matilda and Fanny, back to the United States. Henrietta wrote that she missed Theodosia greatly as she was ‘kind enough to take charge of her children and pupils two hours a day and give them instruction. They were making astonishingly good progress and the arrangement relieved me greatly’.16
A feeling of optimism must have swept the ranks of the Nonconformists when the various Nonconformist schools joined hands to celebrate the opening of the American missionaries’ school on 23 September 1844. The buildings were substantial. The new Bazaar chapel was two storeys high with a dispensary, book depository and seven rooms for native preachers.17 Upstairs there was an auditory and a vestry. The boys’ schoolhouse was a good-sized, two-storey building and twenty boys were enrolled. The building for the six girls was smaller. The pupils from the Morrison Educational Society School and those from the Anglo-Chinese College joined Deane’s Teochiu boys, making a grand total
of over fifty students for the opening service
and tea.
The happy intelligent faces of the majority of the assembled children gave promise that at a future date by the blessing of God, many of these young heathens may become teachers of their
countrymen and, feeling the saving power of God in their hearts, become instruments in the conversion of multitudes to our pure and holy faith.18
Yet the strains of missionary life coupled with child-bearing were beginning to tell on Henrietta. In her last letter dated 30 October 1844, Henrietta wrote:
I have not been free from care and trouble for with so large a family as mine, there must necessarily be great anxiety. But I trust I have been able to bear up under all. At one time I had two mission families living with us, thirty children; besides I had to instruct the children and superintend all and I often felt sad and pressed down with care.
A fourth baby had been born in 1843 and Henrietta felt the added burden of visiting the soldiers’ wives whom she described as:
The most destitute set of human beings I ever saw. Many of them have not
a second dress or garment of any kind. I find use for all my old clothes and
I have begged the other ladies for their …. The great cause of their distress
has been a fire, which broke out and consumed, not only their houses (which
were made of matting), but everything they possessed.19
She continued that their condition in the cold weather of Hong Kong’s winter was ‘worse than that of the slaves in Virginia, notwithstanding the English speak so harshly of American slavery’. Henrietta did not long outlive Theodosia. She
10.5. Headstone in memory of Henrietta Shuck, the first Western
woman to set foot in Hong Kong, d. 27.11.1844.
struggled on, coping with her large household and her four children including a frail little daughter who suffered constantly from diarrhoea, another pregnancy
and weak health. Henrietta died aged twenty-seven giving birth to her fifth child,
a healthy baby son, not much more than nine months after the previous birth. ‘At two o’clock, a powerful and sudden prostration took place and every effort and prayer and remedy proving unavailing. At three o’clock her pure spirit winged its flight to the bosom of her God and Saviour’. 20 Her funeral was said to have been the largest so far in the colony, so widely was she loved and esteemed by all classes, high and low, foreign and native. The European police force, about forty in number, asked for the ‘sad privilege of being permitted to bear her remains to the grave’.
J. Lewis Shuck married again in 1847 and his next wife died in Shanghai, one
day after giving birth, aged twenty-seven. He then married for a third time. Four
female missionaries including Henrietta Shuck had left America in 1839 and when
the last of the four died in 1845, leaving behind three small children, it was shown that the life expectancy of an American woman missionary in China was less than four years.
Yet another Baptist missionary wife, Anna Johnson [9/16/12], died in June 1848, aged twenty-six years. She had been born in Eastport, Maine. Rev. John
Johnson went on, in 1851, to marry a Miss Wakker of the Christian Union, who had come from Germany to help Karl Gutzlaff in his missionary work.
The American missionaries felt that China proper would be a more fruitful field for their endeavours and moved away from Hong Kong. Rev. Dyer Ball moved to Canton in August 1845 and in the next year married a Scottish missionary, Isabella Robertson. There Rev. Ball pursued his medical, educational and evangelical work successfully until his death in 1866. A month later, in September, Rev. Shuck journeyed to Canton to negotiate permission to move there. He left
Hong Kong the following year. It must have been a difficult decision considering the amount in time, effort and money they had invested in Hong Kong.
Gutzlaff, the Christian Union and the German and Basel Missionaries
Standing in a class of his own for his charisma, dynamism, drive and optimism in the missionary field is the controversial figure of Karl Frederick August Gutzlaff [13/8/4], the first Lutheran Missionary to come to China. Gutzlaff was born in Pomerania, Germany, where he is said to have begun his adult life as an apprentice to a stay-maker. He later trained with the Netherlands Missionary
Society, first arriving in the East in 1826. He had a great talent for languages and by the time he came to Hong Kong, he was fluent in Fukkien, Cantonese, Hakka and Mandarin. When dressed as a local with a false queue, he could pass himself off as Chinese: ‘Perhaps no foreigner of the age has more thoroughly identified himself with the [Chinese] people…. Even in personal appearance, the learned gentleman has, in a degree, become Chinese’. 21 Before the First Opium War, Gutzlaff had travelled the coasts of China in opium clippers belonging to William
Jardine as translator and interpreter. He proved very useful in the talk and
bargaining that preceded the sale of the then-officially banned drug, opium, to the local mandarins. Gutzlaff considered the pay-off sufficiently valuable. It gave him
the chance to preach to the natives along the way and distribute his pills, potions
and religious tracts. Gutzlaff, in his Journal of Three Voyages along the Coast of China, described what he saw as the widening gulf between the Europeans and the Chinese:
We regret that the possession of the gospel has not taught Europeans more forbearance and long-suffering. Had these been oftener practised on suitable
occasions, we should have had fewer causes of complaint against the Chinese. But it is not strange, that Europeans, destitute of the spirit of meekness, on coming to this country, and finding themselves treated as barbarians by a nation so evidently below them in civilization, should feel their indignation aroused, and should retaliate insolence for insolence and dislike for hatred. Thus the line of separation became broader and broader.22
Gutzlaff had also accompanied the Expeditionary Force to Chusan in the
First Opium War as interpreter to General Gough, following him into battle through a hail of bullets. Then, due to his language abilities, Gutzlaff was made
chief magistrate of that island. In 1843, on the death of John Robert Morrison, he became chief Chinese interpreter and then registrar general in the Hong Kong government. Meanwhile, starting in June 1844, he drew together a body of Chinese in the Christian Union. These men after instruction were sent to the
interior of China to distribute tracts and spread the word of God. Gutzlaff worked
every hour God gave him on his mission to convert China. At dawn, he left his
house for the office where he taught his colporteurs for four or five hours before the official day’s work began. In the evening, classes for twenty to thirty ‘respectable
Chinese’ were held in his house. On Sundays, he was away by the break of day to the Kowloon hills ‘and was preaching the Gospel in Chinese hamlets which had never been entered by any other foreigners’. 23 As his organization grew Gutzlaff needed help and, after applying to his native land, was put in touch with the Basel Evangelical Mission in Switzerland who sent out two of their highly trained missionaries.
Theodore Hamberg [4/20/4] from Stockholm and Rudolph Lechler arrived
in March 1847 to lay the foundations for the development of the influential
Basel Mission in South China. Help also came from the Rhenish mission, and
from the Berlin Woman’s Missionary Society who set up a foundling hospital out of which grew the Hildesheim Mission for the Blind. Gutzlaff insisted that
each of his European assistants adopt Chinese dress and cuisine, live among
the Chinese and learn a specific Chinese dialect. Hamberg, for example, learnt
Hakka, the dialect of a people originally from Northern China who had settled in the hillier and less fertile land in the neighbourhood and
specialized in stone cutting. When Gutzlaff visited Europe in 1849 to raise funds, he left
Hamberg in charge of the Christian Union. Questions were asked, and in the subsequent investigations, it was discovered that, of the 280 members of the Union, 50 were opium smokers
and between 70 and 80 had given false names
and places of work. Furthermore a number of Chinese colporteurs had been falsifying their accounts. Some members had remained in Hong Kong and pocketed the money meant
for expenses and the profits from the sale of the
tracts which they were supposed to distribute free of charge on the mainland. For example, Jiang Jiao Ren, who later became a preacher and a respected elder of the church at Lilang, confessed:
Each person tried to win the favour of Dr. Gutzlaff in order to obtain money. None of us thought about pleasing God. At that time, I expressed the wish to return to Guangxi in order to proclaim the gospel
to my fellow countrymen. What I really
wanted however was the money allotted
for such purposes.24
Jiang never went to Guangxi but returned
to his home village at Lilang. When he came
back to Hong Kong in January 1850 he handed in a false diary of preachings. The Basel missionary, Hamberg, immediately began dismissing those members he considered untrustworthy.
On his return from Europe, these discoveries dropped like a bombshell on
a much angered and saddened Gutzlaff and may have hastened his death in 1851
from kidney disease complicated by gout. Gutzlaff has been aptly described by
Arthur Waley as ‘A cross between parson and
pirate, charlatan and genius, philanthropist and crook’. 25 Needless to say, Hamberg had made enemies among the colporteurs. They accused him of going on a boat with the wife of a Christian Union member, and there caressing her and speaking to her of things other than the gospel. Perhaps these accusations led to Hamberg’s request that the Basel Mission send him out a wife. It was common practice for the society in Switzerland to pick suitable
girls as wives for their missionaries in the field
and send them off to marry a man they had never even seen. Fraulein Louisa Mutander arrived in Hong Kong in September 1851 and was married on the thirteenth of the month to Hamberg. Her life cannot have been easy. In 1853 Hamberg opened a mission
twenty-five miles inland in a Hakka village where, according to the editor of the
Friend of China: ‘The lawless disorders against civil order in the neighbourhood has placed him in the disagreeable situation of having as much to depend for the safety of himself and his wife upon the fear of his skill as a marksman as much as upon any respect for his peaceful calling’.26 He produced the first dictionary of the Hakka language and wrote an illuminating account of the beliefs of the Taiping rebels entitled The Visions of Hung Taue-Tseuin, which in July 1854 was advertised for sale at John and James Lemon’s stationery shop.27 Hamberg died in May 1854 of dysentery, leaving his wife and two sons to find their way back to Sweden. Louisa lost one of her sons on board the ship. The following year her second son died of cholera and Louisa herself died four days after him.
At the time of the Second Opium War, when there was a price on every
European head, five missionaries, including Lechler, Lobscheid, Genaehr, Philipp Winnes and Friedrich Louis [8/5/3] were besieged by rebels at Pukak not far from Hong Kong. An expedition of seamen from HMS Winchester and a military detachment set out to their rescue in the Sir Charles Forbes which had
been offered for the occasion by merchant David Sassoon. Help arrived in the nick of time for Rev. Philipp Winnes, who was being held with a sword at his throat while the mob were ransacking his house and demanding a heavy ransom. Winnes
was not the only missionary to have luck on his side:
Mr. Lobscheid’s escape might well be termed miraculous. On the mob forcing his doors, he escaped to the roof and running over the tops of the adjacent houses, leapt down a height of eighteen feet and ran through the rice fields. He failed to clear a rivulet … jumping into the water up to his armpits. His pursuers were hard upon him, dashing large stones in the water and thrusting their spears in every direction while some of them got into the water within a foot or two of where he was.… Finally Mr. Lobscheid, after having been nearly three hours in the water, came out and a friendly hand supplied some clothes.28
William Lobscheid of the Chinese Evangelization Society had lost his wife,
Alwine Lobscheid [16Cii/7/22], who died in childbirth in August 1851 aged twenty-nine. She had been in Hong Kong less than one year and had been very
ill from Hong Kong fever the previous October. While he was away on a mission
in the mainland in April 1854, Rudolph Lechler’s wife also died in Hong Kong of diarrhoea aged thirty-one. Her grave has not been found in the Cemetery. Lechler and Lobscheid both married again.29
The contributions of these highly trained and educated missionaries from Germany were invaluable. The Basel missionaries were especially valued by the government for their intimate knowledge of the local Chinese people and their dialects. The regard that these remarkably able, intelligent and well-trained missionaries were accorded by the society of their time is perhaps summed up in the article written on the departure of Lobscheid in 1861 on sick leave:
Though a native of Germany, his written English is superior to that of most Englishmen. In several important respects we differed from the opinions of Mr. Lobscheid but even when so differing, it was impossible not to admire the extensive erudition which he brought to illustrate his views and the philanthropic zeal with which they were inspired…. He displayed that higher virtue which can forgive an enemy and never forgot the courtesies of a Christian gentleman. Such men are rare in China.30
The Basel Mission set up a number of schools and churches and a foundling home in Hong Kong. Many of these institutions continue to thrive today in one form or another, including the well-known Ebenezer School & Home for the Visually Impaired.
By the 1850s the climate of opinion against the Chinese was hardening, the
downturn in the economy had taken the edge off the optimism and much needed
funds for the missionaries were drying up. Hong Kong was no longer seen as a good centre for missionary activity. The Medical Mission in Hong Kong was in dire straits, many merchants having ceased to subscribe. The Friend of China lamented: ‘The trivial duty of calling a meeting has been neglected for the space of two years’. Two attempts were made during the month of October to hold a
meeting of subscribers to the fund, ‘but in both instances have proved ineffectual
and the Society may now be considered to have fallen to the ground…. The dissolution is greatly to be deplored’.31 Dr. Hirschberg, who had taken Dr. Dyer Ball’s place at the M.M.S. hospital, was sent by the London Missionary Society to Amoy and there was no-one to replace him in Hong Kong. The clinics for the Chinese ceased to function. The Morrison Education Society languished after the departure of Rev. Samuel Brown. In 1856, the Anglo-Chinese College and Seminary were closed by Rev. Legge, who felt that they had failed. The Christian Union had been exposed to some degree as a hollow sham. The possible reasons for these failures and for the abandonment of Hong Kong by a number of missionaries shed some light on the society they left behind.
Missionary Disillusionment
A hardening of racial prejudice in these years made the Hong Kong Europeans take a second look at the usefulness of attempting to educate Chinese boys. The feelings of doubt and hesitancy about spending large amounts on educating a handful of Chinese boys from poor backgrounds were exacerbated by a rash of court cases in 1851, involving boys from the Anglo-Chinese school. In February, Tam Achuen was convicted of forgery. The Friend of China commented: ‘The malpractice of knowledge imparted to him by this country was an ungrateful return for misdirected kindness and tends to check all desire to raise the Chinese from their present station’. 32 Then, in July, Tong Ayoke was tried for conspiracy to extort money from brothel keepers, both boys being the products of M.E.S. Lastly, Ungh Assow, a boy from the Anglo-Chinese College, was charged with
robbery, when bills of exchange worth $10,998 disappeared. At this point the
newspaper wrote damningly: ‘Give a Chinese boy an English education and you give him the means of becoming a greater rogue than he was born’. Further the whole aim of the education the boys received in the Anglo-Chinese College and Seminary had been to produce native preachers who would spread the word of God. But once the youngsters had a good grasp of English they could earn far more as, for instance, interpreters in the courts, ‘leaving them to abandon the less alluring prospects of quiet connection with the missionaries’. It was for this reason that a dejected James Legge disbanded the college and seminary in 1856.
Rev. Joseph Smith who, later in 1856 while he was bishop of Victoria, was to lose his two-year-old son, Andrew Brandrum Smith [7/28/6], had in 1846–47 made an exploratory visit to Hong Kong and China. In the ensuing book about his visit, he argued that Hong Kong had an ‘unpromising and uninviting Missionary character’. 33 Beside the insalubrious climate and the many regional dialects spoken there, he listed as reasons the social characteristics of the local Chinese population and of the Europeans. He found the Europeans to be rough and racist in their attitude to the Chinese and irreligious in their lifestyles. The example they set to the Chinese seriously disadvantaged the work of evangelization. ‘Scenes frequently occur in the public streets and in the interior of houses which are calculated to place the countrymen of the missionaries in an unfavourable aspect before the native mind’. 34 Besides ‘Sabbath desecration’, he was dismayed by what he had seen of the drinking and whoring in the taverns and brothels of the port. Furthermore he disapproved of the way the government dealt with its Chinese population, saying that they were treated as a ‘degraded race’. He particularly disliked the laws that enforced passes on the Chinese out after dark and the necessity for them to carry lanterns:
The few Chinese who profess Christianity are not exempted. Some of them have frequently given utterance to the most impassioned indignation when speaking of the cases of harsh treatment to which they are exposed, — only to return to their native soil alienated with prejudice and heart burnings increased to a tenfold degree to spread abroad disaffection to Hong Kong
and hatred of the Western Barbarians.35
A further reason given was the calibre of the Chinese in Hong Kong. Smith
wrote that: ‘They consisted of the lowest dregs of native society’ who ‘flock to the
British settlement in the hope of gain or plunder’. 36 He considered it easier to preach to a settled community with educated leaders. The Hong Kong Chinese of the early days were largely male, migratory and illiterate, ‘consequently shutting out an important channel of religious instruction’. 37 It was useless to produce tracts and translate the Bible into Chinese for those who could not read. It was thought that the missionaries would have a better chance of meeting and converting the higher class Chinese in Canton.
The deepening rift between the merchants and the Nonconformists over the opium trade soured relationships and may have led to a drying up of funding. In 1853, Rev. Legge was unable to pay the amount required for the building of a
chapel and hospital in Upper Bazaar and was forced to pay the outstanding $46.86
from money sent for other purposes by admirers in Leicester. The Friend of China commented:
Some supporters from L.M.S. are known to entertain extraordinary ideas about the propriety of accepting donations from people who make money out of opium…. This, we suppose, accounts for the apparent determination to make no general application for funds.38
Again, later in the same year Dr. Hirschberg, the L.M.S. missionary doctor, publicly announced that funds for the support of the hospital should never be provided from the pockets of dealers in opium.39 This antagonism to their most lucrative trade may have driven the Scottish merchants, who were previously generous supporters of L.M.S. and whose roots were in the Scottish Presbyterian Kirk, into the arms of the less critical Church of England. Certainly when the subscription opened for funds to build a Protestant cathedral, Jardine, Matheson & Co. topped the list with a donation of $500 to the governor’s $150.40 Although they could not match the magnificence of the Dent contribution totalling
$1,050, this sum gave David Jardine a seat at the very front of the cathedral. His
attendance at the cathedral services rather than at the chapel would also have bolstered his social standing.
The rift was also partly due to the fiery nature of the Nonconformist preachings which struck a wrong note with their congregations. The editor of the Friend of China regretted: ‘The exhibitions of fanaticism, bigotry and religious intolerance are so frequent, so discreditable and so injurious to religion
itself’. He added that the sects ‘should not endeavour to intimidate them by fiery
denunciations, by pharasaical ravings or shock them by sectarian intolerance’. 41 The Nonconformists were well known for the pointed denunciations from the pulpit of what they considered immoral. Many old China hands and merchants had formed quiet liaisons with Chinese girls and the amount of drinking at all levels of society dismayed the clergy.
A further factor was the dire poverty of many of the Chinese in Hong Kong and their need to obtain money and sustenance in whatever way they could. This gave rise to the suspicion that conversions were less than sincere. The papers talked of ‘Rice Christians’. Legge was accused of drawing the vagrants of the bazaar to his chapel by the sound of the gong and the promise of a good dinner: ‘Agents in every missionary society in Hong Kong are liable to the very serious charge of holding out the mercenary motive of a good dinner to induce the lowest of the Chinese population to attend their preaching’. 42 For these reasons, the treaty ports became the new centres for missionary endeavour leaving Hong Kong to go its own rather irreligious way. The missionaries who stayed on in Hong Kong at this time and continued to make steady progress were mainly the Roman Catholics.
Catholic Missionaries
One cannot leave the subject of missionary endeavours without a mention of Emily Bowring, who electrified the society that surrounded the governor by running away to become a nun. The Roman Catholic Church had not been idle in Hong Kong. The Apostolic Prefecture of Hong Kong had been created as early as 22 April 1841. Four Sisters of the St. Paul de Chartres order arrived from France in September 1848. They opened the Foundling Home and Orphanage. But as the number of Portuguese arriving in the territory increased and more people converted to the Catholic faith, more help was needed. At the request of the Italian Prefect Apostolic, Father Aloysius Ambrosi, six Italian sisters of the Cannossian Order landed in Hong Kong on 12 April 1860.
Meanwhile, before she left Britain, the governor’s daughter, Emily Bowring, the eighth child in the Bowring family of ten children, had followed her brother Charles into the Catholic Church. They had both been influenced by the Oxford Movement to leave the Unitarian faith of their father. Charles had been cut out of his father’s will and banned from the family home when he became a Jesuit. By the time Emily converted, her father was a little more reconciled, and she accompanied him to Hong Kong where she helped out on social occasions, but only after going to the Catholic Church daily for mass and communion. When her father was about to leave Hong Kong, Emily decided to throw in her lot with the soon-to-arrive Cannossian sisters. The Cannossian records reported the event:
Not finding her about, the father concluded she must have gone on board already … but how despairingly sad was his discovery that his daughter was
no where to be found on board! What decision was there to be taken when the final warning had already been given, the anchors already weighed, the
engine already belching smoke out of the funnel? Nothing was there to be done at the moment, except to leave his beloved daughter in the hands of God knows who … and later, under a wave of bitter sorrow, write threatening letters to friends, acquaintances, newspapers, begging to retrace for him his lost treasure… his beloved daughter … in vain.43
Emily meanwhile waited out the time until the arrival of the Cannossians at the house of the Portuguese chief clerk, Leonardo d’Almada e Castro.
Emily was a godsend to the nuns from Italy who spoke little English. She became headmistress of the English school and translated between English, Portuguese and Italian whenever needed. She gave the convent a social cachet that must have helped the nuns recruit girls to the school. Sister Aloysia Emily
Bowring died in August 1870 and is buried in St. Michael’s Catholic Cemetery in
Happy Valley, in the Cannossian sisters’ plot to the left of the main path. Nearly opposite on the other side of the path is the chest tomb of her guardian and protector during the year she waited for the nuns’ arrival, Leonardo d’Almada e Castro. In spite of all the changes in Hong Kong, the Cannossian convent still occupies the same site that it did in the 1860s and the site where the sisters of St.
Paul de Chartres set up their convent, school and orphanage in Wan Chai is still
occupied by Roman Catholic institutes.
Chapter 11 The Americans
The American Navy
A surprising number of sailors from the U.S. Navy were buried in the Cemetery
during these early years, many being members of the largest American fleet ever
assembled up to that time. Of the four earliest sailors, who were all from the U.S. Navy steam ship Constellation, three died on the same day, 14 September 1842. The most senior was Lieutenant Lewin Handy [11A/5/10] who was twenty-nine years old. The other two were G.W. York [11A/10/2] of Bangor, Maine and E.J. Hume [11A/8/1]. It would be interesting to know whether these three deaths had some related cause. The fourth sailor, Robert Brand [11B/2/1], ‘beloved son of John Heal and Jane Brand’, died aged twenty but the date of his death in October 184? is too faded to be read.
The squadron, which provided the headstones of the majority of American sailors buried in the Hong Kong Cemetery during these early years, was led by Commodore Matthew C. Perry. It was on a historic mission to open up Japanese ports to American trade. Hong Kong was a convenient stopping off place to
replenish supplies and repair vessels, which had just crossed the Pacific. A port of call in Japan for the shipping which had made the long journey across the Pacific
Ocean was particularly sought after at a time when American commercial ties with China were expanding so rapidly. Japan had, up to this time, maintained a policy of strict isolation with only the Dutch allowed limited access to its ports. In 1825, Japan had decreed that any foreign ship approaching its shore would be
fired on and destroyed, and foreigners attempting to land would be killed. Two previous attempts to open Japanese harbours to American ships in 1846 and 1849
had failed. This time, the preparations of Commodore Perry were immaculate and his timing fortuitous. The tide of opinion in Japan was turning against the policy of rigid isolation. So there was a sense of jubilation when the talks were going so well that an exchange of presents was arranged. The American presents included an entire miniature train set with engine, tender and passenger carriage plus track whose circuit measured fifty yards in diameter. Japanese officials perched on top of the engine or clung to the top of the carriage as they were whisked round at speeds of up to forty miles per hour. Other presents included a magnetic telegraph system of over one mile in length down which messages could be passed. The signing of the treaty with Japan in March 1854 was of enormous
significance to both Japan and America.
Twenty-three sailors have headstones dating from between 1853 and 1855. The highest ranking of these sailors was James Hendricks [10/8/1], captain of the USS Plymouth, who died in 1854. The Plymouth, a 22-gun sloop-of-war, was the flagship of the East Indies squadron. The ship was scuttled in the Norfolk Naval dockyard in 1861 to prevent it falling into Confederate hands. Among the sailors from the squadron who died at the hands of pirates, six were killed during what may have been the first example of Anglo-American co-operation
since the War of American Independence.
combined operation against pirates.
One of the largest monuments in the Cemetery once stood in Leighton Road
and was moved to its present site in the Cemetery to relieve traffic congestion. It
is dedicated jointly to the dead of the steamer sloop, HMS Rattler, and the steam frigate USS Powhatan [21A/1/33]. Dating from August 1853, it commemorates four British sailors from Rattler and five Americans from the Powhatan ‘who fell in a combined boat attack on a fleet of piratical junks off Kuhlan’ about 150 miles south-east of Hong Kong.1 The description of the fight in the Gazette praised the pirates for their courage
although they were fighting for the wrong
cause. According to the inscription, on another headstone, one sailor, Seaman
W.M.T. Graves [15/1/14A] from Pennsylvania serving on the Vandalia, ‘was accidently killed during an attack on pirates near Lantao Island on May 18, 1855’. The death of another seaman, John Morrison [16Cii/11/4] from the Macedonia, was described by Captain George Henry Preble in his diary entry for 13 November 1854. It seems a combined force of Portuguese, British and American ships confronted the pirates of Kuhlan Bay destroying forty-seven pirate junks, burning three towns and breaking up a
pirate depot that had defied the Chinese government for over five years:
The only casualty in effecting this victory was the death of one of my men, John Morrison, killed by a shot in the head…. My impression is that he was shot by some of the John Bulls who were foraging and shooting chickens regardless of orders or discipline. Our men, I am happy to say, behaved better and were kept under control.2
This incident could not have improved the relationships between the British and the American forces.
A very unusual and poignant account of the death of one American sailor gives us a graphic picture of the drama of such moments. John Williams [16Cii/10/7], aged twenty-two years, was described by Bayard Taylor, then a clerk on the paddle frigate, USS Susquehanna, as a ‘strong, dark lusty fellow’. He would
come every evening to sling Taylor’s hammock. Williams was numbered fourth of the maintop men, ‘generally the picked men of the ship’. Williams had asked
Taylor whether it would be possible to get a release from the service: ‘His mother, he said, had died, and some property had fallen to him, which he wished to secure’. Given a negative answer he looked depressed
and said: ‘Well, sir, it is the last cruise I shall
ever make’. Bayard continued with a moving account of the poor young sailor’s death:
I had not slept more than two hours, when my sleep was suddenly broken by a cry — a wild gurgling despairing cry which still rings in my ears whenever I think of that night…. I sprang to one of the windows, looked out and saw a hand beating the water blindly and convulsively in the eddy of the rudder. I was about to spring out when a coil of rope fell in the water and the hand grasped it. A horrible phosphorescent light shone around the body struggling beneath the surface….
The hand let go its weak hold…. Just beyond — just out of their reach — [the men in a dinghy] a head rose for an instant to the surface once more, making
a ring of ghastly light. There was one bubble, and it sank forever…. The
drowned man was none other than John Williams.
It was thought that he had either fallen asleep or lost his balance and keeled over while resting on an upturned bucket during his watch: ‘His body was found, however, two or three weeks later … unmutilated, and was placed in the cemetery at Hong Kong where a tomb-stone was erected over it by his messmates’.3
It is worth noting that no less than twenty-five ordinary American sailors were commemorated with headstones at a time when so few stones survive to commemorate British sailors.
American Business
American citizens had long been among the most active in the region. By 1844,
when the United States signed the first Treaty of Peace, Amity and Commerce
with the Chinese Empire, tea made up 80 percent of the total exports from China to the United States with the main import being opium. Russell & Co., A. Heard & Co., Olyphant & Co. and Bush & Co. were among the largest American
companies. F.T. Bush, the first American consul in Hong Kong, was extremely
active in the social life of the colony. His house was used as a meeting place for various societies including the Society for Relief of the Destitute Sick.
Beside the larger American merchant houses, U.S. citizens had set up a number of smaller-scale businesses in Hong Kong. American ships passing through Hong Kong could replenish their stores from American ships’ chandlers like that of Captain Nathaniel Crosby Junior [10/7/6]. Two of Crosby’s daughters married in St. John’s Cathedral, one to Captain Smith of the Annie Buckman and the other to Captain Samuel C. Woodruff of Long Island, New York. When Crosby died of heart disease in December 1856 aged forty-six years, his daughter and Captain Woodruff continued the business on the Praya. Americans could also repair their vessels at Emeny’s yard and from 1853, drink at a tavern called Uncle Tom’s Cabin owned by the New Yorker, Edward Thomas [9/2/1]. He died in July 1859 aged twenty-nine, leaving his estate to his wife, Eudocia, who bravely continued to run the tavern even after she was robbed of her jewellery by her servant.
Five captains of American ships found their way in this period into the Cemetery, including Captain Elias Elwell [9/14/14] of the Arcatus from Boston who died in 1846 at the advanced age of sixty and Latham
B. Avery [9/4/3] of Golden City who died in August 1856. The third captain was the Russell & Co. captain, E.C. Nickels [16Cii/7/11] of the Bald Eagle. He was described as a ‘heavy man — He jumped into a Chinese boat and went right through its frail deck’. 4 He may have been a regular visitor as Dr. B.L. Ball, the American dental surgeon, in September 1848 remarked in his diary that Captain Nickels of the John Q. Adams from Boston had come in that morning: ‘His arrival with letters and papers from America made the day an eventful one’.5 Nickels died in Hong Kong in 1861.
Steven Haskell [9/8/6], commander of the American barque Old Hickory, died in Victoria harbour aged forty in September 1853. The ship was bound for London with a cargo of tea:
Yesterday at daylight, Mr. White, the chief officer, was sent on shore to get two
fresh hands in place of others who were diseased. Greatly to that gentleman’s astonishment about two p.m. the steward came into town to say that Captain Haskell was dead! … It appeared that Captain Haskell had an apoplectic fit, of which he partially rallied after the steward left, dying only at 4.30 p.m. just as the ‘Spark’ was leaving the harbour
with a coffin for him.6
Among the old American families who remained on the China Coast for many years, the name of Huttleston might be mentioned. Ann Maria Huttleston [9/3/3] of Fairhaven, Massachussetts died in Hong Kong in July 1858 aged thirty. Perhaps she was the sister of Jane Huttleston who was married to Clement Nye of Shanghai. Henry Curtis Huttleston [16C11/7/6], also of Fairhaven, died later in 1870 leaving just $225.15 to his descendants.
Chapter 12 The Armed Forces
The Army
Monuments to Soldiers in the Hong Kong Cemetery
In the Hong Kong Cemetery, five monuments to particular regiments date from
this early period and fourteen headstones commemorate individual officers or sergeants who died then. Two of the most moving monuments in the whole of the Hong Kong Cemetery bring home the plight of the common soldiers who
garrisoned the island. They commemorate the unfortunate men of the 95th and the 59th Regiments. The memorial to the soldiers of the 95th Regiment [20/19/2] is a stark reminder of the high levels of sickness and death. In the four months from June to September 1848, fever (or malaria as it later came to be called) killed nine sergeants, eight corporals, four drummers, sixty-seven privates, four women and four children. Over the three and a quarter years the regiment was in Hong Kong, death from other causes took the lives of nine sergeants, four corporals, three drummers, one hundred and fifty-five privates and four women. Of the twenty-nine children who had arrived with the regiment, seventeen
died. The plight of the 95th
drew the pity of the residents.
In March 1849, the Garrison
Amateurs put on a play, The Lady of Lyons by Sir E. Lytton Bulwer, for the benefit of the widows and orphans of soldiers who had died of fever over the previous summer,
with box tickets priced at $3 each or $5 for a couple and tickets to the pit at $2. This was a high price at a time when the wages of a policeman was $15 a month. Jardine, Matheson & Co. put a
‘large and handsome boat’ at the disposal of the soldiers ‘in which convalescents were in the habit of taking airings in the evening’. In return ‘as a slight token of their vivid remembrance of kindness at a time when it was so much needed by them’, the regiment presented the company with a cup in the shape of a pineapple with designs representing a boat full of soldiers.
The second monument is the towering column to the unfortunate 59th Regiment [17/1/1] whose losses during their long nine-year tour of duty from 1849 to 1858 in Hong Kong are still breathtaking. The inscriptions on the four sides of the monument list 10 officers, 502 other ranks and 146 women and children from the regiment who died in Hong Kong. Many more were invalided home and died on the voyage to Britain. James Bodell, sergeant of that regiment, wrote:
Two years from the time we left Cork Barracks, there was a General Parade
called of the Originals, that is of the men who came out in 1849, and out of the 650 men that left Cork Barracks in 1849 only 62 remained.1
12.2.a and b. Monument to the officers and men who died in Hong Kong
while serving with the 59th Regiment.
In July 1850, the Friend of China reported:
We have been told that a residence in Eastern District of Victoria has been,
for some time past, positively unbearable. Morning after morning during the last two months, the dwellers in that locality have had their slumbers disturbed by fife and drum reminding them that death had made havoc of
another soldier.… Our readers … will imagine the effect … of hearing between
sleeping and waking, portions of that most melancholy strain, the ‘Dead March in Saul’. The brain drinks in the din and it resounds thro’ out the day.2
The effect on the morale of the soldiers must have been appalling.
Other monuments include two to the Royal Artillery, one to the 10th Battery [15/1/9] which lost nine men, one wife and two children in just over two months from December 1856 to February 1856 and the other to the 6th Battery, 12th Brigade [19/1/9] which lost twenty-three men between 1857 and 1864. One monument, to a detachment of the Medical Staff Corps [17/1/9], erected in 1859 records twelve names of men who died in the course of the Second Opium War
either in Canton or on the Canton River.
Just one headstone to a common soldier can be found in the Hong Kong Cemetery before 1866. Gunner George Tankard [11A/9/13] of the Royal Artillery was honoured with a headstone in 1855. Perhaps the fact that he had survived army life until the advanced age of fifty-two accounts for his presence in the Cemetery. The cost of the burial of a soldier at this time devolved on his family or
his company and they would not be able to afford more than the basic numbered
granite marker, especially in view of the high rates of death among the soldiers. Nothing could show more clearly the social gulf that existed between the ordinary
soldier and the officers who commanded them than their very different treatment
in death.
The Position of the Army in Society
The armed forces gave Hong Kong the feeling of a garrison town not unlike Gibraltar to which it was sometimes compared. Up to about 1845, the army was in charge of law and order as well as the defence of the colony. The general commanding troops in the East shared the top position in the colony with the
governor. When the judicial system became better established with the arrival of the first chief justice, John Walter Hulme, in June 1844, Major-General d’Aguilar
showed a marked reluctance to accept the loss of his powers. The boundaries
between the civil and the military spheres remained blurred. When a list of
precedency in the colony was printed in the newspaper, the editor commented
sarcastically: ‘We presume, if it comes to an actual question of real rank, the
Aide-de-Camp to the Major-General would take precedence of the whole establishment’.3
Certainly for some years after the appointment of a civilian governor and civil service, the general continued to act with little regard to the civil authorities or to his legal status. He provoked outraged editorials in the Friend of China when he ordered two policemen, Sergeant Atkins and Constable Simmers,
both recently soldiers, to enter the house of Mr. Welch, the dispenser at the
chemist shop, who happened to live opposite him, to demand that he stop
singing between the hours of ten and eleven at night. Welch ordered the men to
leave and then, leaning from the window, threatened to horsewhip them if they came back with more ‘impertinent messages’. He was brought before a military
magistrate and fined $20:
The injustice of this sentence cannot be surpassed. In the first place, every citizen has the same right to enjoy himself in the company of his friends, even by singing, that the Hon. Major General has. — In the second, the Hon. Major General has no control over the police and any order from him was worthless. — In the third, the police acting under his orders committed a
breach of the peace in entering Mr. Welch’s house and behaving insolently,
and had he kicked them downstairs, he would only have done that, which many will do under similar circumstances.4
When the major-general found his sleep was disturbed by the watchmen beating
their bamboos at hourly intervals throughout the night, he unilaterally put an end to this time-honoured custom, much to the annoyance of the community who no longer knew whether their watchmen were awake or asleep and feared for their safety should robbers descend on their houses. The good major-general
continued to act ‘like some Eastern potentate’ when he issued Mr. Wyseman with a summons that resulted in a fine of five pounds for ‘cantering his horse near
the Gap, a locality which is used for that purpose by nearly every resident of the Island’. The editor complained:
How he can reconcile his treatment of others with the bacchanalian orgies which have been heard in his own dwelling on the evening of the Sabbath? In a free community there cannot be two sets of laws — one for the porcelain of the earth, another for the more common ware.5
This quotation acknowledged the high social position occupied by the major-
general and his entourage of officers in Hong Kong society.
Officers
Twenty-two officers and four of their wives are buried in the Hong Kong Cemetery from this early period. Ten of these are from English and twelve from
Indian regiments. Eighteen of the earliest tombs of army officers, dating from the First Opium War, have come from the old cemetery in Wan Chai. Seven consist of handsome, well-constructed chest tombs. Five officers of the 55th Regiment share
a striking six-sided pedestal topped by a shrouded urn and two are remembered
by cubed pedestals topped by urns. The officers of the British army at this time
were largely drawn from the ranks of the lesser gentry, the younger sons who
12.3. Officers Quarters now known as Murray Building and reassembled at Stanley. (Illustrated London News, 27 December 1856.)
under British inheritance rules were not eligible to inherit the family estate, which
was passed on undivided to the firstborn on the death of the father. Younger sons
were groomed to join the armed services, the law or the church. Commerce was considered beneath the status to which they aspired. The less intellectual gravitated
towards the army. Officer commissions at this time were for sale. A commission
would be bought by the parents for their sons in the regiment of choice with the price depending on the status and reputation of the particular regiment.
There was a distinct pecking order in the army with the England-based regiments of the line considering themselves superior to the Indian regiments like the Ceylon Rifles or Madras Native Light Infantry, which attracted the offspring of, for instance, impecunious parsons without the wherewithal to buy expensive commissions for their sons. The Royal Engineers and the Royal Artillery ranked in between and the Royal Marines were well down the pecking order. Orlando Bridgeman, for example, a lieutenant with the 98th Regiment in Hong Kong, conformed to this pattern. He was the younger son of Captain Orlando Bridgeman and his wife Selina. Both parents were descended from aristocrats. Orlando’s grandfather, Baron Bradford, had four sons, the eldest succeeding to the family title, the second, third and fourth following careers in the army navy and church respectively. His mother was the daughter of the Earl of Kilmorey. Two of the sons of Orlando Bridgeman, Orlando Jack and his brother Francis, followed their father into the army with purchased commissions.
Junior officers were at times rowdy and drank to excess, with those stationed in Hong Kong behaving true to form. Orlando Bridgeman commented on a farewell party given by the Madras Artillery for one of their officers: ‘Men of this sort never sit down to a large party without drinking to such an excess that they lose their sences [sic] and are put to bed more like beasts than Christians’. He deplored the lack of women in Hong Kong: ‘Give me women’s society! Without it we are beasts’. 6 Officers lived in comfort in rented houses and ate and drank of the best in their regimental messes. Parties of officers would go across to Kowloon for a day’s snipe shooting, which was a popular pastime. The following letter published in the Friend of China and translated by Karl Gutzlaff shows how seven young officers on one particular occasion went about their sport and also in what humble terms the Chinese felt obliged to offer their complaint, reduced as they were in status by their defeat three years previously in the First Opium War:
13th January 1845 My second Major Ye stated that several Englishmen on a previous day entered into the fort. Your humble officer treated them with politeness
because there exists peace and friendship between our two countries. Who
would have thought that the said Englishmen would have gotten drunk in a public place and afterwards madly fired their guns doing everything
which is disgraceful. On the 4th day Inst (11 January) there came again 7
British soldiers from the Barracks to the Fort. The garrison at the time prevented their coming in but the English soldiers pointed their guns at them and threatened us as if they wanted to strike us. The soldiers of the fort therefore seeing that matters went on in this manner let them come in. The English military then entered, produced their drink and after having become intoxicated went out of the fort and perceiving the pigs and dogs as well as
their tame pigeons fired at them at random just as they pleased.
I would therefore request my elder brother to direct the soldiers of your Honourable Country that whenever they come in future to Cowloon to walk about and to shoot birds, they ought not to go into the fort and injure the domestic animals of the people. This would be no trifling proof of neighbourly friendship. I inform you of this and hope you will cast your glance on it. True translation
Signed Karl Gutzlaff
Chinese Secretary
A tragic incident, that may partly have been caused by over-indulgence in alcohol, took place near Stanley Village and resulted in the deaths of Captain Augustus Frederick Hippolyto da Costa [20/16/2] of the Royal Engineers and
Lieutenant Dwyer of the Ceylon Rifles. After a champagne tiffin, the two officers took a stroll to the Chinese village of Wong Ma Kok. There, according to Chinese
witnesses, in a state of intoxication they demanded women without success until they came to the last house, belonging to an old man:
When they entered the house, his wife and daughter-in-law were engaged in
cooking: the shorter and stouter of the two commenced by taking liberties with this young girl and on being remonstrated with by the old man and
his wife, the latter officer struck them both with his stick with such severity
as to draw blood so that this old woman rushed out of the house and cried
out to the neighbours, ‘Save our lives. Save our lives’.… Whereupon Chui-apo [a well-known pirate chief] rushed in armed with spears and attacked
the officers, who retreated fighting back fiercely. They were finally both
overpowered and chucked over a precipice called Bluff Head.7
Da Costa must have been a bit wild as he had already faced court-martial in Hong
Kong for throwing a glass at a senior officer. His death at the age of twenty-seven was mourned by a broken-hearted mother and two sisters and finally avenged by
the British who bribed the Chinese to capture Chui Apou and hand him over for trial. He hanged himself in his cell rather than face the public hangman’s noose.
Non-Commissioned Officers (N.C.O.’s)
From this period just five sergeants with headstones have been found in the Cemetery. They are Sergeants J. Lambert [9/18/5], Henry Welch [11A/9/4], John Holmes [11A/9/4], schoolmaster, all of the 98th Regiment, Sergeant Daniel Bently [7/10/12] of the Royal Irish and Sergeant Blaik [9/19/1] of the Sappers and Miners, who is buried with his little daughter. The fact that these men merited headstones is an indication of the elevated status given to sergeants in an army where the officers depended almost entirely on them for the day-to-
day running of regimental affairs. Sergeant Thomas Miller of the 98th Regiment
even merited an announcement in the Friend of China when he was promoted to garrison sergeant-major. According to the announcement, he was entitled to a salary of 20 rupees a month and a household
consisting of a head cook at $7 a month and seven coolies at $6 a month.
Commissariat Storekeepers
The members of the Commissariat were mainly chosen from the ranks of the senior sergeants and were entitled to be addressed as mister. The graves of two of them even predate the opening of the Hong Kong Cemetery. The first commissary general, Francis Foote [11A/9/2], died of apoplexy in 1842. The second, John Irving [11A/11/2], was sent out with his wife and four children, but died in 1844 soon after arrival, his health having been weakened by his years at the Cape of Good Hope.
The commissariat consisted of a well-respected small group who socialized with the better known tradesmen and the second echelon of the civil service. Their status can be gathered from the addition of the title, Mr., on the inscriptions, denoting a high degree of respectability. Lydia Priscilla Pearse [9/4/13] died in 1852 aged twenty-eight, one day before her eleven-month-old daughter Elizabeth. She is described on the marble rectangular inscription panel of her handsome pink granite
chest tomb as the beloved wife of Mr. T. Pearse, of the Royal Engineers department.
John Wright mentions in his
diary several engagements that included T. Pearse. Both Daniel Felgate of the navy purveying store, and James F. Norman [9/2/6], assistant storekeeper, who
12.6. Headstones to Elizabeth, wife of Commissariat
was only twenty-two when
General Smith and four of her children.
he died, were also given the title of mister on their inscriptions and Olivia Donnelly [9/6/11] is described as the child of Mr. W. Donnelly, also of the Royal Engineers Department. They were not called to do jury service perhaps because they were so closely connected with the armed services. A high proportion of these men were married. Perhaps illustrating the vulnerability of women and children, a surprising number of the dependants of this small group seem to have succumbed to the diseases of the time. The most unfortunate family among them was that of Commissariat-General John Smith, whose wife Elizabeth Smith [9/3/12] and four children, two girls, Adelaide and Elizabeth Smith [9/3/12],
and two boys, all died in a three-year period from 1849 to 1852. The two boys,
Charles and Walter Smith [9/4/15] aged four and sixteen months, died within a day of each other ‘after a few hours illness’. 8 A fifth child, Henrietta, who is not commemorated in the Cemetery, died of quinsy in March 1851.
Besides this sad family, three other commissariat storekeepers, four wives and six children are found in the Cemetery. William King [16Cii/8/4] of the Ordnance Office, who died in 1866, had by that time witnessed the death of his wife, Maria King [9/18/16] and three sons, Thomas King [9/18/18] in 1852 after an illness of only four days, then William, who died aged two years in 1854 after a few hours of illness, and Harry King [9/18/17] who died aged three years, just one month later. Sophia
C. Boxer [9/18/15], the wife of William Boxer,
chief storeman, Naval Victualling Department, is another in this group whose inscription records also the death of their little daughter.
Soldiers
About one thousand troops were stationed in Hong Kong at any one time. The soldiers usually came from the ranks of the British working class, often driven by poverty and unemployment to the dire extreme of joining the army. The illiterate and destitute, including beggars picked up by the authorities and orphans from the workhouses, were pushed to become soldiers. Others took the Queen’s shilling to avoid starvation. Out of every
120 soldiers entering the army in the 1840s, 117 were listed as indigent, idle or bad
characters. Only one in 120 was listed as ambitious. Up to 1856 the cost of housing a convict was greater than the sum allowed for the keep of a soldier.9
A soldier was provided with beef and bread, but most other foods had to be paid for out of his pay. The editor of the Friend of China, who publicized the plight of the common soldier, had this to say about how the nominal twelve pennies a day due to the soldiers as pay was spent:
Five out of twelve pence per day goes to the Commissariat to pay for one pound of beef — one pound of bread — one and two sevenths ounces of tea and four ounces of rice. Two ounces of oil and a small quantity of wood for cooking are divided among twelve men. As a kind of supplemental mess, the Commissariat for the consideration of three half pence per man supplies also a cup of coffee at Gun-fire, some potatoes and other vegetables. The remaining fivepence per day is appropriated to paying for Regimental necessaries, washing, barrack damages and other incidental charges (Samsoo etc. etc.) Ten dollars per month is the amount generally considered necessary for the keep of a horse in this country — that is to say ten times more per day
than the sum allowed to the British Soldier for his maintenance whose five pence to the Commissariat is hardly on a par with the $1 . per month allowed
by Missionary societies to their Chinese salt fish and rice eaters. British soldiers in the Hongkong garrison appear to us to be treated more like dogs than human beings.10
Soldiers’ wives and children often shared the barrack rooms with the men, merely curtaining off a corner with a blanket. So little attention was paid to hygiene that the tub used by the men to urinate into at night was emptied out and then used in the morning to wash the soldier’s clothes. His only article of crockery, a basin, was used in turn for drinks, for the daily ration of boiled beef, for shaving, for mixing his pipe clay to whiten his belt and gloves, or for the polish which he used to shine the ninety-four brass buttons on his coat. In the cramped unhygienic conditions of the barrack rooms it is not surprising that tuberculosis was rife. Venereal diseases including syphilis were also very common as, even
back in England, soldiers could only afford to go with the cheapest available kind
of women: The women who are patronized by soldiers are, as a matter of course, very badly paid; for how can a soldier out of his very scanty allowance, generally little exceeding a shilling a day, afford to supply a woman with means adequate to her existence?11
When the soldiers had leisure time, the streets of Hong Kong offered little
in the way of recreation except for drinking holes where they drank whatever would render them tipsy in the quickest and cheapest way. This meant arrack in the European taverns or a trip to the Chinese quarter where shamshoo, that lethal concoction of ethanol, sodium nitrate and alcohol sold by the Chinese, was readily
available. A non-commissioned officer of the 18th Irish Regiment addressed the
recruits as follows:
I would especially and above all entreat you to always be on your guard against that monstrous enemy, that greatest of all evils and prolific source of all troubles and crime in the army, viz: DRUNKENNESS…. Beginners do not generally like either the taste or the smell of spirits. They are however frequently led to believe that it betokens a degree of manliness to drink even against their will a glass of spirits in company … and then they come to love spirits for spirits’ sake.12
Attempts were made to control the drinking of soldiers. In February 1850, Bishop
Smith preached a special sermon to the soldiers of the 59th Regiment on the sins
of intemperance, ‘informing them that he had buried hundreds of their fellow soldiers whose disease and death had been brought on by no other cause than that of drink’.13 When Private Nathaniel Hudson died of the effects of drinking arrack at the British Grenadier Tavern, the German innkeeper, Mr. Christopher, was fined $100.14 Nor were the wives of the soldiers immune to the dangers of drink. Dr. Edward Cree, newly appointed surgeon to HMS Vixen, reported in his diary in August 1843, ‘Nearly a hundred of the wives of the 55th soldiers arrived from
Calcutta. I was on shore with Moorsom in the evening. We met many of the ladies
in the road rather the worse for liquor’.15
Public flogging was accepted in the army as the only way in which discipline
could be maintained, just as the cat o’ nine tails was used in the navy. A debate was reported by the local press from the English newspapers. A soldier in Hounslow
had been beaten to death in a particularly gruesome fashion under the indifferent gaze of officers who ‘never cried hold, never even felt his pulse to ascertain if he
could bear another lash, while the men in the ranks were fainting at the horrors they were compelled to witness’. This long article republished in the Friend of China gave the reason for
continuing flogging to be as follows:
Far from dismissing those who have entered as a punishment, they are
retained in service as a punishment and the state is so unreasonably terrified
at losing a few men that it will not even accept their services for a limited
period — it will have them for their whole lives. The difference between the
army and other services is that dismissal from the latter is almost synonymous with death…. Dismissal from the former is life and liberty. From the army a man buys his discharge. The army is a service of slavery and dismissal is a
coveted blessing. It is plain that the use of flogging in the army after it has
almost been banished from the gaol is to make the soldier submit to the
caprice of individual officers — being the chief and main circumstance why
service in the army is abhorred by the bulk of the population.16
Even in sickness, little consideration was shown to the soldiers in early Hong Kong. The editor of the Friend of China visited the military hospital and complained about the conditions he found there. In September 1845, before a proper hospital had been built, the editor complained that:
The hospital consisted of but one large entire square room; and there the convalescent, the raving, the dying, the dead, were promiscuously huddled up with the young; and the strong soldier, who had just arrived from Europe, was thrown into such scenes as he never could have contemplated in his
wildest moments and it had such an effect on his senses as naturally tended
both to frighten and unnerve him and frequently brought on that morbid feeling which aggravated the symptoms under which he laboured, and led him to a speedy death.17
Desertion was the only way out, but the consequences were terrible and it was almost impossible to desert on an island such as Hong Kong so far from
home with nowhere to escape to. In 1849, Privates Alfred Hunter and William Gillispie of the 95th Regiment attempted to desert but were picked up at Stanley
by soldiers of the Ceylon Regiment. At their subsequent court martial, the charges against them read as follows:
First Charge
For having at Victoria Island of Hong Kong or at Tattoo Roll Call on the
night of May 9th 1849 deserted
Second Charge
For having each of them lost by neglect or designedly made away with or being otherwise deficient of the following articles of Regimental clothing, viz:-One pair of ammunition boots, value eight shillings One pair of black cloth trousers, value eight shillings and sixpence Findings: Guilty on both charges Sentence: To be transported beyond the seas as felons and to be marked
with the letter D in the usual manner. [i.e. with a tattoo].
The appearance of the American whalers in Hong Kong made desertion easier. Norton-Kyshe in his History of the Laws and Courts of Hong Kong wrote:
There had been upwards of twenty deserters since Jan. 1st (1851) and nearly
all had been inveighed on board ships in the harbour chiefly whalers in want
of hands…. In one case a verdict of not guilty was released, the majority of the witnesses having left the colony in the whale-ship, Mount Wolleston, in which
two soldiers of the 59th regiment had deserted the year before. From the
ill-usage they were exposed to, both fell sick, one of them becoming totally blind, and at the first island reached they were put ashore and left without medicine, clothes or provisions of any kind.18
In an attempt to flush out deserters, Superinterdent James Jarman boarded the
American whaler Canton Packet in March 1856, and ferreted nine deserters out of their hiding places: ‘These were so cunningly designed and well concealed that it required the scaldings of boiling water and pricks of sharp swords before the renegades were compelled to unearth themselves’.19
From the above description of the life of private soldiers in the colony, it can be seen that their status in society was among the lowest in the colony, only slightly higher than the beach-combers and destitutes.
The Royal Navy
By 1860 the British navy had around 240 ships crewed by 40,000 sailors making it the biggest in the world. Besides this, ‘thanks to the unrivalled productivity of her shipyards, Britain owned roughly a third of the world’s merchant tonnage. At no other time in history has one power so completely dominated the world’s oceans as Britain did in the mid-nineteenth century’. 20 The Royal Navy acted as the watchdog of the seas and the East India Command swept the oceans from the northern coastline of China as far south as Borneo and Burma. One of the most valuable tasks undertaken by the Royal Navy of this time was the survey of these coastlines. Accurate charts contributed enormously to the safety of the
merchant navy shipping. During and after the First Opium War, Captain Richard
Collinson, who produced one of the earliest maps of Hong Kong, was at work in an old Calcutta pilot brig, HMS Plover together with Captain William Thornton Bate in HMS Royalist mapping the coastlines, ‘in the face of great perils, hardships and obstacles, writing sailing directions and calculating and compiling marine statistics and astronomical data of unsurpassing accuracy and value’.21
A number of monuments were erected in the first half of the period before the Second Opium War to commemorate the dead of the Royal Navy squadrons who policed the eastern seas against the fleets of pirates that preyed on the merchant shipping. The earliest two were erected by the officers of the sloop, HMS Scout [15/2/15] and frigate, HMS Vestal [21A/1/32], both dating from 1847. The monument to the men of the Scout records thirteen names of which only two can now be clearly read. Some were killed in action against pirates and others
during a punitive expedition in 1847 against the Bogue Forts which guarded the
approaches to Canton. The monument to the Vestal formerly stood at the junction of Queen’s Road and Leighton Road. It marked a convenient place, where those who could not face the prospect of following the cortege from St. John’s Cathedral to the cemeteries could meet the funeral procession. The Vestal monument records the names of nine men. The ship was part of a squadron which visited Borneo in 1845 to uphold the authority of the Sultan of Brunei and Rajah James Brooke. She took part in the battle at Marudu Bay at the mouth of the Brunei River, where Captain Talbot landed a force of 340 bluejackets and 200 marines. John Watson, whose name is recorded on the monument, was among those killed. There was
fierce hand-to-hand fighting until the pirates were routed. Dr. Edward Cree, who
was tending the wounded on the Vixen, commented after amputating the arm of an unfortunate sailor:
Surgical operations on a crowded deck, by the light of half a dozen dip candles, with too many excited lookers on, are not done under the most favourable conditions, but one had no choice.22
The other men commemorated died from accidents or illness in Hong Kong, Ceylon and Madras.
The third monument, erected in 1850, commemorates twenty men from HMS Columbine [11B/1/4]. Five of the sailors died in a hotly contested engagement in September
1849, when they destroyed the forces of the
pirate chief, Chui Apou. His fleet consisted of, ‘twenty-three junks carrying twelve to eighteen guns each, manned by one thousand, eight hundred desperadoes’. 23 A few weeks later Captain Dalrymple Hay commanding a fleet of three ships, Columbine, Phlegeton and Fury as well as a large contingent of men from HMS Hastings, battled an even larger pirate fleet, commanded by the pirate chief, Shap-ng-tsai. They destroyed fifty-eight out of the fleet of sixty-four junks. This pirate fleet is said to have been manned by over three thousand men and carried over one
thousand guns.24
12.9. Destruction of Chui Apou’s pirate fleet at Bias Bay by Dr. Edward
Cree. (By courtesy of Martyn Gregory, Cat. 79, p. 31.)
The fourth monument is an Egyptian-looking obelisk erected in 1853 by the captain, officers and crew of HMS Cleopatra [17/1/4]. This vessel was dispatched to Borneo from Singapore in 1852 after a letter had been received from Lord Palmerston, demanding that retribution should be exacted from the Borneo pirates of the Tunku River for killing a Scottish trader and explorer, Robert Burns, grandson of the Bard. The monument, erected by the officers and crew of the HMS Winchester [9/1/5], has six sections covering the years from 1852 to 1857 with a total number of 108 names of men who died in Eastern waters. The Winchester caused much scandal in naval circles by staging a mutiny soon after its arrival in Hong Kong. Admiral Pellew seems to have provoked the mutiny, when he refused to allow shore leave to sailors who had not been ashore for eighteen months and were anchored in full sight of the delights of Hong Kong. ‘A year and a half on board was even too much for Jack to endure’. 25 When the crew did not answer the summons to quarters, the admiral sent the captain and officers down with drawn swords to clear the lower deck, wounding five sailors. The excuse put forward in Pellew’s defence in England was that the health of the sailors was put into peril by the existence of the:
most horrid collection of low, filthy grog shops, samshoe that makes men not
drunk but mad, and exposes them to crimps that entice them when drunk to
desert and to the most filthy, low class of Chinese women who infect seamen
with the very worst of that horror of horror so horrid that it can only be expressed by...26
The mutiny was partly due to the system in the Royal Navy of that era whereby men bought their ranks and there was no stated age for retirement. Admiral Pellew, aged well over sixty, had last been to sea in 1813, over forty years earlier and on that occasion too had provoked a mutiny.27 In February 1853, the Winchester took part in an engagement against a notorious Burmese pirate in an
action that went tragically wrong. Captain Loch, whose name is among those on
the monument, had landed with 185 seamen and 62 marines intending to march
against the pirate camp. They were ambushed on the way and lost twelve men
including the captain, who was killed by his pocket-watch. ‘He exposed himself
with reckless daring, and was calling on his men to try the bayonet when a ball
struck his watch and carried the casing and works into his body’. 28 The sailors and in particular the officers were well rewarded for their raids
on pirates. In 1849, the amount of prize money, claimed and paid out for just
one engagement in Borneo amounted to ￡20,700 to be divided among the
commanders, officers and men of the Albatross, Royalist and Nemesis. Twenty
pounds a head had been claimed on the heads of the five hundred pirates killed.29
It was noted in the local newspapers that when the Admiralty discontinued the bounty system due to its expense, the ships of the Royal Navy were much less keen to engage with pirates. The officers also augmented their pay by going to the rescue of merchant ships in trouble and then claiming huge amounts of money in salvage to be divided among the crew according to rank. This did not add to the popularity of the senior service among the ship-owning fraternity in the East.
The monuments erected in the second half of the period, between 1856 and 1861, and the number of sailors lost from HM ships are: Calcutta [11B/9/3]: 50, Sybille [12/6/19]: 22, Bittern [9/2/4]: 11, Tribune [9/3/6]: 24, Sans Pareil [20/16/6]: 31 and Sampson [15/2/14]: 20. Besides these, there are two other monuments, one to the Nankin [20/8/4], where the numbers of those lost have been obliterated by age and weather, and a second memorial to the dead of one unknown ship [9/3/8], where even its name has now become illegible. The losses were caused by disease, accidents and pirates, besides those killed in action in the Second Opium War. Captain Harry Edgell, for example, commander of HMS Tribune [9/3/6], erected an impressive monument topped by an urn in memory of twenty-three men. Of these, five were killed in action in the Second Opium War, sixteen died from disease, one fell from aloft, and two were drowned. The Tribune took part in the battle of Fatshan Creek where she was credited with the destruction of more than eighty Chinese war junks. In this encounter, the ship lost five men including a midshipman, Henry L. Barker [10/5/5] and Lieutenant Patrick Trell [10/5/4]. In 1856, the brig HMS Bittern [9/2/4] commemorated the death of eleven men whose carved names on the impressive capstan are now barely legible. The ship had engaged in several encounters with pirate fleets. In September 1855, it attacked twenty-three heavily armed junks killing 1200 pirates but losing its commanding officer, Charles Turner. 30 Nineteen wounded men were brought back to Hong Kong where at least three died. The largest monument in the Cemetery is to those who died while serving on HMS Calcutta [11B/9/3]. She was the flagship of the fleet and commanded by Admiral
Sir Michael Seymour during the Second Opium War. Because of her size and
draught, she was unable to sail far up the Canton River and therefore took a limited part in the fighting. The Times correspondent, G.W. Cooke, reported in 1859 that: ‘She is now anchored off Tiger Island and is occupied in throwing
shells with marvellous precision into three targets’. 31
Other ships including Sybille, Nankin and Sampson took part in the capture of Canton in 1857. One marine, Private Charles Bennett from the Sybille was beheaded by the Chinese and his companion, Seaman Richard Winter, jumped into a river and was drowned. The pair were said to have strayed from their post contrary to orders and been attacked by villagers. The Sampson was attacked by a large fleet of Chinese war junks and sustained casualties, but of the twenty men whose names have been inscribed on the monument only one was killed in action, and ironically his name is Chinese. Ashing was probably the pilot employed to guide the ship up the river. The rest died of illnesses or in drowning incidents. Few sailors at this time learnt to swim. In all, for the years 1845 to 1860, a total of thirty-three ships have memorials in the Cemetery to members of their crew.
Naval Officers
Of the thirty-eight naval personnel found in the Cemetery during this period,
twenty-eight were officers, ranging in rank from Rear-Admiral Sir Francis Collier [13/8/3], commander in chief of the East India Station, down to Vincent Edward Eyre [20/16/5], a naval cadet from HMS Calcutta, who died in February 1858 aged only fourteen years. They include eight commanders, captains or masters,
five lieutenants or mates, three surgeons, one engineer and one naval chaplain.32
Admiral Collier was living at the time of his death with Chief Justice Hulme and had retired to bed as usual. The next morning his servant found him dead in bed.
He had earlier suffered from a paralytic stroke and gout. Collier was sixty-three at
the time of his death. He had served as a midshipman under Admiral Nelson in HMS Vanguard at the Battle of the Nile. His funeral procession was one of the longest ever seen in Hong Kong.
Like army officers, naval officers were often the younger sons of the landed gentry or aristocratic families. Sometimes the landed gentry backgrounds of the naval officers are shown in the inscriptions. Eighteen-year-old midshipman Charles Goddard, whose name is inscribed on the monument to HMS Columbine [11B/1/4], is described as from The Lawn, Swindon in Wiltshire.
Goddard lost his life in the fight against the pirate fleet of Shap-ng-tsai. After he
had boarded a pirate junk, one of the pirates set light to a fuse connected to the explosives on board and the blast from the explosion killed him and one sailor. Lieutenant H. Bacon [10/2/2] is shown on his headstone to be the fourth son of Charles Basil Bacon Esq. of Moor Park and Culverlands, Surrey.
The headstone of acting mate Frederick R. Hardinge [9/6/1] proudly announced that he was ‘the nephew of the late Lord Hardinge’, a general of Indian fame. There also existed a number of naval families where son followed father into the navy for generation after generation. Captain Troubridge [13/6/2], who died of heatstroke in September 1850, was from such a family. His obituary proclaimed him:
The descendent of a family of naval heroes, he was a fine specimen of the
British sailor; one of those gallant gentlemen who with a fine frigate like the Amazon might be depended on to uphold the honour of the English flag in
any part of the world.
He had entered the service aged thirteen years and become a captain by the young age of twenty-three and soon after in 1841 set sail for Hong Kong as captain of HMS Clio. He had remained in the Far East surveying various coastlines ever since. He was described as of a ‘social joyous disposition’ with correct religious principles shown by his regular attendance at the cathedral.
Naval commanders wielded very real power at a time when it was impossible to consult the home authorities quickly. Those with decisions to make had to rely on their own acumen. The slowness of transport, even from India, meant that in event of emergencies there was no prospect that reinforcements could be
drafted in quickly. Captain Troubridge was faced with such a decision. When on 25 August 1849, the one-armed governor of Macau, Captain Ferriera do Amaral, was pulled from his horse and beheaded by five Chinese, there was a fear that the
Chinese inhabitants would overrun the Portuguese colony:
It is said that a considerable number of Chinese have returned to Macao expressing a desire to place themselves under Portuguese protection. If true this is suspicious; at present not a single stranger should be permitted to enter the city. In war, the Chinese tactics are cunning and deceit; once introduce a large body of armed men and they could take the town at any time.33
Troubridge, aged just thirty, set sail immediately in the gunboat Amazon to offer assistance. As the editor of the Friend of China reported:
Captain Troubridge acts entirely on his own responsibility — the Governor of Hong Kong can advise but not control his actions. He, as an experienced,
prudent officer, knows the power with which he is intrusted [sic] and how
far naval officers on remote stations are left to their own judgement when
placed in novel and difficult positions. If he decides upon active co-operation,
he carries the sympathies of his countrymen with him, — but if otherwise, few if any will blame him; under any circumstance we feel assured that he will not turn a deaf ear to the voice of humanity, nor permit the slaughter of the inhabitants by infuriated Chinese should they take possession of the city.34
Even junior naval officers merited a good send-off when they passed away. When Robert T. Raynes [9/1/3], paymaster of HMS Adventure, died in 1859 aged thirty, the procession which accompanied him to his grave was made up of the following: marines, seamen and the band from HMS Calcutta, the bier with
six senior paymasters as pall bearers, officers of the army and navy, officers of the
American, French and Dutch men-of-war in port. Perhaps Raynes was special. He had distinguished himself in several court martials and it was suggested that his fatal disease may have been aggravated by over-work.
Although the majority of naval officers
seem to have conducted themselves in a
gentlemanly way, some junior naval officers
in spite of their backgrounds were quite capable of rough or even violent behaviour towards the Chinese. Iosif Antonovich Goshkevich, who was one of the Russian
naval officers interned in Hong Kong at the time of the Crimean War, later wrote an
article about his stay. He reported:
On more than one occasion a poor coolie received a beating from a
12.14. Headstone in memory of Robert
passing dandy for not moving out of T. Raynes, late paymaster of HMS Adventure, d. 21.1.1859.
the way in time or simply because the latter wanted to make use of his cane…. During my stay here a small scene took place on Queen’s Road. The main role was played by a young officer of the Frigate, HMS Nanking. It seems that the young man, being in high spirits, decided to eat some fruit from the basket of a hawker and the Chinese, not appreciating the joke, demanded payment and not receiving it grabbed the gentleman by the coat. Apparently, this insult to his attire was too much to take, even if the citizen of the Celestial Empire was
right, and that is why H.M. Mr. Officer dealt
the ‘peasant’ a mighty blow which cut his face’. 35
The officer was taken before the magistrate but
let off with a caution and the suggestion that he pay compensation. Some ships
acquired a bad reputation due to the undisciplined behaviour of their crew. For example, a collective sigh of relief followed the final departure of HMS Hastings. Ships going to sea at this time had to be entirely self-sufficient. They carried on
board not only surgeons and clergymen but also a number of skilled workers considered necessary such as carpenters, sail-makers, armourers, and painters, who were all paid more than the sailors.
Sailors
In this period, the headstones of just five sailors have survived in the Cemetery.
They include two, George Bevans [16/8/3] and Henry Gill [21/3/10] from the little sloop, HMS Beagle, made famous by the voyages of Charles Darwin, which must have visited Hong Kong around 1860. Thomas Harris [11A/10/3], who died in January 1856, is named on his headstone as captain of the long boat of HMS Pique. Henry Wright [7/5/16] is memorialized by the men of HMS Fearless as a seaman who was killed by falling from aloft in April 1848 at the incredibly old age (for those days) of fifty. Next to Wright lies Henry Magee [7/5/17], who died on 6 October 1847 aged twenty-five. The families of naval personnel never
accompanied them abroad, so there are no graves in the Cemetery dedicated to wives or children. There is however one intriguing headstone dedicated to Walter Scott Burn [13/7/3] aged ten months, who died aboard HMS Hercules on 18
April 1857 at the height of the Second Opium War. The question arises as to what
an obviously Scottish baby was doing on a warship at such a time. The Royal Navy was considered the senior service and all ranks were regarded with slightly more respect than those in the army, although they were
recruited from much the same backgrounds. In December 1849, the Friend of China said of them:
No class has benefited more by the marked progress of civilisation since the
beginning of the present century than seamen serving on board ships of war. As a body, the men are more respectable — more manageable. The Navy is no longer burdened with the outcasts of society who can only be kept in
subjection by the constant use of the lash … he [the sailor] is vastly superior
to the men who gained for England her greatest naval conquests. He is not contaminated by associating for years with felons turned over to his ship from the hulks.36
Sailors elicited more sympathy in their drunken sprees than the soldiers did perhaps because they were not such a continual presence ashore, since their ships came and went as they patrolled the eastern seas. However, shore-going sailors known as liberty men often caused trouble to the authorities:
Seamen are the most reckless people in the world and, when relieved from the wholesome restraints of discipline for a few hours, with the exuberant spirit of schoolboys, they hunt after amusement without thinking of the consequences. Yesterday we noticed a party in a ‘happy state of excitement’
perambulating the streets with colours flying and drums beating. We hear that a few days ago, a party of these liberty men made a rather serious attack upon the police, and that it was with great difficulty they were
ultimately captured and carried to the ‘watch house’ only after help had been
obtained from the 98th Regiment.37
The low status of sailors was demonstrated by the fact that in death they hardly merited even a funeral service let alone a plot of land in the Cemetery. In a letter to the Friend of China, Shooks asked:
Are the bodies of seamen dying on board H.M. Vessels lowered from the bow ports into a boat which is then rowed a short distance and the body cast into the deep IN THE HARBOUR OF HONG KONG ITSELF?
[sic] If so, is it in accordance with, or in direct breach of the naval
regulations? And is the funeral service read over the dead, and if so, does
the Chaplain officiate?38
The editor commented below the letter that the situation was even worse than the correspondent represented. H.S. then wrote in reply:
It is not the fault of the navy; they have applied (at least I have been told so from good authority) for ground, but have been refused on account of want of room…. A dead body sewed up in a hammock and sunk with four shot naturally rests on the bottom, but is rapidly destroyed by the vermin that live in the deposit; the shot falls out of the sacking and the body highly decomposed rises to the surface, perhaps in sight of the ship he belonged to. No less than four bodies in that state partially exposed have been seen in the harbour this week, a harrowing and disgusting spectacle to a class of men who may probably share their fate.39
The correspondence continued with a letter from A Man before the Mast:
About the burial of dead bodies, the ships certainly send a sort of person who reads a sort of service and the corpse goes to the deep in a sort of way but this we before the mast think is not all square and I shall give you proof…. A dead body was buried a few days ago within four hundred yards astern of a merchantman vessel and immediately afterwards another three
hundred yards ahead…. When the crew of another merchant vessel in this
harbour were about to have their dinner, a few days ago a dead body came
floating past the ship and because the dinner was fish the men would not eat it. I could give plenty more cases….. The best proof [of this practice] is that sharks have come to clear off the dead but it is a shame that men who have
risked their lives to come to this tropical climate, should be treated like dogs when they die. The stokers of the Vixen acted like men when they had their comrade buried ashore.40
The harbour may have been even more polluted than now. Samuel Guerney Cresswell, a midshipman, reported in a letter to his parents written in July 1844 that a French frigate with four men in the sick bay piped all hands to bathe in the sea after dinner at about two p.m. and next day there were 124 men on their sick list.41
The ordinary sailors were, like the soldiers, subjected at this time to merciless corporal punishment in the form of the cat o’ nine tails which was used more than it should have been by bad officers. Dr. Edward Cree had an entry in his diary for 14 January 1843 to note that: ‘our Lieutenant Downes’ was superseded in his command, and wanted to leave the ship and go home: ‘I shan’t be sorry if he goes as he is an ill-tempered man and too fond of flogging. Not many days pass but I have to attend a corporal punishment. The ship’s company will rejoice when Downes goes’. 42 The editor of the book added a note that it was not uncommon for an unpopular officer to be assaulted by his crew after the ship had been paid off. This happened to the captain of the HMS Cornwallis [11A/3/1], the flagship on which the Treaty of Nanking was signed, when it returned to Portsmouth from the Far East in 1844. A more horrific case of cruelty and oppression by a commander occurred on HMS Childers. Ralph Milbanke [11A/3/4], first lieutenant on that sloop, who died in 1843, may have been a witness to some of those cruelties. Eleven commissioned officers quit the ship, two commissioned officers deserted, one marine and one midshipman’s steward committed suicide, one marine became insane, and one sailor was beaten to death while the ship was under the command of Captain Pitman. In this particular case very unusually the captain was court-martialled, found guilty and dismissed the service. The scenes of oppression and tyranny had extended over a period of four years.
During a greater portion of the time Captain Pitman was to be found night after night smiling at the dinner table of his hospitable countrymen in China. The man, who left his ship (and he was there but little whilst in harbour) in the fore part of the day after committing shocking act of cruelty, in the evening was whispering sentiment in the Drawing Room.43
Chapter 13
Women
and Children
The average age of death of the fifty-four women, including the four army wives,
found in the Cemetery for this period is just over thirty-one years. Twenty of
the fifty-four died in their twenties, four were under forty, and six died between
the ages of forty and fifty-seven, the fifty-seven-year-old being Sarah Murphy [9/8/13], the tough wife of a colour sergeant. The pattern of young deaths points to the vulnerability of women living in Hong Kong, whatever their social ranking. This was demonstrated to all in 1852 when Bishop Smith preached the Sunday sermon on the uncertainty of life.1 Three wives had died within four days of each other. Rosalia Clarincia Gordon [9/10/6], the wife of Robert Gordon, who was one of the original ninety-nine volunteers and probably a manager at the Hong Kong Club, died of dysentery on 1 February 1852. Sarah Ann Markwick, wife of the auctioneer, Charles Markwick and daughter of another auctioneer,
J.B. Watson, succumbed aged thirty-three
on the same day.2 The third of the trio was Caroline Preston [9/9/7], the wife of Dr.
William Preston, one of the dispensers at the
Hong Kong Dispensary. She was the daughter of a solicitor from Southsea near Portsmouth, She had arrived in January and survived in Hong Kong less than one month, dying on 3 February aged thirty-one years.
It is easy these days to forget to what an extent women were slaves to their reproductive systems. In this period, giving birth so far from home, in unhygienic conditions and without the help of trusted mothers or midwives, must have been a risky, frightening and lonely event.
Yet some European women in Hong Kong gave birth almost yearly. Isabella Dundas Cay [40/3/1] arrived in July 1845 with three sons and a daughter and two female servants, a year after her husband, Robert, the Scottish registrar general. She then proceeded to add to her family year by year. Albert arrived in 1846, George in 1848,
Margaret in 1849, Isabella in
1850 and Dundas in 1851. Isabella died in 1851 aged forty-one years, having given birth to nine children. She is buried together with her youngest son in the centre of the largest plot in the entire cemetery. The wide granite railings enclose such a
large area that the flat ledger stone in the centre looks quite insignificant.
There are numerous examples in the Cemetery of women succumbing to childbirth, or becoming weakened in health due to childbirth. A sad epitaph records the death in September 1860 of Mrs. Hotson [9/3/9], the wife of a sergeant in the Royal Regiment. She was born in Gibraltar, and was only twenty-four years
old when she died ‘leaving an infant fifty-eight days old to lament her irretrievable
loss’. 3 The father was in North China on his way to the sacking of the Summer Palace. When Mary Federica Irwin [16Ci/4/9], wife of the colonial chaplain, died in July 1857, it was said in her obituary:
Mrs Irwin was far from strong at any time after the birth of her last child some fifteen months ago; though the immediate cause of her disease was
dysentery, labouring under which she was confined to her room for ten days only. When two or three Sundays ago, it was remarked of the upper notes in
the chant of the Te Deum that they were given with a force and thrill through the holy pile never before heard, little thought those who then attended St John’s Cathedral that so soon the voice of the singer would be hushed in the gloom of the grave.4
Rev. James J. Irwin soon married again and his second wife, Emma Maria [16Ci/4/10], died in January 1861, aged only twenty-one years. The two wives are buried in a joint family plot.
The deaths of a number of the husbands of women living in Hong Kong led to a trend towards quick remarriages. There would have been few opportunities to work or openings for governesses or lady’s maids even if the widows were qualified. It would have been little short of impossible for a lone female to remain single in Hong Kong with children to care for. Poor Mary Roe Goodings, after coping with the deaths of her husband Robert, the head gaoler of Victoria prison, and her newborn baby, was left looking after a six-year-old daughter from her first marriage and the four remaining Goodings stepchildren on a salary of $5 a month which she earned as matron of the gaol. It is not surprising that, three months after Robert Goodings’ death, Mary married for the third time to the new keeper of the prison, Robert Edward Mackenzie, an ex-policeman later to become a tavern keeper.5 In an attempt by a European woman to make an independent living, a widow advertised her services in 1854 at the time of the strike of the Chinese washermen: ‘The widow, Macdonald, living at West Point Police Station on the hill, will be glad to undertake the washing and getting up of fine Linen, at English prices — say four pence per Shirt’.6 History does not relate if she was successful in her enterprise.
The only women who managed to run businesses were the redoubtable wives of shopkeepers, or hotel managers who, supported by their husbands, opened dressmaking and millinery enterprises along Queen’s Road to cater for the wealthier wives of the colony. These included Mrs. Lemon, wife of the bookbinder John Lemon; Mrs. Marsh, wife of a farrier and dealer in products relating to horses; Mrs. Winibeg, married to the owner of the British Hotel; and a Miss Garrett. In 1856, John Lemon was suing the P. & O. shipping line for the non-arrival of $2,000 worth of millinery goods. In that year Miss Garrett was advertising Paris bonnets, lace mantles, flowers, ribbons, gloves and parasols, lace and muslin curtains, children’s clothes, haberdashery and perfumery.7 If a poem in the China Mail is anything to go by, the demands of the small number of wealthy women in the colony must have been substantial:
Bonnets, mantillas, crepes, collars and shawls;
Dresses for breakfasts and dinners and balls,
Dresses to sit in and stand in and walk in;
Dresses to dance in and flirt in and talk in;
…
Dresses for winter, spring, summer and fall
All of them different in colour and pattern;
Silk, muslin and lace, crape velvet and satin, Brocade and broadcloth and other materials, Quite as expensive and much more ethereal.8
The dressmaking business was not without risks. The dangers from fire in a town largely built of wood and without a professional fire service are brought home when one learns that Mrs. Marsh and Mrs. Rickomartz lost their stock in a fire in 1859 and another fire in 1861 totally destroyed Mrs. Winnibeg’s stock of goods.
Another group of women calling for sympathy and respect are those married to sea captains who lived, gave birth to and brought up children on board their husband’s ships never knowing whether in times of emergency they would be within reach of medical help. One such woman was the American, Thankful Lucas [9/14/13], the daughter of Horace Bacon Esq. of Barnstable, Massachusetts and wife of Captain Lucas of the Mary Adam. She died in September 1850, aged twenty-nine, shortly before reaching the Hong Kong harbour. According to her obituary: ‘Her death was that of the righteous, calm and resigned in view of the hope she entertained of blissful immortality: her only earthly wish being that her remains might receive the rights of sepulchre in Christian ground’. One hopes her husband never knew that the grounds of the Hong Kong Cemetery had not been consecrated. Mary Ann Ives [9/17/8] arrived with her husband, Captain Ives on the ‘splendid London river-built brig Berkeley’, which was carrying among other goods pressed hay to feed the horses of Hong Kong.9 Mary Ann succumbed on 14 December 1851, aged twenty-seven, just two weeks after the death of her twenty-month-old baby, W.J.F. Ives, and the two were buried together. Looking after a tiny baby on board a barque at sea must have been fraught with difficulties, especially when the baby became sick.
One particular story lies behind the insignificant square slab that marks the
grave of a baby, Wilhelmina de Castilla [7/12/15], which encapsulates the trials and hardships endured by the women who accompanied husbands and fathers across the seas to live and raise families in alien surroundings. The grandfather of
Wilhelmina, who died in 1862 aged one year, was John Couper, ship’s carpenter for the P. & O. at Whampoa. There on 6 December 1856, his daughter married the
dashing American river boat captain mentioned earlier, Henry de Castilla. Only weeks later, the family were caught up in the wider events of the Second Opium
War. The foreign factories had been burnt to the ground and a price of thirty
silver dollars placed on the head of every foreigner delivered to the viceroy at his yamen in Canton. A little before sunset on 20 December, a man presented himself with a note to be placed in the hands of Couper himself. On being called for by his daughter, Couper came down to the entrance of the chop-boat. There he was seized by six men who tried to drag him into their boat. His daughter held him by the coat and would have succeeded in rescuing him had he not slipped overboard and fallen into the water and then been lifted into the sampan. He struggled manfully with the six Chinese in the boat and jumped into the water again but was
again dragged back into the sampan, which took off at speed. His son in a gig and a
boat from HMS Sybille left in pursuit in the gathering dusk, but Couper was never seen again. Meanwhile poor Mrs. Couper had fallen down in a faint and was found lying senseless when the boats returned.
Eighteen months later at the end of the Second Opium War, the Couper
family, headed now by the son, John Cardew Couper, were back on their chop-
boat in Whampoa and the docks were open once again for business. The widowed
Mrs. Couper and her daughter, Mrs. Castilla, were faced with further threats. In
January 1857,
13.4. Whampoa Dockyard showing what is thought to be the Couper family houseboat. (By courtesy of the Hong Kong Maritime Museum.)
Two drunken men-of-war’s men, but not so drunk as to be insensible of what they were about, attempted violently to force their way on board Mr. Couper’s chop, in the absence of the master and to the terror of the female members of the family.10
On his way back from Canton to Hong Kong, Albert Smith, the impresario, breakfasted on their boat. Old Mrs. Couper and her daughter joined the party. It was hardly surprising that ‘The old lady was very weary of China and longed to be home again’. She was not however destined to see Aberdeen again, dying about a month after this meeting.
Children
In the text accompanying the sketch of children and their amahs shown in Figure 13.5, the correspondent wrote that British children were overdressed and taught to wear crinolines at an early age. But raising children at this time in Hong Kong was a worrying and all-too-often heartbreaking undertaking. The number of infants found in the Hong Kong Cemetery demonstrates the great amount of
suffering and sadness that visited all classes of women.
Of the sixty-four children buried in the Cemetery in this period, the average age of death is only 1.8 years. Babies were at huge risk at the time of weaning, when neither the milk nor the water they drank could be sterilized. In the survey
13.5. Western children and their amahs at the parade ground. (Illustrated London News, 17 October 1857.)
of Hong Kong, d. 1856 aged two years and on the right the memorials to Charlotte and William Blackhead or Schwarzkopf, children of Frederick Schwarzkopf, German ships’ chandler. They died in 1857 and 1854 respectively, both aged six months.
of children in the Cemetery, those of fifteen or over have been excluded. At a time when boys went to sea or became apprentices at around twelve years old, a fifteen-
year-old would hardly have been considered as a child. Only one girl, Mary Ann Hoey [9/5/10], reached the age of eleven years, two others surviving to reach eight years, Fanny Augusta Soames [13/7/1] and Mary Boyland [11A/11/7]. One unfortunate private of the 59th Regiment lost his wife Catherine Robert [16Cii/8/22] in 1851 and then his three children. This headstone is one of the few from this period belonging to the family of a private. Perhaps it was raised in pity for the poor man’s great loss.
The Life and Position of European Women in Hong Kong
The trend to look for a European wife rather than a Chinese ‘protected’ mistress was strengthened by the missionary zeal of the churches, which were at this time spreading the Victorian moral code. Liaisons between men and Chinese women, and resorting to brothels, were increasingly looked on as depraved and immoral. As housing and other facilities in Hong Kong improved and men became more settled, they began to seek out wives who could accompany them back to Hong Kong and live with them there. But when the women arrived from Europe to live in Hong Kong, they found that their lives were perhaps even more restricted than back home. It was considered at this time that women as the weaker sex could only survive the vicissitudes of life under the protection of a father, husband or brother. In Hong Kong, as in Europe and America:
Wives … were classed with minors and idiots and had no responsibility under
the law…. Property, liberty, earnings, even a wife’s conscience, all belonged to her husband, as did the children she might bear. She could sign no contract,
make no will, cast no vote…. Until 1857 no divorce was obtainable except by
special Act of Parliament.11
The epitaph on the headstone of Anna Johnson [9/16/12], the wife of the American Baptist missionary, echoes this idea. ‘Thou no more hast need of man’s protective arm for thou mayst lean on His unchanging throne’. Anna died in 1848 aged twenty-six.
Women needed to be protected from all the more sordid aspects of their
society. A letter from A.B. deplored the reporting of the recent trial of a female brothel keeper who was alleged to have been framed by policemen:
This is a paper which lies on our tables and which our wives and daughters read; and I put it to any man who has the slightest purity of mind left, whether he would not be ashamed to knowingly permit any virtuous woman to read the disgusting details which compose the leading article of more than two columns.12
13.7.a and b. Headstone in memory of Anna Johnson, wife of Rev. John Johnson of the American Baptist Union, d. 9.6.1848.
During the long, hot, monotonous days while their husbands were at work, the women were obliged to remain indoors: ‘As the ladies have not much to do
and cannot stir out of their houses in the daytime, they fill up their time by sending
out chits on every possible pretext and occasion’.13 At home they were deprived of their natural occupations as the work of the house was taken care of by servants. As Dr. B.L. Ball, the visiting American dentist, remarked:
A lady seems very dependent when she is obliged to send for a servant to call two others for the purpose of moving a rocking chair…. I could have done it while she was giving directions to the servant although I might have lost caste with so menial a service.14
Even the care of her children was denied to a wife residing in Hong Kong. It was the custom to send children back to England by the age of six to be cared for by relations or educated in boarding schools. For boys, the attainment of a
firm grounding in Latin and Greek, in an atmosphere of ‘regimented manliness’,
was considered necessary because it conferred gentlemanly status. The high cost of over one hundred pounds sterling a year ensured that only the elite could afford this kind of education. Girls needed ‘moral training and genteel
accomplishments’ in order to find a husband in the right stratum of society. It
was considered that both boys and girls needed to be removed from the heathen environment in which their parents laboured so they could be brought up to learn true Christian principles:
Thus in the pursuit of gentility, small children were dispatched on dangerous journeys half way round the world to be received by relations and guardians they had never met not knowing when (or whether) they would see their parents again.15
The education of the children of the poorer Europeans was largely neglected
in the early years by the government in Hong Kong because the influential sectors
of society saw no need for schools as their children were almost without exception shipped back to England for their education. The position of women in early Hong Kong is summed up in an article:
No one is more to be pitied than a lady in Hong Kong, living like a choice exotic, to be seen, admired and live far away from friends and home, and
utterly separated from all the amusements and affairs that make a lady’s life
agreeable in other lands. Living in a home in which she is prevented from
performing any domestic duties, dependent for requisites on ruffianly China boys or timber-headed amahs, she finally sinks into a kind of automaton to
be carried to church on Sundays and home again and occasionally to be seen borne on men’s shoulders on the upper road when the sun is down.16
Single women would have found it very difficult to survive in early Hong Kong with their reputations intact. John Wright described how in August 1851,
a Miss Hester Coates from Blessington, Dublin, brought out by ‘Smith of the
Engineers’, was abandoned by her fiance: ‘When she called on him, he refused
to have anything to do with her and threatened to call the police if she did not leave. He then sought escape by boarding HMS Sphynx where his brother was a midshipman’. 17 George Duddell, the same man who so terrorized Queen’s Road with his galloping horses, took pity on Miss Coates and invited her into his
home. By October of the same year, John Wright was noting with disapproval,
‘On dit she is in keeping with Mr. Duddell and not married as was given out at the time’. 18 However to do him justice, Duddell did marry her on 1 November 1851. She gave birth to a son in August of the following year and then died at Victoria in September 1853. Hers is one of those whose memorials have not survived in the Cemetery.
Women could find little outlet or intellectual stimulation in the societies and
clubs of Hong Kong from which they were generally barred. In 1855, a motion was presented at a meeting of the Victoria Library and Reading Room Club:
which the secretary has thought not fit to report, viz: that wives of members
be elected honorary members of the Reading room but its gallant proposer, a bachelor of course, found no-one to second the motion.19
Only one occasion has been found in the early years, when the Asiatic Society opened its meeting to ladies.20 Then just three ladies were daring enough to avail themselves of the invitation. Up to 1860, only two letters appeared in the newspapers written by women and one, it is suggested, was actually written by a man. In June 1851, a portion of a letter appeared in the Friend of China signed
Jemima Augusta Walker. The editor snidely commented:
We have received a letter signed or purported to be signed by one of those much to be pitied members of society, an ‘unprotected’ female. We have not
printed it all and must apologize to the good lady (gentleman in disguise) for
not having done so but to tell the truth the writing is so ‘beautifully fine’ we
cannot make it all out.21
Jemima Walker wrote questioning the suggested use of the parade ground as a
cricket pitch for which ‘noble game’ she and the other ladies did not ‘care a straw’. She asked that some part of the ground be given over to ‘recreative pastimes more congenial and becoming to the female taste’. She wrote that she belonged to ‘that unfortunate section of the community who are forbidden to exhibit as speakers on public occasions and whose claims do not seem to have been presented by the gallantry of any gentleman’. Needless to say her views received no consideration. In one letter, a husband sent in some verses written by his wife, some of which are quoted below. He wrote that his wife, ‘unfortunately for my peace of mind derives her views of Hong Kong politics from the Friend of China’.
Was the colony ever at such a bad pass
I really can’t fancy what next it will come to,
What with poison, bad mutton, oil dearer than gas,
… The taxes increasing, such a state the police in And coolies refusing to carry our chairs; If you’d know why this was it was simply because
That horrid Sir John’s at the head of affairs! [Sir John Bowring, governor]
… If the boys at the school of St Andrews are lousy
Or the 59th band play unpopular airs;
If officials are idle or parsons are drowsy,
It’s all the old man at the head of affairs!
But as was usual in those days the husband has the last word in Maritus loquitur
[the husband speaks]:
And now if you’ve done, pray let me have a word too,
I would have you remember it’s very absurd to
Talk about things that you don’t understand.22
Chinese Protected Women and Women in Brothels
In the early days in Hong Kong there were very few women in comparison to the number of men. Neither the Europeans nor the Chinese considered it a suitable place to bring up a family. Many European men delayed marrying or left their wives at home. The Chinese kept their families in their ancestral clan villages where they would visit them during major festivals. In 1846, there were a mere 180 European women to 287 men. 23 Brothels proliferated to a degree almost unheard of except in the newly opened gold mining centres in California and Australia. In 1853, government sources listed 84 brothels as opposed to 103 family houses.24
While the lower classes of Europeans had recourse to brothels, those who could
afford it preferred to keep ‘protected women’, as their Chinese mistresses were called. David Jardine’s Chinese girl, A Choy, even left him for his rival, John Dent,
deepening the rivalry between the two firms. Certainly Jardine, Matheson & Co.
had a well-documented arrangement for dispensing money to ‘protected girls’ left behind in Hong Kong.25 As early as 1844, it was regretted that:
a system of slavery degrading to the British name has been permitted to spring up at Hong Kong…. Female children have been kidnapped at Canton and from villages adjacent and brought to our island and sold…. Our countrymen are implicated in the nefarious transactions alluded to.26
Again in 1851, a note at the foot of an article claimed: ‘Hong Kong is a notorious slave market for all it is a British Colony where slavery is banned’.27 The dilemma facing the administration was how to allow the Chinese in Hong Kong to live according to Chinese custom, as had been promised by Sir Henry Pottinger, and at the same time keep Hong Kong free from slavery, which since 1833 had
been made illegal throughout British territories. Women in Chinese eyes were
chattels and from time immemorial had been sold into serfdom by poor families
to raise capital or pay off debts. They were then raised in richer families as servant
girls or mui tsai and then, if custom was followed, a suitable match would be found for them when they reached marriageable age. The actual outcome of such arrangement in a number of cases was spelled out in the China Mail which
claimed that in 1859, ‘Five-sixths of the Chinese females in Hong Kong are slaves
— regularly sold, purchased and worked in various ways for the pecuniary benefit
of their possessors’. The article continued with a portrait of the life of one typical Chinese girl of this class who is given the pseudonym of Attai by the author and of one typical European, ‘Benjamin Rogers’, said to be involved with a Chinese girl.
1. Attai. Born 1831 in Toon-koon. Sold at the age of 11 to Akeu, a Chinese woman resident in Hong Kong. Employed by Akeu in house-work till 1846
when a partner in the firm of Burley, Burner & Co. purchased her for $100 to clean his boots, also paying Akeu $25 per mensem to show his estimate of her philanthropy. Returned to Akeu in 1848 and hired out at $30 per mensem to a law officer of the Crown, Akeu receiving the money. Sold in 1853, to Assai, a Chinese comprador, for $80. Hired out by Assai in 1858 as amah to the Hon Mrs. —. Died, 1859, after having consumed $200 worth of food, received $200 worth of clothes, $100 of gold ornaments and brought in about $3,000 to the
slave-traders who possessed her.
2. Benjamin Rogers Esq. Partner in the firm of Burley, Burner & Co. Came out to China as an articled clerk on $50 per mensem and extras in 1849. Hired
a slave to clean his boots from Akeu in 1851; dismissed her in 1853. Purchased
a slave from Californian Attai in 1854 for $250 down. We must drop the veil!28
According to a follow-up article, the Attai’s remained by day in the brothels or in private houses leased for them by their European protector, and only visited their protector by night. The editor of the Friend of China in 1851 described the kind of situation that arose.
The husband … tiring of his wife or wanting money to indulge in the vice of opium smoking (of this we are cognizant of a particular instance) sells her to one of the hags continually on the lookout for victims for the Hong Kong market. She is brought here and sold first to a brothel keeper and then to some foreigner for his concubine. At the expiration of a few years the foreigner returns to his native country and the girl receives her liberty
with perhaps a good round sum as a present besides…. We have known the
husband return and claim his wife that he may sell her again.29
The buying and selling of mui tsai remained legal in Hong Kong up to 1932 and until recently a few former mui tsai were still living quiet lives as second wives.
As can be seen by the number of brothels, brothel keeping was a sizeable industry in early Hong Kong. Ironically it was the only industry run almost entirely by women. All the brothel keepers were female. At the upper end, the brothels were run as very high class businesses comparable to the geisha girl establishments of Japan. The girls would play host to rich clients at sumptuous banquets in gilded restaurants. The impresario, Albert Smith, was invited to one such establishment by the comprador of the P. & O., A Chung, who according to Smith was worth thirty to forty thousand pounds sterling:
There were sixteen courses which included shark’s fin, goose tendons, deer meat and rose leaf soup. A woman sat beside each guest filling glasses. Three
grown girls and an eleven year old child were introduced to entertain us as professional singers.30
These singers were known to the expatriates as ‘sing sing girls’ and visiting them was a popular form of entertainment. The ten o’clock curfew imposed by the police brought forth an irate letter from one expatriate who complained that by the time dinner was over, it was already ten o’clock and he and many others were deprived of their fun. The brothels ranged down in status from the very best, which only catered to the rich Chinese, to those at the very bottom of the scale, which catered to the soldiers of the garrison. It was often in the brothels that liaisons were formed and the girls bought out to become ‘protected’ women.
By the end of the first period, ‘that institution, that bane of society, which has obtained the cognomen of “Attaism”’ so vehemently preached against by the incoming Bishop Alford, was coming under increasing attack. But according to the China Mail of 14 June 1860, it still had so strong a hold on the respectable portion of the community that an open assault could not be successfully made. The paper recommended that the ‘evil’ must be approached carefully by an improvement in the tone of society. The marriage bond should be made fashionable and heads of commercial houses should encourage it among their
employees. It went on to say: ‘We pity bachelor life here, well knowing what it
is, but we blame the married portion of the community, as much as we pity the unmarried, for their close and exclusive hospitality’.31 With the gradual decrease in the number of Chinese ‘protected women’ and the increased secrecy under which they were kept, yet another bridge to understanding between the races was being whittled away. The subject of protected women was always sensitive and few details have survived of the kind of lives they led. Two protected women, about whom more is known, demand a special place in this chapter: Ng Akew, who was acquired by James Bridges Endicott (11B/1/1) and Mary Ayou Chan [23/4/1], the wife of Daniel Caldwell.
Ng Akew
A scandal erupted in 1849 concerning the affairs of Akew, allowing us a glimpse
into this hidden area of Hong Kong society. James Bridges Endicott after settling down at Cap-sing-mun as captain of the opium-receiving hulk, Ruparell, bought himself a Tanka girl called Ng Akew. Judging by her familiarity with the pirate chief and his haunts, it is probable that Endicott bought her from the pirates. She lived with him and gave birth to five of his children on board the Ruparell. Akew was described as ‘a shrewd intelligent woman without any of those feelings of degradation which Europeans attach to females in her condition’. 32 The scandal began when Endicott and the captain of another receiving ship contracted divers to raise the cargo of the Isabella Roberts which had sunk in a typhoon. Of the 153 cases of opium raised, Endicott offered eight to his mistress who proceeded to trade them in her own right along the coast. But her ship carrying the opium was seized by pirates. Akew then went in person to visit the pirate chief, Shap-ng-tsai,
to demand her property back. She was palmed off with some betel-nut which did
not represent the value of her opium. In the absence of Endicott and against his advice, she returned to the pirates’ base at Tien Pahk where ‘this Jezebel’ appears to have been involved in a plan to entrap the Royal Navy ship, Medea. Captain Lockyer on a visit to Tien Pahk had himself rowed in the gig to the inner harbour
where he found fifty large war junks among a crowd of shipping. Boarding one of the largest (possibly that of Shap-ng-tsai himself) the naval officers were regaled
with tea:
After leaving the junk, the Macao heroine presented herself stating that these were all pirates and from what is known of this damsel’s career and transactions, it is more than probable that she was acting under orders from Shap-ng-tsai; that wily chief knew that if he could induce Captain Lockyer to enter the harbour with his boats, not a man would escape.33
However, realizing that he was outnumbered, the captain left the bay. Akew, having successfully negotiated with the pirates over her lost opium, sailed back to Cum-sing-moon with her two ships laden with cloth, sugar, pepper and rice, escorted by six heavily armed Chinese junks. Her ships were arrested on suspicion of involvement with the pirates and the case taken to the American consul in Macau. It was handed over to the British authorities by the Americans but, although the goods on board her ships were almost certainly pirated, neither the British nor the Americans wanted to take the case further. This strange tale of Akew and her opium points to the probability of murky and usually hidden trading liaisons existing between some European merchants and the pirates who provided channels for the smuggling and distribution of goods, particularly opium, up the coasts of China in order to bypass the customs taxes that should have been paid.34
When Endicott moved to Macau and contemplated marrying a Western
woman, he secured Akew’s future by a deed of trust, which conferred on her two inland lots. The two men named as trustees both had protected women of their
own, William Scott, a merchant and Douglas Lapraik. Akew acquired additional
real estate in the tavern area of Queen’s Road. In 1868, she was the principal of ten single women who bought a section of Inland Lot 450 to build a house. It would be nice to think that they established a club house there for other women in
the same situation as themselves. In 1878, Akew was bankrupted. Her properties
were sold and her furniture auctioned off. She must have been living in some luxury judging by the description of her furniture which included custom-made blackwood chairs and stools, marble-topped tables, carpets, clocks, pictures, bookcases, crockery and glass. However, she still kept her residence, which had been put in trust and secured by Endicott, where she probably continued to live
until her death. The trust was only dissolved in 1914 and the property then vested
in Robert Endicott of New York.35
Mary Ayou Caldwell
Mary Ayou Caldwell [23/4/1], who died in 1895, was among the first Chinese
women to be buried in Happy Valley. Her early life is shrouded. In the Enquiry into Civil Service Abuses, Charles May, superintendent of the police, testified that
he knew her well from the time she was living in the police station in Central and that she had been bought from a brothel. A Chinese lady, brought as witness by
Daniel Caldwell, testified that she knew Ayou, when she was twelve or thirteen,
and, at that time, she was living at the house of a Chinese undertaker though in
what capacity was not made clear. Wherever the truth lies, there is no doubt that
in 1845, she married Daniel Caldwell in a Chinese wedding ceremony. In 1850 she converted to Christianity and in the next year the Caldwells married again in a Christian ceremony in St. John’s Cathedral.
Life cannot have been simple for Mary Ayou trying to manage her large household in an increasingly racially divided society while giving birth to ten children. The London Missionary Society registered some twenty-four members connected with the Caldwell household as part of its congregation.36 In 1851 Mary Ayou was looking for a wet nurse according to Chinese customs. This brought unwelcome publicity to the family. A pregnant Chinese female was sold by her husband to a brothel keeper who sold her on again ‘or rather allowed a female wanting a wet nurse to redeem her from bondage for the price which had been paid’. 37 The mother of the wet nurse-to-be complained to the police magistrates about the girl’s husband, who had parted from his pregnant wife so that he might cohabit with another girl to whom he gave the proceeds of the sale. Mary Ayou was called to give testimony in the case, but pleaded sickness and produced a note
from Dr. William Harland saying that she was too unwell to appear.
Although speaking Chinese at home, her children grew up as part of the English community. One wonders how Mary Ayou felt when her sons were sent away to public school in England. The eldest son, Daniel, who became a lawyer, married the daughter of the postmaster general, Francis W. Mitchell. The missionary James Legge noted that Mitchell was not pleased and had planned a trip away to coincide with the wedding. Mary Ayou must have been a clever woman. It is said that she did much of the work of translating Chinese documents for her brother-in-law, Henry Caldwell, to help him in his law practice. She was a devout and committed Christian and employed a young man from Fatshan to act as private chaplain to the household. She also contributed generously to good causes. The To Tsai Church and the Alice Memorial Hospital Appeal both benefited from her generosity. The $250, which she gave towards the founding of the hospital, was matched only by one other donation and that was from the mother of Sir Kai Ho Kai [8/4/4].
Chapter 14 The Chinese and Their Position in Relation to the Europeans
When in 1840, Dr. William Jardine was leaving China, at his farewell dinner he
praised the Chinese and their country in the following words:
Here we find our persons more efficiently protected by laws than in many other parts of the East, or of the world; in China, a foreigner can go to sleep with his windows open without being in dread of either his life or property, which are well-guarded by a most watchful and excellent police; … Business is conducted with unexampled facility and in general with singular good faith; …. Neither would I omit the general courtesy of the Chinese in all their intercourse and transactions with foreigners: These and some other considerations are the reasons that so many of us so oft re-visit this country and stay in it so long.1
Yet, the effect of trying to govern the little island of Hong Kong since 1842 seems
to have severely shaken this way of thinking. A newer and more stereotypical view of the Chinese character was attacking the formation of bonds based on mutual trust. The waves of religious fervour that had swept Europe and America at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries had led many
people from the West to associate ignorance of the Christian God with moral
degradation. Heathens were automatically considered ‘wretched’ and ‘benighted’. The Chinese, according to Rev. John Nevius:
are so generally spoken of as ‘a nation of thieves and liars’, that a person who is not disposed to adopt or sanction these and similar stereotyped expressions, is in danger of being regarded as either ignorant or prejudiced.2
No longer were the Chinese seen as protective of the persons and goods of
the foreigners, honest in their commercial dealings and courteous. By the 1860s,
the commonly accepted view of the Chinese people was appalling. Nevius had
spent ten years in China as a missionary and in 1869 published a book, China and
the Chinese. He felt the need to begin his Chapter XIX, ‘General Estimate of the Chinese Character and Civilization’, with these words:
‘The Chinaman’ has almost become a synonym for stupidity, and his habits
and peculiarities afford abundant occasion for pleasantry and ridicule. This
impression has become so fixed and so general, that correspondents and editors of newspapers who wish to make their articles on China and the Chinese readable and interesting, gladly seize upon and exaggerate anything which can be made to appear grotesque and ridiculous. In speaking of this people, their pig-tails, shaven pates, thick-soled shoes, assumptions of dignity and superiority, and the great ignorance of many subjects with which we are familiar, make up the unfailing material upon which the newspapers generally draw.3
From the Chinese point of view, the Europeans had, in the last century,
inflicted two humiliating defeats on the Chinese Empire and forced the Chinese
to sign much disliked treaties. Stories of killing, plunder and looting had
circulated after the battles of the Opium Wars, which included the destruction of
the Summer Palace at Peking and the desecration of the sacred imperial sites in the capital city. The arrogant and overbearing character of some foreigners and their sometimes over-hasty resort to physical violence in their dealings with the Chinese did not endear them to the more disciplined Chinese. Nor did the well-known excesses of the lower levels of European society, particularly with regards to alcohol, enhance the standing of the foreigner in the eyes of the Chinese. It is therefore hardly surprising that Freeman Mitford, when describing Hong Kong as he passed through in April 1865 on his way to taking up his post at the British legation in Peking, could write: ‘The Europeans hate the Chinese and the latter return the compliment with interest’.4
A number of further factors were at work including the prevailing ignorance of each other’s language and culture which made rapprochement almost impossible. The pidgin English, ‘an uncouth and ridiculous jargon’ that had grown up as a means of communication between the merchants and their Chinese business partners in Canton, could only be used for practical purposes, being so
simplified in grammar and vocabulary that it was incapable of being a medium for
higher levels of communication. The use of this jargon led to a mutual disdain. The Chinese despised the Europeans for their woeful ignorance of Chinese language and manners and the Europeans in turn despised the Chinese for their simplified and puerile English. G.W. Cooke, the Times correspondent, gave an example of this ‘grotesque caricature of the language of the nursery’. A friend asked his comprador to find Cooke two servants in the following manner: ‘You see gentleman, — you tawkee one piecey coolie one piecey boy — larnt pigeon, you savey, no number one foolo — you make see this gentleman — you make him house pigeon’. 5 Translated, this means: ‘You see this gentleman, — you must engage for him a coolie and a boy — people who understand their business not stupid fellows; you will bring them to him and then get him a lodging and furnish it’. To this the polite comprador replied, ‘Hab got. I catchee one piecey coolie, catchee one piecey boy. House pigeon number one dearo, no hab got. Soger man hab catchee house pigeon’. Housing at the beginning of the Second Opium
War was extremely difficult to find because of the number of soldiers looking for
lodgings.
The second factor was the fear of the Chinese majority in Hong Kong. It is all too easy to forget the reality of and reasons for the fear that motivated Europeans to keep the ‘dangerous classes’ which congregated in Victoria under strict control. The fear may have partly had its origins back in Europe fuelled by the distrust of the mobs which congregated in the slums of major European cities and at times came together with devastating effectiveness in the various revolutionary movements that shook Europe from the French Revolution onwards. Most Europeans in Hong Kong had met with or heard about mob violence back in Europe and were determined not to allow such ‘dangerous’ behaviour by the ‘overboiling cauldron’, as they collectively called the Chinese masses, to take a hold in Hong Kong.
H.T. Ellis, writing in 1856, spoke of ‘the unscrupulous treachery and hostility of the Chinese’ and the fear of them that kept the greater part of the European population bottled up in Victoria only able to confidently proceed one mile or so to the east and the west. Beyond those bounds,
foreigners felt the necessity of going in groups: ‘well armed against predatory bands and such excursions were seldom attempted’. 6 These fearsome Chinese were for the most part lower class Hakka or Cantonese and desperately poor.
The language and cultural barriers meant that the foreigners had very little idea of what was happening in the Chinese community and even less control. By
1845 Europeans were outnumbered by thirty to one and by 1855 by fifty-five to one
and the ratio was still rising.7 The beleaguered Europeans felt threatened by a number of habitual and long-term criminals, beggars and destitute Chinese who were attracted to Hong Kong from the surrounding countryside. Small groups of scoundrels would waylay them in outlying areas or at night. Retired assistant
general Alfred Weatherhead, in his London lecture, described such an encounter:
I was assaulted by a gang of six ill-looking natives…. One of the rascals threw his arms round me. After a brief struggle I extricated myself and ran but slipped. In a moment the whole half dozen were upon me. They perched themselves on my legs. Two took charge of my arms, one examined my pockets and carefully stowed away my watch while the remaining one
amused himself by banging my unlucky head on the dirt and stuffing dirt and
sand into my nose mouth and ears. After clearing the pockets, they tried to
get my boots off but gave up.
They tried to carry him off but finally to his great relief dropped him.
Many of the coolies and boat people were known to be triad members. As
early as 1847, it was suspected that Hong Kong had become the headquarters of
the triad societies in Guangdong with perhaps as many as three-quarters of its workers having been enrolled as members:
Anyone wishing to join their body and become entitled to the benefits of a participation in the protection and assistance afforded by the ‘Brotherhood’
can do so here with every facility. A candidate for membership is introduced by a ‘brother’ of the Society to the ‘Headman’ to whom he pays a dollar…. The ‘Headmen’ are understood to reside in the Tai-ping-shan, at Sei-ying-poon and at East Point.
These organizations made it difficult for the police to secure convictions.
With the police not only ignorant of the habits and haunts of the most active
and dangerous portion of its members, but also unable to converse with those who do know them, it is not at all wonderful that crime should be on the increase and that detection becomes every day more difficult. Any member aiding in the conviction of a member exposed himself to the vengeance of the whole body.8
The Chinese were afraid to identify the thieves or pirates who could intimidate them or even turn the tables on them by denouncing innocent men to the authorities, leaving the British to do their dirty work by convicting and jailing or transporting across the seas the enemies of triad organizations, ‘a fact which has been repeatedly proved’.9
The pirates were also feared by the Europeans with good reason. They may well have been part of the same organizations as the triads, answering to the same heads. The Overland Mail put forward the interesting theory that Shap-ng-tsai, supposedly the name of the pirate chief, was actually the name of the
triad organization under which the pirate fleets worked. By combining the three companies or Saam Ho Wuy of pirates ‘with the holy number of five of the Hung Tze or triad society they came up with the name of three times five which equals fifteen boys or in Cantonese Shap-ng-tsai’. 10 Each pirate chief had a well-appointed fleet of not less than fifty junks, each carrying eight to twelve canons, and they dominated the coastline from Hainan to the entrance of the Pearl River and up the coast. According to the Friend of China it was well known that a large portion of the boatmen living in Hong Kong harbour or the surrounding islands were more or less connected with the pirates, but it took time for the extent of the piratical organization to dawn on the European population in Hong Kong:
That a fleet had been organized carrying its distinctive flag, changing cruising grounds according to the instructions of a recognized chief, holding meetings at certain stations fixed upon, where the result of the past cruise was ascertained and property disposed of; that all this is taking place within a day’s sailing of Hong Kong nobody dreamt of.11
It is likely that the organizers of the pirate fleets used Hong Kong as their base
since it gave them a refuge safe from the long arm of the Chinese law and was an excellent source of intelligence as to which ships carried valuable cargo. It also gave the pirates a place where they could dispose of their plunder and restock their vessels:
Many of the shops and houses which to the passer-by appear empty are the receptacles of desperadoes, who keep close all day and issue forth at night. Even when any of them has been traced to his lair, he has in general contrived to baffle the police; for besides other precautions adopted, most of the houses are constructed with sliding panels, opening communication with the adjoining tenements, and in many cases those built on piles project into the harbour, and are provided with trap doors having sampans underneath so that should an alarm be given, escape is almost certain.12
Thus the Europeans felt assailed from two fronts. On land, nobody was safe from attack and robbery. At sea no-one could take ship without putting his life at risk. The third factor which fed into the stereotypical view of the Chinese was the
problems incurred by the British authorities in their efforts to administer justice
according to the Common Law.13 The accusations of untrustworthiness rested on an issue that had long taxed the legal establishment: how could they rely on evidence given by Chinese men, since they were not Christians and could not be made to swear on the Bible. The editor of the Friend of China described this dilemma in terms contemporary to the period:
Like other heathens they have very loose notions of the obligations of an oath
and in the everyday affairs of life they tell an untruth without hesitation nor
are they ashamed if detected…. Their system of morality — which in China is religion — does not enforce upon them the importance of Truth; and an oath sits very lightly upon the conscience of those who have no conception of the Deity and care little for the future.14
Six months later, the paper reiterated its view:
The invariable mendacity of the witnesses, who say just what suits their views of the case — and their atheism, and consequent indifference to swear to anything, renders the most scrutinizing examination absolutely necessary.15
This picture of Chinese mendacity was spread to London by, for example, lectures
such as the one given by Alfred Weatherhead on the subject of life in Hong Kong:
I may remark that great difficulty is experienced in applying the machinery
of our legal proceedings to a people so utterly destitute of all ideas of veracity as the Chinese. They have no conception of anything morally wrong in falsehood.16
The impossibility of guaranteeing that justice was dispensed in the Hong Kong courts was highlighted by the China Mail when it questioned the use of the unsupported testimony of one pirate-turned–police informer called Too-apo to sentence his alleged associates to death, in a case known as the Chimmo Bay Piracy. The newspapers acknowledged that innocent men may have been put to death or deported but said:
Such instruments (as informers) may be considered necessary where total ignorance of the language and very partial acquaintance with the habits of a lawless population, render it impossible for Europeans to detect criminals well known to their countrymen.17
There was much discussion about how to ensure that witnesses in court kept to the true facts of the case. Various attempts were made to administer oaths with relevance to those swearing. The killing of a cock, to symbolize the sanctity of the oath taken, was soon abandoned as a method since it was not taken seriously by
the Chinese and only benefited the court officials, who were able to make a good meal off the slaughtered fowl. Later attempts included the breaking of rice bowls
and the burning of inscribed papers, none of which were considered satisfactory answers to the problem. Thus the ever-present doubts of the courts as to whether they had arrived at the true facts of the cases they were trying fed into the myth that the Chinese had no respect for truth. Further problems arose concerning, for
example, cases of mistaken identity. As Weatherhead said:
The remarkable resemblance among the Chinese partly owing to their uniformity of costume, partly to the similarity of features continually gives rise to awkward mistakes of identity especially in our courts of Law where
the witnesses are perpetually mistaken for one another and the plaintiffs and
defendants blundered together in hopeless confusion.
In one case the judge drew the attention of the jury to the fact that Ningpo and Chapoo were not present among the prisoners. It was pointed out that they were place names, not people.18 These kinds of problem made a mockery of the intentions of the colonists to introduce to the Chinese the superior concepts of British justice and they led to talk of ‘the inherent inapplicability to Asiatics of British laws’.19
Needless to say, cases where the law had been misapplied and where harsh treatment had been meted out by rough uneducated policemen led to deep discontent among the Chinese who heard stories of innocent men transported to far-off places or subjected to the miseries of the chain gangs working on the roads of Hong Kong. Things were not likely to have improved during the run up to and the course of the Second Opium War when strict measures and curfews were enforced to ring-fence and control the Chinese.
To the Europeans, the coolies and poorer Chinese posed a dilemma. They feared their massed strength on the one hand. Yet on the other hand, they needed the cheap labour they provided. The Chinese poor had the appearance of a mob to the ignorant foreigner looking on from outside but in fact they seem to have been tightly organized and regulated by their own leaders. Coolies were recruited from particular villages as members of work gangs and the recruiters stood surety for their good behaviour. In September 1850, a youth, Chang Ayee, was charged with doing nothing: ‘The prisoner, a simple, honest-looking youth admitted the charge but pleaded that it was no fault of his’. He gave the telling explanation that he had no clansmen here and could get no surety, so no-one dared employ him. He was ordered to be sent back to the mainland. The trial of two brothers threw light on the question of surety and its link with particular villages. The brothers, from the village of Namping in the district of Heang Shan, were accused of conspiring with pirates. They had been some eighteen years working as ‘first rate horse keepers’ for Robert Jardine:
From this village and others adjacent nearly all our most respectable compradors and house servants are, and for years past, have been obtained.
To be a Namping or a Choey-mee man has been in fact known as of an honourable lineage and a passport in itself to the most trustworthy situations obtainable.20
The craftsmen and artisans were, from very early on, organized into guilds. Even the lowly washermen were as highly organized as any trade union in Britain. Their guild called a strike in September 1854. One man was committed to gaol for
refusing to wash under $2.50 per hundred. (The nature of the articles for which $2.50 per hundred was charged is not specified.) Merman wrote to the paper:
The washer-men have struck and a clean shirt cannot be had for love or money. It is all very well for people to say that the increased cost of charcoal
is not sufficient warranty for a conspiracy not to work. There are strikes in
plenty in England but we do not hear of any such decisions as these from
the bench. And why are Chinese to be treated differently from other of Her
Majesty’s subjects?21
14.3. Street hawkers; note the lack of shoes. (By courtesy of the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank.)
In August 1857, 245 tailors and shoemakers were apprehended by the police and fined $5 each for illegal assemblage. According to the editorial:
The police have had some trouble of late with Trades Unions — secret associations that have long existed among the Chinese in the colony, and which are not confined to the artizans but extend to every species of employment. The books of more than one of these societies are now in the hands of the government and display a system of private intimidation by means of fines, of the existence of which those best acquainted with Chinese had no previous conception…. In some instances the better classes are enrolled compulsorily among the members of these societies…. Besides the affair of the washermen, forty-five of whom were apprehended at the
Joss-house by the police and fined $5 each by the Magistrate, two hundred
and forty-three Tailors and Shoemakers have since been taken in charge for illegal assemblage. They had applied to the Protector of Chinese for permission; but he being aware some time before, from papers in the hands of the Government, of the real object of the meeting, refused to sanction it. In
defiance however of his warning, they did assemble on Friday last, and were all taken into custody and have likewise had to pay a fine of $5 each.22
China Mail obtained a copy of the rules of the Tailor’s Trade Union set up in
1842 and revised in 1848. The tariffs for each item right down to making a seaman’s
mattress were set out and the rules of apprenticeship were also set out in detail. The leaders from among the Chinese organized the collection of fees from stall holders for religious festivals. Two men had been deputed by the Central Market stall holders to raise money to erect and decorate a mat-shed for the autumn
festival in November 1851. One Taiping Shan fish seller who refused to contribute
was dragged out of bed and kicked, rupturing his spleen and causing his death.23 An alternate government was taking shape in which the Chinese elite ruled over those under them, organizing them into groups under the management of kai-fongs based on districts, guilds based on skills or work groups based mainly on where in China the workers had come from. During the administration of Sir George Bonham, 1848–54, E.J Eitel recorded that:
Public spirit among the Chinese vented itself in guild meetings, processions and temple-committees. Among the latter, the committee of the Man-moo
temple … now rose into eminence as a sort of unrecognized and unofficial
local-government board (principally made up of Nam-pak-hong or export merchants). This Committee secretly controlled native affairs, acted as commercial arbitrators, arranged for the reception of mandarins passing through the Colony, negotiated the sale of official titles and formed an unofficial link between the Chinese residents of Hong Kong and the Canton authorities.24
This largely unrecognized parallel government was growing up alongside the colonial administration. Hong Kong in this period did not lag behind where racial prejudice was
concerned. When Yung Wing, a scholar from the Morrison Educational Society School, a Christian and the first Chinese to graduate from Yale College, U.S.A.,
returned to work in Hong Kong, he became an interpreter at the Supreme Court and embarked on a study of British law. However in a remarkably short time, he was hounded out of the colony. His articles of apprenticeship were cancelled and when he applied to become a Freemason, he was blackballed.25 Apart from the deepening prejudice against a Chinese practising law on an equal footing alongside his European colleagues, the other lawyers feared the competition from
a Westernized and well-educated Chinese whom they considered an interloper.
To sum up, between the two communities in this period there were little communication and less trust. Both sides were developing their own sets of guidelines and rules for administering to the needs of those they considered their people. The only person who seems to have been capable of acting as go-between was Daniel Caldwell and his position was seriously damaged by the two government enquiries into his conduct. Other colonies found means of bridging the gap by, for instance in Malaya, the use of the kings of local native states to act as intermediaries. In Hong Kong, such bridges still had to be built and a working
relationship found between the wealthy and influential of the two communities on
which the later prosperity of the colony could be built.
Section III
YEARS OF CONSOLIDATION, 1861–1875
Chapter 15
Victoria City and Its European Inhabitants
In the previous section, only those who died within the specified dates have been
included. In this section, those who lived and made their mark in Hong Kong
between the years 1861 to 1875 have been included, even if they died outside the
period. Too many headstones exist in the Cemetery from these years for as many
of the denizens to be introduced to the reader as was attempted in the first period.
Only those names that are well known or useful as evidence in particular cases will
be included. The figures for this period of people buried in the Cemetery are set
out in the tables below:
Table of Civilians Who Died 1861–75 and Are Buried in the Hong Kong Cemetery
Men Women Children Total Merchants 17 7 6 30
Professionals, clerks 15 4 2 21 Missionaries 0 1 2 3
Technicians, managers 16 6 5 27 Merchant Seamen 84 10 3 97 Tradesmen 8 7 3 18
Hotel and tavern keepers 11 1 0 12
Passers through the port 9 0 0 9
Totals 160 36 21 217
Table of Military Personnel of the Same Period Buried in the Hong Kong Cemetery
Army 55 10 13 78
Navy 23 0 0 23
Support staff 8 7 0 15
American Navy 11 0 0 11
Totals 97 17 13 127
The huge importance of the port in its contributions to the economy of the
island can be seen from the number of officers of the merchant navy who died while
passing through Hong Kong. During these years much was achieved that allowed a later leap into the prosperity and growth which brought Hong Kong into prominence as a major port and city. Among the achievements that are discussed in more detail later are the founding of the Central School in 1861; the introduction of gas lighting in 1865; the establishment of the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank; the
founding of the first City Hall, public gardens and large modern hotel in the city;
the new measures taken by the government to improve the civil service, such as the introduction of the cadets who were given the opportunity to make themselves
fluent in Chinese; and the reform of the police force.
Hong Kong and Its Reputation
However, the decade began on a low note. After the Second Opium War and
through the 1860s, Hong Kong was saddled with a dubious reputation back in Britain:
The praise of old, bestowed on it for its hospitality, is now changed to blame on its extravagance; its ‘celebrated’ races are spoken of as mere betting and gambling; its enterprise as only reckless speculation…. In truth our reputation at home is not enviable at the present time and a man who has returned from China scarcely dares to open his mouth concerning the place where it is popularly believed life consists of ‘cocktails’ tempered by business.1
Hong Kong had been designed to become a model colony, ‘to exhibit before the view of the benighted, so-called semi-civilized pagans of China, the bright example of a Christian Government and a civilized community’.2 This dream, as expressed by the ex-Basel missionary, E.J Eitel, had not yet materialized. In 1864, the China Mail found that Hong Kong’s institutions compared badly with those in China:
It is not that green oasis which some people had hoped it might become and which was to bring to the very doors of a vast Empire, the model of English manners, institutions, and laws. For social order it cannot compare with Canton city. For administration of business it cannot be set up as a model to any Chinese town of equal size; in the detection of crime every China city is superior; while no Celestial port contains, we should say, so many pirates and piratical agents, whom few or no attempts are made to look for. If Hong Kong can in any way be upheld as a model, it is the style of her dwelling houses and in her sanitary aspirations, partly realized in the waterworks and partly unrealized in the drains.3
European architecture and a reservoir at Pokfulam, which piped water into the town, were a far cry from what had been lauded as British intentions for their new city fifteen years earlier. Neither had British justice turned out to be the model it was supposed to be:
In Hong Kong the Chinese man in theory would, ‘taste the sweet delights of trial by jury; that palladium of English freedom’. He would learn what it is to
be an English subject, and know for the first time in his life, the dignity which belongs to the man who can proudly utter, ‘Ego sum civis Romanus’ [I am a citizen of Rome].4
Yet, in practice, as the article had already said:
The failures of Justice in this colony, through bad detective machinery, doubtful interpretation and difficulty in obtaining corroborative circumstantial evidence in the case of Chinese witnesses, has been a disgrace.5
Lawyers’ fees were high, extortion common and the police force deemed ‘useless except for the sake of appearance on the streets’. 6 Yet, during the years leading up to this decade, justice as dispensed in court had won for itself some degree of acceptance among all races. The acquittal of Ah-lum in the case of the arsenic in the bread in spite of strong pressure for a conviction and the conviction of the American pirate, Eli Bloggs, in 1858 had made both an impression of greater even-handedness. In 1862 the Chinese merchants sent Chief Justice Adams a congratulatory address on his retirement.
A new desire to educate the British in Hong Kong about the Chinese way of life began to manifest itself, for example, in Jottings about the Chinese, a series of ninety-five letters detailing the social customs of the Chinese on a wide range of subjects including birth, death, marriage and religion. The letters often filled three columns of the China Mail and continued over a period of three years. The China Mail even confessed to its pro-Chinese stance: ‘We have never shared the feeling that England must be right and have certainly felt that China had much to complain of in our conduct; uttering these sentiments at a time when they were very unfashionable’. 7 The paper also hailed the appearance of the first volume of Chinese classics, translated by Rev. James Legge and published by the London Mission Printing House in April 1861, at the expense of Robert Jardine: ‘Nothing could exceed the noble nature of this proffer’. 8 And some days later the editor wrote at more length:
The days are gone by when it was fashionable to say that it was immaterial to
us what the Chinese thought on ethical subjects. We can no longer afford to be indifferent to the opinions of one-third of the human race on such topics
— opinions held, let us add, that have been held in reverence by them for
thousands of years. We venture to think therefore that to consuls, interpreters
and government servants in this country, whether residing in Hong Kong or the different ports of China, the work under notice is an indispensable adjunct to their library.9
It was considered that perhaps the government of Hong Kong had lessons to learn from the Chinese as well as lessons to teach them. But it is questionable how much this appearance of interest in ‘Things Chinese’ was a general trend and how far it was part of a crusade orchestrated by one man, James Kemp [10/2/4], proprietor and editor of the China Mail. This strapping, parochial schoolmaster from Edinburgh, who ‘astonished the Chinese by diving into deep mountain pools and threatening never to come up again’, had been brought to Hong Kong in 1860 to teach at St. Andrew’s School. When the school folded as a result of competition from the Central School, he switched his energies to the newspaper where according to his obituary he ‘discharged himself with singular ability’. 10 Sadly this rapprochement with things Chinese did not last. The death of Kemp in
November 1866 aged only thirty-four years, together with the downturn of the economy
from 1866 to 1869, seemed to have swung
the public mood away from rapprochement and once again towards the separation of the races.
It is difficult now to conceive how distant and unimportant Hong Kong then seemed in the general scheme of things to people in Britain. The feeling persisted in Hong Kong that colonies were considered by the home authorities to be more trouble than they were worth. In July 1868, the editor of the Daily Press wrote:
The feeling has been very strong in England since 1832 that colonies are of little use to a country, and that the colonies possessed by Great Britain are far more expense to her than they are worth. The exponents of this feeling are almost entirely the leaders and chief men of the present democratic movement, and if the leaders entertain such opinions and adopt such theories,
and have had such influence even under the existing regime, as to force these
theories on the country to some extent and give them practical application, what may we not fear from a Parliament elected by the ignorant followers of such leaders.11
This statement was provoked by the unhappiness caused by the military levy raised to pay in part for the garrison stationed in Hong Kong and the lack of response to the petition to Parliament to have the levy rescinded. Feelings of anger had been sparked because little notice had been taken of the depressed state in which the
colony found itself during the years 1866 to 1872. Hong Kong was struggling for
recognition that it was an asset rather than a liability to the Crown.
Victoria City
The infrastructure of the town, particularly its drainage system, was still rudimentary. In the chapter on Hong Kong in The Treaty Ports of China and Japan published in 1867 by Mayer and Dennys, the authors talk of the necessity
15.3. Hong Kong from the Northwest, c. 1875, Chinese artist. (By courtesy of Martyn Gregory, cat. 77, p. 77.)
of employing an outside coolie ‘to carry away the slops etc. there being no arrangement for underground sewage in connexion with the houses’. 12 Hong Kong was both unsanitary and dirty. In 1866, it was reported that:
A lady cannot walk out during any time of the day without fear of soiling her dress by contact with the abominations which render the upper roads of Hong Kong a disgrace to those whose duty it is to supervise them.13
The article continued by asking why stable manure was allowed to be cast into the public roads of Hong Kong. Another report in China Mail of November 1870 showed that Hong Kong was still in some respects a rural town. The crowing of cocks still disturbed early morning slumbers. Pak Kee was brought before the magistrates as being:
one of those rascally milk-men who persist in driving their cows along
the West Road just at
the time of exercise, to the great terror of ladies and children. He was charged with allowing one of his cows, well known to be vicious, to
15.4. Hong Kong and its harbour, c. 1875, Chinese artist. be so driven whereby a (By courtesy of Martyn Gregory.)
constable was attacked and gored. The driver of the cow admitted she was dangerous and had attacked several people before.14
The man was fined 50 cents with the alternative of one day’s imprisonment. The Chinese quarters suffered much more as far as sanitation was concerned,
as they were more crowded and no adequate attempt had been made to provide
the necessary water supplies or drainage. When traversing Wan Chai, according
to the China Mail,
The stench is so intolerable that early risers who desire to ‘eat’ a few mouthfuls of fresh air on the Race Course … are obliged to canter or drive past at top speed holding their noses for fear of being sickened.15
The papers railed again and again against the inadequacy of the drainage system which,
should it continue in their present state is disgustingly offensive to the olfactory organs and will probably go far to encourage cholera, fever and other diseases to take residence during the summer.16
In one respect, Hong Kong changed for the better during this period. In December 1865, for the first time the streets were lit by gas lighting and those
businesses and houses willing to pay to be connected up, benefited from a bright
and constant source of light. Now there was no reason to insist that the Chinese carry lanterns. The fact that they were still required by law to do so was seen by both races as controlling and suppressive. The pass laws seem to have been put
into effect in a way that caused the maximum inconvenience to those applying for
evening passes that allowed them to be out after dark. A letter from A Passholder to the Daily Press in August 1870, for example, showed that he had good reason for his annoyance:
For the last several days, a great crowd of Chinese was seen assembled within
the precincts of the police compound from 7 am to 4 pm. Many Chinese
complain that they have been waiting successively for two days…. and yet could not obtain a chance to renew their passes. I know this for a fact and am prepared to prove it.17
Noise from building sites was also a continual source of complaint. Stone masons squatting in the street cut and dressed the granite building blocks on site. The editor of the China Mail complained: ‘The din is ceaseless and overpowering rendering anything like steady thinking entirely out of the question’. 18 Others complained bitterly to the press that their sleep was being curtailed. Noise from building sites was not the only kind. A writer to the Daily Press in a letter entitled Hong Kong Noises in April 1870 complained that:
Night after night our streets are invaded by bands of sailors who make the night hideous and regale the ears of respectable citizens with sound which could not
with reason be effected this side of Pandemonium…. Long before he appears,
his singing or swearing has indicated his species and the agile policeman seeks shelter behind some friendly lamp-post until the danger has passed.19
And then before daybreak, noisy young men woke the babies and disturbed the poor invalids with their ‘witching melodies’ played on trumpets as they rode, probably too fast, out to the racecourse.20
Illness
The city was not a healthy place to live. Disease and death could descend on a household very suddenly and many diseases were as yet incurable. Men still died of cholera, dysentery, smallpox and malaria among other diseases. The suddenness with which death could strike is illustrated by the demise of the architect, Frank Darvall Wakeford [16Ci/4/12]. Matilda Sharp [11B/4/10] wrote to her mother-in-law about their friend in July 1865:
You will be shocked to hear of the death of poor Mr. Wakeford. He had
been poorly for some days … on Monday I sent him soup and jelly. At 2 am his landlord heard a strange noise above and went upstairs and found poor
Wakeford on the floor groping for his bed. He saw he was unconscious and
at once sent off for two doctors. At five Edmund was summoned and he arrived just ten minutes before he died. Poor fellow, he came to see us on Sunday week and was in such good health.
Law and Order in the Colony
In the 1860, the European settlers in Hong Kong still feared for the safety of their lives and property. Just one year previously, the editor of the China Mail suggested
the formation of a Rifle Club, giving the following as his reason:
The riots at Singapore in 1854, the rising of the Chinese against Sir James Brooke, the horrors of the Indian Massacre at Jiddah have abundantly shown that no European Community in the East can ever consider itself entirely free from danger and that apparent security may prove the very source of riot and bloodshed.21
Rumours proliferated of Chinese plots to take revenge for their defeat in the
Second Opium War: ‘A real or supposed plot to massacre the Europeans and loot
the foreign houses on the island’ was unearthed in November 1866.22 It involved a force of thirty thousand men that was said to be about to descend upon the island. One rumour involved re-enacting the gunpowder plot by means of a tunnel under the cathedral by which the governor, the bishop and the congregation could all be blown up. 23 The massacres in Tientsin in July 1870 further alarmed the small European minority, making it increasingly fearful for its own safety.
The police in Hong Kong took no responsibility for what happened outside
the narrow confines of Central Victoria and Queen’s Road and, when venturing further than Wan Chai, men went in fear of robbers. The two highest roads, Caine
Road and Robinson Road, were still considered unsafe and a European could not walk easily alone in the Chinese parts of Victoria: ‘The coolies in the street are the most ruffianly looking lot not pleasant to meet in a by-road, alone and unarmed…. It is still downright dangerous to venture on the hills alone without the moral influence of a revolver’. 24 Expatriates carried loaded pistols by day and slept with them under their pillows by night. Lucilla Sharp described in a letter home how she had learned to load the pistol belonging to her sister, Matilda Sharp:
I see that she carries her pistol with her whenever we go out for a walk or ride, quite as a matter of course. The other Sunday
15.5. Headstone in memory of Matilda and evening, as we were starting for Granville Sharp, d. 1893 and 1899.
Chapel, I was amused to find myself asking her ‘Have you got the pistol?’ as
cheerfully as if I had said, ‘Have you got the hymn book’.25
Neither were the expatriates nor the police at all reticent about using these
weapons. In May 1869 a poor coolie was caught by a police constable in a state of
undress bathing in a stream on Robinson Road. The man caught up his clothes
and made a bolt for it, throwing a stone at the police constable as he ran off. The
defendant made straight for the Peak, passing Granville Sharp’s bungalow. ‘The excitement must have been considerably heightened inasmuch as the runner
for “bare” life was more than once fired at by the Surveyor General [Wilberforce Wilson] and by Mr E. Sharp [11B/4/11] as he scampered up the hill’. 26 Ernest Sharp was a solicitor and a nephew of Granville Sharp [11B/4/10], the well-known businessman and husband of Matilda quoted earlier. This incident happened on Sunday afternoon at about three o’clock. The pursued man was finally caught near the Flagstaff, having by then ‘put on his inexpressibles’. He
was taken to court and fined $2 or seven days’ hard labour. To us, it would be
unthinkable for two senior Englishmen to take pot shots at some poor fleeing Chinese miscreant. The light-hearted approach to the topic in the China Mail also
intimates that shooting at a Chinese was considered an affair of minor importance.
But then, shooting guns seems to have been a fairly common occurrence. The Portuguese living in Mosque Gardens were said to have been in the habit of ‘amusing themselves at the unseasonable hour of 11 p.m. by discharging their revolvers out of their windows’.27
Even a trip to Pokfulam was considered an unsafe undertaking, ‘unless a tolerably strong party of foreigners are together, while those who spend the night in Kowloon are looked upon as more venturesome than wise’. 28 In January 1866, the China Mail railed against ‘the disgraceful state of public insecurity to which the lives and property of the inhabitants of Hong Kong are now reduced. Within the last three few weeks, personal assaults sufficient in number to cause a panic in most other colonies have occurred’. 29 Two of the victims of these attacks lie in the Hong Kong Cemetery. Wilmot Wadesdon Holworthy [13/1/7], deputy assistant superintendent of the military stores, was brutally murdered and robbed of his watch on the Peak near the Gap on 24 January 1869. A second victim,
G.W. Yanceystone [37/7/30], confronted a party of burglars numbering twelve to twenty men armed with spears and swords, and furnished with torches at his bungalow in Kowloon. Yancey, as he was called, was an American from Danville,
308 Forgotten Souls
Tennessee employed by the Union Dock Company. According to the account in the China Mail of the inquest, ‘He was a great fool to have stayed and fought as he did and had it not been that he was afraid they would
run off with his girl, he could have made his escape’.30 His Hakka girl successfully fled via a back window. A third victim was a brave policeman, James Mahoney, whose resting place in the Cemetery has disappeared. He lost his life when a small army of fifty to sixty armed Chinese desperadoes bent on robbery descended on the house of a rich
Chinese in Shau Kei Wan close to the police
station. Mahoney, who went to investigate,
was speared through heart and the two Sikh policemen who went with him were badly wounded. The robber band escaped undetected.
These kinds of incidents did nothing to allay the fears of the ‘dangerous classes’, and helped to provide justification for the fact that the concepts of individual rights enshrined in the English Common Law were being given less consideration in Hong Kong than back in Britain. For example, six coolies brought before the magistrate, Charles May, were charged with being suspicious persons, one having been previously branded and deported.31 May, finding no ordinance which provided for the punishment of those harbouring branded men, discharged the coolies. His action was very unfavourably compared to Mr. Goodlake’s conduct of a similar case. The four men brought before him ‘were all properly punished without any preliminary dissertation upon the rights of the subject. And which
course, we would ask, is likely to have the most effect with the dangerous classes?’32
Further, it was clear to all that court proceedings did not present a level playing field. As the China Mail pointed out, the arrangements concerning where the accused should stand highlighted the fact that the Europeans were of higher status. European defendants did not appear in the dock, described as a ‘wooden trough’, but remained seated beside the magistrate on the bench. The editor of the China Mail drew the line at Europeans being asked to stand in the trough, but asked why they should not at least be required to stand in the body of the court.33
Victoria City and Its European Inhabitants 309
Safety at Sea
The sea was no safer than the land. During these years, a number of ships fell prey to pirates. On 23 April 1862, Captain Thomas Browne [11B/4/2] died defending his schooner, Eagle, from a piratical attack near Green Island in the harbour. He is described in his epitaph as: ‘Brave in spirit, gentle in manners, amiable and benevolent in disposition, and upright and manly in character’. The unlucky captain, from Plymouth, Devonshire, had only assumed command of the Eagle the day before. The man at the wheel was shot dead by the boarding pirates and
Captain Browne mortally wounded. The first mate escaped by jumping overboard
and concealing himself under water near the chains until the pirates had departed, taking with them everything of value they could lay their hands on. The brave mate then brought the schooner back to Hong Kong. Among the pirates was a British man dressed as a Chinese who was recognized as Fokey Bill, well known in the low grog-houses of Tai Ping Shan.34 He was not the only sailor who ‘helped out’ on pirate ships. According to the Illustrated London News of January 1867, many of the river pirates were said to be Europeans in disguise.35 In 1863, the
government offered a $1,000 reward for information leading to the capture of
English and American sailors on board piratical vessels but there were no takers.
Another tragedy occurred when an American ship, one day out from Hong Kong on the way to Japan, was boarded by pirates in light winds. Captain Benjamin P. Howes [37/2/14] of the schooner Lubra was shot dead in his cabin, where he was seated with his arms round his wife and two children, one only two months old. The children’s amah was also badly wounded and she died in hospital soon after. A barrel of gunpowder was opened by the pirates and a fuse leading into the barrel set alight. It was hoped that the ensuing explosion would leave no trace of the ship or its crew. Luckily the fuse burnt out before making contact with the gunpowder and the vessel was brought back to Hong Kong. In the subsequent trial, poor Mrs. Howes, whose baby, Genevieve, had by then also died, gave evidence ‘notwithstanding her evident weakness’.36
To a Chinese spectator from the mainland, Hong Kong had never appeared in any other light than as ‘a refuge for bad characters by land and sea, … where they can divide the spoils of many a piracy and repair their vessels for fresh exploits’. 37 Many precautions had to be taken against vessels being seized by gangs of pirates posing as passengers. When Isabella Bird embarked on the SS Kin Kiang for Canton in 1878 she described how the noisy mass of Chinese humanity was:
practically imprisoned below, for there is a heavy iron grating securely padlocked over each exit, and a European, ‘armed to the teeth’, stands by each
ready to shoot the first man who attempts to force it. In this saloon there is a stand of six rifles, and, as we started, a man carefully took the sheaths off the bayonets and loaded the firearms with ball cartridges.38
Piracy in South China was a family affair. The whole family, probably of Tanka or Hoklo origins, lived on board like ordinary fishermen but, when the occasion presented itself, would combine together under a chief to loot some ship reported to be carrying rich pickings. All members of the family would be involved and the grandmother, if necessary, would lend a hand with throwing stinkpots. In
fact pirates were undistinguishable from the ordinary fishermen who could pass
with ease from one occupation to the other. This made their capture much more difficult. According to a story in an article in the China Mail, some British sailors were in pursuit of pirates who had taken to the hills. Mistakenly, they picked up the first person they met, an honest farmer. The sailors took him back to the ship, cut off the poor man’s queue, rope-ended him, and then pitched him into the sea. After this treatment he felt he had nothing to lose and took to piracy.39 In China, only criminals who had been found guilty of a crime were deprived of their queue, so its lack would mark him out among his peers as a criminal. The same article described how
Chui Apak may come into the harbour of Victoria red-handed with his decks
cumbered with heavy guns and his hold filled with spoil that he had pirated
not twenty miles off; he may go ashore, dispose of his goods, purchase ammunition, lay in provisions and make sail on a new piratical cruise.
In July 1866, for example, Lane Crawford was advertising for sale in its weekly auction among other things salad oil, two hundred boxes of Windsor soap, twelve Enfield rifles, one hundred other rifles, two hundred muskets and twenty-seven long swords for sale. There was nothing to stop the agents of the pirates from buying lots of guns like this one and handing them over. The fear of piracy led in this period to the increased regulation of visiting native shipping.
But the pirates were not the only danger to be feared at sea. Poor navigation, lack of reliable charts and ferocious typhoons made the outcome of any journey undertaken to or from Hong Kong uncertain. Matilda Sharp and her amah accompanied her husband, Granville, to Tourane, now known as Da Nang in Vietnam. He had been sent there on business by his bank. The Thebes, which was carrying them, struck an uncharted reef and was shipwrecked off the coast of Hainan Island. Matilda and her husband took to the lifeboats. Matilda had to abandon her trunk, with the blue flounced silk dress and seven other muslin dresses, to the waiting crowds of locals, not to mention gloves, mantles and collars she had brought to impress the French admiral at their destination. However she was determined to be properly dressed even when shipwrecked:
I hesitated about putting on my hoop skirt [crinoline] — it seemed absurd
to think of such a thing in a shipwreck, but I had been looking like a closed umbrella all day, so with amah’s help, I popped it on and felt myself once more a presentable object.40
They were lucky to be within one long night’s row of a port, where they took a passage in a very uncomfortable local junk back to Hong Kong. All the survivors of the shipwreck slept together in one knot, with Matilda in the middle, on the
deck floor with their swords drawn and laid beside each man, for they had no trust
in the character of their new Chinese captain. It took them eight days to reach Hong Kong.
Poor Elizabeth Abbe [20/3/1] was the wife of a doctor from Boston, Massachusetts. She undertook a sea voyage for health reasons after a long illness, but died from exposure on the 4 April 1863. She had been saved from the wreck of the Hotspur on 19 February, but had endured twenty-seven days in an open boat.41 Again, a typhoon in June 1869 engulfed two steamers on their way to Hong Kong from Swatow, the P. & O. steamer, Corea, and one of Douglas Lapraik’s fleet of vessels, Chanticleer. They both disappeared leaving no trace behind. Lapraik had an imposing monument built of Peterhead marble to the memory of the commander, George Lungley Sargant, and another of his captains, Hugh Cowan, who happened to be on board, as well as to the officers and crew of the ship [37/2/5]. Matilda Sharp wrote about the disaster:
Last Thursday week, Mr. Noble went on board the ‘Corea’ for a three-day trip to Foochow. That night there was a typhoon, trees uprooted, verandahs blown in, gardens decimated and since that night the ‘Corea’ and the ‘Chanticleer’, both steamers bound for Foochow have not been heard of. I know intimately the Captain of the ‘Corea’ and his wife. She was a newly
married young creature and was taking her first China trip.42
It seemed that there was still no safe escape route for the thousand odd expatriates who made up Hong Kong’s society.
Some things seem not to have changed. The furious driving and riding continued to arouse the ire of letter writers: ‘I have noticed with regret the impropriety, not to say utter recklessness of certain fast young men in driving furiously through the crowded and narrow streets without the slightest regard for the lives of the citizens’. The writer deplores the fact that ‘persons forget themselves so far as not only endanger the lives of their fellow creatures but also while doing so make fun of using their whips rather freely on the backs of the inoffensive and helpless natives’. He continued: ‘Even worse he had seen a decently dressed young man who, without any cause or reason, inflict with his whip a severe cut on a Chinese female with a very decent appearance’. 43 Furious driving was the cause of at least one death. George Mather Neill [20/17/6] from
Edinburgh was a clerk aged twenty-five working for the German firm of Pustau & Co. In November 1867, he was killed in a nasty carriage accident when his untried
horse refused to obey instructions and, losing his temper, Neill began whipping it, causing it to bolt. The carriage came to rest against the trunk of a tree and he
was thrown out and died soon after from his injuries. It was puzzling to find the
inscription on his headstone in German until it was discovered that Pustau & Co. had taken care of the funeral arrangements and the headstone.
The abuse of alcohol still plagued society at most levels of society. The
China Mail, in January 1871, described the kind of drunken behaviour that so
embarrassed the expatriates:
We observed a little knot of interested Celestials gathered round a sedan
chair this morning, not many yards from the Central Police Station, and were
astonished to find the object of their amusement to be an intoxicated bobby [policeman]. He was of course European, and was cutting a variety of capers
which would have done credit to a circus troupe — getting into the chair nose foremost, landing in a straddling position on the chair poles, … raising a row generally and elevating the respect for foreign rule in the minds of the Chinese onlookers.44
Indulgence in alcohol was not confined to the lower levels. A poem published in the Hong Kong Punch in 1872 made fun of an encounter between a member of the new Scottish contingent of policemen and a party of young revellers coming out of the new Hong Kong Club late at night.
The Constable upon his beat His round was going thro’. He gains the Club and crosses o’er
Unflinchingly and slow.
The tipsy song comes nearer now One moment more and there before The Scot’s expectant sight, A noisy crew came full in view Of youngsters clad in white.
Which spectacle so grieved our friend
That thus he spake outright.
‘Whaur gang ye at sic times o’ nicht,
Awakin a’ the toon. Dinna ye ken it’s Sabbath morn; Folk’ll be risin soon. Gae hame an if ye wull hae songs, Pick oot a Sunday tune.
A Temperance Society was begun in October 1867 and met at the rear of the
yard of the government plumber, Andrew Millar. Although attendance was rather meagre, the meetings were reported on at length in a way to cause maximum amusement to the newspaper’s audience and the efforts of Rev. Pearson, the Scottish minister who presided, were not taken seriously.45
The Relationships between the Expatriates and the Chinese in Hong Kong
An extraordinary degree of prejudice and lack of consideration towards the needs of the Chinese majority continued to exist and even deepen in Hong Kong during these years and this was met by deep dislike on the Chinese side. Bishop Raimondi, the founder of St. Joseph’s College who is buried in the Catholic Cemetery, was reported by the Daily Press as saying in 1870 that it was his belief that the Chinese hated, perhaps even more than ever, whatever was European. The editor continued by saying that this assertion was backed by others whose opinions were equally worthy of respect.46 When A.B. Freeman-Mitford was passing through Hong Kong in April 1865 on his way to become an attache in Peking, he described the racial mix in Victoria as he saw it:
Hong Kong presents perhaps one of the oddest jumbles in the whole world. It is neither fish, flesh, fowl, nor good red herring. The Government and principal people are English — the population are Chinese — the police are Indians — the language is bastard English mixed with Cantonese — the currency is the Mexican dollar, and the elements no more amalgamate than the oil and vinegar in a salad. The Europeans hate the Chinese and the latter return the compliment with interest. In the streets, Chinamen, Indian policemen, Malays, Parsees and half-castes jostle up against
Europeans, naval and military officers, Jack-tars, soldiers, and loafers of all
denominations. Constantinople, Smyrna and Cairo show more picturesque and varied crowds, but nothing can be more grotesque than the street life of Hong Kong.47
‘Grotesque’ seems a strange choice of word to use when describing street life. It is
defined in the dictionary as ‘shockingly incongruous or inappropriate’. But perhaps
it describes the feelings of the Europeans towards the bustling crowded streets of Victoria where there was a strong likelihood of being jostled by locals going about their business. Rev. James Legge, in his lecture on the colony of Hong
Kong given in the City Hall in November 1872, also talked of the Chinese hatred
of foreigners. He contrasted the feelings of the Japanese and the Chinese towards
the Europeans: ‘We have given the Japanese little reason to do anything but love
us, while we have given China much reason to fear us and hate us’. Legge put the
difference down to opium: ‘The one thing which has embittered and fettered our
intercourse with China and will continue to do so, so long as it exists, has no place in our intercourse with Japan’.48
An article in the China Mail in May 1866 shows something of the more extreme of the prevailing attitudes ‘on the question of the “rights” as possessed by Asiatics’. This was a question, according to the editor, ‘on which most men have practically made up their minds but which they dislike to discuss’. The article began with the assertion that ‘One human being is as good as another before the
law. We make it our boast that we do not have one law for the rich and another for
the poor’. But it goes on to say:
Assuming that the Chinaman was socially and intellectually the equal of the European, there are still many reasons for refusing him that legal equality which his admirers would claim for him. Brought up in a school which ignores truth as a virtue; belonging to a race which has ever shown itself nationally untrustworthy in its intercourse with Europeans; possessing ideas
respecting human life which remove one of the most efficient checks on crime
which our code of belief imposes, cruel in disposition to a scarcely credible extent, and moreover in the case of Hong Kong natives, sprung from a class
so low, that the very Chinese themselves regard them as the offscourings of
the country, we cannot see why the word of one of these (for oaths are not even binding on his conscience) should be accepted as of equal value with the
assertions of an educated and respectable European…. We do not advocate
inhumanity or injustice but we do say ‘rule an Asiatic race on principles which it understands’, … we do not hesitate to ascribe the past lawlessness of Hong Kong to the principle ‘equality’.49
This sounds like a classic statement of the ‘us’ and ‘them’ mentality discussed by Edward Said in his book, Orientalism. Nevertheless, some articles found in the local papers, bewailing the current prejudices, do show the beginnings of a change in attitude.
The period from 1861 to 1875 saw a further drawing apart of the Europeans
and the Chinese. This division was happening literally in the separating of European and Chinese living space. For example, in March 1866 a petition was
sent to William Mercer, the acting governor, asking that the Chinese village of
Shek Tong Tsui (formerly spelled Shek Dong Dsui) situated immediately above Mosque Terrace be ‘destroyed or removed to some more suitable portion of the island’. The petition gave as a reason that ‘numerous attacks made on adjacent houses occupied by foreigners were known to have been perpetrated by villagers’. 50 Further reasons were that the neighbourhood was disturbed by the noise of quarrelling, and of their pigs and barking dogs, and that the village was entirely
without drainage or toilets and filthy beyond description causing a stench of the
foulest kind to pervade the air. The environment was not improved by the only ostensible occupation of the people of the village, which was the raising of pigs and the collection and preparation of manure, both of the human and pig variety to be sent to the mainland as fertilizer. The manure was spread in the open air near the houses to dry. Finally, the petition pointed out the fact that the village would form a strategically dangerous vantage ground for the Chinese, if they should one day rise up against the foreigners. This point illustrates once again the fear of the Chinese masses, or ‘the dangerous class’ as they were termed, which stood in the way of trust developing between the races. The petition, published in the China Mail with the strong approval of the editor, was signed by 140 foreigners from all walks of life. Most of the minority groups had added signatures. There were twenty Portuguese signatories, nine Parsees including Dorabjee Nowrojeee and D. Ruttonjee, four Jews including the Cohens, Belilios and Arthur Sassoon.
Eleven Germans also signed including Maximilian Fischer, Woldemar Nissen,
G. Overbeck, the Austrian consul who worked for Dent & Co. Six Americans
signed including W.C. Hunt and James Bridges Endicott. Besides these, William
Soames, head of the P. & O., and C. Bertrand, the head of the French shipping line Messageries Maritimes, whose daughter, Alice Bertrand [40/4/4] is buried in the Cemetery, were also signatories, as were Francis Lane and D.R. Crawford of Lane Crawford. The signatories ranged in occupation from the top-flight
merchants through bank managers to army officers, doctors and lawyers, and on
down to shopkeepers and auctioneers. The list included many well-known names and gave the feeling that the expatriate opinion was, on this occasion, unanimous. The editor urged action in the strongest terms. The village disappeared soon after and was presumably moved to where the modern Shek Tong Tsui is to be found, far to the west of the area above the mosque. During these same years,
some well-off businessmen like Granville Sharp and Emmanuel Raphael Belilios
were beginning to put even more distance between themselves and the masses by building bungalows in the cooler Peak District.
The Chinese seem to have had to bear a good deal of petty annoyance. In a letter to the China Mail written in September 1870, for example, R. asked why the Chinese were being chased out of the public gardens when there was no legislation to forbid them access:
A group of four or five respectable-looking Chinese was standing quietly to
hear the dulcet strains of music, when a European policeman seeing them,
cried out ‘Weilo!’ whereupon the poor Chinese retired slowly without a word
of remonstrance, followed closely by the energetic constable down to the gates…. The Police Authorities ought to know their duty better, and must take care not to treat respectable Chinese with insolence indiscriminately.51
It was claimed that the Chinese community during these years was regulated rather than governed. They were left almost entirely to their own devices in the Chinatowns to find what solutions they could find to the problems of water, sanitation, personal protection, and health, all of which would now be considered the concern of the government. A letter in the Daily Press from W. referred to yet another ordinance for the regulation of the Chinese. He professed himself to be astonished at the nature of government he saw existing. He asked ‘whether it might not be as well if, after a number of years during which we have been endeavouring very futilely to regulate the Chinese, we at last made some bona
fide attempt at governing them’. W. attempted to define the difference between
governing and regulating:
the former being open, plain and distinct; the latter hidden, confused and
undefined — a kind of shoving, a disagreeable element out of sight instead
of a simple and fair endeavour to meet the exigencies and responsibilities of ruling over 100,000 of our fellow men. If we are to commence making distinctions of class in Government, I should like to know where we are to end. Perhaps bye and bye an ordinance will be passed for ‘regulating’ the Americans, the Prussians, the French or other foreigners in the Colony. It would be quite as logical and probably less pernicious than an ordinance for ‘regulating’ the Chinese.52
The accepted dictum of these years that the Chinese were liars precluded the bond of trust and friendship forming between the races. This cliched belief was repeated so often in books and newspapers that it had assumed the weightiness of a ‘truth’ in the minds of the later Victorians. For example, the Daily Press could
write the following in an editorial on the subject of craft guilds in July 1871:
The striking and melancholy feature in the existing condition of Chinese life is to be found in its predominant characteristic of untruth…. The masses live a grand falsehood from day to day: the educated classes prove their superior culture by complicating and interweaving falsehoods in a judicious manner.
That is all the difference. Of verbal truth there is none to be relied on. Indeed,
even where there is honesty of purpose, the customary untruth seems to be the only possible mode of expressing it. It is no exaggeration to say that a
Chinaman always has a fixed lie with which to tell the truth.53
This kind of dictum deepened the wedge which held the two races apart and was even used as a reason for the desire to keep the distance between the two races. When Dolly made her Plea for European Schools at Hong Kong, for example, she asked what parents could trust their young to a school: ‘Where children might
imbibe / The morals of the Orient / And at truth and honour gibe?’54 The often repeated disbelief in the ability of the Chinese to act with truth and honour seems doubly strange when at the same time every firm of any size happily trusted its comprador to the extent of using him as the company banker, with remarkably few instances of compradors absconding with the company’s cash.
For whatever reasons, the prejudice and aggressive feelings against the majority living in Hong Kong turned on too many occasions into violent behaviour against those Chinese the Europeans came into contact with. The most common crime committed by Europeans, after being drunk and disorderly and refusing to pay the chair coolies, was assaulting a Chinese. That this kind of physical violence
was largely condoned is seen by the derisory amounts which the offenders were fined, often as low as fifty cents, about the same amount that chair coolies were fined for carrying passengers without licence or for similar misdemeanours. Yet
the discrepancy in income between the two groups was huge.
William Lowndes [23/12/2], who was listed in 1867 as assistant secretary at
the Hong Kong Club, was a keen member of the Victoria Regatta Club and also
one of the best shots in the colony, usually managing to come fourth or fifth in the Rifle Association shooting matches. He was summoned by Lum Aping for assault.
He admitted to punching the club servant in the right eye for no reason and was fined $1.55 Alexander Levy [23/10/11] came to Hong Kong to work for the Jewish firm of C.C. Cohen & Co, but must have been a Christian as he was married and buried by the Protestant Church. In 1869, Levy, who was staying at the house of Charles Cohen, founder member of the firm, was summoned to court on charges
of assault by Cohen’s boy. The boy had answered back when told to clean the verandah: ‘Suppose you no likee my, more better you catchee another boy’. This reply to an order got him four blows to the face. The boy was labelled ‘saucy’ by the magistrate who threatened that he would remember the boy’s face if he ever
came before the magistrate again. Levy was fined a mere 25 cents.56 N.B. Dennys [18/8/10], editor of China Mail at that time, was summoned for illegally entering
a house in Wellington Street and smashing their chatties, the earthenware crocks
that held the charcoal on which the Chinese cooked soups and stews. The cook house faced the China Mail offices and Dennys complained that, from the doors and windows of the houses opposite, there constantly issued dense volumes of smoke accompanied by a strong smell of garlic, and that his family who lived over
the office had been made sick more than once. He was fined $1. He countered
by saying: ‘At the moment of writing this, three of the smoke-houses … are still in
full blast. We confess to an inability to suggest a remedy except by force which
is illegal.’57 Another case involved the clerk of Andrew Millar, the government plumber. The clerk, Jose Senna, refused to pay his grocery bill. According to the Chinese shopkeeper, the sum had been asked for over and over again. The irate shopkeeper called him ‘a dammed rogue’. He was taken to court by Senna for
using strong language and fined $5, the same amount as Millar had paid earlier for assaulting his chair coolie.58 In March 1869, Thomas R. McBean [23/9/7], bailiff at the Summary Court and interpreter in Hindi, Portuguese and Japanese, was summoned by an elderly Chinese lady whom he had beaten and pushed down the stairs of the courthouse. She had been so forcefully ejected from court because she had prompted a witness.59
There seem to have been at this time not only a continuing prejudice against the Chinese but also a lack of concern in their welfare as part of the community. Rather than being governed in the accepted sense, they were regulated in such a way as ensured an increasing distance between them and the expatriates. In February 1868, the editor of Daily Press wrote:
There are the mass of foreign residents who consider the ‘natives’ and all appertaining thereto, entirely unworthy of a moment’s attention. The reproduction of a European life in China, so far as that is feasible, is avowedly their object while they are here, and, when they go away, the people amongst whom they have spent the best years of their life and out of whom directly or indirectly they have made their fortunes, pass from their minds as completely as the waves of a sea through which they have sailed.
He goes on to ask: ‘Are they blind to the beauty of habits and customs superior to their own, because of mental narrowness and the mist of prejudice through which they view the world?’60 In some ways the lack of governance and isolation from
the expatriate life benefited the now substantial group of wealthy and respectable
Chinese merchants that headed their community. It allowed the merchant elite to build up their own institutions to oversee the care of their community. For
example, the District Watch was founded in 1869 to give a level of security to
respectable Chinese and their property which the police force of the time had
failed to provide. Even more noteworthy was the founding of the Tung Wah Hospital in 1870 to oversee the care of the sick and destitute among the Chinese population. This was followed in 1873 by the first Chinese newspaper and in 1878
by the founding of the Po Leung Kuk to take over the care of women and orphans.
Chapter 16 Hong Kong Society in This Period
Cultural and Leisure Activities
By the 1870s, there had been some attempts to ‘form combinations for the purpose
of affording amusement of an intellectual and refined nature’. The Daily Press wrote with enthusiasm about the delightful choral concerts, the amateur theatrical performances, the establishment of a croquet club and the rumoured revival of the Debating Society. The Royal Italian Opera was giving concerts in Macau
and Hong Kong around 1866–67 and proving very popular. Madame Bouche,
the soprano who played Violetta in Verdi’s La Traviata, ‘was as usual hailed with rapturous applause when she appeared’. Edward Marsden Martin [38/6/1] from New York, the chief engineer of the Hong Kong, Canton and Macao Steam boat Fire Dart, had married Madame Bouche in 1866. Their second baby, Stella Bouche Martin [7/30/7], was born in 1869 but like her brother only survived her
birth by a few hours. Edward himself died of consumption at the Hotel d’Europe where the family had been staying. Signor Hugo Pellico, from the same Italian
opera company, settled in Wyndham Street as a teacher of vocal and instrumental
music, and won much esteem as director of the Choral Society. The China Mail reported in December 1868 that his rich and powerful baritone thrilled the audiences. But all too soon,
in March 1871, he succumbed to smallpox aged
only twenty-eight and was buried in the Roman Catholic Cemetery. He must have had many admirers as his monument is one of the largest in the Catholic Cemetery. The Daily Press highlighted what it saw as the importance of such cultural endeavours, writing:
All amusement of a rational nature is an important element in any community as a means of bringing together in friendly intercourse and thereby dissipating the prejudices and asperities which must necessarily arise where opportunities to meet on a common footing are of a limited nature.1
But such was the nature of Hong Kong’s society that these efforts were seldom well supported or long-lasting. In January 1868 the Daily Press reported on proposals to start a philosophical society while lamenting:
It is not exactly creditable to this colony that no society here of any sort disconnected from that side of life, which may be described metaphorically as the fleshpots of Egypt, is able to keep the breath in its body. The Asiatic Society has a branch at Shanghai, but none in Hong Kong. In the Northern settlement until very recently a debating society has lived and flourished. Here to the shame of the people who have let it die, our society is dead. The only public library in the town
has long suffered in a decline and has now retired to hospital, so as to speak
and the most intellectual society formed for the purposes of pleasure, and now existing in Hong Kong, is devoted to the representation of farces and burlesques on the stage of the Lusitano Theatre.2
In fact, Hong Kong still had the feeling of a hick cowboy town with little respect for the arts. The editor of the Daily Press could write in 1866: ‘There is probably no place on earth’s surface inhabited by any manner of civilized men, which lives so utterly without fine arts as the Colony of Hong Kong’. 3 In a place where the members of one coterie could not be seen at the same gathering as those of another, it was very difficult to keep the broader-based societies and associations going. The Hong Kong Association, which was supposed to exert pressure on the home authorities to take more notice of Hong Kong’s point of view, failed for lack of support. Theophilus Gee Linstead must have felt depressed when it fell to his lot to disband both the Volunteer movement and the Hong Kong Association of which he was secretary, for lack of support. Only seventeen men out of a membership of seventy could be bothered to attend the final meeting and even that small number could not agree among themselves on the steps to take. Inclusive events like the St. Andrew’s Day dinner, to which any Scot in the territory had right of entry, came under fire. An article dated from November 1863 stated that: ‘Many who join in the annual festival will never speak to each other throughout the year, and there is altogether an atmosphere of sham and silliness about St. Andrew’s dinners’. The article continued: ‘The sooner this yearly sham is abolished the better’.4 The dinner was in fact one of the few democratic events which continued to survive. In April 1870, the Daily Press painted a very dull picture of life in Hong Kong:
A trying climate, limited resources for amusement, absence of home associations, a listless half life, where the greatest happiness of the greatest number consists, during many months of the year, in going to sleep and forgetting their weariness and the numerous vexations with which we are beset.5
The disinterest in culture seems to have continued unchanged at least through to 1902. The poem written by Dolly entitled Degenerate Hong Kong could equally well have applied to this earlier period:
Away with books! Let Sport and Dollars rule;
What need of Culture? We, who went to school, Learned all required of us to fill a place,
In bank or business on the office stool.
‘Degenerate’? Why use so harsh a word?
From gaining dollars who would be deterred By wish for knowledge, yielding no return For time and trouble uselessly incurred.6
Culture then appears to have played a small part in the life of the colony where according to the editor of China Mail, ‘stunning races, jolly picnics and A1 theatricals … seem to form the only relief from the one object most men have in view — money-making’.7 One such picnic given by Dr. Cane and C.H. Whyte, the magistrate whose wife is buried in the Roman Catholic Cemetery, was described by Matilda Sharp in a letter home:
It was an immense affair, over eighty guests and three hundred coolies, so
you can fancy the imposing show we all made as we wound our way up the sides of the Peak. The dinner was set up by the French Hotel and was all tasteful and elegant. It was great fun for the long table was set out in the open air and completely encircled by fanciful Chinese lanterns …
We adjourned to the sanatorium,
a large building close by that had been built and intended for our sick soldiers, … now it is only used at picnics. There we had some merry dancing to the music of the band.8
One’s place in society was still to a large extent dictated by the size of one’s income. The rich still led very comfortable lives. Dinners were luxurious even at home. Matilda wrote in a letter:
You would have smiled to see us sit down to dinner at seven, Granville at one end of the table
and I at the other; a servant behind each.… First soup, then fish, then six dishes, then various puddings, then dessert dishes and wine.
One or two boys would accompany their master out to dinner parties and stand behind his chair and replenish his plate as course followed course. The Sharps’ No. 1 boy wore the following livery:
black satin shoes with soles one inch thick, blue hose tied at the knee,
breeches very large of black or blue stuff, tied ditto and a blue kind of smock.
Pigtail ornamented with silk at the end and his head crowned by a black silk cap with a red tassel.9
Sport consisted mainly of cricket, shooting, rowing and swimming and of course, exceeding all others in pleasure and excitement, the annual winter horseracing at Happy Valley. A little of the excitement of the race meeting is captured in this description of road to the racecourse on a race meeting day:
In the beautiful valley of Wong-nei-chong is gathered a crowd which is truly
cosmopolitan, and for this element alone will compare with any assembly in the world gathered to witness an English Race Meeting…. The three
16.6. Horseracing at Happy Valley, 1860s. (By courtesy of Wattis Fine Arts.)
days’ grand pic-nic, which is participated in by high and low, great and small, European and Chinese, is a ‘Derby’, which only such places as Hong Kong can afford. Early on Tuesday morning, the holiday dresses begin to make their appearance upon the streets and by twelve the stream of anxious pleasure-seekers flowing along Queen’s Road, was a sight indeed. Every imaginable conveyance man has invented, ... is today pressed into service: sedan chairs of every build and shape, with two bearers, three bearers and four bearers; some in the dirtiest and most ragged of coolie attire, others in clean uniforms; basket traps of the most rickety appearance drawn by mere frames of horseflesh and crowded with three or four passengers; dog carts and phaetons with horses of the neatest and most attractive appearance; handsome waggonettes with their stylish pair and coachmen and footmen in livery; horse-boys and grooms, foot passengers and coolies heavily laden with
boxes and baskets which in appearance are suggestive of tiffin; all shouting
for a clear way, all crowding and nudging and pushing…all steadily making their way towards the Happy Valley — happy this day indeed!10
The end of the race meeting was celebrated with a grand ball to which those who had made it in society were invited.
In Victorian England, Sundays were marked with ritual solemnity and regular attendance at church conveyed the stamp of respectability on a family. But in Hong Kong, churchgoing appears to have been treated with a certain levity. On those occasions when they attended church, some people took their dogs with them. A letter to the Daily Press asked pointedly whether St. John’s Cathedral was a house of God or a house of dogs and suggested that the owners only attended the service ‘for the purpose of exhibiting their canine pets’.11 In 1865, even the staid, chapel-going Matilda Sharp saw nothing untoward in taking her dog, Frisk, to her sister’s wedding in the Union Chapel. In a letter describing her wedding, Lucilla wrote home:
I must not forget to mention that Frisk went to church as third best man with a bright pink ribbon around his neck and his woolly coat washed to the last
degree of fleecy whiteness. Mrs. Brown told me it quite upset her gravity to
see him come walking in the marriage procession just behind Matty, and so grave and staid in his pace as if to be evidently fully aware of his position.12
Social Distinctions
The class distinctions that made fraternizing for the sake of culture so difficult appear now to be accepted as a fait accompli. The distinction in particular between merchants and tradesmen was more rigidly set. The status of each individual who attended St. John’s Cathedral was made plain by the seating
arrangements. When in 1865, the seating committee asked the harbour master,
Captain H.G. Thomsett, to exchange his seat with A.E. Vaucher, a merchant who was a much older resident, he objected strenuously because of the loss of social precedence it involved. The whole question of the power of the seating committee to compel parishioners to change their seats went first to the attorney general who, perhaps wisely, considering the climate of opinion of those times, refused to commit himself. It was then referred by appeal to England, where it was ruled that: ‘Parishioners have a claim to be seated according to their rank and station’. This finally led to the transference of seats numbered twenty-nine and thirty in the sixth pew from the pulpit to Vaucher to the intense discomfort of Captain Thomsett.13 When Edward Bowra passed briefly through Hong Kong on his way to his first post in the Tientsin Customs, he was upset to see the sign: ‘Bowra &
Co., Ships’ Chandlers and Sailmakers’, remarking that: ‘the Bowra who was there had made a good deal of money at this trade, but was a low common sort of man suited for his business and no merchant at all’.14 In fact the earlier Bowra had not
been low and common, but an ex-army officer who was well respected as a leader
among the tradesmen. Edward Bowra was merely echoing the prejudices of the time against the class labelled ‘shopkeepers’.
A set of unspoken rules now existed that defined relationships between expatriates of different social status. According to W.K. Chan’s The Making of Hong Kong’s Society, these rules and relationships bound the community together rather than split it apart.15 They may have bound it together vis-a-vis the Chinese majority, but it seems quite possible that the governor or his officers could, and probably did, use their knowledge of the way the gossipy, enclosed society worked to split it apart or to isolate a troublesome member when it suited their purpose. In an article entitled ‘Social Verdicts’, the China Mail talked about the effects of gossip on such a small community:
Just enough is known of a man in China to enable him to be misrepresented by those who are adverse to him — but very few really know anything of his
true character; hence a vast amount of misconception, misrepresentation, silly and pernicious prejudice.16
In an article entitled ‘Table of Degrees’ the comment was made that the table of degrees given in Blackstones’ Commentaries, which ran to seventy-one classes, ‘does not seem to be quite long enough to suit the minute subdivisions and social rivalries of modern times’. 17 Isabella Bird arrived in Hong Kong on Christmas Eve
1878 in time to watch the last hours of the great fire. She summed up the social
scene in Hong Kong when she said:
Victoria is, or should be, well known, so I will not describe its cliques, its boundless hospitalities, its extravagances in living, its quarrels, its gaieties, its picnics, balls, regattas, races, dinner parties, lawn tennis parties, amateur theatricals, afternoon teas, and all its other modes of creating a whirl which passes for pleasure or occupation. Hong Kong is not single in this respect; …. Perhaps there is nowhere in the world a place where people care more for social reputation, and where it is in reality of less value.18
Social exclusion, a powerful and divisive weapon, was still a commonly used tool. In a letter signed Anti Snobbery in the China Mail, the writer complained that a thoroughly respectable member of the community, who had resided in Hong Kong for many years, had had his comprador’s order returned with an intimation from the committee of the newly opened bath house that he would not be permitted to use it:
Surely Sir, if jelly fish and other floating material are admitted, the introduction of a respectable man with nothing to distinguish him from the aristocratic frequenters … but the possible difference in the colour of his bathing drawers, might be tolerated.19
The Hong Kong Punch, picking up on the story, showed ‘de Browne’, when asked
why he had not taken the plunge, answering: ‘Why, my dear fellow, you see I can’t. There’s a Wetail Twadah [retail trader] in the watah’. Punch continued in the same vein of humour with the ‘Knights of the Bath’:
A new order made under this title has been instituted at Hong Kong which is going on swimmingly. Recipients are decorated with a spangled pair of bathing drawers and are requested to wear white kid gloves and bell-toppers
when they visit the water. Vulgar people are required to fit themselves with
new skins before being admitted.20
In 1872, this swimming bath was amalgamated with the gymnasium and the boat
club to form the Victoria Recreation Club which still exists.
When these same gentlemen went back to England, they in their turn faced social exclusion. James Kemp in his satirical series, Voices from the Verandah, summed up their dilemma. He maintained that many of the merchants were too young when they left home to have had any real experience of life in Britain:
So their tone has been formed in the Hong Kong mould … When they go
home with fortunes, they are stared at. Men whose manners are the pink of
Hong Kong affability, who are adored by the ingenuous youths at the Clubs and sworn by on the race-course, go to England rich, and find all their Hong
Kong high breeding mysteriously useless.21
An example of the low regard in which Hong Kong merchants were held in England was all too clearly given during the by-election for the parliamentary seat of Totnes in Devonshire in February 1863. Edward Dent, who with the Jardine
Matheson taipans reigned supreme in Hong Kong, could only garner five votes
when he tried to secure the seat and came face to face with a real aristocrat, the Duke of Somerset.
In a letter entitled ‘On Snobs’ in the China Mail of 3 August 1867, An Enemy to Snobs described how:
— Esquire who two years ago was employed in a menial capacity in England — is lucky — falls on his feet and gets sent to China, where he all at once becomes a heavy swell and refuses to associate with, or be seen in conversation with, any one who is not a member of the Club and feels proud to tell his brother swells that he has cut the old Folks in England and does not mean to correspond any more with low [sic] people.
The writer continued by saying that in a place like Hong Kong there must be different stations and positions in society. He does not advocate ‘Liberty and Equality’ but he abhors the ‘horrid snobbishness which one meets at every turn’.
A few men continued to operate outside confines of the prevailing class boundaries. One such was Douglas Lapraik. In 1864, a number of merchants formed a committee for the purpose of honouring Lapraik before his departure on retirement to England. Lapraik refused their invitation to a public dinner because a large number of his friends would be excluded for social reasons. The editor of China Mail commented:
Mr. Douglas Lapraik has never been a party man and has consequently paid no attention to the fact that China society is divided into small cliques and coteries. He has respected everybody who has the smallest claim to respect, and this feeling on his part has been felt by everyone to be perfectly sincere and genuine…. Although he is wealthy, he never measures himself by the amount of his wealth.… Mr. Lapraik’s conduct and general bearing has been at once a public rebuke and a public example. Unfortunately, no man has had
genius enough to imitate him, or sufficient daring to ape him.22
These divisions among the community led at times to the delay or even
abandonment of schemes that had been agreed to be beneficial to all. In 1861 fire
consumed Mrs. Hurst’s millinery establishment in Stanley Street,
with the usual amount of mismanagement, for want of an efficient head to direct the fire-brigade and the many willing hands standing by in helpless longing to render assistance if only they knew how…. The soldiers especially got liquor somehow, and were speedily in such a state that they would neither work themselves nor let others work but were quite an obstruction, and some
of them had to be carried off dead drunk by the guards.23
The fire was prevented from spreading by the police brigade under Superintendent James Jarman and Sergeant da Silva. It was obvious that there
was a pressing need for an organized and trained fire brigade. Various gentlemen,
both officials and non-officials, expressed their willingness to enter the ranks of
such a new brigade, but no plan could be put into effect because the choice of a
gentleman to head the brigade proved impossible due to questions of who would
or would not serve under whom. When in 1867 another destructive fire led to
the death of Thomas Boulden [20/2/1], a young boatswain from HMS Perseus, nothing had changed. His epitaph draws a clear picture of his death: ‘A journey, like Elijah’s, swift and bright / Caught gently upwards to an early crown / In
Heaven’s own chariot of all-blazing light / With death untasted and the grave
unknown’. This left Hong Kong for yet more years without adequate protection
against the devastating fires that ravaged the town.
The importance of the social ladder in Hong Kong led men to strive to climb it and at the same time led others to strive equally urgently to retain the exclusiveness of its upper rungs. Attempting to bring this kind of society together in any kind of action for the public good could prove a fruitless task. As the China Mail expressed it:
One does not live long in Hong Kong in order to become aware that combined public action in almost any direction is a thing altogether unknown…. Cricket, regattas and racing constitute the nearest approach to public action that we know of in this colony and it cannot be said that these things have always been managed in a thoroughly catholic spirit.
Where position in society was so important, men would sacrifice ‘ease, comfort
and health … and that too, even in places where the highest positions attainable are only of very small account’ for small superficial advantages such as the best seats at public entertainments and the right-hand place at the dinner table.24 Again later the editor of the Daily Press objected to the tendency particularly among the
civil servants to elevate trifling distinctions into considerations of great moment. He warned that men of position should be above being affected by ‘the numberless
petty annoyances that must always fret and worry those who — in small places above all others — set their whole hearts upon social distinctions which are often arbitrary and always trivial’.25
In this social climate, etiquette assumed an importance that the modern
world finds strange and unnatural. It was used as a means of separating the sheep
from the goats among the various social circles and was felt to be important enough for there to be an article in the China Mail strongly disapproving of Singapore’s governor for his want of official courtesy in not returning calls
personally. Admiral Penhoat of the Indian Navy, a survivor of the Crimean War
and a Companion of the Bath, called on the Singaporean governor and the call was only returned by the aide-de-camp, a mere lieutenant of the Royal Engineers, bearing a card:
Now mark the difference in the reception of the same gallant admiral at
Hong Kong. A guard of honour awaited him, and a salute was fired on his
landing — the Governor’s carriage took him up to Government House; moreover Sir R. McDonnell returned the visit in person the next day.26
Hong Kong took the dictates of etiquette seriously. The forms of address were also still given an importance that in our more
democratic age is difficult to comprehend. In 1861, for example, the China Mail
struck a blow for a more democratic style of address in its agony column. All were to be called by their Christian names plus surnames without the addition of ‘Esquire’ or ‘Mister’. The editor spelled out his policy of dispensing with the titles: Both publican and sinner and merchant of high degree will be for once placed on equal footings and, should they rail at us for so doing, we must endeavour to bear their bitter words and still more bitter looks as best we may.
He had arrived at this policy because:
In this out-of-the-way corner of the globe, people so often occupy false positions which they only reach by some queer freak of Dame Fortune and
which neither nature nor education seems to have fitted them for.
Friends had suggested the use of ‘Mister’ as a sop to the offended users of the agony column but the editor countered:
Our friends, who hint at such a thing as a solution of our difficulty, have little
conception of the overweening pride and vanity of the present generation. The term in our opinion is too good — too honourable, and would be misapplied in many cases; but that is only our opinion, and several of our upstart mercantile gents and jacks-in-office would, we know, be mortally
affronted by being addressed as Mr. Brown, Mr. Jones or Mr. Smith.27
Needless to say the policy engendered angry letters and even the withdrawal of birth and death notices and was hastily overturned by the next editor who demanded payment for insertions in the agony column, but allowed freedom for the inserters to choose the titles by which they wished to be known.
Meanwhile a new distinction had crept into the language between the meaning of ‘gent’ and that of ‘gentleman’. A letter to the China Mail posed the
question, ‘What is a gent?’ The writer then summed up the distinction as follows:
Gentleman — all that is modest, open, kind, gentle, noble, manly and true;
Gent — the reverse of these terms — all that is pert, silly, affected, cunning, slavish, tyrannical, gangling, mean and selfish.
The distinction arose when in Peking, some touring English ‘gents’ aroused bitter feelings among the Chinese inhabitants. Certain members of the ‘gents’ class had acted with an insolence of manner and a lack of judgement concerning what line
of conduct was fit and becoming to the local population. True gentlemen, it was
said, would have entered Peking with the respectful feelings of guests rather than with the buoyant demeanour of conquerors:
A gentleman is never unbecoming but takes the trouble to consider what is
the fittest behaviour in any given circumstances whereas a gent has neither
the inclination nor the power to adapt himself to new cases…. He prefers allowing the people of Peking to adapt themselves to him; if they don’t like his conduct, they may ‘lump it’.28
The distinction was soon applied to certain members of the Hong Kong society. The gents of Hong Kong were, for example, reprimanded and compared to the scum of San Francisco in an editorial and letters to the Daily Press when they demonstrated their disorderly and antisocial manners. They took a dog into the Lusitano Theatre during a performance and induced it to bark and further disrupted the performance by their concerted and orchestrated ‘stamping and knocking’ which continued at intervals throughout the performance.29 The China Mail took the distinction further when it criticized Sir Hercules Robinson. During the course of the inquiry into the affairs of Daniel Caldwell, an elderly Chinese witness was not allowed to sit in the presence of the governor:
Our own Governor was a gent when he denied an aged and rheumatic mandarin and Chinese interpreter, — as good a man as himself — the
privilege of sitting in his presence in the course of a five hour’s examination;
and we are not sure that he was ever anything else.30
This press comment seems to show that there was now a growing awareness that relationships between the races were in need of improvement.
The Hong Kong Club
The Hong Kong Club claimed to represent the cream of society and guarded its doors jealously. It seems that in the early 1860s the ‘gents’ were to the fore in the task of excluding those who applied for membership but were thought by this group not to be quite ‘up to the mark’. The club’s fees precluded all but the wealthy joining: ‘Forty dollars down, thirteen a quarter and a little bill every month for the buns and glasses of noyau’. Candidates with deep pockets but without what were considered the right credentials were faced with the blackball:
The task of blackballing those who do not approach the Club with a sufficient affectation of awe is so disagreeable to the men of sense who constitute the
majority of its members that they do not as a rule soil their fingers with balls
of a sable hue; that duty is tacitly left to a mischievous clique of ten.31
Tensions rose when eligible would-be members found they had been denied entry and their status in society was in this way publicly denied.
Things came to a head in an incident which involved the lately re-constituted volunteers and occurred on the club steps in September 1864. The volunteers had been re-formed in 1862 under the leadership of the redoubtable Captain Brine of the Royal Engineers who had himself suffered the indignity of being blackballed. He was ably assisted by two of the volunteers, belonging to that new breed of men who had made Hong Kong their home, Lieutenant Theophilus Gee Linstead, and Second Lieutenant Francis Innes Hazeland. All seemed to be progressing in a spirit of unity and brotherhood. The volunteer movement was labelled
One of the healthiest and most useful movements … that was ever inaugurated in Hong Kong. Classes of young men who had not previously seen their way to coming into contact with each other now met together and
acted in concert for the first time and what is more, they broke up and parted
with no intention that it should be the last.32
However, with the exception of one partner who ‘refreshed the corps with beer and cigars one afternoon as they marched out’, the big merchant houses never really gave their support or encouraged their younger employees to join.
In September 1864, serious rioting broke out over three consecutive nights and involved English sailors, a number of Malay seamen, some policemen and
companies of 99th Regiment. It originated when sailors entering a boarding house
were confronted by Malays with knives. Three or four sailors and one soldier from
the 99th were mortally wounded. A body of soldiers from the regiment intent
on revenge ran into a posse of policemen and a second soldier was shot dead by
a policemen. The 99th Regiment had to be hastily withdrawn to Kowloon and the police confined to barracks before worse could happen. There being no-one
else left to police the town, the Volunteers were called out by the governor and patrolled the streets for four hours:
Having mustered hurriedly, they had not dined when they ‘fell out’ at 9 p.m.
opposite the Club; and consequently those Volunteers who were members of the Club wished to get the non-members some refreshment. But to Club rules there are no exceptions and those who were not members were not only turned out and refused any refreshment but were vigorously hooted as they left the premises.33
Public opinion was summed up by James Kemp in Voices from the Veranda. Young Hyson, one of the regular voices, was made to say:
When men wearing Her Majesty’s uniform, and on duty by command of
Her Majesty’s representative in Hong Kong are subjected to such vulgar expressions of contempt from gentlemen standing at the door of the principal Club in China, there must be something rotten in the state of Denmark.34
Drink was put forward as an excuse. The younger element at the Hong Kong Club was prone to rowdiness in its cups. The Volunteers, unable to sustain the facade of brotherhood, stopped attending and the movement went into a decline. It folded in May 1866.
The Visit to Hong Kong of Prince Alfred
In 1869, a great fillip was given to Hong Kong society by the visit of Prince Alfred,
Duke of Edinburgh, second son of Queen Victoria and captain of the Galatea. Hong Kong felt that this occasion would enable it to claw back the position that it
had lost in regard to British public opinion at the time of the Second Opium War and every effort was made to ‘put on a splendid show’. The City Hall, the pride and joy of the expatriate society, was finished in time for the duke to open it. It
incorporated a museum, a theatre, a library and ballrooms. Matilda and Granville Sharp revelled in the occasion. Hong Kong was decorated and lit up as never before. Matilda wrote home to her sisters:
The best treat of all that has taken place, I think, was on Saturday night when cards were issued to all the principal inhabitants of Hong Kong for a
theatrical presentation to be given by the officers of ‘Galatea’.… The officers
were the performers, the band was comprised of the Marines, and the Duke
was the conductor — and a most admirable one too. We shall never have
such an entertainment again, given by some of the best blood in England and conducted by a prince of Blood Royal.35
16.8. The arrival of the Duke of Edinburgh at Pedder’s Wharf, from a drawing by John Thompson. (Illustrated London News, 29 January 1870.)
With their background of shopkeeping and law, Matilda and Granville Sharp
would not have been seen dining with aristocrats or hobnobbing with royalty back in England. Background and blood lines were important, but in Hong Kong in reality money counted for more than breeding.
Nevertheless the extraordinary degree of veneration and trust given to a supposedly ‘true blue-blooded’ nobleman of rank can be seen from a case of deception a few years outside this period, but relevant and worth quoting. In March 1882 a female adventurer named Mary Jane Furneaux successfully fleeced the locals by impersonating the dissolute Lord Arthur Pelham Clinton, one of whose ancestors, Lord Richard Pelham Clinton [11A/3/14], lies in the Cemetery. As the Overland Mail said, ‘To bamboozle a number of apparently sane and sensible people to the tune of something like 20,000 pounds sterling is a feat which is given to few to perform’.36
The importance of ranking in society gave the governor, as the representative of the Queen in the colony, both an unassailable position in this limited society and a number of subtle social mechanisms if he wanted to elevate a favourite or ‘put down’ a gentleman who had displeased him in some way. The choice of the special jurors or justices of the peace was entirely in his hands. The position had become a way of rewarding support and elevating a person’s standing and was awarded by the governor as he thought fit. One change strengthened the privileged position of these special jurors. In 1868 they were exempted from doing their duties in court as jurors. The Daily Press said of them:
It is clear however that J.P.’s cannot stand for Justices of the Peace, because there is one thing that persons decorated with that distinction never do, namely sit on any magistrate’s bench for the purpose of dispensing justice.38
The only task undertaken by justices of the peace, beyond the vague idea that they
might act as buffers between the administration and the general public, was the
bi-annual meeting held in order to dispense licences to sell spirits in the hotels and taverns of the town. It would seem that it was easier in Hong Kong, where social status mattered so much, for the governor to maintain his very real power than it
would have been in a more populated, more far flung and less cliquish colony.
Changes in the Social Set-Up
The Taipans
At the beginning of the second period, the old-style merchant princes seemed in danger of losing the esteem they had once been accorded. ‘All sorts of disreputable things had been laid at their door from petty acts of oppression up to the instigation of war’.38 Britain was determined at least that future wars with China should not arise out of mercantile embroilments where it was difficult to affirm positively who was most in the wrong:
She is determined too, that if the British nation is, to its loss, represented in China by a class who do not scruple to carry on a very large and lucrative trade in smuggled goods, it shall also be represented by those who will endeavour to turn the national revenues into their legitimate channel and see that treaties are observed and our countrymen controlled.39
The old buccaneering days had passed. In August 1861 the expatriate-run Imperial Chinese Customs Service was set up with its clearly set out regulations and fleet of revenue boats to ensure compliance. The editor of China Mail was able to write:
16.9. East Point. A detailed painting of the godowns and residences of Jardine, Matheson & Co., 1870, by a Chinese artist. (By courtesy of Martyn Gregory, cat. 85, p. 85.)
It would appear that the merchants have had their day of power…. The chief
power and influence in the Far East has passed into the hands of the Foreign
Customs Collectorate. It is at their door we must now all knock if we expect any favours; it is to them we must tell young friends coming to China to bring letters of introduction.40
The Imperial Customs Service was organized first by Horatio Nelson Lay, whose son William George Lay [45/11/4] married Rev. James Legge’s daughter and died in November 1921 while he was working as commissioner of customs in Kowloon. The second head of the service was Sir Robert Hart, who could not easily be flouted. In response, the merchants joined forces in May 1861 to establish the Chamber of Commerce enabling influential men in Hong Kong to present a united front. Members of the old houses still held the positions of power. James Perceval, head of Jardine, Matheson & Co., and William Walkinshaw, taipan of Turners & Co. whose son, Constantine Walkinshaw [9/9/16] is buried in the Cemetery, were elected president and vice president of the new chamber. The China Mail said hopefully: ‘In the Chamber of Commerce we desire to recognise a distinct body, having a common interest in the maintenance of commercial respectability and sound commercial views’. 41 But for reasons to do with competition and social status, the merchants found it difficult to agree among themselves on measures they might take. The Chamber of Commerce failed to make its mark and seems later to have become, to a great extent, the tool of the up-and-coming business class.
The British merchants continued through the 1860s to live lives of generous open-door luxury. They were generous not only to those they entertained but also to those in trouble. When cases of hardship were brought to their notice, it was well known that they would quietly put their hands in their pockets to provide the necessary medical treatment or the fare back to the U.K. to prevent suffering or destitution. Joseph and Robert Jardine can be specially cited as examples of merchant generosity. When Rev. Legge’s third volume of translations of the Chinese classics was published in 1864, the late Joseph Jardine was much praised for the way he had counselled Legge to continue his life-work without troubling himself with regard to the expenses. It was said of Joseph: ‘A better means of immortalizing himself could not have been found’. 42 In 1863, Robert Jardine donated $30,000 towards building of a City Hall. As the editor of China Mail said:
When a public boon is wanted, the Merchants are ready with their money
and the thing is carried out; there are the Sailors’ Home and the clock-tower
as examples of this kind of private beneficence.
But in the same article the praise is qualified by what the paper perceived as their
lack of public spirit:
That lively watchfulness over the general conduct of affairs and the tendency
of legislative measures which marks a public-spirited man has almost no existence among the individuals in Hong Kong. Its absence is accounted for by the fact that few individuals there look upon Hong Kong as their permanent residence and on that account few feel any particular interest in
anything not affecting the immediate requirements of the moment.43
The luxury that the merchants could buy was seen by them as an antidote to
the exhausting effects of a tropical climate and as a way of maintaining health and
vitality. The size of their homes was by modern standards spectacularly large. For
example, when Woodlands was for sale in 1867, it was advertised as possessing
‘a croquet lawn, stabling for six horses, a double coach house, a hayloft, a double cow house besides hen houses etc’. Another house situated on Robinson Road for
sale in the same year advertised stabling for five horses with an enclosed grazing
paddock adjoining. The merchants continued to enjoy food and drink which was
of the finest quality that money could buy and the care of a numerous household of
well-trained servants. By the end of the sixties decade, the era of merchant dominance was coming
to an end. The authors of The Treaty Ports of Japan and China reported that:
Men of smaller means now embark in trade and, though individually they do
not much affect the interests of the great houses, they materially interfere with
them taken as an aggregate and much of the business heretofore exclusively in the hands of a few men has been diverted into other channels.44
The closing stages of the era of merchant power arrived with awful suddenness. The folding of the bank of Overend and Guerney in London in 1866 spelled ruin for the house of Dent. Others like Lyall & Still followed Dent & Co. into bankruptcy. Close to fifty-six firms failed in the depression years of 1866 to
1869: ‘The extent to which trade has decreased is enormous and unless it revives,
the prosperity of this place can never be again what it was before’.45 One of the few major merchant houses to remain after the debacle was Jardine, Matheson & Co. It only escaped the same fate by quick footwork and luck. By 1868, the Daily Press could write:
The fall of such houses as Dent and Co., Fletcher & Co., Lindsay & Co. and others and the growth of a number of smaller houses to supply the places left vacant by the defunct giants helped bring down the Taipans to the level of
humanity…. For the first time in the history of the Colony, the Governor was not overshadowed by the heads of the big mercantile firms and the Queen’s
Representative held his proper place.46
The number of merchants around this time seems to have declined. Although
the jury list had increased from 270 names in 1860, to 523 in 1875, the number of
merchants listed had decreased from 85 merchants in 1860, 38 of whom were
marked as special jurors, to 55 merchants in 1875. Thirty-nine of these had special
status and of the sixteen left in the ordinary category, only two were English.
The New-Style Businessmen
A new breed of businessman was arriving in the colony and beginning to make
his presence felt. They differed from the merchants of old in that their interests
were more closely concentrated in Hong Kong. A number regarded the island as their home and were prepared to live and die there. Among the newcomers whose names featured on the list of Chamber of Commerce members, were such names as Granville Sharp [11B/4/10], Phineas Ryrie [23/8/6] and the accountant Theophilus Gee Linstead [8/12/1]. Sharp was laying the basis for a property empire. In the land sales of 30 June 1862 he bought eleven lots in
Morrison Hill and Wan Chai, comprising more than 76,000 square feet costing just over $7,500.
Perhaps the most influential of the new-style businessmen was the taipan of Turners & Co., the Scotsman, Phineas Ryrie. ‘When he died in 1892 aged sixty-three, his headstone proudly proclaimed, ‘He was for over forty years a resident in Canton and Hong Kong and for twenty-six years a member of the Legislative Council of this Colony’.
For many years, he acted as auditor for the young Hongkong & Shanghai Bank. This was the kind of specialized job that the old-style merchants would not have undertaken. Ryrie had a finger in many pies. He helped A.F. Smith raise the
funds needed to build the Peak Tram, and was on the board of directors of the
Hong Kong Hotel, the H.K., Canton & Macao Steam Boats Ltd, China Fire
Insurance, and Dairy Farm among many other companies. He was a member of
commissions to examine the opium monopoly, and to report on the rebuilding of the Praya wall after it was destroyed in the typhoon of 1874. He was president of the Humane Society and official starter at the Hong Kong Races. Ryrie was also a keen shot and is said to have released rabbits on Stonecutters Island in an attempt to provide more sport to the colony. Luckily the rabbits did not thrive or spread. Theophilus Gee Linstead [8/12/1] was a member of Hogg & Co. until 1876, when the partnership was dissolved. He continued on his own, building up the firm that was to become the forerunner of the
Hong Kong branch of Peat Marwick, the accountancy firm. He was also a keen
sportsman and was behind the revival of the Victoria regatta. Linstead was also
the most senior officer of the reconstituted Volunteer Corps and a keen Freemason becoming district grand master. In 1874, he also became consul for Italy.
Henry Liston Dalrymple [37/3/34] arrived in the colony in 1865 as a tea inspector for Birley & Co. but again grew into the new type of businessman. In 1875, when Birley closed down unable to meet the challenge of the black tea from India, Dalrymple established his own company. He was also a founding member of the Hong Kong Golf Club and on his death, his headstone was specially ordered from London and erected by members of the club as a mark of their esteem and respect. In these ways a number of men, who were more likely to act as accountants than as merchants, began business ventures in Hong Kong, made it their long-term home and took a keen interest in its life and its sports. It is significant that these four early members of the new style of business died in Hong Kong.
The Increased Importance of Bankers and Brokers
The bankers in Hong Kong were extending their influence and their strength.
One of the most noteworthy changes to the structure of the local economy was the founding of the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank. This was launched when the
16.12. The first Hongkong & Shanghai Bank from a drawing by Palmer &
Turner, architects.
merchants of Bombay turned their attention to China and tried to set up a Bank of China with Indian capital. The Hong Kong merchants were determined to forestall their efforts. They had earlier suffered the indignity of the Hong Kong Gas Company having been founded in London. The anger among the
merchants was palpable when London offered only seventy shares to the local
market. So, when India-based merchants suggested that a Bank of China should
be founded, and only set aside five thousand of the thirty thousand shares of two
hundred rupees each to be offered locally, the Hong Kong Daily Press stirred public opinion with a violent denunciation of the local lack of public spirit. The lead was taken by the Scotsman, Thomas Sutherland, manager in Hong Kong of the P. & O. Steam Shipping Line. A prospectus for a China-based bank was
drawn up and a provisional committee formed. Within less than a week of the
prospectus being sent out, the whole of the capital allotted to Hong Kong had
been taken up. When the envoys of the Bombay merchants arrived a week later,
cap in hand, they found that no-one was interested in their shares and they soon dropped their scheme. In 1865, the Hongkong & Shanghai Banking Corporation commenced
business with a share capital $5 million in premises rented from D. Sassoon &
Co. The first general manager was a German, Victor Kresser, whose wife was
buried in 1870 in the Roman Catholic Cemetery though the exact spot has not
been found. The Hongkong & Shanghai Bank later bought the site which it still occupies to this day. The Provisional Committee of the bank included in its numbers all the larger merchant houses with the exception of Jardine, Matheson & Co., who refused to join because the Hon. F. Chomley of Dent & Co. had taken the chair. The old animosities were still at work. Jardine Matheson held out
until 1877, when William Keswick was elected a member of the committee.47
A job in banking was well paid and well regarded. Judging by the list of horses and carriages for auction drawn up by Lane Crawford on behalf of the heirs of John McDouall [9/11/12], manager of the Oriental Bank, when he
died in October 1873, bankers must have been among the best-paid employees
in the territory. The list included a first class phaeton with a handsome pair of black carriage horses of Black Hawk stock imported from California, a four-wheeled American buggy, a fast-trotting Japanese pony with buggy and harness, a Cantonese fast-trotting pony with an English dog cart and a Macassar pony with carriage. As well as these, he also kept a donkey and carriage suitable for children and two racing ponies. Thus in total the McDouall stables cared for eight horses
and a donkey beside the six carriages.48 McDouall was first listed for jury service in 1857 as a banker’s clerk. By 1861 he had risen to the rank of sub-manager and in
1863 he became a special juror.
Brokers
A new and to some a puzzling category of employment was making its presence felt in the colony. In the pages of Hong Kong Punch of August 1867, two military swells were shown watching a small man driving past in a basket carriage. The conversation went as follows:
Military Swell No.1., ‘Rum little chap, Muggins, isn’t he?’
M.S.2., ‘What does he call himself?’
M.S.1., ‘Muggins, Oh, he’s a broker’.
M.S.2., ‘And what the deuce is a broker?’
M.S.1., ‘Well, I don’t exactly know but I believe a broker is a fellah that drives
a small trap and hangs about the Club doing nothing all day’.49
Those two ignorant swells would have been very surprised if they could see how far brokering would take Sir Catchick Paul Chater [11B/10/1] and Granville Sharp, who both left their jobs in banking in the early 1860s to set up as independent brokers. In the jury list of 1865 twelve brokers are listed. By
November 1870 the standing of brokers was high enough for a cricket match to
be arranged in which the bankers and brokers challenged the merchants. Chater, playing for the brokers, was wicket keeper. The merchants won by fourteen runs.50
By 1875 the number of brokers in the jury list had swelled to thirty-two and
there was some agitation from the aristocracy of the profession, ‘the carriage brokers’, that their position was being jeopardized by the ‘indefinite number of natives of both India and China who transact a large amount of brokerage business without assuming the title or reputation of regular brokers’. Demands were being made for an ordinance to protect the status of brokers.51 One of the first of the brokers was Thomas Cranmer Piccope [16Cii/9/4], an old-time clerk from Canton and the son of a clergyman. He had moved to Hong Kong in 1851. In 1861 he set up as a broker in Aberdeen Street, dying soon after aged forty-four
years and leaving a fortune of over $22,500.
Clerks and Assistants
The striving for upward mobility among the European community in Hong Kong perhaps accounts for the disappearance of clerks and the equivalent explosion in the number of assistants during this period. To be called an assistant denoted a higher status, the prospect of advancement to partner and the possibility of entering the Hong Kong Club. It is not surprising that many decided, when providing job descriptions for the jury list, that they preferred to describe themselves as assistants
rather than clerks. In the 1860 Jury List, out of the 270 names listed, there were 45 clerks. In the 1875 Jury List of 523 names, no less than 291 or approximately 58
percent of the total number of entries claimed to be assistants. The number of clerks listed in that year had dropped to just one solitary name, Edward Alford working for Jardine, Matheson & Co. Clerkships perhaps had been reserved for the raw youths, whose rowdy behaviour made them appear too immature to be considered for jury service, or for the Portuguese who were not listed for jury service for language reasons or due to the debased status of clerks. The position and pretensions of the clerk/assistant class of Hong Kong, ‘which is becoming a daily increasing one’, was summed up in a letter to the China Mail, from A.B.C.:
I hardly think money-worship is the peculiar failing of the Hong Kong clerk, and to remind him of the lowness of his station at home, is hardly the way to
reduce that complacent, self-satisfied estimate of his aristocratic lineage and
dignity, which he is too apt to cherish in the colonies, where there are few
who find it worth their while to dispute the point …. The large proportion
look forward in vain to the pleasures of partnership, ultimate position and
affluence. Clerks as a rule are not troubled with large balances at the bank,
and the price which they pay for their supposed wealth is the temptation to
be envious rather than selfish.52
Ten years or so later, when John Thompson was photographing his way round China, he has much the same to say about this group of assistants/clerks:
Nothing surprised me more in Hong Kong than the expensive way in which English assistants were housed, and the luxuries with which they were indulged. Indeed few more luxurious quarters were anywhere to be found than the ‘junior messes’ of the wealthy British firms. There the unfledged youth, coming out from the simplicity of some rural home, was apt to develop into a man of epicurean tastes, a connoisseur in wines, and to become lavish in his expenditure; proud of his birthright, as a Briton; honest, hospitable, extravagant; despising meanness and, alas, thrift.53
Three assistants from this period found in the Cemetery are Henry Roberts [20/10/2], Richard Brewster Slate [5/3/35] and George Macalister [10/3/2]. Roberts died in 1868 aged twenty-nine and was the son of a London tax inspector
and an assistant at Gilman & Co. Slate, who died in 1867 aged twenty-six, was an
American, probably from the well-known New York family of boat builders. He was listed as assistant to Gassett & Co. Macalister is an example of the trusted assistants employed by Jardine Matheson who, almost without exception, came from the Highlands of Scotland. Macalister was probably from Stornoway, capital of the Hebrides Islands, as he left his estate to a brother living there. By 1848 Macalister was working as a clerk on the Bomanjee Hormusjee, Jardine’s opium-receiving ship. By 1855, he had established himself ashore in Jardine’s main
office. On New Year’s Eve 1856 he thwarted a daring attack carried out by a gang of about forty ruffians on the shops of an opium dealer and a silversmith at East
Point. A gingall or Chinese cannon had been trained on the door of Jardine’s
establishment. When the Indian sepoy guards burst out, it was fired, killing one
of the sepoys and wounding two others, thus preventing the other sepoys from coming to the rescue. Reinforcements, however, in the form of Macalister’s Manila boatmen turned the tide, forcing the thieves to beat an orderly retreat carrying with them their plunder and their dead and wounded.54 Macalister died
in September 1868, aged thirty-five years.
Chapter 17 Hong Kong Becomes Cosmopolitan
The British no longer had the monopoly of influence in China. The French, German, Russian and American nationals were taking advantage of the weakness of the Chinese Empire to set up their own concessionary areas and trading outposts in various treaty ports. Hong Kong no longer occupied the premier position on the China Coast. Other treaty ports were growing in importance
with Shanghai rapidly outstripping Hong Kong in wealth and power. With the
appointment of Sir Frederick Elgin as consular representative in Peking, the governor of Hong Kong lost his remaining influence over events in the treaty ports. By 1865, the Supreme Court for trying cases that originated in China or Japan had been moved to Shanghai. Hong Kong was no longer in the same sense the gateway to China.
Hong Kong had always possessed a wide mix of nationalities, with men from Macau, Malaya and India living side by side with those from Manila and of course the large majority from China. But the British had always kept political and economic power in their own hands. As regards economic power, this was set to change. A multi-national, multi-cultural band of talented and enterprising men found that Hong Kong offered them good business opportunities and decided to stay. They united in giving to Hong Kong something it had seldom previously found, commitment to its interests and its future. They regarded Hong Kong as home for themselves and their heirs. To them, Hong Kong’s needs were important and they were ready to donate time and money to their adopted home, particularly
in the fields of health and education.
These men included among their numbers, Germans, Armenians from Macedonia, Jews from Baghdad, Indians and Parsees from Calcutta, Bombay and Isfahan, as well as the Portuguese from Macau. The Portuguese were numerous and wealthy enough to open the new Club Lusitano in December 1866 with a grand ball. The club boasted the best theatre in the territory and was used by drama groups and touring opera companies for many years to come. This group were joined by an increasing number of wealthy Chinese businessmen,
many of whom had fled the disturbances caused by the Taiping Rebellion. On the
occasion of the visit of Prince Alfred with HMS Galatea, at least one day of the duke’s visit was devoted to Chinese receptions and entertainments denoting that a measure of recognition was now accorded to the respectable and prosperous portion of the Chinese community.1
Among this band of men who now lie in the cemeteries of Hong Kong are the giants of Hong Kong history, the Armenian Sir Catchick Paul Chater, the Parsees, Sir Hormusjee Mody and Dorabjee Nowrojee buried in the Parsee Cemetery, and the Jews, Emanuel Raphael Belilios and members of the Sassoon
family in the Jewish Cemetery. During the years 1861–75, they were waiting
in the wings, learning skills, and gaining experience and wealth as a series of reforms made Hong Kong into the kind of place where they could succeed. As young men, they became Freemasons, played cricket, and did those things
that would give them the contacts and the influence they would need to further their careers. For example, they took part in horticultural shows. In the 1874
show, Nowrojee took prizes for his camellias and dahlias and J.H. Noronha, the
Portuguese printer and publisher, won first prize for his group of six vegetables and Belilios won third prize for presenting three plants in flower. The long list of
prize winners shows that they were among the best company and making their names known. These men were businessmen rather than merchants. They helped propel the colony to new economic heights, becoming an ever-present force that changed the balance of power in the colony. They were to act as make-weight against the British merchants whose wider interests connected to the treaty ports often left them with less time or energy to tackle the problems of the long-term governance of Hong Kong.
The pages of the jury lists in the Government Gazette show clearly the changing composition of the ‘respectable’ part of Hong Kong’s population and the way these changes were producing a more cosmopolitan society.2 In 1855,
there were no Parsees in the jury list. By 1865, there were thirteen of whom five
had been honoured with the title of special juror. Besides these were now nine Jews, three of whom were favoured with the higher title. There were also seven Armenians listed, including the two Chater brothers, Catchick Paul and Joseph Theophilus, and their nephews, Paul Jordan, a broker, and Dr. Gregory Jordan. The nine Portuguese of the 1855 list had grown to forty-two by 1865. Besides these, five Chinese were now listed, one trader, one comprador, one linguist and two masters of shops. But the biggest change of all was in the number of Germans on the jury list. In 1855, there had been just twelve Germans. By 1865, this number had risen to seventy-five, seven of whom were special jurors. This influx of foreign traders with different outlooks and agendas was not always welcome. In a letter to the China Mail dated 23 June 1869, O.P.Q. complained that the present system of empanelling juries was: ‘unfair, unsafe and unjust…. It makes a mockery of public justice, and seriously retards the spread of civilization in the interior of the country by the results to which it gives rise’. He disliked the multinational make-up of the juries.
Anyone who attended the Court this morning might have seen among the Jurymen who crowded around the door of the Court Room, ten Portuguese, five Germans, three Americans, one Armenian, sundry Parsees and Chinese and two Englishmen. Only five persons speaking the English language to administer the laws of England, and three of those, foreigners in blood and feeling; for this talk of sympathy, brotherly feeling, common ancestors and such
stuff between Americans and Englishmen is all balderdash and moonshine.
The older British merchant houses found that they were being challenged in their
own fields by these assiduous outsiders whose lifestyle was simpler and therefore
whose costs were lower.
Most significant in terms of numbers and influence of the new influx of non-British expatriates were the Germans, many of whom are buried in the Cemetery. When the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank held an extraordinary meeting of shareholders in March 1866, only seventeen or 46 percent of those named shareholders were British. Much the largest minority group were German with 30 percent or eleven members. They were followed by the Parsees and the Portuguese with four members each. Among the remaining names were two Americans, Heard and Purdom, one Jew, David Sassoon, and one Belgian, Charles Henry Bosman, who is credited with being the father of Sir Robert Ho Tung [11B/13/2]. 3
The Armenians
The Christian Armenians had been subject to persecution at the hands of their Muslim Ottoman overlords in the nineteenth century, causing their merchants to disperse often via India to Singapore and the Far East. Two of the better-known Armenian merchants to arrive in Hong Kong came from Canton at a time when the Second Opium War was looming. Peter Aviet Seth [8/16/2] was born in Madras and became one of the earliest Armenian merchants to settle in Singapore. He left for Canton in 1845 but after the death of his wife, Dishkoone, in Macau
in 1857, he moved to Hong Kong which he thought offered better prospects. By 1861, he was described on the jury list as a broker living in Wellington Street. He continued to live and work in Hong Kong until his death in 1876.4 Avietick Lazar Agabeg [8/19/4] was a prominent merchant in Canton, having been among the first members of the Canton Chamber of Commerce. On coming to Hong Kong in 1858, he was listed for two years as the publisher of the Daily Press in
Wellington Street after which he was described as agent and merchant. He died in 1876 at the then impressive age of sixty-five.
But by far the most powerful Armenian in the history of Hong Kong was undoubtedly Sir Catchick Paul Chater [11B/10/1] who was born in Calcutta in 1846, and followed his brother, Joseph Theophilus Chater [11B/9/4], to Hong
Kong in 1864 at the age of eighteen. He was at first employed as an assistant in
the Bank of Hindoostan, China and Japan, resigning after two years in order to become an independent broker. The mother of the Chater brothers had been the granddaughter of the famous Armenian merchant, Agah Catchick Arrakiel, who had been honoured by George III. Catchick Paul was one of fourteen children and was orphaned at the age of seven. He was brought up by relations, who sent him to a British college in Calcutta where he learnt to play cricket, a very useful skill in Hong Kong, where membership of the cricket
team gave automatic entry to the Hong Kong
Club. When Chater first arrived, he stayed
with the Jordan family into which his sister had married. It was probably a member of this family, very possibly Dr. Gregory Jordan, who gave his name to Jordan Road in Kowloon.
In 1867, Chater left the bank and set up as an exchange and bullion broker in Wyndham
Street and within ten years had laid the foundations of his fortune. In 1884 he started a godown business in Kowloon, purchasing the beach front from the government, reclaiming land and erecting wharves and godowns. In this way he became the instigator of
17.1. Monuments in memory of Sir Catchick Paul Chater, d. 27.5.1926.
development in Kowloon. He underlined his interest there by building himself a bungalow on Nathan Road and later building St. Andrew ’s, the first Anglican Church in Kowloon, on a plot cut out from the grounds of his house and garden. By 1886, when Joseph died leaving his brother heir to
his not inconsiderable fortune, Catchick had become the most powerful financier in Hong Kong. He initiated the Praya Reclamation in 1887, a huge reclamation scheme comprising the entire waterfront from Central to Western including
Connaught Road, Statue Square and the land on which the present Legislative Assembly building now stands. This vast project was only made possible by Chater negotiating the acceptance of his plans by all the marine lot holders. Then,
when these were submitted to the secretary of state in Whitehall, he accompanied
the plans to England in order to explain the plans in person and he defended the enterprise so successfully that he won the acceptance that he had hoped for.
From then until his death in 1926, Sir Paul Chater had a hand in almost every new
enterprise in the colony. He served on the Executive or Legislative Council for nearly forty years from
1887 to 1926 and was created a knight in 1902. He was the ever-generous colossus
who, from Marble Hall, his mansion in Mid-Levels, oversaw the growth of Hong Kong’s prosperity and of his own fortune.
The Parsees
In 1860, out of a total of seventy-six merchants in the Hong Kong Directory, thirty-one were Parsees. Among the most influential of the later arrivals, one must include two who are buried in the Parsee Cemetery at Happy Valley. Dorabjee Nowrojee is said to have stowed away on a ship bound for China. He was discovered by a kindly Portuguese captain who allowed him to stay on as the
ship’s cook. On arriving in the colony in 1857, he seized the opportunity to open a bakery in the colony in January 1857, after the
bread-poisoning incident at Ah-lum’s bakery
at the beginning of the Second Opium War.
Nowrojee then became a prosperous hotelier, owning the very respectable Victoria Hotel and later King Edward Hotel and was the
founder in 1872 of Star Ferry. He acquired his first vessel in order to transport the bread
from his bakery to Kowloon and himself back to his family home in Kowloon, after a hard
day’s work. Nowrojee’s generosity in offering
friends and hotel guests lifts across the strait in his boat gradually led to the regular passenger service being set up. In this way the Star Ferry
was born in 1872 when Nowrojee ordered the eighty-five-foot Evening Star followed by the Rising Star, the inspiration for the name being said to come from two lines of Tennyson’s poem: ‘Sunset and evening star / And one clear call to me’.5
A figure of more importance, Sir Hormusjee Mody arrived in Hong Kong aged nineteen in 1860 and worked as a clerk for a firm of Indian bankers who dealt in opium. At the age of twenty-one, he opened his own opium auction firm but, realizing that the Sassoon family dominated the opium trade, he turned his abilities to exchange and broking. Mody and Chater went into business together. Both men firmly believed in the future importance of Kowloon and worked
together to fulfil their dream. It is fitting
that Mody Road in Tsim Tsa Tsui should be named after this self-made man. Mody and Chater remained firm friends and amicable rivals on the racecourse where they raced under the respective names of Mr. Buxey and Mr. Paul. Both men built houses nearby each other on Conduit Road and in their wills donated their mansions to the government. Two blocks of government quarters built on their sites, Chater Gardens and Buxey Lodge, still stand in memory of the donations. Mody was invited to become director of so many firms that he earned the nickname ‘the Napoleon of the Rialto’. 6 He undertook the entire expense for the erection of Loke Yew Hall, the oldest
building in the University of Hong Kong. In 1912, he laid the foundation stone and
used to visit the site as a frail old man. As he sat surveying the wilderness of bricks and puddles, he would repeatedly say that he wanted the very best regardless of
expense. Sadly, he did not live to see the building finished.
The Jews
David Sassoon, the first of his family to settle in the East, came in the 1840s from
Baghdad via Bombay and Canton. As early as 1862, Sassoon was wealthy enough
to donate $1,000 to the Lancashire Operatives Relief Fund, the fifth largest
donation in the colony. It seems unlikely that he felt strongly about the plight of the cotton spinners and stocking knitters in Lancashire, so his donation must
rather have been a way to impress the merchant community. By 1869, the Jewish
community in Hong Kong was numerous and wealthy enough for the stewards of the racecourse to solicit from them a ‘Hebrew Cup’, though some disappointment was felt when it was awarded on a walkover, all other horses having been withdrawn for various reasons. 7 In 1871 Sassoon presented the Ashley Cup to the winner of the Yacht Club Race. Money spent this way gained ready acceptance to Hong Kong’s society. Although some members of the family remained in Hong Kong, the Sassoons later moved the centre of their empire to Shanghai where they put down deeper roots.
In the Jewish Cemetery, beside various members of the Sassoon family, we
also find Emanuel Raphael Belilios, who became a special juror in 1870. He was
a member of a Venetian Jewish family that had immigrated to India in the early
years of the nineteenth century. He was born in Calcutta in 1837 and came to
Hong Kong in 1862. Belilios was connected to the Sassoon family through his wife. His business, which centred around Indian cotton and opium, flourished.
Following Granville and Matilda Sharp up the hill, he was among the first to take
the insidiously socially divisive step of living on the Peak. Belilios is said to have bought a dromedary in Peking in 1888 and kept it among his menagerie on the Peak to carry his goods up and down the steep tracks. According to a story in the China Mail, the dromedary was chased over a steep dip on the Pokfulam side of the Peak where it fell, breaking its leg. The poor animal was too heavy to move and had to be buried where it lay. Belilios was a generous donor to good causes
in his adopted home. In 1881 he contributed $12,000 to build a new reformatory at Causeway Bay. Then in 1890 he provided a new building to house a sister school
to Queen’s College for the daughters of Indian, European or Chinese residents. Opening with just thirty-four girls, the Belilios Public School for Girls quickly grew in size and importance. Belilios was also a member of the Court of the College of Medicine and endowed scholarships and indirectly contributed to the cost of clinical teaching at Alice Memorial Hospital with great generosity.8
The Germans
John Thompson, the photographer, described the success and high standing of the Germans in Hong Kong as ‘being spoken of with feelings not unmingled with bitterness’. He continued:
Next to the English and Americans, the German merchants hold the
foremost place. They have just built a splendid new club [1866] and they are
our close and successful competitors in almost every avenue of trade…. They manage their business more cheaply than we do. They are, many of them, less expensive in their mode of living. Their assistants are not so numerous … and often they are masters of more than one European language.9
According to Bert Becker, another difference between the British and the German merchants was that the German merchants did not use the comprador system favoured by the British firms, thus cutting out an area of middleman expense and keeping a firmer control over their budgets.10 One of the first German graves
found in the Cemetery belongs to Johann Jacob Funfgeld [16Cii/7/14] from Baden who was a merchant and commission agent from Stanley Street.
The oldest of the leading German firms was Carlowitz & Co., founded in 1840 by Richard Carlowitz. The importance of the firm in the colony was indicated by the fact that successive partners served on the board of the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank from 1879 to 1914. Second in age, and perhaps of equal importance, was Pustau & Co. which was founded in 1846 and acted as agent to the Austrian Lloyd Steam Navigation Company which ran a steam ship line between Trieste and Alexandria from which port the passengers would cross overland to the Red Sea and board a P. & O. steamer.11 Charles Brodersen, a partner of the firm, who in 1858 and 1859 respectively was made consul for Oldenburg and Hanover, lost his twelve-year-old daughter Eliza Brodersen [9/4/1] in 1868. At least two German members of Pustau’s staff, Ernest Franke [32/2/11], clerk and Freemason, and Hermann Bonne [16Ci/1/15], an assistant, are buried in the Cemetery. Perhaps the third most important firm, Siemssen moved to Hong Kong in 1855 and was managed from 1859 by Woldemar Nissen who was probably the most influential German in Hong Kong during this period. Dr. Carl Nissen [8/21/2] may well have been a relation of his. Woldemar, a partner from 1855 to his death in Hamburg in 1896, was a member of the Provisional Committee for the organization of the Hongkong & Shanghai Banking Corporation, deputy chairman in 1866 and chairman in 1867. He was also consul for the Hanseatic towns of Bremen, Hamburg and Lubeck as well as for Sweden and Norway. Woldemar left Hong Kong in 1867 and his place was ably filled by his assistant, Heinrich Hoppius [7/12/3], who had arrived in Hong Kong aged twenty-one in 1862 and became a partner in January 1869. He served the company in Hong Kong for twenty-five years until he died in 1894. Hoppius was an influential figure and served on the governing board of the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank from 1869 to 1894. He was also president of the Club Germania from its beginning up to his death.
The Club Germania was started in 1859 and rebuilt twice, in 1865 and again in 1872, to accommodate the growing number of members. By 1866, a Gymnastic Society had also been organized by Dr. Schetelig who acted as steward to the Club. It was much appreciated by British seekers after fitness. The 1872 building (on the east side of Wyndham Street) was a monument to the increased opulence of its members with a concert hall seating 275 people, library, billiard room and four bowling alleys. The Germans also organized a liedertafel, which put
on concerts of choral music superior to anything the British of the time could produce. Sunday services were held in German at the Berlin Foundling Home chapel by its superintendent, Ernst Klitzke [8/12/3], pastor to the German
community from 1867 to his death in 1881. The entire population of Germans
attended his funeral, the liedertafel sang hymns and all the German vessels in
port flew their flags at half-mast.
The Germans penetrated all the different layers of Hong Kong’s society. The doyen of the German community in terms of the years spent in China was Frederick Schwarzkopf, or Blackhead as he was called by the British. He had
been active in Whampoa since the mid-1840s where he was an assistant to the firm
of Murrow & Stephenson. In 1853, he married an English girl, Sarah Bullen, from
Hackney, London, in St. John’s Cathedral. Schwarzkopf was first mentioned on the list of jurors as early as 1855 as living in West Point. Perhaps his wife had a house there and he commuted between Hong Kong and Whampoa. Two of his
children are buried in the Cemetery. William Murrow Schwarzkopf [7/26/2] who died in 1854 was followed by Charlotte [7/26/1] who died in June 1857 aged just eighteen months. In 1856, Schwarzkopf opened his own ships’ chandlery on a hulk, the Hornet, at the Whampoa anchorage.
During the Second Opium War, he moved the chandlery, sail-making and auctioneer businesses to new buildings erected on Queen’s Road West. In 1860,
he took on a partner, John Warden Morriss [10/8/5], who held a third share in the business and perhaps helped to finance the new buildings. Morriss died just one year later in 1861 and his impressive square vault topped by a pyramid is an eye-catching feature of Section 10 of the Cemetery. Schwarzkopf
retired to Germany in 1872, at which time he
was described as perhaps the oldest resident in the colony.
A number of Germans held licences to dispense liquor in taverns and hotels. Among the earlier licence holders was Peter Ketels [16Cii/7/12] who died in 1867, aged thirty-three
years. He held the licences for the El Dorado Inn and then for the Hamburg Tavern. At
17.6. Headstone in memory of Peter Ketels, d. 28.12.1867. the licensing meeting in December 1867 the
justices complained that the cheaper brandy which he sold at 50 cents a shot
contained vitriol or in scientific terms, sulphuric acid. Colonial surgeon Dr. Ivor
Murray observed that adding a touch of sulphuric acid gave the drink a proper nip and Scotsman would not drink it without. However Ketels was ordered to throw the remaining vitriol-laced bottles into the harbour.
Two other Germans, William Gardner [43/1/13] from Strassburg and his friend, Wilhelm von der Bussche [38/1/10], had married two Macanese sisters and kept hotels in Macau. Gardner had run the Oriental Hotel and, according to an advertisement, had at great expense established two bathing machines in 1868 on the end of the Praya Grande charging $20 for a monthly family ticket or 25 cents per bathe.12 But, in August 1869, his hotel was totally destroyed by fire:
Mrs. Gardner and her children were asleep in the upper storey; a rush was at once made for their rescue. On going upstairs the whole place was found under a cloud of smoke and it was with difficulty that the lady and her children were brought to safety.
They then left Macau and acquired a licence for the Hamburg Tavern and
also a boarding house. On his death in February 1875, William Gardner left the respectable sum of $3,724. Another German, Otten, whose wife, Louise Otten [13/1/2], was taken in by Basel missionaries when she was dying, changed the name of the tavern he had acquired from the ‘Russian Eagle’ to the ‘Prussian Eagle’.
Hong Kong at the Crossroads of the Far East
As the treaty ports expanded and flourished, a further category of persons included
visitors and passers through Hong Kong on their way to or from their place of
business. Hong Kong had become a transport hub and a stopping off place from
where steamers to Singapore, Manila, India, Europe or America could be booked. Five lines now served Hong Kong. They included the French line Messageries
Maritimes, the American Pacific Line and the Holt Line of Glen Steamers that
docked in Liverpool, as well as the P. & O. and the Austrian Trieste Line. Men struck down by illnesses would leave the treaty port where they were working to seek medical help in Hong Kong or to recuperate on the long sea voyage back to Europe. Inevitably some succumbed on the way to or in Hong Kong and their headstones or monuments are found in the Cemetery. R.S.R. Fussell [5/3/1] and Henry Hudson [37/6/15] were both described on their inscriptions as ‘of
Foochow’. From Shanghai, we find the graves belonging to Herbert Hancock [13/5/1] and Ludovic Dunlop [13/4/4], a banker.
Among the lesser men who died in Hong Kong were James Simpson [38/4/1], a Shanghai ship’s pilot who was staying in the Hotel d’Europe
when he collapsed and died, and the Welshman,
Robert Jones [38/6/3]. His inscription states that he was a diver from Shanghai and Hong Kong.
He had amassed enough savings by 1870 to obtain
a licence for a tavern named the Diver’s Arms. Jones is said to have been paralyzed when diving to recover property from the sunken ship, Dunmail. He must have been considered respectable because, the year after being awarded his licence to sell liquors, he was named in
the jury list. He died in 1872 aged fifty leaving all his assets including the tavern to his friend, William Bristow, who had cared for him as well as helped to run his
tavern. He must have been tough to survive as a diver in China into his fiftieth year.
Another new category of men to find a last resting place in the Hong Kong
Cemetery were members of the Imperial Customs Service. One of the earliest is
Herbert K. Lane [42/1/8], who died suddenly at sea in 1874 aged twenty-nine
years when in command of the Chinese gun boat, Chen Jui. It is ironic that at a time when the Hong Kong community was railing against the Chinese use of gun boats to blockade the port, an English commander of a Chinese gunboat should be buried in the Cemetery.
Henry Hance: An Example of a Member of the Consular Corps in China with Close Links to Hong Kong
Consuls were appointed in all the treaty ports to look after British interests and deal with British miscreants of various kinds, but most commonly drunken sailors. Many of these men had links with Hong Kong. For example, the sons of
three of the best known of the early civil servants, William Pedder, the harbour master, Major William Caine and Charles Hillier, magistrates, were all given
posts in the consular service in acknowledgement of their fathers’ work in the colony. Henry Fletcher Hance [4/1/1] is a particularly interesting example of this class of men and his career in the East was
a long one. He spent his first ten years in the East
working for the Hong Kong civil service and then, having failed to gain promotion, joined the consular service. He came back to Hong Kong in
1897, presumably in search of medical treatment on
falling ill and died there. His long career in the East
spans three periods from 1845 to 1897. In the world
of botany, he was a very important figure and as such deserves a special mention.
Hance was born in London in 1827 and was educated in London and Belgium. History does not relate how he came to be recruited as a member of the crew of the Laird by Nicholas de St. Croix, a former East India Company captain, who had made and lost a fortune in the Far East. In order to recoup his losses, he had used the last of his fortune to buy and fit out the Laird for a trading venture to China. Captain de St. Croix manned the ship with the younger sons of good families from Devonshire who wanted to go to sea. Sixteen-year-old Hance was joined on board by William Tarrant, later to become the anti-establishment owner and editor of the Friend of China. The two teenagers arrived in Hong Kong in 1845 and both found employment in the government, Hance as third clerk in the Colonial Office.
While employed as a clerk in Hong Kong, Hance used his spare time to study the flora of Hong Kong. This interest probably became more important to him than his duties in the office. Thus began his life’s work in the field of botany. In the ten years he spent in the civil service he never achieved promotion. By 1849, his work had impressed the University of Giessen in Germany to such an extent that they made him an honorary doctor of philosophy. He was constantly mentioned by John Wright as a member of the group of civil servant clerks, doctors and solicitors who met for botanizing, walks across the hills, picnics, dinners and boating expeditions. He had a deep and lasting friendship with Dr. W. Aurelius Harland, calling one of his sons Theodore Aurelius and another Arthur Harland. In 1852, Hance went on leave to England bringing back a bride, Anne Edith Baylis. This was the last time in his life that Hance could afford home leave. His
increasingly large family put the cost of the fares beyond his reach.
With little hope of promotion and the added responsibility of a wife and
children, Hance asked his patron, Captain de St. Croix, who was now consul
in Whampoa, to recommend him to the Consular Service. He was appointed
in 1854, as fourth assistant superintendent in Canton. There, in 1856, when the factories were burnt down by the Canton mob, the family lost everything they possessed including Hance’s prized botanical collection. The itemized claim for compensation that he subsequently put in gives an insight into his standard of
living. The biggest items, two pianos, one a grand and sheet music reflected his
wife’s musical taste and the solid library of books, his taste. They included the 1481 Parma edition of Pliny, illustrated by hand and a number of classics in English, French, Latin and Greek. The rest of the furnishings did not suggest luxury. The
drawing room had four chairs, two with cushions, four lamps, two flower-stands
and two rugs. In the bedroom were a four-poster and wardrobe from Calcutta, two children’s beds and a bidet. The bedroom and the dressing room both boasted a Shanghai porcelain bath, commode and washstand. This suggests that there was no separate bathroom and no plumbing. In the spare room, Mrs. Hance kept her side-saddle, embroidery frame, a black lacquered pram and a sedan chair. Visitors would have been put up on a camp bed.13
In 1861, Hance seized the opportunity to become vice consul in Whampoa because it offered him free accommodation on board the ex-hospital ship, HMS
Alligator. Perhaps he also thought it would give him more opportunities to replace his lost botanical specimens. A house was built for him in 1865 and he was able to
move ashore. Hance stayed in Whampoa for the next twenty-five years, adding to his collections of flora and of children. Anne Edith presented him with babies in 1853, 1854, 1855, 1856, 1858, 1859, 1860 and 1862, dying some time after that. Her
death left him with six surviving children to be educated at home since he could
not afford to send them to England.14 In 1875, Hance married an Anglo-Chinese
girl, Charlotte Page Kneebone, who brought him another daughter followed by twins. Hance never learned Chinese and this ignorance later became a bar to
promotion. The Whampoa consulate was closed in 1876 and he was considered for
the promotion to consul in Canton, but the post was refused on the grounds that he was in bad health, had married a half-caste who led him a hard life and that he drank ‘though not enough to be of consequence at a small port’.15 Finally, in 1876, he was promoted to be acting consul in Amoy. He died there soon after his arrival.
His herbarium, which on his death amounted to 22,437 specimens, was left in his will to the British Museum. Over the thirty-two years he spent in China, Hance wrote 222 papers on botanical subjects.16 At a rough count over seventy species of flora growing in Hong Kong still bear his name. He died in June 1886 aged fifty-nine, the epitaph on his red marble headstone stating that he was ‘A world renowned botanist’. He is the only Hong Kong civil servant to have won for himself an entry in the British Dictionary of National Biography. But his life also demonstrates that the British government had few concerns at that time about the welfare of its servants and their families and that honesty and length of service won few rewards.
Chapter 18
Government Measures
and Their Effect
on Society
The Augmented Power of the Governor
As a direct result of the difficulties of the previous governors and the perceived quarrelsome nature of the Hong Kong civil servants, it was decided that Hong Kong needed a strong governor with wide powers and the backing of the colonial office. The governor was seen as the strong arm through which colonial office administered the Crown colony. An able, energetic, ambitious governor who was looking for speedy promotion up the ladder of governorships was needed. One
such was Sir Hercules Robinson. When Sir Hercules obtained permission from
the home authorities to build a mint in Hong Kong while on a visit to England, the Daily Press railed against the unilateral action of the governor who had ‘disregarded all law and precedent’. It asked: ‘whether the Governor of this Colony whilst absent on sick leave can pledge its revenues and prostrate its welfare … in consideration of promotion’.1
The governors of this period sometimes seemed more interested in pleasing Downing Street than in solving the problems of Hong Kong, such as supplying the clean water and adequate drainage that Hong Kong so badly needed. As the China Mail succinctly expressed it: ‘Democracy in Government was sacrificed for the outward appearance of smoothness in the eyes of the world’. There were numerous articles in both papers decrying the lack of public representation in the colony. The editor of the China Mail wrote vehemently on the subject in February 1867:
There is scarcely any limit to the ruin and destruction which a Governor of Hong Kong, if he were malignantly disposed, might not bring about legally and by the mere exercise of the power and authority which is undoubtedly his. It is urgently desirable that there should be a body in existence, no matter how called into existence, which should represent the community and have real influence on the local legislation, more especially local taxation and local expenditure. It is monstrous and ridiculous, when the colony contains numerous men of mature experience in business and Anglo-Eastern life who have lived for ten or twenty in the town, that they should be powerless to say
a word which may influence the mode in which their income and property is
to be taxed.2
But in spite of wearying the public ‘with a subject to which it is of the utmost importance that their attention should continuously directed’, the editors failed to galvanize public opinion where it mattered. The merchant elite chosen to serve on the Legislative Council almost always sided with the governor. In August
1867 Sir Richard MacDonnell was shown in a cartoon by the Hong Kong Punch
inducting the new members of the Legislative Council. He was shown as a
headmaster saying: ‘Now my boys, you’ll no doubt be a little nervous at first but
you’ll soon get over that and will pull very well together as long as you do exactly what I tell you and make no noise’. This was a far cry from the state of affairs during the governorship of Sir John Bowring. Civil servants, who were in the majority on the council, were bound to vote with the governor who had little
difficulty overcoming any opposition.
The newspapers gave as the main reason for the general lack of opposition, the fact that those men, with the power to influence the future, did not regard Hong Kong as their place of permanent residence:
The desire to inaugurate improvements which will only bear fruit after many years … is not so strong among us as it would be were Hong Kong to be our permanent abode where our children if not ourselves were to reap the fruits of what we had sown.
The disappearance of a number of the more powerful merchant houses by the
early 1870s also helped to enhance the governor’s power. One editorial decried the
loss of the merchant princes:
We hear a good deal, now-a-days, about ‘the merchant princes’ of former
times who acted as if they were indeed ‘rulers among men.’ There is much congratulation that that monopoly has ceased, and that it is possible to be considered a gentleman in China without being a millionaire or a millionaire’s clerk. But we are tempted to wish for a few months of the old regime, when a British merchant had an opinion and a will of his own and made them felt. ‘A Merchant’ of today is politically but a degenerate type of his predecessor!3
The governors were also making use of new methods to evade criticism. They would suppress or delay the publication of unpalatable facts when it suited them.
In March 1870, the Daily Press asked why it had taken the governor five months
to publish the minutes of the Legislative Council of the previous 30 September. It continued:
The length of time which these minutes have taken to prepare, has apparently aided their being placed in a peculiarly succinct and condensed form; the lengthy debate and objections made to the estimates being summarised into
a mere statement of ‘debate ensued’ or ‘discussion followed’ — the non-official remarks being considered of too little importance to be recorded officially.4
Sir Hercules Robinson suppressed the colonial surgeon’s report for 1860 and again
in 1873, Sir Arthur Kennedy suppressed the first report of his colonial surgeon, Dr.
Phineas Ayres. The report was not passed on to London for six years and then it was a matter of chance that it was unearthed and sent. An extract from that report shows that the facts contained in it were a damming indictment of the sanitary
state of the town of Victoria and would have reflected badly on the governor:
My first series of inspections discovered that pigs were kept in houses all over the town by hundreds, and that pigsties were to be found under the beds and in the kitchens of first, second and third floors. I visited many houses in which over a hundred pigs were kept, every bed in the house had large pigs in a sty constructed underneath it … Imagine houses whose upper
floors are constructed of thin boards with wide interstices between them and whose lower floors are inhabited, and the state they would be in under these circumstances, with pigs’ urine etc. dropping through from floor to floor.5
Ayres went on to describe the lack of any kind of proper drainage with broken or half-choked pipes leading to the open gullies outside, which were clogged with stinking detritus.6 Such houses, crowded with poor coolie tenants, were often
owned by well-off Europeans including, for example, Granville Sharp.
Sir Hercules Robinson relied on various initiatives to help leave a legacy of action to mark his time in the territory. The Botanical Gardens earlier proposed by Karl Gutzlaff, the missionary, began to take shape. The cadet scheme was inaugurated, the mint was built, the all important Companies and Bankruptcy Acts were passed and significant steps were taken to improve the education services for the Chinese and Eurasians.
The Botanical Gardens
The Parsee community donated a bandstand which still stands in the gardens with a small plaque to show its origins. The services
of Thomas Donaldson [5/3/32] were engaged to design the gardens and enrich the bare earth with plants and flowers. As his obituary put it: ‘Donaldson was the gentleman to whose patient and unobtrusive skill and industry the Colony was indebted for
one of the prettiest gardens in the Far East’. Donaldson died in November 1870
leaving a widow and child.
In 1861, convicts of the chain gangs similar to the one pictured were used to clear and level the ground above the Government House in preparation for a public garden.7
18.2. Policemen with a chain gang, c. 1890. (By courtesy of the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank).
The Civil Service and the Cadet Scheme
Hong Kong had become more closely integrated into the official imperial
organization in Downing Street, U.K. and experienced and tested officers were
being sent out to fill the civil service posts. One such, for example, was Chief Justice Adams who it was said always had ‘the best interests of this Colony at heart’. The editor of China Mail contrasted former practices with the increased sense of responsibility and public awareness of the chief justice:
He declined to stand tamely by and see legislation conducted in a slovenly,
careless manner. When his state of health was little able to bear the fatigue,
he has attended meetings of Council, rather than see measures carried
through in a style of legislation which would have reflected discredit on the
whole Council, himself included.8
Besides this, an experiment was being carried out in an attempt to bring to Hong Kong men who could communicate in Chinese and would have a better knowledge of the Chinese culture and customs. As early as 1854, while still superintendent of trade, Sir John Bowring had devised a cadet scheme which he had persuaded the Earl of Clarendon to adopt to supply the consular service in China with student interpreters who would spend their first years in China learning the language and acquainting themselves with the routine of consular business. This scheme was adapted to suit the needs of the civil service and launched by Sir Hercules Robinson. In March 1861 the first three cadets, Charles C. Smith, William Deane and Malcolm Struan Tonnochy [8/6/2], were appointed. Such was the usefulness to the government of knowing Chinese that
not one of them was allowed to finish their language course. The careers of these
early cadets were meteoric. Smith acted as registrar general with responsibility for
the Chinese population in his first post in October 1864. In 1865, when still only twenty-five, Tonnochy held the posts of sheriff, coroner and marshal of the Vice-Admiralty Court. He was from Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1867, he became
assistant harbour master and superintendent of the gaol. Tonnochy died extremely suddenly in 1882. The day before, he had been in good spirits, playing tennis and dining with a friend. The next morning, when the Chinese barber came to shave him, he found Tonnochy dead in bed.9
Alfred Lister, whose wife, Fanny Elizabeth Lister and baby son, Arthur Lister [16Ci/4/16] are commemorated in the Cemetery, was recruited in 1867
as a cadet and rose while still in his twenties to become postmaster general and
colonial treasurer (1883–90). He died on board ship near Yokohama while on sick leave. For the first time, with the exception of Daniel Caldwell, there were men
in the key positions in the government who could liaise with the Chinese and understand their needs and grievances.
The Mint
Sir John Bowring had before his retirement suggested the establishment of a
mint to remedy the embarrassing fluctuations in the value of Mexican dollars and
complaints of the insufficiency of small silver coins which led to the chopping of dollars into smaller pieces. Bowring’s suggestion had been turned down by the home authorities but the question was again raised in 1861 and this time the scheme was agreed. Plans for the mint went ahead with additional land reclaimed
costing $9,000, a water supply costing $3,500 and the new buildings priced at $25,000. Six men were brought from England to run the mint led by Major Thomas Kinder of the West Yorkshire Militia whose daughter Ada Kinder [40/3/2] died in 1865? (inscription unclear) aged fourteen. Kinder had worked as a mechanical engineer inspecting engines and rolling stock at the Railway Carriage
18.3. The mint and its garden. (By courtesy of the Hong Kong Museum of Art.)
Company near Birmingham but had retired in 1856 and joined the militia. He had had no experience of anything to do with metallurgy or minting.10 Kinder left England in July 1865 accompanied by his family and a governess. He must at times come to have regretted his decision to accept the post as the mounting problems included mechanical failures, staff sickness and the negative attitude of the new governor, Sir Richard MacDonnell.
When the mint opened in May 1866, so great was the influx of inquisitive
visitors demanding to be taken round that the governor had to issue an order that the public would not be admitted. An accident to the rolling stock and illness
among the mint staff made it impossible to coin dollars as rapidly as expected. The
frequent occurrence of often fatal illnesses demonstrated the problems connected
with bringing skilled technicians to such a remote place. The first family member
to die was Ann Morris [16Cii/8/8], wife of John Morris, on 10 July 1865, followed closely by the forty-one-year-old wife of John Inglis, superintendent of the mint, at their home on Morrison Hill.11 On 12 August, the engineer, William White [16Cii/9/7], died aged only twenty-seven.
Barely a fortnight after that, another Ann Morris [16Cii/6/14], the wife of James Morris, the foreman of the rolling stock, died. Then again in 1865, little Susan Maria, daughter of John Pritchett, the foreman of the coin department, died in Spring Gardens
Lane, Wan Chai, followed in June
1866 by his wife, Elizabeth Pritchett [16Ci/5/10]. Poor John Pritchett had to put his remaining daughter into the Diocesan Orphanage where she too
died in February 1867 aged one year and
ten months. In a little over a year seven family members of the small team had met their deaths.
The timing of the opening of the mint could not have been worse, coinciding as it did with a slump in the price of silver and a downturn in the
economy. Seeing no hope of a profit, the
18.4. Headstone in memory of William governor closed the plant and sold the White of the Royal Mint, d. 12.8.1865.
site to Jardine, Matheson & Co. who opened a sugar refinery.12 The machinery was sold to Japan, where it was used with such success that businessmen later on regretted the short time of only three years that the experiment had been allowed to operate in Hong Kong. Major Kinder accompanied the mint to Japan and continued to successfully direct operations there.
Some of the men who had worked at the mint added to a growing class of technically skilled craftsmen who were to be invaluable in the colony in the establishment of new enterprises such as the docks. Inglis, for example, married for the second time to a local girl, Caroline Matilda Smithers [9/5/13], in 1868 became acting secretary of the Union Dock Company. In 1870, he took over the Victoria Foundry in Spring Garden from Samuel Speechley who had been responsible for building the Parsee bandstand in the Botanical Gardens and whose infant daughter, Maria Webster Speechley [7/22/12], died in 1867. Inglis built the steam-launch, Sergio, for the Macau government. The success of this order brought eleven more orders for steam launches to his shipyard.
Education in Hong Kong
The sixties decade saw a big change take place in the education of Hong Kong’s youth. A new board of education was formed in January 1860 for the management of the government schools. A plan was formulated by Rev. James Legge and Bishop George Smith to amalgamate three of the government schools into one government school whose headmaster would double as inspector of the schools. In 1862, the Central School, later known as Queen’s College, was opened to boys of all nationalities. This new school would become the central pillar of a secular education freed from the old ties to the Protestant Church.
An able young Scottish dissenter from Rev. Legge’s hometown of Aberdeen, who was studying to be a Presbyterian minister, applied for the job. Frederick Stewart [23/5/7] was born into the family of a poor crafting tailor who struggled to find the money for his education until, while at Aberdeen University, he won a bursary. He was interviewed by Bishop Smith, found to be eminently suitable and almost at once embarked for Hong Kong and an illustrious career in education and government. Stewart arrived in Hong Kong in 1862 aged twenty-eight to find that little had been done to organize the new school. There was no timetable, no curriculum, and just three Chinese masters teaching the Confucian classics to three hundred boys by the noisy system of rote learning practised out loud. Just one year later, the new school eclipsed St. Andrew’s School so far in popularity that the latter had to close. Stewart went on to become the colonial secretary
before he died of pneumonia in September 1889. His obituary in the China Mail
stressed how much all who knew the man felt his loss:
As a man he combined all the qualities which call forth not merely respect and esteem but something akin to reverence. He was looked up to as a model man, and all the more so because from his modesty and absence of assumption he was unconscious of the high estimate which his friends placed upon his moral worth.
However, by 1868, even after the new school had been operating for six years, the maximum attendance at all the government schools stood at only 664 pupils,
while the number of children not in any form of education was put at 10,697.13
Stewart in his annual report made a plea for compulsory education for all, but he was too far ahead of his time for this to be seriously considered. Nevertheless, under Rev. Legge’s influence and guidance, Stewart created the foundations on which Hong Kong’s secular education system could be built.14 For the first
time Chinese boys were able to benefit from the kind of quality education at an affordable price that enabled them to compete in the expatriate world of business and finance. The school was the cradle for future generations of clever, influential
and far-sighted Chinese whose influence was to grow in the twentieth century.
Included among the old boys of Central School are many well-known figures such as Sir Kai Ho Kai, Sir Robert Ho Tung, Sir Boshan Wei Yuk and Dr. Sun Yat
Sen, the founding father of modern China.
The Education of Chinese Girls
An early attempt to tackle the education of Chinese girls came through the wife of Bishop George Smith. She opened a school for girls known as the Diocesan Native Female Training School, run by a committee composed of the wives of civil servants who were in charge of raising funds and who functioned as school governors. One of the most active was Emma Maria Irwin [16Cii/4/10], the second wife of the colonial chaplain, James J. Irwin. The Diocesan Native Female
Training School opened formally in November 1859 with twenty girls in the charge of Miss Wilson. When she retired in 1863, Mary Ann Eaton, aged twenty-
three, was sent out from England by the Female Education Society to take her place. However she lost her nerve after what was described as a ‘murderous attack made on her by six Chinese thieves’ on her way home from church. Mary Ann was stoutly defended by her chair coolies who were duly rewarded by the committee with a sum of money. After the event, she received much support from Rev. E.J. Eitel who had come out with the Basel Mission in 1862. The two fell in love and, in May 1865, Mary Ann wrote to the Female Education Society saying that she
planned to get married but not until she had fulfilled her five-year contract with
the society. However six months later she wrote again to say that her nerves had not recovered from the shock of the previous December and she was no longer equal to her duties and begged to be released from the contract. Permission was given for her to resign.
The Diocesan Native Female Training School was not entirely successful. As early as 1865, it was noted that ‘The teaching of English [was] not to be compulsory as several cases of girls being offered for sale at high prices (A. Wong $500) on the recommendation of speaking English had occurred’. 15 A further mention of this problem was made by Frederick Stewart when he spoke guardedly in his report of 1867: ‘To the melancholy results which in nearly every instance followed from teaching Chinese girls English, I need not more particularly allude’. A case that reached the court illustrates the dilemma of the school. Rev.
C.F. Warren, a member of the Diocesan Female School Committee, appeared
before the magistrate to enter a complaint against the mother of a sixteen-year-old Chinese girl who had attended the school for three years. The mother had created a disturbance at the school when told that the school wished to keep her daughter
longer in school. A Mr. W., a European police inspector, wanted to marry the
girl. Her mother, with an eye to the money she could make from the deal, wished to remove her from the school in order to further the union. The magistrate told the mother that, although the girl refused to marry at present, ‘She might later
change her mind and get married, as every woman ought’. Rev. Warren was
permitted to keep the girl in the school whereupon the mother became ‘somewhat demonstrative outside the court’.16 This problem resulted in the Diocesan Female School, as it was now called, taking an unexpected turn in its development. A circular was issued by Bishop Alford inviting support for the establishment of an orphanage for destitute European and Eurasian children:
Many children of European and half-caste parentage are to be found living under very deplorable circumstances in Hong Kong, China and Japan….
One of the objects of the Female Diocesan School in Hong Kong is to offer
a permanent home for a limited number of orphans and other children in necessitous circumstances. The education of Chinese girls in Hong Kong on Anglo-Chinese principles having been found undesirable, it is proposed
to extend the benefits of the education given … to a few such children of both
sexes … reserving one wing for the boys and the other for the girls.17
Thus in 1869 the Diocesan Female School changed into the Diocesan Home and Orphanage with the Diocesan Boys’ School as part of it. Its efforts were largely
directed to the care and education of Eurasian children.
An earlier step in education had been made with the help of Susan Harriet Sophia Baxter [20/5/3], who arrived in Hong Kong in July 1860. Her father was a wealthy banker with houses in Doncaster and London. Mrs. Smith, the wife of the bishop of Hong Kong, had visited him to discuss school projects. Sophia was present at the meeting and her interest was captured. She decided to go to Hong Kong as an independent missionary paying her own way. Finding that the
Diocesan Female School was well supplied with staff, Miss Baxter struck out on
her own, founding schools where she saw a need and funding them herself through her family. She founded among others an independent Chinese girls’ boarding school, a school for European orphans and children of mixed race, and a boys’ day school. E.J. Eitel said of her: ‘She made her home in Hong Kong, the home of
every friendless, fatherless, motherless suffering, outcast woman or child, without
distinction of nationality, creed or social rank’. 18 Bishop George Smith wrote:
Among the European community she had many friends who valued her uncompromising honesty, her Christian boldness, her willingness to risk offence when sense of duty compelled her to utter words of rebuke, her determination to call all things by their right names, her courageous resistance to worldly compliance with fashionable customs injurious in their
influence on Christian character and her willingness to reprove others under the promptings of real affection and interest in their spiritual well-being.19
She sounds like a very formidable woman. On 30 June 1865, Susan Baxter died of Hong Kong fever. Matilda Sharp was at her bedside till near the end: ‘Dear Miss Baxter has gone to her rest after being ill only ten days. I was with her ten minutes before her death and was with her all the day before’. 20 The Baxter Schools continued with the support of the Female Education Society and Susan’s sister, Nona, back in England. In 1876 the Hong Kong Telegraph reported that four Baxter Schools were still in existence, namely the Tai Ping Shan School, the Sai Ying Poon School, the Staunton Street School and the Girl’s School.21
Roman Catholic Schools
The important role played by the Catholic Church in the field of education should
not be forgotten. In particular, the Italian Bishop Raimondi and the Catholic nuns, many of whom are buried in the Roman Catholic Cemetery, played a major part in expanding the scope of Catholic education. The French order, the Sisters
of St. Paul with their headquarters in Wan Chai and the Italian Cannossian
Order, the Daughters of Charity in Caine Road both provided education in particular to the daughters of the Portuguese minority. The Sisters of St. Paul also ran an orphanage. Both orders have large monuments in the Roman Catholic Cemetery on which the names and ages of all the nuns are inscribed. The life span of the nuns illustrates dramatically the way in which medical advances have made
Hong Kong a more healthy place. The first ten Cannossian sisters to die in Hong Kong from 1867 to 1891 had an average life span of thirty-seven years while the last ten listed averaged eighty years. The difference for the Sisters of St. Paul de Chatres is even more startling. The first ten to die from 1850 to 1889 only averaged
thirty-one years, while the last ten averaged eighty-three years. Bishop Raimondi founded St. Saviour’s School in Pottinger Street, which
advertised in 1867 that it was running seven sections. In the English School,
European boys were taught a limited syllabus of English, maths, book keeping, mensuration and geography. The Anglo Chinese School for Chinese boys who wanted to learn English was ‘quite separated from the European boys’.22 Even the Catholics, who showed the least amount of racial discrimination in their churches, could not break the taboos of that era that separated races. A Portuguese school for the Portuguese boys ran alongside the other two. There was also according to the advertisement a noteworthy experimental school for European boys who wished to learn Chinese which lasted one hour a day in the afternoon. Besides these, included in the advertisements were a French school, a drawing school and a music school. Besides St. Saviour’s college Bishop Raimondi opened a reformatory in March 1864 for twelve boys in two or three small houses near the
West Point Slaughter House. The bishop depended for its support on ‘the ever
open-handed merchants and they did not let him down’. This establishment was
essential if boys picked up for petty offences or vagrancy were not to be herded in
an indiscriminate manner into Victoria Gaol alongside the hardened criminals, as had previously happened.
The Legalization of Gambling
Sir Richard MacDonnell came to Hong Kong as governor in 1865, and by then he had already done the rounds as governor of Gambia, St. Lucia and St. Vincent, South Australia and Nova Scotia. At the end of his career and less dependent
than others on the good report of the colonial office in England, he embarked on an ambitious experiment to legalize gambling and confine it to clearly authorized
and controllable houses whose owners paid large sums for the privilege of running the establishment. Fifteen gambling houses were to be authorized, twelve in the district of Victoria and three in the outlying villages. The registered keeper of each
house was to pay a fee to the government amounting to $1,450 a month.23 It was an experiment fraught with difficulties. In September 1867, eleven
public gaming houses were licensed and opened to the public to the outrage particularly of the missionaries. Daniel Caldwell [19/1/1] proved, yet again,
how indispensable he was to the government. In 1867, he was employed by the
proprietors of the licensed public gaming houses to keep their houses on the right side of the law. Caldwell recruited and ran a number of Chinese informers who became an informal detective force under Caldwell supplementary to the police
force. When a survey was made of the arrests of ‘Illegal Gamblers and Dangerous
Characters’, it was found that twenty-one of the twenty-four subsequently jailed had been apprehended by ‘Mr. Caldwell’s detectives’. 24 Sir Richard MacDonnell had realized that Caldwell was the one person who could make his scheme to license gambling in the colony workable and recalled him to the government ‘at
the monstrous salary’ of $2,500. As late as 1870, Chief Justice John Smale was able
to state frankly that Caldwell was still the only person the authorities could rely on in the detection of crime and the apprehension of criminals. Until his death
in October 1875, Caldwell continued to be trusted and held in high esteem by
the Chinese businessmen to whom he acted as agent and general adviser. The monument, raised in his honour by the Freemasons, is one of the most striking in the Cemetery. Daniel Caldwell, the adventurer who made good, is the only man of that era who can be said to have truly bridged the gulf that separated the European settlers from the Chinese.
Legalized gambling attracted so much controversy and bad publicity and was so unpopular with the Europeans and Chinese alike that the experiment was stopped in 1870 on orders of the colonial office in London.
The Police Force
The years 1871 to 1872 were watershed years for the Hong Kong Police Force
and this watershed is echoed in the Hong Kong Cemetery. In the ten years from
1861 to 1871, the headstones of only three policemen have survived. The first two
include an inspector of nuisances, Samuel Cook London [32/1/4] and Sergeant Luke Bright from Norfolk, whose headstone has become separated from the footstone so that he now appears to have two graves [Headstone 21A/2/7, Footstone 16/8/1]. The third headstone belongs to the only police constable to be commemorated during those ten years. This unfortunate American, George William West [38/6/6], had been sent to search the slopes of the Peak in the hot August sun for bands of robbers. He keeled over and died, probably of heatstroke,
though the records give the cause of death as apoplexy. West was a rather
overweight twenty-one-year old. ‘He was thought to have over-exerted himself
because of the chaffing of his fellow constables’. Perhaps the fact that he had died
in the execution of his duty made him worthy of the honour of a headstone.
In the first ten years, 1861–71, pay was low and morale was even lower. Those
who served in the force occupied the bottom ranks among the expatriates. It is
not surprising that their efforts to maintain law and order fell below expectations.
The police, for example, were helpless when, in 1865, a gang tunnelled for several weeks right under the treasury of the Central Bank of India and carried off upwards of $100,000 in gold bullion and notes.25 A song entitled Guardians of the Peace by a Mr. Small published in the Daily Press in 1871 gives a good idea of the composition and reputation of the force as popularly perceived:
A pretty motley group of roughs I swear,
A riff-raff pick’d up heav’n alone knows where.
Drunken Europeans and the lanky Sikh,
Who cannot understand a word we speak;
Lazy Indians too, from various tribes, Chinese detectives who are fond of bribes-In league — if all I hear is true —
With gamblers, thieves, and even murderers too.
Shame on the Government, shame I say,
To keep such barefac’d robbers in their pay’.26
The force was blamed for being inept, drunken and corrupt. One example from the China Mail will suffice. In March 1870, William Smith, P.C. No. 25, was charged by the assistant superintendent:
On the 13th inst., he had been brought to the Station visibly suffering from
the effects of heavy drinking and was then sent to the hospital, suffering from delirium tremens…. There were fourteen previous reports against the defendant, and another most aggravating circumstance … was that he
had received $127 to pay the mess-man of the European force and when apprehended only $90 were found upon him.
More columns were written in the pages of the press on this subject than on any
other. At the root of the problem was the level of pay the government offered. It
was too small to attract or keep the kind of men needed to raise the standard of the force. In July 1867, the editor of the China Mail asked what could be done and answered his question as follows:
Why sir, if we want an honest servant, we must pay him a fair amount of wages. We must not only give him enough to find the bare necessities of life
but we must leave a fair margin besides. One thing is certain: if we do not supply the wants of our servants, they will supply their own wants if they get the chance.27
The police of this period suffered from what would now be seen as a lack
of the bare necessities of life. It was not until February 1867 that the policemen
at the central barracks could take a bath. It was then announced in the China Mail that just one bath tub had been provided for the use of all the Europeans. The paper asked what the Indian contingent did for a bath.28 Again the China Mail complained that the Wan Chai Police Station had more the appearance
of a stable than a house for the habitation of one inspector, three sergeants and four policemen: ‘There is little or no preparation for the comfort of the staff.
The Europeans have to cook their victuals in apertures in the wall and generally follow a real life closely resembling gipsy life’.29 William Deane, head of the police, wrote in his report dated June 1871: ‘At the Central Station, the want of proper
cook-houses, latrines, lavatories and stables complained of for so long a time, still
continues’. The first police mess was only set up in 1870 at the Central Barracks
but the cutlery and crockery needed had to be paid for by each European constable ‘as best he could’.30
It is not surprising that the policemen were unable to find European women willing to marry them. In May 1871, of the 115 policemen in government employ,
only 11 had wives.31 The taverns and brothels gave many policemen their only relaxation but also brought them into contact with the worst elements among the Europeans, as well as the dangers arising from excessive drinking and visiting the
lowest class of brothels. Up until 1873, policemen had to undergo the indignity of a
compulsory monthly inspection for venereal disease.
Many policemen set out to amass a competency that would propel them to better things. At this time, all Chinese venturing out after eight p.m. at night needed a pass from the registrar general’s office. The China Mail wrote in 1861:
By overlooking the want of a pass a policeman can easily make $2 a night … while getting a good beat in the line of the well-filled godowns and counting houses, a little careful blindness would often be cheap at $20 or $30 —
overpowering to a man who has the wolf continually at the door…. The policeman has neither education nor a high sense of integrity. The probability is that he sees nothing accursed in bribery but quadrupling his salary.32
The discovery of the Wan Chai Squeezing Club in 1867 shows the extent of
the corruption:
Wanchai is notoriously the district of Victoria where congregate the vilest
thieves and the most ’cute and hardened criminals which this island and the
mainland can furnish…. The fact is simply that the Police Station in Wanchai
has been for months so completely the centre of bribery and corruption that not one honest constable could be found in the lot.33
The police in Wan Chai had specialized in watching over illegal gambling dens and
giving the alarm when necessary. For this service the station cook helped by the interpreter had collected weekly fees which were then divided out according to rank.
The work the police constables were expected to do for a pittance was hard and often dangerous. They did not understand Chinese and had no way of communicating with or understanding the Chinese majority. In 1865, the editor of China Mail asked:
What do we actually know of the ten or dozen inmates that each house
shelters — Nothing whatsoever. A shepherd may no more control his flock with a Manila poodle than we can the Chinese in this city with the
present legal and executive machinery. Were it not that the Chinese govern
themselves and are free from riotous habits (clan fights exempted) a much stricter municipal code would have to be in force.34
In any case cooperation was made difficult and dangerous, because the secret triad societies who were at the bottom of many piracies and robberies had
their own method of dealing with the Chinese who told on them. When Wilmot Wadeson Holworthy was brutally murdered on the Peak, it was only through the detective work of Daniel Caldwell’s force that two men were found in Macau who could be accused of the crime.35 They finally had to be released through lack of evidence. It is hardly surprising that the Chinese looked down on the police force with loathing as drunken scum and refused to cooperate with them.
Besides their efforts to curb crime in the colony, the police force also had great difficulty in attempting to control the antics of seamen, both Europeans and Lascars, in their jaunts ashore. Drunken seamen, often armed with knives, violently resisted being taken to the police cells and were aided in their resistance by their companions. In 1868, Inspector Henry Stroud [43/2/2], for example, was assaulted by six seamen on a Sunday afternoon and had his uniform torn to
rags. Later, in 1875, Stroud collapsed and died while on patrol in Western aged
only twenty-eight years. Inspector Grimes was on special duties in plain clothes in
West Point when he tried to break up a fight between two Malays in Lascar Row.
He was attacked by forty Malays with bamboos and sticks. They only stopped beating him because the huge crowd of men were getting in each other’s way. Grimes, bleeding from his head and hand, was compelled to beat a quick retreat:
and while doing so was assailed by a shower of bottles, pots and other missiles. He then said that had he not managed to escape the crowd, he would have been killed. Eighteen Malays were rounded up and appeared in
court next day where they were fined heavily.36
Earlier attempts to solve the problems of the police force only seemed to make matters worse. One of the new initiatives instituted by the governor, Sir
Richard MacDonnell, in 1867 was the substitution of a force of Sikhs for the
sepoys previously recruited from Bombay. These men were cheap to hire yet tall and powerful when compared to the Chinese. They also had the advantage that they could be used to control the Chinese without the British being seen to be involved. They took coercive policing one step further, particularly as they too lacked the language skills to explain themselves to the local Chinese:
Another element of confusion has been introduced by the increase in the number of Hindustani-speaking police between whom and the Chinese there exists a hopeless and unbridgeable gulf of non-comprehension…. There is not a single competent interpreter who can communicate directly between the Sikhs and Chinese.37
They had to resort to more violent methods of enforcing the law:
Beat a man over the head and face from a Northerly direction and the probability is he will retreat backwards to the southward and this is the ultima ratio adopted by the enlightened Sikh — arising from utter incapacity of the chair coolie to understand what the black is saying.38
The Sikhs were found to be taking into custody many more Chinese than ever came to court and some of those appearing in the dock were in a dreadfully battered state. The Hong Kong Punch published a poem on the subject in August
1867, one verse of which went as follows:
Don’t you see the hawkers Beneath the high verandahs,
Where they get a little shade
From the sun.
They must be dreadful ruffians With crimes upon their conscience,
For when a Sikh approaches How they run! There’s no mistake, they scuttle from the giant,
Who rushes with the rattan to the fray.39
One Chinese lamplighter was shot at by a Sikh while up a ladder lighting the gas lamp; another Hindu constable:
was peering into the mysteries of a small revolver within the confines of the
Police Court ‘seeing how the trigger would work’ we suppose — when one of the chambers exploded, and the ball passed through the head of a Chinese woman who was in attendance as a witness.40
Another European constable shot and killed a frightened fleeing Chinese whose only crime was not being gainfully employed. This kind of reckless use of firearms
was encouraged by some jurors who, in the subsequent trials, found the policemen not guilty of manslaughter in the face of clear evidence and the judge’s summing up. ‘There is a bloodthirsty sort of instinct abroad that the deceased being only a Chinaman no particular harm is done by shooting him’.41
The system of policing during these years seems to have been increasingly discriminatory against the Chinese. This trend was highlighted by the Hong Kong Punch, in the December number of 1872, when it described a mock action before Choker White Esq. (nom de plume for the magistrate, C.H. Whyte, whose wife is
buried in the Roman Catholic Cemetery):
Mr. Unfairman of Messrs. Crane Lawford & Co. charged a coolie with walking on Queen’s Road and carrying a bundle of bamboos while he, Mr.
U. was driving there. Mr. U. was just turning the corner from the Parade Ground on to Queen’s Road when the defendant had the audacity to be in this public thoroughfare. In order to avoid being run over, he actually jumped out of the way and in doing so dropped the bamboos which damaged Mr. U’s carriage slightly and frightened him greatly. Mr. U. did not think that the coolie had tried to save his life ‘from any malicious motive’ and he did not wish to press the charge. His worship said that in that case he should deal
leniently with the man. He would fine him FIVE DOLLARS or seven days
imprisonment and hoped this would be a warning to him next time not to jump out of the way when any European nearly drove over him. The roads were intended exclusively for Europeans driving, not for coolies carrying
burthens…. The unfortunate delinquent was carried off to prison.
The Indian police had even more trouble than the European police when they tried to control the riotous and drunken soldiers and seamen who nightly poured out of the many taverns worse for wear. The editor of the China Mail railed against the uselessness of Sikhs and Bengalis:
trying to preserve the peace when drunken sailors are concerned. We
ourselves witnessed a case a few days since in which it took five Sikhs and two Bengalis all they could do to manage one drunken man — to the great delight of a chuckling crowd of Chinese.42
So by this time an element of farce was creeping in to compound the lack of
police success and the many different agencies involved in peace-keeping. Because
of the inadequacy of the police, every godown and every European household
had their own watchman. Among the Chinese, the District Watch was born
in 1866 out of a meeting of the Kaifong leaders, the Chinese merchants and the more prosperous shopkeepers. They asked the government for permission to elect members to act as watchmen paid for by themselves from money collected by men appointed by them from among the Chinese. This self-help organization was readily accepted by Sir Richard MacDonnell and placed under the registrar general’s department. The licensed gambling houses had their own policing system of Chinese runners or informers under Daniel Caldwell since policemen were not allowed to enter a gambling house in case they become addicted or
corrupted. West Indians, Irishmen and even the best Scotland Yard in London could produce had been brought to Hong Kong in the effort to find an efficient
and incorruptible source of manpower for the police and each in turn had shown themselves to be corruptible and prone to drink to excess. No-one was able to
effectively penetrate the criminal elements.
Under Sir Richard MacDonnell a start was made in reforming the police. More police stations were established and they were connected by telegraph. A separate naval yard police was established under the control of the Admiralty and a number of the better policemen were seconded to this branch of operations. A police school was opened so that Indians and Europeans could learn Chinese, and allowances were paid out for good conduct. Forty additional policemen were sought from Scotland, it being thought that those coming from the homeland of Calvinism and the Presbyterian church would be better able to withstand the temptation to earn extra money on the side. In 1872, a commission was called for by the justices of the peace backed by a petition signed by over four hundred residents. Its recommendations were acted on by the new governor, Sir Arthur Kennedy. Police pay was increased, their living conditions improved, a better pension scheme was provided and those policemen who died on government service were given the right to funerals and headstones at government expense.
The police force, in spite of a few later hiccups, never looked back. From 1872,
almost every policeman who died in Hong Kong can be accounted for somewhere
in the Cemetery. Between 1873 and 1875, the burial places of eight policemen, five of whom were from Aberdeenshire were marked by the first of the solid, properly
inscribed and well-carved granite testaments to the newfound respectability of the police. It seems sad that four of those men were under thirty and that they had travelled so far only to die within a couple of years of their arrival in Hong Kong.
The effects of the new aura of respectability accorded to the police and the
better type of police recruited from Scotland shine through the diary kept by Sergeant James Dodds [42/1/11/]43 from Roxburghshire. He was stationed at
Stanley up to 1 June 1875 and then, on promotion to inspector, at the Central Police
Station. Both Dodds and Inspector James Youngson [42/1/12] had previously been policemen in Scotland and both were serious, upright men. Dodds in his diary made clear his disapproval of the fast living, drinking life-style of many Hong
Kong men. On 5 November 1876, he recorded his reading matter as The Elements of Social Science. His hobby was rifle shooting which he practised with his friend,
Youngson. The newfound respectability of the police force was demonstrated to all when it was arranged that Dodds would entertain the governor, Sir Arthur
Kennedy, and his daughter for lunch at Stanley police station. The financial status
of policemen had also changed for the better. Dodds had a bank account in the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank and invested money in
shares. In 1875, he sold the six shares that he
owned jointly with Youngson for just over
$363.00. He had enough ready cash in July to
buy himself an ‘English lever, hunting watch and a gold locket from G. Falconer’s shop’. In November he was able to buy Youngson a dozen bottles of port wine. He also sent money home to Scotland to his sister and father. He enjoyed attending the races and, when he became ill with a chest infection, could afford to go to Macau to recuperate. Dodds also became a member of the United Services Lodge of Freemasons. He recorded with obvious satisfaction his passage
through the first and second degrees. On 17 November 1876, Dodds went into the
government civil hospital where he was twice visited by Sir Arthur Kennedy, and
soon after that, on 20 November 1876, he died aged thirty-four. The report in the
Gazette stated that both he and Youngson displayed great trustworthiness and ability throughout their service in the colony.
Victoria Gaol
The decade 1861–71 was a difficult one also for the prison governors. Escapes
were numerous and discipline difficult to enforce. In 1863 twenty-two prisoners made their escape by tunnelling into a drain. Not long after Rev. James Legge, the missionary, claimed that he ‘did the service to the government of disconcerting a scheme on a larger scale, by which within a few hours, eighty-nine men would have got away’. 44 In 1859 Joseph Scott [16Cii/7/7], an ex-colour sergeant and drill master of the 95th Regiment, was placed in charge of Victoria Gaol. He had been
an overseer of the works for the surveyor general in 1855. In 1856, he became acting sexton and clerk to the colonial chaplain on whose recommendation he was elevated to the post of governor of the prison. Two factors made it almost inevitable that discipline in the prison would be enforced by means of the stick. Firstly, prison governors who were mostly ex-soldiers had become inured to brutality in the army. Secondly, the poorly paid, poorly educated men put in charge of the prisoners could not communicate with the majority of their charges as they spoke no Chinese. A prison riot in March 1860 was caused, according to Colin Crisswell, by ‘overcrowding, lack of proper supervision and sheer unimaginative inhumanity augmented by downright cruelty’. 45
While William Tarrant was serving a sentence for libel in 1860, he accused Scott of cruel practices and listed a number of European prisoners whose health had broken down in prison due to their treatment. In 1861, Scott undertook the public flogging
18.6. Headstone in memory of
of a British escapee himself and was again
Joseph Scott, governor of Victoria reported for cruelty. He punished with Gaol, d. 17.5.1863.
dismissal the turnkeys who had made the report. Treatment of the Chinese would
doubtless have been worse. When a Chinese, Lye Mooey Chie, died in suspicious
circumstances and was subsequently exhumed, it was found that although sick
with dysentery, he had been flogged twice, dosed with aperients, placed in solitary confinement and put on half rations. The jury voiced their opinion: ‘There is great
carelessness in conveying to the Gaol Governor the reports on prisoners made by
the Surgeon’. They added a note that: ‘The punishment of flogging within the gaol
appears to be much too common’. 46 Scott remained in his post until his death in May 1863. He and his wife Elizabeth Scott [16Cii/8/5] are buried near each other in the Cemetery. Though Scott came in for his share of the blame for the state of the prison and the number of escapes that were made from it, the government was mainly held responsible because of the class of men it employed as turnkeys and the miserable level of pay allowed them. The drains through which so many escapes were made were eventually filled up and constructed of iron pipes not large enough for a man to crawl through.47
Scott was replaced on the cheap by Charles Ryall, an ex-ship’s mate who, because of his inexperience, took a cut in salary. Inevitably, a scandal erupted
when a friend of his, William Kent Stanford, was sentenced to eight years in gaol
for his part in the opium fraud perpetrated on board the Circassia. Stanford was married to Isabella Morriss, the widowed daughter of the Cornishman, Captain Curnow. Her former husband, John Warden Morriss [10/8/5], an assistant to Frederick Blackhead, had died after only two months of marriage. In 1858, Stanford was made a partner by Captain Charles Jamieson and given command of the Circassia. In 1862, the failure of a Parsee firm brought to light a huge and systematic swindle. Hormusjee & Rustomjee collapsed owing over $1 million
dollars. The firm had been receiving large amounts in loans on the security of non-existent opium which was supposed to have been stored in the holds of two ships, the Circassia and the Tropic, both jointly owned by Stanford and Jamieson.
Investigators found only fifty chests of opium aboard the ships where, according
to the receipts signed by Stanford, there should have been fifteen hundred chests. Both Stanford and Rustomjee were sent to gaol. It is interesting to note how readily opium was accepted as security for loans. It seems to have played a
significant part in financing the commercial development of Hong Kong.
Ryall had also recently married a widow from Cornwall and Stanford’s Cornish-born wife was a good friend of Ryall’s new wife. So, it came about that he organized a dinner party to include the prisoner, Stanford, and his wife, Isabella. Put on notice by the turnkey, Frederick Bowen [32/2/17] from Portsmouth, Charles May, superintendent of the police, paid a surprise visit to Ryall’s quarters that night. He found Ryall, his wife and a drunken Johnson, the chief executioner, in one room. Proceeding on to the second room, he found Stanford and his wife in evening dress sitting on a sofa together. These irregular proceedings brought Ryall’s career in the prison to an ignominious close. He was sentenced to six months in prison. Stanford was found guilty of escaping from prison, which seems unfair considering his cell door had been opened by a warder, and sentenced to three months’ extension of sentence.
On 26 November 1862 Francis Douglas [8/17/5] arrived from England to take over as governor of the prison. He had probably served previously in the army but his last post had been as assistant overseer of convicts at Bermuda.48 Victoria Gaol became known as Douglas Hotel, but bore few of the hallmarks of a hotel as the old brutalities seem to have continued largely unabated. Douglas’ task was not easy. He presided over three sections in the prison, a debtors’ section, a European section filled mostly with recalcitrant, drunken seamen and a Chinese section. He had to deal with the bad, the mad and the destitute, since there was no other provision in the colony for these people. The turnkeys came from the lowest class of Europeans and were in general little better than the prisoners they guarded.
Things did not improve when one hundred of the worst offenders were put on board a hulk, the Royal Saxon, under the supervision of G.L. Tomlin whose infant son, Ernest Harry Tomlin [20/14/3], is buried in the Cemetery. Thirty-nine prisoners drowned when a barge ferrying them upset. Then, in May 1868 a stampede on Stonecutters Island was orchestrated and one hundred men managed to escape. Questions were asked as to why the convicts had been supplied with bamboos and why a barge had been conveniently anchored nearby making the prisoners’ escape so much easier. Following that, in July 1868, an Indian prisoner, Abdool Khan, was kicked and beaten to death by three turnkeys in so outrageous a manner that they were charged with manslaughter, found guilty and sentenced to six months’ hard labour. The China Mail talked of ‘the degradation to which the lowest classes of British subjects descend’.49
The hatreds and resentments caused by bad treatment sometimes boiled over into murderous attacks. In September 1868, one such caused the death of John Stinson [5/1/27], a Scottish turnkey from Banff. Stinson
who bears a good character was ordered for duty in that part of the prison called the lower yard, where the stone masons, blacksmiths etc. work, and while standing amidst the convicts under his charge, a Chinaman came up to him and knocked him down with a hammer.50
He was hit on the head with such force that he was dead by sundown. Perhaps
Douglas tried to stem the endemic violence in the gaol. He dismissed William
Jackson, a coloured chain gang guard and charged him with assault. Jackson had broken the arm of a Chinese prisoner under his care. 51 Douglas stayed in Hong
Kong eleven years until his death from dysentery in June 1874 and enjoyed a high
reputation. The chief justice said on hearing of his death: ‘I have recently felt that the two great institutions in this Colony to show to strangers are our public school and our gaol’. 52 Douglas’ funeral was numerously attended by leading
officials, residents and members of the Masonic lodges of which he was a member. The Legislative Council voted an honorarium of $1920 to Mrs. Douglas and her children. Mary Douglas, who died in 1879, is buried in the Roman Catholic
Cemetery. The graves of four turnkeys from the Douglas Hotel era of the prison still exist in the Cemetery. Robert Sharp [11B/2/11] was head turnkey. James Beasley’s headstone [43/2/7] was erected by his friend, John Williams, who proclaimed himself on the inscription to be in charge of the Protestant Cemetery.
George Marshall [43/3/5], who died in 1875, had his stone erected by a Japanese friend. William Higgins [32/1/8] was accidentally drowned.
Chapter 19 Changes Taking Place outside the Government
The Professionals
By this time fewer professionals died in Hong Kong. Lawyers and doctors were well paid and could afford to take a ship to Britain. But by now some professionals also saw Hong Kong as their home and not just a temporary place of residence. Among them particular mention must be made of three lawyers, Francis Innes Hazeland, whose wife, Margaretta [13/3/9], and son, John Innes Hazeland [12/5/9], are to be found in the Hong Kong Cemetery, and John Joseph Francis. These two followed in the footsteps of that indomitable survivor William Gaskell [16Cii/7/14], mentioned earlier, who was one of the
first solicitors to work in Hong Kong, having arrived in the colony in November
1846 and stayed up to 1868, when he died aged fifty-seven.1 Francis Hazeland
arrived in the colony around the beginning of the Second Opium War. Soon after his arrival, in February 1857, he was attacked when returning from Stanley by
the Military Road. He met three or four Chinese who accosted him in English. Turning to reply, he was surprised by a blow to his head and
in attempting to ward off this, Mr. Hazeland’s thumb was nearly severed from his hand. Another stroke laid open his skull and stretched him senseless
on the ground. Other wounds were inflicted, and his gold watch and chain
were taken.2
In spite of the doubts expressed as to his survival, Hazeland recovered without any lasting effects and resumed his work as a solicitor. He was an enthusiastic Freemason and was one of the very few to keep his sons in the colony and educate them at the Diocesan School at a time when to do so was almost unheard of. He
died in January 1871 aged just thirty-six years: ‘Mr. Hazeland was much respected
and the announcement of his death in the prime of his manhood caused general sorrow’.3 The Legislative Council voted $3,000 as a gratuity to his family. He was buried in Happy Valley but the site of his grave has been lost.4 Two of his sons, Ernest and Francis Arthur, distinguished themselves in the course of long careers in the colony. Ernest became an architect and civil engineer and Francis worked in the legal departments of the government where he rose to the positions of deputy registrar and acting chief clerk.5
John Joseph Francis, who is buried in the Roman Catholic Cemetery, and
was from Dublin, Ireland, is the third of the trio. He had become an army officer
in his early twenties and was serving in the Royal Artillery when he was posted
to China. In 1859, he made the momentous decision to buy himself out of the
army and remain in Hong Kong. He worked as a clerk living in Mosque Street
until 1865, when he became articled to William Gaskell. Francis later decided to become a barrister and in 1874 he left Hong Kong to become a student of Gray’s Inn, returning on qualification to be admitted to the Hong Kong bar in 1877. He quickly became influential in many spheres of his life. He was elected captain of the Volunteers Corps, revived for the third time in 1878, was a faithful adherent
of the Roman Catholic Church in Hong Kong, and was one of the supporters
of the Chinese in the colony. He signed an affidavit in support of the application of Ng Choy, the first Chinese to be admitted to practise at the bar. He was also
an outspoken supporter of his fellow Irishman, the governor Sir John Pope Hennessy, whose pro-Chinese stance so upset the expatriate community. In 1886, when he was candidate for the justices of peace seat on the Legislative Assembly, Francis showed his feelings for his adopted home: ‘It is my home, my life’s work is here and I rise or fall with its fortunes’.6
The Utilities
Gas
The first utility to reach Hong Kong, in November 1864, was gas lighting, to the
delight of the Europeans who could then do away with the smoky, smelly lamps
which used peanut oil and whose wicks needed constant trimming. Gas fitters for
the new utility had to be sent out from England and again illness and death took their toll. The first to die in 1860 was Frederick Augustus Autey [7/29/6], the small son of the superintendent gas fitter, William Autey [4/11/4], who managed to continue for another thirteen years and become the indispensable chief
manager of the Gas Works before following his son to the grave in 1873. Edward Richard Handley [5/2/27] came out to Hong Kong as foreman gas fitter and left the company in 1867 to start his own business with John Paterson, advertising themselves as house and ship plumbers, copper and zinc workers and gas fitters. Paterson died in Hong Kong in 1869 and Handley carried on the business. He attained the respectable position of being on the jury list by 1872. His wife, Louisa, died in 1871 aged thirty-three; he followed in 1875.
The Telegraph
Work on two telegraph services began in Hong Kong when the Danish Great
Northern Telegraph Company began to connect Hong Kong to Shanghai
and work started at Deep Water Bay. Then the China Submarine Telegraphic cable came ashore in 1871 at a small inlet at Pokfulam Bay which became known
as Telegraph Bay. This was done under the superintendency of John Squier whose baby daughter, Mary Douglas Squier [7/25/6] died in 1874 aged sixteen months. On 5 July of that year a congratulatory message, sent by the chairman in
London to the Hong Kong Chamber of Commerce, took just fifty-three minutes
to reach Hong Kong. Communication with the outside world and in particular with the authorities in London had been revolutionized. But once again, the stresses and strains on the technicians brought half way round the world to work
on difficult projects in the outlying areas of Hong Kong were enormous: ‘To go unarmed at all beyond the outskirts [of Victoria] by day as well as by night was a
risky sort of pleasure, through the footpads who abound in all these locations’. 7 The China Mail in the same article reported in 1871 that one of the European employees of the Great Northern Telegraph Company had been attacked by highwaymen near the Gap at Happy Valley but had managed to escape. Two employees of the Great Northern committed
suicide. In January 1871 a Dane,
Anton Christensen [38/7/4], took an overdose of laudanum and in the following December Charles Donovan [38/7/5] shot himself at
Deep Water Bay.
The importance of the telegraph service to Hong Kong cannot be overstated. No longer was it an isolated backwater where any sort of communication to Europe took six weeks. Distance had ceased to matter as much when a telegraph could be sent and replied to within the course of the same day.
Developments in the Ship Repairing Business
A number of men, mainly from the north of Britain and Scotland, laid the foundations for technology in Hong Kong by their enterprise in the ship building and repairing business. One of the earlier men to establish a yard in Hong Kong was Alexander Ross [43/1/4] of Glasgow who worked as foreman in Stephen Prentis Hall’s yard. Hall is said to be the father of Sin Tak Fan who in his turn fathered generations of Eurasians, many of whom now lie at rest in the Cemetery.
In 1865, Ross established a yard in Wan Chai together with a Mr. Thompson and by 1867 he was in sole charge of it. His son, James Gordon Ross [20/10/1], died in 1864 and shares a monument with his sister, Jane, who died in 1865. Then in 1867 his wife, Mary Ross, joined her children in the family tomb aged thirty-two after a long and painful illness. Thomas James Record [40/3/3] from Woolwich, whose inscription describes him as a moulder in the Royal Navy Yard, must have been a close friend of David Illingworth.
19.2. Headstone in memory of David Illingworth, Iron and Brass Foundry worker and owner, d. 14.7.1871.
When he died at West Point Foundry in 1869, he left Illingworth $900 and made
him his executor. David Illingworth [5/1/32] from Bradford, Yorkshire began work as foreman at Russell & Co.’s Iron and Brass Foundry and then went on to
start his own foundry at West Point. He auctioned off his stock in 1870 when he became ill. Illingworth died in July 1871.
J.W. Croker [20/6/2] was another technician who worked his way up to become foreman and then, in 1876, managing engineer of the Novelty Iron Works, finally moving into the docks as engineer in 1880.
The Beginning of Hong Kong’s Dockyards
By the end of this period, Hong Kong possessed five docks, three slipways and
everything needed to repair the ships of that period and to build medium-sized
vessels. The loss of the use of the Whampoa docks during the Second Opium War had hastened this development. Furthermore, the depth of the water in the
Pearl River would no longer allow the bigger Royal Navy vessels to be docked there. Docking facilities for larger vessels were needed in Hong Kong. John Lamont, the ships’ carpenter from Aberdeen in Scotland, teamed up with a fellow Scot, Douglas Lapraik, to purchase a suitable site for a dock in Aberdeen.
In June 1860, Lamont opened the first dock in Hong Kong that was capable of rivalling the docks built by the Coupers at Whampoa. Such was its success that,
in January 1863, he embarked on a second, even larger dock. In mid-1865, with this dock half built, Lamont decided to return with his two Eurasian sons to his native Aberdeen, perhaps foreseeing his impending death there. However, first he managed to sell his share of the Aberdeen Docks to Jardine, Matheson & Co. After his death, the two boys were seen through school in Scotland and generally looked after by members of the Jardine and Matheson families in Aberdeen. Thomas Lamont [23/9/6] came back to Hong Kong to assume his father’s mantle
as superintendent of the Aberdeen Docks, dying in 1890 aged forty years.
Meanwhile, in July 1863, with the full support of his partners, Jardine Matheson and the P. & O., and within a few weeks of the passing of the Companies Ordinance, Lapraik set up the Hong Kong & Whampoa Dock Company with Thomas Sutherland as its chairman. So in this way, the dock company became the first listed company in Hong Kong, literally the No. 1 Hong Kong Company.
Reactions from Dent & Co. followed swiftly. The directors put together a consortium of companies which included Dent’s and the two American companies, Heard and Hunt, and set up the rival Union Dock Company of Hong Kong and Whampoa. In November 1864, the newly formed Union Dock Company bought a piece of land on the Kowloon peninsula near the village of Hung Hom and proceeded to dig a large mud hole. This was the first time a professional architect, John Studd, had been brought in to supervise the dock construction. Some of the more old-fashioned members of the board were convinced that the old-style ships’ carpenters like Couper and Lamont could do a better job. Captain Henry de Castilla announced: ‘All the docks in China and Singapore have been built by Scottish carpenters and there are no better docks in the world’. A series of disputes convulsed the boardroom and interrupted progress. Dr. Ivor Murray, the colonial surgeon, whose little daughter, Edith Mary Murray [7/24/4], died aged two years, insisted on calling in Robert Duncan from the Aberdeen Docks to advise. He was another Scottish carpenter who had taken over as superintendent when Lamont returned to Scotland. Disputes erupted over the design of the Hung Hom docks, and in particular over the kind of concrete to be used on the floor of the dock. The deputy surveyor, John Clark [20/12/1], who died suddenly in the following year (October 1868) while at work in his office, was called in to
adjudicate and sided against the architect, Studd. The entire board of directors took ship to Hung Hom and solemnly stared at the mud hole. Victor Kressner, the chairman, resigned twice during the altercations, leaving Captain James Bridges Endicott [11B/1/1] in the chair. Finally Studd won his battle, the dock
was successfully finished, and the Chinese concrete mix proved, over many years
to come, its ability to stay waterproof.
Robert Duncan and the Great Dock Swindle
Meanwhile at Aberdeen a second dock was finished by Robert Duncan whose wife, Catherine Duncan [5/3/27], died in September 1867 aged twenty-nine soon after the docks were opened.
There now began a period of intense competition between the two dock companies. Union Dock did such tremendous business that a second dock was
called for. Then in 1869, the main partner, Dent & Co., folded and went out of
business. In the meantime Jardine Matheson met the competition by lowering their prices to uneconomic levels and deliberately operating at a loss. In less than a
year Union Dock went into voluntary liquidation. Jardines, led by James Whittall,
whose probable relative Charlton Whittall of Smyrna [32/2/15] lies in a distant corner of the Cemetery, raised a mortgage to buy up the entire Union Dock
property both in Kowloon and Whampoa. The Hong Kong & Whampoa Dock
Company name went up over the Hung Hom gateway to the docks and was to remain there for one hundred years.
However this was not the end of the troubles for the docks. Duncan, now promoted to secretary of Union Dock, had the complete trust of the busy directors. He proceeded with the help of his accounts clerk, Manuel Joaquim Rozario, to abuse this trust in a number of cleverly hidden frauds varying from ghost workers drawing salaries to hugely inflated prices recorded as having been paid for teak logs, which could then be
skimmed. When William Keswick, the
new head of Jardine Matheson, brought in auditors, Duncan took to his bed. It took a whole year of intense detective work to uncover enough of the frauds to bring the matter to the court. Robert Addyman, the head office clerk, whose wife, Anne Addyman [9/12/13], is buried in the Cemetery, was a very nervous man and terrified of losing his job. He made a very poor witness and was so upset by the case that he tried to commit suicide. However the evidence was strong enough to send the case up to the Supreme Court. In an unprecedented move, Duncan was refused bail. The hearing was before Justice Francis Snowden [11B/5/5] and
bail was set at $40,000, the highest ever in Hong Kong, on personal recognizance with two sureties of $20,000. So began the trial of the century before Chief Justice Sir John Smale. The Crown solicitor and William Brereton, whose twelve-year-old daughter, Laura Frances Brereton [13/4/2], had died in 1871, prosecuted and the defence was ably conducted to the admiration of all by Henry Kingsmill, whose wife, Frances Elizabeth Kingsmill [40/5/4], was buried in 1865 aged thirty-three years. Sir John Smale summed up:
Your crime is great without any parallel in my large experience. You, a ship’s carpenter, were raised from that humble establishment to a position in which the most implicit trust was placed in you. You almost immediately lost all notion of honesty.
Smale went on to trace the crime ‘to the temptations arising from the want of due supervision by directors and auditors’. 8 Duncan was sentenced to nine years in prison and Rozario to six years. Jardine Matheson never worked out the true extent of their losses, so involved and subtle was Duncan’s system. Thus ended the era of talented ships’ carpenters from Scotland, who had built and run the docks
at Hong Kong, Whampoa and elsewhere in the Far East. The precarious health
of wives and children in Hong Kong through the 1860s can be ascertained by the number of those associated with the dock scandal that died during these years.
In the early days of steam, boilers were still prone to explode. Perhaps SS Yesso, of the Douglas Line, was a dangerous ship. She had already been the cause of the death of one foreman boilermaker of the Hong Kong Dock Company, Thomas Welsby [38/4/18], in an accident at the Aberdeen Docks. Then on 30
October 1874, the ship was involved in another accident of horrifying proportions.
The SS Yesso had just arrived from Swatow and was being moored alongside Lapraik’s wharf at the Aberdeen Docks when one of her boilers exploded. The force of the steam was such that a plate from the boiler, weighing over two hundred pounds, broke through the bulkhead separating the boilers from the fore-hold. Steam poured into the hold, burning the Chinese passengers who were
getting ready to leave the ship. When the Civil Hospital was filled to capacity, Victoria Gaol was opened up for victims, some of whom felt even more terrified
and unhappy when they found themselves in prison rather than in hospital. Eighty-seven people died from scalding, loss of skin, shock and internal injuries caused by the steam burning their throats and lungs. There was only one European casualty: the second engineer, a Scotsman called John Haggart [27/2/11], died of his burns the next night. Very few of those scalded by the escaping steam seem to have survived.
The Merchant Navy
Helped by the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the rise in the number of vessels
visiting the port of Hong Kong in this period was startling. The authors of The Treaty Ports of China and Japan, published in 1867, give an idea of the multiplicity
of vessels in the harbour and also of the importance of the sea and the sea routes in providing Hong Kong with its livelihood during this period:
Every variety of floating conveyance finds its way to this safe and commodious
harbour. The English and American clipper, the clumsy junk — the awkward looking sampan and the fast gig — the P. & O. steamer and American river boat with its tiers of cabins and its massive looking engine beam, each and all in countless variety are scattered over the surface of the water while the Chinese ‘fast boats’ presenting to the English eyes the queerest combination of ugliness and speed they have ever beheld … are crossing, leaving and entering the harbour.9
In 1878, only three years outside this period, Isabella Bird summed up the
importance to Hong Kong of the harbour as follows:
Will it be believed that the amount of British and foreign tonnage annually
entering and leaving the port averages two million tons? And that the
number of native vessels trading to it is about fifty-two thousand, raising the
ascertained tonnage to upwards of three millions and a half, or half a million in excess of Singapore? To this must be added thousands of smaller native boats of every build and rig trading to Hong Kong not only from the Chinese coasts and rivers, but from Siam, Japan and Cochin China. Besides the P.
& O., the Messageries Maritimes, the Pacific Mail Company, the Japanese
‘Mitsu Bichi’ Mail Companies, all regular mail lines, it has a number of lines of steamers trading to England, America and Germany, with local lines
both English and Chinese, and lines of fine sailing clippers, which however
are gradually falling into disuse, owing to the dangerous navigation of the Chinese seas and the increasing demand for speed.10
Men in Hong Kong still looked outwards to the sea for their living. After Queen’s Road, the Praya with its piers jutting out into the sea was the most important road in the town and along its length clustered ships’ chandlers, repair
yards, sail makers and hotels for merchant navy officers.
The commanders and officers of merchant ships continued in this period to provide the largest group of civilians in the Cemetery. Eighty-three
merchantmen can be identified, fourteen of whom worked for the P. & O. Thirty-
nine headstones commemorate captains, commanders or master mariners from
Scandinavia, Germany, U.S.A., Holland, New South Wales, and Nova Scotia
as well as Great Britain including the Channel Islands. Crew members include
three officers, ten engineers, one boilermaker, three stewards, one carpenter, three
seamen and two gunners. Twenty-nine men buried in the Cemetery are listed as belonging to ships, barques, brigs or schooners as opposed to the nineteen who sailed in steam ships or were described as engineers. Many of these ships belonged to the local coastal and river lines such as those run by Douglas Lapraik, the Apcar family or the Hong Kong, Canton & Macau Steamboat Company. In the ports and narrow windy rivers, the steamers had great advantages over sail.
Life as a merchant seaman was hard and accidents happened easily. For example, in December 1867, Philip Gandin [37/4/1, from Jersey, the chief mate of the Adeline, went aloft to sight a local landmark, the Pedro Branca rock. He was
French and Spanish ships in the harbour, 1854, by a Chinese artist. (By courtesy of Martyn Gregory from his booklet entitled The Perry Landings.)
standing on the main top-sail when the tie gave away and the poor fellow fell to the deck, broke his neck and died instantaneously aged twenty-six.11 The stress of the long sea voyage seems too often to have been relieved by sprees ashore where too much drink and visits to brothels helped the sailors forget their hardships. These methods of relaxation were not confined to the lower ranks. Captain William Shiels [37/5/20], master of a local vessel, Lark, fell down in a fit in the Commercial Billiard Rooms and died soon after. The poor man was put into an open chair at midday and conveyed under the full sun to the police station instead of the hospital, which may have hastened his death. However, it was admitted at the coroner’s inquest that he had long been a hard drinker and the cause of his death was delirium tremens combined with syphilis. His friends protested against this verdict and felt that, had he been given brandy and water, he might have recovered.12 The unfortunate ex-captain Charles Stewart, who had missed his passage on the Arratoon Apcar, appeared again and again in court on charges of being drunk and incapable. ‘There seems to be nothing under the sun capable of restraining this besotted individual from getting helplessly drunk’. The ‘poor wrecked gentleman’ was sent to gaol again for seven days.13 Officers of the merchant navy ranged in age from Robert Charles Needham [32/2/16], the very young master of Light of Ages, who was killed falling from aloft at the young age of nineteen years, to Captain Jabez Clarke [38/4/3] from New York who died in Hong Kong
in 1866 at the hoary old age of fifty-six.
Captains still sailed with their wives and families. Included among those who died during
these years are five wives and two babies. Captain
James Boyd must have felt the loss of his twenty-five-year-old wife, Jane Boyd [38/3/1], very keenly. On arriving back in Liverpool, he went to Colquitt Street to arrange for a large marble headstone to be cut and inscribed. He brought it back on his next visit to be set up in the Cemetery. One’s sympathies must also be with James Sangster, master of the Menandrina, whose thirty-year-old wife, Margaret Sangster [38/4/9], died of typhus just two hours before
entering port in March 1869.
The P. & O. Steam Navigation Company
The P. & O. was still the most important line linking the Far East with Europe though its reputation was now somewhat diminished. By this time the number of complaints from passengers were mounting.
During this period, a new and handsome design of headstone was in use for its officers. A marble shield was set into a spectacular eight-foot granite mount. This pattern of headstone was used, for example, for Alexander Smith [32/2/9], engineer of the SS Pekin, James Hamilton [37/7/17], engineer of the SS Ganges and William Hamilton [37/1/2], second officer
of SS Ottawa. It is significant that women were now also employed on
the line as stewardesses. One woman is included among the fourteen P. & O. employees from this period: Nancy Spickernell [37/6/31] of the Travancore died
in Hong Kong in 1869 aged thirty-nine.
Seamen
Life was still tough on board ships and ordinary seamen were at risk of death from disease, from drowning or from falling from aloft. Seamen from the naval ships and those from the merchant ships of all nationalities, when they arrived in Hong Kong, still looked on it as the place for a spree and some fun involving drinking, singing, dancing and brothels. Streams of sailors passed through the courts for offences involving alcohol and disorderly behaviour, and a number seem to have ended up destitute and sleeping rough or in the gaol. The fact that during this period the headstones of only two seamen have survived suggests that the status of ordinary seamen in the port had not changed much over the years. One of those seamen whose headstones have survived was Joseph Laverance [43/3/4], aged eighteen years, of the British barque Tansy. He accidentally tumbled down the fore-hold and died from the effects of the fall. One headstone commemorating Theodore Glawson [40/3/4], of the Rajah of Goghin, was paid for by his shipmates who
commissioned it in 1869 after his death in hospital.
In January 1865, a sailors’ home was opened in Hong Kong built with money contributed mainly by the merchant community, with an
added $45,000 and the first three years of running
costs being given by those generous merchants, Joseph and Robert Jardine. The handsome building contained a canteen which served grog and tobacco, a skittle alley, a reading room and library of ‘instructive and amusing works’. The
first superintendent was William Punchard,
probably the brother of Captain John Elgood Punchard [8/13/4] who had for many years been in the employ of Douglas Lapraik as commander of the SS Kwantung and was described at the opening as ‘a man in a hundred and well suited by temperament’.
In spite of the fact that the sailor’s home had opened and was being run
for the benefit of seamen, Hong Kong was still a hotbed of crimps in the form
of grasping boarding-house keepers and their runners. Sailors who had been lured ashore were rendered incapable with bad liquor in the adjacent tavern also
owned by the keeper of the house, and then, in that stupefied state, they were all
too frequently deprived of their money without any means of ascertaining where it had gone. They lived on the credit which the landlord of the house granted
them until they were finally compelled to either live rough on the streets or ship
out on the first craft available. Their ship was often also arranged by the same landlord who took a cut from the captain of the ship for providing him with crew. To give an example of the current practices, R. Gorman, an illiterate runner, sued E. Blackwood, proprietor of the Empire Tavern and boarding house, in
July 1869 for his wages. Gorman declared in court that he had enticed 207 men
to the boarding house during the period in question with an average of twenty to
twenty-two men a day for whom the going rate of pay due to him was $1 per head.
As there were no records and Gorman had had free board, lodging and drink throughout the period, he lost his case. 14 As this case shows, boarding houses were still providing a ready-made clientele to the adjacent taverns:
Jack on shore is to a great extent a helpless creature, and if once in the hands of a set of harpies known as ‘boarding house keepers’, he is not only kept in the most wretched dens of iniquity that ever existed and plundered to his last penny, but he is sold like a piece of merchandize to the first shipping master who will take him. The next thing Jack knows is that he finds himself on board a ship with an empty pocket, an empty chest and three months debt.15
The Lower Classes
Boarding-House and Tavern Keepers and Their Barmen and Runners
All sorts of men gravitated towards the lucrative trade of tavern keeping. James S. Williams [8/21/5] from Devonshire came by a common ex-police route. By 1860,
he was paying the rates for Britain’s Boast Tavern at 62 Queen’s Road West and two years later was also running the Land We Live In with the assistance of T.E.
Hawkins. By the end of the second period, it was becoming more common for proprietors to hire bar-keepers. A new layer of underdogs was being added to the
social scale. Williams went on to acquire a horse repository in 1875 and died in 1878 aged forty-four years, leaving by the standards of the time a large estate of $7,000
to his wife Jessie. Some men descended from higher social spheres into tavern
keeping. In February 1871, John Baynes [23/6/6] lately of the P.W.D. and now
landlord of the Angel Inn appeared before the licensing justices. Although given a good character, Superinterdent Charles May expressed regret that he had come down in the world and that a man of good repute should be compelled to adopt such a doubtful line of business.16
Among the foreign contingent were the three Olson brothers, John [16B/7/3], Olaf [38/3/7] and Anders [42/1/3], natives of Carlshamn in Sweden. They were probably ex-merchant seamen who left Sweden in the late 1850s due to poverty.
Anders was the first to die, of smallpox in 1872. He has an anchor and chain on
his headstone which was erected by his brother, John. From the early 1860s, the brothers ran the National Tavern in a not altogether approved-of fashion. According to the police, there were complaints that John Olson allowed or even encouraged prostitutes to hang around the door where they attracted the sailors.17 However he achieved the respectability of
having his name on the jury list from 1867 onwards and continued to flourish. By 1877
he was in a position to take over the Stag
Hotel which he ran up to 1912. John stayed
in Hong Kong and had relationships with
two Chinese women, the first of whom died
of laryngitis. His second relationship with Ching Ah Fung, also known as Ellen Olson [16B/6/11], lasted for thirty-four years. Ellen was christened by the London Missionary
Society. She died in 1915 aged 61 and is
buried near her husband. The four Olson children attended the Diocesan Schools. John’s daughter, Hannah, married Charles
Warren, a plumber and self-styled architect. He and John Olson junior combined
in business as building contractors, sanitary engineers and tile manufacturers. They later added the title of granite and marble merchants and monumentalists.
By 1921 the family had built a large, castellated mansion on Broadwood Ridge overlooking the racecourse and Charles Warren was racing horses under the name ‘Mr. Towers’. Thus, a mixed marriage family rose from tavern to castle, from seaman to racehorse owner and member of the Jockey Club in two generations. The rise of the Olson family shows clearly that tavern keeping was profitable and could lead to better things. Another tavern keeper with a lasting relationship with a Chinese ‘protected girl’ was George Wilkins [20/18/5]. He was first granted a licence for a billiard table at the Commercial Hotel in 1859 and by 1861 had opened the Magnet Tavern in Stanley Street. He had previously been working as an assistant to De Silva & Co. When Wilkins died in 1867, he left $500 and the household furniture to Ngan Achoey and his remaining money to their two daughters and three sons. He left his gold watch to his executor, Samuel Speechley, the engineer.
Destitute Europeans
More destitutes than ever were buried in plots marked by numbered granite
markers and their lot was if anything worse than in the first period. The problem
of what to do with these men whose plight shamed the ‘respectable’ portion of society seemed insoluble since neither the government nor the community was willing to take responsibility for them. The Society for the Relief of the Destitute Sick started by Dr. Francis Dill had disappeared. European destitutes were ruthlessly ousted from their makeshift huts and hiding places by the police and sent to prison for being rogues and vagabonds. In August 1868, Sergeant Hawes ‘who persists in the most praiseworthy manner in hunting out disreputable Europeans in the colony’ produced four such men in one day.18 The downward path to joblessness and destitution was all too often caused by alcohol.
The case of James Murphy, an unemployed seaman, seems typical. He had been a soldier in the 31st Regiment and his discharge had originally been purchased by the Shanghai Municipal Council. Mr. Gray, warden of Victoria
Gaol, first knew the prisoner as a policeman:
He was taken into the gaol as a turnkey in 1868. He was discharged for drunkenness. He then came back as a rogue and vagabond; he then paid a visit as a destitute. After this he came back as a prisoner for stealing a
watch from Sergeant Wassenius. He was then again in gaol as a rogue and
vagabond and was discharged on 20 May.19
Then in desperation he gave himself in charge as a destitute. The story of David Brown who appeared before the court in December 1868 rounds out the picture:
He says he is a clerk and hies from Edinburgh. He admitted to having
been in the 74th Regiment and came from Liverpool in the American
ship, ‘Bunker Hill’.… Inspector Horspool said Brown had been living for the last six weeks at the Black Soldiers’ barracks, and had been over and over again warned for roaming about in a vagabondish manner: … He had been dismissed from the police force for drunkenness three months ago…. Prisoner was an inveterate drunkard, and would never work so long as he could get food and drink for nothing.20
When it came to sentencing the man, the magistrate Mr. Goodlake commented
that he was sorry to hear such bad accounts of the prisoner and did not suppose any ship captain would have anything to do with him. There were no poor rates in Hong Kong and neither could he be allowed to roam the streets without a place
of abode. He would send him to gaol for a month and C.H. Whyte would speak
to Francis Douglas, the gaol governor.
An article in China Mail in September 1866 on ‘Houseless Europeans’ drew attention ‘to an evil which exists to a greater extent in Hong Kong than most are willing to believe’.21 The kind of person the editor seems to have had in mind was the American ex-sailor Thomas Reynolds, ‘a miserable looking object, filthy and half clad who had been found sleeping on the pavements of Tai Ping Shan under some mats’. He also was sent to gaol for one month. The editor suggested that there was a need for a new aid society to at least pay the fares home for the hopeless cases. Later that year, when wishing the readers of the China Mail a merry Christmas, the editor begged help for the many in Hong Kong, chiefly seamen, who were almost if not utterly destitute. Unfit sailors and other men without work or money were passed from one treaty port to another and Hong Kong stood at the end of the receiving line. Sherk Grassman from Holland was picked up in the street as a destitute. The ex-sailor said he had arrived in Hong Kong eighteen months earlier and been discharged at Nagasaki and sent to hospital to get cured of his rheumatism. He was discharged uncured and was shipped to Shanghai with a letter to the German consul who sent him to gaol for twenty-four hours after which he was taken to the Dutch consul who packed him back to Hong Kong. He had no papers to substantiate his story and was sent back to gaol for two weeks.22
If the European community and its government were so uncaring about the fate of the European unfortunates, it is hardly surprising that little attention was paid to the problems of the Chinese community. As a result of a petition for relief by a lady left destitute with two children, Sir John Pope Hennessy commissioned
E.J. Eitel, ex-Basel missionary, to write a report in 1880 on the treatment of paupers in Hong Kong. He divided the class into two categories, non-resident foreigners and Chinese. According to him, the destitute of the first group consisted of a
small fluctuating residue of non-descript seamen, deserters, or men discharged from Hospital, who are beyond the pale of the Merchant Shipping Act, disowned by their respective Consuls and Shipping masters, ‘beach-combers’ well known to the Marine Magistrates as drunken sots. They hang about the grog shops, levy blackmail on former shipmates and on native fruit hawkers, call at gentlemen’s houses early in the morning begging for food and clothes which are forthwith converted into drink.
Eitel classed the Chinese destitute as beggars, strangers, waifs cast on the community by kidnappers, lunatics or men disabled by accidents or opium smoking. For them too no provision had been made. Eitel reported:
It is neither humane nor reasonable for the Government to have no other
remedy to offer for the misfortune of its Chinese subjects suffering from the
natural consequences of such misfortune but that of fine, imprisonment, whipping and transportation. 23
He contrasted the early vision of Hong Kong as a model colony which would become a beacon of light to the so-called ‘semi-civilized’ pagans of China with its present un-Christian mode of dealing with its poor and the destitute. He described official policy as a ‘barbaric policy of brute repression’, which treated poverty as a crime and drove men to despair. He attributed the unusually high number of suicides in Hong Kong to this policy.
The Army
The Soldiers of the Garrison
The reports of the heroism and sufferings of the soldiers in the Crimean War had
been instrumental in arousing in the public mind a better image of the common
soldier. This had been strengthened by an incident in the Second Opium War.
An old Scottish sweat, serving in the Kent regiment, was captured by the Chinese and had refused to kowtow and had consequently been beheaded. According to one account, he had earlier helped himself to his unit’s rum ration and his recalcitrance was due in no small part to the fact that he was drunk.24 The Times newspaper, ignorant of the details, published a poem written by Sir Francis Doyle in his honour which was quoted in the China Mail:
Soldier’s Sacrifice for His Country
Last night among his fellow-roughs,
He jested quaffed and swore. A drunken private of the Buffs Who never looked before.
Today beneath the foeman’s frown He stands in Elgin’s place, Ambassador from Britain’s crown, And type of all her race. Poor reckless, rude, low-born, untaught Bewildered and alone; A heart with English instinct fraught, He yet can call his own. Honour calls! — with strength like steel He put the vision by; And thus with eyes that would not shrink,
With knees to man unbent,
Unfaltering on its dreadful brink, To his red grave he went.25
Hong Kong after the Second Opium War was beginning to view its garrison
in a more favourable light. A long article in May 1863 in the China Mail railed against the obstinacy of conservatism and red tape that denied soldiers proper
respect in death. In this case, a grave only three feet deep and filled with water had
been prepared for some poor fellow:
It is doubly painful to see that sublime ceremonial for the burial of the
dead, [the Protestant Burial Service] brought face to face with the indecent
spectacle of a grave in which one would scarcely bury his dog.26
The editor proposed that there should be a proper soldiers’ cemetery while still making clear their lowly position near the bottom of the social scale:
So long as the Church maintains the practice [of burying Christians in consecrated ground] and so long as the laity attach the smallest importance
to it, just so long will the lowest subordinate in the social scale adhere to his belief that there is something in it and so believing … he is fully entitled to claim the prospective satisfaction of being buried in holy earth.
The conditions under which soldiers lived and died were still bad. The China Mail waged a long campaign on their behalf. The editor argued that the press was frequently ‘the best if not the only advocate of the poor man’.27 The specific charge that the editor brought against Major-General Guy and his surgeon-general Dr. Dick on this occasion was dereliction of duty to his troops. It was stated that
due to ‘culpable and wilful neglect’, and ‘conduct that ill befits any officer of rank,
and which greatly resembles desertion from duty in the moment of action’, the general had been in Japan lining his pocket while the 11th Regiment was sickening and falling dead like flies. Only 102 men of that regiment were fit enough to show up at the parade on the previous day out of a total of 550, and several were actually without arms — ‘a fact sufficient to make the bones of the late Duke of Wellington shake in their coffin’. Again in 1865, the China Mail wrote: ‘From incapacity, ignorance or wilful neglect of sanitary arrangements, and even bare accommodation, the troops who lately arrived here have come all the way round the Cape to this Colony to die’.28 The high number of deaths produced a sense of outrage among the authorities and newspapers in England:
The officers thro’ whose mismanagement,
the mortality of the 9th and 11th
(Regiments) was brought about, have it seems caused something more than the deaths of the men who died. They have caused prejudice at home against the colony which will endure for many years…. The Army & Navy Gazette is fairly disgusted with Hong Kong and pens an acrimonious article in which the offensive name of the place is repeated in varying accents of contempt, anger and vituperation in every second line.29
Hong Kong was sometimes seen as a perpetual drain on Anglo Saxon strength and accused of wasting the blood of British soldiers for its
own benefit.
A mark of the increased esteem in which soldiers were held by the end of this period is shown by the fact that, for the first time, ordinary private soldiers began as a matter of routine to be given headstones. One of the first to be dignified with an individual headstone with his name on it seems to have been Private J. Poole, who died on 3 July 1865. He and eleven others, all belonging to the 2nd Battalion of the 9th Regiment, have similar granite headstones, but they were the exceptions.
The lists of soldiers dying in 1865 when cholera struck show that many more died unmemoralized. On Thursday 6 July for example, no less than fifteen soldiers, mostly privates, can be counted in the ‘in memoriam’ column of the China Mail. The unnamed young men in the prime of life, who died in Hong Kong, must have exceeded those with headstones by many times. The most senior officer in the army to die in Hong Kong during this period was Major-General Brunker [17/14/1], commander in chief of the forces in China and Japan and lieutenant governor of the colony. He followed his wife to the grave in March 1869 aged sixty-two. According to his obituary, he had not been the same man since her death and had gradually sunk ‘notwithstanding the unremitting care and attention of his daughters and medical adviser’.30
Some attempts were made in the face of such criticisms to alleviate the lot of the soldiers. A soldiers’ club and reading room had been opened in Hong Kong and a reading room in Kowloon by February 1862. The club was described as ‘a glittering beer and gin palace open early and late with its fiddle, bad liquor and sundry other accompaniments, which also boasted a skittles alley, a racquet court and a billiard room’. 31 The subscription for the private was a sixpence a month which was considered affordable.
Women
Women were able to act with toughness and decision as, for example, was shown
by Mrs. Dunn, an Irish woman, while travelling from Hong Kong to Macau to
join her husband. In 1862, she happened to be aboard the SS Iron Prince when the Chinese passengers aided by three nearby piratical junks tried to seize control of the ship. Although wounded in the neck and shoulder in the initial pirate charge, Mrs. Dunn made her way to the after-cabin where the captain was mustering his forces and had earlier stowed arms against such an emergency. She proceeded to pass out arms to all the able-bodied passengers and crew and then to fire at the pirates with such good effect that they fled the ship in panic, jumping into the water where many who could not swim were drowned. The Iron Prince was
carrying $40,000 worth of opium and would have made a fine prize.32
Yet the position of women in society during these years had hardly changed. Their lives like their clothes were incredibly restricting. Crinolines and corsets were in fashion. In the China Mail of 1864, Salomon’s of London was advertising their patent jupon, a spiral crinoline in steel and bronze, which would collapse under the slightest pressure and resume its shape when the pressure was removed. Along with the jupon went ‘Castle’s patent ventilating corset invaluable for the
ball room, equestrian exercise and warm climates’. Women would not have been
allowed to venture out by themselves, let alone do their own marketing. Ladies had to be guarded from sights that might have upset their frailer senses:
The filthiness of the Chinese quarters where most of the shops are situated
and the rowdy nature of the native frequenters of Central Market make it impossible for ladies to visit these places in person even when desirous of making their own purchases.33
It was not until about 1874 that women were allowed to take the female roles
in Amateur Dramatics. An extract from the China Mail recorded that: ‘During the visit of the Hongkong cricket team to Amoy, the Amateur Dramatics — assisted by real ladies [sic] — performed with considerable success, ‘To oblige Benson’ and ‘The Goddess with the Golden Eggs’. 34 Croquet and tennis were about the only sports open to women. Swimming was considered unladylike. The fair sex was not allowed to bathe in the Swimming Club pool and swimming off beaches would have been a subject for scandalized gossip. A letter from some brave man to the
Daily Press in July 1870 entitled ‘Advanced’ Bathing, asked: ‘Why should we not
have bathing houses at Pokfulam or Stonecutter’s Island and a Bathing Society … composed of ladies and gentlemen who should bathe together in costume?’ He continued: ‘Behold the uplifted palms of some walking Code of Proprieties as he reads this terrible suggestion’. 35 Needless to say his suggestion was ignored.
Croquet had become fashionable and popular and, in 1870, a croquet club
was set up, perhaps like so many of Hong Kong’s clubs to regulate against improper social mixing and make sure that only those of the right social status could participate. An article about the club pointed out that its committee consisted exclusively of gentlemen:
It is hardly possible to conceive a stronger proof of the degrading subjection
of women, than is afforded by this proceeding. If a woman has one field more
especially marked out for her than another it is the Croquet Lawn. Yet the people of Hong Kong are so wedded to prestige and precedent, so blindly ignorant of the great truths that John Stuart Mill and Miss Martineau, and Miss Josephine Butler have been labouring to bring before this world that a Croquet Club is started and its management offered to men. This indicates a wish on the part of the residents in the Island Colony not only to keep women in their present position of social bondage, but even to thrust
them from those fields of delightful usefulness which they now occupy. We
trust that a colony called after the Queen will not allow so sad a stain to rest upon its chivalry. Let the Ladies immediately start a rival club unless prompt reparation is made them.36
The frailty of women so much played upon by men at this time was only too
often proved to be close to the truth. In this period fifty-six wives were buried in
the Cemetery. Taking the forty-eight whose ages we know, the average age of death can be worked out as thirty-three years, not a great improvement on the
thirty-one-year-old average found in the first period. The average age was brought
down by the seven army wives whose average age at the time of their death was only twenty-seven. Included among them is the first female found serving in a regiment among the soldiers. Elizabeth Ann Atherley [31/1/5] was school
mistress to the 88th Regiment. She died in 1874 aged thirty-one. Her eight-month-
old son had died just two days before herself. Mary Ann Namick [24/5/2], the wife of the band master of the 2nd Battalion 20th Regiment who died in 1865 aged twenty-seven, has the largest headstone in that part of the Cemetery, a token perhaps of her husband’s love, but also of the prestige of the regimental band and its band master.
Childbirth was still dangerous and could all too often lead to a weakened state of health. Poor Edith Ann Ryrie [10/6/3], again aged only twenty-one years, died in February 1866 in childbirth and her infant daughter, Muriel, died too ‘having survived her birth by only a few hours’. Perhaps the overwhelming sorrow was too much for her husband, the well-known merchant Phineas Ryrie [23/8/6]. He never married again, but is rumoured to have quietly installed a Chinese mistress instead. Eliza Storey [16Ci/4/11], the wife of the architect, Charles Storey, ‘obeyed her Maker’s call’ in November 1866. She had had a baby girl earlier that month. Another victim of childbirth was poor young Grace Malzard [38/3/10] who died five days after giving birth to a son who only survived eighteen hours. Women also suffered greatly from complaints that could now be alleviated
with analgesics. Harriet Vincent [38/4/11], the wife of a foreman boilermaker in
the Royal Navy dockyard, died in October 1872 aged forty-four years:
Affliction sore
Long time she bore And seldom did complain. Till God was pleased to call her home, And ease her of her pain.
Problems with debt-ridden or drunken or abusive husbands must have
seemed worse so far from the support of family and friends. One such was Sarah
Jane Barnes [42/2/6] who died in 1874 aged fifty. Her husband, Leonard Barnes,
was a coach builder from Duddell Street who had formerly been a wheelwright in the Royal Artillery. Leonard Barnes and Edmund Boyd had established a partnership as farriers, keepers of a livery stable, and harness and coach makers but, as his appearances in court for the non-payment of debts and assault mounted, Barnes became a person that few wanted dealings with and the partnership was
dissolved. In 1869 he became the government undertaker and by 1871 he was
combining undertaking with goods and furniture delivery. The position of women caught in an abusive relationship would have been dire. They had little option but to stay with their abusers and bear the brunt. Anna Maria, the wife of Gerardus Baas of the City of Rotterdam tavern, who laced his brandy with common salt, went so far as to charge her husband with violent assault. ‘A great row had taken place and cries of murder had been heard’. 38 Anna Maria appeared in court with her eyes bandaged but had changed her mind and refused to press charges and stated that she had fallen down the stairs. ‘Mrs. Baas, amid her tears, said that this
was the first time she had ever been in Court and that it would be the last’.
A glimpse into the family life of a boarding house keeper of the time shows the
difficulties that arose from the death of a mother leaving behind an unprotected
daughter. In July 1866 Auguste Harewyn was charged with abducting Eugenie
Willis from her stepfather’s house. Louis Bourboen, proprietor of Argus Boarding
House in Peel Street, lost his wife, Rosalie Bourboen [16Cii/5/6], in November
1865. He was left with the care of Eugenie Willis, a pretty stepdaughter of fifteen.
Nine months after her mother’s death, Eugenie ran away to Marius Leon’s
boarding-house in Spring Gardens, Wan Chai, accusing her step-father of beating
her and treating her badly. Auguste Harrewyn had been a lodger in her father’s house and had struck up a rather too intimate relationship with Eugenie. He had been caught kissing her and, when turned out, had begun corresponding with the girl. According to the evidence, Eugenie had been found with a letter from Harrewyn, but Bourboen could not produce it as evidence because Eugenie had eaten it rather than let him see the contents. Mr. Leon, to whose house the girl
had fled for shelter and protection, told the court that when Bourboen came to his
house seeking his stepdaughter, he had become drunk and irritable. ‘There was a bottle of brandy standing on my table when he came, to which he had helped himself as if it had been water’. The court sided with the young lovers against
Bourboen and C.H. Whyte, the magistrate, said that if he had known the facts,
he would never have granted the warrant for the arrest of Eugenie and Harrewyn. In a later case in February 1868, the magistrate judged Bourboen capable of violent behaviour when he was sued by his houseboy for unpaid wages and
damage to his leg amounting to $30. The boy had had a large flat plate smashed on him and the presiding magistrate awarded the boy $20 which he said was not
excessive for a broken limb.39 It rarely happened that, when Chinese servants sued their European employers, they were given what they asked for in damages. Bourboen was later bankrupted. Life for women in Hong Kong must have been uncomfortable and boring at best with illness, death and disaster never far away and at worst very hard indeed to bear.
European Prostitutes
By the late 1860s a new underclass was beginning to make its presence felt in Hong Kong. European prostitutes were finding willing customers among the richer expatriates and beginning to settle. In 1868, James Browne, the barkeeper at the Hotel des Colonies and described as a ‘coloured man’, was refused a licence. In an indignant letter to the China Mail, he ascribed the refusal to colour prejudice. The authorities however cited the fact that he had employed a female barkeeper: ‘It is of the opinion of the Colonial Surgeon and the Police Superintendent that the place was a sort of sly brothel and that many other women were in the house’. 40 Later in
that year, the female barkeeper herself, Mary Ann Garde alias Welch, charged two
men from the Gas Company, Henry Simmonds, brick-layer, and James Lyall, brass-fitter, with forcibly entering her house and assaulting her person and furniture. Inspector Horsepool gave evidence that things were generally smashed up. The
men were fined and significantly the prosecutrix was ordered to find security of $5
to keep the peace for three months. The same two men were later charged by Mrs. Julia Carter, ‘a female of negro persuasion’, with assault:
Beaten on the arms kicked on the breast and bitten on the calf of the leg by their dog, Mrs Carter, inspired with a dash of the Amazonian, got to her feet and seizing a stick or cudgel improvised a very fair resistance.41
According to the defendant’s statement, had the stick wielded by Mrs. Carter alighted on Simmond’s head as intended instead of his arm, it must have terminated his brick-laying career at one fell swoop. The men were fined ten shillings and one Henry Darrell gave a bond of security for Mrs. Carter and carried her away. Darrell had recently been living at the Hotel des Colonies where he had been sued for board and lodging.42 Again in 1869, a Mrs. Miller sued Atai, a hard-working Chinese tailor with twenty years standing in the territory, for theft. Mrs. Miller was described by the judge as ‘A woman living away from her husband — being what is generally known as a “soiled dove”’. 43 Unusually the tailor’s word was believed and he was found not guilty by the unanimous decision of the jury.
Children
During this period thirty-three children, who were under the age of four years,
and five older children died. Babyhood was a dangerous time in an age when the
importance of hygiene in the fight against germs was not generally understood. Death was no respecter of position or wealth. The deputy registrar of the Supreme Court, Frederick Sowley Huffam, lost three babies, Henry Seymour, Mary Jane and Frederick Henry [20/14/4]. In April 1852 Huffam, who had arrived in the colony in 1855 and taken the post of a third clerk in the government, married Mary Irwin, the daughter of the colonial chaplain. In spite of his regular church
attendance, where he played the organ, Huffam was accused in 1878 of embezzling nearly $150,000, found guilty and sentenced to seven years in prison. The quiet
acquisition of illegal money was too easy when it was acknowledged at the time of his trial that ‘his accounts had never been audited and the man had been left practically to himself’. Feelings of sympathy must be aroused by the plight of his poor wife who had to cope first with the death of three babies and then with a husband in prison. The only other person known to have lost three children, Isaac, Aaron and Elizabeth Jane McNally [7/27/10] was Sergeant Michael McNally of
the 75th Regiment and keeper of its canteen at Murray Barracks. He was refused
a spirit license because the barman of the Liverpool Arms made it known that he had been selling liquor for some time to men other than soldiers without a licence.
Section IV
THE TURN OF THE CENTURY, 1876–1918
Chapter 20 Age of Empire
This next section of the book takes the reader by a much less detailed path through the last twenty-four years of the nineteenth century and the first eighteen years of the twentieth century. In this part, the concentration is on the Cemetery rather than the social history. The next chapter gives an idea of the kind of disasters that the people in Hong Kong had to cope with and the one after deals with the lives of those people who are buried in Section 23, the section set aside for residents who
survived over twenty-three years in Hong Kong. Subsequent chapters look briefly
at the other various groups buried in the Cemetery including the Freemasons,
the Chinese, the Eurasians, the Japanese, and finally the Russians. It was during
these years that the Cemetery received a major redesign to make it more like the
fashionable garden cemeteries of Western cities.
In this period, Hong Kong was still considered a far distant outpost of the empire as is shown by the opening lines of Major Henry Knollys’ book, English Life in China: ‘Hong Kong — Jericho — Timbuctoo! Are these names not used indifferently to represent extreme remoteness’. He continued that Hong Kong was described ‘by the majority perhaps as an odious place of exile’. 1 A picture of the colony emerges from the writings of the period that is not altogether unlike earlier descriptions. The horse-drawn carriage had by now given way to jinrickshas or rickshaws which had been recently invented by a missionary in Japan: ‘These most convenient little carriages for hire having one coolie in the shafts, while private rickshaws have one or
two in addition pushing
behind ’. 2 A Chinese
small holder could still
be seen shepherding his
string of goats along
the thoroughfares and
milking them at the door
of customers’ houses. The
slopes of the mountain
were portrayed as covered
with alabaster -white
chalk patches which turned out to be the drying grounds where native washer-
men spread the European linen. Mexican dollars, still used as common currency, were each tested individually
by shroffs under the porticoes of the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank. ‘Balancing each
chopped dollar on two fingers, the Chinese servant of the bank instantaneously decided on its fitness for currency and consigned it to three piles, good, bad or doubtful’. Some knowledge of pidgin English was still essential: ‘The jargon has taken firm root and constitutes an indispensable acquirement’ without which ‘communication with the servants is a source of constant vexation and misunderstanding’. A colourful international crowd thronged its streets: ‘A walk here (and everybody walks on the street instead of the sidewalk) is a kaleidoscope of dress and a college of languages’. The crowd along the Praya included soldiers in high-buttoned, tight-fitting blue or red tunics, wealthy Chinese bankers from Bonham Strand with their ‘powdered and carmined wives’. Belgian priests in black friar hats, Koreans ‘with tiny black bamboo fibre hats perched on their rolled-up
hair and baggy white trousers fluttering in the breeze’, Hindu women in the ‘flimsiest
pink silk from the bazaars of Calcutta’, Maharattas from Bombay with upturned shoes, native youths in long gowns of blue, buff or purple, and to complete the picture, ‘an Episcopal bishop in a black morning coat, knickerbockers, silk stockings and pumps whose head was crowned by a solar topee’. 3
Yet during this period, a very different kind of colony was emerging. The ‘magnificent city with stately buildings climbing tier after tier from the sea’ was the pride of its European inhabitants and impressed all who visited. Able men from many nations and backgrounds were putting their energies into building up a range of industries that changed the face of Hong Kong, giving it a new sense
of achievement and direction and a new energy. By 1900, Hong Kong was the
second biggest port in the world and men looked with affection to the harbour for its beauty and the prosperity it brought to the city. Sir Henry Blake, the ex-governor, described the view from the Peak as he looked down on it:
the great steamers of every nation trading with the Far East, round whose hulls are flitting the three hundred and fifty launches of which the harbour boasts…. Out in the harbour, towards Stonecutter’s Island, the tall masts of trim American schooners may be seen … while the thousands of Chinese
boats of all descriptions look like swarms of flies moving over the laughing
waters of the bay…. The night scene is still more enchanting for spread out beneath are gleaming and dancing the thousands the thousands of lights
afloat and ashore. The outlines of the bay are marked by sweeping curves of
light, and the myriad stars that seem to shine more brightly than elsewhere are mirrored in the dark waters, mingling with the thousands of lights from the boats and shipping.4
By this period, a number of industries were employing thousands of Chinese overseen by a sizeable number of European technicians and managers. In the jury list for 1900, no less than seventy-six expatriates registered for jury service were working in the Hong Kong & Whampoa Dock Company or the Hong Kong & Kowloon Wharf and Godown Co. ‘Where Eastern seas bubble up hot to the flame of an equatorial sun, Chinese workmen with Scotch overseers turn out 6,000 ton steel ships and do battleship repairing worthy of Woolwich or Devonport’. 5 The largest sugar cane refinery in the world (Butterfield and Swire’s Taikoo plant), together with the slightly smaller China Sugar Refinery owned by Jardine, Matheson & Co, were churning out 200,000 tons of sugar a year at 3.5 cents a pound. The same jury list of 1900 shows the refineries as providing no less than seventy-seven, predominantly Scotsmen, for jury service. The Taikoo Refinery was ‘a marvellous study in Scottish sociology’ with its own company reservoir and hospital in the hills of Quarry Bay.
A cable car carried the European overseers five hundred feet over the gullies to the fever-free company bungalows on the cliffs. Company model tenements
were provided at inexpensive rents with a company loan fund for overseers
20.4. The Quarry Bay Sugar Refinery. (By courtesy of the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank.)
to bring out Scotch wives, a running track, athletic association, medals, (swimming) baths and launches for picnics. Employees were encouraged to join yacht, golf, water polo, gunning, cricket and riding clubs so as to be athletically happy even in enervating South China.6
Among those employed in the sugar trade were Henry Dickie [5/1/20] (1894), David Symington [5/1/35] (1897), both from Greenock, and Donald McCrae [5/2/20] (1905) from Inverness. They all worked for China Sugar Refinery, Dickie
as manager, McCrae as foreman clerk and Symington as a sugar boiler. Besides these, another twenty-nine engineers and technicians were working for
such enterprises as the Cotton, Spinning, Weaving and Dyeing Co., Green Island
Cement and the Rope Factory. Other technicians and managers were arriving to work in the utilities which now included telegraph companies, the China & Japan Telephone Company and the Electric Company, with China Light and Power Co. soon to follow. As Hong Kong became a Far Eastern hub, more visitors arrived. To cater to their needs, the number of hotels, whose managers or proprietors were
considered eligible for jury service, had risen to fifteen. Modern technology seemed
to have arrived in Hong Kong when, in 1883, the Hong Kong Hotel could boast ‘Hydraulic ascending rooms of the latest and most approved type’ in its advertising.
This growth in managers, technicians and staff is mirrored in the Cemetery by an increase in the number of graves of dock workers, sugar boilers, wharfingers, hotel
and restaurant managers and so on. A growing number of expatriates were making Hong Kong their permanent home and are mentioned in a later chapter.
Society
In the social sphere, old attitudes continued their hold on men’s minds. Subtle demarcation lines dictated by birth and schooling combined with spending power and club membership rules continued to keep the social groups and the races apart. Racial and social segregation went one step further when the Peak
was declared a European enclave in the 1904 Ordinance. The Peak was by then a
popular year-round resort with its own church, bungalow club and hotel. Henry Knollys, a major in a less prestigious Artillery Regiment, complained that his experiences in the social sphere would be comparatively limited: ‘inasmuch
as nine-tenths of those, who can afford the expense, take refuge from the heat at
the cooler Peak’. For the more sought-after infantry regiments, the Peak Hotel had become ‘the centre of the garrison social life’ and every dinner was described
as ‘a glitter of regalia, braid, buttons, forgivable swagger and affected intonations’.
The Hong Kong Club remained at the pinnacle of social aspirations, an exclusive haven of luxuries which included ‘porcelain baths, electric fans, Amoy oysters in season, mango ice-cream, curries made opiate with powdered poppy seeds and the noblest wines of Europe’. John Stuart Thomson stated that the emperor of China himself could not be made a member because of his colour and the one Parsee who achieved ‘getting in through the eye of the needle’ was said to have needed the help of the king of England.
Life at the top was expensive. Every foreigner earning more than $75 a
month kept a sedan chair with two or four coolies to carry it ‘who were uniformed as conspicuously as the purse would allow’. 7 The governor was carried by eight coolies in bright red liveries, white gaiters and ‘mutton pie’ hats with red tassels.8
Major Knollys sets out for us what he saw as the upper echelons of the social ranking scale when he explained the need for visitors to bring letters of introduction:
Our Addressee is, we will suppose, a local merchant prince, a Government
employee, a military officer or a well-to-do agent of a commercial firm. Stay clear of the rank and file of the civilian community, inasmuch as they are not
on the whole, a favourable set either in their associates or in their lifestyle.9
In an introduction to the chapter entitled Social Life, the editors of Twentieth Century Impressions of Hong Kong described the layered society:
In this little community are produced all the characteristics of suburban life in England, intensified by peculiar local circumstances. As is perhaps only natural, each of the principal nationalities represented — British, German, Portuguese, Indian and Japanese — resolves itself into a separate and distinct unit, while the Eurasians here … hold a precarious position somewhere between the foreign and native elements.
The chapter continued with a description of the British community, which:
after all the more familiar methods of social distinction have been exhausted … have introduced other and more ingenious devices to satisfy the desire for exclusiveness. Thus a man’s exact position in the social scale is not infrequently determined by the altitude of his house. Generally speaking it may be said that the higher he climbs up the side of the Peak the rarer becomes the social atmosphere he breathes, and as a consequence, between those who reside at the summit and those who live in the peninsula of Kowloon there is as wide a gulf as that which divided Dives and Lazarus. A club which welcomes with open arms a mercantile clerk — or rather ‘assistant’ as he becomes on landing in Hong Kong — closes its doors resolutely against the head of a departmental store .
Robert Fraser-Smith [23/8/4] bears out this discrimination when he
reported on the St. Andrew’s Day Ball of 1881. While acknowledging that ‘the stiffness and clique-ism so intimately associated with our public balls was happily
much less conspicuous than has been the case on previous occasions’, he criticized
‘a flagrant case of most unladylike conduct’. A set for the Caledonian Scottish Reel
needed two couples to complete it. The couples were found and took their places. Immediately one of the original women: ‘the term lady would be misapplied in this case, — deliberately walked away taking her partner and vis-a-vis with her’. The reason for this ‘gross infringement of all the recognized rules of well bred behaviour’ was that one of the new couples was a storekeeper who was dancing
with another storekeeper’s wife. To cap the story the offending lady according to
Fraser Smith was herself originally from the same class of tradesmen.10
20.5. St Andrew’s Day Ball. (From the Graphic, 26 February 1887.)
Sport still held its importance in the lives of the expatriates. As John Stuart Thomson put it: ‘An Englishman (few as there are in the East compared to the Scotch) brings all his sporting and club impedimenta to the Orient’. Sport still formed ‘the pivot of existence’ with racing still attracting the most attention. It was followed by cricket, yachting and golf each with their own exclusive clubs to organize their activities. Shooting birds was a popular sport with parties visiting Castle Peak and Deep Bay to shoot huge numbers of ‘ortolans, teal, wild geese, and partridges and noblest of all, the pheasant’. The remaining leisure hours were filled with card playing and tennis games. Picnic parties and junk trips to quiet bathing beaches dominated the social calendar in the summer and the winter dancing season was initiated by the St. Andrew’s Ball, which was preceded by Scottish reel practice sessions.
Rudyard Kipling, who visited in 1888, described how the residents did their best to imitate the life of an Indian up-country station:
They are better off than we are. At the bandstand, the ladies dress all in one
piece — shoes, gloves and umbrellas come out from England with the dress, and every Memsahib knows what that means…. The Inhabitants complain of being cooped in and shut away. They look at the sea and they long to get away. They have their ‘At Homes’ on regular days of the week, and everybody meets everybody else again and again. They have their amateur theatricals and they quarrel and all the men and women take sides and the station is cleaved asunder from top to bottom. Then they become reconciled….11
Kipling recognized the same patterns of behaviour that he had seen in India: ‘Henceforward Hong Kong is one of Us, ranking before Meerut, but after Allahabad, at all public ceremonies and parades’. 12 According to Major Knollys, religion was ‘coldly regarded’ by many of the British: ‘The majority of our countrymen have left their religion behind in England’. But he also added: ‘A large proportion of the shepherds are idle and inferior’.13
The Colonials and the Chinese
A sizeable number of respectable, well-to-do Chinese families were by now living exemplary, quiet, hard-working lives in Hong Kong. In spite of this, the rather negative view that a good many Europeans held about the Chinese still prevailed. It was reinforced by the news of attacks on Europeans and atrocities
which emerged from China during the Boxer insurgency of 1900. The ex-
governor of Hong Kong, Sir Henry Blake, when writing the text to accompany the illustrations in China by Mortimer Menpes, could say without any qualms: ‘The average European, if he thinks of China at all, sets her down as a nation just emerging from barbarism, untruthful, deceitful and having more than her share of original sin’. Sir Henry continued by describing the Chinese view of the foreigners:
On the other hand, the Chinese who have come in contact with foreign powers regard them as bullies, who have by their destructive prowess forced themselves on the Middle Kingdom and deprived the Emperor and his government of their sovereignty over the various concessions at the treaty ports.14
The distance between the European and the Chinese races can still be read in the gulf that existed between these two views.
The contrast between the rich and poor in the city was still very marked. Hong Kong was described as the ‘world famous city of the unroofed’, with ‘20,000 coolies having no place on which to lay their heads at night’.15
Again in the 1920s, the roofless coolies
were pictured as a pathetic sight: ‘Rows of homeless toilers, wet or dry, sleep in their tattered rags on the pavements … dressed in straw sandals at a penny a pair, … their clothes sometimes made from bags’.16 The too obvious poverty of the toiling masses would inevitably have lowered the prestige of the Chinese in the eyes
of foreigners. Yet, astute Chinese businessmen in Hong Kong had created for themselves a prosperity not dreamt of in earlier years. Sir Henry Blake could now say: ‘The wealthiest part of the city is in the Chinese quarter, and here property
has changed hands at startling figures, sometimes at a rate equal to one hundred
and sixty thousand pounds an acre’. The way the Chinese rallied to help themselves after the typhoon of
1906 demonstrated an independence from the Western bureaucracy and a determination to look after their own community. On the day after the 1906
typhoon, Sir Henry Blake sent for a Chinese gentleman and offered help. He found that all that was necessary had already been done: ‘The guild had sent two
powerful launches, one with coffins for the drowned, the other with a doctor on board, equipped with the necessary means of succour for the injured’. When he
later steamed along the Kowloon shore, instead of the expected stunned despair, he found:
a crowd of boatpeople, men and women, … working with a will, each endeavouring to save something from the smashed wreckage of what had been their homes, the men jumping from one heaving mass to another, diving
betimes and struggling with adverse buffets of fate with an energy none the
less for their stoical acceptance of the inevitable.17
The old antipathies were now tinged with admiration.
The Civil Service
The public school man was now the more or less established choice among the upper civil servants. As an example of this type of man, mention might be made of the puisne judge, Francis Snowden [11B/5/5], who died in April 1883. The decision to grant him sick leave had been made too late and thus he became almost the only judge to be buried in the Cemetery. Snowden was typical of the public-
school-educated men being sent to the colony to fill posts in the government and
judiciary. The second son of a Somerset squire, he had been educated at Rugby
and Oxford and was called to the bar in 1854. He had arrived in 1874 on promotion
from the Straits Settlement, where he had acted as senior magistrate. He was part of the new imperial elite who had received training to instill in them a sense of duty to those under them and also of Christian beliefs, manliness and sportsmanship in the preparatory and ‘public’ schools they had attended and whose belief in their own ‘good breeding’ and education gave them a sense of superiority over all those who had never had their privileges. Men like him travelled round the empire on promotions that were in the hands of the authorities at home and often felt more need to please their masters in England than the population they were responsible for in some distant corner of the empire. Hong Kong had assumed a position rather low in the pecking order of the various Crown colonies in the British Empire. Snowden is described by Norton-Kyshe as ‘painstaking, patient and conscientious’.18
The Police and the Prisons
George Hayward [8/7/1], who occupied a much lower rung on the social scale,
died of an apoplectic fit in November 1883, the same year as Francis Snowden. He
was aged forty-four and had, only three months before, been promoted to acting superintendent of Victoria Gaol. He had been in the Hong Kong prison service
for fifteen years and had come to Hong Kong from Chatham convict prison where
he had been trained. He was originally chosen for the post from among some thirty candidates. A mechanism was now in position to identify and attract trained men such as Hayward into service in the colonies. Unlike Mrs. Snowden, George Hayward’s wife, Eliza, and his children remained in Hong Kong after Hayward’s death. Eliza died in 1919 at the age of seventy-four. She and one son, George Cresswell Hayward, are buried in the same tomb as their father. The Hayward family could
not have afforded the cost of the journey home. For those Europeans filling the less prestigious jobs, the mortality rates and
average age at the time of death had hardly changed over the years. Between the
years, 1876 and 1918, seventy-seven policemen, whose age at death was recorded
on their headstones, were buried in the Hong Kong Cemetery. Their average age at death can be worked out as 31.2 years, an age when a man should be in the prime of his life. Only seven men survived beyond forty, the oldest man being
Johann Rauch [23/9/1] who died at the age of fifty-six. Sixty-two percent of these officers came from Scotland, Ireland or Wales with the great majority coming
from Scotland.
A glimpse into the life of Sergeant John Swanston [27/3/2] shows the difficulties of trying to raise a family in the less-than-comfortable police stations of the colony. Swanston was the son of a blacksmith from Caithness, Scotland,
who joined the Hong Kong Police Force in 1872. His brave fiancee, Anne, arrived
in October 1876 on the SS Fleur Castle and married her sweetheart in the Union Church
straight off the ship. In 1877 their first son,
N.J. Swanston [27/3/3] was born in Shau
Kei Wan police station and died there aged one year and eight months. When Swanston left Shau Kei Wan, he was waited on by a
deputation of Chinese villagers who presented him with a very handsome silk flag as a mark of their appreciation.19 Another son, M.T.B.
Swanston, died at Wan Chai aged eight years and ten months. Then a newborn died at West Point aged one hour. Next, in April 1900 Annie died at Wan Chai aged ten months,
followed five months later by Archibald, the second surviving son, aged three years and ten months.20 The one remaining son was
enrolled in 1887 in the Diocesan Home and
Orphanage and educated there and only died
in 1935. Five children had died in five different
police stations. One wonders how Anne could have borne so many losses. That Swanston was considered ‘respectable’ is shown by his membership of the Freemasons which is indicated on his headstone. He died in
February 1891 aged thirty-eight.
The police did not again lose the respect
they had gained by the end of the 1870s. Their
standing in the community was boosted by
the courage, devotion to duty and sterling work during the plague years. Other
than one prominent and exceptional case, corruption in the police force no
longer featured in the colony’s newspapers. In late 1897, a far-reaching network
of corruption was uncovered when Sir Francis Henry May raided a gambling house. That led to a ruthless cull: nearly half of the establishment was lost through dismissals or forced resignations. The only European to be convicted and sentenced
to six months in prison was Inspector Job Witchell from Gloucestershire. His wife,
Mary Maud Witchell [5/2/24], the daughter of
William Powell, owner of the General Drapers, lost one son in November 1887, then died
herself at the height of the scandal in February
1898 leaving her unfortunate husband in prison
and five children with no parent to care for them. Dr. Cantlie’s views probably mirrored the general feeling that a certain level of squeeze was a perk almost universally attached to a policeman’s occupation:
At the present moment there is considerable scandal in connection with the acceptance of bribes by European police, and men of great local experience are being got rid of because they took ‘tips’; surely a well-understood purloin of the police in all countries.21
In 1915, an incident gained general sympathy and respect for the police.
A tiger had severely injured a villager in Sheung Shui causing his death and the police were called out to deal with the
animal. When Police Constable Ernest Goucher [2/2/6] approached the bushes where the tiger was said to be hiding, it sprung out and mauled him. The poor man died of his wounds soon after. Before being shot dead, the tiger also managed to kill an Indian constable. It was a huge beast measuring eight and a half feet from nose to tail tip and standing four foot three inches high.
Then in January 1918, the dangers
attached to being a policeman were brought home to the public when four policemen and two robbers were shot dead and one robber and six policemen wounded in the Gresson Street shoot-out. Gresson Street was a row of small dingy
shop-houses in Wan Chai
whose back rooms had been subdivided into cheap cubicles let out to the poor and the transient. At 11 o’clock in the morning, Inspector Mortimer O’Sullivan, probably acting on a tip-off, led a search party to the doors of Number Six. They were met by a hail of bullets as the men in one of the cubicles made a desperate dash for freedom. O’Sullivan was shot five times in the head, Sergeant Goscombe Clarke [2/2/3] four times and an Indian sergeant who tried to stop the men fleeing was also shot dead as he pursued
the robbers down the street. Reinforcements were sent for and with the arrival of the dockyard police, the army and the police reservists, the shooting began again.
Bullets flew everywhere. The door of the room where the remaining robber was
hiding was forced open by a gas bomb. The robber had shot himself in the head
and was found to be dying. When O’Sullivan was buried in the Catholic cemetery,
the priest said: ‘Erin has lost a faithful son, the Empire a faithful member and the Colony a gallant officer and an honest citizen’. It was thought that Sergeant Norman Gibson Johnson [2/2/4], who had been shot dead while on patrol five days earlier, was killed by a member of the Gresson Street gang. The dead men were buried with pomp and honour and were elevated to the status of heroes in the territory. The police force had dramatically shown the dangers it faced and earned real respect from the community.
The Army
The prestige and also the living conditions of the ordinary soldiers continued to rise slowly during these years. As reported in the Hong Kong Telegraph in July 1881:
The following resolution according to the latest home papers was shortly to be moved in the House of Commons by General Burnaby: ‘That the
cost of a soldier’s funeral shall not be defrayed as at present, by a preferential charge on the sum realized by an auction of his underclothing (the cost of which has already been deducted from his pay), or from any savings he may have in the Regimental Savings Bank; but all soldiers shall be buried at the cost of the State.22
A further resolution moved that the state should provide the entire cost of a soldier’s food, not just the cost of one pound of bread and three-quarters of a pound of meat then provided. As the smart monument to Corporal W.H. Stephens [6/6/29] of the 25th Regiment, Royal Engineers with its surrounding of potted plants shows, the ordinary soldier was by now given a great deal more respect in death.
At the time of the British involvement in the Boxer troubles in China, Section 3 of the Cemetery was reserved for the inclusive use of soldiers; and a monument was raised on which are inscribed the names of nine soldiers who died in action, three died of their wounds, seven were killed by an explosion and two suffocated by fire. The last and only one to die in Hong Kong accidentally drowned. But in spite of their better social status, the average age of death of soldiers in these years seems appallingly low. Taking fifty consecutive graves in Section 3 of men below the rank of sergeant who died between 1901 and 1909, the average age of death is only 26.2, the youngest soldier being only sixteen.
Women and Children
The ladies of the colony had begun to gain a little ground. They acquired their own club with formal approval given in 1883 and the grant of land at a nominal
rent of $1 a year. The Ladies Recreation Club was organized and run by ladies for the benefit of those who wanted a place where they and their children could play tennis and other games, keep fit and find friendship.
Golf should have been a very suitable game for the ladies of the colony but
even as late as 1897, the captain of the Golf Club reported:
The question of granting permission to ladies to play golf has provoked a lot of discussion due to the already crowded conditions during the year, but I have decided that in the coming year I shall allow them to play on a very restricted basis.23
The ladies were limited to Sundays and an application for the establishment of a ladies’ golf club at Happy Valley was refused by the governor. It seems likely that due to lack of occupation and boredom, the ladies indulged in endless gossip, fomenting and increasing tensions between the already fragmented sections of Hong Kong society. In the poem entitled The Sisterhood of Eternal Silence, Dolly reported that the ladies of Hong Kong had started a society, ‘the principal rule of which is that no word of scandal or gossip is to be uttered by any of its members’. Two verses of the poem are quoted below:
Tis told of how a lady through forgetfulness one day Fell back on talking scandal in the old familiar way; And of how the others relished every word she had to tell, Then rose in wrath and horror and on the culprit fell. (She was expelled from the new society.)
But can we alter Nature? Does a surface change ensure A woman’s whole foundations being shaken to the core? Is it not a little doubtful that the change will lasting prove,
And will not woman’s nature find its old familiar groove?
For if women don’t talk scandal it will mean, when all is said, That they’re simply pledged to silence, curtain lectures too will cease, And this planet glow with happiness and universal peace!24
20.16. Afternoon at Scandal Point on Kennedy Road. (Illustrated London News, 6 January 1883.)
It took until 1903 for the Golf Club to relax its rules and allow ladies onto the
golf course. As described by Betty in Intercepted Letters:
This year the members of the Royal Hong Kong Golf Club have most kindly and generously allowed us poor down-trodden women one afternoon a week
— Thursday to wit, … On this day we are allowed, not only to play round the course, but even to come inside the sacred enclosure of the Club House railings to drink a cup of tea. Before this magnanimous rule was made, we had to drink our tea standing outside the fence.
The golf course at Happy Valley also accommodated football and cricket and Betty found it fearfully overcrowded when thirty to forty people played mixed foursomes on a Thursday afternoon. Mixed tennis and bathing parties were now taking place in the summer though according to Betty it was necessary for ladies to wear a skirt over their swimsuit which reached down to the knees, making swimming difficult.
A ladies’ tennis club also existed though Betty admitted: ‘It is true we are inclined to be exclusive, but the membership of our club is a guarantee of respectability’.25 The colony’s ladies stand accused of setting the social standards. Captain Casserly in ‘The Land of the Boxers’ wrote that: ‘The merchant class is supreme and their wives rule society’. He later expanded on this:
The English merchant or lawyer overseas is usually a very good fellow though
occasionally puffed up by the thought of his bloated moneybags; but his wife
is often a sad example of British snobbery, the spirit of which has entered her soul in the small country town or London suburb from which she came….
The naval and military officer is puzzled and amused at the minute shades of difference in Hong Kong society.
The differences even penetrated Kowloon society where ‘the wives of the superior dock employers are the leaders of Kowloon society; and the better half of a ship’s captain or marine engineer is only admitted on sufferance to their exclusive circle’. 26
Hong Kong was still seen to be unhealthy for prolonged residence, especially for women and children, though not quite as deadly as in previous years:
The majority of men, nearly all the women and the children, without exception, succumb more or less, sooner or later to the enervating effects of severe heat combined with steamy humidity. Dysentery, fever, liver or a general breakdown ensues and it is out of the question to re-establish health thoroughly here after such attacks — a voyage to other climes is inevitable.27
The belief in the early separation of children from their parents for
education back in England still held firm. Otherwise it was thought youngsters
would mature too early in the tropical climate, be physically weakened and
infected by (as the Westerners saw it) the laxer moral standards of the East.
A poem entitled A Plea for European Schools in Hong Kong portrays a
combination of the Western view of Chinese morality and its unquestioning
assumption of its own moral superiority.
But East is East and West is West;
Can we eradicate The habits of a nation, Or their morals elevate?
His ways are not our ways; though they Be passing good for him,
We grieve to see our children learn
His code of morals grim.28
Major Henry Knollys sternly advised:
English mothers, do not bring out your children, whatever their age, to
Hong Kong except under dire necessity. They will not drop off suddenly but
they will inevitably droop and pine and drift into weakly health which not
improbably may permanently affect them.29
This kind of outlook led to a ‘degenerate’ status attaching itself to Europeans who
had been allowed to remain in Hong Kong as children. Major Knollys reflected
this when he wrote:
As to Hong Kong women, born and bred there, the most charitable criticism is that their attractions are on a par with their scanty numbers and that those with whom an English gentleman would care to exchange two words of
conversation are rara nantes in gurgite vasto [rare fish in the vast ocean].30
At the lowest end of the social scale, European prostitutes had now come to stay, another sign of Hong Kong’s growing wealth. In 1883, the Hong Kong Telegraph reported a case of ‘two fair but contentious belles whose dazzling display of beauty illuminated that dingy room where justice is dispensed at times in such eccentric fashion’ by yet another of their frequent visits in front of the magistrates. They were said to ‘reside in that choice region of our city known as Cochrane Street’. 31 These women seem even to have had some kind of social recognition. John Stuart Thomson for example reported that ‘the denizens of Lyndhurst Street were permitted to watch the races from a remote corner of the stands’.
Three sad deaths in the later part of the century were caused by entanglements with European prostitutes. The grave of Franciska Berger [32/3/21], a native of Bremen, lies high up on a narrow ledge one grave away from her lover, a river pilot from Hanover, T.W. Drewes [32/3/19]. On 24 October 1883, having visited her earlier in the day, Drewes came back with a gun and shot Franciska in the neck and then turned the gun on himself. Franciska first came to notice in January 1869 when she was sued by a Singapore tavern keeper for $200. She was described in court as ‘the fair actor girl’ and was said to have been touring with a San Francisco troupe. She had run away from Singapore leaving her debts unpaid including money owed to the butter man and the milk man. She found a protector in Hong Kong, Charlie Dermer, the barman from the Stag Hotel, who agreed to underwrite her debts. At the time of her murder, Francisca was living in Gage Street with Kitty Waters and Sally Clarke, the madam of the establishment.
According to the testimony of the two girls, before the shooting Sally had been playing the piano and Franciska singing. There had been sandwiches and beer but no drunkenness. No further explanation was forthcoming. Franciska, who is the only known prostitute in the Hong Kong Cemetery, was buried by the Basel missionary, Rudolph Lechler.
In a similar case, a lonely young Armenian from Isphahan, Apcar Gabriel Apcar [23/12/1], took under his protection a girl called Eva Saunders. Apcar was
a stockbroker and clerk working for the family firm. The unfortunate young man had lost money in the stock market crash of 1889 and jealousy over his relationship drove him deeper into depression. He shot himself in the head in September 1890.
Afterwards Eva claimed that she had come to Hong Kong to make money and not to seek a relationship. She said at the inquest that she had taken Apcar’s money for the rent of her rooms in Lyndhurst Terrace, but paid her own household expenses
and did not feel it necessary to give Apcar exclusive rights. When the official receiver tried to sell the furniture in Eva’s flat, she instructed a firm of solicitors to
argue that the furniture belonged to her and won her case.32
Hong Kong, a Hub in the Far East
Hong Kong continued to tempt a number of enterprising and respected businessmen, with wide-ranging experiences of trading in the Far East, to settle and do business there. An example of this can be seen in a brief account of two distinguished Armenians who were both unlucky enough to die soon after arriving. Peter Aviet Seth [5/3/10] was one of the oldest foreign residents in Singapore of the Armenian Community having arrived in 1828 aged fifteen. He had spent three years from 1833 trading in Borneo especially with the Hill Dyaks. He attempted to start a new Armenian colony in Melbourne, Australia and after it failed took up auctioneering in Singapore, while continuing to trade with China, Java, Macau, Sidney and Melbourne. After the death of his wife, Seth lived with Galstaun Edgar [5/2/17] and worked in Edgar and Co. He left Singapore with Edgar in mid-1886 for Hong Kong, but died in the same year. 33 Members of the Edgar family had run successful trading enterprises in Singapore for over a hundred years. After furthering his education in Calcutta, Galstaun Edgar
travelled to Batavia and then Surabaya where he founded the family firm. In 1886,
the family sold up and travelled to Hong Kong where they hoped to expand their business interests, but in six months Gaulston was dead from a carbuncle that turned malignant. A plaque was put up to his memory in St. Gregory’s Church in Singapore. It reads in Armenian:
To the memory of Gaulston Edgar, a benevolent merchant, in recognition of his kindly enviable love for work and honest faithfulness, generosity to the needy and many laudable acts throughout his whole life until his tragic untimely death. He was a faithful husband, compassionate father and true
friend to everyone. Born in New Julfa, Died in Hong Kong 30th January 1887
at the age of 45.34
The amount of traffic in and out of Hong Kong was increasing and it was inevitable that some of those visiting or passing through should die in the city. For example, James Twinem [5/3/11], a commissioner of customs in Kiung Chow, died at sea on the way to Hong Kong in 1886.
The Scot, Joseph Hogg [5/3/42], master mariner and latterly surveyor at
Manila, came from the Philippines to die in Hong Kong in 1899. But of all these
visitors, the most colourful was Captain Samuel Cornell Plant [12A/5/15], and it would be wrong to leave these years without mentioning the headstone of the
first man to command a merchant steamer plying the rapids of the Upper Yangtze
River. Plant died of pneumonia in February
1921 on the boat bringing him to Hong
Kong and is buried in the Cemetery with his wife, Alice Plant, who followed her husband to the grave just three days later.
Born in Framlingham, Suffolk in 1881, Plant
followed his father into the merchant navy. At the age of fourteen, he went to sea in the iron ship, SS Reigate, commanded by his father. After working his way up the ladder
of promotion, in 1891, he was offered the
command of the steamer, Shushan by the Tigris and Euphrates Shipping Company. Plant took the ship to southwest Iran where he was asked to extend the current service to the upper reaches of the Karun River above the rapids where no maps of the narrow, winding, fast-flowing waterway existed.
In 1896, after successfully taming that river and starting a regular passenger
and freight service, Plant caught typhoid fever and had to return to England to recuperate.
There he met Archibald Little at the Oriental Club which resulted in him being offered command of the Pioneer. Little was having this steam ship built at Glasgow in the hope that it could conquer the rapids, whirlpools and huge seasonal fluctuations in the depths of the water along the upper reaches of the Yangtze River. In this way, Samuel Plant and his wife Alice came to China in
1899 and remained on the Upper Yangtze River for the rest of their lives. Plant took the Pioneer up the river and in June 1900 succeeded in his first attempt to conquer the Three Gorges. The mission was successfully accomplished in seventy-three hours steaming over seven days. The rumblings from the Boxer Uprising led to the Pioneer being commandeered by the consulate to evacuate expatriates from trouble spots. Plant and his wife stayed on. He traded up and down the river between Yichang and Chongqing in a junk until he was asked to take command of a pair of purpose-built steamers for the Chinese-owned Szechwan Navigation
Company. Then in 1910, Plant accepted the post of senior inspector, Upper Yangtze, in the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs, finally retiring in 1919 with a
Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs medal for outstanding service. The Chinese government built him a small bungalow on a promontory overlooking the mouth of the Xiling Gorge and the Xin Tan Rapids. Steamers approaching this stretch of the river would salute Plant by sounding their whistles and he would reply by waving his hat or handkerchief. After his death the British consulate in Chunking
raised a memorial where the Dragon Horse Stream flows into the Yangtze at Xin
Tan village. The thirty-foot obelisk was constructed of pink granite on a brown
sand stone base. With Alice constantly by his side, Plant had demonstrated that
the mighty Yangtze River could be tamed and navigated by steamers if the men involved had the right combination of skill, patience and common sense.
The Effects of the First World War
The First World War impinged but little on life in Hong Kong. It did spell an
end to the years of German prosperity in the colony as German assets were seized and Germans incarcerated as prisoners of war. One such prisoner was Ernst Schelle [16Ci/3/1] who died in March 1919 and whose small granite headstone
proclaims the fact. After the war there may have been a slight slackening of the tight rank and status rules that had bound Hong Kong for so long. For instance in the matter of church seating in St. John’s Cathedral, there was a feeling that such clearly delineated social distinctions at church services did not accord with postwar
feelings, after so many had shared in the same sufferings and hardships brought on by the war. In 1918, it was decided that there should be free seating at Evensong
and at Matins. Once the bell had stopped tolling at the main Sunday service, anyone could sit in the seats left vacant by absent seat-holders. The abolition of seat
holding came about ten years later in 1928. But the old behaviours and shibboleths
still kept their grip on the minds of expatriates, showing the staying power of social attitudes and patterns of behaviour in a small, distant colony like Hong Kong.
Somerset Maugham, who travelled to Hong Kong and China in the 1920s,
wrote a series of sketches full of sharp observation of the life-styles, manners and attitudes of the expatriate community. He described a typically splendid, opulent dinner such as still graced the tables of the businessmen:
In the middle of the snowy damask cloth was a centrepiece of yellow silk … and on this a massive epergne. Tall silver vases in which were large chrysanthemums made possible to catch only glimpses of the persons opposite you, and tall silver candlesticks reared their proud heads two by two down the length of the table. Each course was served with its appropriate
wine, sherry with the soup and hock with the fish.
Even the conversation showed little difference from that of past years:
They talked of racing and golf and shooting. They would have thought it bad form to touch upon the abstract and there were no politics for them to discuss. China bored them all, they did not want to speak of that; they only knew just so much about it as was necessary to their business, and they looked with distrust upon any man who studied the Chinese language … it was well known that all those fellows who went in for Chinese grew queer in the head.35
In another of Maugham’s vignettes, a British socialist named Henderson lauded democracy on the one hand and boasted of his Fabian background, while on the other hand swearing at and even kicking his rickshaw puller.36 It would take another world war and the upheavals it engendered to bring an end to such entrenched attitudes as those that appear to have prevailed at the treaty ports on the China Coast.
Chapter 21 The Disasters of These Years
Three disasters, plague, typhoon and fire, shattered the peace of Hong Kong society during these years and added to the number of graves in the Hong Kong
Cemetery. The typhoon of 1906 was one of the fiercest manifestations of the pure
force of nature that Hong Kong had yet endured. And it had endured many.
The Plague
The plague, or black death as it was called in medieval Europe, arrived in
Hong Kong from Canton in 1894. It raged for the three summer months,
killing at least 2,500 people and driving out 100,000 others, who fled in terror, spreading the infection wherever they went. The disease started with a high fever followed by headaches, stupor and glandular swellings in the arm-pit or groin, and usually ended in coma and death within forty-eight hours. Hong Kong’s Chinatown provided the perfect breeding ground. The squalid slum of tangled, overcrowded alleys in Tai Ping Shan and Sai Ying Pun was seldom penetrated
by wary government officials. Human and animal filth and garbage lay in heaps
everywhere clogging the inadequate open drains. The unsanitary conditions, for so long the despair of the colonial surgeons, had bred an army of rats who grew fat on uncollected waste. Once the rats were infected there was little the authorities could do to stop them passing on the disease to the crowded inmates of the poorly constructed houses.
By 23 May 1894 nearly four hundred plague cases had been found and on
that day the army was called in. The Chinese had little faith in foreign doctors
or Western medicine and strongly resisted anti-plague measures. They did not
want to report cases and have their loved ones taken away to isolation wards on the Hygeia, the ship moored out to sea, or to the glass factory in Kennedy Town, hastily converted into a hospital, never to see them again.
21.1. Newly built Kennedy Town glass factory used as a makeshift hospital during the outbreak of the plague, 1893. (By courtesy of Dennis G. Crow.)
Infected bodies were whisked out of the temporary hospitals to be buried en masse in anonymous lime pits, thus denying the dead the proper funeral rites and the comforts of the nether world. To avoid submitting to such treatment, sufferers were smuggled from house to house, spreading the disease as they went. Houses were barricaded against searchers and the sanitary officers and police were stoned. Inevitably, feelings rose and rioters converged on the house of the Tung Wah
Hospital chairman for not protecting the peoples’ interests. On 23 May, three hundred men from the First Shropshire Light Infantry,
known as the Whitewash Brigade, were detailed to carry out house-to-house
searches. The men had all volunteered, and in return received extra tobacco and a
pay rise of fifty cents a day. They entered suspected buildings by force if necessary
and, where they found signs of the plague, threw all the household goods into the street to be burned, disinfected the rooms and lime washed the walls. Their duties included clearing out the corpses from the dark deserted houses by the light of candles, electric torches having not yet been invented.
It was not uncommon for a soldier, groping his way about the house in the dark, to place his hand on a dead victim of the disease. The dead were collected and put into carts and, as each cart became full, the soldier-driver took his pathetic load to a place where the bodies were burnt.1
Unsurprisingly, members of the Whitewash Brigade started falling ill with the
disease. That summer, ten soldiers caught the plague. Eight recovered and two died including Private Boliver, whose grave was cleared when the Aberdeen tunnel was built, and Captain George Colthurst Vesey [6/5/47]. Vesey, an Irishman, had been put in charge of a cleansing programme that involved clearing ten acres of Tai Ping Shan and of moving the seven thousand or so inhabitants. He was due for retirement at the end of the tour of duty. His grave was placed in an isolated corner of the Cemetery. Two monuments [20/5/5] and [19/2/7] were raised to honour the dead of the Shropshire Regiment who died from whatever cause while serving in Hong Kong.
Also on 23 May, a notice went out asking for fifty volunteers from the civilian
population to aid the police in their grim task by accompanying inspectors on
house-to-house visitations in the areas of Yau Ma Tei, Western and Shau Kei Wan, but the plea went largely unheeded. Far fewer men volunteered than the
fifty called for. Among the brave men who rendered real service in the long hot summer months were George Reinhold Lammert [23/3/7], the auctioneer, and George Hutton Potts [12A/11/23], who had arrived in 1864 aged twenty-one and worked for Russell & Co. before moving into broking. He was one of twelve children, several of whom came to Hong Kong and made a name and fortune for themselves. The third volunteer who was picked out for special mention was the Indian H. Samy, three of whose descendants are found in the Cemetery.
House visitation was perhaps the most arduous and the most disagreeable work of any in connection with the plague, involving in addition of the mere
physical labour of climbing up innumerable flights of almost perpendicular
stairs and going into every room and cockloft in a mass of Chinese houses, in the hottest part of the year, contact with every form of dirt … and the serious danger of infection; for these gentlemen had themselves to handle the sick and dying.2
Many policemen also received the thanks and recognition of the community
for their part in fighting the spread of the disease. Inspector Mann, for example,
whose wife, Isabelle Mann [23/8/10] is buried in the Old Residents Section,
personally visited every house in Shau Kei Wan with Jeyes Fluid and lime and
won a silver medal for his disregard of his own health and his devotion to duty. Thomas Henry Gidley [2/6/8] and George Phelps were among the policemen
to receive honourable mention and public thanks. Gidley, who died in 1904 aged
thirty-one, must have been only twenty-one years old when he was made ward master on the Hygeia and responsible for the plague victims during every stage
of their illness, from admitting them, to nursing them and finally, all too often, to
coffining the corpses. Phelps worked with him removing victims of the disease
from their houses to the hospital ship and later helping with the coffining of the dead, which included filling the occupied coffins with quicklime. Gidley, who won a plague medal in 1894, lost a daughter, Eugenie Esmeralda Ernestine [27/1/11]
aged four years to the plague in 1886. A policeman with a young family during these years must have been fraught with worry.
By June, between eight and nine hundred people were dead from the plague, three hundred and fifty houses had been condemned as unfit for habitation, seven thousand Chinese had lost their homes and the whole area of Tai Ping Shan had been cordoned off and closed. The Chinese were fleeing the infected town in thousands. Signs of desertion were evident in the streets: laundries were closed, rickshaws and chairs abandoned and stores shuttered. The disease began to strike Europeans. An early victim was a reporter from the China Mail, Donald MacDonald [23/8/3], who died on 20 June 1894.3 He had joined the paper seven years earlier and had married Mary, the only daughter of H. Crawford of Lane Crawford, just six months previously. In July, Frederick Harold Benning [6/5/41], the eldest son of Captain Thomas Benning [5/3/7] of the Hong Kong, Canton & Macao Steamboat Company, died aged nineteen and was buried near Captain George Vesey. By September the worst was over for that year, only to break out
again the following summer and again more virulently in the summer of 1896. The
Plague Services Recognition Committee was set up to decide who should be
rewarded with medals for their services in fighting the disease. The committee
contained the names of the rich and influential members of the society, and it can be clearly seen that members of the minority groups were by now publicly recognized figures of some standing. The Armenian, Catchick Paul Chater, and the Parsees, Dorabjee Nowrojee and Hormusjee Mody, were members of the committee. The Jews, E.R. Belilios, R.S. Sassoon and S. Moses, were also
members. Kai Ho Kai, Fung Wa Ch’un and Ho Tung represented the Chinese,
and Heinrich Hoppius the German contingent. Lessons were learnt concerning the necessity of higher standards for house-building, the collection of rubbish and sewage disposal. The government could no longer ignore the poor sanitary conditions in the Chinese quarters of the colony.
21.3. Resulting from the plague, a government scavaging cart. (By courtesy of Dennis G. Crow.)
The plague continued to revisit the colony most summers up to 1904.
Inspector Galbraith Moffat [6/5/12], who had survived the work of removing
the rubbish and fumigating infected houses in 1894, and was probably awarded a silver plague medal, then died of plague in June 1896. ‘There can be no doubt
that he contracted the disease in the performance of his duties, as a few days ago, he removed a body which was very decomposed and which had perhaps died of plague’. 4 Moffat was a senior warden of the United Services Lodge
of the Freemasons and was buried by his lodge. In 1898, two nurses from the
Government Civil Hospital succumbed to the disease. Sister Frances Higgin [45/9/9] caught the plague in April 1898 and passed it on to Sister Gertrude Ireland [45/9/10] who was nursing her.
The Typhoon of 1906
Of all the typhoons that swept over Hong Kong, the one remembered with
the most dread occurred on 18 September 1906. It unleashed a catastrophe of
appalling and unprecedented magnitude. There was no warning. At 8 a.m. the sky was overcast and it was drizzling when a sudden wind arose from nowhere.
Half an hour later, by the time the typhoon gun had been fired and the black ball
hoisted to signal the coming storm, it was already too late. The wind had reached cyclonic force. The bishop of Hong Kong, Joseph Hoare, had gone sailing with eight young curates. His boat was smashed to pieces on the rocks and his body never seen again. Only two of the curates managed to survive and carry back the bad news. Another family, William and Hannah Donaldson [37/1/20] from Glasgow and their two little boys, Willie and Ernest, drowned in the Hong
Kong harbour. But those to really suffer were the boat people. Their retreat cut off, ‘they were caught in the throes of the storm like sheep in a slaughter pen’. The
watchman on HMS Tamar reported:
It was an endless procession of junks and sampans, mostly dismasted, tearing past the ship, some abandoned and others with several wretches still on
board and very much terrified. Many were rudderless as well as mastless and,
consequently, completely at the mercy of the elements. It was pitiable to see them pass so close and yet be unable to rescue them.5
The fishing fleet was wiped out. Approximately 1,796 native craft sank. Five European vessels foundered, twenty-two were stranded and five broke up on the
sea wall. Thirteen more were badly damaged. A huge memorial was raised to the five petty officers of the French Navy torpedo ship, La Fronde [21A/4/30], who died in the storm. The ship was picked up by a giant wave and thrown against the depot wall. The monument used to stand at the junction of Gascoigne Road and Jordan Road in Kowloon, but was moved to the Cemetery for traffic reasons. The ramifications of the disaster continued.
According to reports, the harbour master Captain Lionel Barnes-Lawrence [45/8/10] fell victim to duty and contracted an illness brought on by overwork. He died less than one month later. Over ten thousand lives were lost and property to the value of many millions of dollars destroyed.6
Fires in Hong Kong Culminating in the Racecourse Fire of 1918
Throughout its history, Hong Kong people, particularly the Chinese, had been the victims of devastating fires. The territory was slow in finding an effective method of containing and putting out such blazes. The overall organization of the early groups of volunteers from regiments and companies, each with their own small hand-pulled fire engine was defective, training was lacking and their
equipment often poorly maintained. In accounts of a destructive fire in 1867, for
example, the China Mail asserts: ‘Many of the police engines were practically useless, in some cases the stream (of water) barely issuing from the nozzle, and their hoses bursting continually’.7 Looting, sometimes on a grand scale, broke out with some soldiers and policemen also taking whatever they could conceal. The
great fire that raged over 25 and 26 of December 1878 demonstrated that there was still an absence of any efficient system in the management of the force. This fire
destroyed 361 houses in Central.8 Two indomitable Victorian lady travellers wrote accounts which give a very
good idea of the terrors of large-scale fires before the advent of professional fire
brigades. Mrs. Gordon Cumming described how:
That livelong night we stood or sat on the verandah watching this appallingly magnificent scene — flames rising and falling, leaping and dancing, now
bursting from some fresh house, shooting up in tongues of fire, now rolling
in dense volumes of black smoke…. Very soon it was evident that neither
their [the fire-fighters] numerical strength, their engines, nor their meagre
water-supply could possibly master the fire — a very startling revelation to
the colony which prided itself on the perfect organization of its fire brigade…. A considerable number (of the fire-fighters) were none the steadier for their
Christmas festivities, and so a good deal of British valour was misapplied.9
Isabella Bird described the fire in even more graphic terms:
It was luridly grand in the twilight, the tongues of flame lapping up house after house, the jets of flame loaded with blazing fragments, the explosions,
each one succeeded by a burst of flame, carrying high into the air all sorts of projectiles, beams and rafters paraffin soaked, strewing them over the doomed city, the leaping flames coming nearer and nearer, the great volumes of smoke,
spark-laden, rolling towards us, all mingling with a din indescribable.10
The aftermath was equally terrible:
In every corner of the unburnt streets whole families were huddled together
beside a little pile of the poor household stuff they had succeeded in saving
while the houses which a few hours before had been happy homes lay in smouldering ruins. I never could have believed that any community could have borne so awful a calamity so bravely and patiently. Not a murmur was heard; not a tear have I seen shed by women who have lost every thing, and crouched shivering and half-dressed in a really chilling breeze.
At least two monuments exist to members of the volunteer fire brigade who lost their lives while fighting fires. The first is to Robert Anderson [38/1/7] who died in February 1882 aged twenty-six years. He came from County Antrim in Ireland but had been working as a policeman in Glasgow when he volunteered for the Hong Kong Police Force. He was one of the largest policeman in Hong Kong, weighing 230 pounds and also ‘one of most useful and active members of the Government Fire Brigade being ever in the van whenever danger was to be braved or good service rendered in saving life or property’. 11 His helmet and crossed batons and the set square and dividers symbol of his membership of the Freemasons are carved on two sides of the square base of the monument. The second is in memory of Stephen Fox [33/2/3] ‘who was killed by the falling of
a house at a fire in the Queen’s Road, Central’12 in November 1887. There was still no professional fire brigade when, in February 1918 during the
race meeting, the public stands collapsed under the weight of the spectators onto
the fires of restaurateurs and hawkers whose cooked food stalls and charcoal grills
underneath quickly started the blazes that led to one of the worst disasters that
Hong Kong has ever suffered. As recounted by J. Miller, a witness at the coroner’s
enquiry:
Attention was immediately diverted from the ponies by an uproar from the Chinese stands. On looking over, I saw a whole row of matsheds with thousands of people collapsing sideways, one against the other like a pack of cards…. It seemed to be but a moment or two later that the tragedy became
more awesome by an outbreak of fire. In a few moments, the whole range of mat-sheds was a mass of flames.13
Panic set in and the crowds stampeded. The bugler sounded the Fall In and all the soldiers rallied to help. Many ladies present began to tear up their petticoats for bandages. People rushed to help the victims. Sheung Kim dragged over forty people out of the wreckage. The emergency services arrived and did their best.
The horrifying casualty list from this fire was 570 dead, 52 in hospital and 34
missing. Known victims buried in the Cemetery include Albert Ahwee [16B/1/1], a Japanese husband and wife, Hung Yin Gee and Chung Saam Long [31ii/2/1], who ran a restaurant and were presumably providing lunches for race-goers and were subsequently trapped by the fire. David Marshall [7/8/11] aged twenty-
one also perished there. Whole families were wiped out while solitary amahs sat
alone in houses waiting in vain for their return. One such family totalled eleven members, another thirteen of whom only three returned. A memorial was raised on Caroline Hill to which the immediate victims were taken to be buried. Those interred in the Cemetery included only those who died later in hospital from their
burns. Finally in 1922 an official and professional full-time fire brigade was set up.
21.7. The racecourse during the fire of 26 February 1918. (By courtesy of
Chapter 22
The Old Residents Section in the Hong Kong Cemetery
Section 23 of the Cemetery is devoted to the new type of settler, the old-timer. Hong Kong was by reputation a small, unloved and distant island where men came to make money and left as soon as they had gained their competency.
Those who stayed were mostly the underdogs who could not afford to go ‘home’, wherever that was. By the 1890s, this was changing and one special section of
the Cemetery was kept for those who had passed at least twenty-three years in Hong Kong and then died in their adopted home. In this section there are 138 headstones, representing a total of 150 people. Of these, 104 are men, 36 are women and 10 children. The imbalance between men and women highlights the continued shortage of women in the colony. The people in this section died over a twenty-five-year period at the turn of the century. The earliest grave seems to belong to Frederick Stewart [23/5/7] who was buried in September 1887, and the later graves date to about 1910. Where it is known, the kind of employment
of those buried in this section or of their husbands is shown below in numerically descending order.
Table of Employment of Those in Section 23
Merchants 21
Merchant Navy 21
Civil Service 15
Tradesmen 11
Professionals 10
Hotel and Tavern Keepers 9
Managers and Technicians 8
Imperial Customs 7
Armed Forces 4
Missionaries 4
Total 110
Besides a wide range of employment, Section 23 also contains men and women from a number of countries. The largest minority groups are the Scottish with twenty-five members or 16 percent, closely followed by the Germans with twenty-four names representing nineteen men and five women. Beside these, six people are recognizably Americans, although it is difficult to give exact figures, since their names do not, like the Germans for instance, indicate their country of origin. Among the Americans, Rear-Admiral Ralph Chandler [23/5/6] is the highest ranked American officer in the entire cemetery. He died in February 1889. It is a mystery why the authorities should have buried him in the Old Residents Section. Also represented are three Armenians and two men from the West Indies, Edward Lewis [23/7/6] from St. Vincent, and William Gomes Thomas [23/7/9], an innkeeper from St. Thomas who may have initially been brought to Hong Kong as policemen. If so, they may have been black. Two of the Armenians were children. Arratoon Apcar [23/4/13], aged twelve at his death, was the son of Mr. and Mrs. A.V. Apcar. His father had lived in Hong Kong for thirty-eight years and was managing director of the Pacific Mail Shipping Line which was owned by the family. He built and settled in Ava House in Kowloon. Ripsima Jordan [23/4/6] was the small daughter of Paul Jordan [7/10/4], a broker and committed Freemason, and a nephew of Catchick Paul Chater. The monuments to civil servants in this section, especially to policemen who had attained a higher rank, clearly show their rise in prestige in the social scale. George Rae [23/8/5],a native of Tonghe in the north of Scotland, was promoted inspector of nuisances in 1883, foreman of the fire brigade and assistant inspector of markets in 1885 and inspector of dangerous goods in 1890. He retired on a pension in 1892 and died aged forty-five in 1893. He had been in Hong Kong for twenty-three years. The photograph was taken soon after his funeral.
The Scotsmen
Perhaps this would be an appropriate place to acknowledge the huge part that Scotsmen played in Hong Kong’s development.1 Many of the well-known and highly respected men who worked in Hong Kong came from Scotland. These included Douglas Lapraik, Thomas Sutherland who have been mentioned earlier, and Dr. Patrick Manson from Aberdeen University who went to found London’s Institute of Tropical Medicine. Two of his sons share a memorial in the Cemetery,
Alexander Livingston Manson [26/8/6], who died in 1887 aged seven and Dr. Patrick Thurburn Manson, his eldest son who died on Christmas Island in 1902.
Others came to Hong Kong as missionaries, teachers, sea captains, professionals, ship’s carpenters, technicians and policemen.
A long line of canny Scotsmen steered the Jardine, Matheson & Co. to prosperity, while men with Scottish ancestry like Phineas Ryrie [23/8/6] and Robert Shewan helped put Hong Kong’s industry onto a sound footing. Ryrie is an
example of that independence of mind that has made Scots fight for their rights all over the world. Ryrie was a member of the Legislative Council for twenty-five years and he continually questioned government measures. In 1871 he won a battle for freedom of speech in the Council and again in 1873, due to his protests, a rule was made that the estimates must be produced in sufficient time to be examined by the unofficials before they were debated. Other Scots who came to Hong Kong and
made their mark in the territory, like Frederick Stewart [23/5/7], were intelligent
men self-made men from humble backgrounds, who had profited from the excellent
Scottish school system which at that time far outclassed England’s educational
efforts.
Following in the footsteps of John Lamont and the Coupers, father and son, an important group of Scottish managers and foremen built up the ship and repairing building industry, a number of whom are represented in Section 23. The skill, devotion to duty and length of service of the Scottish technicians and managers impressed all their contemporaries. These men from Scotland were said to have been more democratic in their outlook than many Englishmen of that time and inter-racial relationships in the dockyards were excellent. They were among the earlier expatriates who made Hong Kong their home and kept their children with them. Among those lying in Section 23 is Thomas Lamont [23/9/6] who had grown up in Hong Kong with his father, John Lamont, and then followed in his footsteps by becoming superintendent of the Aberdeen Docks. Alexander Geddes Aitken [23/8/14] was the foreman of the P. & O. repairing shop from 1865
to 1876 and after that foreman at Union Dock, where he remained until his death in 1901. He clocked up thirty-six years in the dockyards of Hong Kong. One of his sons, Rutherford Aitken, is buried with his father. Rutherford died in 1908 aged twenty-seven. Kate MacDonald Lammert [23/2/8] was born little Kitty Aitken, According to her obituary: ‘She endeared herself to all in the colony as one of the brightest of the home-grown children’. She married George Reinhold Lammert, the well-known auctioneer from Lithuania. Having given birth to three babies, she
died aged twenty-five of typhoid fever. Lammert then went on to marry her sister,
Jane Aitken, demonstrating the closeness between these two families.
Also among the indispensable Scottish foremen was Andrew Harvie [23/7/15] from Glasgow. His monument proudly proclaims, ‘For twenty years in the employ of the Dock Company’. He worked as a moulder for Union Dock to the time of his death in 1902 aged sixty. Harvie also had outside interests of his own. The China Mail reported that in May 1899 his lorcha loaded with timber and stores for the lighthouse had been blown onto the rocks in the night with the loss of three lives. He had lost three lighters previous to this. His red marble monument adorned with a thistle is handsome and his estate of $22,500 shows that he died wealthy. Another foreman joiner, Alexander Ewing [23/7/3] from Dumbarton was, according to the inscription on his headstone, ‘many years in the employ of the Hong Kong & Whampoa Dock Company’. Like many in this close-knit community, he was married and one of his infants, Alick Ewing [41/8/2] died in 1899 aged two years. Alick’s grandfather and grandmother are also mentioned in this inscription. Mr. Kyle also worked in the Kowloon Docks and he and his wife were living in Kowloon.
One other name not from the Old Residents Section must be added to this illustrious list of Scottish dockyard managers and foremen. James Liddell [8/7/4], also a native of Dumbarton, came to Hong Kong in 1865. He became the highly respected superintendent of the Kowloon Docks responsible for building many ships including the light ship on the Formosa Shoal in the Straits of Malacca. In August 1881, the Hong Kong Telegraph reported that Liddell was leaving on SS Chinkiang for his first holiday after sixteen years’ continuous service. ‘He has never required a single day’s holiday until now’. Liddell is commemorated on the memorial to his wife, Mary Sinclair, and his two daughters, Maggie and Minnie, but managed to retire to West Kilbride, Scotland where he died in 1929 aged ninety-one.
A number from among this group moved across to Kowloon where living was cheaper and they were closer to their work. They were joined by the merchant navy captains on local runs. Captain Cobban [23/8/13] for example, who was on the Hong Kong to Manila run, lived at 11 Knutsford Terrace in the same street as Alexander Geddes Aitken. It is said that they had enough land in front of their houses to accommodate their own bowling green. The Union Church built a chapel nearby to meet their needs and such was the clout of this community that their demands for a primary school in which to educate their children led to the
building of the British School in Nathan Road in 1901. The school was paid for
under protest by Sir Robert Ho Tung who had hoped for a school catering more widely across the racial divides. However his own children were admitted and made the trek every day from their home on the Peak to attend in the building on
Nathan Road where the Monuments and Antiquities Office now stands.
The Germans
The Germans began arriving in greater numbers and making their presence felt during this period. In 1881, when the Freya and the Itis, war-ships of the Imperial German Navy, were visiting, the captain of the Freya, Paul Kupfer [8/13/5], died in Hong Kong. His funeral procession was one of the most impressive the
colony had ever seen. It included over one hundred German sailors and officers, some bearing palm leaves, bouquets of flowers and ‘devices in evergreens, besides
men from HMS Victor Emanuel and two Spanish men-of-war and nearly all the German residents. Kupfer, the son of the ober-burgomeister of Berlin, was ‘a man of large and robust habit of body and most genial and happy temperament’. 2 He died of a heart attack aged forty.
By January 1897, the Germans in Hong Kong numbered 208 and accounted for about 5.75 percent of the European population. This seemingly small
percentage represented a much higher economic and political potential than the numbers may suggest. In the government for example, Rev. E.J. Eitel, the ex-Basel missionary, followed in the footsteps of the Rhenish missionary, Rev.
William Lobscheid, who had been appointed inspector of the government schools in 1857. The missionaries’ knowledge of Chinese made them particularly useful
to the administration. Eitel was then appointed to the board of examiners for the
Chinese examinations for the cadets and the police force and was finally given the
difficult job of Chinese secretary to Sir John Pope Henessey. He was also one of the first Europeans to make a study of feng shui, the author of a Dictionary of the Cantonese Dialect and wrote the first historical account of events in Hong Kong, Europe in China. Eitel arrived in Hong Kong in 1862 and stayed for thirty-
five years. He left the Basel Mission when it refused to allow him to marry Mary
Eaton and joined the London Missionary Society. They married in January 1866 and one son, Herbert John Eitel [23/5/5] who was born in 1870, died aged twenty years and lies buried in this section.
In all eleven German missionaries from this period, five of whom were women, are buried in the Cemetery. Four of these including an inspector of missions, Rev. Sauberzweig-Schmidt [1/3/8], were from the Basel Mission, three were from the Rhenish Mission and three more from the Berlin Mission. Their length of service in the East meant that they were fluent and knowledgeable in the Chinese language and culture and their educational attainments and missionary training gave them the necessary intellectual grounding. The presence in Hong Kong of this formidable body of missionary scholars must have had an effect on the cultural scene. Martin Schaub [4/8/6], for example, was in the Far East for twenty-six years and in that time wrote a number of works including A History of Christian Missions and a treatise, On the Administration of a Christian Mission.
There were twenty-one German wholesale trading companies, five agents
for money exchange, shipping and securities and eight shops. In the 1890s, four
Germans served on the board of Hongkong & Shanghai Banking Corporation
and three on the board of the Hong Kong and Whampoa Dock Company. In 1897, both of these companies had a German chairman. By the end of 1906, it was
reported in a memorandum sent to Chancellor Bernhard von Bulow in Berlin that 60 percent of the total imports from Europe to Hong Kong and 65 percent of the exports from that port to Europe passed through German hands.3
The German contingent of twenty-four names buried in Section 23 spreads over all the employment categories. Eight were merchants, assistants or wives of merchants. Christian Grossmann [23/8/11] from Hamburg had come to Hong Kong aged twenty-one as an assistant with Siemssen & Co in 1865. He left to become a partner of Kirchner, Boger & Co in 1867 and then set up as a merchant in his own right in 1879, and continued as such until his death in 1899, by which time he had lived in Hong Kong for thirty-four years. Louis Mendel [23/3/10], who was born in Altona, had joined Arnhold Karberg & Co. in 1867, becoming a partner in 1874. He left to set up on his own in 1885 as a broker. He had been in Hong Kong for thirty-two years when he died in 1897. Two of the
German merchants committed suicide. Oscar Wegener [23/11/12], a merchant
from Kiel, worked for Hesse Ehlers and Co. until it was wound up by him in 1898 when he started his own company, Lautz, Wegener & Co. which he ran until his death by suicide in 1902. He stated in a letter that he took his own life because
of his worsening health problems. The second, Friedrich Christian Dittmer [8/10/4], who was employed by Hesse & Co., had ‘retired to his room and shot himself through the forehead with a revolver in 1881 in a state of depression’.4 The Liedertafel of which he was a prominent member sang at his graveside.
Three graves belonging to German wives stand out for the fineness of their metalwork railings. Emmi von Bose [23/5/3] was a Nissen by birth and
probably related to Woldemar Nissen, one of the first directors of the Hongkong
& Shanghai Bank. She was married to Carl von Bose, a partner of Carlowitz &
Co., one of the oldest German firms in the East. The carving of the small metal
pillars at the corners which support the metal work enclosure and the metalwork itself is very fine. The second belongs to Emma Schroter [23/7/10] and the size of her monument suggests that her husband must have been of the merchant class although nothing is known of her background. The third and most outstanding metalwork — probably the best example of nineteenth-century metalwork in Hong Kong — surrounds the grave at [32/7/4] where sadly the lead lettering has been lost. It was probably stolen by thieves, such as the one, for example, who
was caught in November 1950 prising the lead letters out of the inscriptions in
Section 2. This grave probably belongs to Bertha Kramer, the wife of Julius
Kramer, who was admitted as partner of Arnhold, Karberg & Co. in 1892. Bertha died in February 1896 at
Luginsland on the Peak and Julius left Hong Kong soon after.
There had also been a big increase in German shipping during this period. Sir Henry Blake
writing in about 1908
reported that: ‘Ten years ago the German flag in Hong Kong harbour was comparatively infrequent.
Today the steamers of Germany frequently outnumber our own in that great port’. 5 This increase in shipping is matched in the Cemetery by the large increase
in the number of German merchant navy officers and crew who were buried in the Cemetery during this period. Ten German master mariners and thirteen officers or crew can be identified from this period, compared to a total of five in the previous period. Of these, five were born in Apenrade and four in nearby Flensburg, the area where the Jebsen family started the shipping line of Jebsen & Co. in 1895. Four
others came from Hamburg. Two long-serving captains with identical monuments lie side by side in Section 23. Lorenz Cordsen Jwersen [23/10/16] of the SS Tritos and Heinrich Christian Bertelsen [23/10/17] of the Chi, both from Flensberg,
may have been brothers-in-law. They died in November 1890 and January 1891
respectively.
Among the four German tradesmen identified are two close friends. Christian Frederich Rapp [23/4/3] was first named on the jury list in 1864 as assistant and then a partner of Frederick Schwarzkopf, the doyen of German society in terms of years spent in the Far East. Rapp left the firm in 1877 to go into business as an auctioneer and commission agent. His friend, William Schmidt [23/9/10], a gunsmith from Thuringia, was a versatile man, who besides repairing arms, making ‘gun gear’ and converting rifles to breechloaders, advertised his skills in sharpening surgical instruments and repairing musical instruments, sewing machines and iron safes.6 He opened a shop in Wellington Street in 1865, later moving into Beaconsfield Arcade. In 1881, Schmidt and Rapp were attacked when on their way back by boat from a day’s shooting on the mainland. Shots were fired and the Chinese captain of the Germans’ boat killed, his place at the helm being taken by his wife. Schmidt readied his arms, a repeating carbine, a revolver and a fowling piece and sent a few shots into the air to show he was armed, thinking they were being attacked by pirates. The boat was then boarded and the two sportsmen were surprised and relieved to find that their assailants were wearing the well-known red sash and blue uniform of the Canton Customs Service. They were taken to Canton but luckily soon released unharmed.7
Five Germans in Section 23 were tavern or hotel keepers, including the three members of the Bohm family who owned and ran the Windsor Hotel. Maria Bohm [23/11/5], wife of Paul and two of their children, Albert and Elsa, lie in the section. One of the oldest residents, Georg Felix Muller [23/2/3] from Hanover, first arrived in Hong Kong in 1846. He had held the licence of the El Dorado but auctioned it off and threw in his lot with Charles Frederick Petersen [23/3/1] as runner and keeper of his boarding house. One other German tavern keeper from this period is Andreas Wilhelm Wohlters [20/10/9] who died in 1888. He had
been granted the licence of the Nelson Tavern in 1870 and by 1872 was also paying the rates on the Union Tavern at No. 45, Lower Lascar Road. In 1871 Wohlters,
aged thirty-nine, celebrated his marriage in the Roman Catholic Cathedral to Coriane Maria da Cruz from Macau who was just fifteen. One wonders how Maria felt being married to a tavern keeper more than twice her age.
Relationships Which Crossed the Racial Divide
Those with steady loving relationships which crossed the racial divide were more likely to choose to stay in Hong Kong. They realized that Britain was not a country where a Chinese wife would be well received or able to settle happily. In spite of the opprobrium attached in the late Victorian days to such liaisons, approximately 21 percent or 22 of the 104 in Section 23 are known to have been married to Chinese women or to have been in a long-term relationship. More may have kept Chinese mistresses but, since the main source of our knowledge comes from the wills of the men who made provision for such partners, men who died intestate or were too poor to leave money might also have belonged in this category. For example, it is quite likely that Thomas Carter [23/11/9], carpenter, shipwright and blacksmith living in Tank Road in the heart of Chinatown had a Chinese partner, but there is no proof.
The men with Chinese partners in Section 23 seem to be spread evenly across the classes from, probably, Phineas Ryrie [23/8/6], premier merchant and for twenty-five years a member of the Legislative Council, downwards. They fall into two almost equal categories. The first group of twelve names includes
those men who married their Chinese girl. With the exception of Mary Ayou Caldwell [23/4/1], wife of the ex-registrar general, Daniel Caldwell, most of those with Chinese wives in Section 23 come from the lower levels of society. Among the more respectable members of society married to Chinese women was the previously mentioned German auctioneer, Christian Friedrich Rapp [23/4/3]. He had married Mei Ho and obviously had great faith in her capability as he appointed her as guardian over his six children in his will. His wife, Mei Ho/May Rapp [12/9/4] who died in 1932 aged eighty-five, outlived him by nearly forty years. The immaculate state of her white marble headstone and the regular flowers laid
there suggest that there are still descendants of the Rapp family living in Hong Kong. Alfred Parker [23/8/8], chief engineer of SS Tai On, was married at the Chinese congregation church of St. Peter, indicating that his wife was Chinese. She worked as matron of the Hong Kong Hotel.
Four of the husbands come from the lower ranks of the civil service, one from among the tradesmen and one from the merchant navy. Edward Lewis [23/7/6], who left provision in his will for his widow, Ah Ching Lewis and daughter, Yan Noi, came from Kingston in the West Indies in 1865. He joined the Public Works Department where he served for the next thirty-six years until his death in 1897. Lewis was appointed watchman of the Pokfulam Reservoir and given accomodation in the small house, which still exists at the head of the reservoir in order to guard against anyone trying to poison the water. He failed to preside effectively over his band of coolies, and their violent quarrelling and assaults reached the newspapers. However, he was later promoted to head the security at Tai Tam Reservoir. The Scot, John Maxwell [23/7/12], an ex-policeman from the Royal Naval Yard also working for the P.W.D., took his first child to the London Missionary Society Chapel to be baptized. A promise was then extracted from him that he would marry his girl, Wong Ah Hing, which he duly fulfilled. William Godwin [23/7/13] from Middlesex married the Chinese widow of Christian Jensen, entered in the 1882 Jury List as assistant at the travern the Land We Live In. Godwin was custodian of the recreation ground.
Johann Rauch [23/9/11], ex-police sergeant, married Chan Lai who is buried with him. Rauch was the first man to be granted a spirits licence for the Praya East Hotel in Wan Chai. It was previously feared that soldiers in the neighbouring barracks would have too easy access to alcohol. After Rauch’s death, the hotel was taken over by H.J. Faunch [23/9/13] who was born in Knightsbridge, London. He carried on the business with his wife, Tai Hoo, until his death in 1901, when he left all he owned to her and their daughter, Nellie. Thomas R. McBean [23/9/7], usher and interpreter in Hindustani and Bengali at the Supreme Court for twenty-five years, was married to Francesca Brigitta Cruz described as a Chinese woman, whom he was accused of maltreating. His obituary in the Hong Kong Telegraph stated that: ‘Although not pretending to much education, his faculty for languages was marvellous. Besides the above languages he was often called to translate in Portuguese, Japanese and Malay. He died suddenly leaving his wife and seven children totally unprovided for’. 8 At the request of the barrister John Joseph Francis and Bishop Raimondi, a compassionate allowance of $875 was awarded to Mrs. McBean. Three tavern keepers with Chinese wives include the Petersen brothers. Christian Frederick Petersen [23/3/1], who established the German
Tavern, lost his first wife from Bristol in 1878. She is said to have died aged twenty-eight from the effects of taking cajuput oil. Christian then married a Chinese girl
and three of their children were baptized in the Chinese To Tsai Church.9 Rev.
Philipp Winnes, the Basel missionary, first reported that a poor German named
Petersen had opened an inn for German sailors in 1858. ‘In this inn, I preached until the sailors had had enough and that they had quite soon’.10 By 1867 Christian with his brother Peter was running the Continental Hotel on the Praya as a kind of club for ships’ captains. They were disapproved of by the authorities for the gambling games they organized, but both later attained the respectability of having their names on the jury list. The size of Christian’s headstone and the fact
that he was able to leave an estate of $52,000 indicate a shrewd man in a financially
lucrative occupation. Peter Petersen [8/21/1] is described as a native of Sweden on his headstone, so the brothers were probably from Schleswig Holstein which had recently been captured by the Germans. Peter was for a time barkeeper at the Land We Live In where he took the owner, Louis Kirchmann [23/10/3], to court for assault. This tavern was notorious for the number of shooting incidents and a policeman was always deployed to stand outside its door. The assault case came before the magistrates and Kirchmann was found guilty and fined. Peter then moved to the City of Hamburg and finally held the licence for the Royal
Oak until he died in 1876, aged fifty-two. In 1874, Peter was taken to court by his
Chinese mother-in-law, Ow Atai, for assaulting her. He had ejected her rather too forcefully from his house. The case was dismissed by the magistrate.11 Cross-cultural relationships have never been easy. Kirchman was most likely married to a Chinese woman, Anna Kirchmann [23/10/4], who had been born in Canton. Kirchmann died a
wealthy man leaving nearly $21,000 to
his daughter and her children.
The second category of men, those with ‘protected women’ rather than Chinese wives, includes ten names. Two, George Snelling [23/5/4] and Jens Anton Ahlmann [23/12/6], could be said to come from the lower
middle ranks of society in Hong Kong. Snelling had come to Hong Kong from Calcutta. He had in the course of his career run the London Inn, the Albion Inn, and
finally the Stag Inn. Snelling, whose estate totalled $10,500, left money for his Chinese girl, Tai Yau, as well as $500 in trust for his
daughter, Ah Mun. Ahlmann and his two ‘protected women’, Atkinson and Ng Ah-mui [23/12/6], between them produced seven daughters and one son. Jens was born in the Sonderborg Disrict of Denmark but moved to San Francisco where he became an American citizen, and then moved on again to Hong Kong. He remained a resident for forty-six years working for nearly thirty years as chief officer of the P. & O. coal hulk, Fort William, and later as pier master at the P. & O. wharf. He finally took charge of the hulk belonging to the ships’ chandlery, Blackhead & Co., where he worked until his death in May 1903
aged seventy-nine years. It must have been something of a record in Hong Kong
to still be at work at that age. In 1969, Ng Ah-mui, who had died in 1883, was moved by one of her grandsons, Peter Wong, from a Chinese cemetery to join
Ahlmann in Section 23.
The other nine names in this category come from the ranks of the merchants or merchant navy. Four merchants, Phineas Ryrie [23/8/6], David Sliman [23/3/6], David Culloch [23/8/9] and Hector Coll Maclean [23/9/3], all had lasting relationships with Chinese women. According to information in Carl Smith’s card index, Ryrie bequeathed in his will $5000 to Maggie and Eva, the daughters of a Chinese woman, A Chun. Sliman was for many years Jardine, Matheson & Co.’s agent in Swatow, but was working in the head office in East Point at the time of his death and must have been visiting Swatow when, according to his headstone, he drowned there in 1897. His girl, Lam Yu-shi, is said to be buried in the Roman Catholic Cemetery in Happy Valley. The merchant Culloch was from an old Scottish family based in Ardwell in Kircudbrightshire. He worked for Turner & Co. for more than a quarter of a century and took a leading part in the management of the Hong Kong Hotel before leaving to try his fortunes in Japan in 1868. Returning in 1871, he rejoined Turners and lived at the Haystack, on the Peak. On his death he left the income from the rent on a property in Gough Street to his Chinese girl, Young A-chun, for the rest of her life. Culloch
died of a heart attack aged forty-eight and his estate amounted to $40,000.
Maclean left his money to his son-in-law, Sir Robert Ho Tung, who had married his Eurasian daughter, Margaret Mak Sau Ying. Maclean worked as Jardine
Matheson’s agent in Tientsin where he was described in rather unflattering terms
by Edward Bowra:
A good-looking, good-tempered rather addle-pated fellow with a vast notion of his own importance and of the littleness of other mortals, much given to the cracking of bad jokes and the making of poor puns; and if it were not for the intense amusement which he himself derives from his own jocularity he would be rather a bore.12
Margaret was born in 1865 which must have been around the time Edward Bowra reached Tientsin. Three more names come from the merchant navy. Thomas Rowan [23/13/11],
an Australian master mariner who died in 1906 aged sixty-eight, left 23 Mosque
Street to his Chinese woman, Ah Junka, with the residue of the estate going to nephews in Melbourne. George Hopkins [23/5/1], an ex-master mariner who had managed the Scottish Oriental Steam Ship Co. and lived at the Bungalow
on the Peak, left $4,000 to Sam Ho, ‘the Chinese woman at present under my protection’, and, in a codicil, another $2000 to their daughter Ah Sung. The
third, Captain James Stewart [23/7/5] of the Hong Kong, Macao & Canton Steamboat Company’s SS Kai Pan, baptized his son in the Chinese St. Peter’s Church, so almost certainly had a Chinese wife. He lived at Isadale, Kowloon. The fourth and last name in this group belongs to Thomas Trustlove Phillips [23/11/7]. He was a member of the Imperial Customs and a Freemason. In his will, Phillips bequeathed to Achune from Canton all the money in his account in the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank and all the furniture in his house in China. In addition, he left money to pay the fees of his four children, Minnie, Jane, Thomas and Daisy, to attend the Diocesan Schools, ‘provided their mother can see them if she wishes’. The ‘protected’ women in Section 23 seem mostly to have been under
the protection of the better off and socially more respectable men. One wonders
if it was the case that, while the lower ranks were encouraged to marry their consorts for the sake of respectability, those in the upper ranks found the cost to their reputation too great to countenance marriage to their Chinese girls.
The Children of the ‘Old Timers’
Intermarriage, particularly among the families of the tradesmen and technicians, had increased the numbers of Hong Kong–born Europeans. Beside the Aitkens and Lammerts who have already been mentioned, two Crawfords from the ships’ chandlery and general stores, Lane Crawford, found their resting place in Section 23, namely Lindsay Stanford Lamont Crawford [23/3/5], who is said to have died of the plague in 1898, and Ninian Robert Crawford [23/13/7]. The names, Stanford Lamont Crawford, conjure up a picture of close friendships between
William Kent Stanford, the merchant navy mate who went to prison over the
opium swindle, John Lamont and Ninian Crawford. They all moved in the much same social circle. It was said that by this time a customer to Lane Crawford could
wander from room to room and find anything there from a pin to an anchor.13
A.G.B. Hance [23/5/2], the son of Henry Hance, the botanist, is another who can be included in this group. He is remembered on a monument dedicated to three young engineers working for the Imperial Customs Service. Young Hance was working as second officer on SS Ho Fei, one of the revenue cruisers, when he died in Sydney, Australia aged thirty-two. An imposing monument commemorates Arthur Wagner [23/10/13], the son of one of the first professional musicians in Hong Kong. Carl Wagner, his father, was living in Hong Kong by 1861 when the birth of a son was announced in the paper. Wagner lived in Hollywood Road and taught music, repaired and sold musical instruments, played the fiddle at parties, and tuned pianos. But these occupations did not provide sufficient income and he was bankrupted and only discharged from bankruptcy in 1870. Carl then turned his hand to tavern keeping and finally ended up as first clerk in the police department. Arthur was educated at St. Saviour’s School, where he took some prizes. He served time as an apprentice under the engineer and boilermaker, William Dunphy, and then in 1883 became an assistant in the surveyor general’s office. He died while in Canton working as engineer to the fleet of imperial revenue cruisers, ‘a slave to duty’, having taken on his superior’s work load while he was on leave.
Another old timer, Henry John White [23/12/7], had arrived in 1847. He bought and ran the British Hotel, but left on the Corsair in 1849 for Australia. However he was back by 1859, letting rooms and opening a business as a wine merchant. He may have been related to John Robinson White [8/17/1], who had been an auctioneer and hotel keeper in Macau, but came to Hong Kong in 1869 and, by 1871, had become manager of the Commercial Billiard Rooms and then went on to run the Stag Inn. White died in 1896 and, in his obituary, it is said that he was formerly a soldier who had fought through both the Crimean War and the
Indian mutiny before coming east. He was buried with his wife and brother-in-law, Charles R. Reed [8/17/1] Interestingly, seven Reed brothers served during
the Second World War in the Volunteers with most serving in the Eurasian company, four of whom lost their lives. After White’s death, his wife continued to
run a boarding house, Zetland House. Herman White [23/12/7], Henry’s son,
fought in the First World War, but came back to Hong Kong and worked on the staff of the Hong Kong Club. He later became manager of the Kowloon Hotel
where he was assisted by his brother, Nowell, who later managed the Ritz Cafe. According to the inscription on his headstone, Nowell Bernard White [23/12/7], a member of the Volunteer Force, was killed in action against the Japanese on 18
December 1941. The sons of these two brothers continued the connection with Hong Kong that may have began nearly a century earlier in 1847. Perhaps it would
be appropriate here to mention that the mixed blood daughter of Daniel and Mary Ayou Caldwell is also buried in Section 23. Emily Caldwell [23/3/7] married an American, John Martin Armstrong [23/3/9], who had been a clerk to Rawle &
Drinker as far back as 1849. After closing the accounts of Drinker & Co. in 1854, he joined the American firm of Thomas Hunt. This was one of the oldest firms of the ships’ chandlers on the China Coast, and had moved from Whampoa to Hong Kong at the time of the Second Opium War. From 1858 to 1869, Armstrong was a storekeeper for Hunt, leaving in 1873 to become an auctioneer. Armstrong died in 1897, but Emily lived on until her eighty-fourth year, dying in 1921. One of the sons
of this couple, John Henry Armstrong, was educated in Hong Kong and after twenty years’ service with the Volunteers, he was honoured by being chosen as aide-de-camp to the governor.
The European Associates of Dr. Sun Yat Sen
A group of European men, a number of whom are now lying in Section 23, may
have helped to influence the thinking of Dr. Sun Yat Sen and the direction of the
revolutionary movement he led. These men set up the College of Medicine for the Chinese and some then gave their time free of charge to teach there. It is thanks to them that Sun Yat Sen was able to qualify as a doctor in Hong Kong and it was during his time under their tutelage that he formulated his revolutionary ideals.
Dr. William Young [23/13/4] was the first Western doctor since the days of Dr. Benjamin Hobson and Dr. Hirschberg to try to further the practice of Western medicine among the Chinese in Hong Kong. Dr. Young was a Scot who had immigrated to Canada, graduated from the University of Montreal and then moved on to Hong Kong. In 1881, he decided to form a Medical Mission Committee to promote medical care among the poor Chinese. Dr. Young consulted with Rev. John C. Edge [16Ci/4/21], a member of the London Missionary Society and the Union Church.
Under the auspices of that church, the two men enlisted the interest of others in the organization of a committee. They included in the committee Rev. Rudolph Lechler of the Basel Missionary Society and Frederick Stewart [23/5/7], whose post as headmaster of the Central School gave him strong links to the Chinese community. Also included were
E.R. Belilios, Wong Shing, H.W. Davis, of the accountancy firm Linstead & Davis, and Ninian Robert Crawford [23/13/7] of Lane Crawford. Dr. Young and Rev. Edge together opened a dispensary on two days a week using spare rooms at the Tai Ping Shan chapel. The success
of the dispensary, which looked after 927 patients in the first quarter of its operation, together with the offer by Belilios to donate $5000 to a hospital
for the Chinese, spurred the committee to make more ambitious plans.
Sir Kai Ho Kai [8/4/3] now became interested in the project and, in the absence of Dr. Young who had returned for a time to Canada, he worked hard to stir the interest of Chinese Christians in a hospital for the Chinese. The hospital proposal, after some setbacks, was finally launched in 1884. Mary Ayow Caldwell
468 Forgotten Souls
[23/4/1] and the mother of Ho Kai each
gave $250 to the fund. Ten thousand dollars
was raised at a bazaar in the Botanical
Gardens and $3000 came from the Chinese
community. Rev. John Chalmers [23/3/4] of the London Missionary Society helped
with the fund-raising by realizing $14,000
towards the new hospital from the sale of the Lower Bazaar Chapel. He had by the time
of his death in 1899 spent forty-seven years in
Hong Kong, long enough for both him and his wife to have been present at the deathbed of Henrietta Shuck.
The new hospital building with its
eighty beds was paid for by Kai Ho Kai and
named the Alice Memorial Hospital after
his first wife. The foundation stone was laid
in 1886 with the main speech being made
by Rev. Chalmers. The hospital was finally inaugurated on 1 October 1887 and
put under the control of the Medical Missionary Society. Dr. Patrick Manson, on seeing the hospital rise from its foundations, formed a Hong Kong Medical Society to include those who had been working for the success of the scheme, Rev. Chalmers, Frederick Stewart and Kai Ho Kai as well as Drs. Cantlie, Hartigan and Jordan.
The new hospital for the Chinese made possible a further plan, to open an
attached medical school. This was accomplished by 1890 when ten students,
including Sun Yat Sen, were enrolled and reported to be living and studying in the hospital, seven of them being Christians. The Medical Society Committee reconstituted itself as the senate of the new medical school with Dr. Manson as dean, Rev. Chalmers as chairman, Frederick Stewart as rector and Dr. Cantlie as secretary. The teachers for the new college included Dr. Gregory Jordan, the Armenian nephew of Catchick Paul Chater and brother of the broker Paul Jordan, who taught tropical medicine and Kai Ho Kai who taught medical jurisprudence, all free of charge. Dr. Manson and Dr. Cantlie were later to be responsible for rescuing Sun Yat Sen from imprisonment in the Chinese embassy in London and a certain death had the embassy succeeded in smuggling him out of the
country. H.W. Davis then provided the funds to build the Nethersole Hospital
for women and children, so called after his mother’s maiden name, which opened
in 1893. Demand soon outstripped the number of beds available and, through the munificence of Kai Ho Kai and his sister, Ho Miu Ling, the enlarged hospitals
opened on a new site in Bonham Road, and the College of Medicine was now
able to meet the full requirements of clinical students and open the first training
course for general nursing in South China and the first courses for midwives. Thus, the money made by Kai Ho Kai’s father, Rev. Ho Fuk Tong, in property transactions and passed on to his children, was largely spent improving the health of the Chinese population. This almost revolutionary shift in direction towards meeting the needs of the Chinese majority grew out of the work of the small group dedicated to their interests, a majority of whom lived and died in their adopted island home.
Merchant Navy Group
At the close of the nineteenth century the strength of Hong Kong still lay in its position as the premier port of call on the China Coast. This explains the fact that one of the largest groups in Section 23, numbering some twenty-one, consists of men who belonged to the merchant navy. Four captains could now afford addresses on the Peak or in the Mid-Levels. Charles Tomlin [23/3/3] of the Canton, Hong Kong & Macao Line lived at Mountain View. Henry Hope Joseph, superintendent of the P. & O., also had a house on the Peak where his wife Helen [23/4/5] died in December 1894, to be followed four months later by his eldest son Edward Henry Joseph [23/4/4], aged four years. Captain Edward Burnie [23/2/7], marine surveyor for Lloyds and for many years a captain with the Douglas Line, lived at Ferndown, Robinson Road and his friend, Captain George Hopkins [23/5/1] of the Scottish Oriental Steamship Co., lived nearby at the Bungalow. Henry Kennett [23/8/2] from Yorkshire was among the master mariners who, like Captains James Stewart [23/7/5] and Cobban [23/8/13], moved to Kowloon about this time. Hong Kong also boasted nautical
schools where mariners could gain their master mariners’ qualifications. Captain Ambrose Clarke [23/10/18] for example, who died in 1899 aged fifty-eight, taught
navigation and nautical science in such a school.
In spite of the precautions taken and the increased size of the steam ships, piracies still occurred. In December 1890, the SS Namoa belonging to the Douglas Line was sailing to Hong Kong from San Francisco with 220 Chinese
returnees and five first-class passengers. As the ship neared Hong Kong, a gang of fifty to sixty men poured out of the Chinese passengers’ quarters, changing into
the uniform of soldiers as they came out. They began their attack by taking control of the arms and ammunition. Carl Magnus Peterson [23/10/15], a lighthouse keeper from the Imperial Customs Service who happened to be on deck,
encountered the pirates first but was shot four times in the head before he could
raise an alarm. Captain Thomas G. Pocock [23/13/10] was summoned from the saloon for negotiations, but was shot in the chest before he could reach the door. Having thoroughly cowed the rest of the crew and passengers, the pirates ordered the Namoa to be steered in a big circle while the pirates went to work relieving everyone of their hard-earned savings. A protesting Chinese merchant was thrown overboard to drown and his two wives after him. The cargo of opium was left,
but the pirates escaped with $55,000 in cash besides jewellery, watches and gold.
The Namoa returned to Hong Kong the following morning. Pocock was given an
official funeral with all honours, and collections were taken up for his wife and four
children. Eventually most of those involved were put to death. Grisly postcards showing the ringleaders being beheaded on a beach outside the walls of Kowloon fort became a popular buy.14
Although the execution of the ringleaders caused a hiatus in piratical activity, attacks began again in the new century with at least three more headstones proclaiming death at the hands of pirates. In November 1911, the chief
officer H.J. Nicholson [16B/1/21] was, according to his inscription, ‘killed while defending his ship against a piratical attack in the West River’. As reported in the
Hong Kong Telegraph:
It appears that the vessel went aground and it was not long before a number of pirates in several junks came up and when within a short distance of the Shui On they opened fire.… The chief officer received three bullets in his abdomen. The poor fellow in terrible agony managed to crawl to his cabin where he succumbed almost immediately. The crew being unable to defend themselves against the onslaught of the pirates were at their mercy and they simply looted the ship taking away several junk loads of cargo.15
On the very next day thirty pirates boarded the Kwong Yuen also in the West River and divested the passengers of their money and clothes. The pirate attacks continued as, for example, when in 1924 James Wilcox [16Cii/3/1], captain of the SS Tai Lee of the Douglas Line, was shot dead by his Chinese boatswain and members of the crew who took over the ship. They looted 20,000 pounds sterling worth of goods and departed with nineteen Chinese passengers whom they hoped to ransom.
Journalism
Journalism still represented itself as one of the few avenues open to the public where opposition to the government could be voiced and perceived malpractices
highlighted. It was also another area where the influence of independent-minded
Scots dominated the field. Two men in particular towered over the profession. The first, George Murray Bain [23/1/3], was born and educated in Montrose, and arrived in Hong Kong in the 1864 as a printer. He worked as sub-editor of the
China Mail, rising to become editor and then in 1875, sole owner of the paper. Bain
made his home in Hong Kong residing at Birnam Brae on Conduit Road, Mid-Levels. His wife, Anna [9/3/13], and his son, Horace Murray Bain [23/1/4], who followed in his father’s footsteps, are both buried in the Old Residents Section. The China Mail under Bain was the more conservative of the newspapers.
In contrast, Robert Fraser-Smith [23/8/3], who in 1881 founded the Hong Kong Telegraph, was a force to be feared in the territory. He preached ‘the gospel
of anti-humbug … With scathing pen he pricked various bubbles, and made
worthy and unworthy citizens alike tremble in their shoes’. Austin Coates called
him ‘a first-rate journalist, a hilarious character and a real firebrand’. He added that Fraser-Smith ‘let fly at commercial malpractice, government sloth, discrimination
of all kinds and anything that smacked of corruption’. 16 His taste for racy reporting
led to five separate summons for libel, two of which resulted in prison sentences.
In the last, he had made unsubstantiated charges of assault and rape against John Minhinnett [1/1/4], a P.W.D. foreman and was sent to prison for six months.
Minhinnett, a Plymouth man with a Chinese girl, was a rather unpleasant character who earlier had been convicted of falsely accusing a rickshaw man of assaulting him
in order to get the man into trouble. Soon after the governor, Sir George William
des Voeux, had been told that Fraser-Smith was on the point of death in prison and therefore released him on humanitarian grounds, he witnessed the selfsame
man defiantly sauntering past his box at the racecourse looking fit and healthy and
smoking a large cigar. Fraser-Smith on another occasion, armed with a deck chair, a pile of books and a whisky and soda, sat himself in the middle of the cricket club pitch in protest at the way the cricket ground, which had been intended as a general place of recreation, had become the preserve of an exclusive club.17
Managers and Tradesmen
By the end of the nineteenth century new categories of employment were finding
their social level in the territory. Examples from among the up-and-coming managerial class are William Whiley [23/2/4] and T.C. Crane, whose wife, Mabel Crane [23/3/2], is buried in Section 23. Whiley, an American, was the
resident manager of the Sperry Flour Mill, while Crane was a manager working for the Eastern Extension Telegraph Company. Of the eleven who can be counted as tradesmen, the top social positions were undoubtedly held by the Christian Friedrich auctioneers and owners of well-known stores. This would have included the two Crawfords, Lindsay [23/3/5] and Ninian [23/13/7] of Lane Crawford and Christian Friedrich Rapp [23/4/3], Paul Brewitt [23/6/1] and John Martin Armstrong [23/3/9] from among the auctioneers.
The best known family of auctioneers was undoubtedly the Lammerts. They first registered as auctioneers in 1861 and continued to run auctions through to 2000. George Reinhold Lammert [23/3/7] came to Hong Kong in the early 1850s from Lithuania, working as assistant to Charles Glatz in his watch-making shop. He settled in Hong Kong and started as an auctioneer in Stanley Street in 1858. Before the opening of the Suez Canal it was very difficult and slow to obtain European items for the household. This meant that there was a very good market for second-hand goods. By 1861 there were fourteen registered firms of auctioneers, but Lammerts continued to be the leading firm right up to the 1990s. Rheinhold married Jane Aitken at St. John’s Cathedral in 1863 and had ten children. His wife and several of his children are buried in the Cemetery. He was succeeded in 1890 by his son, George Philip Lammert [12A/2/11], who carried on the business until his death in 1939, by which time he was known as
the grand old man of Hong Kong. The direct family involvement in the business line died out when Lionel Eugene Lammert [23/3/7] left Hong Kong to fight in the Second World War, but the business continued under Ken Watson who had
married into the Lammert family.
Andrew Millar [23/9/1] was the government plumber. His name first reached the jury list in 1864 when he was listed as foreman plumber at Mr. Logan’s. He opened his own establishment in 1868 advertising as ship, house and steamboat plumber, coppersmith and brass founder, with an address in Wan Chai. He later added gas fitting to his list of skills. Millar was among those who moved to Kowloon. In 1877, he charged his gardener there with stealing his vegetables. James Edwin Howroyd [23/13/2] from Yorkshire, the clerk of the works for the government who would have supervised Millar’s work, is also buried in the Old Residents Section within a few metres of Millar’s monument. Millar died in 1890 aged forty-seven. The other tradesmen include William Boffey [23/2/1], tailor and cutter at Lane Crawford, and William Ross [23/3/8], the manager of the Falconer family’s clock and jewellery store. Ross was a volunteer member of the Fire Brigade and lost a leg in a fire accident. William Porter Moore [23/7/7] from Philadelphia, U.S.A. described himself as a ‘tonsorial artist’ and advertised his special Gogo Shampoo made from soap roots found in the Philippine Islands where the inhabitants ‘are never found bald and it is quite common to see females with hair five to six feet long’. He opened the first expatriate hair dressing salon by 1867 and then moved into the Hong Kong Hotel. He came to Hong Kong via Shanghai and had been in China nearly thirty-five years when he died in 1896.
The Lower Social Levels
Nine men buried in Section 23 come from among what could be termed the least socially prestigious expatriates. Among their ranks are found officers of the public works department and tavern keepers. It was well understood that
Europeans, who needed a job and could not be fitted in elsewhere because of lack of education or drinking problems would be sent to the Public Works Department. H.L. Mather [23/13/8], lighthouse keeper and John Livesey, the husband of Harriet Livesey [23/8/7], are examples of the lower level civil servants. Livesey was the driver of
the government fire engine and later put in charge
of the gunpowder department. Harriet, his wife, died of smallpox on Stonecutters’ Island aged thirty-five. John Wylie [23/10/1] rose to the rank of inspector of nuisances and would have been
regarded with rather more respect. Wylie then
became ward master at the lunatic asylum. In July
1890, he shot himself at his home in Wyndham
Street. It transpired that he had beaten his wife and locked her in her room and was worried by
his debts of $1,300. His two boys were taken in by the Christian brothers and his
two girls by the nuns at the Italian Convent.
Although the tavern keepers were still near the bottom of the social pile, men like Louis Kirchmann, C.F. Petersen and George Snelling were making good money catering to the demands for alcohol. But the demon drink took its toll. For
example, in 1881, William Payne, an ex-sailor who ran a coffee lounge gave way to
intemperance ‘indulging in spirits to an inordinate degree’. On Saturday night he
fell or slid halfway down a flight of wooden stairs in his house. A sedan chair was
called to take him to hospital, ‘but when the coolies saw the state of their intended
fare, they hurried off and left him lying on the footpath’. He expired shortly after finally reaching hospital. There is no record of his headstone in the Cemetery, so it
is likely that he was buried in a pauper’s grave.18
Chapter 23
Industry at the Turn of the Century
The Metamorphosis of the Merchants
The story of Ernest Deacon [23/4/9] may serve as an introduction to the changes that were taking place in the kind of business transacted by the merchants of the China Coast. It also shows how a family with money earned in the Far East could then climb from relatively humble origins to the heights of squiredom and respectability. Deacon’s grandfather had been a coachman and owner of a line
of horse-drawn carriages that ran between Wiltshire and Newcastle stopping at inns en route to drop passengers off, change horses or rest for the night. His
son, James, set up as a not very successful shipping agent in London and fathered
fifteen children. One son, Ed mund, looked to China and in 1847 began his career
there as a tea inspector for Heard & Co. He was soon trading on his own account
as well as acting for the firm. In 1856 after nine years in China, he was able to retire
aged just twenty-seven with a fortune that enabled him to buy a large manor house in the countryside and live in comfort for the rest of his life. Richard followed his brother into Heard & Co. and he too made a fortune. Albert, the seventh child in the family and third brother to go east, had left school at fourteen. He also acquired his experience in the tea trade at Heard & Co. In 1856, he set up independently as a tea trader in Canton. Like his brothers, Albert retired, aged twenty-seven with his fortune made, to a country estate where he bred shorthorn cattle.
Finally, Sidney and seventeen-year-old Ernest Deacon were sent east to continue to boost the family fortunes. The brothers needed to diversify due to the changing tastes in tea that saw Chinese tea being neglected in favour of Indian tea. They fell back on acquiring agencies for British companies who wished to be represented in China. Among the agencies appearing on the Deacons’ brass plate
over the office door on Shameen Island, Canton, were China Traders Insurance,
the China Fire Insurance, London & Provincial Maritime Insurance, Union Insurance Society and Lloyds. In shipping they represented the P. & O., Ben Line, Castle Line, Canadian Pacific, Boston Steamship and Bank Line among
others. The firm’s newfound prosperity had little to do with tea. Sidney became wealthy and popular in Canton society. His five-hundred-piece dinner set, with the
Deacon coat of arms engraved on every piece, attested to his elevated social and
financial position. Yet life became too much for him and he took a gun and shot
himself in his bedroom aged only thirty. This left Ernest Deacon junior to carry on the family name. He remained a senior partner for fourteen more years with a total
of service in the company of twenty-nine years. He finally caught dysentery from
drinking contaminated water at the age of forty-six and was sent to Hong Kong
to be nursed where he succumbed on 1 July 1890. His death ended the Deacon family’s association with a firm that was until recently still trading in the territory.
The Hong Kong & Whampoa Dock Company
In the boardroom of the Hong Kong & Whampoa Dock Company, matters at
the turn of the century did not proceed with proper trust and respect between the directors and the shareholders, who had good reasons to suspect that the
directors were lining their own pockets at the shareholders’ expense. By 1901, the
shareholders had had enough of the company’s profits being siphoned off to be
used for the benefit of the old boy network of expatriate directors.
Their arcane methods of accounting successfully hid the leakage of money that the shareholders rightly thought should be used to increase their meagre dividends. Their shortcomings were highlighted on the pages of the Hong Kong Telegraph by Robert Fraser-Smith. Out of 530 shares, 102 were owned by the increasingly wealthy Chinese, and more belonged to members of the minority groups which included the Portuguese, the Jews, the Eurasians, the Parsees and the Indians. It was time for a takeover and who was better qualified to take it over than Sir Catchick Paul Chater [11B/10/1]. His name was put forward as chairman by his great friend and admirer, the Eurasian Sir Robert Ho Tung [11B/13/2]. But at first he refused
to take on the company, perhaps because of the overwhelmingly expatriate make-up of its board. However with the encouragement of Robert Shewan and J.P. Braga, his unofficial secretary, many of whose descendants lie in Section 11B, Chater accepted and remained a director
of the Dock Company for the next twenty-five years up to the time of his death in 1926.
Electricity Comes to Hong Kong
The Hong Kong Electric Company
During these years, two separate companies brought electricity to Hong Kong. The Hong Kong Electric Company started generating in December
1890 on Hong Kong Island and has done so continuously ever since. The two
prime movers behind this company were Bendyshe Layton and Henry Liston Dalrymple [37/3/13]. The spread of electricity across the island was excruciatingly slow. But Dalrymple had that confident, gentle and reassuring way that could cajole shareholders into the patient wait for dividends that was necessary for the
young industry. Each year he took the shareholders into his confidence, explained
the problems, extolled the excellence of the management and somehow kept them on his side. Sir Catchick Paul Chater was also a director of the Electric Company
throughout the first thirty-seven years of its existence. Chater identified a site for the first generator in Wan Chai in the place where the colony’s first cemeteries
had stood, by then a bleak and forlorn wasteland. He had learned from an inside source that the government proposed to move the remaining monuments to Happy Valley and liberate the land for building purposes. He was quick to
seize the opportunity. In 1897 the purchase was made and, almost immediately
afterwards, Chater sailed for London to accompany the dispatch that put forward his big reclamation scheme to the secretary of state.
China Light and Power Company
Thus by the early years of the twentieth century, talented and skilled entrepreneurs who had adopted Hong Kong as their place of abode were taking up positions at the head of a number of industries. One of these was the Scot, Robert Shewan [12A/3/14], who was the son of the captain of the Lammermuir, one of Jardine, Matheson & Co.’s tea clippers. Shewan was likely to have been born in Shanghai.
He joined Russell & Co. in 1881 aged twenty-one. By 1895, he had organized
a buy out of Russell & Co. and renamed the company Shewan, Tomes & Co. It was one of the biggest companies in Hong Kong, typically beginning life as
23.4. The cement works, Kowloon Bay, 1890–1900. (By courtesy of Dennis G. Crow.)
an exporter of tea and silk and changing over the years to become involved in Green Island Cement, China Light and Power and shipping insurance. This
company registered the China Light and Power Syndicate in 1900 with a capital of $200,000. Shewan shared with Sir Catchick Paul Chater the vision of making
Kowloon into a residential and industrial hub and he was determined that it should have its own source of electricity. He was already chairman of the Green Island Cement Corporation and a director of the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank.
The problems of running a successful company based on newly invented technology in a distant place were huge and not helped by the inexperience of the directors. By 1911, of the sixty-eight thousand inhabitants of Kowloon, a mere five hundred had signed up to have electricity installed in their homes. In 1932 Shewan retired briefly to his native Scotland, but he felt homesick for Hong Kong and soon returned. In February 1934, fifty-three years to the day after Shewan had first disembarked from the Yangtze, he was found dead in the garden of No. 2, Conduit Road. Aged seventy-five, he had fallen out of the window. That block of flats is still said to be haunted.
A handful of businessmen who had made Hong Kong their home pushed ahead with developing the infrastructure of the island and made possible the later expansion of industry here. The most important was undoubtedly Sir Catchick Paul Chater but he was helped in his enterprises by such talented men as Robert Shewan and Henry Dalrymple Liston, Sir Robert Ho Tung and later the Kadoorie brothers, Elly and Ellis.
Dairy Farm Company
Dr. Patrick Manson, one of the leading general practitioners in the colony, was very aware of the dangerously unsanitary conditions under which the milk supply had been produced in Hong Kong. He may also have been spurred on by the death of his four-and-a-half-year-old son, Alexander Livingston Manson [26/8/6]
in May 1887. In his first memorandum on the proposed company, he stated:
From the hygienic point of view the milk supply of a community is second in importance only to its water supply…. Unfortunately, in consequence of the epidemic among the cows which the very inadequate, unreliable and exceedingly expensive milk supply has hitherto had to submit to, it seems likely to give out altogether and there is every prospect of a milk famine. This is a serious matter … especially for young children and the sick, for whom
milk is the principal and often the only food and indeed the staff of life.1
Manson managed to interest a distinguished coterie in his prospectus including Sir Catchick Paul Chater, Phineas Ryrie, Granville Sharp and two other well-known
businessmen, W.H. Ray and J.B. Coughtrie. The first octagonal cow sheds built
for Dairy Farm and now used by the students of the Academy for Performing Arts were erected near Pokfulam village and a herd of eighty cows brought.
By the end of December 1887, the Dairy Farm Company was already presenting its first annual report. Sadly, the directors had nothing good to report.
Many of the first batch of cows had died. Experience was needed to overcome problems connected with herding, feeding and milking the cows and the bottling and sale of milk which would take time to iron out. Yet another Aberdeen man
from a well-known farming family was found. James Walker arrived in 1890 to
become farm manager and stayed to serve the company for thirty years. Dairy Farm also attracted the able and long-term service of Malcolm Manuk who became the company secretary. He was an Armenian, educated in Calcutta,
who came to Hong Kong aged eighteen, spent a short time in the post office as a clerk, then in a bank and finally joined Dairy Farm in 1906, where he stayed until his death from meningitis in 1932. Manuk had many interests. He travelled
widely and was the leader of the Hong Kong Theosophical Society. He was a keen Volunteer and a first-class rifle shot. He also rode to hounds at Fanling and became a member of the Jockey Club. Manuk managed to scale the ladder of expatriate society and not long before his death was elected a member of the
Hong Kong Club. While Manuk himself was cremated, his immediate family have
contributed some of the best kept and most striking headstones to the Cemetery, among them his sister, Sophie Manuk [7/8/15], and his sister-in-law, Mary Manuk [7/8/18].
The Railway Comes to Hong Kong
Few who have travelled on the Kowloon to Canton Railway can have imagined the huge problems posed by the twenty-two miles of track across the New
Territories to Lo Wu which necessitated the building of fifty bridges, five stations and five tunnels. The actual construction began in August 1907. Problems were
soon encountered, particularly in finding workers willing to blast and dig out the tunnels. Feng shui beliefs meant that the Chinese were unwilling to work underground, so miners were brought out from England. However, it was recorded that this first batch proved to be so unsatisfactory that within a few months they had to be sent home. A new crew of Italian tunnel workers was recruited from a Yunnan project. Again problems arose. The men were working in waterlogged conditions and malaria was wiping out the crews. On a doctor’s advice, all the Italians working on the Beacon Hill tunnel were housed high up on the hillsides and a ropeway was built to slide them gently down to work each day. The tunnels had mostly to be carved out of the granite rock and it is said that 250,000 pounds of explosives were used. The Beacon Hill tunnel was lined with ten million bricks which were made alongside the track by coolies from India.
Coal had to be imported so that the bricks could be baked over fires in the Indian
fashion. The line of the railway was the subject of endless disputes since the local villagers viewed it as a feng shui nightmare, challenging the natural order of
things as it pushed its way in a straight line relentlessly through the rice fields of the valleys. As chief engineer Frank Grove said in a paper delivered in 1913: ‘The
local committees, aided by a ragged mob of truculent peasants, obstructed and interfered from the beginning of operations almost to the end’.
The track was opened by Sir Francis Henry May on 1 October, 1910 with the Lo Wu to Canton section opening about a year later. But this was a time when China was in a state of upheaval and civil disorder was rife. Bandits and marauders claiming the title of revolutionaries were unable to resist the lure of the rich travellers passing in trains near their remote settlements. The train was held up several times in the first few months on its 111-mile run to Canton. But it was not until 1916 that the railway was hit really hard. On the Chinese side of the border between Nam Kong and Sun Tong where the track made a wide turn, two whole sections had been ripped up:
The train was instantly derailed and two third-class front carriages with a full load of passengers overturned. About one hundred robbers were lying in ambush…. They calmly went through the whole panic-stricken mob of
passengers, taking money and valuables amounting to $10,000.2
An American Pentecostal missionary, Elmer Hammond [16B/7/5], and two Chinese in the front carriage were crushed to death when the carriage slammed into the engine.
The chief engineer Frank Grove was succeeded by William Murray Stratton [18/4/11] from Edinburgh. During the 1925–26 anti-foreign boycott
in Canton, he personally drove an engine crowded with European women and children to Hong Kong with some women swinging from the footplates.3
Chapter 24
The History of the Freemasons in Hong Kong
1845–1860
The Freemason symbol of set square and dividers is found throughout the Cemetery from the earliest graves right through to the present century. About eighty headstones in the Cemetery are adorned with the Freemason symbol and furthermore a large number of the men buried in the Cemetery were masons but did not choose to proclaim the fact on their headstones. It therefore seems
appropriate to outline the history and influence of the movement in Hong Kong. The first recorded activity of the Freemasons was in April 1845, only three years
after the island was formally ceded to Britain. By June of the same year, the Friend of China reported:
The Masonic Brethren in Hong Kong have obtained a charter and formed in the colony a new lodge named the Royal Sussex…. It promises to be a strong and highly successful lodge. It has already enrolled the names of many
influential members of the community.1
The first master was J.H. Cook, paymaster of the hospital ship HMS Minden, suggesting that early masonry arrived through the auspices of the armed forces. In fact, thirteen of the founding members were from the armed forces, seven from among the merchants, two from the government and two were surgeons. 2 Freemasonry was seen as a charitable organization and the Friend of China dropped a strong hint that ‘the benevolent intentions of masonry’ should be directed towards the cause of the merchant Seamen’s Hospital. Among the earliest masons buried in the Hong Kong Cemetery are three of the founding fathers, Nicolay Duus [20/7/1], a merchant whose mother lodge was at the Cape of Good Hope, Peter Harrison Spry [9/17/15], paymaster to the HM sloop Wolverine, who acted as inner guard in the first meeting but died early on, and James F. Norman [9/2/6] from the Royal Artillery who was a commissariat
assistant storekeeper. Other early members included, in order of joining, William
Franklyn, the general storekeeper, John Pope [9/16/14], clerk of works for the government and Alexander Lena, the Italian assistant harbour master.3 T.A. Gibbs, merchant of Gibbs & Co., made a room available in the Gibbs godown.
In December 1845, Samuel Rawson was elected master and installed ‘in ancient form, the ceremonial being conducted in a very impressive manner’. Thirty-
two members and guests then sat down to the first recorded Masonic banquet.
Rawson, a leading merchant of the company, Fox, Rawson & Co., had purchased
Marine Lot 42–43 at the very first land auction and built a godown and house, and
was very active in early Hong Kong society.4 By 1846 the number of masons had grown so fast that they were able to open a second lodge, Zetland Lodge, so called in honour of the then grand master of English Constitution, the Earl of Zetland.5
The difference in wealth between the members of the two lodges can be seen in their respective donations in 1847 to the Fund for the Relief of the Destitute in Ireland and Scotland. The Royal Sussex contributed 570 pounds sterling whereas
Zetland Lodge only managed 220 pounds.6 In the years 1846 to 1851, Hong Kong faced a period of decline and Royal
Sussex Lodge, which had opened so auspiciously, was now finding it difficult to
hold meetings. So many of its merchant class members had removed to Canton that the lodge decided it would transfer its sittings to that place. This news was regarded as ‘pregnant proof of the general desertion of Hong Kong and the removal of many of its principal inhabitants to Canton’. 7 Meanwhile in Canton,
the first Armenians to join a lodge, Peter Seth and M. Agabeg and perhaps the
first Jew in the Far East, David Sassoon, joined respectively in 1854, 1855 and 1858. Zetland Lodge, which remained in Hong Kong, being the second and less
influential lodge, had to some degree lost its position in society. The merchants
kept their ties to Royal Sussex Lodge and attended meetings in Canton, while Zetland Lodge in Hong Kong was left to be run by second rank civil servants and
professionals and suffered a sharp decline. A.L. Inglis, assistant harbour master and the designated next master, left to try his luck in the goldfields of California in
1851 and the possibility of closing down was even discussed at a lodge meeting, but the decision postponed for a year. Meanwhile Rawson stepped into the breach as master and travelled to Hong Kong from Canton to take each meeting, no mean feat when the time then taken to make the round trip and the dangers from piracy are taken into account.
Freemasonry in Hong Kong was portrayed from the early days as a patriotic organization closely allied to the establishment and the Protestant Church. The Friend of China, in an article in October 1853, described how such well-known
figures as the Duke of Wellington and George Washington had been masons. 8
The national anthem was sung and the Queen toasted at all banquets. The lodge was attractive to lonely men far from home as a place where they could fraternize, eat and drink together. It provided camaraderie, a ready-made social circle and support and financial help in an emergency. Part of its appeal may have been because it gave its members a form of insurance in a far-away place where disaster
or disease could strike without warning with devastating effects. John Wright, the post office clerk, was initiated into the lodge in February 1850. He described how, in September of that year, the lodge made a collection to pay the fare so that T.W. Marsh, Wright’s colleague in the post office, could travel back to England
by the P. & O. liner. Marsh was secretary of the lodge but had fallen seriously ill. Sadly, he died soon after reaching England aged only twenty-six. In December
1850, Wright attended the annual Masonic banquet and described the good
fellowship enjoyed, perhaps rather over-enthusiastically:
At six-thirty p.m. forty members sat down to an excellent dinner — the room
nicely decorated with flags and evergreens — an hour or so saw us all talkative
and a little excited with the wine decanter in great requisition — fruit on the table — the Queen’s health drunk with all honour and sundry other national toasts for England and America — Ladies’ health proposed and drunk, when
I broke a glass for the dearies, which caused Mr. Bevan (Senior Warden
and civil servant) to sing out, ‘The gent who has broken a glass for the ladies must return thanks on his bare knees’. Of course I did it most willingly for the petticoats and mounted the dining room table amidst the decanters and glasses and shouts and cheers and laughter whilst I mounted on high with a canape in my hand saying something for the —. Everything went swimmingly till a number of the party left and then commenced a little skylarking. I foolishly vaulted over a small table twice very well but the third time my lame leg slipped and I broke the thigh.
In the following year, William Mercer became master and Wright was made
junior deacon. Mercer had been private secretary to Sir John Davis and later became colonial secretary in Governor John Bowring’s administration. After he was installed, Zetland Lodge seemed to have regained its momentum. In
1853, Wright assisted at the initiation of Captain Henry de Castilla, Dr. William Harland and William Tarrant, the editor and proprietor of the Friend of China. Then in January 1853, he helped when Prince William of Hesse and Dr. William
T. Bridges, the acting colonial secretary took their first degrees. E.J. Eitel was able to say in his book Europe in China: ‘The growing popularity of the Masonic fraternity, (which gave its first ball on Feb. 1st 1853) served to contribute some powerful elements of social reintegration’ and on the following page, ‘Masonic pursuits were popularized by the elaborate solemnity of laying the foundation stone of the Masonic Hall under the direction of the Provincial Grand Master ... of British masons in China’. 9 The procession left from the old lodge rooms in Queen’s Road for the new site on Zetland Road led by Robert Goodings, the keeper of Victoria Gaol and the tyler of the lodge, with drawn sword, followed by the band
of the 59th Regiment. Then came the banner of the Royal Sussex Lodge, followed
by fellow crafts and master masons walking two by two and the secretary, holding
the Book of Constitution on a cushion. The officers, bearing the columns, plumb
rule, and level, and the treasurer, holding the Volume of Sacred Law, flanked by the stewards, came next, followed by the band of the U.S. Navy SS Susquehanna and the banner of Zetland Lodge. A cornucopia of corn and ewer of wine was then borne by the past masters and they were followed by the senior warden with the plans of the new lodge building and the inscribed plate. The senior deacon brought
up the rear with the trowel and mallet. When they reached the site, the plate with
its inscription together with coins of British currency and a copy of the Hong Kong Register containing a programme of the day’s events were soldered into a hollow in the foundation stone just before HMS Cleopatra signalled midday: ‘As the bells proclaimed high noon, the upper stone descended to its place and was properly adjusted, — the band playing God save the Queen’. The provincial grand master,
Samuel Rawson, was presented with an exquisite silver epergne worth $80, by
which gift he was so overwhelmed as to be rendered speechless, ‘overpowered and obliged to sit down’. 10 The morning’s events were followed by a ball. John Wright commented in his diary: ‘All the masons looked remarkably well in their aprons and
different badges of office. It is said to have been the best ball given in Hong Kong’.
The new building nicknamed the Bungalow was designed by the surveyor general, Charles St. George Cleverly, the senior warden.
By the mid-nineteenth century, the masons of Zetland Lodge came from a variety of less-than-grand backgrounds. The following all proclaimed their Masonic allegiance on their headstones: John Lemon [9/2/7] was a bookbinder, Milton A. Harsant [9/3/10] an employee at Bowra & Co., one of the biggest ship’s chandlers of the day, John Warden Morriss [10/8/5] worked for the German ships’ chandlery run by Frederick Schwarzkopf, who also joined the craft the following year, and William Collins [9/3/11] from Guernsey was master of the sailing barque, Primula. The lodge must have been one of the few places where men could drink and dine on equal footing in a spirit of brotherhood. This spirit of good fellowship struck visitors to the banquets. When about fifty sat down to a sumptuous feast on 30 December 1851 with the American merchant, Sandwith Drinker, in the master’s chair, the guest speaker (himself not a mason) congratulated the lodge on ‘the unanimity of feeling so apparent throughout the assemblage’.
1861–1880
The 1860s saw the consolidation of the Masonic presence in Hong Kong, which by now was reported to be ‘very numerously supported’.11 By the end of the decade two new lodges, Victoria and Perseverance, had been added. The bungalow was no longer spacious enough and a new porticoed and pillared two-storey building took its place in 1865. Masons continued to come from a wide cross-section of the community: Isaac McLean [11A/9/5] was a sergeant in the Royal Artillery, Henry Winniberg [40/2/3] the Polish proprietor of the British Hotel, the only respectable hotel in the colony, and Edward Anthony [20/5/2] a storekeeper. Alexander Ross [43/1/4] was a shipwright, Thomas James Record [40/3/3], from Woolwich, London, a moulder in the Navy Yard, and J.W. Cunningham [42/3/13] of Maine, U.S.A., a ship’s pilot. Two masons captained ships, Captain Pladsrud [32/2/10] from Norway and Captain Thomas Austin [38/2/3] of the Hong Kong, Canton & Macao Steamboat Company. One member of the craft was provided with a headstone by the masons: Frederick Plummer [38/2/4] of the Navy Yard must have been a zealous and dedicated member of the craft. His death prompted ‘Lodges of Sorrow’ in both Zetland and Perseverance Lodges. His epitaph, Sit lux et lux fuit (There is a light and the light is no more), seems to sum up the appreciation and esteem of his fellow masons.
Freemasonry began to flourish in Hong Kong in the 1870s. The part played by the less influential members during the earlier decades was important in that
the craft membership was widely based, and the members from the lower ranks of
the society had already proved their worth when, in the mid-1870s and early 1880s, the explosion in influence and numbers occurred. The ties between Freemasonry and the Protestant churches were made clear when, from 1875, the masons were
permitted to hold an annual service in the cathedral on the feast of St. John. In that year the Masonic Sermon was preached by the colonial chaplain, Rev. Richard Kidd [8/18/2], who doubled as district grand chaplain of the Hong Kong Lodges.
When he died of dysentery in August 1879, he was described in his obituary as
an ‘energetic and enthusiastic mason, ever ready to advise an erring brother and assist him with his purse as far as he was able’. After Rev. Kidd’s death his place was taken by Rev. D.B. Morris, who combined the post of district grand chaplain with minister of the Union Church and Presbyterian churches and chaplain to
H.M. Forces in Hong Kong. Rev. C.G. Booth [8/9/2], who died in 1882, was both chaplain to the garrison and chaplain to several lodges:
On the death of Rev. Gilbert Booth … Mr. C.P. Chater, Deputy Grand Master, immediately summoned the lodges of the Colony to pay the usual tokens of respect at the grave of the departed brother and the summons was duly attended to by those who received it in time.12
In March 1876, a purely Masonic burial service took place in the Hong
Kong Cemetery. Fifty brethren wearing their aprons and carrying acacia sprays, the Freemason symbol of immortality, followed the coffin of Mr. Estarico to the graveside. The brethren were led to the graveside by the banner of Zetland Lodge draped in black. The Freemasons seem to have been the first recorded organization, not a recognized Christian denomination, to be given the freedom to conduct their own rites at the graveside in this period.
The ball given by the combined lodges in 1874 demonstrated the increasing influence of the masons. It was described in the China Mail as ‘probably the most successful gathering of the sort which Hong Kong has yet witnessed’. 13 Its description merited three columns of newsprint, whereas the ball to mark the end of the racing season was only given a quarter of one column. Those present numbered 608, over half the expatriate population, of whom only 108 were women. The China Mail noted with pride that ‘Masons at the other ports would be interested in learning how thoroughly the social credit of the craft had been maintained by their brethren in Hong Kong’. The decorating of the ball and supper rooms under the superintendence of Daniel Caldwell was brilliant with a blue and silver theme, and trophies, banners and engravings borrowed from the lodges. The whole affair was under the direction of the district grand master, Theophilus Gee Linstead [8/12/1]. The governor, Sir Arthur Kennedy, and his daughter were received by twenty-four knights of St. John who, with drawn rapiers, formed an arch of steel beneath which they passed. The governor then proceeded up the stairway lined with masons wearing the regalia of their orders, crimson and blue for the royal arch masons and blue and silver for the master masons. The pomp and ritual of such occasions must have enhanced the appeal of the craft in the otherwise rather arid life of the expatriates.
By the 1880s, two chapters, the Royal Arch Chapter and the Rose Croix Chapter had been formed to stand above the lodges. The number of lodges had grown to six including the Lodge of St. John and the United Service Lodge. The seventh, Eothen Mark Lodge, was founded in that year with Sir Catchick Paul Chater as its first master. The establishment of the Lodge of St. John proved controversial. When the petitioners for a new English Lodge were turned down by the district grand master of the English Constitution, they turned to the Scottish Constitution becoming, in spite of a marked absence of Scotsmen among their ranks, the first Scottish lodge in Hong Kong. The man who had fought for the new lodge and for his place as its master was Joseph Moses Emanuel, a Jewish clerk in the shipbuilding enterprise of an ex-ship’s carpenter, William B. Spratt. In 1881 the new Lodge of St. John elected two German tavern keepers to posts in the lodge. Louis Kirchmann [23/10/3] became director of ceremonies and Andreas Wohlters [20/10/9], who ran the Lord Nelson Tavern, was made a steward. The secretary of the lodge was John Livesey, the assistant
engine driver of the fire engine. Unlike Kirchmann and Wohlters, the senior
deacon, junior deacon and tyler were not even accorded the civility of initials
before their names in the announcement of the elected officers, but were listed as
Hayden, Vanstone and Partington.
1880–1918
The influence of the Freemasons in Hong Kong at the end of the nineteenth century can be judged by the openness of a fraternity that in modern times has earned for itself a reputation for secrecy. Since everyone who mattered was a member, it seemed right and natural that Masonic business was freely reported on by the newspapers. Meetings were advertised, elections results were given together with the lists of officers chosen by the various lodges. For example, in 1881, the Rose Croix Chapter of St. Mary Magdalene included Henry Smith [8/8/2], chief accountant at the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank, as first general and Walter Deane, the superintendent of the police, as second general. Lawrence Mallory [7/10/5] and the architect, William Danby [7/10/7] of Danby, Leigh and
Orange, who died in 1908 from injuries received when falling down the granite
steps of the Hong Kong Club, were grand marshals. Mallory was an American
timber merchant from Philadelphia with a timber yard in Wan Chai, who left $3,000 in his will to his Japanese housekeeper. Dr. William Young [23/13/4] was captain of the guard and Dr. Phineas Ayres, treasurer. The solid respectability of this chapter contrasts with the distinctly marginal tone of the Lodge of St. John. It
is not surprising the new upstart lodge ruffled some feathers.
This openness was made easier since the editors of the main newspapers were committed masons. Robert Fraser-Smith [23/8/4] of the Hong Kong Telegraph and N.B. Dennys [18/8/10] of the China Mail both helped popularize Freemasonry by giving it column space. Fraser-Smith’s description of the
Masonic Ball of 1883 was even longer than the description in 1874 and included
the decorations, the supper menu, the programme of dances and the names of the sixty-two stewards. Among these were found the names of the Chater brothers, Major-General Sargent, Hormusjee Mody, who is buried in the Parsee Cemetery, and the leading merchant from Turner & Co., Phineas Ryrie [23/8/6].
As Hong Kong became more cosmopolitan, masonry followed suite. As an example of the varied nationalities and backgrounds of the members, the 1882 list of officers in the Eothen Mark Lodge can be looked at.14 The Armenian Joseph Chater [11B/9/4], brother to Catchick Paul, became master and the post of senior warden was given to the American, Lawrence Mallory. The junior warden post went to a Welshman from Abergele, Edward Hughes [7/10/9], a broker and auctioneer who had been in Hong Kong for thirty years when he died from typhoid fever in 1911. Paul Jordan [7/10/4], the nephew of the Chater brothers, was secretary. The junior overseer post went to a Berliner, Erich Carl Georg [7/10/8], who had been a member of Siemssen’s until 1887, when he formed a partnership with Edward Hughes. By the time of his death in 1911 he had become president of Club Germania and secretary to the Stockbrokers Association. A Jew, A.N. Judah, was the organist. Catchick Paul Chater [11B/10/1] achieved the rank of district grand master for Hong Kong and Southern China in February 1881 aged only thirty-five and was to remain in that post until 1909. According to the China Mail:
His Masonic career speaks trumpet tongued in his favour. It is seldom the fortune of any man to attain such widespread and genuine popularity — his high honours were bestowed by the unanimous desire of every lodge of Freemasonry in the Colony.15
In a place where gatherings were fraught with rivalries, Sir Catchick Paul Chater guided the craft through the inevitable squabbles and kept the ideal of brotherly love to the fore of the movement. It could be suggested that his own upward path in the colonial society may have been eased by his standing in the movement and the contacts it gave him at all levels of the society
Even as the movement expanded and drew into its ranks more influential men, it continued to recruit men whose social standing was less exalted and to elect them as officers. It seems that masonry did not succumb to the social pressures of the time by becoming an exclusive organization but continued, perhaps in part due to the machinations of men like Joseph Emmanuel and the Lodge St. John, to draw on experienced men from the lower echelons. To these men, membership of a lodge was a mark of respectability and proof that they were moving up in society and this group was more likely to display the Masonic emblems on their headstones.
During the third quarter of the nineteenth century, three men were buried by their lodges and the size of their monuments shows the importance of their contribution to the movement. The first member is Daniel Caldwell
who died in 1876 and about whom much
has already been written. The second is Henry Smith [8/8/2] of Victoria Lodge. From 1866 to the time of his death in June 1882, he worked for the young Hongkong & Shanghai Bank where he was promoted from assistant to chief accountant. According to his obituary he was ‘the soul of good nature and kindness and popular with all classes’. The third monument belongs to ‘the late worshipful brother’, J.W. Croker [20/6/2], buried
in 1896 by the members of St. John’s Lodge ‘as a token of affectionate regard and
approbation of his long and faithful service to the Lodge’. Croker was an engineer
who began his career in Hong Kong in 1872 as foreman engineer of Novelty
Ironworks. After working as engineer on Captain Sands’ Patent Slip, he joined
Hong Kong and Whampoa Dockyard. From 1886 onwards, he was back at the Novelty Iron Works as manager to George Fenwick.
The only group in Hong Kong who adamantly refused to allow its members to belong to the organization was the Roman Catholic Church. As early as January 1856, Grandpre, who was assistant superintendent of the police and a mason, was refused permission to marry Ann d’Almeida of Singapore. Her father also happened to be a mason. The China Mail reported: ‘Mr. Grandpre was not inclined to renounce either his masonry or his marriage’. He therefore married according to the rites of the Protestant Church. A similar situation provoked a strong outburst against the Roman Catholics. In February 1884 the Hong Kong, Canton & Macao Steamboat Company steamer, Yotsai, commanded by Captain John Hoyland [23/12/5], was on trial after renovations and a small number of well-known persons had been invited aboard for the trip. At two p.m., while
the passengers were enjoying liqueurs on deck after their tiffin, the boilers blew
up with such force that they cut the steamer in two. The scholarly antiquarian, Polycarpo Andreas da Costa [8/3/3], who was the secretary of the Hong Kong, Canton & Macao Steamboat Company, died in the accident and was refused burial in the Catholic Cemetery on the grounds that he was a practising mason. The matter was raised in the Legislative Council and strong disapproval was registered, coupled with queries as to whether the government should continue to support Roman Catholic schools. Da Costa’s funeral service was conducted in the Hong Kong Cemetery according to Masonic ritual. Almost all those mentioned as on board at the time of the explosion, including the captain, John Hoyland and three expatriate officers, George Frizell, George Pinker and William Scott [8/3/2], who died in the accident and share a monument, were Freemasons. The self-exclusion of most Portuguese Catholics from Freemasonry in Hong Kong possibly led to them being thrown back onto the resources of their own community. It is interesting to speculate to what extent the Portuguese community was held back from promotion to higher positions in business and the civil service because they followed the dictates of their religious leaders. They certainly missed out on an important source of networking and support.
The first Chinese to be initiated into a lodge in Hong Kong may have been
Chan Tai Kwong. He died in 1882. He had met the bishop of Hong Kong in
England in 1849 and came to Hong Kong under the patronage of the bishop
who appointed him assistant tutor at St. Paul’s College.16 The next Chinese
masons were Sir Kai Ho Kai and Wei
Yuk who were initiated in October 1888
and February 1889 respectively. Their
standing in Hong Kong’s society could not be questioned since they had both served on the Legislative Council. Ho
Kai’s brother, Ho Wyson, joined three months later. Both Ho Kai and Wei Yuk
took an active part in the formation of the University Lodge. Chinese would-be initiates were, however, frowned on and
in 1899, in reply to a query in Ars Quatuor Coronatum, Brother O’Driscoll Gourdin [7/9/3] made clear the general feeling when he said:
24.4. Monument to Polycarpo Andreas da Costa, d. 24.2.1884.
Grand Lodge is (as you are of course aware) strongly opposed to the admission of Chinese into Freemasonry, and though we have the misfortune to have one or two of such nationality attached to one of our lodges, their number is not likely to increase.
It would be many years before the climate of opinion changed enough to allow the Chinese to enter the craft in a spirit of equality. By the late nineteenth century, the symbol of Freemasonry was common on headstones in the Cemetery. The turn of the century probably saw the movement
in Hong Kong at its apogee. During these years, two governors, Sir William Robinson (1891–98) and Sir Henry Blake (1898–1903), were masons and staunch supporters. Sir Henry had been a past master of Sussex Lodge No. 359 in
Jamaica and district grand master of that island. The celebration of half a century
of masonry in Hong Kong in July 1895 was a great occasion and a grand ball
was given with an attendance of between eight and nine hundred. Interestingly the masons at this time temporarily stopped sending their contributions to the Masonic funds in Britain. A great deal of anger had been roused when the Masonic Girls’ School in England refused a place to the daughter of Alexander Falconer [23/13/3], second master of the Central School and a past mason of
twenty years’ standing, who had died suddenly in June 1893 of heart disease. It
was decided then that the support of the Hong Kong and South China Masonic Benevolence Fund should henceforth be given to children educated in Hong
Kong at the Diocesan Boys’ and Girls’ Schools. A significant step away from the mother country had been taken and a vote of confidence given to Hong Kong as a
place to settle and raise children. The fact that the Freemasons could sustain their craft so successfully over
this period of more than fifty years, when many societies languished and faltered,
is not easily explained. Perhaps the concept of ‘brotherhood’, promoted as one of the key doctrines of the society, allowed men to trust one another across some of the boundaries of nation, class and language. Perhaps too, the lack of wives and female company contributed, since lonely men far from home were more in need of fraternity and support. The trust that grew up among the brethren might have oiled the wheels of commerce in China where every treaty port had its lodges. It is easy to visualize partnerships being formed and money secured to be invested in new ventures during and after the dinners at Zetland Hall.
Chapter 25 The Chinese Buried in the Hong Kong Cemetery
The Chinese represent a small but especially important minority group in this Cemetery. It is tantalizing and sad that so few could be identified but, among
those who were are some significant names. Between the dates of 1891, when
the first Chinese as far as can be ascertained was buried in the Cemetery, and
1970, when this study ends, approximately 197 Chinese found their permanent resting place in the grounds. These include 71 men, 96 women and 30 children.
Besides these are a small group of eight mysterious marker stones, some of which are painted white and used to mark boundaries. They have Chinese characters inscribed on them, indicating that they were used originally as headstones. The characters are old and difficult to read, but it would be interesting to know to whom these old stones engraved with Chinese characters belonged and whether other Chinese Christians whose stones have disappeared were buried in this manner.
Chinese Women Married to Europeans
The first Chinese, by a few years, to have been found in the Cemetery is Wong
Humby (黃帶喜 ) [29/1/22]. She departed this life in January 1891 aged forty-two years. Wong was married to John Humby, who joined the police in 1865 and was later picked for the superior naval yard police force. In 1872, Humby bought
the British Tavern, changed its name to the Empire Tavern and successfully
applied for a spirit licence. He continued as proprietor of the tavern until 1891.
He was obviously considered respectable because his name appeared in the jury
list for most years between 1871 and 1881. After the death of their mother, his two
daughters, Margaret and Mary Ann, were placed in 1881 and 1884 respectively
in the Diocesan Orphanage. Wong Humby was buried in the Cemetery before
Major Henry Knollys visited and wrote: ‘No natives are allowed inside so, leaving
our rickshas at the gate, we pass into the peaceful solitary groves’. 1
It is possible that a number of Chinese wives in this category go unrecognized, especially if they are recorded with Christian names and their husband’s surname and no Chinese characters have been added. This is the case for example with May Rapp [12/9/4], but in this case there is proof that she was Chinese. In the nineteenth century, Chinese wives of the European settlers were not usually buried with their husbands or even mentioned on the inscriptions. Hee Mong Banker (彭母冼氏 ) [1/3/6] and Mary Ayou Caldwell (高三桂 ) [23/4/1]
were among the exceptions in that they were given their own monuments. Hee
Mong Banker came from a very different layer of society from Wong Humby. She was the respectable widow of William Swallow Banker, a merchant from Newchwang, and when she died in 1906 aged sixty, she was commemorated by
her son with an imposing angel standing on a plinth. Mary Ayou Caldwell, who
died in 1895, also achieved status and respectability in the course of her long and
tumultuous life which has been already described in an earlier chapter. One other enigmatic headstone deserves a mention. A-Kuk Takyan [34/1/8], who died in
1895, may have been a ‘protected woman’. Her headstone has been erected ‘by her friend, H.R. in affectionate remembrance’. She died in August 1895 and her
epitaph is: ‘Sheltered and safe from sorrow’.
Chinese Women Married to Chinese
The lives of the individual Chinese ladies buried in the Cemetery remain almost entirely shrouded in mystery. These wives of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Chinese Christians would have led quiet, house-bound lives, disabled by their small feet from walking far abroad, and by custom from appearing in public. That these wives were often treasured and respected
25.1. Headstone in memory of Wong Humby, d. 1891, the first known Chinese to be buried in the Cemetery.
in the family circle is shown by the size and ornamentation of some of their monuments. Those in the Cemetery seem to fall into three groups depending on how traditional the families into which they had married were.
The first and most conservative group of six have no personal names engraved on their inscriptions. They are only recorded by their own family name and the name of the family into which they were married, for example Lam married to Wong family (黃母林太君 ) [2/4/16], or in one case merely Wife of Chun (陳門周氏 ) [31/4/20]. Their monuments vary from the totally Chinese in imagery and style to the conventionally Christian.
The second group of twelve consists of wives whose names are given but about whom, as with the first group, nothing else is known. The earliest is Chau Yau Kam (韋門周氏 ) [34/1/26] born in Canton who died in 1894, aged thirty-seven. The daughter of another, Chow Chung Shee (周門鍾氏 ) [1/2/5], who died in 1906, was responsible for erecting her headstone. This is surprising when such tasks usually fell to the lot of the male members of the family. One of the grandest monuments in the Cemetery belongs to Lau YiWan (劉綺雲 ) [6/3/27] who married into the Wang family and died in 1908.
The last group of six names contains those
more Westernized women who had Christian
names. Among these are Mary Hung [5/1/33] who died in 1897, Margaret Jane Heang
25.2. Photograph of an unknown Chinese lady whose identity on the inscription is given as Zhang, consort and mother, Xu Clan, d. 1924.
25.3. Monument in memory of Lau Yi Wan married to Wang family, d. 1908.
[5/3/44] who died in 1899 and Bessie Ting [16/1/7] who died in 1908. Perhaps
they were the wives of returnees from the United States or Australia.
Chinese Men
One particular monument can be taken as an introduction to this section. Its tall spire and gothic features stand out in the far distant corner of Section 1 and it clearly demonstrates the dilemma of Chinese Christians when they approached death. It must have been a terrible wrench for such men to realize that they would not be remembered down through the generations in their clan hall, with their name inscribed in the clan book and the customary rites performed in their honour on the appointed days. Being a Chinese Christian must have engendered some of the same feelings as being exiled, even when conversion was willingly embraced. The inscription on the tomb of U Pun Cho (余磐初 ) [1/2/17] is the longest in the entire cemetery and reflects a little of this feeling. Those who erected this monument wanted to record some of his family history for posterity which they
rightly feared would otherwise be lost. U Pun Cho died in 1905 aged thirty-seven
and, judging by the size of the monument, must have been a successful merchant. According to the inscription, he had wanted to be a scientist but, when his father’s younger brother died in Hong Kong, U Pun Cho had to take his place in order to support the family back in the clan village in Xinning County, Guangdong. His family, which was originally from a more northern district of China, could trace its history back to the Song dynasty.
Among the Chinese buried in the Cemetery, two groups seem to emerge. The first group includes nine men and three women who demonstrate their allegiance to the Ching dynasty by the addition of the characters, Wong Ching, or by the use of imperial (probably bought) titles on their inscriptions. This is in contrast to the second group who show no particular allegiance to the Chinese empire.
By far the most influential man to include
Wong Ching in his inscription was Fung Ku Shau (馮古修 ) [1/3/18], comprador of the National Bank of China, who died
in 1906. He was the son of Fung Ping
Shan, alias Fung Po Ha alias Fung Chew,
25.4. The imposing monument in memory of U Pun Cho, merchant from Xinning County, d. 1905.
one of the founders of the Tung Wah Hospital. In the 1870s he was comprador
to A.H. Hogg, whose baby daughter Eleanor Hogg [20/15/3] is also buried in the Cemetery; but he later became comprador to the Chartered Mercantile Bank. Fung had been educated at St. Paul’s College and was a close friend and a
classmate of Ng Choy (Wu Ting-fang), the first Chinese barrister. Fung helped
to start the Po Leung Kuk in order to assist those women and children who had been kidnapped and brought to Hong Kong for immoral purposes. He came from Tung Kwun and was one of the signatories of a petition to the government to try to prevent the kidnapping of females from that district. Two members of the group, Yeung Woi Chun (楊匯川 ) [1/4/11] and Bessie Yeung (楊啤士 ) [26/5/5] , both came from the same village as Sun Yat Sen, Cui Heng village in Xiang Shan District, and they would have known each other’s families. The other supporters of the Ching dynasty include Leung Kin Shan (梁健臣 ) [16/6/3] who was one of the bidders for the opium farm in 1909. 2 The ladies include Chow Chung Shee (周門鍾氏 ) [1/2/5] and Wong Sau Ngai (王秀奶 ) [5/1/38], who came from Macau and whose gravestone is entirely Chinese in design and imagery, and lastly a certain Chen married to Wan (溫門陳太恭人 ) [16/1/6] who was also the possessor of an imperial title. Her husband may have held a post in the civil service as her headstone is of a standard government type.
Civil Servants
Among the civil servants are the two Ng’s, probably brothers who both worked many years in the magistracy, Ng Kwai Shang (吳府 ) [4/20/10] and Ng Ping Shang吳屏生 [5/3/43] . There was also Wong Wing Ho (黃永浩 ) [16/4/14]
(Huang Yong Hao), who died in August 1909. Ng Kwai Shang entered government service aged only fifteen in 1873 and remained there for twenty-eight years, rising to the rank of second clerk in the magistracy in 1889 and living in Wellington Street. After retiring from government service, Ng became secretary to the chief manager of Wing Kee, a leading Chinese company. He must have also been involved with the German firm, Carlovitz & Co., because in 1895, when the
company celebrated its fiftieth-year anniversary, he was selected as spokesman
for the Chinese. Ng died suddenly in November 1900 having attended the office
the day before. According to his obituary, Ng was educated at Barcelby College,
India and, on his arrival in the colony in 1875, he could neither read nor write Chinese and had to be provided with a Chinese teacher by the authorities. Wong Wing Ho was appointed clerk and shroff in the registrar general’s office in 1892.3 He was said to be the son of Wong Shing, the well-known deacon of the Chinese
congregation of the London Missionary Society, who managed the London
Mission press and was a pioneer of Chinese journalism, and also the first Chinese in 1858 to be included in the jury list. Wong Shing had graduated from the first
class of the Morrison Education Society School. Another Chinese who cast his lot with the colonial government was Tsoi
Yeuk Shan who came from the Heung Shan province of Guangdong. By 1897 he was second Chinese clerk and interpreter in the registrar general’s office. He was made a British subject in 1900. His five-year-old son, Tsoi Pui Kwong [41/1/3], died in 1901. The inscription makes it clear that the family was Christian: ‘From
thy parent’s arm / Borne to Jesus breast / Now above all harm / dear child sweetly rest’. After the New Territories had been handed over to the British and the
local people ‘pacified’, Tsoi Yeuk Shan accompanied Colonial Secretary Stewart
Lockhart through the territory as his interpreter. He was also the specialist within the government on triad societies. He later went into business. There seems little doubt that conversion to Christianity helped provide that bond of trust between the races, which otherwise was lacking, and helped to speed promotion.
Professionals and Businessmen
It is interesting to note the arrival in Hong Kong of a university graduate, Rev. Walter N. Fong (鄺華汰 ) [1/2/3], from the United States, with his American
wife, Emma E. Howse. Fong, who came from Guangdong, was the first Chinese to graduate from Stanford University, California in 1896. Earlier, Fong had
become a Methodist preacher after studying for the ministry at the University of the Pacific. According to the New York Herald, it was during these years
that Walter Fong helped to organize the Hung Chung Hui Society. With its
headquarters in New York the society worked towards the overthrow of the Ching dynasty.4 He resigned his post as instructor in the University of California
to become principal of the Li Sing Scientific and Industrial College and thus to
strengthen the education of young China and further reform in that country. This
college was founded with a grant of $50,000 in memory of Li Sing, the founder of the well-known Li family. In the address at the first speech day and prize giving,
it was said that the only way to raise China from her low industrial condition was to educate her sons in modern science and industry, training them to use their hands as well as their brains. According to the Hong Kong Telegraph, the college had experienced teething problems and, of the more than seventy students who enrolled, only thirty-five remained to take the final exam. 5
Fong died in May 1906 aged forty. The
second teacher buried in the Cemetery
in 1908 is Lau Hon Chun (劉漢全 )
[1/6/2], superintendent of the South China Academy, a private school at
No. 7, Bonham Road where science
was also taught. The unfortunate Lau was killed in a laboratory experiment that went wrong.
One early Chinese doctor came to Hong Kong from China. Dr. Chung King U(鍾景裕 ) [2/7/5] was trained in the medical school in Tientsin, which opened in 1881 under the patronage of the reforming viceroy, Li Hung Chang. Dr. Chung was appointed in 1890 as staff surgeon of the newly opened Alice Memorial Hospital. By 1898, he was teaching a course on minor surgery and bandaging at the Chinese College of Medicine. In 1902, he became resident surgeon in Western medicine at the Tung Wah Hospital. He must have resigned due to ill health, as his resignation was received by the government the day after his death in 1902. Dr. Chung’s sister, Chung Foong Ching (鍾鳳清) [34/2/22], may have accompanied him to Hong Kong. Hers is one of the earliest Chinese headstones, dating from 1894.
A small Latin cross commemorates a baby, Tso Kai [26/2/8], who died in 1908 aged six months. He was the son of Tso Seen Wan, a Chinese solicitor ‘highly respected among all sections of the community’.6 Tso Kai’s mother, Alice Suffiad, was the daughter of Mahmood Ben Suffiad, who had worked in the colonial secretary’s office for twenty years. Tso Seen Wan’s uncle, Tso Aon, had entered the service of the superintendent of trade as early as 1834 and, when the British moved to Hong Kong, he had become responsible for all the Chinese staff working there, as well as serving as comprador to the treasury. Tso Aon’s father, Chow
25.5. Monument in memory of Dr. Chung King U, d. 24.11.1902.
Yik Chong, was an important and influential merchant in Macau who had been
knighted by the Portuguese government and made a member of the Portuguese
Legislative Assembly. Tso Seen Wan was sent to Shanghai and Cheltenham
College in England for his education, and then set up the law firm, Tso and
Hodgson. He was on the board of the Tung Wah Hospital and was present at
the coronation of Edward VIII as one of the representatives of the Chinese, and
from 1929 to 1937 was a member of the Legislative Assembly. Tso was also one of
the mostly English-educated signatories of the petition to found a school for upper class Chinese children based on public school principles. The petition was agreed to by the government and led to the founding of St. Stephens Boys’ College in
1903 and St. Stephens Girls’ College in 1905. He is further mentioned as one of the
Chinese who gave generously to the endowment fund set up to meet the costs of founding Hong Kong University.
An impressive monument, whose cheerful imitation flowers are changed with great regularity by some of his descendants, stands in remembrance of a man who must have been among the first Chinese dentists in Hong Kong.
Chu Sien Ting (徐善亭 ) [4/19/3] died in July 1912 aged fifty-eight. One of the largest monuments in the Cemetery commemorates the death of Yeung Shi (楊氏) in 1901 and Woo Pak Pang (胡百朋 ) [16A/7/1] in 1908. They were the wife and young son of Woo Hay Tong. Mr. Woo was a successful businessman who
founded the Tung On Steamship Company. He also acquired two steam ships which were run in direct competition with the Hong Kong, Canton & Macao Steamboat Company.
Members of the Early Christian-Educated Group and Associates of Dr. Sun Yat Sen
Two men buried in the Cemetery and a third, whose son is buried there, were among the very early converts of the London Missionary Society, and part of the influential Chinese Christian community. They were Wei On (韋安 ) [6/3/25], Wan Tsing Kai (溫清溪 ) [4/19/2] (1832–1915) (Wen Qing-xi) and Kwan Yuen Cheung (關元昌) [2/10/9] (1832–1912). Wei On was the son of Wei Akwong, who
originally came from a village near Macau where his father had been comprador to two American merchants. After his father’s death, the family fortunes nose-
dived. Wei Akwong, as the youngest of ten sons, was turned out of the house to find his own living and had to resort to begging on the streets of Macau until he
got a job as a servant in a Portuguese household. He left this job because of the bad treatment he was subjected to and luckily then found a patron, Rev. E.C. Bridgman, who rescued him and sent him to Singapore as the first scholar of the Morrison Education Board. Akwong became comprador of the Chartered Mercantile Bank of India, London and China. He held this position for more than
twenty years and was a leading member of the Tung Wah Hospital Committee and was on the jury list from 1864 to 1875. He died in May 1878 leaving fifteen boys and ten girls, the offspring of two wives and five concubines. Wei Akwong’s eldest son and Wei On’s brother was the well-known Wei Yuk, or later Sir Boshan Wei, who was one of the first three Chinese to be sent overseas to Scotland for
his education. He succeeded his father as comprador and was a member of the
Legislative Council from 1896 to 1917. He was knighted in 1919. Wei On was
educated at Cheltenham College and then at Christ Church College, Oxford. He was a fine athlete and won first prize in the inter-public schools gymnastic competition. He became a solicitor of the Supreme Court of Judicature in
England and the Supreme Court in Hong Kong. Wei On died in May, 1907 aged forty years. A small headstone close to the monument commemorating Wei On is said to have belonged to Wei On’s mother, one of the two wives of Wei Akwong.
Among this important group of Christian Chinese are the friends and co-revolutionaries who supported Dr. Sun Yat Sen and worked with him for the overthrow of the Ching dynasty. Sun Yat Sen arrived in Hong Kong in about 1883 where he met, and for a time lived with, Rev. Charles Hagar, the American Baptist Missionary, who baptized him in late 1883 or early 1884. When attending Sunday services at the Union
Church conducted by Rev.
and as a member of the circle of Chinese Christians, Sun Yat Sen would have made friends among this group which would have included
Wan Bing Chung whom
he had previously met in the
United States. Wan’s father,
25.6. Monument in memory of Wan Tsing Kai, d. 1915.
Wan Tsing Kai (溫清溪 ) [4/19/2], was one of the earliest Chinese Christians in Hong Kong. He came to Hong Kong in 1854 from the Toi Shan district of Guangdong
and was by trade a carpenter. He was among the first ten converts of the London Missionary Society and a devoted follower of Rev. James Legge. Wan was
baptized in April 1864 and was ordained a deacon of the London Missionary
Society in 1872. He went on to acquire property in the form of shops in Hong Kong’s Chinatown. Wan was very interested in evangelistic work in Hong Kong
and was one of those instrumental in founding the To Tsai Church and the China Congregational Church. The latter was said to have been built on property owned
by Wan, and was also said to be the church in which Sun Yat Sen was baptized and where he lived for a time on the first floor. Wan was naturalized as a British subject in 1900.7 His rise in wealth and status is a good example of how conversion to Christianity could materially increase the upward mobility of a Chinese in
Hong Kong. His son, Wan Bing Chung, had been sent to the United States in 1873 at the age of twelve to study under the auspices of the Chinese Educational Mission. On his return, he taught for a time at the Central School. Wan Bing
Chung’s first wife was Nieh Ping Kwan (關月屏 ) [5/3/37] (Kwan Yuet Ping) whose brother, Kwan King Leung, entered the Hong Kong College of Medicine at the same time as Sun Yat Sen. They lived together in the same dormitory
and became close friends. Nieh Ping Kwan died in 1898 aged thirty-three and is
described on her headstone as an exemplary Christian who had been for eleven
years president of the Chinxiang Women’s Temperance Union and translator of
the Christian Temperance literature. Wan Wai Hing (溫維慶 ) [1/5/1], the son
of Wan Bing Chung and Nieh Ping Kwan, died in 1907 aged eighteen and is also buried in the Cemetery. It was probably through Wan Bing Chung that Sun Yat Sen met his secretary, Soong Ching Ling whom he married in 1914. Wan had
befriended her father, Charlie Soong in America. A closer connection was formed
when Wan and Soong married two sisters from the Christian Ni family from Yuyao. In 1926, a younger Soong daughter, Soong Mei Ling, married Chiang
Kai-shek. So it seems as if the events taking place in and around church attendance
and time spent in the United States had an important influence on Sun Yat Sen
and his outlook. From among this like-minded group of Christians, Sun Yat Sen found some of his closest friends and allies. Kwan Yuen Cheung (關月昌 ) [2/10/9], the father of Nieh Ping Kwan,
Wan Bing Chung’s first wife, was an elder in the To Tsai Church. He came
from a Christian family based in Panyu in Guangdong. His first job in Hong Kong was working in the printing press of the
Ying Wah College set up by the London
Missionary Society. There he won the trust and regard of one of Legge’s European
colleagues who taught him the Western
techniques of dentistry. Kwan started to
practise in Guangzhou in 1870 but returned
to Hong Kong where he became the first registered Chinese dentist. He is celebrated as the founding father of Chinese dentistry. Kwan Yuen Cheung met his wife, Li Shi (李氏 ) [2/10/9], at the house of Mary Ayou, the wife of Daniel Caldwell. Li Shi, who came from Nanhai, had lost her entire family during the disturbances caused by the
uprising of the Red Turbans and had fled to
Hong Kong where she was taken in by the Caldwell family. Besides giving birth
to fifteen children, many of whom became doctors, Li Shi worked as interpreter, or perhaps head nurse, at the Alice Memorial Hospital and taught in Ying Wah College. Kwan Yuen Cheung and Wan Tsing Kai count among the six men who
have been named the elders of Hong Kong. Sun Yat Sen often spent his free time at the home of the Kwans and considered them as godparents. The Kwan’s daughter-in-law, Emma Lee Kwan (Li Kam Ngo) (李月娥) [2/2/22], the wife of Sun’s classmate, Kwan King Leung, was from Hawaii and was introduced to him by Sun Yat Sen. Kwan King Leung became a well-known doctor and established the Chinese Medical Association in Hong Kong.
Hung Chuen Fook (洪春魁) (1836–1904) and Yeung Ku Wan (楊衢雲) (1861–1901)
Even more closely connected with the revolution are two men who now lie at rest in the Hong Kong Cemetery. The first of them, Hung Chuen Fook (洪春魁) [2/4/28] (Hong Chun Kui), was a nephew of Hung Hsiu Chuan (Hong
25.7. Monument in memory of Kwan Yuen Cheung, d. 1912, and his wife, Lai A Mui, d. 1902, early Christians and close associates of Sun Yat Sen.
Xiu Quan), the king of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. Hung had joined the Taiping Rebellion when young and was given the title of King Ying for his achievements in the field of battle. On the capture of Nanking by the Imperial forces, he fled to Hong Kong and joined the crew of a European-owned ship as cook. He returned later to Hong Kong where he worked as a Chinese herbalist. Hung was introduced to Tse Tsan Tai by Tse’s father and
in 1899 he offered his services to the cause of the
republican movement. Tse Tsan Tai wrote in his Secret History of the Revolution that he ‘had considerable military bravery and experience in
the army of his uncle…. We decided to place the
task of organizing and recruiting the fighting force in the hands of Hung-chuen-fook’. 8 In this way Hung was chosen to be chief military organizer of the League of Patriots and was given the task of testing their arms and ammunition. He did this on the slopes of Castle Peak where Li Ji-tang owned the farm now known as the Red House and open to the public. Li was the son of the wealthy businessman, Li
Sing, and the death of his father had enabled him to contribute $500,000 to the
revolutionary cause. Hung led the forces of the Republic under Sun Yat Sen in its second attempt to capture Canton. After this attempt to seize Canton in January
1903 was betrayed and aborted, a number of revolutionaries were arrested. Hung
shaved his head and escaped to Singapore in disguise. He later returned to Hong Kong to reorganize the men and make another attempt but, soon after his
return, he fell ill and died in January 1904 aged sixty-eight. Hung must have had a charmed life, escaping first in 1864 from the massacres of the Tai Ping rebels and then again in 1903 from the disastrous attempt to oust the Imperial government in
Canton and establish a revolutionary foothold in China. It seems incredible that one Hakka man buried in the Cemetery could have played a major role in two such momentous movements in the history of China.
The second man took an even more prominent part in the revolutionary movement and as a result of his role was murdered. Yeung Ku Wan (楊衢雲 ) [4/16/3] (Yang Qu-yun) was born in Hong Kong in 1861. His father, a Fukienese
25.8. Headstone in memory of Hung Chuen Fook, a Taiping prince, d. 1904.
by birth, came to Hong Kong from Penang.
Yeung Ku Wan became a trainee mechanic at
the Royal Navy shipyard and learned English by night. After an accident led to the amputation
of one of his fingers, he became a student at St.
Paul’s College and went on to become a teacher in St. Joseph’s College. After further experience as a clerk, he became assistant manager to
David Sassoon & Co. In 1890, with fifteen other
men including Tse Tsan Tai, Yeung founded the Furen Literary Society or Society to Study Science and Renovate Society. The society acted as a political forum for the promotion of
anti-Qing ideas. In 1892 Yeung met and teamed up with Sun Yat Sen and in 1895 together they
formed the Revive China Society or Xing Zhong Hui with Yeung as chairman. By March 1895 the
society was planning action and had raised three thousand men to capture Guangdong and set up a revolutionary base there. The discovery of the plot led to its cancellation and the loss of forty-eight lives. Yeung was forced to
flee to South Africa.
In 1899 Yeung Ku Wan met Sun Yat Sen in Japan and gave up his position as chairman of the society to Sun. In 1900 the two planned to stage a further uprising in Huizhou. The uprising failed due to inadequate support at a crucial stage and the revolutionaries were forced to disperse. It was thought in China that Yeung, who was teaching English in Hong Kong at that time, was still president of the revolutionary society and had been responsible for the uprising, so a death warrant was issued against him. At 6 p.m. on 10 January 1901, a gang burst through his front door in Gage Street. Yang was shot in the head and chest and by the next day he was dead. The gang escaped under cover of the darkness. Had Yeung Ku Wan not been assassinated, the course of the revolution in China might have taken a very different turn. His friends and relations, including Tse Tsan Tai, erected the monument in the Hong Kong Cemetery, but significantly no name or inscription can be found on the plinth. It is thought that while secretly sympathizing with the revolutionaries, the Hong Kong government did not want to antagonize the Chinese Imperial government.
Sir Kai Ho Kai
Towering over the other Chinese present in the Cemetery in terms of service to
Hong Kong and influence on Hong Kong affairs is Sir Kai Ho Kai (何啟 ), K.T.,
C.M.G. [8/4/4]. He qualified first in medicine at Aberdeen, Scotland and at St. Thomas’ Hospital in London, and then in law at Lincoln’s Inn. Ho Kai was born in
March 1859, the son of Rev. Ho Fuk Tong, who had come to Hong Kong with Rev.
James Legge from the Anglo-Chinese College in
Malacca. Ho Fuk Tong became the first Chinese
pastor to be ordained in Hong Kong and gave valuable service to the London Missionary Society. He was not only a man of God who could read the gospels in the original Greek and Hebrew, but also a remarkably good businessman. Ho Kai
was admitted to the Central School in 1870 at the
age of eleven and left at thirteen for schooling in England where he studied medicine at Aberdeen
University. While in London studying (for a
second degree) law, in December 1881 Ho Kai met and married Alice Walkden who lived in
25.10. Monument in memory Blackheath. In the next year, the couple returned of Sir Kai Ho Kai, d. 1914 and
to the East. Back in Hong Kong after ten years his first wife, Alice Walkden, d. 1884.
spent in England, Ho Kai found that his Western
style of medicine was unacceptable to the Chinese and turned to law for a living. Alice tragically died of typhoid fever soon after giving birth to a daughter after only three years of married life. Ho Kai subsequently married an American Chinese, Lai Yuk-hing, and fathered ten sons and seven daughters.
In 1890, Ho Kai became an unofficial
member of the Legislative Council and continued as one for fourteen years. He supported Sun Yat Sen and wrote extensively on the need for reform in China. His writings were never as influential 25.11. Photograph of Sir Kai Ho
Kai. (By courtesy of Ko Tim-
as they might have been, perhaps because of Ho
keung.)
Kai’s close links with the colonial powers. His ventures into the property market
with his partner, Au Tak, did not bring in the expected profits, but they did leave
behind a name for the future airport, Kai Tak. Ho Kai received his knighthood in
1912 for his services to the public, but retired soon after due to ill health and died in July 1914 at the age of fifty-five. Besides funding the building of the Alice Memorial
Hospital, his contributions to the founding of Hong Kong University were substantial. Ho Kai died, not only intestate, but also penniless, leaving nothing but the furniture in his house and some law books. The government was asked for
help and Sir Francis Henry May agreed to provide tuition fees for five sons.
Overseas Returnees
One final group of Chinese represented in the Cemetery are the overseas Chinese
who returned from abroad and, perhaps due to their exposure to European cultures, found Hong Kong a more congenial place to live and do business than China. One of the earliest of these was the Fukienese Choa family who had lived and traded in Malacca for more than five generations. An early member of the family had been given the title of Captain China by the Dutch and when, on the arrival of the British, almost all such titles were abolished, he was allowed to keep
his due to his great influence over the Chinese community. Choa Chee Bee and Choa Leep Chee (蔡立志) [16A/4/12], his nephew, had both benefited from the
English-language education they received in the Straits Settlement. Chee Bee’s wealth was derived from the sugar trade and real estate. He
came to Hong Kong in 1874 as comprador of the new Wahee, Smith & Co. Sugar Refinery on the site of the defunct Mint, staying on after the bankruptcy of some partners led to the sale of the refinery to Jardine, Matheson & Co. His will showed that when he died in 1900, he owned eighteen houses, two in Malacca,
four in Macau, and six each in Canton and Hong Kong. Choa Leep Chee joined his uncle in Hong Kong when he had completed his education in Singapore.
He obtained a post in the China Sugar Refinery Company and by diligence and
perseverance won promotion, until he too became comprador and chief of the
Chinese staff. After the death of his uncle, Leep Chee inherited his estate. He was
one of the few Chinese to live in the Mid-Levels at Burnside, in Robinson Road
where, in 1905, he won the prize for the best kept private garden in the colony. He
was a prominent member of the Chinese community and on many committees, including those of the Alice Memorial Hospital and the Nethersole Hospitals,
and he contributed very generously from his own funds to the relief of the
victims of the terrible typhoon of 1906.9
He was survived by ten children and his descendants include such well-known names as Dr. Gerald Choa, C.B.E., J.P., former director of the Medical and Health Department in the government and founding dean at the faculty of medicine of the Chinese University, and Dr. George Choa, president of the Hong Kong Medical Association.
A number of Chinese who made their homes in Hong Kong came from Australia where the white Australia policies made it impossible for the Chinese immigrants to lead a normal family life. They brought with them the capital and business know-how that helped to enrich the territory. Typical examples were the two brothers,
James Gocklock and Philip Gockchin, founders of the Wing On Department
Stores which has recently celebrated its centenary.10 The brothers arrived
in 1907 and opened their first small store on Queen’s Road. By far the most
imposing monument in Section 1 belongs to the Leong family and incorporates twelve family members. The father, Rev. Leong Ong Tong (梁安統 ) had been
associated in 1867 with the London Missionary Society School in Wan Chai. His name can be seen in the 1867 Blue Book as the main teacher of forty pupils. He is next heard of at Castlemaine, Australia, where in 1872 he was a probationer of the Wesleyan Church, being ordained in 1876. By 1893 he was back in Hong
Kong. Four of his children studied at the Diocesan Home and Orphanage, and his elder daughter, Millie, became assistant mistress at the Central School for Girls. The Leong family lived in Robinson Road, Mid-Levels and were among the earlier families who mixed socially with the Europeans and attended certain expatriate functions.
The Ahwee family, founded in Hong Kong by Albert Ahwee [16B/1/1] and his wife Marie, is another well-known local family which returned from overseas
25.12. Monument in memory of Choa Leep Chee, d. 1909.
to settle and make their fortunes in Hong Kong, intermarrying with the Kews and Ablongs from Australia. As a young man, Ahwee is said to have been one of a group of Chinese which left Hong Kong in May 1884 for Kingston, Jamaica. He served as translator for the group and operated a provision store there. He returned to Hong Kong and acquired land in Kowloon where he kept a herd of cows. From this small enterprise grew the Kowloon Dairy which is still a large
and profitable business. Ahwee himself was one of the victims of the great fire at the Happy Valley race track in February 1918. An intriguing monument belongs to Edith Marshall [16/1/5]. Edith, who died in 1908 aged twenty-eight, was the beloved wife of Ching Johnson and is described on her headstone as ‘a native of Trinidad’. This grave is tantalizing for all the things that it does not say; for instance whether Ching was a returnee from Trinidad, how he met his wife, and
how he had made enough money to afford the beautiful carved angel guarding his
wife’s grave. Members of many of the above returnee families married Europeans and it is not really possible to draw a hard and fast line between them and the Eurasians discussed in the next chapter.
Chapter 26
The Eurasians
During the first three decades of British rule, the Eurasian minority, almost all of whom were born to Chinese mothers and European fathers, fell through the cracks that separated the races. They were for the most part brought up by the mothers’ family and disappeared into the Chinese population. Almost nothing was done for such children, although the need for some kind of action was occasionally recognized. In 1850, Rev. Moncrieff, tutor of St. Paul’s College, called for the education of Eurasian children, while at the same time calling them ‘A much neglected, but promising class, the offspring of sin’. 1 In March 1855, the editor of China Mail wrote:
There is a rising generation of mestizos, to whose numbers officials have largely contributed and who, if not trained to usefulness, will swell the ranks of our dangerous classes; though by proper management and the appropriation of a portion of the ample revenues of the Colony … these half castes, as well as the less fortunate of the pure breeds, might not only grow up creditable members of the community, but with qualification for public service about which the Government professes to be very solicitous, we mean the facility in speaking Chinese as well as English.2
But with the exception of a passing mention of a Gage Street child with fair, curly hair, who went by the name of Charley and had been abandoned by his father, a Captain James, not one Eurasian name emerges in the earlier periods.3 Charley’s European colouring aroused a degree of guilt among the expatriate community.
By 1865, the number of Eurasians had grown considerably. In the Treaty Ports of China and Japan, the authors could now say: ‘A large number of those of mixed blood have however been born here and regard Hong Kong as their home in every sense of the word.’4 Generally they were still left without resources or education and
disappeared into the general Chinese population. In 1870, in a letter in the Daily Press, about the proposed registration of European births, it was asked:
How, Sir, does Mr. Ryrie propose to distinguish European Children? Is the term to include half-castes, of whom there are a fair number born here, I believe? Certainly if there is to be registration at all, this class ought to be included, because … it is very desirable that there should be a record of such children as they are peculiarly liable to be left destitute by persons leaving the Colony.5
As late as 1879, Sir John Smale, the chief justice, wrote:
No-one can walk through some of the bye streets of this Colony without seeing well-dressed Chinese girls in great number whose occupations are self-proclaimed, or pass those streets, or go into this Colony without counting beautiful children by the hundred whose Eurasian origin is self-declared. If the Government would enquire into the present condition of these classes, and still more into what has become of these women and their children of the past, I believe that it will be found in the great majority of cases the women have sunk in misery, and that, of the children, the girls that have survived have been sold to the profession of their mothers and that, if boys, they have been lost sight of.6
The usefulness of the Eurasian community could only be tapped if young Eurasians were given the opportunity to complete the kind of education that would equip them with the skills necessary to join the workforce. The founding of the Central School and the Diocesan Schools and Orphanage made possible the
rise of the Eurasians in the territory. When the Diocesan School came into being in 1869, one of the objects was stated as being: ‘to receive or place children or both
sexes, sound in body and mind, of European, Chinese and half-caste parentage’. 7 This concept of an institution where Chinese, mixed blood and European children could be educated together could be seen as revolutionary at that time. It
is not surprising that Sir Robert Ho Tung, who was among the first generation
of Eurasians to attend school, so revered Frederick Stewart [23/5/7], his teacher at the Central School, that he paid for the erection and upkeep of Stewart’s
headstone. In 1901 the registrar general reported that:
the number of Eurasians was ascertained to be 276. This is 5 less than in 1897. The large majority of Eurasians in this Colony dress in Chinese clothes,
have been brought up to live in Chinese fashion and would certainly return themselves as Chinese.
This may have been due to the low social standing of Eurasians who adopted the
European way of life during these years. By 1911 the census officer claimed that
those who actually returned themselves as Eurasians diminished every year. 8 By the late Victorian days, a more damaging concept of the dangers of racial mixing, perhaps sparked by Darwin’s theories, had taken a hold. It was believed that the mixing of blood across the racial divide would lead to human beings who were
physically and morally flawed and mixed marriages were strenuously discouraged. A writer publishing in 1909 shows clearly the general feelings of the English
towards those with mixed blood ancestry: ‘Occasionally a Eurasian stouter than either European or Chinese and whose blood kinship neither boasts of, with hair hanging loose, passes by to the unheeded shame of the foreigner’.9 European employees of the government who violated the colonial etiquette by interracial marriage jeopardized their careers and risked social ostracism.
It took a brave couple to fly in the face of such prejudice. Not only were they
at risk but their children’s future would also be put in jeopardy. This hardening of attitudes can be seen in the case of W.J.B. Fletcher [7/2/4]. He had joined the China consular service at the age of twenty-one and was considered a highly
promising second assistant when, in 1908, he was discovered spending his home
leave in Hong Kong with his Chinese wife, May Tsoi Yan Siu [7/2/4]. The
resulting memo to the foreign office stated that the marriage was an unfortunate
example of the way in which lonely and remote posts tended to produce a degree of degeneration and that, by his marriage, Fletcher had lost caste in the eyes of the British in China to such a degree that his usefulness would be seriously impaired. A confidential circular was sent out strongly reprobating marriages to Chinese women as detrimental to the public interests and reiterating that permission must be sought. Not long afterwards Fletcher was pensioned off and became professor of English at Sun Yat Sen University in Canton. Yet only fifty years earlier, the Chinese wife of the consul, J.A.T. Meadows, had gained acceptance and his marriage to her had not impeded his progress in the consular service.10 Furthermore, May, Fletcher’s wife, who is buried with him in the Cemetery, was from a respectable family and well educated unlike Meadow’s wife.
Another example of the way cross-cultural marriages were now viewed involves Thomas Edwards, the man who married Alice Catherine, the fourth daughter of Jens Anton Ahlmann and Ng Ah Mui. Edwards’ father, Francis
Ebenezer Woodruff, while working for the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs,
had fallen in love with and married Teng Kwei Yin, the daughter of a mandarin.
Their son, Thomas Edwards, was placed in the Diocesan Home by his father.
Woodruff’s parents back in America objected so strongly to the marriage that they had refused to allow their grandson to be called by the family name of Woodruff,
so instead he was given the surname Edwards.11
One example from the Cemetery can be quoted, illustrating perhaps the problems of a Chinese woman left behind by her European partner to bring up her mixed-blood baby alone. Willie [41/3/6] died in 1898 aged one year and eleven months. His mother’s name was given as Ah Choi (亞才 ) and his father’s name, which is given phonetically in Chinese characters, reads as ‘Geor Si Lok Hat’(佐士落乞 ). It almost certainly refers to George Lockhart, a native of Glasgow, who arrived from San Francisco in 1852 and worked as chief engineer on the P. & O. ship, SS Formosa. The Chinese inscription would seem to indicate that Willie’s father had already left the colony when he was buried. Ah Choi must have been a practising Christian or the baby could not have been buried in the Hong Kong Cemetery. One must sympathize with the predicament of other Chinese mothers who were left to deal with all the worries of bringing up their ‘half-castes’ in an unforgiving society. These women were usually absorbed back into their own family circles where the children grew up speaking Chinese and imbibing Chinese cultural values. The offspring generally used their Chinese names, lived by Chinese customs and, if successful, would join the Chinese Club, the Chinese Chamber of Commerce and take part in the running of the Tung Wah Hospital. One small Eurasian, Hung Pik Ann (洪壁顏 ) [26/1/13], who died in 1889 aged five years, was the daughter of Hung Kam Ning, also known as Henry Graham Anderson. He was one of the four prominent Eurasians who, in 1929, set up the Welfare League, the first foundation to come to the aid of needy Eurasians. The inscription on Hung Pik Ann’s headstone is interesting in that it begins with the characters, ‘Wong Ching’, showing her father’s Chinese leanings and his feelings of loyalty to the Ching dynasty.
But by the early twentieth century, Eurasians were also viewed less favourably by the Chinese community. Racial nationalism was one of the Three Principles of the People as stated by Sun Yat Sen, who, when he made his appeal to the emerging national consciousness, realized that there was a strong current of prejudice against foreigners.12 This had been sparked by the territorial aggressions and racial humiliations to which the China had been subjected by the Europeans and Japanese. With the high levels of prejudice against Eurasians, it was difficult for the off-spring of mixed marriages to find partners willing to marry them, except among their own community, or by, in their turn, becoming ‘protected women’. For example the two eldest daughters of Jens Anton Ahlmann, Ah Mui Atkinson [245/6/2] and Ah Peng Atkinson [24/6/3], whose lonely graves lie in a section otherwise given over to soldiers, were the protected women respectively of a Hughes and a Perkins and Ah Peng is said to have later become the protected woman of a Sassoon.13
Those Eurasians who used Chinese names and lived according to Chinese cultural norms considered themselves to be socially more distinguished than the Eurasians who used their English names. The Gittins family can be used as an example of one of the most respected families of those who used their English name. Henry Gittins (alias Hung Tsin) [12A/3/13] entered the Diocesan Boys’
School & Orphanage as a boarder in 1877. At the age of fourteen in 1885, he
became a student teacher in the school and was taught to play the organ by Mrs. Piercy, matron and wife of the headmaster. At sixteen he left school and went
to work in A.S. Watson. In 1899 he joined the Hong Kong Cotton Spinning Weaving and Dyeing Company becoming paymaster and later accountant. He joined Jardine, Matheson & Co. and worked there until his retirement in 1935.
Gittins was a keen church-goer and served on the Council of St. Paul’s and St. Andrew’s churches and supported the Chinese YMCA. He was a Freemason
for some fifty years and was district grand organist from 1916–30. He and his wife Dorothy had eleven children, four dying under the age of five. Dorothy, another of Jens Ahlmann’s daughters, had married Henry at the age of fifteen. In spite of
the Gittins family attaining a position of obvious respectability, it was said that Sir Robert Ho Tung was reluctant to give his consent when his daughter Jean asked his permission to marry Billy Gittins, one of Henry’s sons.
The story of Sir Robert Ho Tung (何東 ) [11B/13/2] and his brothers is relevant here and interesting.14 Their mother, surnamed Sze, was rumoured to have been from a wealthy family. Her brothers are said to have gambled away the family fortune and then sold their sister ‘down the river’. The Ho Tungs’ father was the Belgian commission agent and merchant, Charles Henry Bosman, by whom Sze had six children. Bosman is said to have returned to Europe in 1868
leaving his Chinese family destitute in one room fighting over whatever scraps of
food were to be had and in winter over the few blankets. Rescue was provided by a rich merchant of the Nam Pak Hong who incorporated Sze into his household
as an official concubine and bought a house for her children. Robert Ho Tung,
born in 1862, being the oldest male in the family and therefore head of the family, must have had the main responsibility for caring for his siblings and making decisions on their behalf from the age of eight or nine. He spent some years in a vernacular school where his intelligence must have made him stand out as, at the age of twelve, he was one of the youngest to gain entry to the Central School
in 1873. Ho Tung went to Canton to
sit an examination for entrance to the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs. He was the youngest and only successful candidate and began work at a salary of
$30 per month.
In 1880 he joined Jardine Matheson, later becoming an assistant comprador and then comprador. He then resigned his place in Jardines in favour of his brother, in order to concentrate his energies on building his own commercial empire. He became a substantial landowner in Hong Kong and Macau. Ho Tung was the founder and first president of the Chinese Club and then in 1921 was appointed honorary adviser to the president of the Chinese Republic. In 1932 he was made an officer of the French Legion of Honour. At one time he was director or chairman of eighteen leading companies and the largest shareholder in the colony. He was knighted by George V in 1915, at which time he adopted the English name, Robert, and changed his surname to Hotung. He was the first man with Chinese blood to be allowed to live on the Peak and his influence in the colony was immense. Hotung married two Eurasian cousins as equal wives, first Lady Margaret (麥秀英 ) [11B/13/1] and later, when it was realized that no children were forthcoming, Lady Clara. Sir Robert’s entry in Twentieth Century Impressions of Hong Kong begins with these words:
No nationality has done more towards furthering the colony’s prosperity than the Chinese, the original owners of the island, and no man among the Chinese has borne his part in local, commercial and social life with more conspicuous ability, or with greater credit to himself and his nationality than Mr. Ho Tung, J.P.
26.1. The memorial to Sir Robert and Lady Margaret Ho Tung, d. 26.4.1956 and 2.7.1914 respectively.
In spite of his pale skin, blue eyes and red hair, Sir Robert Hotung chose to live the life of a Chinese gentleman. He invariably dressed in a black silk Chinese gown, satin slippers and a black skull cap. He is said to have only converted to Christianity on his deathbed so that he could be buried next to Lady Margaret who had predeceased him by a few years. Near to Lady Margaret Ho Tung lies a small Chinese grave in which is interred her faithful mui-tsai and loyal companion for forty years, Miss Au Shing Cheung (區成璋) [11B/12/2].
Hotung’s second brother, Ho Fook, followed his lead into Jardine,
Matheson and took over as chief comprador in 1900. The third brother, Ho Kom
Tong, was equally successful. He first worked as clerk in a shipping firm and
then as translator/interpreter in the office of the registrar general. After a stint in a law firm he too became comprador for Jardines. He had interests in the cotton
business and in rubber plantations in Malaya. He went on to become chairman of
the Tung Wah Hospital and a director in the Chinese Chamber of Commerce.
These very successful Eurasian brothers all found their wives among the Eurasian community, as did their sons, linking their family name to the Choa’s and Zimmern’s
among others. Ho Kom Tong was the first Eurasian to live in the Mid-Levels. He
increased his standing and that of the Eurasian community by building a private
cemetery, the Wing Yuen Cemetery, at Pokfulam, for the burial of family members
and of other Eurasians approved by a committee made up of family members. Ho Kom Tong had twelve concubines whom he housed on Conduit Road and a total of twenty-three children, thirteen sons and ten daughters.
Buried in the Cemetery is a representative of another well-known Eurasian familiy. Chan U Hon (陳汝漢 ) [34/2/25], the son of Chan Kai Ming (陳啟明 ),
was killed in 1893 aged
seven years. According to the story told by a descendant, U Hon was see-sawing with a cousin on a plank over the sill of a third-floor window when someone entered the room. The cousin jumped guiltily off the see-saw leaving U Hon to fall to his death in
26.2. Headstone in memory of Miss Au Shing Cheung, loyal the courtyard below. The companion of Lady Margaret.
sad little monument was erected by his grandmother, most likely the ‘protected woman’ of the Russell & Co. merchant, George Bartou Tyson. The father of Chan U Hon, Chan Kai Ming, studied at the Central School and then stayed on as pupil teacher rising to second assistant master in 1881. He then taught in
the police school, before becoming third clerk in the police magistracy. In 1909,
Chan Kai Ming left the government to become secretary of the opium farm. His name ‘need only be mentioned to recall his long standing connection and intimate knowledge of the opium trade’. He also became a director of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce and director of the Tai Yau Bank. He was also active on the fund-raising committee of the University of Hong Kong. He died aged sixty
in 1919 at his house in Caine Road and was buried in the Eurasian Wing Yuen
Cemetery at Pokfulam.
Several well-educated and Westernized families of returnees seem to have lived in the Mid-Levels and mixed rather more freely with the Europeans including the Kews, the Ablongs and the already mentioned Leongs. Robert Akid Kew and his Australian wife, Sarah Honoria Whiteley [6/5/20], arrived in Hong Kong from Maryborough, Australia in 1884 and enrolled their sons in Queen’s College. They had eight children and no less than thirteen members of the Kew family are buried in the Cemetery. Many of them were successful. Charles Kew for example entered the Chartered Bank where he soon became confidential secretary to the manager. He later started his own business and was said to be handling 30,000 pounds sterling worth of Yunnan tin a day. His brother, Joseph, by 1902 was manager of the Hong Kong Steam Waterboat Company. One other Australian returnee, Otto Kong Sing [16B/2/1], who had qualified as a solicitor in Australia and practised successfully in Hong Kong, had a Western or Australian wife, but it was very unusual at that time for a European
26.3. Small memorial in memory of Chan girl to marry a Chinese. The exodus from U Hon, d. 14.10.1893.
Australia helped to create a Eurasian middle class that gained a certain degree of acceptance in the colony.
Even so, in the early years of the twentieth century, the taboos against mixed marriage were as firm as ever. Vaudine England put the general view in her autobiography of Noel Croucher:
The eligible bachelors of the empire who, though happily consorting with non-European women, could not contemplate marrying an ‘oriental’. Mixed marriages were greeted with shock if not outrage by both Chinese and English communities, and terminated a young man’s climb up the social hierarchy.15
The Hong Kong Cemetery houses about 140 known graves belonging to members of the Chinese community and probably more unknown. They include six members of the Gittins family, five Halls, the descendants of Stephen Hall alias Sin Tak Fan, five Randalls, four members of the Jex family, four Rapps, four Grieves, three Zimmerns and so on whose interconnected families represent
the flowering of what some may see as true Hong Kong belongers.
As the war memorial in the Kowloon Cricket Club shows all too clearly,
members of these families proved their loyalty to Hong Kong in the Second World War by joining the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps and fighting and dying
in defence of their homeland. So many Eurasians had joined the Volunteers that
George White suggested the formation of a Eurasian company. He was backed in
this by a group of classmates from the Diocesan Boys’ School. The suggestion was
adopted and No. 3 Machine Gun Company was first mentioned in the Volunteer Yearbook of 1935.16 It was also picked out for special praise by General Maltby in the Dispatches of 29.1.1948. ‘I should like to place on record the superb gallantry of No. 3 (Eurasian) Company at Wong Nai Chung Gap’. A number of Eurasian
volunteers were interned in Sham Shui Po Camp. Arthur Gillard [12A/3/12], for example, a warrant officer in the Volunteers, became the camp gardener and managed to grow tomatoes from the seeds carefully extracted from a tin of
Delmonte tomatoes. His efforts may have helped to save the lives of some of the
unfortunate prisoners.17 Charles Simon Rosselet [27/3/13] was another prisoner who was sent to Japan with Billy Gittins and John Shea.
While their husbands were in prisoner-of-war camps, some of the wives saw
out the war in the Stanley internment camp. Among these were Mabel Hall (nee Gittins) and her two boys, Marie Fincher, the wife of Teddie Fincher [12A/11/5] and Jean Gittins whose husband, Billy, died in Japan. Other internees at the Stanley camp included two members of well-known Eurasian families, James Arthur Kew [7/2/3] and Rose, nee Ablong [7/2/3], his wife. Rose also lost a brother, Alfred Ernest Ablong. He was divisional A.R.P. warden for North Point
on the night of 19 December when the Japanese invaded and was killed by sniper
fire. Arthur Kew joined Hutchinsons after the war and went on to manage a group of their companies.
War-time evacuations and postwar travel led to a dispersal of the previously close-knit Hong Kong Eurasian community, but those remaining families who stayed in Hong Kong are still quietly prospering.
Chapter 27 Other Nationalities: The Japanese and Russians Buried in the Hong Kong Cemetery
Japanese Graves
It may come as a surprise that the number of Japanese graves in the Hong Kong Cemetery is approximately 465, compared to the Chinese graves which number
about 197. The Japanese have a long history in Hong Kong. As early as 1845,
Japanese were recorded living there, mostly the survivors of shipwrecks. Japanese sailors were not able to return to Japan due to the Sakoku policy adopted by the Tokugawa shoguns. It was feared that returnees would contaminate Japanese society with un-Japanese ideas and beliefs such as Christianity and foment dissension if allowed back into the country.
Adonia Rickomartz was one such sailor whose curious story lies behind the simple granite headstone commemorating two young Japanese/German infants, Maria Lucy Rickomartz [9/11/2], who died aged two and a half years, and Lucy, aged ten months. The date of their death is difficult to read on the faded
stone but seems to be May 1850. The father, Adonia, as he was christened, was one of a group of Japanese sailors who had been rescued from a shipwreck and brought to Macau, where they were converted to Christianity by the missionaries,
William Wells and George Tradescant Lay. In exchange for lessons in religion
and English, the sailors taught the missionaries to speak Japanese.1 These lessons
stood Wells in good stead when he accompanied Commodore Matthew Perry
as interpreter on his famous expedition to open up Japan to American trade. The missionaries had hoped the sailors would spread the gospel back in Japan, but in 1836 failed in an attempt to repatriate them. Back again in Macau, Adonia became
the servant of Rev. Karl Gutzlaff, took him to Hong Kong, and taught him how
to work as a compositor, producing the Christian tracts that Gutzlaff used to distribute through his Chinese Union. In Hong Kong, the missionary introduced Adonia to a German lady called Rickomartz in want of a husband. On marriage
27.1. The headstone commemorating the 27.2. The inscription on the headstone infant daughters of Adonia Rickomartz, commemorating Maria Lucy and Maria Lucy (d. 5.22.1830) and Lucy (d. Lucy Rickomartz. 23.11.1848).
Adonia took his wife’s name. By 1859 they had had four children, two of whom died young and are buried in the cemetry. After the death of Gutzlaff, Adonia went
to work as compositor for the Friend of China. In 1858, Mrs. Rickomartz teamed up with a Mrs. Jurgens from Hamburg to open a millinery and haberdashery establishment on Queen’s Road. Sadly, in the following year a fire destroyed
their business and after auctioning off the fire-damaged stock, Mrs. Rickomartz
departed to set up a haberdashery business in Shanghai leaving her husband and children behind. She died there in June 1860, followed in September by Adonia, aged thirty-seven. The surviving orphans, Eliza and Louisa, entered the newly founded Diocesan Orphanage where they were baptized in 1868, Louisa becoming a teacher there at the age of eighteen.
In the early 1860s, at the beginning of the Meiji Restoration, contacts between Japan and the outside world became more frequent. Missions and delegates sent overseas by the Japanese government always called at the port of Hong Kong. Records on early Japanese deaths here are inconclusive, though at least one Japanese official report on Hong Kong, Honkon Jijo (香港事情), published in 1917 by the Japanese Foreign Ministry, recorded that earlier Japanese nationals were buried in the Chinese cemetery at Mount Davis. From the 1880s onwards, the Japanese formed a respected minority group. The number buried in comparison to the number of Chinese in the Cemetery suggests that it was easier for the Japanese to get permission for burial there. This may indicate that they were accorded a higher status by the British authorities, or that their total number in the colony being fewer, they never posed the threat of overwhelming the Cemetery.
Two hundred and twenty-seven of the Japanese graves are inscribed with information such as names and ages, in line with Japanese tradition. Some even give the person’s home address in Japan. Sixty -two graves were erected by various charitable and religious organizations, including four that were erected by Japanese medical doctors practising in
Hong Kong at that time. In 1873 the first
Japanese consulate opened to look after Japanese interests. The earliest recorded burial
was carried out five years later, in 1878, when
a twenty-two-year-old army second lieutenant, Yukawa (湯川溫作 ) [27/2/14], died in Hong Kong. He had been sent to France to study but caught a brain disease while there. He died in Hong Kong on his way home. The next earliest burial is of an able seaman, Shimizu (清水政之助 ) [27/3/15], who died one year later.
Unlike in other places in South-East Asia where the Japanese have been buried, in this cemetery, very few military men have been found and, surprisingly,
not a single one remains from the Second World War. The majority of the graves
belong to crewmen from the merchant navy, shop owners and employees of Japanese trading firms. The grave of Honda (本田政次郎) [31/4/5], for example, the first manager of the Mitsubishi Mail Shipping Company, heralds the growing
commercial links between Hong Kong and Japan. He arrived in Hong Kong
in 1879 and died just a year later. Next to him is a seaman of the same company,
27.3. Monument to Lieutenant Yukawa, the first Japanese to be buried in the Hong Kong Cemetery, d. 5.8.1878.
27.4. The inscription on the memorial to Lieutenant Yukawa.
Murakami (.上秀士 ) [31/4/3], from the Province of Bungo who died aged twenty-one. His details are recorded, unusually, in both English and Japanese. One communal grave [34A/1/6] was erected by the Nippon Yusen Japanese
Shipping Company in 1901 to house the remains of four sailors who died in the
Government Hospital of an epidemic, probably the plague. In the first row of Section 34B, there lies the grave of the captain (照峰廣吉) of the Japanese ship Daini Tatsumaru (第貳辰丸 ) which, in January 1908, was loaded with firearms
for the revolutionaries in Guangdong Province. The ship was spotted by Chinese government agents at Macau and surrounded by Chinese gunboats. The captain
was forced to lower the Japanese flag and raise in its place the yellow dragon of
China. The ship was escorted to Guangzhou and detained for one month. After
diplomatic activity, it was freed minus the firearms, but the unfortunate captain,
overburdened with worries, fell ill and died in Hong Kong on his way home.
By the 1880s, a number of Japanese had opened businesses and restaurants in Hong Kong including Miura (三浦清一) [26/13/10], who died in 1919 aged forty-six. He came to Hong Kong in 1906 from Gifu near Nagoya to make his fortune by importing Japanese medicine and other products. He was sole agent for a very popular herbal medicine called Jintan (仁丹 ) and was successful enough to open a shop in Wing Lok Street. Miura was cremated in the Japanese crematorium at So Kon Po. A local historian has been in contact with his descendants back in Japan who provided photographs of Miura and his assistants in Hong Kong, and expressed amazement that his grave still existed in the Cemetery.
27.5. The monument to Miura from a photograph taken in 1919 after his funeral.
27.6. Cremation of Miura at the So Kon Po Japanese crematorium. (By courtesy of Ko Tim-keung.)
27.7. Miura and his Japanese and Chinese employees on an outing. (By courtesy of Ko Tim-keung.)
In all, twenty-two Japanese are known to have perished in the terrible
racecourse fire of 1918. Monuments to commemorate victims include those of
Uetsuki (植月覺三 ) who operated a well-known Japanese restaurant in Central Victoria, and a husband and wife surnamed Matsubara (松原治三郎 ) [31/4/1]. The husband owned a hotel/hostel in Central and was one of the many with stalls
providing food for the race-goers. The husband finally died on 7 March 1918,
so must have been one of those rescued, but too badly burnt to recover. Their monument is one of the most striking of the Japanese memorials.
A considerable number of the Japanese memorials belonged to the so-called Karayuki-san, young girls, mainly from Kyushu, though a small number were from the Kanto area, who were brought to South-East Asia and treaty ports in China during the Meiji and Taisho periods as prostitutes. In 1909, among the many colourful people who thronged the streets, the Japanese courtesans from Ship Street were described as ‘dressed in their blue-figured Kasuri cloth’2 and shuffling by on their wooden shoes, exciting catcalls from the Chinese coolies. In most cases, these simple country girls were lured from their villages with stories of well-paid jobs as domestic helpers and then tricked into prostitution. An intriguing monument to a woman, aged thirty named Kiya Karayuki (木谷佐喜女) [31/4/24] who died in 1884, points to her being the keeper of a brothel or perhaps a much-loved prostitute in it. Fifty-eight girls have their signatures inscribed into the granite base of his memorial in Katakana, the simple form of Japanese writing which usually signified only a very rudimentary education. An inscription in English on the body stone at the foot of the monument declares that the monument was erected by her friends.
In Section 34C, beyond the path, are a number of monuments to young girls who have been buried by one of the charitable organizations. These girls were probably from the Japanese-run brothels. Typical is one little column to Iwai岩井.. [34C/1/1] whose given name Haru
means spring, and who died in 1908
aged twenty-one. The names of the girls in this section are also written in Katakana, no relations are included in the inscription and the granite columns are small and insignificant in appearance. Prostitution was
big business and many of the Japanese working in Hong Kong were in some way related to the brothels. They worked, for example, in photographic studios, jewellery shops, cafes or as doctors caring for the health of the girls.
A well-kept Japanese monument (Manreito萬靈塔 ) towers over the other
memorials at the top of Section 35 where the path ends. This memorial was first erected in the Japanese crematorium in So Kon Po in 1919. The crematorium was specially built for the Japanese in 1912 by a major Japanese charitable
organization in Hong Kong (Nihonjin Jisenkai日本人慈善會 ) as cremation was not approved of or adopted by the Chinese in those days. It is not known
when the crematorium was demolished (perhaps around the early 1950s when
the cemeteries in So Kon Po were cleared), but the memorial remained in place
until 1982 when it was removed to the present site by the Japanese Club, under instructions from the Hong Kong government. When a troupe of Kabuki actors visited Hong Kong to perform in 2002, the wife of the leader of the troupe made the suggestion of planting Sakura trees in places associated with the Japanese
in Hong Kong. She had no difficulty in collecting the necessary funds in Japan.
27.8. Monument to Kiya Karayuki San, brothel keeper 1884.
27.9. Base stone of the monument to Kiya Karayuki San showing some of the 58 signatories inscribed round the monument.
Two years later fourteen of these young trees were planted near the Japanese graves inside the Cemetery. They can be identified by the labels directing that they should not be cut down. One hopes that these trees will be allowed to grow to maturity undisturbed.
The Russian Refugees
About 108 Russians are buried in the Cemetery. A group of sixty-three monuments belong to
the White Russian refugees who fled across the
Siberian plains and down into China, where they congregated in the northern Chinese cities such as Harbin. A number moved further south to Hong Kong to escape the fighting and upheavals in China. They stand out in the Cemetery with their special Russian Orthodox crosses with the extra slanted cross-bar. The simplicity of some crosses
points to the poverty of many of those who had fled
Bolshevik Russia. Only a handful of monuments to Russians are
from before the Second World War, with the great majority dating from the years 1950 to 1970. In those years they formed a close-knit
community with their own archpriest, Dimitri Uspensky [11A/4/11], vicar of the Russian Orthodox Church in Hong Kong and of a well-appointed chapel in Kowloon.
The Russians in the Cemetery impress with their longevity, many living into their seventies or eighties and one living into his nineties. A number of businesses in Hong Kong were started by them. For example, the Queen’s Bakery is partly responsible for changing the dietary habits of Hong Kong Chinese. It began the trend for cakes and buns that are now commonly seen in
bakeries all over Hong Kong. Without Russian
intervention, it is possible that the ubiquitous red bean bun and the barbecued pork bun would not have been invented. The other dish popularized in cafes run by refugees is borscht, the Russian soup made with beetroots. The Russian community has now decreased in numbers, many moving on to the United States in particular, but still at Easter time members come to the Hong Kong Cemetery to decorate family graves with
flowers and coloured hard-boiled Easter eggs.
One of the best known of the refugees, whose story is rather typical is George Vitalievich Smirnoff [13/2/7]. He was born in Vladivostock and, when he was eight years old, he and his mother fled to Harbin. He graduated from the Polytechnic Institute of Harbin in 1928, where he won a gold medal and a bursary to study in America which he was unable to take up. He first came to Hong Kong in 1937 and soon after joined the Volunteers. He was arrested by the Japanese and sent to Stanley Prison, but released one month later and in 1944 found refuge for
27.13. An example of Smirnoff’s work, ‘Macao Landscape’. (By courtesy of the Macao Museum of Art.)
himself and his family in Macau. Although living conditions were hard and food
was scarce, Smirnoff found some excellent friends and patrons who provided him
with the means to demonstrate his talent for painting. Jose Maria Braga helped
him find work teaching art. The millionaire Dr. Pedro Lobo commissioned him
to paint a series of watercolours picturing Macau’s architecture and scenery, which established his reputation as an artist. Smirnoff returned to Hong Kong
in 1945 and took a job with the P.W.D., where he was asked to design and build
urinals and latrines, but his position as a foreman precluded him from receiving the supplies of soap, beer, cigarettes and chocolate which were reserved for
officers in the government, and from entering any of the clubs. He also complained
that the low level corruption of the ‘old China hands’ was distasteful to him. In a
letter to Braga, he said: ‘I feel myself perfectly insignificant, shrinking to zero and am developing … an inferiority complex’. Just two years later in February 1947, Smirnoff died aged forty-three years.
Chapter 28
The Second World War
and Its Aftermath
This last chapter tells the stories of the Second World War that cannot be left out
of a history of the Hong Kong Cemetery. The war ushered in years of turmoil and
suffering for Hong Kong and a little of this can be deduced from the Cemetery
registers. One hundred and thirteen soldiers, forty-six of whom are entered as
unknown, were buried over the weeks of fighting when the Japanese invaded in December 1941. Conditions were such that none of them could be given a funeral service. All these soldiers were exhumed in October 1947 and taken to the Saiwan Military Cemetery. But more dramatically, on Christmas Day 1941, three Chinese
Jockey Club grooms or ma-fu as they are called were buried by the Red Cross in
Section 19, and the grave of the first became also the final resting place for one
of their horses. The horse and its groom were entered in the register as numbers
10043 and 10044. According to the records in 1976, these bones were exhumed
and removed to the ossuary to make way for the Aberdeen Tunnel. In fact the
horse was not the first animal to be buried in the Cemetery. In January 1931, Molly Hope [17/13/12], the wife of an officer in the South Wales Borderers, was buried with ‘Tango, her beloved Alsatian’. The dog had died ten days before Mrs. Hope.
In February and March 1942, terrible events must have taken place close to the
Cemetery and emergency burial places urgently needed. On 1 February, four
Chinese males were buried together in one grave numbered 10062 in Section 17 and on 2 February, five more were buried together in Section 45, followed by four
more on 3 March. According to the records, these Chinese men are still there. The Cemetery itself was fought over as is shown by shell damage to certain graves, for example to that of John Smith [10/2/3].
During the war years, very few funerals were held in the Cemetery. About seventy civilians were buried, almost all by Johan Nielson, a Scandinavian pastor, who remained as the only Protestant minister on call during the war. The Russian dead were buried by Arch Priest Dimitri Uspensky [11A/4/11], vicar of the Russian Orthodox Church in Hong Kong. Many of those buried had names that put them into the category of Eurasians, like Starling Jex, Arthur Hall, Josephine Ryrie Greaves and Aileen Rapp. Sympathy must go to Lavinia Alice Madar [37/2/18] of the Armenian family who survived the war years, only to be killed at the very end by an American bombing raid on Kowloon. Surprisingly, according to the records, among the invaders who were buried in the Cemetery, there were more Koreans than Japanese. The records list eighteen Koreans, eight males, seven females and four children, whereas only sixteen Japanese are listed. These graves have not been found. The remains were likely to have been repatriated after the war.
Sixty-one of those buried in the Cemetery are known to have been interned by the Japanese, among whom one of the best remembered must be Harold Smyth [11A/9/1], a director of Deacon & Co. He is an example of a man who came out of the ordeal with an enhanced reputation. He had himself assigned to the military hospital in Bowen Road where he took charge of the large copper outside the hospital
building. Daily he filled it with water to boil the
daily ration of one pint using dried grass twigs
and anything burnable that he could find. Later
at the Stanley Camp Harold is said to have helped hundreds survive the ordeal of camp life. After the war he lived quietly on Cheung Chau Island and distinguished himself by acts of kindness and generosity to all in need. It was said at his funeral service: ‘Chinese or European, rich or poor, whatever their virtues or faults, he was a friend to all’. At St. John’s Cathedral a room in their new hall was named after him, and at St. Andrew’s Church in Kowloon the new pews and choir stalls were also named after Smyth.1
Other Stanley camp internees buried in the Cemetery include the two sons of the late commissioner for Chinese customs in Kowloon, William George Lay [45/11/4]. William was the grandson of George Tradescant Lay, missionary
and interpreter who converted Adonia Rickomartz to Christianity and later
became the first consul in Foochow. His father was Horatio Nelson Lay, who became the first inspector general of the Chinese Imperial Customs in 1863. Alec Hyde Lay, who had lost a leg in the First World War, and his wife were among
those killed when a stray American bomb fell on a bungalow in the camp. His brother, Arthur Tradescant Lay died soon after the war of an illness contracted in the camp. John D. Tobin [9/18/2] from Michigan was a purchasing agent for the U.S. Navy when he was interned. After the war, he worked for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in Hankow and was then posted to Shanghai, where he acted as naval attache to the British consulate. He ended up back in Hong Kong, again as purchasing officer for the U.S. Navy. Thomas H.G. Brayfield [10/2/1] began his career early in the century on ships
taking cheap Chinese labour to the goldfields of Australia and South Africa. He came to Hong Kong in 1919 as a partner in Carmichael and Clarke. After the
war he became a successful businessman and a member of the Hong Kong Club with his own race horses.
Twenty men have been found in the Cemetery who endured camp life at Argyle Street or Sham Shui Po. Frederick P. Franklin [7/12/9] must speak for the others in Hong Kong. He had fought in the First World War with the Australian forces and volunteered while working for the South China Morning Post as manager. He was made a lieutenant in the Royal Engineers. He was wounded while trying to take cover in the grounds of the Indian Club and was saved by the Punjabi soldiers he was commanding. After recovering at the old military hospital in Bowen Road he spent the rest of the war as a prisoner-of-war. The grim reality of life in camp is conjured up in two verses from his poem written in captivity:
Now Prisoner of War.
With your uniform all tattered,
Not a pillow for your head;
Your hopes and visions shattered,
And scarce your daily bread.
With the wire-girt grim confinement,
For an undetermined spell;
Not a vestige of refinement
You’re not very far from Hell
When at night you lie a’thinking,
On the boards that form your bed,
You can’t help your spirit sinking
From the doubts that lie ahead.
You’re derelict and friendless,
All links of love have snapped; You’re facing something endless, You’re starving, broken, trapped. 2
Franklin was released on 15 August 1945, the day victory against the Japanese
was declared, weighing 105 pounds. He went straight out to organize the SCMP office, requisition a generator, and print and distribute the now famous one-column paper, letting the Hong Kong people know that the war was over. Among the other prisoners of war buried in the Cemetery are Leslie Wilfred Peckham [1/1/1] and James McLachlan Macintyre [9/9/3], both Volunteers. Peckham served as a sergeant in the Dockyard Defence Corps and died aged forty-three in December
1942 while in the Sham Shui Po Camp.
Macintyre timed his arrival in Hong Kong
in 1940 very badly. He worked for the war
taxation department, and immediately joined the Volunteers and then found himself among those sent to Japan. He survived
the ordeal to work for UNRRA in Canton, Shanghai and Washington before
returning to Hong Kong. One can only speculate on how many other men and
women who suffered similarly during the Second World War, and whose stories
are waiting to be uncovered, may now also be lying at rest in the Cemetery.
The Postwar Years
The turmoil of the war years was slowly righted during the next few years. Unknown male bodies found in various places around the territory were brought to the
Cemetery for burial, only to be exhumed again for reburial at the Sai Wan Military Cemetery. Even as late as 1950, bodies were still being discovered, for example, the one from near culvert number 10572 in Repulse Bay. Unexploded shells as well as unknown bodies needed to be dealt with. In March 1946, an act of great courage
brought the military medal to Joseph Hughes [16D/2/1], a driver with the RASC.
The work of removing live ammunition from the military camp at Chai Wan
was in progress. The area had been used by the Japanese and had been the site of fierce fighting. A convoy of lorries laden with unexploded ammunition was making its way down to the water’s edge. On the lorry driven by Joseph Hughes, the netting covering the ammunition had worked loose and wound itself round a wheel, where it ignited. Hughes tried to alert the others in the convoy by hooting, but they thought he was having a joke. Rather than jumping clear of his lorry and saving his own life, Hughes drove as fast as he could towards the sea, hoping to reach the water in
time to douse the flames. However the ammunition
began detonating and the ensuing explosion blew
a huge hole in the cliff face that can be seen to this
day. Driver Hughes was killed, but his brave action had spared the lives of those driving behind him.
The city, still feeling the effects of the Japanese occupation, had no housing for the refugees who came from China. Whole townships of shacks made of
corrugated iron and wood grew up on hillsides. One to the west of Kennedy Town covered the slopes all the way down to the sea. These mini towns lacked drains and clean water and were at the mercy of landslides. One such encampment grew up alongside the Cemetery, which became a much loved
playground for refugee children who flocked there to pick fruit from the cemetery
trees. The author heard this from G.S. Yue who had returned from California to pay his respects and see once again the haunts of his boyhood.
Life was tough and desperate men roamed the hillsides. Newcomers to the colony were
advised by old-timers to carry a sufficient sum of
money if they went walking. The money would satisfy any robbers they met who would then let them proceed without violence. Two company directors of Deacon & Co., Ronald Ross and Lytton Bevis Wood [37/5/8], were not so lucky
in February 1948, when they went walking in
the Kowloon Hills. They were attacked by four men near Lion Rock, overpowered and bound
hand and foot. They were both beaten up and had their pockets rifled. Ross was dumped in some bushes and survived, but Wood, who was thrown headlong into
a shallow stream died of his head injuries.
Hong Kong entered the age of the aeroplane with a number of early air disasters before the war. Two pre-war incidents involved the Royal Air Force. In 1928, a Fairey 3D sea plane, piloted by three officers, went out of control and crashed into the harbour on its way back to the aircraft carrier HMS Hermes. According to the Hong Kong Telegraph, it had been carrying out ‘an almost bewildering series of stunt evolutions’. The body of Alfred
W.B. Hale [21A/4/6] was recovered from the waters. Hale, Lieutenant P. Graham [21A/1/10] and Stanley Jackson [21A/5/23] then shared a grand funeral. In 1930 Alfred Jarvis [21A/2/28] managed to fall out of the cockpit of a Fairey sea plane from a height of two hundred feet.
The postwar years heralded the founding of Hong Kong’s own airline, Cathay Pacific, in 1946. Three years later, the company suffered the first crash of a passenger plane. The pilot,
J.C. Paish, was coming in from Manila to land at fog-bound Kai
Tak Airport on 24 February 1949.
He was disorientated by the low cloud and flew in too low over the Braemar Reservoir, striking the twenty-foot retaining wall of the reservoir and knocking out a chunk of masonry. He then smashed into Mount Butler killing all nineteen passengers and
four crew. Had the aircraft flown just two feet higher, it would have cleared the
wall and avoided the hill-side. Olive Batley [17/12/10], the young air hostess and
two others, are buried in Section 17.3
Something of the turmoil in China that accompanied the Communist takeover is reflected in the Cemetery. A number of coffins were brought down from Shanghai around 1956 by relatives fearing that their loved ones would receive short shrift under the new government. Section 16G was cut out of the hillside to receive the displaced remains. Others are scattered throughout the Cemetery and include the remains of Billie Liddell nee Coutts [12A/4/13], who was reputed to be the best dressed lady on the China Coast, and was only the second lady owner-trainer in 1924 and in 1924 triumphantly rode two of her own ponies to victory at the Shanghai Racecourse. Her husband, Jack Liddell, owned a firm of hydraulic packers with a branch in every port in China. The fears of the descendants were not unfounded and now few if any graves of foreigners remain in Shanghai.
The Cyril Wild Story
Colonel Cyril Wild [17/11/8] was one of the four sons of the Bishop of
Newcastle. Whereas his brothers all entered Holy Orders, Wild after his
education at Charterhouse and Oxford started his career with the Shell Company. The company sent him to Japan to work with the Rising Sun Company where he
learnt to speak fluent Japanese. Wild was a keen territorial and, at the outbreak of war, he joined the
Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. After a short stint in Ireland, he was attached to the Indian Army who sent him to Singapore to work under General Sir Louis Heath. After the surrender of Singapore, he was invaluable as
the only fluent Japanese speaker available and thus the only translator capable of
helping to negotiate the terms of the surrender. He is the man in the well-known photograph marching to the Ford Factory in Bukit Timah to open negotiations,
carrying the white flag of surrender accompanied by Brigadier T.K. Newbigging,
who carried the Union Jack. This Union Jack was later concealed in a tin and
hidden from the Japanese. When Wild was questioned as to its whereabouts, he
described how he had faced England and solemnly burnt it on the ramparts of
Fort Canning, which story both satisfied and impressed the Japanese. And so the flag survived the war.
During his imprisonment at Changi Prison and subsequently on the Thai-
Burma Railroad, Wild earned the Japanese nickname of the tall man who never
slept. This was because he was called out at any time day or night to put the case in Japanese for the defence of prisoners accused of infringements of regulations
and often threatened with the death penalty. When he won a case and secured the release of a prisoner back to the camp, Wild often had to endure a beating from
the guards, but in spite of this he continued to defend the men to the very best of his ability. The testimony of the men he had defended won him the M.B.E. medal.
At the end of the war Wild returned
to England. His detailed knowledge of the
28.8. The headstone of Colonel Cyril Wild M.B.E, d. 25.9.1946.
Japanese behaviour towards the prisoners-
of-war made him very valuable to the War
Crimes Tribunal and they begged him to return to the East to help the prosecution gather the evidence of war crimes. He agreed on condition that he could bring his wife, and that he would be made a full colonel, so that he could negotiate with his American counterparts from a position of parity. After
the guards and minor figures had been tried,
the tribunal began to amass evidence in order to prosecute those responsible for the Japanese policy of brutality and degradation
towards its prisoners. Wild had collected
a number of signed statements from high-ranking officers in custody, including General Yamashita himself and travelled
to Hong Kong from Tokyo en route to Singapore. On 25 September 1946, he
was found seats at short notice on the scheduled Royal Air Force Transport
Command Dakota to Singapore, via Saigon. When the plane took off from Kai
Tak Airport, it gained height normally, then was seen literally to fall out of the sky, crashing into the Kowloon Tong hillside between Lion Rock and Beacon Hill. Nineteen people lost their lives, including six soldiers and four airmen who are
buried in Row 11, Section 17 of the Cemetery with Colonel Wild. The average age of the ten men buried with Colonel Wild was just twenty-three. They were in the
wrong place at the wrong time. The interview transcripts and detailed notes relating to evidence for the
War Crimes Tribunals were reduced to cinders, which meant that all further
trials were compromised. On news of the crash there was jubilation amongst the
Japanese in custody. It was impossible to find the cause of the crash, but it was
thought that the triads may have been involved in sabotaging the plane in return for a big payoff. Lord Mountbatten had presented General Yamashita’s sword,
which had been offered up at the surrender of the Japanese, to Colonel Wild. The Wild family also had in their possession the Union Jack that had been buried at
Changi and survived the war. These two artefacts were donated by the family to Charterhouse School and may be seen in the chapel there.
The Pearl River Incident
Seven headstones in Row 7 of Section 17 tell of another sad and largely forgotten
story of these years. They recall the deaths of six young sailors from the Royal Navy, none of whom was over twenty-three years of age, and a captain from the Royal Hong Kong Defence Regiment who was acting as liaison officer. In
September 1953, an incident occurred which could have had serious repercussions had the affair been allowed to escalate. It was sparked by the gung-ho captain of
Motor Launch No. 1323. Lieutenant G. Merriman [17/7/14] had a reputation for ‘communist baiting’ and he deliberately provoked the trigger-happy commander of a Chinese warship.
On 9 September, the motor launch left HMS Tamar, the British naval depot in Hong Kong, on a routine patrol past Deep Bay and into the Pearl River estuary. A signal had been sent three weeks earlier that the patrol boats should not on any account provoke incidents and that they should keep well clear of Chinese territorial waters. In spite of this signal, Lieutenant Merriman decided to close with and photograph a Communist warship in a move that took the motor launch perilously close to, if not within, Chinese waters. The warship immediately ordered the launch to stop. Far from stopping, Merriman ordered the engines to be put to full speed ahead and began to turn away from the warship.
Almost immediately, the Chinese vessel opened fire. The crew took shelter in the
wheelhouse whose armour plating provided a measure of protection, with the
exception of Leading Seaman Cleaver who checked the engine room and finding
an unexploded shell in the starboard corner, carried it up on deck and dropped it into the sea. Merriman remained on the bridge taking photographs when a shell smashed into it severing both his legs above the knee, smashing his right arm and blowing off his right hand. Another shell hit the forward six-pounder gun and seriously wounded Able Seaman O’Keefe. Yet another smashed into the wheel house killing five men including Captain E. Gower [17/7/8]. This left Cleaver, who had been promoted four weeks earlier and was just twenty years old, in
charge of the motor launch. Shells and machine gun fire continued to rain down.
The wheel house was hit again, killing Able Seaman Ralph Shearman [17/7/9] and putting the steering out of action.
Two Hornet jets from the 80th Squadron saw the gunfire and smoke rising
from the stricken launch. They dived low over the Chinese vessel again and again,
drawing away the fire power from the motor launch. The warship altered course
towards Lin Tin Island leaving the motor launch in a critical condition with half
its crew dead, the steering blown away and a fire in the engine room. Meanwhile
the wind was rising and conditions at sea deteriorating. The remaining crew members managed to douse the flames and Cleaver then organized the fitting of the emergency steering. Merriman remained on deck where he had fallen, in
great pain and asking for morphine, which no-one could find. The mast had been
shot away and was hanging over the side and needed to be cut away, no easy task as the launch plunged and heaved in the heavy seas. The launch made for Tai O
where Police Inspector Anderson, who had heard gunfire, sent out a police launch
to bring in the crippled boat and help berth it at Tai O pier. Soon after berthing, Merriman died from his wounds.
On 11 September 1953, the seven casualties were given a funeral service at HMS Tamar and buried with full naval honours in Hong Kong Cemetery. A protest note was sent to the Chinese government, but was rejected by the Chinese who said that the launch was carrying no flag and was taken for a pirate ship. There was widespread condemnation of the Chinese action just at the time when China was trying to join United Nations. Neither side wanted the incident to increase tensions. The Chinese quietly leaked it that the captain of their warship had been tried in secret and executed. The authorities on both sides were happy for memories of this incident to fade away. Back in England, the queen approved the award of the British Empire Medal to Leading Seaman Cleaver, the son of a postman from Esher, Surrey, for his coolness and courage under fire. In the report on the incident, it was stated that Merriman had been involved in previous incidents, on one occasion going so close to a Communist ship that he was threatened with hand grenades.4
The Big Move
The final rearrangement of the Cemetery took place in 1976 when land was
resumed to make way for the Aberdeen Tunnel to be built. A further strip was taken from the Cemetery to allow for the widening of the road that leads to the
tunnel. In this major upheaval, 3,473 graves had to be cleared from these two
areas. Of these nearly nine hundred were re-sited around the Cemetery. New terraces were dug, for example Section 16C, trees and bushes were cut down on old sections to make more room for extra graves to be slotted in, as for example in Sections 4 and 20. The remains from over two thousand were placed in an ossuary or, where no remains were found, were commemorated by plaques on a wall. It must have been an arduous and grisly job dealing with that number of remains. That so big a portion of the Cemetery could be resumed in order to ease the
flow of traffic round the island shows how vulnerable the Cemetery is to outside
forces. Colonial cemeteries similar to this one have disappeared, for example in Singapore. There is always a hunger for more land for building, especially when it is so conveniently placed and it could command very high prices. Yet should this ever be allowed to happen, Hong Kong would lose a beautiful, historical, ecologically valuable asset. It is strongly recommended that the line of cemeteries in Happy Valley should be given some kind of preservation status by the
Antiquities and Monuments Office that would ensure that future generations can
learn from their stories and enjoy their peace and tranquillity. It is also important that funding should somehow be found to preserve the early tombs that are in a poor condition before they collapse and another solid reminder of Hong Kong’s history is lost forever.
Appendices
1. Time Line of Hong Kong History
1839 High Commissioner Lin Tse-hu appointed to stamp out the drugs trade in
Canton.
1840 The beginning of the First Opium War.
1841 Treaty of Nanking. The treaty ports of Amoy, Canton, Foochow, Ningpo and Shanghai opened for international commerce.
Hong Kong ceded to the British. Sir Henry Pottinger, first governor.
1843 Governor, Sir John F. Davis. Queen’s Road laid out. 1845 The establishment of the Ice House Company. The China Mail first published.
P. & O. Steam Navigation Co. established monthly mail route. 1846 The Hong Kong Club opened. 1848 Governor, Sir George Bonham.
Opening of the gold fields in the Sacramento Valley, California. American
whalers began refitting in Hong Kong. 1849 Defeat of the pirate fleets of Chui Apou and Shap-ng-tsai.
Opening of St. John’s Cathedral. 1851 The Cricket Club established. 1852 The Taiping Rebellion refugees started to arrive in Hong Kong. 1853 The beginning of regulated coolie emigration. 1854 Governor, Sir John Bowring.
U.S. Squadron under Commander Matthew C. Perry arrived on the way to Japan.
1857 The beginning of the Second Opium War.
Establishment of the Aberdeen Docks. 1858 The Treaty of Tientsin signed, legalizing opium sales in China.
1859 Governor, Sir Hercules Robinson.
1860 The sacking of the Summer Palace in Beijing. Convention of Peking ratified, formalizing lease of the Kowloon Peninsula and Stonecutters Island to Britain in perpetuity.
1861 Hong Kong Chamber of Commerce founded. The Botanical Gardens laid out.
1864 Gas street lighting introduced. 1865 The Hongkong & Shanghai Banking Corporation founded. 1866 The Hong Kong Mint opened.
Governor, Sir Richard Graves MacDonnell.
1867 The blockade of Hong Kong by Chinese customs cruisers.
1868 Mint closed.
Tung Wah Hospital founded. 1869 Visit of Duke of Edinburgh and royal opening of City Hall. 1870 Completion of submarine telegraphic link to China. 1872 Governor, Sir Arthur Kennedy. 1873 Major typhoon. 1874 Rev. James Legge appointed professor of Chinese at Oxford University. 1877 Governor, Sir John Pope Hennessy.
Ng Choy, first Chinese barrister admitted to the bar. 1878 Secular system of education introduced to government schools.
Grant-in-aid schools to have freedom of religious instruction.
1879 First rickshaw. Appointment of Ng Choy as unofficial member of the Legislative Council.
1881 Publication of Chadwick’s report on sanitary conditions in Hong Kong.
1884 Sino-French War sparked riots in the colony. 1887 Governor, Sir George William des Voeux.
College of Medicine for the Chinese. Sun Yat Sen became an early student. 1888 Peak tram.
1890 Duke of Connaught laid foundation stone for Sir Catchick Paul Chater’s
praya reclamation.
1891 Governor, Sir Willam Robinson. 1892 Gas lighting introduced to Kowloon. 1894 Outbreak of bubonic plague. 1898 The Convention of Peking. Ninety-nine-year lease of New Territories to
Britain. Governor, Sir Henry Blake.
1900 British Expeditionary Force against the Boxers. 1904 Governor, Sir Matthew Nathan.
Electric tramways on Hong Kong Island.
1907 Governor, Sir Frederick Lugard.
Time Line of Hong Kong History
1906 Worst typhoon in Hong Kong’s history. 1910 Opium divans in Hong Kong closed.
First car seen in Hong Kong.
1911 Kowloon-Canton railway opens. First aeroplane flight. 1912 Abdication of Puyi, the last emperor of the Ching dynasty.
Supreme Court Building (now the Legislative Council Building). Opening of the University of Hong Kong. Governor, Sir Francis Henry May.
1918 Happy Valley racecourse fire.
End of First World War. 1919 Governor, Sir Reginald Stubbs. 1922 Seamen’s strike in Hong Kong. 1925 Death of Sun Yat Sen. Chiang Kai-shek became leader of the
Kuomingtang. The general strike and boycott in Hong Kong.
1925 Governor, Sir Cecil Clementi. 1932 The Japanese annexation of Manchuria. 1935 Governor, Sir Alexander Caldicott.
The Long March ending at Yan’an.
1937 Governor, Sir Geoffry Northcote.
The beginning of the Japanese invasion in China with the capture of the Marco Polo Bridge.
1939 The beginning of the Second World War in Europe. 1941 Governor, Sir Mark Young. 1942 Japanese invasion of Hong Kong.
Surrender of British Forces to the Japanese.
1945 Surrender of Japanese forces. British rule resumes. 1947 Governor, Sir Alexander Grantham. 1949 Founding of the People’s Republic of China headed by Mao Tse-tung. 1958 Governor, Sir Robert Black. 1964 Governor, Sir David Trench. 1967 The beginning of the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution.
Riots and explosive devices in Hong Kong.
1971 Governor, Sir Murray Maclehose.
2. Sources
1. The Blue Books, a series of yearbooks that give details of the government accounts and some reports by heads of departments. The series begins in 1855. Exact figures are given in these books with great confidence, but one wonders how accurate these figures are in the light of the tools available to the civil service in the early days, the lack of manpower and their lack of knowledge of Chinese. They have been quoted in various places in the book, but should perhaps be seen as educated guesses.
2. The annual Government Gazettes begin in the same year and include the jury lists as well as lists of justices of the peace, those chosen to sit on the legislative or executive councils and legislation passed.
3. The two newspapers mainly quoted are the Friend of China (F. of C.) and the China Mail (C.M.). The Friend of China started in 1843 and was used in early days to gazette government appointments and announcements. It became rather anti-government in its views after being acquired by William Tarrant, the civil servant sacked by the government for alleging that Major Willam Caine was involved in corrupt practices. It became the spokesman for the merchant navy and tradesmen of the colony. The China Mail began in 1845. It usually supported the government and was closer to being the paper of the establishment. These two are supplemented towards the last quarter of the nineteenth century by the Hong Kong Telegraph (H.K.T.) edited by Robert Fraser-Smith.
4.
Carl Smith, the well-known genealogist and historian of Hong Kong and Macau history, compiled an invaluable card index of about ten thousand names from his readings in the local papers, and his researches into the land records and the Government Gazettes. This index has been extensively used and the author is very indebted to Carl Smith.
5.
The names of cities in China have been cited in the form by which they were known in the nineteenth century. For example, Guangdong has been left as Canton.
6.
In this work, where amounts in dollars are given, the amounts specified are always in Hong Kong dollars unless otherwise stated.
Sources
7. The Hong Kong Cemetery has been known by several different names. In the past, it was more usually referred to as the Protestant Cemetery and later as the Colonial Cemetery. In the interest of consistency, it has been called the Hong Kong Cemetery throughout this work.
8. The lack of standardization in the former spelling of Chinese names makes it difficult to write Chinese names correctly. Some names are found spelled differently in different places. As far as possible the most usual spelling has been used.
3. Glossary
Amah Arrack Barracoon Cajuput oil Chop boat Colporteur
Crimping Dhobi Factory
Godown Joss-house Lascar Lorcha
Matshed Nabob Nullah
Punkah
Queue Rattan Samsoo, Shamshoo
Shako
Children’s nurse (of Anglo-Indian origin). Alcoholic spirit manufactured in the East from cocoa palm or rice. A set of sheds or enclosure in which the Chinese emigrants were temporarily detained. Aromatic medicinal oil obtained from a Malay tree (Melaleuca cajuputi). A house boat. The chop originally meant that the boat had been given the chop of approval by the Chinese authorities. One employed by a society to sell or distribute bibles and religious writings from place to place. Decoying men in order to persuade them to use a particular boarding house. A washerman. An establishment where foreign traders lived and stored their goods in an overseas country. A warehouse or store for goods in Asia (of Malay origin). A Chinese temple. An East Indian sailor. A fast sailing ship built in China with the hull based on the European model but rigged in Chinese fashion and usually carrying guns. A temporary structure made of rattan and covered with palm leaf matting. A person of great wealth or formerly of high rank returning to Britain usually from India. A deep ditch or river bed. A large fan to cool a room; a large swinging cloth fan on a frame worked manually by a punkah-wallah. A plait of hair worn at the back. Malaysian climbing palms used for walking sticks, furniture etc. Chinese liquor distilled from rice or sorghum. Uniform hat worn by the 55th Regiment.
Glossary
Shroff A banker or money changer; to shroff: to examine coin in
order to separate the counterfeit or base.
Solar topee Pith hat designed to protect the head from the sun.
Specie Coin money as opposed to paper money.
Stinkpot A small missile emitting suffocating smoke when thrown,
used as a diversionary tactic in attacking and boarding
ships.
Sycee Fine uncoined silver in the form of lumps of various sizes,
usually stamped with the banker’s or assayer’s seal, formerly
used as a medium of exchange.
Taipan A foreign merchant or businessman in China; the head of a
foreign business.
Tiffin A light lunchtime meal.
Yamen The seat of local government in China presided over by a
mandarin.
Notes
Introduction
1.
Ken Nicolson, The Happy Valley: A History and Tour of the Hong Kong Cemetery, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010.
2.
Wan Chai is the district to the east of Central in Hong Kong.
3.
Ko Tim-keung, ‘A Review of Developments of Cemeteries in Hong Kong: 1841–1950’, Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 41, 2001, pp. 241–80.
4.
F. of C., 10.7.1850.
5.
E.J. Eitel, Europe in China, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1983, p. 219.
6.
Surveyor General’s Report in the Blue Book, 1856.
7.
Blue Book, 1850.
8.
Robert McLachlan, ‘Oh for the Joys of England’, Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 14, 1974, p. 80.
9.
Rev. James Legge, ‘The Colony of Hong Kong’, Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 11, p. 175.
10.
E.J. Eitel, op. cit., p. 189.
11.
E.J. Eitel, op. cit., p. 167.
12.
Susanna Hoe, The Private Life of Old Hong Kong, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1991, pp. 76–77.
13.
E.J. Eitel, op. cit., p. 245.
14.
F. of C., 14.1.1846.
15.
Dominick Harrod (editor), War, Ice and Piracy: The Remarkable Career of a Victorian Sailor, London: Chatham Publishing, 2000, p. 48.
16.
C.F. Gordon Cumming, Wanderings in China, Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1886, p. 114.
17.
Letter written by Lieutenant Collinson to his father, Rev. J. Collinson at Bolson Rectory, Gateshead, dated 22
February 1844, Hong Kong Public Records Office, H.K.M.S. No. 140, D. & S., No. 1/1.
18.
Ko Tim-keung, op. cit., p. 241.
19.
Michael Levien (editor), Naval Surgeon: The Voyages of Dr. Edward Cree, Royal Navy as related in his Private Journals, New York: E.P. Dutton, 1982, p. 89.
20.
Michael Levien, op. cit., p. 90.
21.
F. of C., 10.7.1850.
22.
Robert Fortune, Three Years Wanderings in the Northern Provinces of China, Shanghai: University Press, 1945, p. 22, footnote.
23.
F. of C., 16.8.1851.
24.
Blue Book, 1851.
25.
F. of C., 1.2.1845.
26.
F. of C., 10.10.1845.
27.
E.J. Eitel, op. cit., pp. 246–47.
28.
Blue Book, 1845, p. 40.
29.
Sprue is a tropical disease involving ulceration of the mucous membrane of the mouth and chronic enteritis.
30.
Blue Book, 1855. 31. C.M., 23.11.1865.
32. From the personal correspondence of Bandsman F. Davis, 2nd Battalion 20th Foot who was posted to Hong Kong between December 1863–January 1864 and May 1866–March 1867, quoted in Ko Tim-keung, op. cit., p. 245.
33.
Blue Book, 1861, p. 78.
34.
Keith Sinclair (editor), A Soldier’s View of Empire: The Reminiscences of James Bodell 1831–1892, London: Bodley Head, 1982, p. 66.
35.
F. of C., 10.2.1844.
36.
F. of C., 30.4.1849. 37. C.M., 19.3.1857. 38. C.M., 23.11.1865.
39.
List of Tombstones from the Old Colonial Cemetery, Hong Kong Government Gazette, 2.11.1889.
40.
Mortimer Menpes, China, with text by Sir Henry Arthur Blake, London: Adam & Charles Black, 1909, p. 112.
41.
These definitions are taken from J.C.J. Metford, Dictionary of Christian Biography, London: Thames and Hudson, 1883.
42.
C.F. Gordon Cumming, op. cit., p. 114.
43.
Major Henry Knollys, English Life in China, London: Smith & Elder & Co., 1885, p. 18.
44.
Grave No. 4953. This grave has not been found by the author. 45. H.K.T., 10.11.1909.
Chapter 1
1.
Edward W. Said, Orientalism, New York: Vintage Books, 1979, p. 40.
2.
It was amended on 13 November 1844.
3.
F. of C., 9.11.1844.
4.
Blue Book, 1845.
5.
Blue Book, 1845.
6.
Blue Book, 1845.
7.
Rev. J. Collinson, Letter, op. cit.
8.
E.J. Eitel, op. cit., pp. 186 and 246–47.
9.
Peter Ward Fay, The Opium War: 1840–1842, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1975, p. 324. Fay writes that during the winter of 1842, according to Pedder’s (the harbourmaster) lists, every fourth vessel that touched Hong Kong carried opium.
10.
Letter to F. of C., 16.10.1852.
11.
F. of C., 4.4.1849.
12.
As I write, still in the same place that it was in 1845, but soon to be pulled down and replaced with new developments.
13.
F. of C., 4.4.1849.
14.
F. of C., 4.4.1849, letter from Job.
15.
Letter to F. of C., 14.8.1851. 16. C.M., 9.10.1856.
17.
F. of C., 1849.
18.
F. of C., 18.6.1845. 19. C.M., 31.2.1849. 20. C.M., 7.9.1848. 21. C.M., 31.1.1852.
22.
E.J. Eitel, op. cit., p. 277.
23.
W.D. Bernard, Narrative of the Voyages and Services of the Nemesis, London: Henry Colburn, 1844, p. 83.
24.
E.J. Eitel, op. cit., p. 35.
Notes to pp. 39 - 53
25.
E.J. Eitel, op. cit., p. 91. Also see Maurice Collis, Foreign Mud, London: Faber & Faber, 1946, p. 219.
26.
The merchants had already paid what had been demanded in the way of import dues to the Cantonese Customs authorities and felt that it was reasonable to demand compensation for their losses.
27.
Jack Beeching, The Chinese Opium Wars, London: Hutchinson, 1975, p. 98.
28.
Michael Levien (editor), op. cit., p. 83.
29.
W.D. Bernard, op. cit., p. 399. He is most likely the same man as on the monument whose name is spelt C. Hewet.
30.
W.D. Bernard, op. cit., p. 429.
31.
Michael Levien (editor), op. cit., p. 97.
32.
Michael Levien (editor), op. cit., p. 105.
33.
Michael Levien (editor), op. cit., pp. 100–102.
34.
Solomon Bard, Garrison Memorials at Happy Valley, Hong Kong: Antiquities and Monuments, Occasional Paper, No. 4, 1987.
35.
F. of C., 7.9.1843.
36.
Solomon Bard, op. cit., p. 58.
37.
W.D. Bernard, op. cit., p. 238, He states that: ‘For gallantry and steadiness of the single company cut off near San-yuan-li in May the 37th Regiment of the Madras Native Infantry were appointed a grenadier regiment’.
38.
Jack Beeching, op. cit., p. 116, quotation from the Indian Gazette.
39.
Jack Beeching, op. cit., pp. 59–160.
40.
F. of C., 17.3.1842.
41.
F. of C., 24.7.1850.
42.
F. of C., 18.7.1846.
43.
F. of C., 3.2.1847.
44.
G.B. Endacott, An Eastern Entrepot — A Collection of Documents Illustrating the History of Hong Kong,
London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1964, p. 132.
45.
F. of C., 4.8.1844.
46.
F. of C., 31.8.1844.
47.
F. of C., 10.7.1848.
48.
F. of C., 6.2.1850.
49.
David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire, London: Penguin, 2000, p. xix.
50.
David Cannadine, op. cit., p. 9.
51.
C.M., 11.1849. Taken from the periodical The Constitutional.
52.
David Cannadine, op. cit., p. 4.
53.
F. of C., 20.4.1848.
54.
David Cannadine, op. cit., p. 28.
55.
Edward Barrington de Fonblanque, Niphon and Pe-che-li; or Two Years in Japan and Northern China, London: Saunders, Otley and Co., 1863, p. 2.
56.
F. of C., 17.3.1842.
57.
F. of C., 17.3.1842.
58.
Henry T. Ellis R.N., Hong Kong to Manilla and the Lakes of Luzon, London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1859.
59.
David Cannadine, op. cit., p. 59.
60.
A.N. Wilson, The Victorians, London: Arrow Books, 2002, p. 120.
61.
A.N. Wilson, op. cit., p. 28.
62.
F. of C., 6.4.1850.
63.
F. of C., 23.2.1853.
64.
William Graham [11A/3/3], staff assistant surgeon, Bengal Establishment, died of fever 1843; Jane Fitzgerald [9/18/7], d. 1846, wife of Major Fitzgerald, 42nd Madras Native Light Infantry; Lieutenant
George Dixon [9/14/7], d. 1847, Bengal Rifles; Lieutenant Kelson [9/14/11], d. 1847, Ceylon Rifles; Lieutenant C.E. Kingsmill [9/1/10], d. 1848, Ceylon Rifles; Jane Mylius [7/10/16], d. 1848 of cholera, wife of Captain Rodney Mylius, Ceylon Rifles; Lieutenant Alfred Millar and two sons, Alfred and Frederick [9/17/2], d. 1849, Ceylon Rifles; Lieutenant F.T.F.A. MacDonnell [9/16/4], d. 1849, Ceylon Rifles; Lieutenant Gorege and Maria Dawson [16cii/6/25], d. 1851; Elizabeth Mitchell [9/9/13], d. 1852, niece of John Williams formerly assistant surgeon of the Madras Sappers and Miners and later hospital clerk of the hospital ship, HMS Minden; Elizabeth Johnston [9/1/4], d. 1858, ‘the last surviving daughter of Lieutenant W. Johnston, Commissariat Department, Madras Army’.
65. C.M., 9.11.1854.
66.
F. of C., 2.11.1850.
67.
George Pottinger, Sir Henry Pottinger: First Governor of Hong Kong, U.K.: Sutton Publishing, 1997, p. 79.
68.
E.J. Eitel, op. cit., p. 207.
69.
George Pottinger, op. cit., pp. 50, 127–28.
70.
E.J. Eitel, op. cit., p. 207.
71.
Maggie Keswick, The Thistle and the Jade, London: Octopus Books, 1982, p. 17.
72.
The inscription is very faded and difficult to read and his name may be wrongly spelled.
73.
Fred Dagenais, ‘John Fryer’s Early Years in China: First Impressions of Hong Kong and the Chinese People’, Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 30, 1990, p. 155.
74.
Dennys, Mayer et al., The Treaty Ports of China and Japan, London: Trubner & Co., 1867, p. 36.
Chapter 2
1.
A.D. Blue, ‘Chinese Emigration and the Deck Passenger Trade’, Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 10, 1970, p. 81.
2.
John Evelyn Fortunatus Wright, Diary. Unpublished original manuscript held at the P.R.O., Hong Kong,
No. HMMS 143/1/2. Date 27.9.1850.
3.
E.J. Eitel, op. cit., p. 273.
4.
E.J. Eitel, op. cit., p. 387.
5.
James Hayes, ‘The Nam Pak Hong: Commercial Association of Hong Kong 1868– 1968’, Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 19, 1979, p. 216.
6.
B.L. Ball, Rambles in Eastern Asia Including China and Manilla during Several Years Residence, Boston: James French & Co., 1856, p. 204.
7.
W. Harland, from The Letters of William Harland M.D. and William Aurelius Harland M.D., Unpublished manuscript held at the Hong Kong Library, No. R.A.S. 826 Har., Letter dated 20.3.1849.
8.
Wright Diary, op. cit., 23.12.1852. 9. C.M., 10.7.1856.
10.
J.W. Norton-Kyshe, The History of the Laws and Courts of Hong Kong, Vol. I, Hong Kong: Vetch & Co., 1898, p. 423 (quoting from a passage in the journal of T. Raikes Esq.).
11.
J.W. Norton-Kyshe, op. cit., p. 258.
12.
J.W. Norton-Kyshe, op. cit., p. 295.
13.
E.J. Eitel, op. cit. pp. 261–62. These words are said by Eitel as having been quoted verbatim by Sir John Bowring.
14.
G.B. Endacott, op. cit., p. 99.
15.
C.M., 15.7.1858. The previous quote attempting to analyze the problem is from the same editorial.
16.
J.W. Norton-Kyshe, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 383.
17.
The Times, 15.3.1859.
Notes to pp. 68 - 82
18. C.M., 23.6.1859.
19.
William Maxwell Wood, Fankwei or the ‘San Jacinto’ in the Seas of India, China and Japan, New York: Harper Bros., 1859, p. 478.
20.
William Maxwell Wood, op. cit., p. 491.
21.
E.J. Eitel, op. cit., p. 311.
22.
J.W. Norton-Kyshe, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 424. (He is quoting a letter written by Sir J. Bowring to the Liverpool Courier.)
23.
Rev. James Legge, op. cit., p. 185.
24.
Richard Brooks, The Long Arm of the Empire: Naval Brigades from the Crimea to the Boxer Rebellion, London: Constable, 1999, p. 87.
25.
George Wingrove Cooke, China: Being the ‘Times’ Special Correspondence from China in the Years 1857–1858, London: G. Routledge & Co., 1858, pp. 330–31.
26.
Dominick Harrod, op. cit., p. 60.
27.
D. Bonner-Smith and E.W.R. Lumby, The Second China War, 1856–1860, Naval Records Society, 1954, p. 360.
Chapter 3
1.
David Cannadine, op. cit., p. 63, quotation of a poem by Robert Southey.
2.
F. of C., 4.12.1850.
3.
David Cannadine, op. cit., p. 14. 4. C.M., 26.5.1859.
5. E.J. Eitel, op. cit., pp. 282–83. 6. C.M., 18.3.1852.
7. The names of the memoralists included Messrs. C.W. Bowra, G. Duddell, J.W. Brimelow, C. Markwich,
J.A.
Brooks and T.A. Lane who were all ship’s chandlers and auctioneers, and A.H. Fryer, W. Emeny and
H.
Marsh who were shopkeepers.
8. Trial by Jury Enactment, No. 7 of 1845, also E.J. Eitel, op. cit., p. 220. 9. C.M., 12.10.1848. 10. C.M., 12.10.1848.
11. F. of C., 10.1.1852. 12. C.M., 13.3.1859.
13.
Henry T. Ellis, op. cit., p. 6.
14.
Alfred Weatherhead, Life in Hong Kong, 1856–1859, transcript of talk given in London. Donated by the
family to the Hong Kong government and held by P.R.O., Hong Kong, No. HMMS 143/1/2.
15.
Henry T. Ellis, op. cit., p. 6.
16.
F. of C., 11.12.1844.
17.
F. of C., 18.12.1844.
18.
F. of C., 18.1.1851.
19.
Alfred Weatherhead, op. cit.
20.
W. Harland, op. cit., letter dated 24.12.1845.
21.
W. Harland, op. cit. p. 58.
22.
Advert., F. of C., 1.8.1852.
23.
Bayard Taylor, A Visit to India, China and Japan, Vol. 2, London: Ganesha Publishing, 2002, p. 217.
24.
Bayard Taylor, op. cit., p. 219.
25.
W. Harland, op. cit., p. 80.
26.
Wright, Diary, op. cit., P.R.O.
27.
Wright Diary, 18.9.1850.
28.
Wright Diary, 24.10.1850.
29.
Michael Levien (editor), op. cit., p. 143.
30.
F. of C., 14.2.1845.
31.
F. of C., 18.5.1850, quoted again in the paper, 29.5.1851.
32.
F. of C., 26.9.1849.
33.
G.B. Endacott and Dorothy She, The Diocese of Victoria, Hong Kong: A Hundred Years of Church History, Hong Kong: Kelly & Walsh, 1949, p. 35.
34.
F. of C., 22.6.1843.
35.
F. of C. 10.11.1846. 36. C.M., 2.8.1860.
Chapter 4
1.
F. of C., 1.12.1851.
2.
F. of C., 18.9.1852.
3.
Osmond Tiffaney Jr., The Cantonese Chinese, Boston: James Munroe & Co., 1849, p. 212.
4.
E.J. Eitel, op. cit., p. 370.
5.
F. of C., 9.1.1850.
6.
Henry T. Ellis, op. cit., p. 6.
7.
Solomon Bard, Traders of Hong Kong: Some Foreign Merchant Houses, Hong Kong: Urban Council,
1993, p. 82. 8. C.M., 10.1.1850.
9.
W. Harland, op. cit., p. 80.
10.
Carl Smith, Card Index.
11.
F. of C., 22.10.1851.
12.
Sword Family Papers, Pennsylvania Historical Society Manuscript Collection.
13.
Albert Smith, To China and Back, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1974, pp. 32–33.
14.
Albert Smith, op. cit., p. 56.
15.
F. of C., 25.10.1851.
16.
F. of C., 10.10.1851.
17.
Maggie Keswick, op. cit., p. 26.
18.
F. of C., 9.11.1844.
19.
F. of C., 8.1.1847 and 3.2.1847.
20.
F. of C., 14.10.48.
21.
F. of C., 30.1.1850.
22.
E.J. Eitel, op. cit., p. 330.
23.
Osmond Tiffaney Jr., op. cit., p. 213. 24. C.M., 13.7.1848.
25.
Frank Welsh, A History of Hong Kong, London: Harper Collins, 1997, p. 178.
26.
Fred Dagenais, op. cit., p. 155.
27.
Bayard Taylor, op. cit., p. 217.
28.
Alfred Weatherhead, op. cit.
29.
The merchant, N. Duus, advertised for sale, ‘A patent Water Closet for an upper story complete’ as early
as 5 August, 1845, and some of the grander merchants’ houses were advertised as ‘with water closets’. 30. C.M., 24.1.1850. 31. C.M., 14.10.1858.
Notes to pp. 109 - 128
32.
All the details in this and the previous two paragraphs have been taken from advertisements put by tradesmen on the front page of the Friend of China.
33.
B.L. Ball, op. cit., pp. 84–85 and 87.
34.
Bayard Taylor, op. cit., p. 217.
35.
Osmond Tiffaney Jr., op. cit., p. 215.
36.
Judith Balmer (editor), Thompson’s China: Travels and Adventures of a Nineteenth-Century Photographer, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1993, p. 5.
37.
Blue Book, 1852.
38.
Ivan Alexandrovich Goncharov, ‘Hong Kong, translation from a book chapter written by Ivan Alexandrovich Goncharov in 1853’, Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol.
38, 1998, p. 143. Goshkevitch was a Russian naval officer who was interned with his crew for a short time
during the Crimean War.
Chapter 5
1.
E.J. Eitel, op. cit., p. 233.
2.
F. of C., 24.5.1848.
3.
F. of C., 22.7.1844.
4.
According to the inscription on his chest tomb.
5.
F. of C., 5.1.1847.
6.
F. of C., 2.5.1846.
7.
F. of C., 29.8.1850.
8.
J.W. Norton-Kyshe, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 378.
9.
F. of C., 6.12.1856.
10.
Wright Diary, 31.5.1850.
11.
Albert Smith, op. cit., p. 63.
12.
Lindsay and May Ride, An East Indian Cemetery: Protestant Burials in Macao, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1996, p. 90.
13.
Wright Diary, 29.11.1851. Unpublished manuscript held at Public Records Office, Hong Kong.
14.
Carl Smith, Card Index.
15.
C.M. 21.11.1855 and C.M. 1.11.1855 for example. Both letters from Cerberus on the subject on Charles May’s brothels, the second one beginning: ‘Take the brothels in May’s Row for instance’.
16.
E.J. Eitel, op. cit., p. 337.
17.
J.W. Norton-Kyshe, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 504.
18.
P.D. Coates, The China Consuls, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 90.
19.
P.D. Coates, op. cit., pp. 97–99.
20.
P.D. Coates, op. cit., p. 58.
21.
P.D. Coates, op. cit., p. 92. 22. C.M., 13.8.1853.
23.
F. of C., 2.5.1849.
24.
Wright Diary, 14.9.1850.
25.
Carl Smith, Card Index.
26.
Wright Diary, 14.5.1850.
27.
Wright Diary, 4.5.1850.
28.
Memoirs of Hong Kong Natural History Society, No. 23, June 2000.
29.
Wright Diary, 25.8.1850.
30.
Wright Diary, 30.4.1850.
31.
Wright Diary, 25.6.1850.
32.
Wright Diary, 12 to 16.10.1850.
33.
Wright Diary, 29.7.1849.
34.
Wright Diary, 16.10.1850.
35.
Wright Diary, 29.5.1852.
36.
Wright Diary, 28.4.1851.
37.
Wright Diary, 6.8.1852.
38.
Wright Diary, 29.11.1851.
39.
Wright Diary, 15.2.1852.
40.
Wright Diary, 23.5.1852.
41.
F. of C., 8.6.1849, Obituary.
42.
Carl Smith, Card Index.
43.
F. of C., 15.7.1850.
44.
F. of C., 19.11.1851.
45.
Probate file of 9.12.1851, Carl Smith, Card Index.
46.
Fred Dagenais, op. cit., p. 156.
47.
J.W. Norton-Kyshe, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 249. 48. C.M., 24.8.1868.
49.
Carl Smith, Card Index.
50.
A. Kerrigan, Doctoral Dissertation, University of Hong Kong, 1991, quoted in Paul Lau, ‘Paramilitarism and the Use of Force in the Royal Hong Kong Police Force’ (Masters Dissertation, University of Hong Kong, 1994).
51. C.M., 24.2.1847.
52.
Blue Book, 1847.
53.
C. M., 27.3.1850, a letter signed by Idler headed Constitution of the Police Force. As the wording is
identical, it must be the source of the remarks quoted by Norton-Kyshe. 54. C.M., 31.8.1848.
55.
Carl Smith, Card Index, Probate File No. 246 of 1851.
56.
J.W. Norton-Kyshe, Vol. I, op. cit., p. 126.
57.
J.W. Norton-Kyshe, Vol. I, op. cit., p. 496, quoted from the Straits Times.
58.
J.W. Norton-Kyshe, Vol. I, op. cit., pp. 401–2.
59.
F. of C., 10.1.1849.
60.
F. of C., 9.5.1848.
61.
J.W. Norton-Kyshe, Vol. I, op. cit., p. 289.
62.
Keith Sinclair (editor), op. cit., p. 58. In 1850 James Bodell reckoned that the total strength was 1,200 including the 59th regiment, the sappers and miners, three companies of the Ceylon Regiment, two companies of Royal Artillery and two companies of Lascar Artillery.
63.
F. of C., 18.9.1845.
64.
E.J. Eitel, op. cit., p. 238.
65.
Maggie Keswick, op. cit., p. 26.
66.
F. of C., 16.1.1850.
67.
J.W. Norton-Kyshe, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 278. 68. C.M., 30.10.1851.
69.
G.B. Endacott, op. cit., pp. 118–19.
70.
F. of C., 17.2.1849.
71.
Dolly, Tales of Hong Kong, Hong Kong: Kelly and Walsh, 1902, p. 151.
72.
F. of C., 17.2.1847. 73. C.M., 6.3.1855.
Notes to pp. 143 - 156
Chapter 6
1. C.M., 9.10.1856. 2. C.M., 23.9.1858.
3.
Hong Kong Government Gazette, 3.5.1860.
4.
F. of C., 9.2.1850.
5.
Wright Diary, 30.8.1850.
6.
William Maxwell Wood, op. cit., p. 490.
7.
E.J. Eitel, op. cit., p. 341.
8.
F. of C., 9.10.1852.
9.
E.J. Eitel, op. cit., p. 350.
10.
E. Morrison, Memoirs of the Life of Robert Morrison, London: Ormei, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1839, p. 117.
11.
F. of C., 15.7.1846.
12.
F. of C., 11.8.1849.
13.
Lindsay and May Ride, op. cit., p. 244.
14.
W.D. Bernard, op. cit., p. 7.
15.
W.D. Bernard, op. cit., p. 242.
16.
Barbara-Sue White, Hong Kong: Somewhere between Earth and Heaven, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 48.
17.
B.L. Ball, Diary for 1.4.1849, op. cit.
18.
F. of C., 11.3.1848.
19.
Wright Diary, 21.11.1850.
20.
E.J. Eitel, op. cit., p. 350. 21. C.M., 16.9.1858.
22.
According to Carl Smith’s Card Index, Harland’s will is filed under C.O.129/43 No. 81, 20 October 1853.
23.
Iosif Antonovich Goshkevich, op. cit., p. 235.
24.
His headstone is difficult to make out. 25. C.M., 19.3.1855. 26. C.M., 10.3.1859.
27.
F. of C., 4.11.1848.
28.
F. of C., 25.9.1850.
29.
Mortality rates for the civil population: 1845, 5.5%; 1846, 7.5%; 1847, 3.9%; 1848, 12.9%; 1850, 10%; 1852, 8.4%; 1853, 9.4%. As given in the Blue Books.
30.
C.M., 19.12.1846, quoting from A Statistical Comparison of Hong Kong and Chusan.
31.
B.L. Ball, op. cit., p. 84.
32.
F. of C., 23.9.1848.
33.
F. of C., 1.11.1849.
34.
Keith Sinclair (editor), op. cit., p. 60. 35. C.M., 10.12.1857.
36.
F. of C., 26.6.1850.
37.
Wright Diary, 6.6.1852.
38.
C.M., April 1848.
39.
F. of C., 31.7.1844.
40.
F. of C., 9.8.1845.
41.
F. of C., 9.3.1844.
42.
F. of C., 18.11.1845.
43.
Wright Diary, 24.6.1849.
44.
F. of C., 6.3.1853.
45.
Wright Diary, 31.5.1851.
46.
F. of C., 25.7.1850.
Chapter 7
1.
Judith Balmer (editor), op. cit., p. 2.
2.
B. Lubbock, The China Clippers, Boston: Charles E. Lauriat, 1914, Appendix iii. (The names of both the above mentioned clippers appear on the same page).
3.
B. Lubbock, op. cit., p. 163.
4.
B. Lubbock, op. cit., p. 6.
5.
F. of C., 4.8.1845.
6.
A. Marshall (editor), The Singapore Letters of Benjamin Cook, Landmark Books, Singapore, 2004, p. 16.
7.
F. of C., 8.1.1845.
8.
Lieutenant Collinson, Letter to his father, op. cit.
9.
F. of C., 6.8.1853 and 10.8.1853.
10.
F. of C., 12.4.1851. 11. C.M., 5.4.1855.
12. Keith Sinclair (editor), op. cit., pp. 56–80 for an account of James Bodell’s time with the 59th Regiment
in Hong Kong. 13. C.M., 13.8.1855.
14.
Lindsay and May Ride, op. cit., pp. 111 and 263–64.
15.
Rear Admiral George Preble, The Opening of Japan, Norman: University of Oklahama Press, 1962, p. 307.
16.
Rear Admiral George Preble, op. cit., p. 316.
17.
F. of C., 4.6.1851. 18. C.M., 5.3.1857.
19.
F. of C., 8.1.1851.
20.
Carl Smith, Card Index.
21.
F. of C., 13.2.1850.
22.
F. of C., 21.8.1851. 23. C.M., 30.9.1854.
24. Albert Smith, op. cit., p. 44. 25. C.M., 15.1.1857.
26.
F. of C., 30.5.1849.
27.
F. of C., 4.8.1851.
28.
F. of C., 3.8.1850.
29.
Carl Smith, Card Index.
30.
F. of C., 23.11.1853.
31.
Carl Smith, Card Index.
32.
Wright Diary, 20.10.1851.
33.
B. Lubbock, op. cit., Appendix iii.
34.
Albert Smith, op. cit., p. 40. 35. C.M., 11.6.1857.
36.
Osmond Tiffany Jr., quoted by Barbara-Sue White, Hong Kong, op. cit., 1996, pp. 38–39.
37.
F. of C., 8.3.1854. 38. C.M., 2.2.1854.
Notes to pp. 181 - 193
39.
F. of C., 21.11.1852.
40.
F. of C., 13.12.1851.
41.
F. of C., 24.6.1854.
Chapter 8
1. F. of C., 29.9.1849. 2. C.M., 19.5.1859.
3. The Hong Kong Almanac and Directory of 1848 also included the following names as belonging to this category, none of whom are represented in the Cemetery: Charles Buckton, Mrs. Innes, McEwen & Co., Mackay & Co. and Robert Rutherford.
4. C.M., 10.7.1850.
5.
B.L. Ball, op. cit., p. 208.
6.
F. of C., 7.6.1845.
7.
Wright Diary for 1.1.1858.
8.
Wright Diary for 3.11.1851.
9.
E.J. Eitel, op. cit., p. 337.
10.
E.J. Eitel, op. cit., p. 347
11.
G.B. Endacott, An Eastern Entrepot, op. cit., p. 62.
12.
Carl Smith, A Sense of History: Studies in the Social and Urban History of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Educational Publishing Co., 1995, pp. 92–93.
13.
Carl Smith, ‘Notes on the So Kon Po Valley and Village’, Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 23, 1983, pp. 14–15.
14.
F. of C., 17.12.1845.
15.
G.B. Endacott, An Eastern Entrepot, op. cit., p. 154.
16.
This was situated on the corner where Ice House Street meets Queen’s Road. Ships could unload their ice at the quay alongside Queen’s Road which fronted the sea and the ice dragged across the road to the Ice House.
17.
F. of C., 6.4.1850.
18.
F. of C., 20.4.1849.
19.
G.B. Endacott, An Eastern Entrepot, op. cit., p. 153.
20.
F. of C., 6.4.1850.
21.
F. of C., 16.1.1851.
22.
Carl Smith, Card Index.
23.
Carl Smith, Card Index.
24.
F. of C., 2.7.1851. 25. C.M., 1.6.1851.
26.
F. of C., Advert, 20.1.1851.
27.
F. of C., Advert, 15.7.1846.
28.
F. of C., Advert, 28.4.1848.
29.
F. of C., 27.5.1848. 30. C.M., 31.7.1845. 31. C.M., 6.4.1854.
32.
F. of C., 14.4.1846.
33.
F. of C., 13.2.1850.
34.
F. of C., 11.10.1849, Programme of the Victoria Regatta Club’s First Meet.
35.
F. of C., 18.1.1851.
36.
Henry T. Ellis, op. cit., p. 6.
37.
F. of C., 11.6.1851.
38.
F. of C., 18.6.1851.
39.
Peter Ward Fay, op. cit., pp. 124–25.
40.
F. of C., 4.10.1851. 41. A.G.M., 24.7.1851.
42. Carl Smith, Card Index.
43. In 1854, when the Crimean War was being fought in Europe, the settlers in Hong Kong had thought themselves under threat from the Russian Navy, particularly when the British fleet was engaged elsewhere. The authorities had raised the first Volunteer service to train settlers as soldiers. In the first call, ninety-nine men volunteered from all walks of life and it was one of the few occasions the different classes met on equal footing. At the end of the Crimean War it was allowed to disintegrate, to be re-established in 1862.
44.
F. of C., 4.7.1850.
45.
Osmond Tiffany Jr., op. cit., quoted in Barbara-Sue White, Hong Kong, op. cit., pp. 39–40.
46.
B.L. Ball, op. cit., p. 81. 47. C.M., 23.9.1858.
48. Carl Smith, Card Index. 49. C.M., 10.12.1846.
50.
F. of C., 3.1.1849.
51.
Judith Balmer (editor), op. cit., p. 10.
52.
F. of C., 4.12.1850.
53.
F. of C., 23.11.1853.
54.
Letter to the editor of F. of C. dated 11.10.1857.
55.
F. of C., 25.1.1851.
56.
The yearly salaries of Chief Gaoler Robert Goodings and Inspector of the Police James Jarman were $125 at that date.
57.
F. of C., 2.8.1852.
58.
Wright Diary, 22.6.1849.
59.
Public Records Office, Kew, London, C.O.129/6.
60.
Carl Smith, Card Index.
61.
Carl Smith, Card Index.
Chapter 9
1. F. of C., 27.6.1846. 2. C.M., 18.3.1847. 3. C.M., 20.3.1847.
4. F. of C., 28.7.1847. 5. C.M., 24.7.1851. 6. C.M., 8.6.1848.
7.
F. of C., 7.5.1851.
8.
F. of C., 7.5.1851.
Notes to pp. 214 - 231
Chapter 10
1.
Inscription on his headstone.
2.
Lindsay and May Ride, op. cit, pp. 231–33.
3.
F. of C., 30.10.1845.
4.
F. of C., 3.12.1843. (It announced the death at the house of the Morrison Educational Society of the son of Charles Paulet Harris Esq. of Manchester.)
5.
William Tarrant, The Early History of Hong Kong to the Close of 1844 — A Series of Articles Reproduced from the ‘Friend of China’, Canton, Friend of China Office, 1862, p. 77.
6.
Susanna Hoe, op. cit., pp. 50–51.
7.
Anthony Sweeting, ‘Re-evaluating James Legge’s Contributions to Education in Hong Kong’, Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 45, 2005, pp. 5–25.
8.
Anthony Sweeting, op. cit., p. 9
9.
Cited in Helen Legge, James Legge: Missionary and Scholar, p. 37 and quoted in Anthony Sweeting, op. cit.
10.
Susanna Hoe, op. cit., p. 93.
11.
F. of C., 20.10.1852.
12.
Letter by Rev. James Legge published as part of the Report of the Morrison Education Society and reprinted in the editorial of the China Mail, 1.5.1867, also quoted in Anthony Sweeting, op. cit.
13.
Peter Hamilton, ‘An American Family’s Mission in East Asia, 1838–1936’, Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 49, 2009.
14.
E.J. Eitel, op. cit., p. 190.
15.
J.B. Jeter, An American Woman in China and Her Missionary Work There, Boston: D. Lothrop & Co, 1874, p. 182.
16.
J.B.Jetes, A Memoir of Henrietta Shuck: The First American Female Missionary to China, Boston: Gould Kendall & Lincoln, 1846, p. 188.
17.
FES/AMI Minute 727, 14.7.1839, quoted in Susanna Hoe, op. cit., p. 109.
18.
F. of C., Letter from Alpha dated 26.9.1844.
19.
J.B. Jeter, op. cit., pp. 198–99.
20.
J.B. Jeter, A Memoir of Henrietta Shuck, op. cit., p. 189.
21.
Hong Kong Register, 2.10.1849.
22.
K. Gutzlaff, Journal of Three Voyages along the Coast of China in 1831, 1832, & 1833, Ch’eng-Wen Publishing Company, Taipei, 1968, p. 9.
23.
Hong Kong Register, 2.10.1849.
24.
Jessie Lutz and Ray Rolland, Hakka Chinese Confront Protestant Christianity, 1850–1900, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1998, pp. 14–15.
25.
Arthur Waley, The Opium War through Chinese Eyes, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1958, p. 233.
26.
F. of C., 10.12.1853.
27.
F. of C., 29.7.1854.
28.
C.M., 13.11.1856, as told in a letter signed Observer.
29.
Susanna Hoe, op. cit., p. 96. 30. C.M., 7.3.1861.
31.
F. of C., 25.9.1850.
32.
F. of C., 22.2.51.
33.
Rev. George Smith, A Narrative of an Exploratory Visit to Each of the Consular Cities of China, London: Seeley, Burnside, & Seeley, 1847, p. 507.
34.
Rev. George Smith, op. cit., p. 512.
35.
Rev. George Smith, op. cit., p. 513.
36.
Rev. George Smith, op. cit., p. 508.
37.
Rev. George Smith, op. cit., p. 511.
38.
F. of C., 2.1.1853.
39.
F. of C., 18.6.1853. 40. C.M., 10.6.1847.
41.
F. of C., 30.1.1850.
42.
F. of C., 26.9.1849, Letter from James Legge and H.F. Hirschberg.
43.
Nora M. Clarke, The Governor’s Daughter Takes the Veil, Hong Kong: Cannossian Missions, 1980, p. 91.
Chapter 11
1.
Inscription on monument.
2.
Rear Admiral George Preble, op. cit., p. 270.
3.
Bayard Taylor, op. cit., pp. 214–15.
4.
B.L. Ball, op. cit., p. 93.
5.
B.L. Ball, op. cit. Diary extract for 10.9.1848, taken from Barbara-Sue White, Hong Kong, op. cit., p. 48.
6.
F. of C., 24.9.1853.
Chapter 12
1.
Keith Sinclair (editor), op. cit., p. 61.
2.
F. of C., 17.7.1850.
3.
F. of C., 29.11.1845.
4.
F. of C., 17.9.1845.
5.
F. of C., 6.6.1846.
6.
Robin McLachlan, op. cit., p. 80
7.
F. of C., 7.3.1849.
8.
F. of C., 27.11.1850.
9.
T.H. McGuffie (editor), Rank and File: The Common Soldier at Peace and War. 1642–1914, London: Hutchison, 1964, p. 23.
10.
F. of C., 23.8.1850.
11.
Peter Quennell (editor), Henry Mayhew’s London Underworld, London: Spring Books, London, 1950, p. 71.
12.
F. of C., 9.8.1845.
13.
Wright Diary, op. cit., 24.2.1850.
14.
F. of C., 24.2.1850.
15.
Michael Levien (editor), op. cit., p. 123.
16.
F. of C., 31.10.1846.
17.
F. of C., September 1845.
18.
J.W. Norton-Kyshe, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 323.
19.
J.W. Norton-Kyshe, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 376.
20.
Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, London: Penguin Books, London, 2003, p. 165.
21.
B. Lubbock, op. cit., p. 20.
22.
Michael Levien (editor), op. cit., pp. 166–67.
23.
F. of C., 25.9.1849.
Notes to pp. 257 - 276
24.
E.J. Eitel, op. cit., p. 270.
25.
F. of C., 12.11.1853.
26.
F. of C., 13.5.1854.
27.
C.M., 4.3.1854, quoted from The Times.
28.
F. of C., 24.3.1853, quoted from the Friend of India.
29.
Owen Rutter, The Pirate Wind, Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1986, p. 252.
30.
E.J. Eitel, op. cit., p. 339.
31.
Solomon Bard, Garrison Memorials in Hong Kong, op. cit., p. 59.
32.
Headstones or monuments to individual officers of the Royal Navy. 1) Commanders and masters: Captain William Thornton Bate [13/8/7] of the Royalist, Captain Troubridge [13/6/2] of the Amazon, Commander F. Woollcombe [13/7/3] of Nina, Commander John Ince [9/17/12] of the Pilot; Masters: John Cater [9/11/7] of the Vulture, Mansoon T. Sturgess [9/16/3] of the Espiegle, John Perry [20/11/1] of the Forester, John Hanter [13/9/1] of Prince Arthur of the Indian Navy; 2) Chief officers, lieutenants and mates: Francis Hourse [9/9/11] of Rob Roy, Frederick R. Hardinge [9/6/1] of the Encounter, J. Warre [9/12/3] and J.J. Dornford [9/14/5] of the Scout, Lieutenant K. Steart [10/6/1], commander of the Plover, F. Cuffnell [10/7/3], mate of the Otter, Lieutenant H. Bacon [10/2/2] of the Inflexible; 3) Paymasters and pursers: Peter Harrison Spry [9/17/15] of the Wolverine, Robert T. Raynes [9/1/3] of the Adventure, J. Cole [9/14/4]; Clerks: F. Boulter [9/11/8] of Stoke Deverel, Devon of the Vulture, M. Seymour Crouch [9/17/13] of the Hastings; 4) Surgeons: Robert Austin Bankier [13/1/1] of the Minden, Henry French [13/8/1] of the Winchester, David Davidson [9/14/2] of the Alligator; 5) Chaplains: Rev.
K.L. Halke [9/16/8] of the Cumbrian; 6) Midshipmen: Henry L. Barker [10/5/4] of the Tribune, E.C. Bryan [10/6/1], Vincent Edward Eyre [20/16/5] of the Calcutta.
33.
F. of C., 26.8.1849.
34.
F. of C., 28.8.1849.
35.
Iosif Antonovich Goshkevich, op. cit., p. 231.
36.
F. of C., 12.12.1849.
37.
F. of C., 22.9.1844.
38.
F. of C., 3.8.1843.
39.
F. of C., 5.9.1843.
40.
F. of C., 8.9.1843.
41.
Dominick Harrod (editor), op. cit., p. 36.
42.
Michael Levien (editor), op. cit., p. 121.
43.
F. of C., 12.12.1849.
Chapter 13
1.
Wright Diary, 28.1.1852.
2.
No grave has been found for Sarah Markwick.
3.
Inscription on her headstone. 4. C.M., 22.7.1857.
5.
Susanna Hoe, op. cit., p. 81.
6.
F. of C., 12.9.1854.
7.
F. of C., 26.6.1856.
8.
C.M., 5.11.1857, copied from the Philadelphia Inquirer.
9.
F. of C., Advert., 25.10.1854. 10. C.M., 28.1.1857.
11. Duncan Crow, Victorian Women, London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1871, pp. 146–47.
12.
F. of C., 19.12.1851.
13.
Alfred Weatherhead, op. cit.
14.
B.L. Ball, op. cit., quoted in Barbara-Sue White, Hong Kong, op. cit., p. 48.
15.
Vyvyen Brendon, Children of the Raj, London: Weidenfield & Nicholson, 2005, p. 40. 16. C.M., 23.9.1859.
17.
Wright Diary, 20.8.1852.
18.
Wright Diary, 14.10.1851. 19. C.M., 24.5.1855. 20. C.M., 7.5.1855.
21. F. of C., 11.6.1855. 22. C.M., 23.4.1856.
23.
Blue Book, 1853.
24.
Blue Book, 1853.
25.
Maggie Keswick, op. cit., p. 39.
26.
F. of C., 20.1.1844.
27.
F. of C., 10.12.1851. 28. C.M., 30.6.1859.
29.
F. of C., 10.12.1851.
30.
Albert Smith, op. cit., p. 36. 31. C.M., 14.6.1860.
32.
F. of C., 13.10.1849.
33.
F. of C., 10.10.1849.
34.
Carl Smith, A Sense of History, op. cit., pp. 266–75.
35.
Carl Smith, Card Index.
36.
Carl Smith, Chinese Christians: Elites, Middlemen and the Church in Hong Kong, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005, pp. 199–201.
37.
F. of C., 12.11.1851.
Chapter 14
1.
As reported in C.M., 1.3.1859.
2.
Rev. John Nevius, China and the Chinese, London: Sampson Low, Son and Marston, 1869, p. 283.
3.
Rev. John Nevius, op. cit., p. 275.
4.
A.B. Freeman-Mitford, The Attache at Peking, London: Macmillan & Co, 1900, p. 5.
5.
George Wingrove Cooke, op. cit., p. 60.
6.
Henry T. Ellis, op. cit., pp. 4–5.
7.
Blue Books, 1845 and 1855. 8. C.M., 14.1.1847. 9. C.M., 14.1.1847.
10.
F. of C., Overland Mail, 29.10.1849.
11.
F. of C., 29.9.1849.
12.
F. of C., 14.1.1847.
13.
For a detailed analysis of the problems in this field, see Christopher Munn’s excellent book, Anglo-China: Chinese People and British Rule in Hong Kong, 1841–1880, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009.
14.
F. of C., 30.1.1850.
Notes to pp. 292 - 308
15.
F. of C., 17.7.1850.
16.
Alfred Weatherhead, op. cit. 17. CM., 27.1.1847. 18. C.M., 17.1.1847.
19.
E.J. Eitel, op. cit., p. 237.
20.
F. of C., 22.10.1851. 21. C.M., 11.9.1854. 22. C.M., 13.8.1857.
23.
F. of C., 5.11.1851.
24.
E.J. Eitel, op. cit., p. 282.
25.
Yung Wing, My Life in China and America, New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1909, pp. 59–62.
Chapter 15
1. C.M., 21.5.1867.
2. E.J. Eitel, The Hong Kong Government Gazette, 2.4.1880, p. 468, Report on the Treatment of Paupers in
Hong Kong. 3. C.M., 28.1.1864. 4. C.M., 3.7.1862. 5. C.M., 18.9.1862.
6. C.M., 18.9.1862: All three quotes are taken from the same article. 7. C.M., 19.12.1861. 8. C.M., 9.5.1861. 9. C.M., 9.5.1861. 10. C.M., 22.11.1866. 11. D.P., 30.7.1868.
12. Dennys, Mayer et al., op. cit., p. 24. 13. C.M., 8.3.1866. 14. C.M., 28.11.1870. 15. C.M., 8.3.1866. 16. C.M., 15.3.1866. 17. D.P., 26.8.1870. 18. C.M., 22.3.1866. 19. D.P., 28.4.1870. 20. C.M., 8.12.1870. 21. C.M., 11.8.1859. 22. C.M., 22.11.1866.
23.
Rev. James Legge, ‘The Colony of Hong Kong’, op. cit.
24.
A.B. Freeman-Mitford, op. cit., p. 5.
25.
Joyce Stevens Smith, Matilda: Her Life and Legacy, Hong Kong: Matilda & War Memorial Hospital,
1988, p. 53. 26. C.M., 24.5.1869. 27. D.P., 4.54.64. 28. C.M., 13.5.1869. 29. C.M., 25.1.1866. 30. C.M., 26.9.1868.
31. A law had been passed allowing those criminals who chose to be branded with an arrow on the ear and deported to the mainland and thus escape punishment in Hong Kong so long as they were not caught returning to the Island.
32. C.M., 6.3.1869. 33. C.M., 2.8.1867. 34. C.M., 24.4.1862.
35. Illustrated London News, 24.1.1867. 36. C.M., 27.9.1866. 37. C.M., 30.10.1862.
38.
Isabella Bird, The Golden Cheronese and the Way Thither, London: John Murray, 1883, p. 42.
39.
C.M., 10.5.1866, quoted from the Pall Mall Gazette, 13.3.1866.
40.
Joyce Stevens Smith, op. cit., p. 33.
41.
Inscription on headstone.
42.
Joyce Stevens Smith, op. cit., p. 54. 43. D.P., 2.3.1864. 44. C.M., 9.1.1871. 45. C.M., 1.10.1867. 46. D.P., 29.8.1870.
47.
A.B. Freeman-Mitford, op. cit., pp. 5–6.
48.
Rev. James Legge, ‘The Colony of Hong Kong’, op. cit., p. 191.
49.
C.M., 31.5.1866, copied from the Evening Mail. 50. C.M., 1.3.1866.
51. The letter is addressed to the C.M., and dated 21.9.1870. 52. D.P., 22.10.1870. 53. D.P., 11.7.1871.
54. Dolly, op. cit., p. 99. 55. C.M., 29.10.1867. 56. C.M., 24.7.1869. 57. C.M., 24.8.1868. 58. C.M., 7.8.1869. 59. C.M., 20.4.1869. 60. D.P., 5.2.1868.
Chapter 16
1. D.P., 19.3.1870. 2. D.P., 13.1.1868. 3. D.P., 17.6.1866. 4. C.M., 26.11.1863. 5. D.P., 19.4.1870.
6. Dolly, op. cit., p. 21. 7. C.M., 4.12.1868.
8.
Joyce Stevens Smith, op. cit., p. 62.
9.
Joyce Stevens Smith, op. cit., p. 25. 10. D.P., 7.3.1870. 11. D.P., 6.8.1867.
Notes to pp. 326 - 348
12.
Joyce Stevens Smith, op. cit., p. 55.
13.
G.B. Endacott and Dorothy She, op. cit., pp. 35–37.
14.
Charles Drage, The Dragon Throne: Being the Lives of Edward and Cecil Bowra, London: Peter Dawnay Ltd, 1966, p. 65.
15.
W.K. Chan, The Making of Hong Kong’s Society: Three Studies of Class Formation in Early Hong Kong,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991, pp. 44–46. 16. C.M., 24.9.1870. 17. C.M., 30.4.1867.
18. Isabella Bird, op. cit, pp. 38–39. 19. C.M., 30.4.1867.
20. The Hong Kong Punch, 28.5.1867. 21. C.M., 29.5.1862. 22. C.M., 31.3.1864. 23. C.M., 24.10.1861. 24. C.M., 6.2.1862. 25. D.P., 2.6.1871. 26. C.M., 19.1.1869. 27. C.M., 6.6.1861. 28. C.M., 9.6.1861. 29. D.P., 10.3.1870. 30. C.M., 24.10.61. 31. C.M., 24.4.1862. 32. C.M., 19.6.1862. 33. C.M., 22.9.1864. 34. C.M., 22.9.1864.
35. Joyce Stevens Smith, op. cit., p. 71. 36. D.P., 31.3.1882. 37. D.P., 10.1.1868. 38. C.M., 26.3.1863. 39. C.M., 26.3.1863. 40. C.M., 29.8.1861. 41. C.M., 26.3.1863. 42. C.M., 19.5.1864. 43. C.M., 9.4.1863.
44. Dennys, Mayer et al., op. cit., p. 31. 45. D.P., 7.1.1868. 46. D.P., 1.10.1868.
47.
Maurice Collis, Wayfoong: The Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, London: Faber and Faber, 1965, pp. 22–25.
48.
Advertisement inserted into China Mail on 18.12.1873.
49.
Hong Kong Punch, 27.8.1867. 50. D.P., 3.11.1870. 51. C.M., 19.7.1866. 52. C.M., 20.2.1867.
53. Judith Balmer (editor), op. cit., p. 19. 54. C.M., 2.1.1856.
Chapter 17
1.
Frank Welsh, op. cit., p. 245.
2.
I have counted by name where obvious and by company, for instance assigning to the Jewish list those with Jewish-sounding names working for Oxford & Co. or Sassoons. Some, particularly Jews, may not have been recognized as such or may have been consigned to the German list.
3. C.M., 8.3.1866.
4.
Nadia H. Wright, Respected Citizens: The History of Armenians in Singapore and Malaysia, Australia: Amassia Publishing, 2003, pp. 284–85.
5.
Barbara-Sue White, Turbans & Traders: Hong Kong’s Indian Communities, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1994, pp. 21–22.
6.
Barbara-Sue White, Turbans & Traders, op. cit. pp. 28–29. 7. C.M., 19.2.1869.
8.
Brian Harrison (editor), The University of Hong Kong: The First Fifty Years, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1962, p. 17.
9.
Judith Balmer (editor), op. cit., pp. 18–19.
10.
Bert Becker, ‘German Business in Hong Kong before 1914’, Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 44, 2005, p. 105.
11.
Carl Smith, ‘The German-Speaking Community in Hong Kong, 1846–1918’, JRASHKB, Vol. 34, 1994,
p. 56, and Bert Becker, op. cit., pp. 91–114.
12.
Carl Smith, Card Index.
13.
P.D. Coates , op. cit., p. 90.
14.
P.D. Coates, op. cit., p. 203.
15.
P.D. Coates, op. cit., p. 203.
16.
Encyclopedia Sinica, Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, 1917 under Hance.
Chapter 18
1. D.P., 13.1.1864. 2. D.P., 31.3.1870. 3. C.M., 22.5.1868. 4. D.P., 2.3.1870. 5. C.M., 11.2.1867.
6. Nigel Cameron, The Milky Way, Hong Kong: The Dairy Farm Company Ltd., 1986, pp. 16–17. 7. C.M., 24.10.1861. 8. C.M., 9.4.1863.
9.
H.J. Lethbridge, Hong Kong: Stability and Change, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1978, notes 12 and 15, pp. 46–47. The facts about both Tonnochy and Lister are taken from this page.
10.
P. Kevin Mackeown, ‘The Hong Kong Mint: The History of an Early Engineering Experiment’, Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 47, 2007, pp. 41–75.
11.
C.M. 13.7.1865. Obituary Notice.
12.
An interesting and more detailed account of the setting up, operation and failure of the mint can be found
in P. Kevin MacKeown, op. cit. Some of the details used in my brief account have come from this article. 13. C.M., 9.3.1869.
14. See Gillian Bickley, The Golden Needle: The Biography of Frederick Stewart 1836–1889, Hong Kong: Institute for East-West Studies, The Baptist College, 1997, for a much fuller picture of his life.
Notes to pp. 373 - 390
15. Susanna Hoe, op. cit. p. 121, quoted from W.T. Featherstone, The Diocesan Boys School and Orphanage,
Hong Kong: The History and Records 1869–1929, Hong Kong: Ye Olde Printerie Ltd, 1930, p. 95. 16. C.M., 2.8.1867. 17. C.M., 4.2.1869.
18.
Susanna Hoe, op. cit., p. 113, quoted from E.J. Eitel, The Protestant Missions of Hong Kong, 1875, p. 26.
19.
Susanna Hoe, op. cit., p. 199, quoted from Female Missionary Intelligencer, Vol. 7–9, 1.11.1865.
20.
Joyce Stevens Smith, op. cit., p. 54. 21. H.K.T., 14.2.1876.
22. C.M., 28.8.1867. Advertisement for St. Saviour’s School on its reopening for the second year of operation. 23. C.M. 25.7.1867.
24.
Frank Welsh, op. cit., p. 239.
25.
Rev. James Legge, ‘The Colony of Hong Kong’, op. cit., p. 179. 26. D.P., 12.7.1871. 27. C.M., 25.7.1867. 28. C.M., 21.2.1867. 29. C.M., 30.5.1867. 30. C.M., 22.11.1870. 31. D.P., 11.5.1871. 32. C.M., 18.7.1861. 33. C.M., 29.3.1867. 34. C.M., 30.3.1865. 35. C.M., 2.2.1869.
36. C.M. Police Report, 26.1.1867. 37. C.M., 4.11.1867. 38. C.M., 15.7.1869.
39. Hong Kong Punch, 27.8.1867. 40. D.P., 17.9.1868. 41. C.M., 3.6.1867. 42. C.M., 22.5.1868.
43.
Document at Public Records Office.
44.
Rev. James Legge, op. cit., p. 179.
45.
C.H. Crisswell and G. Watson, The Royal Hong Kong Police, 1841–1945, London: Macmillan, 1982,
p. 42. 46. C.M., 20.6.1860.
47.
J.W. Norton-Kyshe, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 47.
48.
C.M., 18.6.1874. (According to the obituary.) 49. C.M., 16.5.1868. 50. D.P., 22.9.1868. 51. C.M., 2.2.1867.
52. J.W. Norton-Kyshe, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 234.
Chapter 19
1. J.W. Norton-Kyshe, op. cit., Vol. I. Table at front giving the arrival dates of solicitors. 2. C.M., 3.2.1857.
3.
J.W. Norton-Kyshe, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 186.
4.
C.M., 21.1.1871 for his obituary.
5.
Who’s Who in the Far East (June) 1906–1907.
6.
Walter Greenwood, ‘John Joseph Francis, Citizen of Hong Kong, A Biographical Note’, Journal of the
Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 26, 1986, p. 33. 7. C.M., 27.1.1871.
8.
Austin Coates, Whampoa: Ships on the Shore, Hong Kong: South China Morning Post, 1980, p. 107.
9.
Dennys, Mayer et al., op. cit. p. 16.
10.
Isabella Bird, op. cit., p. 39. 11. C.M., 4.12.1867. 12. C.M., 28.6.1867. 13. C.M., 8.6.1868. 14. C.M., 16.7.1869. 15. D.P., 3.10.1868. 16. C.M., 2.2.1871. 17. C.M., 21.10.1870. 18. D.P., 8.2.1868. 19. D.P., 27.6.1871. 20. C.M., 17.12.1868. 21. C.M., 13.9.1866. 22. C.M., 1.2.1871.
23.
Hong Kong Government Gazette, 9.6.1880, p. 466.
24.
Saul David, Victoria’s Wars: The Rise of Empire, London: Penguin Books, 2007, pp. 378–79. 25. C.M., 26.3.1863. 26. C.M., 14.5.1863. 27. C.M., 14.5.1863. 28. C.M., 2.11.1865. 29. C.M., 26.2.1867. 30. C.M., 25.3.1869. 31. C.M., 20.2.1862. 32. C.M., 7.5.1862.
33. Dennys, Mayer et al., op. cit., p. 38. 34. C.M., 23.1.1874. 35. D.P., 27.7.1870. 36. D.P., 4.4.1870. 37. C.M., 22.7.1857. 38. C.M., 18.7.1868. 39. C.M., 2.21.1868. 40. C.M., 12.11.1868. 41. C.M. 2.6.1868. 42. C.M., 28.5.1868. 43. C.M., 19.5.1869. 44. C.M., 27.4.1870.
Chapter 20
1.
Major Henry Knollys, op. cit., p. 1.
2.
Mortimer Menpes, op. cit., p. 117.
3.
John Stuart Thomson, The Chinese, London: T. Werner Laurie, 1909, p. 20.
Notes to pp. 420 - 449
4.
Mortimer Menpes, op. cit., pp. 112–13.
5.
Captain Gordon Casserly, The Land of the Boxers, London: Longmans & Green & Co, 1903, p. 54.
6.
John Stuart Thomson, op. cit., p. 8.
7.
John Stuart Thomson, op. cit. The above quotations all come from this book, Chapter 1.
8.
Susannah Hoe, op. cit., p. 119.
9.
Major Henry Knollys, op. cit., p. 4. 10. H.K.T., 2.12.1881.
11.
Arnold Wright and H.A. Cartwright (editors), Twentieth Century Impressions of Hong Kong, Singapore: Graham Brash, 1990, p. 341.
12.
Rudyard Kipling, From Sea to Sea, quoted in Barbara-Sue White, Hong Kong, op. cit., p. 105.
13.
All the unattributed above quotations come from Major Henry Knollys, op. cit., Ch. 1.
14.
Mortimer Menpes, op. cit., pp. 134–35.
15.
John Stuart Thomson, op. cit., p. 36.
16.
Alistair Macmillan, Seaports of the Far East, United Kingdom: W.H. & L. Collingridge, 1923.
17.
Mortimer Menpes, op. cit., p. 117.
18.
J.W. Norton-Kyshe, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 366. 19. H.K.T., 16.6.1881.
20.
This information comes from a headstone erected in memory of the five children.
21.
H.J. Lethbridge, Hard Graft in Hong Kong, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1985, p. 32. 22. H.K.T., 8.7.1881.
23.
Spencer Robinson, Festina Lente: A History of the Royal Hong Kong Golf Club, Hong Kong: The Royal Hong Kong Golf Club, 1986, pp. 6–8.
24.
Dolly, op. cit., p. 95.
25.
Betty, Intercepted Letters, as quoted in Barbara-Sue White, Hong Kong, op. cit., pp. 147–48.
26.
Capt. Gordon Casserly, op. cit., pp. 190–91.
27.
Major Heny Knollys, op. cit., p. 29.
28.
Dolly, op. cit., p. 98.
29.
Major Heny Knollys, op. cit., p. 28.
30.
Major Heny Knollys, op. cit., p. 31. 31. H.K.T., 3.2.1883.
32. Susanna Hoe, op. cit, pp. 141–53. 33. D.P., 7.9.1886.
34.
Nadia Wright, op. cit., pp. 193–94.
35.
W. Somerset Maugham, On a Chinese Screen, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1984, p. 31.
36.
W. Somerset Maugham, op. cit., pp. 68–69.
Chapter 21
1.
K.S.L.I., p. 20 reported in Jerome Platt et al., The Whitewash Brigade: The Hong Kong Plague 1894, London: Dix, Noonan, Webb Ltd, 1998, p. 49.
2.
Minutes of the Permanent Committee of the Sanitary Board, 18.9.94 as reported in D.P., 27.9.1894.
3.
Jerome Platt et al., op. cit., p. 41. 4. D.P., 1.6.1886.
5.
Frena Bloomfield, Scandals and Disasters of Hong Kong, Hong Kong: South China Morning Post, 1985, p. 69.
6.
Arnold Wright and H.A. Cartwright (editors), op. cit., p. 93. 7. C.M., 29.11.1867.
8.
E.J. Eitel, op. cit., p. 528.
9.
Gordon C.F. Cumming, op. cit., pp. 10–11.
10.
Isabella Bird, op. cit., p. 33. 11. H.K.T., 20.2.1882.
12.
Inscription on headstone.
13.
Quoted from Frena Bloomfield, op. cit., p. 98.
Chapter 22
1. H.K.T., 1.12.1881. 2. H.K.T., 20.6.1881.
3. Bert Becker, op. cit., pp. 93–94. 4. H.K.T., 17.10.1881.
5.
Mortimer Menpes, op. cit., p. 66.
6.
C.M. Advert. Dated 3.2.1871. 7. H.K.T., 1.12.1881. 8. H.K.T., 8.4.1890.
9.
Carl Smith, ‘The German Speaking Community in Hong Kong’, op. cit., p. 13.
10.
Carl Smith, ‘The German Congregation in Hong Kong until 1914’, Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of
the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 15, 1975, p. 293. 11. C.M., 5.5.1874.
12.
Charles Drage, op. cit., p. 70.
13.
Solomon Bard, Traders of Hong Kong, op. cit., p. 70.
14.
Frena Bloomfield, op. cit., pp. 45–53. 15. H.K.T., 25.11.1911.
16.
Austin Coates, Fountain of Light, p. 129.
17.
Both these stories are taken from by Austin Coates, A Mountain of Light, London: Heinemann, 1977,
p. 21. 18. H.K.T., 27.6.1881.
Chapter 23
1.
Nigel Cameron, op. cit., p. 28.
2.
Frena Bloomfield, op. cit., pp. 81–88. I am indebted to Bloomfield for this account of the beginnings of the K.C.R.C.
3.
Robin Hutcheon, The Merchants of Shameen: The Story of Deacon & Co., 1990, p. 74.
Chapter 24
1.
F. of C., 18.6.1845.
2.
C. Haffner, The Craft in the East, District Grand Lodge of Hong Kong and the Far East, 1997, pp. 18–19.
3.
T.M. Casey, Full Circle: A History of the Royal Sussex Lodge No. 501, 1844–1989, pp. 9–10.
4.
Geoffrey Robley Sayer, Hong Kong 1841–1862: Birth, Adolescence and Coming of Age, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1980, p. 205.
5.
F. of C., 1.7.1846.
Notes to pp. 484 - 515
6.
F. of C. Notice signed by V. Stanton dated 21.5.1847.
7.
F. of C., 29.10.1846.
8.
F. of C., 13.10.1853.
9.
E.J. Eitel, op. cit., pp. 283–84.
10.
F. of C., 9.2.1853.
11.
Dennys, Mayer et al., op. cit., p. 27. 12. H.K.T., 16.1.1882. 13. C.M., 23.1.1874. 14. H.K.T., 5.1.1883. 15. C.M., 3.2.1881.
16. Carl Smith, Chinese Christians, op. cit., p. 137.
Chapter 25
1.
Major Henry Knollys, op. cit., Ch. 1.
2.
Other names of those with ‘Wong Ching’ on their inscriptions include Ng Ping Shan [5/3/34], Wong Suk Po [26/1/2] d. 1909 aged eight, Poon Kwok She [16/4/11], Wan Chun Po [2/3/14], Chan Hoi Tung [1/1/10] and Lam Ping Moon [16A/1/4].
3.
Blue Book, 1892. 4. D.P., 20.10.1896. 5. H.K.T., 30.1.1905, D.P., 25.1.1906.
6.
Arnold Wright & H.A. Cartwright (editors), op. cit., p. 187.
7.
Carl Smith, Chinese Christians, op. cit., pp. 98–99. Also Joseph S.P. Ting, A Preliminary Study, Prominent Figures in the Hong Kong Cemetery, Hong Kong: Hong Kong Institute of Contemporary Culture, 2008, pp. 54–55.
8.
Tse Tsan Tai, The Chinese Republic: Secret History of the Revolution, Hong Kong: South China Morning Post, p. 16.
9.
Arnold Wright & H.A. Cartwright (editors), op. cit., p. 176.
10.
16 November 2007, according to the SCMP of that day.
Chapter 26
1. From the archives of the Church Missionary Society, East Asia (Group 1) Missions, Vol. 2, CCH O
63/1-14 quoted in Rev. Carl T. Smith, A Sense of History, op. cit., p. 295. 2. C.M., 1.3.1855. 3. C.M., 2.5.1860.
4. Denny, Mayer et al., op. cit., p. 31. 5. D.P., 29.8.1870.
6.
Quoted in Vicky Lee, Being Eurasian: Memories across Racial Divides, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004, p. 20.
7.
Quoted in Peter Hall, In the Web, Wirral, England: Peter Hall, 1992, p. 123.
8.
David Faure (editor), Hong Kong: A Reader in Social History, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 530.
9.
John Stuart Thomson, op. cit., p. 21.
10.
P.D. Coates, op. cit., pp. 441–42.
11.
Peter Hall, op. cit., p. 154.
12.
Vicky Lee, op. cit., pp. 17–18.
13.
Peter Hall, op. cit., pp. 153–54.
14.
Frances Tse Liu, Ho Kom Tong: A Man for All Seasons, Hong Kong: Compradore House, 2003. The information for the details about the Ho family comes largely from this book.
15.
Vaudine England, The Quest of Noel Croucher: Hong Kong’s Quiet Philanthropist, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1998, p. 96.
16.
Tony Banham, ‘Hong Kong Volunteer Defense Corps, Number 3 (Machine Gun) Company’, Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 45, 2005, p. 118.
17.
Heard in a lecture given by a fellow prisoner of war and great friend, Arthur Gomez.
Chapter 27
1.
G. Tradescant Lay, The Chinese as They Are, Paternoster Row, London: William Bell & Co., 1841, pp. 140–41.
2.
Judith Balmer (editor), op. cit., 1993, p. 17.
Chapter 28
1.
Robin Hutcheon, op. cit., pp. 91–92 and 100.
2.
Frederick Percy Franklin, In Hong Kong 1941–1945, Australia: Boolarong Press, 2002, p. 33.
3.
Wings over Hong Kong, Hong Kong: Odyssey Book, Pacific Century Publishers, 1997, p. 178.
4.
John Fleming, op. cit., 2002.
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Index
1. Those people in the index, whose names are written in bold, are buried in the Hong Kong Cemetery
2. Where there are differences in the spelling of names between the original sources (newspapers etc.) and the inscriptions in the Cemetery, the names are spelled as they are shown in the Cemetery. Chinese names, where known, are also given in the main text as they appear on the inscriptions in the Cemetery.
3. Where two names are presented in the index on the same line in the same reference, they are children buried in the same grave with their siblings or parents).
4. I have only included the names of ships with special significance.
Abbe, Elizabeth, 311
Aberdeen Tunnel, 26, 444, 531, 541
A Chung, P. & O. comprador, 282
Addyman, Anne, wife of Robert, 395
Addyman, Robert, 395
Adnams, Grace Caroline, granddaughter of James, 199
Adnams, James, saddle and harness maker, 199
Agabeg, Avietick Lazar, 19, 352
Agabeg, M., 484
Aguilar, Major-General, 6, 135, 244
Ahlmann, Jens Anton, 462–3, 515–6
Ahlmann, Ah Mui Atkinson, daughter of Jens Anton, 516
Ahlmann, Ah Peng Atkinson, daughter of Jens Anton, 516
Ah-lum, E-sing Bakery, 68–9, 150, 300
Ah Moon, dock owner, Whampoa, 203
Ahwee, Albert, businessman, 451, 510–1
Ahwee, Marie, 510–1
Aitken, Alexander Geddes, 454–6
Aitken, Jane, sister of Alexander, 455
Aitken, Kitty, see Lammert, Kate
Aitken, Rutherford, son of Kitty, 455
A-Kuk Takyan, 496
Alford, Bishop of Victoria, 282, 373
Alford, Edward, 346
Alfred, Prince, Duke of Edinburgh, visit of, 336, 544
Alice Memorial Hospital, 285, 356, 468, 501, 505, 509–10
Ambrosi, Aloysius, Rev., missionary, 233 American Baptist Missionary Union, see under
Missions to Hong Kong American business in Hong Kong, 239 American monuments in Cemetery (U.S.N.
Powhatan), 237 Perry Mission to open Japan to U.S. shipping, 235–9
Americans, first in Cemetery (crew of U.S.N.
Constellation), 235
Anaesthetics, first use of in Hong Kong, 149
Anderson, David, blacksmith, 199 Anderson, Henry Graham, Eurasian, see Hung Kam
Ning Anderson, Insp., H.K. Police, 541 Anderson, Robert, H.K. Police, 450 Anglican Church, 15–6, 34, 85–6, 219, 232
and Freemasonry, 485, 488 Pew allocation and seating at St. John’s
Cathedral, 85 St. Andrew’s Church, Kowloon, 352–3, 532 St. John’s Cathedral, 85, 127, 133, 157, 256, 326,
327, 441
Anglo-Chinese College (Malacca/Hong Kong), 124,
214, 217, 222, 230, 508 Ankatell, Oliver, Lieut., Indian Army, 43 Anstey, Thomas Chisholm, Attorney General, 65–7,
145 Anthony, Edward, 488 Apcar, Apcar Gabriel, broker, 438
Apcar, Arratoon, son of A.V. Apcar, 453 Apcar Family Shipping Line, 398 Armenians in the Hong Kong Cemetery, 349–53, 438, 453, 484 Armstrong, Emily, nee Caldwell, wife of John Henry, 466 Armstrong, John Henry, son of John Martin, 466 Armstrong, John Martin, auctioneer, 466, 472 Army, 1845–60 commissariat storekeepers, 249–51 desertions, 254–5 Expeditionary Force, 1st Opium War, 40–4 Expeditionary Force, 2nd Opium War, 70–2 food and conditions, 252, 432 losses in 2nd Opium War, 260
non-commissioned officers (sergeants), 249 officers, 246–9
privates, 242, 251–5, 409 Army, 1861–75, 406–9 Club and Reading Room, 409 Army, post-1876, 428, 431–3 funerals, 431 Army, British average age of death, 269, 274, 411, 43 Indian Army Bengal Volunteers, 43 Ceylon Regiment, 53, 87 Madras Artillery, 54 Madras Native Light Infantry, 247 Medical Staff Corps, 244 monuments (marked below with an asterisk) to soldiers in the Cemetery, 244–6 position of the army in society, 244–6 ranking of regiments, 87, 193, 247 Regiments of Infantry 18th Irish Regiment, 54 55th Regiment, 10, 42, 45 59th Regiment, 154, 242, 243 95th Regiment, 242 98th Regiment, 42, 136, 247, 249, 266 King’s Shropshire Light Infantry, 443–4 Royal Artillery, 87, 247 6th Battery, 12th Brigade, 244 10th Battery, 244 Royal Engineers, 247 Royal Marines, 71, 87, 247 Army & Navy Gazette, 408 Arnhold, Karberg & Co., 457, 458
Arrakiel, Agah Catchick, 352 Arsenic, 69, 132, 150, 300 Artisans, 92, 183–209, 294 Ash, William Sword, clerk, 87, 100 Ashing, pilot, 261 Asiatic Society, see under Societies Atcherley, William, Lieut., R.N., 41 Atherley, Elizabeth Ann, 411 Au Shing Cheung, 518 Auctioneers and large storekeepers, 87, 183–90, 472, 473 lifestyle and status, 190–6 Austin, Thomas, Capt., merchant navy, 488 Austin-Gardiner, Charles Mildmay, 60 Austin-Gardiner, Hugh Percy, 60 Austin-Gardiner, John G., Colonial Secretary, 60 Austrian Lloyd Steam Navigation Co., 357 Autey, Frederick Augustus, son of William, 390 Autey, William, manager, Gas Works, 390–1 Avery, Latham B., Capt., merchant navy, 240 Ayres, Phineas, Dr., 366, 490
Baas, Anna Maria, wife of Gerardus, 412
Baas, Gerardus, tavern keeper, 412
Baboo, Samuel, H.K. Police, 54
Bacon, H., Lieut., R.N., 262, 565
Badenoch, Alexander, ship builder, 204
Bain, Anna, wife of George Murray, 471
Bain, George Murray, owner, China Mail, 471
Bain, Horace Murray, son of George, 471
Baker, Gladys, 537
Ball, Benjamin Lincoln, Dr., 109, 148, 153, 186, 201, 220, 240, 277
Ball, Dyer, Rev., missionary, 220, 224, 230
Ball, Frederick Joseph Dyer, son of Rev. Dyer, 220
Ball, Lucy Dyer, wife of Rev. Dyer, 220
Ball, Mills Bridgeman Dyer, son of Rev. Dyer, 220
Ball, W., Madras Commissariat Establishment, 87
Bank Shipping Line, 476
Banker, Hee Mong, wife of William, 496
Banker, William Swallow, merchant, 496
Bankers, 101, 343–6
Bankier, Robert Austin, surgeon, R.N., 54, 150, 152, 565
Barker, Henry L., midshipman, R.N., 71, 260, 565
Barnes, Leonard, coach builder, 412
Barnes, Sarah Jane, wife of Leonard, 412
Barnes-Lawrence, Lionel, Capt., R.N., harbour master, 448
Barnicot, William, civil service, 125
Barton, Charles, 120, 204
Barton, Sarah, wife of Zephaniah, 19
Barton, Zephaniah, merchant, 19
Basel Evangelical Mission, see under Missions to Hong Kong
Bate, William Thornton, Capt., R.N., 70–1, 256, 565
Bateson, Charles, merchant, 95
Batley, Olive, 537
Baxter, Susan Harriet Sophia, 374
Baynes, John, tavern keeper, 402
Beard, Nathaniel, Capt., merchant navy, 51
Beasley, James, turnkey, 388
Beavan, Francis, Lieut., 43
Beazley, Martha, sister of George Duddell, 188
Beazley, Thomas G., husband of Martha, 188
Belilios, Emanuel Raphael, merchant, 317, 350, 355–6, 446, 467
Belilios Public School for Girls, 356
Ben Shipping Line, 476
Benning, Frederick Harold, son of Thomas, 446
Benning, Thomas, Capt., merchant navy, 446
Bentham, Jeremy, 64
Bently, Daniel, Sergeant, Royal Irish, 249
Berger, Franciska, 437–8
Berlin Missionary Societies, see under Missions to Hong Kong
Bertelsen, Heinrich Christian, Capt., merchant navy, 459
Bertrand, Alice, 316
Bevan, Arthur F., Capt., 39th Madras Native Infantry, 43
Bevans, George, 265
Bird, Isabella, 310, 328, 397, 449
Birley & Co, 343
Blackhead, Frederick, ships’ chandler, see Schwarzkopf, Frederick
Blackhead, T.B., see Schwarzkopf, T.B.
Blackwood, E., tavern keeper, 401
Blaik, Sergeant, Royal Sappers and Miners, 249
Blake, Sir Henry, Governor, 20, 420, 426, 427, 458, 494
Bloggs, Eli, pirate, 301
Bodell, James, Sergeant, 59th Regt., 16, 169, 243
Boffey, William, tailor, 473
Bohm, Albert and Elsa, children of Paul, 459
Bohm, Maria, wife of Paul, 459 Bohm, Paul, hotelier, 459
Boileau, John Theophilus, assistant surgeon, Bengal Volunteers, 43
Boliver, Private, Shropshire Regt., 444
Bonham, Sir George, Governor, 65, 74, 85, 194, 295
Bonne, Hermann, Pustau & Co., 357
Bonnett, Jane, 19
Booth, C.G., Rev., 488
Borboen, Louis, boarding house keeper, 413
Borboen, Rosalie, wife of Louis, 413
Bose, Carl von, merchant, 458
Bose, Emmi von, wife of Carl, 458
Bosman, Charles Henry, merchant, father of Sir Robert Ho Tung, 351, 516
Botanical Gardens, the, 190, 366–7, 371
Boulden, Thomas, R.N., 330
Boulter, F., 565
Bowen, Frederick, turnkey, 387
Bowen, T.F., Ensign, 59th Regt., 72
Bowra, Charles, storekeeper, 185, 190, 200
Bowra, Edward, Imperial Customs Service, 327, 464
Bowra, Miss, 83
Bowring, Emily, daughter of John, 233–4
Bowring, Sir John, Governor, 64–6, 103, 123, 184, 233–4, 279, 365, 368–9, 486
Bowring, Lady, wife of John, 69
Boxer, Sophia C., 21–2, 251
Boxer, William, husband of Sophia, 22, 251
Boxer Insurgency, 426
Boyd, Edmund, 412
Boyd, James, Capt., merchant navy, 399
Boyd, Jane, wife of Edmund, 399
Boyland, Mary, 275
Braga, J.P., 477
Braga, Joao J. Roza, Victoria Dispensary, 198–9
Braga, Jose Maria, 530
Braine, C.J., merchant, 107
Brand, Robert, U.S. Navy, 235
Brayfield, Thomas H.G., 533
Brereton, Laura Frances, wife of William, 395
Brereton, William, Crown prosecutor, 395
Brewitt, Paul, 472
Brice, George, Dr., surgeon, 150, 151
Brice, Winefred Astor, daughter of George, 150–1
Brice, Yearn Anow, wife of George, 150
Bridgeman, Orlando, Lieut., 98th Regt., 5, 247
Bridges, William T., Dr., barrister, 66, 143, 486
Brigade of the Royal Marines, 71 Bright, Luke, Sergeant, H.K. Police, 377 Bristow, William, tavern keeper, 360 British Chamber of Commerce, Canton, 39, 102 British School, Nathan Rd., 456 British Social Order, memory of, 48–50 British superiority and national pride, feelings of, 50–2 Battle of Waterloo, 51 Brodersen, Charles, Pustau & Co., 357 Brodersen, Eliza, daughter of Charles, 357 Brodie, James, son of William, 10 Brodie, William, Commander, R.N., 9 Brohmann, Paul Kurt, 25 Brokers, 345–6 Brooke, James, Rajah, 256, 306 Brooks, James, auctioneer, 132, 306 Brooks, Mary, wife of George Stanley, 162 Brothels, 34, 67, 123, 157, 205, 231, 275, 280–2, 400, Japanese brothels, 527 and relaxation for the lower classes, 136, 180, 379, 398 Brown, David, destitute, 404 Brown, James, solicitor, 35, 36, 87, 143 Brown, Mrs., wife of Samuel, 217 Brown, Robert Morrison, son of Samuel, 216–7 Brown, Samuel R., Rev., missionary, 216–7, 230 Browne, James, barkeeper, 413 Browne, Thomas, Capt., merchant navy, 309 Bruce, Frederick, the Hon, Colonial Secretary, 139 Bruce, J., Capt., H.K. Police, 54, 208 Brunker, Major-General, 409 Brunker, Mrs., 409 Bryan, E.C., midshipman, R.N., 71, 565 Bryne, James, H.K. Police, 136 Bulow, Bernhard von, Chancellor, 457 Burd, John, merchant, 97–8, 175 Burn, Walter Scott, 265 Burnaby, General, 431 Burnie, Edward, Capt., merchant navy, 469 Burns, Robert, trader, 258 Bush, F.T., U.S. Consul, 239 Bush & Co., 239 Businessmen, new-style, 341 Bussche, Wilhelm von der, tavern keeper, 359
Caine, William, Major, chief magistrate, 67, 82, 114, 117, 121, 124, 138, 141, 212, 360
Cairns, John, owner of the Friend of China, 78, 145 Caldwell, Daniel, son of Daniel Richard, 285 Caldwell, Daniel Richard, Registrar General, 65–6, 127, 144, 296, 383, 466, 489, 492 and the Freemasons, 489, 492 his life story, 119–23 and the legalization of gambling, 367–8, 380 and the Royal Navy, 172, 187–8 Caldwell, Emily, 466 Caldwell, Henry, brother of Daniel Richard, 285 Caldwell, Mary Ayow, wife of Daniel Richard, 120–1, 128, 282, 284–5, 460, 466, 467–8, 496 Caldwell, Richard Henry, son of Daniel Richard, 120 Campbell, Archibald, merchant, Dent’s, 107 Campbell, Hugh Archibald, Capt., R.A., 176 Campbell, J., Ensign, 55th Regt., 43 Cane, Dr., 324 Cannadine, David, 48, 73–4 Cantlie, Dr., 430, 468 Canton Chamber of Commerce, 39 Canton merchants and 1st Opium War, 36–8, 43, 70 Canton mob rioting, 46, 362 Canton Register, 38 Cards, visiting, 80, 114 Carlowitz, Richard, 357 Carlowitz & Co., 357, 458, 499 Carr, Eliza Steavens, 207 Carr, Henry John, tavern keeper, 207 Carr, John, editor of Friend of China, 144 Carter, Archibald, merchant, 7 Carter, Julia, 414 Carter, Thomas, ships’ carpenter, 460 Castilla, Henry de, Capt., merchant navy, 172–4, 273, 486 Castilla, Mrs., nee Couper, 273 Castilla, Wilhelmina de, daughter of Henry, 172, 273 Castle Shipping Line, 476 Castro, Leonardo d’Almada e, chief clerk, 116–7, 234 Cater, John, 565 Cay, Isabella Dyce and Dundas, wife and son of Robert, 113, 115, 270 Cay, Robert Dundas, Registrar General, 107, 115, 270 Cemeteries All Souls Cemetery, Kensal Rise, London, 20
Hong Kong Cemetery burial fees, 11 burial record book, 12 Christian Cemetery Ordinance of 1909, 24 dedication of the Cemetery, 25 granite markers for paupers, 13, 404 Islamic Cemetery, 3 Japanese graves, 25, 522–8 Jewish Cemetery, 3, 17, 26, 76, 350, 355 mortuary chapel, 7, 12 motifs, 16, 20, 21 neglect of cemeteries, 18 non-Christian burials, 24
Parsee Cemetery, 2, 3, 26, 57, 350, 353, 354,
490 pauper graves, 11, 13, 135, 212 Pere Lachaise Cemetery, Paris, 20 St. Michael’s Roman Catholic Cemetery, 3, 15,
116 types of headstone and imagery, 1845–59,
15–18 types of headstone and imagery, 1860–80, 19 types of headstone and imagery, 1880–1900,
20–5 Wan Chai Protestant and Catholic cemeteries,
8, 9, 10, 12–13, 18, 40, 246 Western Cemetery, 10, 11, 18 Wing Yuen Eurasian Cemetery, 518, 519
Central Bank of India, 377
Central School/Queen’s College, 220, 356, 371–2,
513, 517, 519 Chalmers, Helen, wife of John, 218–9, 468 Chalmers, James Legge, son of John, 219 Chalmers, John, Rev., missionary, 219, 468 Chan Hoi Tung, 575 Chan Kai Ming, 518–9 Chan U Hon, son of Kai Ming, 518–9 Chan W.K., 327 Chan Yui Tong, 24 Chandler, Ralph, Rear-Admiral, U.S. Navy, 453 Chape, George, Capt., merchant navy, 176–7 Chape, George and William, sons of George
above, 176 Chartered Mercantile Bank of India, London and China, 499, 503
Chater, Sir Catchick Paul, 346, 350, 446, 453, 468 and Dairy Farm Co., 480 and Freemasonry in S. China, 491 his life story, 352–3 and H.K. & Whampoa Dock Co., 477 and the H.K. Electric Co., 477–8 and Kowloon, 479 and Mody, Sir Hormusjee, 354–5
Chater, Joseph Theophilus, 352–3, 491 Chau Yau Kam, 497 Cheltenham College, 502, 503 Chen married to Wan, 499 Chiang Kai-shek, 504 Children, 1845–60, 274–5
1860–75, 414–5
post-1875, 436–7 children of ‘Old Timers’, 465–6 Eurasian children, 512–3 post-WWII refugee children, 535
China Congregational Church, 504 China Fire Insurance Co., 342, 476 China & Japan Telephone Co., 422 China Light and Power, see under Utilities, 479 China Mail newspaper, 27, 34, 316, 546
China Sugar Refinery Co., 421, 422, 509
China Traders Insurance Co., 476 Chinese emigration to the New World, see under Emigration guilds, 295
merchants/businessmen, 6, 59–61, 301, 320,
350, 376, 383, 427
triads, 122, 132, 290, 380, 500, 539 Chinese Chamber of Commerce, 512, 515, 518–9 Chinese in Hong Kong Cemetery
civil servants, 499–500
members of the Christian-educated group/
associates of Dr. Sun Yat Sen, 502–5 overseas returnees, 509–11 professionals and businessmen, 500–2 women married to Chinese men, 496–7 women married to Europeans, 495–6
Chinese Medical Association, 505 Chinese protected women
A Choy/David Jardine/John Dent, 280 Achune/Phillips, children Minnie, Jane, Thomas and Daisy, 464
Ah Choi/George Lockhart, 515 Ah Chun/Ryrie, daughters Maggie and Eva, 463 Ah Junka/Rowan, 464
Atkinson/Ahlmann, 463, 516 Atkinson, Ah Mui/Hughes, 463, 516 Atkinson, Ah Peng/Perkins/Sassoon, 516
Attai, 280–1 Lam Yu-shi/Sliman, 463 Ng Ah-mui/Ahlmann, 463 Ng Akew/Endicott, 282–4
Ngan Achoey/Wilkins, 403 Sam Ho/Hopkins, 464 Tai Yau/Snelling, 463 Young A-chun/Culloch, 464 Chit system, 57, 110–11 Choa Chee Bee, 509 Choa, George, Dr., 510 Choa, Gerald, Dr., 510 Choa Leep Chee, 509, 510 Chomley, F., merchant, 344 Chow Chung Shee, 497, 499 Chow Yik Chong, 501 Christensen, Anton, Great Northern Telegraph Co., 391 Christian Cemetery Ordinance of 1909, see under Cemeteries: Hong Kong Cemetery Christian Union, see under Missions to Hong Kong Chu Sien Ting, 502 Chui Apou, pirate, 249, 257 Chun Moon, wife of Chui Apou, 497 Chun Tai Kwong, 202 Chung Foong Ching, sister of King U, 501 Chung King U, Dr., 501 Church of England, see under Anglican Church Citizen Householders, 75 Civil service, 1845–60 clerks, 125–9 corruption, 141, 212, 379 lesser civil servants, 129–34 lifestyle of, 127–9 problems of the civil service, 138–42 top civil servants, 13, 113–9, 127, 139 1861–75, 364–6, 368, 369 post-1876, 452 Clark, seaman, 135 Clark, John, deputy surveyor, 394 Clarke, Ambrose, Capt., 469 Clarke, Goscombe, Sergeant, H.K. Police, 431 Clarke, Jabez, Capt., merchant navy, 399 Clarke, Sally, 437 Clayton, George, Capt., 99th Regt., 64
Cleaver, leading seaman, 540–1 Clerks and assistants in merchant houses, see under Merchants Cleverly, Charles St. George, 14, 43, 102, 118, 144, 483 Cleverly, Osmond, Capt., merchant navy, brother of Charles St. George, 171 Clifton, Emma Elizabeth, daughter of Samuel, 130 Clifton, Elizabeth (Quin), wife of Samuel Clifton, 129, 130 Clifton, Fanny, nee Jones, wife of Inspector Samuel, 130 Clifton, Samuel, Insp., H.K. Police, 130 Clifton, Samuel, son of Samuel, 131 Clinton, Lord Arthur Pelham, see Furneaux, Mary Jane Clinton, Lord Richard Pelham, Lieut., R.N., 42, 337 Cliques, 31, 75, 77–9, 92, 139–40, 152, 328, 330 Clubs Chinese Club, 515, 517 Club Germania, 356, 357, 491 Club Lusitano (Portuguese), 349 Cricket Club, 112, 195–6, Croquet Club, 321, 411 Hong Kong Club, 34, 81–2, 94, 111–2, 166, 196, 313, 333–5, 423 Hong Kong Golf Club, 343, 433, 435 Hong Kong Jockey Club, 403, 480, 531 Hong Kong Yacht Club, 355 Indian Club, 533 Ladies Golf Club, 433 Ladies Recreation Club, 433 Ladies Tennis Club, 435
Rifle Club, 305–6
Swimming Club, 328, 410 Victoria Recreation Club, 329 Victoria Regatta Club, 197–8, 318 Victoria Rowing Club, 193 Coates, Austin, 471 Cobban, Capt., merchant navy, 456, 469 Cockell, James, Lieut., R.N., 72 Cohen, C.C. & Co., 319 Cohen, E., 196 Cole, J., 565 Colledge, Dr., 215 Collins, Elizabeth, wife of James, 129 Collier, Sir Francis, Rear Admiral, R.N., 261 Collins, James, chief gaoler, 129
Collins, William, 487 Collinson, Richard, Capt., R.N., 8, 34, 165, 256 Compradors, 110–1, 185, 281–2, 245, 294, 318, 356 Compton, Charles Spencer, merchant, 104 Consular Establishment, 123–5 Cook, Benjamin, 164 Cook, J.B., ships’ chandler, 170 Cook, J.H, R.N., 483 Cook, John H., ships’ chandler, 170 Cooke, George Wingrove, Times Correspondent, 70, 261, 288 Corrigan, James, merchant navy, 209 Corruption, 27, 66, 113, 141, 137, 212, 429–30, 530 Wan Chai Squeezing Club, 378–80 Costa, Augustus Frederick Hipplyto da, Capt., R.E., 248, 249 Costa, Polycarpo Andreas da, 492–3 Costerton, Mr., banker, 76 Cotton Spinning, Weaving & Dyeing Co., 422, 516 Coughtrie J.B., 480 Couper, John, ships’ carpenter, 170, 172–3, 202, 394 Couper, John Cardew, son of John above, 203, 273 Couper, Mrs., wife of John, 274 Cowan, Hugh, Capt., merchant navy, 312 Cowper, William, Capt., Royal Engineers, 118 Crane, Mabel, wife of T.C., 472 Crane, T.C., 472 Crawford, D.R., 316 Crawford, H., 446 Crawford, Lindsay Stanford Lamont, 465, 472 Crawford, Ninian, 184–5, 472 Crawford, Ninian Robert, 465, 467, 472 Cree, Edward, surgeon, R.N., 9, 82, 83, 106, 149, 253, 256, 257, 267 Cresswell, Samuel Gurney, midshipman, R.N., 7, 71, 267 Crimps and runners, 180, 212, 258, 383, 401, 402–3 Crinolines and corsets, 108, 274, 410 Crisswell, Colin, 385 Croker, J.W., 392, 492 Crooke, James, merchant, 95 Cropper, Henry, commission agent, 13 Crosby, Nathaniel, Capt., ships’ chandler, 239 Crouch, M. Seymour, 565 Croucher, Noel, 520 Cuffnell, F., 565 Culloch, David, merchant, 463–4 Cumming, Gordon, Mrs., 23, 449 Cunningham, J.W., 488
D’Aguilar, Major-General, 6, 134–5, 244–5 Daini Tatsumaru (Japanese ship), Captain of, 525 Dairy Farm Company, 342, 479–80 Dalrymple, Henry Liston, 343, 477–8, 479 Dalziel, Eliza, 19 D’Amaral, Governor of Macau, 4 Danby, William, architect, 490 Dane, Dr., chief staff surgeon, 151 Dane, Eva, daughter of Dr., 151 Danvers, Robert, Ensign, 70th Bengal Native Infantry, 72 Darrell, Henry, barman, 414 Darwin, Charles, 52, 265, 514 Davidson, David, assistant surgeon, R.N., 13, 150, 565 Davis, H.W., broker, 467, 468–9 Davis, Henry, merchant, 96 Davis, Sir John, Governor, 11, 31, 102, 104, 114–5, 138–42, 184, 209, 220, 486 Dawson, George, Lieut., Ceylon Rifles, 156–7, 554 Dawson, Maria, wife of George, 156–7, 554 Day, John, Attorney General, 143, 144 Deacon, Albert, 475 Deacon, Edmund, son of Ernest, 475 Deacon, Ernest, 475, 476 Deacon, James, 475 Deacon, Richard, 475 Dean, Theodosia, nee Barker, wife of William, 221–3 Dean, William, Dr., missionary, 218–9, 221–2 Deane, Walter, Supt., H.K. Police, 490 Deane, William, Police Chief, 368, 379 Dennys, N.B., editor, 319, 490 Dent, Edward, merchant, 329 Dent, John, merchant, 102, 280 Dent, Lancelot, 39 Dent & Co., 96, 99, 340–1, 344, 393–4 Dermer, Charlie, barman, 437 Destitute Europeans, 180, 190, 211–3, 387, 400, 404–6 Society for the Relief of the Destitute Sick, see under Societies Dickie, Henry, 422 Dickson, George, blacksmith, 204 Dill, Francis, Colonial Surgeon, 146, 147, 149, 152, 404 Diocesan Boys’ and Girls’ Schools, 389, 403, 464, 494, 513, 516, 520
Diocesan Home and Orphanage, 176–7, 429, 495, 510, 513, 515, 523 Diocesan Native Female Training School (Diocesan Female School), 372–4 Dirom, Gray & Co., 96 District Watch, 320, 383 Dittmer, Friedrich Christian, merchant, 458 Dixon, George, 554 Doctors, 10, 93, 127, 145–51, 183, 361 their response to illnesses, 153–7 Dodds, James, Sergeant, H.K. Police, 384, 385 Doherty, Thomas, P. & O., 12, 13 Dolan, William, sail maker, 23, 204 Doller, William Henry, Capt., merchant navy, 175 Dolly, Collection of Verses, 318, 323, 424 Donaldson, Hannah, wife of William, 447 Donaldson, Thomas, civil servant, 367 Donaldson, William, 447 Donaldson, Willie and Ernest, sons of William and Hannah, 447 Donnelly, Olivia, daughter of W., 251 Donnelly, W., Royal Engineers, 251 Donovan, Charles, Great Northern Telegraph Co., 391–2 Dornford, J.J., 565 Douglas, Francis, head gaoler, 387–8, 483 Douglas, Mary, wife of Francis, 388 Douglas Line of steamships, 126, 197–8, 396, 469, 471 Downes, Lieut., R.N., 167 Downie, James, Capt., merchant navy, 159, 160 Doyle, Sir Francis, 406 Drake, F., sexton, 17 Drewes, T.W., pilot, 437 Drinker, Sandwith, merchant, 487 Drinker & Heyl, 191 Drunkenness, see under Illnesses: abuse of alcohol Dublin Magazine, 153 Duddell, George, 140, 185, 188, 190, 192, 207, 278 Duddell, Hester nee Coates, wife of George, 278 Duke of Somerset, 329 Dumayne, Thomas, Capt., merchant navy, 56 Duncan, Catherine, wife of Robert, ships’ carpenter, 394 Duncan, Robert, ships’ carpenter, 394–5 Duncan, Robert, sail maker, 204 Dunlop, Archibald, banker, 101 Dunlop, Ludovic, banker, 360
Dunn, Mrs., 409–10 Dunphy, William, 465 Dupuig, Monsieur, shopkeeper, 108 Duus, Nicolay, merchant, 97–9, 484
Dwyer, Lieut, Ceylon Rifles, 248
East India Company, 38, 54–5, 105, 176 Eastern Extension Telegraph Company, 472 Edgar, Galstraun, 438 Edge, John C., Rev., missionary, 467, 503 Edgell, Harry, Capt., R.N., 260 Edger, Joseph, merchant, 102, 175, 208–9 Education in Hong Kong, 371–2 education of Chinese Girls, 372–5 Roman Catholic Education, see under Roman Catholic Church in Hong Kong: schools Edwards, Thomas, 514–5 Eitel, E.J., Rev., 139, 146, 149, 295, 300, 373–4, 405, 406, 456–7 Eitel, Herbert John, son of E.J., 457 Ellis, H.T., 52, 77, 78, 97, 194, 288 Elwell, Elias, Capt., merchant navy, 16, 240 Emigration Chinese emigration to the New World, 59–62 emigrating from Britain, reasons for, 52–3 Emmanuel, Joseph, 491 Endicott, Ann, nee Russell, wife of James, 169–70 Endicott, James Bridges, Capt., merchant navy, 169, 174, 282, 283–4, 394 Estarico, Mr., 489 Exhibition of 1851 at the Crystal Palace, 37 Ewing, Alexander, foreman, 455 Ewing, Alick, son of the Alexander, 455 Eyre, Vincent Edward, midshipman, R.N., 71, 261
Falconer, Alexander, 494
Falconer, G., shopkeeper, 384
Farncomb, Edward, sheriff, 140
Faunch, H.J., hotelier, 461
Faunch, Nellie, daughter of H.J., 461
Faunch, Tai Hoo, wife of H.J., 461
Fearon, Samuel, 39
Felgate, Daniel, naval purveyor, 250
Fenwick, George, 492
Ferguson, Henrietta, wife of deputy inspector of hospitals, 151
Fever, see under Illnesses
Fincher, Teddie, 520
Fires in Hong Kong, 448–51
Racecourse fire, 450–1
First Opium War, see under Opium War, 1st Fischer, Caroline, wife of Maximilian, 162 Fischer, Maximilian, commander, P. & O., 161–2, 316 Fitzgerald, Jane, 553 Fletcher, May Tsoi Yan Siu, wife of W.J.B., 514 Fletcher, W.J.B., 514 Fletcher & Co., 341 Flunkeyism and toadyism, 74, 84 Fokey Bill, pirate, 309 Fong, Emma E., nee Howse, wife of Walter, 500 Fong, Walter N., Rev., 500–1 Foote, Francis, Commissary General, 249–50 Fortune, Robert, 11, 107 Fox, Benjamin, Lieut., R.N., 40 Fox, Rawson & Co., 484 Fox, Stephen, H.K. Police, 450 Francis, John Joseph, barrister, 389–90, 461 Franke, Ernest, Pustau & Co., 357 Franklin, Frederick P., 533–4 Franklyn, William, shopkeeper, 108, 185–6, 191, 484 Franklyn, William and Alfred, sons of William above, 36, 185 Fraser-Smith, Robert, journalist, 424, 471–2, 476 Free trade, 38, 44, 45 Freeman-Mitford, A.B., 314 Freemasonry, 21, 483–94 Knights of St. John, 489 lodges Eothen Mark Lodge, 489, 491 Lodge of St. John, 489, 490 Perseverance Lodge, 487 Royal Sussex Lodge, 484, 486 United services Lodge, 384, 447 Victoria Lodge, 487 Zetland Lodge, 484, 486, 487, 489 Rose Croix Chapter of St. Mary Magdelene, 489, 490 French, Henry, surgeon, H.M.S. Winchester, 150, 563 Friend of China newspaper, 27, 34, 51, 55, 67, 83–4, 102 Frizell, George, 493 Fronde, La, French navy, monument, 448 Fryer, John, 27, 104, 131–2
Funck, Frederick, 212 Funfgeld, Johann Jacob, merchant, 357 Fung Ku Shau, son of the Ping Shan, 498–9
Fung Ping Shan/Fung Po Ha/Fung Chew, 498–9
Fung Wa Ch’un, 446 Furen Literary Society, see under Societies
Furneaux, Mary Jane/Lord Arthur Pelham Clinton,
impersonator, 337 Fussell, R.S.R., merchant, 19, 359
Gambling in Hong Kong, legalization of, 376–7
Gandin, Philip, merchant navy, 397–8
Garde, Mary Ann, alias Welch, 414
Gardner, Mrs., wife of William, 359
Gardner, William, tavern keeper, 359
Garrett, Miss, milliner, 271
Gaskell, Mrs., wife of William, 82
Gaskell, William, solicitor, 87, 126, 127, 143–4, 389, 390
Gee, Mary Carr, 61
Genaehr, Ferdinand, Rev., missionary, 228
Georg, Erich Carl, 491
Germans in the Hong Kong Cemetery, 351, 356, 440–1, 453, 459
Ghaut Serang, 98
Gibbs, T.A., merchant, 484
Gibbs & Co., 484
Gibson, Hugh Cross, clerk, P. & O., 162
Gidley, Eugenie Esmeralda Ernestine, daughter of Thomas Henry, 445
Gidley, Thomas Henry, H.K. Police, 445
Gill, Henry, 265
Gillard, Arthur, 520
Gittins, Billy, son of Henry, 516, 520
Gittins, Dorothy, nee Ahlmann, 516
Gittins, Henry, alias Hung Tsin, 516
Gittins, Jean, wife of Billy, daughter of Sir Robert Hotung, 520
Glawson, Theodore, seaman, 400
Gockchin, Philip, 510
Gocklock, James, 510
Goddard, Charles, midshipman, R.N., 261–2
Godwin, Mrs., wife of William, widow of Charles Jensen, 461
Godwin, William, 461
Gold, the discovery of, in California and Australia, 59, 61–2
Goodings, Collingwood, son of Robert, 131
Goodings, Mary Anne, nee Marsh, first wife of Robert, 131, 134
Goodings, Mary (Roe), second wife of Robert, 134, 271
Goodings, Robert, chief gaoler, 131, 134–5, 271
Goodlake, Mr., magistrate, 308, 404
Gordon, R.E., Major, 64
Gordon, Robert, 269
Gordon, Rosalia Clarincia, wife of Robert, 269
Gorman, R., runner, 401
Goshkevich, Iosif Antonovich, Russian Navy, 150, 263
Goucher, Ernest, H.K. Police, 430–1
Gough, General, 225
Gourdin, O’Driscoll, 493
Governor, augmented powers of, 364–6
Gower, E., Capt., Volunteer, 540
Graham, P., Lieut., 536
Graham, William, 553
Grandpre, Supt., H.K. Police, 128, 492
Grassman, Sherk, destitute seaman, 405
Graves, W.M.T., U.S. Navy, 237
Gray, Mr., turnkey, 404
Gray, William Forsyth, merchant, 13, 96
Great Exhibition of 1851, 37
Great Northern Telegraph Co., 391
Greaves, Josephine Ryrie, Eurasian, 532
Green, Frederick, Attorney General, 144
Green Island Cement Co., 422, 479
Gresson St. shoot-out, 430–1
Grossmann, Christian, merchant, 457
Grove, Frank, engineer, 481–2
Gutzlaff, Karl, Rev., missionary, 116, 219, 224–7, 247–8, 366, 522–3
Gutzlaff, Mary, second wife of the Karl, 221–2
Guy, Major-General, 408
Hacket, Frederick, Lieut., 59th Regt., 72 Hagar, Charles, Rev., missionary, 503 Haggart, John, engineer, 396 Hale, Alfred W.B., R.A.F., 536 Halke, K.L., Rev., 264, 565 Hall, Arthur, Eurasian, 532 Hall, Mabel, nee Gittins, 520
Hall, Stephen/Sin Tak Fan, Eurasian, 520
Hall, Stephen Prentis, shipyard owner, 392
Hamberg, Louisa, nee Mutander, wife of Theodore, 227 Hamberg, Theodore, Rev., missionary, 226–8 Hamilton, James, merchant navy, 399 Hamilton, William, merchant navy, 399 Hammond, Elmer, missionary, 481 Hance, A.G.B., son of Henry, 465
Hance, Anne Edith, nee Baylis, first wife of Henry, 361–2
Hance, Charlotte Page, nee Kneebone, second wife of A.G.B., 365
Hance, Henry Fletcher, consular service, 127, 150, 361–3, 465
Hancock, Herbert, merchant, 360
Handley, Edward Richard, gas fitter, 391
Handy, Lewin, Lieut., U.S. Navy, 235
Hannay, John, military turnkey, 135
Hanter, John, 565
Hardinge, Frederick R., Lieut., R.N., 80, 262, 565
Hardinge, Lord, uncle of Frederick, 262
Harland, William Aurelius, Colonial Surgeon, 127, 145–9, 152, 285, 361, 486
Harrewyn, Auguste, 413
Harriot, Henry, Capt., 39th Madras Native Infantry, 43
Harris, Thomas, Capt., R.N., 265
Harris, Vere Pallett, 216
Harsant, Frederick May, brother of Milton, 200
Harsant, Milton A., clerk to Bowra & Humphreys, 200, 487
Hartigan, Dr., 468
Harvie, Andrew, foreman, 455
Haskell, Steven, Capt., merchant navy, 240
Havilland, T. De, Capt., 55th Regt., 43
Hawkey, John Pullin, Dr., principal medical officer of the forces, 151
Hawkins, T.E., bartender, 402
Hay, Dalrymple, Commander, R.N., 172, 257
Hayward, Eliza, wife of Chief Gaeoler George, 428
Hayward, George, chief gaoler, 428
Hayward, George Cresswell, son of Chief Gaoler George, 428
Hazeland, Ernest, son of Frances Innes, 390
Hazeland, Frances Innes, Crown solicitor, 334, 389–90
Hazeland, Francis Arthur, son of Frances Innes, 389
Hazeland, John Innes, son of Frances Innes, 389, 390
Hazeland, Margarretta, wife of Frances Innes, 389
Heang, Margaret Jane, 497
Heard & Co., 475
Heath, Sir Louis, General, 537
Heaton, G.H., Capt., marine surveyor, 179
Heaton, Margaret, wife of E.H., 179
Hegan & Co., 7
Hendricks, James, Capt., U.S. Navy, 236
Hennessy, Sir John Pope, Governor, 390, 405
Hertslet, Charlotte, wife of Frederick, 123
Hertslet, Frederick Lewis, consular service, 123
Hesse, Prince William of, 486
Hesse Ehlers & Co. (Hesse & Co.), 458
Hewitt (Hewet on inscription), C., Lieut., R.M., 41
Hickson, Miss, 83
Higgin, Frances, nursing sister, 447
Higgins, William, turnkey, 388
Hillier, Ann Eliza and Hugh, children of Charles, 117–8
Hillier, Charles Batten, chief magistrate, 66, 117–8, 124, 212, 360
Hillier, Mrs., wife of Charles Batten, 118
Hirschberg, Dr., missionary, 230, 232, 467
Ho Fook, brother to Sir R. Hotung, 518
Ho Fuk Tong, Rev., father of Ho Fook and Ho Kom Tong, 469, 508
Ho Kom Tong, brother to Sir R. Hotung, 518
Ho Miu Ling, sister of Sir Kai Ho Kai, 469
Ho Tung, Robert, see Hotung, Robert
Ho Wyson, brother of Sir Kai Ho Kai, 493
Hoare, Joseph, Bishop of Hong Kong, 447
Hobson, Benjamin, Dr., missionary, 152, 216–7, 218, 467
Hobson, Jane, first wife of Benjamin, 152, 217, 218
Hobson, John Abbay, son of Benjamin, 152, 216
Hobson, Rachel, nee Morrison, second wife of John, 217
Hoey, George and Mary Elizabeth, relations of
H.E., 201
Hoey, H.E., hotel keeper, 201–2
Hoey, Mary Ann, daughter of H.E., 201, 275
Hogan, H.K. Police, 208–9
Hogg, A.H., 499
Hogg, Eleanor, daughter of A.H., 499
Hogg, Joseph, 439
Hogg & Co., 342
Holdforth, Charles, 140, 190, 212
Holliday & Wise, 191, 200
Holmes, John, of Holmes and Bingham, storekeepers, 185, 249
Holmes, Mr., sausage maker, 200 Holt Shipping Line (Glen Steamers), 359 Holworthy, Wilmot Wadesdon, commissariat, 307, 380 Honda, Mr., Japanese, 524
Hong Kong, as a crossroads/travel hub of the Far
East, 359–60 Hong Kong Almanacs for 1848 and 1850, 97, 98, 99, 151, 184, 188, 189 Hong Kong Association, 323 Hong Kong, Canton & Macao Steamboat Co. (from 1860s onwards), 488, 492–3, 502 Hong Kong, Canton & Macao Steam Packet Co. (1847–1860), 169, 171 Hong Kong Club, see under Clubs Hong Kong Docks Aberdeen Dock, 393, 477 Great Dock Swindle of Robert Duncan, 394–6 Hong Kong & Whampoa Dock Company, 393, 394, 421, 476–7 Union Dock Company, 174, 308, 371, 393, 396, 455 Hong Kong Gas Co., 344 Hong Kong Electric Company, 422, 477, 478 Hong Kong Hotel, 342, 422, 463 Hong Kong & Kowloon Wharf and Godown Co., 421 Hong Kong Medical Society, 468 Hong Kong Police Force, 129–38, 205, 211, 313, 376–85, 428–33, 450, 453 Central Police Station, 378–9 Police constables and turnkeys, 113, 134–8 Scotland Yard, police from, 133, 137, 383 Scottish police, 313, 383–4, 414, 428–9 Sepoys, 86, 348, 381 Sikh policemen, 308, 377, 381–2 Wanchai Police Station, 328, West Indies, 59, 73, 453 Hong Kong Punch, 313, 328, 378–9, 345, 365, 381, 382 Hong Kong, reputation of, 1860s, 59, 139, 299–302 Hong Kong & Shanghai Banking Corporation, 299, 343–5, 351, 357, 544 Hong Kong society, 1845–60, 32, 73–89, 144–5, 246 social distinctions, 327–33, 441 formal level, 73–7 informal level, 77–89
social status and precedency/ranking scale, 50,
327, 339, 441, 433 Hong Kong society, 1861–75, 321–6, 336 snobbishness, 329 social exclusion, 328, 329 social set-up, changes in, 338–48 Hong Kong University, 197, 502, 509 Hong Kong Volunteers, 1854, 179, 201, 207, 269 Hong Kong & Whampoa Dock Company, see under Hong Kong Docks Hong merchants, 39 Honkon Jijo, 523 Hope, Molly and her dog, Tango, 531 Hopkins, George, Capt., merchant navy, 464, 469 Hoppius, Heinrich, merchant, 357, 446 Horder, Charles W., book-keeper, 200 Horsepool, Insp., H.K. Police, 414 Hotel keepers, 200–2 Hotson, Mrs., 270 Hotung, Lady Clara, 517 Hotung, Lady Margaret Mak Sau Ying/Maclean, 464, 517, 518 Hotung (Ho Tung), Sir Robert, 351, 477, 513, 516–8 Hourse, Francis, chief officer, 166, 565 Howes, Benjamin P., Capt., merchant navy, 309 Howes, Genevieve, daughter of Benjamin, 309 Howes, Mrs., 309 Howroyd, James Edwin, civil servant, 473 Hoyland, John, Capt., merchant navy, 492–3 Hudson, Henry, merchant, 359 Hudson, Mr., clerk, P. & O. Co., 154
Hudson, Mr. and Mrs., post office clerk, 128
Hudson, Nathaniel, private, 253
Huffam, Frederick Sowley, deputy registrar, 414
Huffam, Henry Seymour, Mary Jane and Frederick Henry, children of Frederick, 414
Hughes, Edward, broker, 491
Hughes, Joseph, Corporal, R.A.S.C., 534–5
Hulme, John Walter, Chief Justice, 66, 114, 121, 141, 147, 190, 244, 261
Hulme, Julia, daughter of John, 113, 114
Humby, John, tavern keeper, 495
Humby, Wong, wife of John, 495–6
Hume, E.J., U.S. Navy, 235
Hung Chuen Fook (Hong Chun Kui), 63, 505–7
Hung Hsiu Chuan (Hong Xiu Quan), 63, 505
Hung Kam Ning, 515
Hung, Mary, 497
Hung Pik Ann, daughter of the Kam Ning, 515
Hung Yin Gee and wife Chung Saam Long, Japanese, 451
Hurst, Mrs., milliner, 330
Huttleston, Ann Maria, 241
Huttleston, Henry Curtis, 241
Huttleston, Jane, wife of Clement Nye, U.S. merchant, 241
Hyland, Mr., H.K. Post Office, 129
Ice Company, 189 Illingworth, David, 392 Illnesses, common, 153–8 abuse of alcohol, delirium tremens, 136, 156–8, 253, 287, 313, 400, 404
apoplexy/apoplectic fit, 96, 157, 250, 377 dysentery/cholera/diarrhoea, 10, 40, 43, 153–4,
305, 436 fever, 40, 42–3, 54, 56, 146, 153–4, 242 sunstroke, 41–2, 57, 155–6 Ince, John, Commander, 565
Indian influences on Hong Kong Indian mutiny and massacre at Cawnpore, 70, 446 Indian regiments, 43, 53–4, 246–7 Lascar seamen, see Lascars linguistic influences, 57–8 Parsees, see Parsees policemen recruited from India, 54, 314, 381–3
Inglis, A.L., civil servant, 484
Inglis, Caroline Matilda, nee Smithers, 371
Inglis, John, the Mint, 370–1
Inglis, Robert, 39
Ireland, Gertrude, nursing sister, 447
Irwin, Emma Maria, 2nd wife of James, 270, 372
Irwin, James J., Colonial Chaplain, 270, 372
Irving, John, Commissary General, 250
Irwin, Mary, daughter of James, 414
Irwin, Mary Federica, 1st wife of James, 270
Irwin, Thomas John, sail maker, 204
Isolation, feelings of, 47–8 murder at Hwang Chu Kee, 47
Italian Opera, the Royal, 321
Ives, Capt., merchant navy, 272
Ives, Mary Ann, wife of Capt., 272
Ives, W.J.F., child of Capt., 272
Iwai Haru, Japanese, 527 Jackson, Stanley, 536 Jackson, William, turnkey, 388 James, Capt., 512 James, Charley, son of Capt., 512 Jamieson, Charles, Capt., merchant navy, 172, 175–
177, 386 Jamieson, Henry Charles, son of Charles, 175 Jamieson, Mary, wife of Charles, 82, 177–8 Japanese
Japan and the Second World War, 466, 531–4 Japanese graves in the Cemetery, 521–8 Kabuki actors, 527 Mitsubishi mail line to Hong Kong, 397 non-Christians in the Cemetery, 24–5 opening of Japan to foreign ships, 235–6
Jardine, David, merchant, 102, 171, 232 Jardine, Joseph, merchant, 399 Jardine, Robert, merchant, 293, 301, 339 Jardine, William, Dr., 38–40, 56, 214, 225, 286 Jardine, Matheson & Co.
benefactors, 147, 232, 280, 301 and the depression of 1866–69, 340–1 and the Great Dock Swindle, 394–6 and Hong Kong & Shanghai Banking
Corporation, 344 and Hong Kong & Whampoa Dock Co., 393
its fleet of ships, 160–1, 169
merchants, 94–9 Jarman, Anne, daughter of James, 132 Jarman, James, Supt., H.K. Police, 131–5, 255, 330,
562 Jarman, James and Mary Eleathia, children of
James, 132 Jarman, Mary Grey, second wife of James, 132 Jarman, Sarah (Mitton), wife of James, 132 Jarvis, Alfred, 536 Jebson & Co., 459 Jeejeebhoy, Jamsetjee, 56 Jephson, Alban Mountney, 63 Jews in Hong Kong, 183, 316, 349, 350, 355–6, 446 Jex, Starling, Eurasian, 520, 532 Johnson, Anna, 1st wife of Rev. John, 76, 224, 276 Johnson, Ching, 511 Johnson, Edith Marshall, wife of Ching, 511 Johnson, John, Rev., missionary, 511 Johnson, Mr., chief executioner, 387 Johnson, Mrs., nee Wakker, 2nd wife of Rev. John,
224
Johnson, Norman Gibson, Sergeant, H.K. Police, 431
Johnston, Elizabeth, 554
Jones, Charles, brigade major, 130
Jones, George B., tavern keeper, 207
Jones, John, P. & O., 161, 163
Jones, Robert, tavern keeper, 360
Jordan, Gregory, Dr., Parsee, 350, 352, 368
Jordan, Paul, Parsee, broker, 350, 453, 468, 491
Jordan, Ripsima, daughter of Paul, 453
Joseph, Edward, son of Henry, 469
Joseph, Helen, wife of Henry, 469
Joseph, Henry Hope, Supt., P. & O., 469
Journalists/journalism, 144, 471–2
Judah, A.N., 491 Jurgens, Mrs., 523 Jurors, common, 75–6, 341, 351, 382 Jurors, special, 75–6, 337, 351 Just, Donald, son of Leonard Senior, 197 Just, Leonard Senior, shopkeeper, 197 Just, Leonard Junior, son of Leonard Senior, 197
Justices, unofficials, 74, 454
Justices of the Peace, 73–6, 86, 122, 145, 192, 337, 383, 546
Jwersen, Lorenz Cordsen, Capt., merchant navy, 459
Kadoorie, Sir Ellis, 479
Kadoorie, Sir Elly, 479
Kai Ho Kai, Alice, nee Walkden, wife of Kai Ho Kai, 508
Kai Ho Kai, Sir, 285, 372, 446, 467–9, 493, 508–11
Kelson, Lieut., 554
Kemp, James, China Mail, 301–2, 329, 335
Kennedy, Sir Arthur, Governor, 336, 383, 384, 385, 489
Kennett, Henry, Capt., merchant navy, 469
Keswick, William, Jardine, Matheson & Co, 344, 395
Ketels, Peter, tavern keeper, 358–9
Kew, Charles, 519
Kew, James Arthur, 521
Kew, Joseph, 519
Kew, Robert Akid, 519
Kew, Rose, nee Ablong, wife of the James Arthur, 521
Kew, Sarah Honoria Whiteley, wife of Robert, 519
Kidd, Richard, Rev., Colonial Chaplain, 488
Kim Sheung, 451
Kinder, Ada, daughter of Thomas, 369
Kinder, Thomas, Major, 369–70
King, Maria, wife of William King, 251
King, Mrs., missionary, 221
King, Thomas, son of William, 251
King, William, Ordnance Office, 251
King, William and Harry, sons of William, 251
Kingsmill, C.E., Lieut., 554
Kingsmill, Frances Elizabeth, wife of Henry, 144, 395
Kingsmill, Henry, barrister, 144, 395
Kipling, Rudyard, 425
Kirchmann, Anna, wife of Louis, 462
Kirchmann, Louis, tavern keeper, 462, 490
Kirchner, Boger & Co., 457
Kiya, Karayuki San, 526–7
Klitzke, Ernst, 358
Knight, Elizabeth, wife of Michael Ryan, 131
Knollys, Henry, Major, 23, 422–3, 425, 437, 495–6
Kowloon Canton Railway, 480–2
Kramer, Bertha, 458
Kresser, Victor, merchant, 344
Kupfer, Paul, Capt., Imperial German Navy, 23, 456
Kwan, Emma Lee (Li Kam Ngo), wife of King Leung, 505
Kwan King Leung, son of Kwan Yeun Cheung, 504–5
Kwan Li Shi, wife of Kwan Yuen Cheung, 505
Kwan Nieh Ping/Kwan Yuet Ping, daughter of Kwan Huen Cheung, 504
Kwan Yuen Cheung, 502, 504–5
Lai Yuk-hing, Lady, 2nd wife of Sir Kai Ho Kai, 508
Lam married to Wong Family, 497
Lam Ping Moon, 575
Lambert, Esther, daughter of William, 162
Lambert, J., Sergeant, 95th Regt., 249
Lambert, W.F., Capt., Royal Engineers, 72
Lambert, William, P. & O., 162
Lammert, George Philip, auctioneer, son of George Reinhold, 473
Lammert, George Reinhold, auctioneer, 445, 455, 472
Lammert, Jane, nee Aitken, 2nd wife of George Reinhold, 473
Lammert, Kate MacDonald, nee Aitken, 1st wife of George Reinhold, 455
Lammert, Lionel Eugene, 473 Lamont, John, ships’ carpenter, 197, 202, 393–4, 454, 465 Lamont, Thomas, son of John, 393, 454 Lancashire Operatives Relief Fund, 355 Lane, Edward, 185 Lane, Francis, 316 Lane, Herbert K., 360 Lane, Odiarne Tremayne, consular service, 16, 123–4 Lane, Thomas Ash, 78, 126, 185, 194, 196 Lane, William, relative of Thomas Ash, 126 Lane Crawford & Co., 126, 184–5, 311, 344, 465–6 Lapraik, Douglas, merchant and Aberdeen Dock, 393 departure from Hong Kong, 329–30 and ‘Protected Women’, 202, 284 a Scotsman, 454 watchmaker and founder of the Douglas Line, 126, 196–8, 312, 397 Lascars, 36, 100, 167, 380 Lau Chu Pak, Hong Kong Telegraph, 24 Lau Hon Chun, S. China Academy, 501 Lau Yi Wan, 497 Lauz, Wegener & Co., 458 Laverance, Joseph, seaman, 400 Law and order, 244, 305 safety at sea, 1861–75, 309–12 safety on land, 1861–75, 306–8 Lawson, George Clarke, merchant navy, 174 Lawyers, 93, 127, 143, 183, 300, 389 Lay, Alec Hyde, 532 Lay, Arthur Tradescant, 533 Lay, George Tradescant, 522, 532 Lay, Horatio Nelson, 399, 532 Lay, William George, Chinese Customs, 339, 532 Layton, Bendyshe, 477 Lechler, Rudolf, Rev., missionary, 226, 229, 438, 467 Legge, Anne Murray, daughter of James, 15, 218 Legge, James, Rev., missionary, 6, 15–16, 69 and Chinese Christians, 504, 508 educator, 220, 371 founder of the Union Church, 217–20 his disillusionment with missionary work in Hong Kong, 230–1, 233 on relationships between the English and the Chinese, 504, 508
translator of Chinese Classics, 218, 301, 339, 544 Legge, Mary Isabella, wife of James, 15–16, 217–9 Lehmann, Henry, merchant, 95 Lemon James, shopkeeper, brother of John, 199 Lemon, John, shopkeeper, 199, 271, 487 Lemon, Mrs., milliner, 271 Lena, Alexander, deputy harbour master, 116–7, 484 Lena, Eliza, wife of Alexander, 116 Leon, Marius, boarding house keeper, 413 Leong, Millie, daughter of Ong Tong, 510 Leong, Ong Tong, Rev., 510 Letters of introduction, 80, 339, 423 Leung Kin Shan, 499 Levy, Alexander, merchant, 319 Lewis, Ah Ching, wife of Edward, 461 Lewis, Edward, 453, 461 Lewis, Yan Noi, daughter of Edward, 461 Li Hung Chang, viceroy, 501 Li Ji-tang, son of Li Sing, 506 Li Sing, merchant, 500
Li Sing Scientific and Industrial College, 500
Liddell, Billie, nee Coutts, 537
Liddell, Jack, husband of Billie, 537
Liddell, James, 455
Liddell, Maggie and Minnie, 4555
Liddell, Mary Sinclair, his wife, 455
Liedertafel, German Choral Club, 357, 358, 458
Lin Tse-hsu, commissioner, viceroy, 38–9
Lindow, James, tavern keeper, 207
Lindsay & Co., 341
Linstead, Theophilus Gee, businessman, 23, 323, 334, 341–3, 489
Lister, Alfred, 368–9
Lister, Arthur, son of Alfred, 368
Lister, Fanny Elizabeth, wife of Alfred, 368
Little, Archibald, 440
Livesey, Harriet, wife of John, 474
Livesey, John, P.W.D., 474, 490
Living space in Hong Kong, division of, 24, 106, 316, 355, 422
Lobo, Pedro Jose, Dr., 530
Lobscheid, Alwine, wife of William, 228
Lobscheid, William, Rev., 126, 228–9, 456
Loch, Capt., R.N., 259
Lockhart, George, merchant navy, 515
Lockhart, Stewart, 500
Lockhart, Willie, son of George, 515
Lodges, see under Freemasonry London, Samuel Cook, Insp., H.K. Police, 377 London Missionary Society, see under Missions to Hong Kong London & Provincial Maritime Insurance Co., 476 Lorrain, William, Dr., and Jessie, 150 Louis, Friedrich, Rev., Basel missionary, 228 Lovett, Henry, Capt., merchant navy, 167–8 Lowndes, William, secretary, Hong Kong Club, 318 Lubeck, Alexander, German, 99 Lucas, Capt., merchant navy, 272 Lucas, Thankful, wife of Capt., 272 Lyall, George, merchant, 96, 171
Lyall, James, brass-fitter, 414
Lyall Still & Co., 340
Macalister, George, assistant, 347–8 McBean, Francesca Brigitta nee Cruz, wife of Thomas, 461 McBean, Thomas R., bailiff, 319, 461 McCrae, Donald, 422 McCurrie, John, clerk, 99–100 MacDonald, Donald, reporter, 446 MacDonnell, F.T.F.A., 554 MacDonnell, Sir Richard, Governor, 365, 370, 376, 381, 383 McDouall, John, banker, 344–5 MacEwen & Co., 109 Macgrath, J.R., Ensign, 55th Regt., 43 Macintyre, James McLachlan, Volunteer, 534 MacIver, William Walker, clerk, 99 Mackenzie, Robert Edward, chief gaoler, 271 MacKnight, storekeeper, 83 Maclean, Hector Coll, merchant, 463–4 McLean, Isaac, Sergeant, R.A., 488 Maclehose, James, innkeeper, 36, 130, 201, 207–8 Maclehose, Mary Anne, widow of James, 201 McMurdo, Archibald, son of Robert, 159 McMurdo, Robert, Capt., merchant navy, 159, 161 McNally, Isaac, Aaron and Elizabeth Jane, children of Michael, 415 McNally, Michael, Sergeant, 75th Regt., 415 MacQueen, David, son of Farquar, 176 MacQueen, Farquar, Capt., merchant navy, 171, 176 MacQueen, Mrs., 176–7 Macreary, James, H.K. Police, 211
McSwyney, P. Caulincourt, 212–3
Madar, Lavinia Alice, 532
Magee, Henry, R.N., 265
Mahoney, James, H.K. Police, 308
Malarial fever, see under Illnesses
Malays, 34, 314, 335, 380
Mallory, Lawrence, 490
Maltby, General, 520
Malzard, Grace, 412
Manila men, 34
Manliness, the Victorian virtue, 193, 253, 277, 427
Mann, Insp., H.K. Police, 445
Mann, Isabelle, wife of Insp., 445
Manreito, Japanese monument, 527
Manson, Alexander Livingston, son of Dr. Patrick
Manson, 454, 479
Manson, Patrick, Dr., 454, 468, 479–80
Manson, Patrick Thurburn, Dr., son of Dr. Patrick
Manson, 454
Manuk, Malcolm, 480
Manuk, Mary, 480
Manuk, Sophie, 480
Markwick, Charles, auctioneer, 36, 140, 173,
185–7
Markwick, Sarah Ann, wife of Charles, 269
Marsh, Edward, 199
Marsh, Henry, farrier & shopkeeper, 194, 199
Marsh, Mrs., milliner, wife of Henry, 109, 271–2
Marsh, T.W., post office clerk, 485
Marshall, David, 451
Marshall, Edith, 511
Marshall, George, turnkey, 388
Martin, Annie, nee Neil, widow of Hogan and
Corrigan, 2nd wife of John Patrick,
209–10
Martin, Edward Marsden, merchant navy, 321–2
Martin, Elizabeth, 1st wife of John Patrick, 209
Martin, John Patrick, hotel keeper, 209–10
Martin, Mme. Bouche, opera singer, wife of Edward
Marsden, 321–2
Martin, Stella Bouche, daughter of Edward
Marsden, 321, 322 Mather, H.L., lighthouse keeper, 474 Matheson, Alexander, merchant, 101, 139 Matheson, Donald, merchant, 139 Matheson, James, merchant, 38, 101 Matsubara, Mr. and Mrs., hotelier, 526 Maugham, Somerset, 441 Maxwell, John, Naval Yard, 461 Maxwell, Wong Ah Hing, wife of John, 461 May, Charles, Chief Supt., H.K. Police, 122–3, 137,
202, 284, 308, 387 May, Sir Francis Henry, Governor, 429, 481, 509,
545 Meadows, J.A.T., consular service, 514 Medical Missionary Society, see under Societies Meiji Restoration, 523 Mendel, Louis, merchant, 497 Menpes, Mortimer, 426 Mercer, John Ambrose, merchant, 6, 87 Mercer, William, civil service, 60, 138, 144, 316,
486
Merchants Chinese merchants, 6, 59, 61, 301, 320, 383 clerks and assistants, 1845–60, 75–6, 82,
99–101 clerks and assistants, 1861–75, 346–8 merchant /tradesman dividing line, see Hong
Kong society: social distinctions their lifestyle, 13, 94–95, 105–12 their outlook and reputation, 101–5
Merchant navy, 1845–60 captains of opium hulks, 174–8 marine surveyors, 178–9 merchant navy sailors, 179–80, 211–2 ocean-going vessels, 165–9 owners and commanders of river boats, 169–74 sailors manning lorchas, 180–2 tea and opium clippers and their captains, 16,
158, 159–61, 225 1861–75, merchant navy sailors, 380,
387, 400–2, 405 Merriman, G., Lieut., R.N., 539–41 Messageries Maritimes Shipping Line, 316, 359,
397 Milbanke, Ralph, Lieut., R.N., 267 Millar, Alfred, Lieut, 554 Millar, Alfred and Frederick, sons of Alfred, 554 Millar, Andrew, government plumber, 21, 314,
319, 473 Miller, J., 450 Miller, Mrs., 414 Miller, Thomas, Sergeant, 98th Regt., 249 Milne, John Robert Morrison, son of William,
missionary, 124, 216 Milne, William, Rev., missionary, 124, 214, 217
Milne, William C., Rev., consular service, son of William, missionary, 124, 216 Minhinnett, John, P.W.D., 472 Missions to Hong Kong American Baptist Missionary Union, 156, 218, 220–4, 276, 503 Basel Evangelical Mission, 19, 126, 224–30, 359, 373, 438, 462, 457, 467 Berlin Missionary Societies, 226–7, 357, 457 Catholic missionaries, 233–4, 375–6 Chinese Evangelization Society, 222 Christian Union (Gutzlaff’s), 224–7, 230 Female Education Society, 221, 273, 375 London Missionary Society and the Union Church, 76, 214–20, 230, 285, 457, 403, 457, 461, 467–8, 500, 504, 508, 510 missionary disillusionment with Hong Kong, 230–3 Rhenish Mission, 226, 456, 457 Mitchell, Elizabeth, 554 Mitchell, Francis W., Postmaster General, 285 Mitchell, W.H., sheriff and chief magistrate, 66, 145 Mitsubishi Mail Shipping Co., 524 Mitton, Sarah, wife of John Thomas, see under Jarman, Sarah Mitton, John Thomas, H.K. Police, 132, 134, 135 Miura, Mr., restauranteur, 525 Mody, Sir Hormusjee, Parsee merchant, 350, 354–5, 446, 490 Moffat, Galbraith, Insp., H.K. Police, 447 Moncrieff, Rev., missionary, 512 Moore, William Porter, hairdresser, 473 Morris, Ann, the Mint, wife of James Morris, 370 Morris, Ann, the Mint, wife of John Morris, 370 Morris, D.B., Rev., 488 Morris, James, the Mint, 370 Morris, John, the Mint, 370 Morrison, John, U.S. Navy, 237–8 Morrison, John Robert, civil servant, 216–7, 225 Morrison, Rachel, daughter of Robert, 217
Morrison, Robert, Dr., missionary, 146, 214–5, 217
Morrison, William, Colonial Surgeon, 131, 146, 148, 219
Morrison Education Society, see under Societies
Morriss, Isabella, wife of John H., 386
Morriss, John Warden, ships’ chandler, 358, 386, 487
Moses, S., 446
Moses Emmanuel, Joseph, 489
Motifs found on headstones and monuments, see Cemeteries: Hong Kong Cemetery
Moul & Co., 96
Mulholland, Eliza, wife of Thomas, 207
Mulholland, Thomas, tavern keeper, 207
Muller, Georg Felix, tavern keeper, 459–60
Municipal type of government/town council, 64–5, 103, 142
Murakami, Mr., seaman, 525
Murphy, James, 404
Murphy, Sarah, 269
Murray, Edith Mary, daughter of Ivor, 394
Murray, Ivor, Dr., 359, 394
Murrow, Yorick, Daily Press, 66
Mylius, Jane, wife of Rodney, 554
Mylius, John, Land Office, 8 Mylius, Rodney, Capt., Ceylon Rifles, 554
Namick, Mary Ann, 411
Nanking, Treaty of, 41, 44, 45, 59, 267
Nannan, N., Capt., 166
Napier, George, civil service, 125–6
Napier, Lord William, 39
Nazi Swastika, 25
Needham, Robert Charles, Capt., merchant navy, 398–9
Neil, Elizabeth, wife of Richard, 208–10
Neil, Richard, livery stable keeper, 208–10
Neill, George Mather, assistant, 312
Nethersole Hospital, 469, 510
Nevius, John, Rev., 286
Newbigging, T.K., brigadier, 538
Newspapers as a source of information, 546
Nicholson, H.J., merchant navy, 471
Ng Ah-mui, see under Chinese protected women
Ng Akew, see under Chinese protected women
Ng Choy, alias Wu Ting-fang, 390, 499
Ng Kwai Shang, 499
Ng Ping Shan, 499, 575 Ngan Achoey, see under Chinese protected women Ni Family, 504 Nickels, E.C., Capt., merchant navy, 240 Nihonjin Jisenkai, charitable organization, 527 Nippon Yusen Japanese Shipping Co., 525 Nissen, Carl, Dr., 357 Nissen, Woldemar, Siemssen & Co., 316, 357, 458 Noble, Capt. and Mrs., 312 Noble, Mrs., 55 Norman, James F., assistant storekeeper, 87, 250, 484, 487 Noronha, J.H., printer, 350 Norton-Kyshe, James William, 64, 137, 255, 428 Nowrojee, Dorabjee, businessman, 316, 350, 353–4, 446
O’Flaherty, Thomas, Dr., surgeon, 59th Regt., 151 O’Keefe, able seaman, 540 O’Sullivan, Mortimer, Insp., H.K. Police, 431 Olson, Anders, seaman, 402 Olson, Ellen, alias Ching Ah Fung, wife of John, 403 Olson, John, tavern keeper, 402–3 Olson, John, Junior, 403 Olson, Olaf, 402 Olyphant & Co., 239 Opium trade Opium War, 1st, 37–44 Opium War, 2nd, 68–72 arsenic and Ah Lum’s bakery, 150 Canton, the capture of, 261 casualties, 244, 260 effects of in Hong Kong enhanced prestige of soldiers, 406–7 relocation of people and docks to Hong Kong, 351–2, 358, 393, 446 on relations with the Chinese in Hong Kong, 293 Fat-shan Creek, 260 Fei Ma runs the gauntlet of Imperial junks, 174 and the missionaries, 228 Oriental Bank, 101 Orr, William, Dr., assistant surgeon, 59th Regt., 151 Otten, Louise, wife of tavern keeper, 359 Otten, tavern keeper, 359
Overend & Guerney, 340 Ow Atai, mother-in-law to Peter Petersen, 462
Pacific Mail Company, 397, 453
Paish, J.C., 536 Palmerston, Henry T., viscount, 40, 258 Parade, Evening, in Hong Kong, 88–9, 104, 111
Parade Ground/cricket pitch, 194, 279
Parker, Alfred, merchant navy, 461 Parliament, British, 44, 67, 102, 160, 302 House of Commons, 102, 431 Parsees, 56–7, 89, 174, 185, 314, 316, 349–51, 353–5, 446, 447 Paterson, John, plumber, 391 Patterson, H.K. Police, 87 Peak, The, 24, 32, 106, 148, 317, 324, 355, 424, 517 Ordinance of 1904, 422 Peak Tram, 342 Pearse, Elizabeth, daughter of T., 250 Pearse, Lydia Priscilla, wife of T., 250 Pearse, T., Commissariat, 250 Pearson, Rev., 314 Peckham, Leslie Wilfred, volunteer, 534 Pedder, William, Lieut., R.N., harbour master, 116, 360 Pellew, Admiral, 258–9 Pellico, Hugo, Signor, opera singer, 321–2 Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Company (P. & O. Co.), 12–13, 161–5, 169, 171–2, 271, 397, 399–400 Perceval, Alexander, merchant, 95 Perceval, James, son of Alexander, 339 Perceval, Robert Jardine, son of Alexander, 95 Perry, John, 565 Perry, Matthew C., Commodore, U.S. Navy, 235–6, 522 Petersen, Charles Frederick (also known as Christian), tavern keeper, 459, 462 Petersen, Peter, tavern keeper, 22, 460 Peterson, Carl Magnus, lighthouse keeper, 470 Phelps, George, H.K. Police, 445 Phillips, Thomas Trustlove, Imperial Customs Service, 464 Piccope, Thomas Cranmer, broker, 346 Picnic parties, 324, 425 Pidgin English, 45, 287, 420 Pinker, George, foreman engineer, 493
Pirate attacks showing casualties buried in the H.K. Cemetery Brig Arratoon Apcar, Capt. Lovett, 1853, 167–8 Schooner Eagle, Capt. Thomas Browne, 1862, 309
S.S. Haiching, 1929, Kingsley Woodwards, 471 S.S. Iron Prince, 1862, 410 S.S. Kwong Yuen, 1911, 471 Schooner Lubra, Capt. B. Howes 1866, 309
S.S. Namoa, Capt. T.G. Pocock, 1890, 469–70
S.S. San Nam Hoi, 1928,
S.S. Shui On, H.J. Nicholson, 1911,471
S.S. Tai Lee, James Wilcox, 1924, 471 Pitman, Capt., R.N., 267–8 Pitton, Washington T., staff assistant surgeon, 151 Pladsrud, Capt., merchant navy, 488 Plague, the, 429, 442–7, 525 Plant, Alice, wife of Samuel, 439–40 Plant, Samuel Cornell, I.C.S., 439–40 Plummer, Frederick, Navy Yard, 488 Po Leung Kuk, 320, 499 Pocock, Thomas G., Capt., merchant navy, 470 Poole, J., Private, 409 Poon Kwok She, 575 Pope, John, civil servant, 113, 115–6, 484 Portuguese, 57, 307, 316, 349 isolation of the community, 128, 423, 493 and the Jury List, 76, 350–1 and Macau, 262 in the Police Force, 136 and the Roman Catholic Church, 3, 86, 233–4, 375–6 sailors, 173 Potter, Daniel, merchant, 96 Potter, Mary, wife of Daniel, 96 Pottinger, Eldred, Major, 54–6 Pottinger, Sir Henry, Governor, 54, 57, 74, 87, 138, 215–6, 280 Potts, George Hutton, broker, 445 Powell, William, of General Drapers, 426 Praya Reclamation Schemes, 103, 108, 353 Preble, George Henry, Capt., U.S. Navy, 170, 237 Preston, Caroline, wife of William, 198, 269 Preston, William, Dr., druggist, 198, 269 Prichett, Elizabeth, wife of John, 370 Pritchett, John, coin department, 370 Prichett, Susan Maria, daughter of John, 370
Professionals, 78, 82, 93, 94, 143–52, 389–90 Chinese professionals, 500, 502 Prostitutes, Chinese, 61–2 European, 403, 413–4, 437–8, 450 Japanese, 526–7 Protected women, see Chinese protected women Protestant Church, see Anglican Church Public spirit, lack of in Hong Kong, 102, 340, 344 Punchard, John Elgood, Capt., merchant navy, 401 Punchard, William, Capt., merchant navy, 401 Pustau & Co., 312, 357
Queen’s Bakery, 528 Queen’s College, see Central School Quin, Capt., H.K. Police, son of James, 130, 131 Quin, Elizabeth, wife of Samuel Clifton, 130 Quin, James, clerk, civil service, 130, 131
Racecourse, Happy Valley, 6–8, 17, 193–4, 344, 425, 441 Racecourse Fire of 1918, 448–51 Rae, George, 453 Railway, comes to Hong Kong, 480–2 Raimondi, Bishop, 314, 375, 461 Randall Family, Eurasian, 520 Randeen, Alexander, 54 Rapp, Aileen, Eurasian, 532 Rapp, Christian Friederich, auctioneer, 459–60, 472 Rapp, May, Mei Ho, wife of Christian, 460, 496 Rauch, Chan Lai, wife of Johann, 428, 461 Rauch, Johann, hotelier, 428, 461 Rawle, Duus & Co., 109 Rawle, S.B., American merchant, 98 Rawson, Samuel, merchant, 484–6 Ray, W.H., broker, 480 Raynes, Robert T., 263, 565 Reasons for emigrating, 52–3 Record, Thomas James, moulder, 392, 488 Reed, Charles R., 466 Regiments, see Army, British Reid, Mr., banker, 76 Reiniger, Anna, Basel missionary, 19 Reiss & Co., 95 Relationships between the expatriates and the Chinese, 31, 36, 102, 282, 304, 422 Chinese and the judicial system in Hong Kong, 291–3, 300
racial prejudice, 116, 230–1, 296, 314, 514–5 Western fear of mobs, 1845–60, 44–8 1861–75, 314–20 post-1876, 426–7 Rice, John, 207 Rich, Samuel H., merchant, 16, 95 Rich & Co., 95 Rickett, Grace, 178 Rickett, John, marine surveyor, 178–9 Rickett, Sara Ann, daughter of John, 178 Rickomartz, Adonia, Japanese compositor, 523, 532 Rickomartz, Maria Lucy and Lucy, daughters of Adonia, 522–3 Rickomartz, Mrs., wife of Adonia, 272, 523 Robert, Catherine, 275 Roberts, Henry, assistant, 347 Roberts, John, cooper, 181 Roberts, Mary Primrose, sister to John, 181 Roberts, Tom, son of John, 181–2 Robertson, assistant surgeon, 10 Robertson, Arthur, H.K. Police, 137 Robertson, Isabella, 224 Robinson, Felicia, wife of Sir William, 13 Robinson, Sir Hercules, Governor, 123, 333, 364–6, 368 Robinson, Sir William, Governor, 13, 294 Rogers, Benjamin, 280–1 Rogers, L.H.C., Ensign, 55th Regt., 43 Roman Catholic Church in Hong Kong, 86 and Freemasons, 492–3 missionaries, 233–4 schools, 375–6 Catholic Reformatory, 375–6 St. Joseph’s (St. Saviour’s), 314, 507 Rope Factory, 422 Ross, Alexander, ship repairer, 392, 488 Ross, Mary, wife of Alexander, 392 Ross, James, merchant, 167–9 Ross, James Gordon and Jane, children of Alexander, 392 Ross, Ronald (Deacons & Co.), 535–6 Ross, William, 473 Rosselet, Charles Simon, Eurasian, 520 Rowan, Thomas, merchant navy, 464 Rowe, Dr., 128 Royal Navy, 70–1, 86, 93, 171–5, 256–68, 539–41 burial at Sea, 266–7
naval officers, 261–4
R.N. ships with monuments in the Cemetery H.M.S. Bittern, 93, 260 H.M.S. Calcutta, 56, 93, 260, 261, 163 H.M.S. Cleopatra, 93, 258, 486 H.M.S. Columbine, 93, 172, 257, 261 H.M.S. Cornwallis, 40, 267 H.M.S. Nankin, 93, 174, 260–1 H.M.S. Rattler, 237 H.M.S. Rattlesnake, 91 H.M.S. Sampson, 93, 260–1 H.M.S. Sans Pareil, 93, 260 H.M.S. Scout, 93, 256 H.M.S. Serpent, 93 H.M.S. Sybille, 93, 260–1, 273 H.M.S. Tribune, 71, 93, 260 H.M.S. Vestal, 256 H.M.S. Winchester, 93, 150, 228, 258–9 sailors, 256–268 Rushton, Henry William, merchant, 95 Russell & Co., 169, 239, 329, 478 Russian Orthodox Church, 28, 528, 531 Russians in the Hong Kong Cemetery, 528–30 Rustomjee of Hormusjee & Rustomjee, 386 Ryall, Charles, head gaoler, 386–7 Ryan, Mr., Commander, P. & O., 165 Ryan, J.C., innkeeper, 136, 200 Ryan, Michael, H.K. Police, 131 Ryrie, Capt., merchant navy, father of Phineas, 161 Ryrie, Edith Ann and Muriel, wife and baby of Phineas, 411–2 Ryrie, Phineas, merchant, 161, 341–2, 411–2, 454, 460, 463, 480, 490, 513
Said, Edward, 31, 217, 315 Sailors’ Home, 401 St. Andrew’s Church, see under Anglican Church St. Andrew’s Day Ball, 424–5, 323 St. Andrew’s School, 141, 188, 301, 372 St. Croix, Nicholas de, Consular Corps, 361–2 St. Joseph’s College, 314, 507 St. Paul’s College, 57, 104, 493, 499, 507, 512, 516 St. Saviour’s School, see under St. Joseph’s College Sam Ho, 464 Samy, H., 445 Sands, Capt., patent slipway, 492 Sangster, James, Capt., merchant navy, 399 Sangster, Margaret, wife of James, 399
Sargant, George Lungley, Commander, merchant navy, 312 Sargent, H.N., Major-General, 490 Sassoon, Arthur, 316 Sassoon, David, merchant, 228, 351, 484 Sassoon & Co., 344, 507 Sassoon Family, 175, 350, 355, 446, 516 Sauberzweig-Schmidt, Rev., missionary, 457 Scales, Thomas, Postmaster General, 114–5 Scandals, public, 65–8 Schaub, Martin, Rev., Basel missionary, 457 Schelle, Ernst, 440 Schmidt, Capt., merchant navy, 175 Schmidt, William, gun smith, 459 Schroter, Emma, 458 Schwarzkopf/Blackhead, Charlotte, daughter of Frederick, 181, 275, 358
Schwarzkopf/Blackhead, Frederick, ships’ chandler,
181, 275, 358
Schwarzkopf/Blackhead, T.B., son of Frederick, 181
Schwarzkopf/Blackhead, William Murrow, son of Frederick, 181, 275, 358 Scott, Alexander, merchant, 87 Scott, Elizabeth, wife of Joseph, 386 Scott, Joseph, head gaoler, 385–6 Scott, William, merchant, 284 Scott, William, Supt. engineer, Whampoa Dock Co., 493 Scottish, in the Hong Kong Cemetery, 183, 454–6, 421 and Freemasonry, 489 journalists, 471–2 policemen, 313 and the Presbyterian Church, 215, 232 Scottish Oriental Steam Ship Co., 464, 469 Seamen’s Hospital, 34, 147, 190, 483 Second Opium War, see under Opium Wars Selby, Donaldson, civil servant, 125 Senna, Jose, 319 Sepoys, 8, 348, 381 Servants, 54, 105–6, 109–10, 129, 186, 201, 294, 340, 413, 420 Seth, Peter Aviet, merchant, 352, 438, 484 Seymour, Michael, Sir, admiral, 118, 124 Shap-ng-tsai, pirate, 171, 257, 262, 283, 290 Sharp, Ernest, barrister, 307 Sharp, Granville, businessman, 306, 311, 317, 336–7, 341, 346, 355, 366, 480
Sharp, Lucilla, sister of Granville, 306 Sharp, Matilda, wife of Granville, 305–6, 326, 336–7, 311, 312, 324, 355, 374 Sharp, Robert, head turnkey, 388 Shearman, Ralph, able seaman, 540 Shek Tong Tsui, removal of the village, 316–7 Shelley, Adolphus Edward, civil servant, 140, 189 Shewan, Andrew, Capt., merchant navy, 161 Shewan, Robert, merchant, 161, 454, 477–9 Shewan, William Thompson, businessman, 161 Shewan Tomes & Co., 478 Shiels, William, Capt., merchant navy, 398 Shimizu, able seaman, 524 Ship repairing, 392–3, see also under Hong Kong Docks Ships and boats, see also under Pirate attacks Fei Ma, 173–4 Hygeia, 182, 442, 445 Lady Mary Wood, 161, 163, 165, 167 Red Rover, 159, 161, 167 Ruperell, opium-receiving ship, 169, 283 Spark, 170, 172–3 Shopkeepers, 169–200, 316, 327 Shortrede, A., proprietor, China Mail, 145, 191 Shroffs, 419 Shuck, Henrietta, missionary, 221–4 Shuck, J. Lewis, Rev., missionary, 156, 221–4 Siemssen & Co., 357, 457 Sikhs, 68, 308, 377, 381–3 Simmonds, Henry, brick-layer, 414 Simpson, James, ships’ pilot, 360 Sing, Otto Kong, 519 Slade, John, merchant, 37–9 Slate, Richard Brewster, assistant, 347 Sliman, David, merchant, 463 Smale, Sir John, Chief Justice, 376, 395, 513 Smirnoff, George Vitalievich, 529–30 Smith, Capt., merchant navy, 239 Smith, A.F., merchant, 341 Smith, Adelaide and Elizabeth, daughters of Capt. and Elizabeth, 251 Smith, Albert, 100–1, 120, 172–3, 179, 274, 281 Smith, Alexander, merchant navy, 399 Smith, Andrew Brandrum, son of Bishop Joseph Smith, 16, 231, 275 Smith, Charles and Walter, sons of Charles C., 251 Smith, Charles C., civil service cadet, 368
Smith, Elizabeth, wife of the above, 251
Smith, George, bishop, 121, 253, 269, 371, 374
Smith, Gilbert, merchant, 7
Smith, Henry, accountant, HSBC, 490, 492
Smith, Henry, Capt., R.N., 4, 40
Smith, James, storekeeper, 185, 188
Smith, James Brimelow, auctioneer, 188
Smith John, 93, 531
Smith, John, Commissariat General, 250–1
Smith, John C., H.K. Police, 211
Smith, Joseph, Rev., Bishop, 231
Smithers, Caroline Matilda, 371
Smithers, John, usher and bailiff, 16, 131, 133–4, 144, 209
Smithers, Thomas, brother of John, Insp., H.K. Police, 133–4
Smyth, Harold, 532
Snelling, George, tavern keeper, 462–3
Snowden, Mrs., 428
Snowden, Francis, puisne judge, 395, 427–8
Soames, Annie Kate, daughter of William Soames, 171–2
Soames, Fanny Augusta, daughter of William Soames, 171, 275
Soames, William, Capt., merchant navy, 171–2, 186, 316
Societies
Amateur Dramatic Society/drama society, 78, 410
Asiatic Society, 152, 278, 322 Chirurgical Society, 151–2 Choral Society, 322 Debating Society, 321–2 Furen Literary Society, 507 Gymnastics Society, 357 Medical Missionary Society, 215, 230, 468 Medico Chirurgical Society, 151–2 Morrison Education Society, 76, 215–22, 230, 296, 500 Revive China Society, 507 Society for the Relief of the Destitute Sick, 146, 190, 196–197, 211, 239, 322, 404 Temperance Society, 314 Theosophical Society, 480 Soldiers, see under Army Soong, Charlie, 504 Soong, Ching Ling, 504 Soong, Mei Ling, 504 South China Academy, 501
Sparkes, William, chief engineer, P. & O., 161
Speechly, Helen and Mabel, 21
Speechley, Maria Webster, 371, 403
Speechley, Samuel, 371, 403
Spence, John R., Hong Kong Dispensary, 198–9
Spence, Thomas, 199
Spickernell, Nancy, stewardess, 400
Sport, its place in society, 20, 111–2, 126, 193–4, 323, 325, 425
Spry, Peter Harrison, R.N., 87, 484, 565
Squier, John, 391
Squier, Mary Douglas, daughter of John, 391
Stanford, William Kent, merchant navy, 175, 386–7, 465
Star Ferry, 354
Steart, K., Lieut., 565
Steele, Thomas, innkeeper, 130
Stephens, W.H., Corporal, R.E., 432
Stewart, Charles, Capt., merchant navy, 398
Stewart, Frederick, civil servant, 220, 371–2, 373, 452, 454, 467–8, 513
Stewart, James, Capt., merchant navy, 464, 469
Stewart, Peter J.N., journalist, 219
Stinson, John, 387–8
Storekeepers, 75, 78, 82, 97, 184–90, 200
Storey, Charles, architect, 412
Storey, Eliza, wife of Charles, 412
Strachan, George, architect, 35
Strachan, Robert, publisher, 145
Stratton, William Murray, 482
Straube, J.A., 22
Stroud, Henry, Insp., H.K. Police, 380
Stuart, Charles, banker, 101
Studd, John, architect, 393–4
Sturgess, Mansoon T., R.N., 87, 88, 565
Suaicar, Mr. and Mrs., tavern keeper, 206–7
Suffiad, Alice, 501 Suffiad, Mahmood Ben, civil servant, 501
Sullivan, James, H.K. Police, 136 Summer Palace, 270, 287 Sun Yat Sen, Dr., 372, 499, 507–8, 515 European associates of Dr. Sun Yat Sen, 466–9 members of the Christian-educated group and associates of Dr. Sun Yat Sen, 502–5 Sutherland, Thomas, banker, 344, 393, 454 Swanston, Anne, wife of John, 428–9 Swanston, John, Insp., H.K. Police, 428–9 Swanston, N.J., M.T.B., D.M., A.A., Archibald, children of John, 429
Swimmer, H.K. Police, 87 Sword, John D., merchant, 100 Symington, David, 422
Tai Yau Bank, 519
Taikoo Sugar Refinery, 421–2
Taipans, see Merchants Taiping Rebellion, 62–4, 228, 350, 505–6 Talbot, Capt. R.N., 256 Tam Achuen, 230 Tankard, George, gunner, RA, 244 Tarrant, William, 27, 67, 126, 151, 201, 361, 385, 486 Tavern and boarding house keepers, 136, 205–10, 402–3, 461–2, 474–5, 489 Taylor, Bayard, 105, 238 Teng Kwei Yin, 514 Thom, Robert, 39 Thomas, Edward, tavern keeper, 239–40 Thomas, Eudocia, wife of the above, 239–40 Thomas, William Gomes, 453 Thompson, Henry, midshipman, 71 Thomsett, H.G., Capt., harbour master, 327 Tiffaney, Osmond, 95, 179 Ting, Bessie, 497 To Tsai Church, 285, 462, 504 Tobin, John D., 533 Tomlin, Charles, merchant navy, 469 Tomlin, Ernest Harry, son of G.L., 387 Tomlin, G.L., civil servant, 387 Toms, Hannah, 178 Toms, Margaret, wife of the Walter Toms, 177–8 Toms, J.Y., Capt., merchant navy, 178 Toms, James Edward, son of J.Y., 178 Toms, Richard, son of Walter, 178 Toms, Walter, Capt., merchant navy, 177–8 Tong Ayoke, 230 Tonnochy, Malcolm Struan, 368 Town Council, see Municipal type of government Tradesman classes, 82, 87, 97, 106, 126–7, 183–200, 327 Tradesmen and managers, post-1876, 459–60, 472–3 Treen, John, P. & O., 162 Trell, Patrick, Lieut., 260 Triad societies, 122, 220, 290, 380, 500, 539 Troubridge, Capt., R.N., 262–3, 565 Tse Tsan Tai, 506–7
Tso Aon, 501–2 Tso Kai, son of Tso Seen Wan, 501 Tso Seen Wan, lawyer, 501 Tsoi Pui Kwong, 500 Tsoi Yeuk Shan, civil servant, 500 Tung On Steamship Company, 502 Tung Wah Hospital, 4, 320, 443, 499, 501–2, 503, 515, 518 Turnball, Dr., R.M., 72 Turner, Charles, Capt., R.N., 260 Turner & Co., 463, 490 Turnkeys, see under Hong Kong Police Force: Police constables and turnkeys Twinem, James, Imperial Customs Service, 439 Typhoons, 133, 312, 342 typhoon of 1906, 427, 447–8 Tyson, George Bartou, merchant, 519
U Pun Cho, 498 Uetsuki, 526 Uniacke, James, Major, R.M., 41 Union Church, 15, 127, 214, 218, 456, 467, 488, 503 Union Dock, see under Hong Kong Docks Union Insurance Society, 476 Uspensky, Dimitri, Arch Priest, 528, 531 Utilities, 390, 422 China Light and Power Company, 478–9 gas, 390–91 Hong Kong Electric Company, 422, 477–8 telegraph, 391–2
Vaucher, A.E., merchant, 327
Vesey, George Colthurst, Capt., Shropshire Regt., 444
Victoria City, 1842–60, 32–7, 102, 244, 288–9 1860–75, 302–5, 366, 314–5 1875–1900, 366, 391
Victoria Foundry, 371
Victoria Gaol, 131–2, 138, 271, 385–8, 428
Victoria Harbour, 158–9, 266–7, 397, 420, 458–9
Victoria Hotel, 202, 354
Victoria Library and Reading Room, 166, 278
Victoria Queen, 53, 74, 207–8, 366
Victoria Theatre, 78, 354
Vincent, Harriet, wife of boilermaker, 412
Viney, Joseph, hotelier, 187
Voeux, Sir George William des, Governor, 472
Volunteers, Hong Kong, 199, 201, 297, 269, 334–5, 390, 466, 520, 529, 534
Volunteer Fire Brigade, 330, 449–501, 453, 473
Wagner, Arthur, son of Carl, 465
Wagner, Carl, musician, 465
Wahee, Smith & Co. Sugar Refinery, see China Sugar Refinery Co.
Wakefield, Edward, 139
Wakeford, Frank Darvall, architect, 305
Walker, James, 480
Walker, Jemima Augusta, 278–9
Walker, Robert, P. & O., 162
Walker, Thomas Larkin, Surveyor General, 144
Walkinshaw, Constantine, son of William, 339
Walkinshaw, William, merchant, 339
Wan Bing Chung, son of Wan Tsing Kai, 503–4
Wan Chun Po, 575
Wan Tsing Kai, 502–5
Wan Wai Hing, 504
Warner, John, H.K. Police, 135
Warre, J., 565
Warren, C.F., Rev., 373
Warren, Charles, businessman, 403
Warren, Hannah nee Olson, wife of Charles, 403
Washington, George, 485
Waterloo, Battle of, 51
Waters, Kitty, 437
Watson, Charlotte Devereux, wife of J.B., 187
Watson, Ken, 473
Watson, J.B., store and hotel keeper, 187, 269
Watson, John, R.N., 256
Watson, Thomas Boswall, Dr., 198
Watson & Co, A.S., 147
Weatherhead, Alfred, Deputy Registrar, 77, 105–6, 109, 289, 292–3
Wegener, Oscar, merchant, 458
Wei Akwong, businessman, 502–3
Wei On, 502–3
Wei Yuk/Sir Boshan, 372, 493, 503
Welch, Mr., dispenser, 245 Welch, Henry, Sergeant, 98th Regt., 249 Wellington, Duke of, 485, 408 Wells, William, Rev., missionary, 522 Welsby, Thomas, boilermaker, 396 Wen Qing-xi, see Wan Tsing Kai West, George William, H.K. Police, 377 Wetmore & Co., 96
Whelehan, Bernard, H.K. Police, 136 Whiley, William, 472 Whittall, Charlton, of Smyrna, 394 Whittall, James, Jardine Matheson & Co., 394 White, George, Eurasian, 520 White, Henry John, hotelier, 465 White, Herman, hotelier, son of Nowell Bernard, 466 White, James, editor, 221 White, John Robinson, hotelier, 465 White, Nowell Bernard, brother of Herman, 466 White, William, the Mint, 370 Whiteley, Sarah Honoria, 519 Whyte, C.H., magistrate, 324, 382, 405, 413 Wilcox, James, 471 Wild, Capt., merchant navy, 128 Wild, Mrs., wife of the above, 128 Wild, Cyril, Colonel, 537–9 Wild, Edward Wright, son of Capt., 128 Wildiame, J.S., Sergeant, H.K. Police, 138 Wilkins, George, tavern keeper, 403 Williams, James S., horse repository, 402 Williams, John, assistant surgeon, 554 Williams, John, P.W.D., 388 Williams, John, U.S. Navy, 238–9 Willis, Eugenie, 413 Wills, John, Capt., merchant navy, 175 Wilson, Miss, schoolmistress, 372–3 Wilson, A.N., 52 Wilson, Wilberforce, Surveyor General, 307 Wing, James, merchant navy, 161, 163 Wing Kee Co., 499 Wing On Department Store, 510 Winnes, Philipp, Rev., missionary, 228, 462 Winniberg, Mrs., nee Curnow, milliner, 201 Winniberg, Henry, hotelier, 36, 201, 488 Witchell, Job, Insp., H.K. Police Witchell, Mary Maud, wife of Job, 430 Wohlters, Andreas Wilhelm, tavern keeper, 460, 490 Wohlters, Maria nee da Cruz, wife of Andreas, 460 Women, 269–79, 409–13, 433–8 childbirth, 270, 411–12 see also Chinese protected women
Wong Ching (Honorific title), 498, 515
Wong Ma Chow, pirate, 67, 122 Wong Sau Ngai, 499 Wong Shing, 76, 467, 500
Index 611
Wong Suk Po, 575 Wong Wing Ho, civil servant, 400 Woo Hay Tong, businessman, 502 Woo Pak Pang, wife of Woo Hay Tong, 502 Woo Yeung Shi, son of Woo Hay Tong, 502 Wood, Lytton Bevis, 535–6 Wood, William Maxwell, Dr., surgeon, 68, 145 Woodberry, Joel, Capt., merchant navy, 167–9 Woodruff, Francis Ebenezer, 514–5 Woodruff, Samuel C., Capt., ships’ chandler, 239 Woolcombe, F., Commander, 565 Wright, Henry, 265 Wright, John Fortunatus Evelyn, 60–1, 82, 120–1,
126–9, 149, 156–7, 187, 218, 250,
278, 361, 485–6 Wylie, John, civil servant, 474 Wyseman, Mr., 245
Yamashita, General, 539 Yan, A Kuk Tak, 496 Yanceystone, G.W., Union Dock, 307–8 Yang Qu-yun, see Yeung Ku Wan Yeung, Bessie, 499 Yeung Ku Wan (Yang Quyun), 506–7 Yeung Shi, see Woo Yeung Shi Yeung Woi Chun, 499 Ying Wah College, 217, 504, 505 York, G.W., U.S. Navy, 235 Young, A.H.S., Capt., 55th Regt, 43 Young, F.H., naval surgeon, 147 Young, James, Dr., 147–9, 198 Young, Peter, Colonial Surgeon, 146, 147–9 Young, William, Dr., 467, 490 Youngson, James, Insp., H.K. Police, 384–5 Yukawa, Lieut., 524 Yung Wing, 296