by Mark Felton
At Changi, the British quickly organized a school for the young children. When the camp first opened in 1942, the women’s section contained only fifty children. By March 1945 that figure had multiplied to around 330. At Changi, certain groups of prisoners were exempted from working, which left much more time to care for the youngest, and to attend to their educational needs. Harris described how ‘the aged, the sick, the infirm, the children and the mothers with families were all exempted from the more exacting camp chores.’ The Japanese agreed to the creation of a school in the camp dining room and an experienced teacher, Mrs Betty Milne, was appointed headmistress. The children, in addition to their regular classes, received daily religious instruction from the ten regular female teachers, which included a Miss Rank, Mrs Nelson, Miss Robinson, and Miss Russel-Davis. A welfare committee was also formed by the internees to make sure that the children were properly cared for in the camp, and this was chaired by a noted paediatrician, Dr Cicely Williams, who had undertaken pioneering work in Africa before the war. It remains a testament to the selflessness of so many of the volunteer teachers, the mothers and the prisoner doctors and nurses that none of the children died during their long captivity. The presence of the children united the adults, and gave them a reason to live. It was noted in all of the camps where education was permitted by the commandant, that schools created a sense of normality and continuity, and gave structure to the lives of the internees. It also allowed the adults to have some precious time, space and privacy when the children were in their classes.
In Hong Kong, the Japanese moved swiftly to concentrate not only the 10,000 military prisoners they had captured when the colony surrendered on Christmas Day 1941, but also the remaining Allied civilians who were living in the territory. The battle had torn the heart out of the colony. Between 8 and 25 December 1941, British, Canadian, Indian and Chinese forces had battled furiously with overwhelming numbers of Japanese troops. Churchill had exhorted the British commander, Major General Christopher Maltby, to fight on for as long as possible with the 10,000 men at his disposal, in order to buy time for the British position in Malaya and Singapore. Outnumbered nearly five to one, Maltby’s two gallant brigades had fought hard for almost every inch of the New Territories, Kowloon and finally Hong Kong Island, with absolutely no hope of relief or reinforcement. There had been no mass evacuation of civilians from Victoria Harbour as the end approached. Those civilians still in Hong Kong had done their bit for the defence, donning uniforms in the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps or the Red Cross, and stood by their posts until captured or killed. The rest had retreated with the troops into the Stanley Peninsula, and there awaited their fate once Maltby surrendered the colony at a small ceremony inside the famous Peninsula Hotel in Kowloon on Christmas Day.
On 4 January 1942, a notice had appeared in the English language press that ordered all ‘enemy nationals’ to assemble at the Murray Parade Grounds on a set date. Although about 1,000 mainly British civilians complied with the Japanese edict, many missed the notice in the confusion following the end of hostilities, and they were slowly gathered up over the coming days and weeks. Those civilians who reported to the parade grounds were marched down to the waterfront and imprisoned for seventeen days in a disgusting collection of flea pit hotel-brothels that had been the pre-war playground of rowdy sailors and soldiers from the local garrison. The accommodation was dirty, overcrowded and the food was poor. During the interim period the new Japanese military administration in Hong Kong had liaised with some of the high ranking British civil servants and diplomats that they had taken prisoner, and through these consultations they had decided upon a permanent camp for the civilian internees. Dr P. S. Selwyn-Clarke, Director of Medical Services, and Frank Gimson, the Colonial Secretary, recommended to the Japanese that the internees, including themselves, should be moved to the Stanley Peninsula into St Stephen’s College and the grounds of Stanley Prison. Gimson took the lead in asking for this because the Governor of Hong Kong, Sir Mark Young, had been placed in isolation at the Peninsula Hotel preparatory to being flown north to Shanghai and imprisonment there.
The site of the new camp was at the time slightly over six miles from the centre of Victoria on Hong Kong Island. The Japanese agreed at once and moved the internees by boat to Stanley, but failed to make any provision for their reception there. What the internees discovered on their arrival at Stanley was a camp almost bereft of facilities. There was nowhere to cook, all the furniture had been looted by local Chinese, and there was little crockery or cutlery left. The toilets were dirty, inadequate and lacking water. The camp would become very overcrowded, and initially at least little attention was paid to hygiene or public health.
In Hong Kong, almost 2,800 internees would eventually be living in the Stanley Internment Camp, 2,500 of whom were British. Among them were 286 children below the age of sixteen (ninety-nine under the age of four). The camp was under the control of the Japanese Foreign Affairs Department, and the commandant and his guards were not drawn from the dreaded Imperial Army, but from the Consular Police. However, they dressed like soldiers and carried rifles. They were perhaps slightly more humane than the Imperial Army, but many prisoners later remarked that there was not that much separating the two, or their attitude towards prisoners. The actual organization of the camp was the responsibility of the prisoners themselves, and very soon the British formed committees for housing, food and medical care. This was a pattern followed by the Japanese nearly everywhere. They were sensible enough to realise that Anglo-Saxons, and especially the British, enjoyed creating organizations and committees, and fell naturally into this form of democratic government with its elected leadership positions and strong sense of fair-play and cooperation. The British were for their part canny enough to realize in Hong Kong and elsewhere that the key to surviving the horrors of Japanese internment was in organizing themselves, and in creating order out of what could so easily have degenerated into chaos and anarchy, and a Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’ situation. It is a tribute to the selflessness exhibited by the vast majority of Allied civilians who were interned that, among the vulnerable groups such as children, very few deaths were recorded in the camps.
Food was the single most important issue to all prisoners-ofwar and civilian internees throughout the Japanese Empire. The Consular Police in Hong Kong provided little food to the Stanley Camp, and it was typically of very poor quality. The rice and other foodstuffs the Japanese issued to the internees often contained such repellent and health-threatening additives as dust, mud, rat and cockroach excreta, cigarettes butts and dead rats. The daily bill of fare could scarcely sustain body and soul for very many months and seemed designed to slowly kill the prisoners off. At 8.00 am, rice congee (a kind of porridge) was served, followed at 11.00 am by rice with stew (which contained very little meat). The evening meal at 5.00 pm was also rice with stew. The internees only survived because the Japanese permitted them some limited contact with friends and family outside the wire who were able to send in food. The Japanese probably tolerated this arrangement as it saved them money and time in procuring supplies. Some Red Cross parcels were also distributed, and the internees took to creating vegetable plots to supplement their meagre rations. They could also buy overpriced food from the camp canteen or obtain things through the thriving black market that existed in occupied Hong Kong. Money equalled survival, and although committees existed that made sure that people could at least be kept alive, the wealthier the interned family, the less they ultimately suffered in Stanley.
Health was the next most important concern after food for the Stanley internees. The Japanese routinely refused to provide medical facilities to prisoners, and they allowed tropical and malnutrition diseases to flourish everywhere throughout Asia. At Stanley, 121 people died before the end of the war, nearly all through illness. There were, however, no major disease epidemics at the camp because there were so many medical staff imprisoned alongside everyone else, including 40 doctors,
2 dentists, 6 pharmacists and 100 trained nurses. A simple hospital was created and drugs were begged from the Japanese or bought on the black market. Malaria was the most common disease at Stanley, closely followed by the usual Japanese prison camp illnesses of malnutrition, beriberi and pellagra.
Many of those who survived Stanley Camp spoke of how important children were to the survival and general wellbeing of the internees. Women and children contributed a sense of normality, a continuation of conventional social, family, and gender relations. Many of the adult internees believed that the presence of so many children made them less selfish, as they were forced to consider the needs and welfare of the little ones first. Children as a motivating force for survival were extremely significant, and as well as giving essential physical support to their parents and to the general camp population through their labour, they ‘acted as a barometer by which adults measured their success or failure to retain control and sustain Western values and colonial culture.’3 Internment completely changed a child’s understanding of the world. For many children, internment was not the wholly negative experience that their parents endured, but rather a time of liberation. Internment ‘offered the children broader horizons, new experiences, challenges, knowledge and understanding. The multifunctional room with limited amenities, the sudden poverty, sickness, hard labour, responsibility, unchaperoned outdoor life and close proximity to other Western adults and children – all enabled them to mature in ways not offered by the traditional colonial childhood.’4 One young girl imprisoned in Stanley recalled: ‘We children experienced a wonderful sense of freedom with loads of time to idle away, this sounds somewhat paradoxical as we were all prisoners.’5 The types of experiences depended very much on where a child was interned, and the atmosphere and regime inside a particular camp.
Education at Stanley did not just mean learning the ‘three R’s’, it was also an opportunity for the adults to try to instill some sense of ‘Britishness’ into the children, and to try to reinforce some of the colonial values that had been undermined by the war and internment. It was also an opportunity to try and educate children about their own culture. Classes were held to tell the children about life in Britain, as most of them had never lived there – many had been born and spent their entire lives in the colonies. The children were taught about trains, travel, the post office, and British villages and towns. But the adults nonetheless discovered that the children were keen on avoiding school and exploring instead their new-found freedoms. ‘It was easy to skip school if you wanted and crawl under the wire and wander around,’ recalled one young internee.6
It was soon recognized by the teachers assigned to the education classes at Stanley that the children had been profoundly changed by what they had experienced during the Battle for Hong Kong. Kathleen Anderson, headmistress of the junior school inside Stanley Camp, recalled: ‘At the time of coming into camp, after a fortnight of siege warfare and four weeks of nerve wracking confinement, the children were suffering from shock and anxiety …’7 What the children had seen and heard during the battle had been both frightening and confusing. The subsequent weeks that families had spent cooped up in arduous circumstances in the former waterfront brothels had not improved their outlook. ‘The children cannot fail to have been adversely affected by the atmosphere of anxiety, irritation and depression,’ noted Anderson. During internment, the school faced serious challenges, not only from the students’ frame of mind, but also from the weather. ‘The children’s school work suffered from their discomfort due to lack of clothing in the cold weather. In the rainy season their school attendance suffered because many were without umbrellas and raincoats.’8
Many of the former child internees remember with great respect and affection the largely volunteer teachers who tried their very best to educate them. ‘Most of the volunteer teachers had to instruct entirely from memory,’ recalled one former pupil. ‘Geography was taught by an ex-mountaineer, there weren’t many places in the world he hadn’t been. His lessons were embellished with stories of adventure that kept us enthralled. The same was true of Mr Willis who taught us maths. He was a surveyor and to impress us with the importance of trigonometry, he recounted stories of his surveying days in the wilds of Canada.’9 Some of the religious personnel imprisoned alongside the adults and children were also impressive teachers. ‘Father Thornton had a passion for English literature and seemed to be able to recite from memory … How grateful I am to him for the rich memory of those words that have kept me company through seemingly endless nights.’10 Such teachers generated results, and at Stanley two sets of matriculation examinations were held for submission to the London Matriculation Board. One child internee, Ruth Baker, later went on to an impressive academic career as a bio-chemist at Oxford University.
The provision of education was not only a boon to the children themselves, but also to their parents. As mentioned above, having a school in the camp allowed adults some time, space and privacy in their extremely overcrowded living spaces, usually overrun with noisy young children. The sense of normality and continuity even in captivity was a very significant aid to the mental wellbeing of the adult internees. ‘The school day, week and term gave structure to the lives of all the internees,’ wrote Bernice Archer. ‘The education of the children offered employment to interned teachers, academics and other professionals who were able to imbue the next generation with Western education and culture which was being eroded by the camp environment.’11
The interned women organized Christmas and birthday parties for the children. There were musicals, plays, recitals and variety shows, and despite the severe lack of books, school lessons tried to make up some of the gaps in children’s knowledge due to having their schooling so violently interrupted by the war and internment. For adults too, education could offer a way to stay sane, with language courses among the most popular, along with lectures on subjects as diverse as photography, yachting, journalism, and poultry-keeping. Of course, the internees were still prisoners, and apart from the diseases and rampant malnutrition that might kill them, the Japanese remained a significant threat. Seven internees from Stanley were executed by firing squad in October 1943 after being discovered in possession of a radio – but not before they had all been publicly tortured before the assembled camp as a warning. The Japanese did not permit radios under any circumstances, and they were constantly vigilant concerning escape attempts, potential resistance activities and sabotage. A handful of adult men managed to escape from the camp and make it into Free China, but some others were recaptured and sentenced to hefty periods in solitary confinement under appallingly brutal circumstances.
Internment inevitably broke down some of the rigid class and race divisions of the time, as people were forced to rub along with others of different nationalities and skin colours. Some parents tried to enforce their colonial attitudes upon their children. Anneka Kekwick, a child internee at Stanley, recalled: ‘Of course, my father was very strict about who I mixed with. He didn’t want me to mix with people with mixed blood – the Eurasians.’12 But children are generally colour-blind, and in the playgrounds of the internment camps, parents could not prevent cross-national and cross-cultural friendships from happening. Children had to play outside, unchaperoned for the first times in their lives, because the family rooms were too crowded.
‘Outside’, though surrounded by barbed wire, represented freedom from adult or parental control, constraints and structured time. It was the social and recreational area for the children, the space where relationships and friendships were made, both with other children and with adults. It was where mud, old ammunition, and stones replaced traditional toys, and where the imagination could run free as new play materials were discovered and games created. It was outside the school and family room that the children had the greatest opportunity to shape their own internment world; it was also where the internment would shape them.13
‘I had more freedom from my parents than I had before the war, because th
e children all seemed to get together,’ recalled child internee Dorothy, who was in Stanley Camp. ‘It was very much like them and us. We were like a colony of our own … The grown-ups were quite removed, they were sort of busy trying to survive.’14 Children naturally formed gangs, which roamed ceaselessly around the environs of the camp, and sometimes sneaked out beyond the wire. ‘There were all sorts of friends,’ recalled one former child prisoner, ‘we could choose our own friends rather than have your parents choose your friends for you … We had a lot of fun …We were not supposed to talk to the guards but we did.’15 Free for the first time in their lives from the constraints of a colonial lifestyle, child internees made the most of their time in the camps. ‘The kids used to wander everywhere. They couldn’t keep us in. Boys and girls together. Most of us were bilingual. We used to go and talk to the guards … crawl under the wire and come back. I remember taking bullets to bits and we would string the cordite together and use a magnifying glass to set off an explosion … The kids ran wild.’16 Rosemary Murray recalled of Stanley: ‘There were always gangs and going out … We built a network of roads in the mud in the hills. Someone discovered that they could use a slimy gutter as a shute, it was thick with slime and you shot down bullet-like.’17 The children were often busy with mud. ‘We would spend a week making mud bombs and come the day we declared war on each other, we would go up to the hills and throw these mud bombs at each other ...’
