This is a handsome cover, I think, for my just about to be published account of the impact of the Great War on the British at Shanghai. As well as exploring how Britons in the city reacted, and negotiated the awkwardness of living in a neutral country with their new enemies, many of whom they were closely connected with in the business, public and even private lives, it follows 110 men who sailed off together in October 1914 to join the army.
This is the title of a Radio 3 programme by Rana Mitter, produced by Phil Tinline, to which I contributed, and in which Maurice Tinkler’s open-mouthed arrival in Shanghai in 1919 gets an airing. As well as still being available on BBC iPlayer until — it says here — 2099, you can catch that particular sequence from it on Radio 4’s Pick of the Week.
There are some great moments in the programme, especially when a pre-revolution film star chats with some contemporary Shanghai women in a coffee shop, ‘Wow, Mo-deng’, one of them says: ‘Wow, modern!’. The jazz is fun too. There’s more on Tinkler and his journey through this world in my book Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai (Penguin).
C.A. Montalto de Jesus, Washington DC, 12 July 1921, photographed by Herbert French: Library of Congress.
Some writers do not take well to bad reviews. Carlos Augusto Montalto de Jesus, author of Historic Macau, published in 1902, and of Historic Shanghai, published in 1909, was one such. Both books were pioneering ventures, the first comprehensive histories of foreign settlement in each city. Montalto de Jesus was born in Hong Kong in c.1863, and was to die in Shanghai, on 19 May 1932.
The first edition of Historic Macau was well received and well reviewed, though it did not sell well. In 1929, however, all copies of the second, which had appeared in 1926, were burned by the colonial authorities. Stuart Braga has written informatively on this episode in the Newsletter of the Casa de Macau in Australia. They had been seized in response to an additional chapter which lambasted the Portuguese for their alleged maladministration of the colony, and which proposed that the League of Nations take over its running and development. This was not in fact an unusual idea — foreign activists in Shanghai were to raise it several times over the next few years as a solution to the ‘Shanghai problem’, and one preferable in their eyes to the assumption of Chinese control over the International Settlement. A ‘free port’ status had been proposed as early as 1862: it was a recurring fantasy in the settler mind. Montalto’s first edition had concluded with a similar proposal for Macau, that it be ‘enfranchised as a municipality and placed under the auspices of the Powers in China’ (p. 358). But when updated and accompanied by pungent criticism of the authorities, the suggestion did not go down well with the colonial government in Macau in 1926, as Paul Spooner’s 2009 thesis also explains. The author was charged and fined under its press laws: the book was banned, and on 15 June some 500 copies seized, including some of those already sold, which were seized from private houses; and when Montalto de Jesus attempted to recover the confiscated volumes in 1929 they were burned.
Montalto himself felt burned by the reception to the first edition of Historic Shanghai. In advance of its publication he had attempted to secure a subvention for it from the Shanghai Municipal Council, which administered the International Settlement. As the Council had already commissioned a history from George Lanning, it declined the request, and the introduction to the book takes a swipe at it for doing so. His strictures on the shortcomings of the Council and the public life of the settlement were harsh, but probably already embedded in his manuscript. ‘Fairly readable’, noted the 29 May 1909 review in the North China Daily News, though fairly expensive. But it was too much a history of the Taiping rebellion, complained the reviewer (quite reasonably in fact), the sentences were too long, and there were many small mistakes, not least in Montalto’s English, which were successively catalogued.
In his defence against the charges brought against his Historic Macau, Montalto would later state that ‘The criticism impartially made by me, though stern, is justifiable and well-meant’, but he had not taken the same stance in July 1910, when he launched an action in Shanghai against the North China Daily News, which had published two items plagiarising passages in his book. The proceedings in court opened by raising the issue of the paper’s critical review, and its apparently damaging effect on sales, and kept returning to it. The Court found for Montalto on the infringement of copyright, awarding him $500, but entirely rejected the issue of the criticism as relevant. In October he appealed, representing himself in court, and seeking larger damages, as they were ‘inadequate to the gravity of the offence, as well as to the injury sustained.’ The Council’s rejection of a subvention, the review, and the plagiarism were all in his mind intimately connected.
C.A. Montallo de Jesus & F.W. Gleason, Washington DC, 12 November 1921, photograph by Herbert French: Library of Congress.
Montalto de Jesus was ‘evidently very much oppressed with a sense of his own wrongs’, noted the judge, Sir Havilland de Sausmarez, patiently, ‘and he feels very sore about them’, but there was nothing incorrect or inadequate about the judgement in his favour, which de Sausmarez affirmed. The judge will have known Montalto well, for both were actively involved in Shanghai’s International Chess Club.
While the newspaper had accepted the infringement from the start, it had part-parried by intimating that if two writers had drawn verbatim from the same original source, then it would not be surprising if they appeared identical. And the book is rather more safely viewed as a historical object, than in any sense as a history. The controversy did little to help sales, which had only reached 339 by the end of 1909. Thereafter the controversy ceases.
The truculent author considered that he had incurred not a fine, in 1926, but a ‘decree of civic death’, and that he had fled Macau for Hong Kong, penniless — a recurring self-description — and ‘found it necessary to intern myself at the Asylum of the Little Sisters in Kowloon and was sheltered by charity among Chinese old men… Some who knew me were shocked find the historian of Macao herded with poor decrepit coolies.’ His characteristic hyperbole aside, Montalto’s financial state then perhaps explains the fact that in 1927 he returned to his much earlier plan and invited the Shanghai Municipal Council to purchase the remaining stock of Historic Shanghai – half of the 2,000 copies printed — whose publication costs he had had to meet himself, but it declined.
A recent post on the blog Sikhs in Shanghai drew attention to a little known fact: Captain Edward Ivo Medhurst Barrett, C.I.E., Commissioner of the Shanghai Municipal Police, well known Hampshire cricketer, and the target for a bolt of lightning which struck Aldeburgh golf course in summer 1932, had also been a novelist. Barrett was fired for reasons that were never quite made clear in 1929, and was to die in 1950 when he was knocked off his bicycle. The novel, a secret agent thriller, Drums of Asia, was published by Lovat Dickson in 1934, the author being given as Charles Trevor.
Barrrett had been recruited from the Malay States Guides to head the SMP’s Sikh Branch in 1907. Various records show him to be an important collaborator with Government of India intelligence activities in Shanghai aimed at countering Indian nationalist activities there. To find that he had written a novel which commences with German diplomats in Shanghai plotting to entice some Indian activists to organise a plot against the British in the pre-era was an enticing thought. ‘Herr Von Truebb-Blaich, German Consul-General in Shanghai was deep in thought’ it begins, as all such thrillers should. From the Consulate-General’s views of the Astor House Hotel and the ‘Whangpoo’ river, the plot ranges across the globe and fetches up with a finale in a barely disguised Afghanistan where it all unravels and the British Secret Service triumphs, predictably. What unexpected light, though, might it shed on Barrett’s role in Shanghai? How much was this a roman à clef? I had long wondered if Barrett was not in fact an intelligence agent of some sort, and perhaps this might shed light on that.
A file in the India Office Records noticed by Sikhs in Shanghai’s blogger promised some answers: entitled “Drums of Asia by Captain E I M Barrett alias Charlie Trevor: India Office correspondence with publishers on suggested changes prior to publication” (IOR/L/PJ/12/469, File 657/33), it details attempts by the India Office in London, liaising with MI5, and the Government of India, to thwart the book’s publication, or, as that was deemed impossible, to ‘shape’ the text. After all, one official notes, surely the India Office could not allow it to be alleged that British Secret Service agents operated under cover in foreign countries, could it? Well, another — perhaps more worldly colleague — remarked, it would not exactly be an entirely new fictional scenario. As you can see, Captain Barrett is identified as the author in the catalogue, and the file does have some interesting comments about him. He had, noted one man, ‘an ‘intimate knowledge of Indian political movements and individuals connected therewith’, and even though he was ‘very well known as a keen officer who did much for the Government of India in Shanghai’, he was also ‘impetuous and indiscreet’.
Alarms bells rang; the drums of Whitehall were beaten: memos were exchanged. New Delhi was contacted; MI5 was called on. A lengthy list was drawn up of troublesome passages and characterisations in the manuscript. Even though the nationalists who were named as plotters were now dead, officials worried that the characterisations would ‘give much offence in nationalist circles in India’. It could also prove difficult for relations with Afghanistan. In fact, publisher and author were actually to ‘behave in the most wonderfully accommodating manner’. The publisher, Lovat Dickson had brought the issue to the attention of officials himself, calling on them in early July 1933, pointing out that Barrett had supplied the facts, while the book had then been written up by a professional writer, by the name of Broadbridge. Much of the material was actually in the public domain, Dickson later argued, but he and Barrett proved more than happy to change plot details, names and locales, and generally defuse the book’s more worrisome factual elements.
Early memos and notes in the file show officials trying to work out who Barrett was, and how much he might really know. Someone clearly managed to find an old China hand who could oblige, and a month after the file was opened a note on Barrett was entered into the file, indicating also that he left the Shanghai police in those somewhat unclear circumstances and that he was now living in Aldeburgh. On 25 August, Dixon and Barrett called by arrangement on Sir Malcolm Seton, Deputy Under Secretary of State, to clarify how things stood. There must have been a perplexing phase in the discussion, for Barrett stated that he had never been in Shanghai in his life, and that his ‘only Eastern experience’ had been service with the West Kent Regiment on India’s North West frontier during the First World War.
Indeed it proved true: this was and has been a wild goose chase. India Office worries about security leaks and offending nationalist sentiment had been heightened by the belief that one of their own, with ‘intimate‘ knowledge of Government of India intelligence activities, was supplying the facts on which the ghost writer was preparing his text. Those of us interested in the colonial and anti-colonial politics of Shanghai had been bemused and pleased to find a prominent figure in that world writing what was presented as a lightly fictionalised account of events and personalities concerned. But the India Office cataloguers had finalised their summary of the file’s contents without getting to the bottom of its convoluted narrative. They had, we had, the wrong Barrett.
So we are left with Barrett the cricketer (that’s him, 3rd from left in this photograph on Sikhs in Shanghai) , rugby player, Sikh branch commander and police chief, and golfer, but not Captain Barrett, C.I.E., the novelist. However, we are also left with a previously unnoticed 1930s thriller partly set in Shanghai, and an interesting account in the file of the engagement of the British intelligence establishment and popular culture. But never fear: all is not in fact lost — that is, for those of us looking for novels written by Shanghai’s police commanders. Captain Alan Maxwell Boisragon, who held the post of Captain Superintendent in 1901 to 1906 obliges instead: his book for boys, Jack Scarlett: Sandhurst Cadet, was published in 1915. Was the War Office warned, we wonder?
Here are Shanghailanders at play, in the third of the Shanghai Race Club Amateur Circus events, in 1901, a year after the Boxer War, while foreign troops still occupied parts of north China, and were stationed at Shanghai. The first two circuses were held in August 1894 and 1895, a hot and steamy time of year for the foreign community to be masquerading as Sophie Skylark, Tottie Chuckerout and Professor Nankin Roady (to select a few from the programmes). The leading light was British merchant Frank Maitland (‘Frankini’), sportsman, sometime Master of the Shanghai Paper Hunt Club, Race Club Steward, founder of the Shanghai Society for the Prevention of Cruely to Animals, proprietor of the newspaper Sport and Gossip, and then of the Shanghai Times.
It was, as far as I can see, an entirely masculine enterprise, originating in a ‘circusette’ put on one sultry Wednesday evening in June 1893 in the Race Club Grand Stand. A lavishly illustrated souvenir of the 1901 performances surfaces at auctions, and sells quite handsomely. Amongst its photographs is this pearl: Tottie Longsocks — who ‘wins all hearts’.
Robert Bickers 