Category Archives: Family history

Old stories, new departures

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As a historian, I dwell in the past in more ways than one. Unlike some of my peers, I remain curious about stories once told, and as new resources come online, or I visit new archives, I will in quiet moments submit old names of those whose lives I have looked into to see if anything interesting comes to light. Sometimes it does.

John Thorburn, 1931

One early story I pursued and wrote up concerned the disappearance and death in 1931 of a nineteen-year-old British boy, John Thorburn (left). This young fantasist stole away from his home in Shanghai and set off for adventure and to ‘make good’. Unhappily he carried two revolvers and by the end of the day had used them, to lethal effect, fatally wounding two Chinese gendarmes who challenged him as he walked along a railway line in the dark. Within twenty-four hours he had been apprehended by Chinese military police, from whose custody he never emerged. Thorburn was killed and his body secretly disposed of. Details of his fate were not uncovered for over five months. Meanwhile, his disappearance galvanized British residents in Shanghai both to demonstrate their fears for their safety in the face of Chinese moves to reform legal protections that should have led to his being promptly handed over the British after his arrest, and of course to lobby for his return, or for retribution if he were dead.

Thirty years ago this month, I gave a seminar paper on the affair for the first time, luridly titling it ‘Tortured, mutilated or dead’, then submitted it to the journal Modern Asian Studies, where it appeared after a long delay as ‘Death of a Young Shanghailander: The Thorburn Case and the Defence of the British Treaty Ports in China in 1941’. You can read the published version here, and if you do not have access to that, you can read the mss text here. I found my sources in the Public Record Office at Kew, the US National Archives in Washington DC, the Shanghai Library and the National Library of China in Beijing. Aside from the essential mystery of what John Thorburn was actually up to, which remained unclear, I felt I had sources that covered all the angles that interested me and supported the argument that I was making.

There was one exception, the identity of a ‘Mrs W. P. Roberts’, a ‘young married woman’, in whose company Thorburn spent most of the evening before his departure, and who was the bearer of his final farewell letter to his father. British diplomats decided to keep her out of the limelight, for the sake of her reputation, and I was unable to identify her. This was not important, but it did rankle. I ransacked newspapers and directories for ‘W. P. Roberts’, assuming that the convention of identifying a married woman by her husband’s initials held true in this case. Aside from tying up loose ends, this was one of the points that audiences asked me about when I gave talks on it. The appeal of a having a mystery shared with you, I learned, partly lies in trying to help solve it. It was a talk that engaged its listeners, who provided helpful reflections and challenges. Some I dealt with as I revised the paper. But I could not track Mrs W. P. Roberts down.

John Thorburn (top row, far left) and his father (bottom row, far right), Shnghai Volunteer Company, Light Horse, 1931

My colleague Tom Larkin has helped me solve the mystery and in a way that unexpectedly threads our work together. Tom is just about to leave the University of Bristol, where he has worked with me on his doctorate and as a research fellow, since 2017 with what is now the Hong Kong History Centre. He is moving to take up an Assistant Professorship in the History of the United States at the University of Prince Edward Island. He will be there when his fine book appears in print next year with Columbia University Press. The China Firm: American Elites and the Making of British Colonial Society is a wonderful study of the world of the men and women associated with the American trading company Augustine Heard & Company, in nineteenth-century Hong Kong. That work intersects with mine in ways we both know, for Heards helped John Samuel Swire establish his business in China and Japan in the late 1860s, an episode I discuss in my history of the British firm, China Bound: John Swire & Sons and its World (which has just appeared in translation in Taiwan).

Tom came to Bristol fresh from an MA at the University of York in Toronto. His dissertation there explored representations of the shooting in Shanghai of an Englishman called Harry Smith in 1906 by a Macanese, Peter Sidney Hyndman, who had been born in Hong Kong. Smith had invited Hyndman’s fiancé Winifred Dorothy Rose to tea. Hyndman, who had asked her not to go, burst in to find her ‘in a state of undress’. He had a revolver with him, shot Smith dead, and accidentally wounded Winifred. Tom used this episode to present a rich picture of the fears of white society in treaty port society about the threats to its position posed by such ‘undesirables’ (and that discourse zeroed in on the alleged behaviour and mores of Winifred Rose, barely eighteen, already widowed, and of mixed Irish and Asian parentage). Hyndman was spared the gallows. In fact, he served only an eighteen-month sentence for manslaughter and lived on and worked in Shanghai until his death in 1936, and yes, dear reader, Winifred married him. You can read the article Tom drew out of his dissertation either here as published, or here, in manuscript.

There are obvious themes that both our papers share, and we have both benefited from other people’s misery. Violent death generates paperwork and newsprint, and freezes people at a particular moment in time. It seems callous to say so, but it is a gift for the historian. The disappearance of John Thorburn and the killing of Harry Smith allowed each of us to look in different ways at Shanghai’s foreign world at points a quarter of a century apart, and these incidents provided us with a rich set of materials to use as we did so. The essays are different in many ways, not least in terms of the wider political environment in which they are set – the last years of the Qing on the one hand, and the early years of the Guomindang republic on the other, and international society before and after the First World War. But the world of colonial power, even if under threat as it was in 1931, encompasses both of our articles.

So does the Hyndman family. I now know that Mrs W. P. Roberts was baptized Winifred Dorothy Hyndman. She was born in April 1911, and would be the only child of the marriage of Peter Sidney Hyndman and Winifred Dorothy Rose. I had been misled for years — for thirty years — by a typo, and by a Shanghai policeman’s inconsistency in referring to Thorburn’s ‘young married’ friend in this way. Winnie Hyndman was barely a month and a half older than John. She had been married just as she turned 15 to a British employee of a tobacco company, John Chamberlain Roberts, and gave birth to their first child a year later. John Roberts was in Britain when Thorburn went missing, and Winnie was living with her parents in Shanghai. Perhaps it was also cautiousness about stirring memories of the lively early years of that couple’s relationship, as well as the potentially compromising presence of Winnie in John Thorburn’s company in the last hours he spent in Shanghai that led the police and diplomats to be reticent. British officials presented the missing youth as an upright, decent young man, who had been naïve, foolish, and unlucky. They did not want anything to complicate that picture. 

Bride and groom: Winnie and her husband, J.C. Roberts. Her parents stand on either side of them: China Press, 23 May 1926, p. D1

Our two research projects, initially undertaken a quarter century apart, can be linked together though the figure of Winifred Dorothy Hyndman, who died of tuberculosis in a hospital in Qingdao in 1937, and her parents. She was buried in the city’s International Cemetery, which is now a park. I doubt either article would have needed any changing if this connection had come to light earlier. It might have occasioned a comment, though. I had filled in other gaps since I completed the project. I found that Thorburn’s father lived in Shanghai until he died in 1957, long after the vast majority of Britons had left, and that after his death his Russian partner brought his ashes to Hong Kong where a remembrance service was held. I was contacted by relatives of some of those involved, who shared photographs and observations. I found another image myself, such as the one above of Thorburn in Shanghai Volunteer Corps uniform. Much remains unknown and unfathomable about John Thorburn’s adventure. But at least, finally, thirty years on, I have identified Mrs W. P. Roberts, Winifred Dorothy Roberts – Winnie Hyndman – and her history.

Thank you, Tom, and bon voyage.

Missing archive: the papers of the Russian Emigrants’ Association, Shanghai

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I recently found a document in a bundle of papers I was given that had once belonged to a senior scholar in the field of modern Chinese history. With a covering letter dated 13 August 1956, it’s a 20 page packing list detailing the contents of seven crates of the documents of the Shanghai office of the Russian Emigrants’ Association from its establishment in 1926 to 1946 (in the main). (A little confusingly, this body was actually known as the Russian Emigrants’ Committee). The file originates from the CIA, and the packing list dates from Spring 1949 when the US navy took out of the city the records of the Shanghai Municipal Police Special Branch along with some other records that are now in the US National Archives, notably the Russian Emigrants Committee Registration Cards. Here’s a taste of what was taken from the Russian Emigrants’ Association.

And another

The SMP Special Branch archive and associated records were transferred to the National Archives by the CIA in 1979. You can find the catalogue and an introduction here. But of this substantial collection of material from the Russian Emigrants’ Association I can see no trace in the National Archives catalogue, nor anywhere else. Perhaps it’s still with the CIA. There’s growing scholarly and genealogical interest in the history of this community: Katya Knyazeva has been writing about it, and steadily surfacing material and making it available online. Marcia Ristaino’s pioneering Port of Last Resort: The Diaspora Communities of Shanghai (2001) set the agenda and framework, but there is much that can be learned about the experiences of this, the single largest community of Europeans in Shanghai in the 1930s and 1940s.

Introducing China Families

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Over the last couple of years I have been working with colleagues to transfer some of the scattered sets of biographical information that I have developed during research projects over the last two decades onto a new platform. The site, China Families, is now live, and still growing. Through various projects I had built up substantial sets of biographical information about men who served in the Shanghai Municipal Police (when developing Empire Made Me), the Chinese Maritime Customs Service (Chinese and foreign staff), and the shipping line China Navigation Co (whilst writing China Bound). An interest in the history of cemeteries and memorialisation amongst treaty port communities in China left me with sets of historic cemetery lists. These have now been combined with lists of civilian internees, neutral European nationals in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, and British government probate records, into a single searchable database. There are at least 60,000 records available. In addition I have developed a list of all the digitised copies of residents’ and business directories that I could find online, and provided guides for looking for men and women who lived in Hong Kong, and in Shanghai.

The sources are diverse. Much of the information comes from archival documents in Shanghai, Nanjing, and in London, from my own research in local newspapers and printed records. Some of the materials used have subsequently been withdrawn from public access, especially material from archives in China. I have also recently published an introduction to the history that underpins this, and set out some of the resources available for those researching their treaty port China family histories (and I identified some that you will not find).

The site is free to use, and requires no registration, and is designed to be useful for historians and genealogists alike, and also sits alongside the Historical Photographs of China platform. Do play around with it, and let me know what you think. I would be interested to know what you find there, and what you do with the information.

 

Fifty years in China

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Actually, it came to almost 54 years: Thomas Carr Ramsey was unusual as a Briton in spending over half a century in China without leaving the country once. Of course, many Roman Catholic missionaries never left, but most foreign residents in China spent leave periods outside the country. Some worked for firms or oganisations such as missionary societies which had paid-leave policies, allowing them a furlough every five to seven years. This was deemed to be good for their health, but also for their general well-being, allowing them to reconnect with families. It did not suit everybody, and some found themselves at a loose end, distance and time having eroded their ties to their former homes. And of course, others were in China precisely to escape them.

Directory and Chronicle, 1917

Directory and Chronicle 1917, Swatow

Many memoirs share the title (or variations on the theme): My Twenty-Five Years in China, or Forty Years in China, and so on — the latter, by consul Sir Meyrick Hewlett, is quite one of the battiest of the genre — but it was unusual for a man actually to be able to boast five decades unbroken residence in the country. The occasion it was marked, at Shantou (Swatow) with a reception at the foreigners’ Kialat Club, presentation of a bowl and ‘numerous scrolls and plaques, testifying in classical Chinese characters to his many virtues’, a Chinese banquet, a cinema show, and a performance by a Chinese military band. Ramsey responded with a rendition of ‘Auld Lang Syne’, though he was no Scotsman, having been born in South Shields, the son of Captain Henry Ramsey, who worked as a pilot in Swatow from 1876 until his death in 1883. So the family connection with this, one of the quieter and lesser-known treaty ports, was longer still.

Directory & Chronicle 1905, Weihaiwei

Directory & Chronicle 1905, Weihaiwei

The younger Ramsey arrived in China aged 15 on 24 September 1874, sailing out via Cape Horn and San Francisco on a vessel captained by an uncle. His career thereafter in China was peripatetic, but after 1909 he was based in Shantou. He first worked in a shipping office in Hong Kong, moved to Swatow, then on Shanghai, where he married in 1885, then moved on to Chefoo (Yantai) — where his father had previously lived — to a gold-mining venture. That failed, and he followed the flow of the expansion of the British presence in China by arriving in Weihaiwei shortly before it was formally handed over to the British, being present at the ceremony itself. After an altercation in the British court there over the probity of the firm he had established, and its practices in supplying the government (he was acquitted), Ramsey removed back to Swatow, where he secured the local agency for the British-owned Kailan Mining Administration, and became a stalwart in the Kialat Club, and in yachting locally (he designed his own boats). He also secured for a decade the position of Norwegian Acting Vice Consul, which must have been useful for something. On the way he surfaces frequently in the treaty port press as a sportsman: a champion jockey and a useful boxer.

Desk Hong List, 1884, Shanghai and Northern Ports, Shanghai section

Desk Hong List, 1884, Shanghai and Northern Ports, Shanghai section

It is the pattern of movement that interests me most, as well as, conversely, his fixity at Shantou and that of his family. When he died in Shantou in December 1931, Thomas Carr Ramsey was buried in a grave next to his mother in the now-lost Kakchieh Foreign Cemetery, while his son, Noel Ronald Ramsey carried on the firm’s business in the port after his death. Thomas Ramsey roamed along the China coast seeking opportunity but settled on exploiting a niche. You can find many like him in the archive, often moving swiftly, pouncing on new opportunities that opened as the political geography of China changed. The opening of a new treaty port, or leased territory, or a change in the rules that allowed foreigners to enter a new sphere of activity – mining, for example, or manufacturing – saw men leap in to try to secure a windfall profit (scooping up land at the first auction of lots was generally a sure-fire way to secure a good return), or otherwise exploit the advantage of early arrival. In the wider history of the treaty ports we know more about the successful than the not so lucky, but the latter always outnumbered the former. (The spectacular bankruptcy of Dent & Co. in 1865, sometime biggest rivals to Jardine, Matheson and Co, means that they are largely absent from histories of the China coast). Legal records are full of details of debts, bankruptcies, and the sorting out of estates. Sometimes, however, a man stands out in the record, and in this case one chanced into my line of sight, when I was looking for something else, through a little sub-heading in the North China Herald: ‘Mr. Carr Ramsey’s Jubilee’.

The man seems finally to have cracked: for on 13 June 1928 the ‘Norwegian Consul and Merchant’ (as he styled himself to the immigration authorities) landed with his wife in San Francisco on the SS President Grant, where he featured in the local press due to his ‘record’ stay in China, before making his way onwards to Britain. Sixteen months later he arrived in New York heading westwards; Ramsey’s wife, Ella Mary McLeod, followed him, dying in Swatow in 1935. This family was more widely embedded in the China coast world: his wonderfully named brother, Alfred Formosa Ramsey, was a ship’s engineer, who married the eldest daughter of the Inspector of Hong Kong’s naval dockyard police in 1893. One sister married a mariner in Chefoo in 1873, a man who was later Parks overseer at Shanghai for six years before his death in 1902, and whose family were a local fixture. Another sister married the founder of Shanghai’s Inshallah Dairy, A.M.A. Evans, who kept a fine herd of Jersey cattle in the east of the settlement. Thomas Carr Ramsey’s son Noel married the sister of a Chinese Maritime Customs officer, but his daughter Violet broke the China mould, and relocated to the Straits Settlements.

Swatow, a short hop by steamer from Hong Kong, was never a very successful treaty port, at least as judged in foreign minds, but it was an important point of movement of China to and from Southeast Asia, and prospered as a result of remittances from its diaspora. The city was comprehensively wrecked by a devastating typhoon in 1922, and was badly affected by the communist insurgency in eastern Guangdong province in the mid-late 1920s: in 1927 it was even briefly seized and held by Communist forces. Like many other ports it had its small foreign community, and contrary to assumptions that foreigners came, ‘plundered’ — a term I found in use only last week in a talk given by a Fudan University graduate — and then quickly went, the Ramsey family’s multi-generational story was not uncommon, nor was the way in which they had secured a comfortable niche. Old Swatow is now mostly invisible in today’s Shantou, and the port and its ilk are generally overshadowed by the bright lights (and richer records) of Shanghai, but it was an important part of the infrastructure of the China coast, and the Ramsey family itself in all its branches is emblematic of this now obscured world.

Sources: North China Herald, various, especially 25 October 1924, 8 December 1931; US immigration records via Ancestry.

‘Picturing China’ filmed

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The Arts & Humanities Research Council have made a nice little film about one of my projects, ‘Historical Photographs of China’. This is one of a number of films they have commissioned to mark the tenth anniversary of the council, and which showcase projects that it has funded. We have placed 9,155 photographs on the site, with another c.22,000 in process, and just in the last few days have received wonderful collections showcasing Chongqing and the Upper Yangzi river in the mid/late 1930s, and north China at about the same time. Our collection ranges back as far as 1857, and as recently as December 1950. And we know there’s a lot more out there … so what’s safely tucked away in your attics and on your bookcases?

Vanishing Policeman

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I get contacted fairly regularly by relatives and descendants of members of the Shanghai Municipal Police (as well as the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, and China coast residents more widely). Sometimes they have found my book, Empire Made Me (and sometimes I have mentioned the men), or they have found the website or other references to the work. I learn a great deal from these contacts, and have often been able to share information accumulated from personnel and other police files in the archives in Shanghai, published staff lists, and newspapers. Some of the information shared with me has gone into my books.

Shanghai lives often have a trajectory of their own in family memories: every Shanghai Sergeant becomes chief of police; every Customs tidewaiter is harbour master; every man who died in service has been killed by armed robbers, instead of typhoid, for example. So often I am the scholarly spoilsport, digging out the death notice and UK National Archives probate file reference. Of course, sometimes they are right, but in general a combination of the very idea of Shanghai — exotic and violent in the Western (and other) imagination — and perhaps the tall tales told by grandfathers and great uncles when home on leave, means that most careers have very greatly improved with a retelling.

Screen Shot 2014-08-23 at 09.41.52A recent exchange highlighted both what can now be found out with relative ease, and the limits to tracing people in the past. What could I tell my correspondent in Australia about her grandfather, Philip James Doylend, killed in service shortly before her grandmother moved with the children from Shanghai to Canada? I found I could tell her quite a lot, for over a decade I had been contacted by other descendants in north America (who were unknown to her), and looked into his career a little. Born in Suffolk in 1880, Doylend had joined the police in 1903, after eight years service in the Royal Navy, and was promoted to Sergeant in 1907. He married a Finnish woman, Johanna Maatanan, in Shanghai in 1908 — when this photograph, left, was taken — and resigned to join the armed forces in 1917. In a common pattern he went on long leave on 23 June 1917, ahead of his contract actually terminating on 2 March 1918. Rather than leave his family in Shanghai, Doylend attempted to return to the UK via Finland, where they would stay until the war was over, heading overland on the Trans-Siberian railway. They ran slap into the Russian revolution: Finland was in turmoil, and they had to return to Shanghai — a much harder journey back across Russia. They arrived in February 1918, exhausted and penniless.

The Shanghai press next takes up part of the story. Far from finding stories of violent death at the hands of Chinese criminals, we find appearances in court in 1922 and 1923 of a couple whose marriage is breaking down. Doylend worked now in a Shanghai department store, and then in a hotel bar. His wife ran a boarding house. She sued him for maintenance and even at one point for the family furniture: when they were still living in the same house. The British judge made unenforcible orders that Doylend make a monthly payment, and attempted to cajole him to do the right thing: ‘I should have thought a great lazy man like you could do something’ to support them, he told Doylend, ‘you ought to feel ashamed of yourself’. The furniture issue gave the proceedings a novelty value, and papers in Hong Kong took up the story as well. In 1925 his wife and the children moved to Canada.

So far, so unexceptional. Except that after the last court appearance in December 1923 Doylend himself disappears entirely from view. He does not resurface in the newspaper, or in any of the databases I can access. New digital family history tools have generally changed the game, especially in the case of a group of men like this, serving overseas. The family history sites have ship passenger lists, for example, and you can trace men and women backwards and forwards, and it helps immensely also if they ever travelled across the United States or Canada. But Doylend’s name — and it is not a common surname surname — does not appear. The story in the north American side of the family was that a former colleague still serving in the Shanghai police delivered news to his family in England, early during the Second World War, that Doylend had recently died in Shanghai. But in fact this man, Alexander Aitkenhead, had also left the police, back in 1912.

The newly available digitalised newspapers and passenger lists mean that a researcher can often now track those who deliberately disappeared. You can trace people and their movements, life events, court appearances etc, through newspapers on sites such as Australia’s Trove, New Zealand’s Papers Past, the Singapore National Library Board’s NewspapersSG, and Hong Kong’s Old HK Newspapers (but not easily in the last, for it is a very poor platform). These are all free to access (you can also find some other resources I have created here). The English-language press in Shanghai can also be searched, but mostly only by those with access to scholarly resources (although an incomplete version of the North China Herald can be found in the international newspapers resources on findmypast). You can find an obituary — as I have — in a small town Canadian newspaper of a Glaswegian which bears no relation to the known facts of his life, but which is eloquent testimony to the power of his own reinvention far from home.

That sort of thing hardly surprises: as they career through life people often lie, dissemble, hide, or flee. Birth dates are often tweaked — for men are too old or too young otherwise for military or other service: Doylend added at least a year to his age on joining the navy, which has his birth in 1879. Men and women change names, invent backgrounds and careers. The Shanghai Municipal Police’s Special Branch files, helpfully scooped up the CIA in 1949, document various tricksters moving their way around East Asia, securing credit or an entree to society with this tall tale or that one. Of course, a patient sleuth could do this before, and such wonderful books as Hugh Trevor-Roper’s Hermit of Peking, about Sir Edmund Backhouse, a liar, fraud, forger and fantasist, living on remittance in Peking for decades a very long way from his family, have emerged from such searches. It does seem, however, to be much easier now than ever before to track people down, even those who hid their tracks. In Doylend’s case perhaps it was as simple as assuming another name, for I can find no trace at all of him, having ransacked all the newspapers, family history websites, city directories, etc. that I know of. Perhaps we should respect his choices, and leave him in whatever obscurity he found. Perhaps I simply have not looked in the right place, and of course the paper archive still dwarfs the digitised one. He might simply be just out of sight and reach.

So while the family tales were incomplete, and had grown fanciful in the telling, a mystery remains: Philip James Doylend, where are you?