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.
My work has often considered questions of memory and history making, and of forgetting. A correspondent’s query nudges me to return to my files about a small case study of this that I very briefly mentioned in my book The Scramble for China, but had notwritten up more fully: one of the Shanghai International Settlement’s more obscure historic memorials, an imposing granite cross that stood in the grounds of the British Consulate-General from 1867 onwards.
There is very little record of it, but its prominence can be gauged from the screenshot above from Pathé newsreel footage of the 24 May 1920 Empire Day parade in the Consulate-General grounds. Even so, correspondence from 1913 suggests British officials at the consulate had little understanding of its origins and in fact of what it commemorated, and even less faith that their successors would have any. Here it is almost two decades later, in a magazine article on cemeteries and monuments in Shanghai. (That’s Broadway Mansions, which faced along the Bund, that you can see to the right).
What none of these photographs convey is the fact that it was made of Peterhead granite: it was a deep red in colour, and as a result it was known in Chinese as the ‘Red Stone Memorial’, 红石纪念碑. As a magnified section of this much earlier photograph below shows, it did have some inscriptions around its pedestal, but aside from a religious text below, these were simply the names of five men. (This photograph, which seems to date from the late 1860s or 1870s, can be found here on the Chinese photographic history blog, Jiuyingzhi).
Two names can be made out in this image: Robert Burn Anderson, and (just) William De Norman, traces of another can just be made out. There were in fact five men listed here:
William De Normann Born 28th August 1832, Died 5th October 1860
Robert Burn Anderson Lieutenant and Adjutant Fanes Horse Born 14th October 1833, Died 27th September 1860
Thomas Wilson Bowlby Special correspondent of the Times newspaper Born 7th January 1818, Died 25th September 1860
Luke Brabazon, Captain Royal Artillery Supposed to have died 19th September 1860, aged 28
John Phipps, Private 1st Dragon Guards, Born 1833, Died 18th September 1860
These were five of the men who died in captivity during the last stages of the Anglo-French invasion of north China during the Second Opium War. They were part of a group of nearly 40 taken when under flag of truce, some 14 of whom died from neglect or ill-treatment. Most of those who perished were Sikh troopers accompanying the group, which was travelling to parlay with Qing officials. No memorial was raised to them.
This episode, which prompted the invaders to seek to find a way to personally punish the Qing court, and resulted in the destruction of the Yuanmingyuan — the old Summer Palace — once held a central place in British memories of the conflict. However, noted Consul-General Sir Everard Fraser in the summer of 1913 in a letter to the British Minister in Peking, ‘the lapse of half a century has made their names and the incident commemorated quite unfamiliar to all but careful readers of Chinese history’. It would not have helped that the richly detailed first English-language Shanghai guidebook, Charles Darwent’s Shanghai: A Handbook for Travelers and Residents (1904) misread the most prominent of the names, and thereby misunderstood its meaning. As well as the ‘De Morgan’ Cross, it was various referred to, when mentioned at all, as the Bowbly Cross, or simply as a monumental cross.
The shaft of the cross did bear an inscription, but these echoes of Pilgrim’s Progress hardly helped tell its story:
Born in its light
Passing thro’ the dark valley
In its power
Resting in its shadow
Rejoice O Christian
In its great glory
Behold O Heathen
Enquire believe and live
Perhaps there should be something explicit, and less pious, pondered Fraser, and an additional inscription might be cut into the granite ‘briefly recording the deplorable act which cost the lives of the five persons whose names are cut upon the monument for the information of of the many visitors whose notice is attracted by the memorial’. A draft was enclosed: ‘This monument provided by Lady De Norman commemorates the death under most cruel torture of some members of the party who under a flag of truce went with Sir Harry Parkes on a mission of peace to the Commanders of the Chinese forces near Ho-hsi-wu and were there taken prisoners on 18th September 1860’.
The Minister asked the Legation’s Chinese Secretary, Sidney Barton, for his thoughts. Barton thought it best to leave it as it was. ‘The public having refused the custody of the monument, why cater for them now’, he wrote. Diplomatic and consular staff will know what it is, and wouldn’t the Chinese have a comment to make if such an inscription was added, especially with that reference to ‘cruel torture’. The time for such a brazen statement of anger was perhaps past; it would be best to leave it as it was.
Barton was alluding to the circumstances of the arrival of the monument in China. It had been conveyed to Shanghai in 1862, commissioned and sent out by William De Normann’s mother, and it was intended to form the centrepiece of the memorial at Beijing in the Russian cemetery where the remains of four of the five were interred in October 1860 (Brabazon’s body was never found). De Normann — who was christened Wilhelm Mererie Carl Helmuth Theodore von Normann — was the only son of his widowed mother, and had been born after his father’s death. These circumstances quite amplified her grief. But if there was a fullness of emotion, there were no funds to ship the monument north, and instead the ‘unwieldy packing cases’ were left to weather in the consulate grounds, providing a ‘favourite seat’, complained one newspaper correspondent in February 1867, for ‘seamen and other loungers at the British consulate’. Work on the new Public Garden, built on reclaimed land on the riverbank across the road from the consulate, was nearing completion. Might the Municipal Council like to offer it a home there, asked consul Winchester. No, reported the council, ‘there is a strong public feeling’ against this. After all, it was to be a park, not a graveyard. So a call to tender was published for the erection of the cross in the grounds of the consulate.
And there it stood, and probably did so until after the complex, abandoned in May 1967 after a week of intense Red Guard demonstrations, was forcibly requisitioned by the Shanghai city authorities in September 1967. Religious symbols of all kinds fell from the Shanghai skyline during the Cultural Revolution, and it is hard to believe that Baroness De Normann’s blood-red memorial to her son long lingered in the consulate grounds after they were taken over. But the Baroness’s grief and anger do in fact survive in stone in Northamptonshire, where a well-kept tombstone still lies for him, recording that ‘His mortal remains / Rest in the British cemetery / at Pekin / Having by the permission of God / Perished in captivity / In the cruel power of the heathen / After a captivity of sixteen days’. So a De Normann memorial, despite an erasure in Shanghai, still today tells one story of the China war of 1860 in a rural English churchyard. The ruins of the Yuanmingyuan, of course, tell another.
Sources: The National Archives, Kew, FO 228 1875, Shanghai No. 77, 5 June 1913, enclosures and minute; North China Herald, 16 February 1867, p. 27, 19 July 1867, p. 154; ‘Shanghai’s Cemeteries and Memorials’, Oriental Affairs IX:6 (June 1938), pp. 313-316; The London and China Telegraph, 14 October 1867, p. 539; The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire, 1832-1914 (Penguin).
Shortlisted for the 2018 Wolfson History Prize, my most recent book, book Out of China, now published in a Penguin Books paperback in the UK, and in hardback in the US by Harvard University Press, narrates the struggle of China’s peoples across the twentieth century to roll back foreign power, and explores the explosive legacy today of the era of foreign domination. Starting in 1918 it charts the decline, fall and afterlife of the foreign enclaves that had been established in many of China’s great cities (as well as in some quite out-of-the-way backwaters). It shows how the battle to restore China’s dignity and sovereignty took place on battlefields, and in conference chambers, but also in museums and galleries, in Hollywood, in print, and on stage. Out of China is concerned with struggles over ideas, and political power, but I also draw out the human dimension, and the stories of those caught up by design or chance in this now largely vanished world. The battle for China was not over even when the last foreign colony, Macao, was handed back in 1999, and tensions over the record of foreign powers in China, and over the wider legacy and impact of the West remain live today.
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.
A 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?
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?
One hundred and seventy years ago this week, the North China Herald reported on a series of consular and public meetings which had led to the creation of what was originally called the British local Volunteer Corps, and in time became officially know as the Shanghai Volunteer Corps. Formed after the seizure of the walled city of Shanghai by a rebel ‘Small Sword Society’, it saw action the following year in the 2 April ‘Battle of Muddy Flat’. This was a successful, if incompetent affair which drove away Qing government forces who were besieging the rebels, but who were camped too close to the foreign settlements, thereby drawing fire onto foreign property. Most of the handful of SVC dead were probably killed by ‘friendly fire’.
Quiescent thereafter until 1870, a revived SVC came under the control of the Shanghai Municipal Council, and in time became a vital component in foreign military defence schemes, and in internal security. A servig British officer was seconded to lead the Corps. Different foreign communities served in national or other companies (American, German, Jewish, the Customs, Philippine etc); the Shanghai Light House deemed itself the socially most prestigious; the Shanghai Scottish probably had most fun in the Mess; and the Chinese Company was formally the most efficient: they shot well and true.
In 1927 a paid Russian detachment was created from refugee White Russian soldiers, becoming in 1932 the Russian Regiment. In 1941 this was transferred to the Shanghai Municipal Police as the Russian Auxiliary Detachment. The Corps was abolished in early 1942 after the takeover of the international settlement by Japanese troops. In 1954 a gala dinner at the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club commemorated the centenary of the ‘Battle of Muddy Flat’ with fillet steak, wine and song.
At times a very significant proporton of young foreign businessmen served in the volunteers. It can not have helped the way many of them understood the nature of the foreign presence in China, let alone the way they were perceived by the Shanghainese who regularly saw parades of armed foreign traders marching down the Nanjing road.
Zhejiang University Press has recently published a Chinese translation of the book, as 帝国造就了我:一个英国人在旧上海的往事 (Diguo zaojiu le wo: yi ge Yingguoren zai jiu Shanghai de wangshi). The main title has been retained, although the sub-title has been slightly changed to stress the fact that policeman Maurice Tinkler was adrift in ‘Old Shanghai’.
One choice which puzzles me is the decision not to use at all the photograph of Tinkler which was central to the UK cover. That photograph, of Tinkler on a houseboat holiday west of Shanghai, standing in a field holding a pistol in a firing position, seemed to me encapsulate a great deal about the man and his image of himslf. In fact, it was looking at that image which suggested some of the key themes which I explored in the book. Instead we have a slice of the Shanghai bund, younger Tinkler swaggering in his all to brief days as a trainee officer at the end of the First World War, and, charmingly, a figure from one of his war-time drawings, which I found in his sweetheart Lily Wilson’s commonplace book.
Robert Bickers 