At the Versailles peace conference, George Morrison had been struck down by a mysterious illness. Instead of returning to China, he sought treatment in Britain from a variety of doctors ranging from Harley Street specialists to Caledonian quacks. No one could arrest his dramatic loss of weight. In May 1920 he took Jennie and his three sons, Ian, Alastair and Colin, to the Devon seaside resort of Sidmouth in the hope that the bracing sea air might restore his vitality.
But Morrison was suffering from undiagnosed pancreatic cancer and his life was slipping away. With Jennie at his side, he died on Sunday 30 May at the age of 58. Peking’s greatest foreign correspondent during the most turbulent of times was laid to rest in a cemetery overlooking a placid English river. A wreath of orchids was placed on the coffin. It bore the inscription: ‘In sorrow and gratitude, from the President of the Republic of China.’ There was no wreath from the Commonwealth of Australia, although Major A. W. Arkill represented the Australian high commissioner. As Albert Wearne had wisely observed, ‘out of sight out of mind’.
Morrison had sold his library containing his vast collection of books on Chinese life and history for £35,000 to a Japanese aristocrat, Baron Iwasaki Hisaya, who promised to house it in Tokyo and make it available to all scholars who sought access. The lease on his Peking house, his furniture and other belongings remained to be sold. Bill Donald put himself at Jennie’s service to arrange the transfer of the lease to a Russian diplomat, Ignatius Yourin, head of the Russian Far Eastern Mission which was intent on bringing the dubious benefits of Bolshevism to the young republic. Yourin was anxious to move into the house and gave Donald a cheque for 15,000 silver dollars.
The Japanese Government, however, had no intention of allowing Yourin to set up a nest of Comintern spies in the Chinese capital. On 26 October, Donald warned Jennie, ‘Dear Mrs M, Get ready to shed tears . . .’ It was his sad duty to inform her that the police would not agree to the Russians taking up residence in the capital. The matter had been referred to the cabinet and although some members were in favour, the Japanese had objected so strongly to the Wai-wu-pu that ‘the matter assumed a purely political aspect and the Government hasn’t backbone enough to go against the influence of Japan, America and France’.6
Donald had tiffin with the minister of foreign affairs, Dr Yen, in an effort to have the decision overturned but was unsuccessful. There was nothing for him to do, he said, except hand back the cheque and ‘continue to try to help you out, which I will do with great pleasure’. Donald suggested that an auction might be the best way to dispose of the assets and Jennie agreed. Just three years later, however, she died unexpectedly in London at the young age of 34. The raising of her three orphaned sons was left in the hands of an elderly and distant English cousin.7
Meanwhile, Donald had run into serious trouble in his work. During the Versailles peace talks, he moved to Shanghai to take over all duties relating to the publication of the Far Eastern Review. His partner, George Bronson Rea, was in Paris, where he began filing strongly pro-Japanese articles just as the Chinese delegation was fighting to regain sovereignty of Shantung. Donald spiked the first article because it clearly conflicted with the magazine’s pro-Chinese policy. When other articles in a similar vein followed, he discovered that Rea was actually in the pay of the Japanese. As Rea was the majority shareholder in the Review, Donald published these articles under his byline and added a disclaimer, ‘The Editor does not necessarily personally accord with or support opinions expressed in signed articles appearing in the Far Eastern Review.’
The United States Consulate in Shanghai was so disturbed by the articles that it prepared a document for the American State Department on Rea’s character and activities in China. The source of the information – described as ‘reliable’ – was probably Carl Crow. The document stated that the December 1919 and January/February 1920 editions of the Far Eastern Review contained articles written by Rea attacking Paul Reinsch and criticising United States’ policy in East Asia. The articles, with such headlines as ‘Another view of the Shantung issue’, ‘Democratic dollar diplomacy’, ‘America’s Far Eastern muddle’ and ‘Minding our own business’, were ‘thoroughly pro-Japanese in every way’. The document continued, ‘Positive information is at hand that Rea is actually in the pay of the Japanese Government to further Japanese interests. The editor of the Far Eastern Review, an Australian by the name of Mr W. H. Donald, a very highly thought of man in the Far East, has cabled Rea that he will resign his position if Rea insists on publishing, in the future, articles of the character referred to above.’8
When Rea returned to Shanghai in early 1920, Donald resigned as editor, having announced on page one of the magazine’s next issue that the Review’s publisher was now unacceptably pro-Japanese. Rea replied it was his intention for the Review ‘to combat a conspiracy hatched in Peking during the World War to pit the United States against Japan in the Pacific’. While it was in order for Americans to work with the Chinese Government, he complained that anyone who did the same work for Japan was characterised as ‘a notorious Japanese propagandist’.9
Donald returned to Peking, where he continued to file stories for The Times but after receiving a curt telegram saying, ‘Why attack an ally?’ in response to an article about Japanese aggression, he switched his allegiance to the more liberal Manchester Guardian. Without the stimulus of George Morrison, Peking had lost much of its appeal. He was preparing to sell his house and move back to Shanghai when the Chinese Government approached him with a project dear to his heart.
Donald had always complained about the lack of facts and figures relating to Chinese life. The Chinese offered him 2000 Mexican silver dollars per month to set up a Bureau of Economic Information whose primary function would be to assemble statistical data on the Chinese people and Chinese industry. Donald accepted the challenge and started work with a handpicked staff, including the American writer George E. Sokolsky.
The son of a Russian-speaking rabbi, Sokolsky had travelled to St Petersburg in 1917 to join the Russian Revolution. As editor of the English-language Russian Daily News, he had supported the moderate regime of Alexander Kerensky against the Bolsheviks and fled to China when the latter were victorious. Such was the bitterness of those memories that he acquired the title of ‘the high priest of anti-Communism’.10
Donald also hired Herbert B. Elliston, a 24-year-old Yorkshireman and former officer in the British Army who had arrived in China in 1919 to work as a reporter on the Shanghai Times, but quit after discovering it was funded by Japanese money. He went to Peking when he heard Donald was looking for an editor and joined the Bureau of Economic Information in the winter of 1920–21. The bureau supplied statistical supplements, memoranda, bulletins, booklets, books, and published a journal, the Chinese Economic Monthly, which Elliston edited intermittently over the next seven years.
As an echo of his Lithgow childhood, Donald put up a slogan on the wall, ‘Get the facts.’ He also added several attractive European women to his staff. As winter gripped the capital in its icy embrace, friends noted that the boss had become intensely possessive of one of the women. One evening when she left a party at his house in the company of a young man, he followed them. Apparently distraught at seeing them enter the woman’s house next to the city wall, he climbed the steps to the top of the wall and, despite the freezing wind whipping in from Mongolia, paced anxiously up and down until the young man left an hour later. The woman had noted Donald’s presence and it was probably just as well that she left Peking before matters got out of hand.
‘Don was a man of the highest moral and intellectual integrity, delightful humour and natural charm,’ says Harold K. Hochschild, an American businessman who arrived in Peking in 1921. Through the American Legation he met Roy Anderson, who introduced him to the Donald milieu. ‘Although Don wasn’t interested in money as such, and was sometimes without any, he used his income as a journalist to live well,’ he wrote to
Professor Winston Lewis in 1969–70.
He had a comfortable, well-staffed house and liked to entertain. He ran a good table. Although a teetotaller he provided plenty of good drink – wines and spirits – for his guests. There was sometimes dancing in his home to the music of a record player.
He had a host of friends among Chinese officialdom, the Peking diplomatic corps, foreign businessmen and Chinese and foreign journalists. There were always interesting people at his parties, including attractive women. He was at least as susceptible to women as the average man.
Hochschild, a 28-year-old Yale graduate, was the son of Bert- hold Hochschild, one of the founders of the immensely wealthy American Metal Company. His mission in Peking was to collect payment from the Chinese Government for bar silver shipped to the Canton Mint on which the latter had defaulted. He expected to be there for two months but stayed two years during which time he got to know Donald well.
My recollection of the men I used to meet at Donald’s house was that they were there because of his and their mutual political or journalistic interests; my impression of the women was that Donald cultivated them because of their good looks and charm. His predilection for social intercourse, at least with attractive women, was one of his outstanding characteristics.11
One of the male guests was Hochschild’s colleague at American Metal, Chester Fritz, an economist from Buxton, North Dakota. Fritz had been sent to China by the Fisher Flour Mills of Seattle in 1914 but after three years resigned in order to travel around China. When he arrived in Peking, he was hired by American Metal as its China representative to trade in precious metals, mainly silver bullion. Donald enjoyed talking to the economist about his travels and ways in which China’s mineral resources might be harnessed.
In November 1921 George Morrison’s old employer Lord Northcliffe arrived in Peking on an around-the-world tour. David Fraser was retiring as Times correspondent and over dinner Northcliffe offered Donald the job. Donald explained his difficulties with the paper’s pro-Japanese stance and related the ‘why attack an ally?’ incident. Northcliffe immediately cabled London ordering the Times editor, Wickham Steed, to sack the man responsible. He then asked Donald to write the paper’s editorials on East Asia and cable them to London; once again, Donald declined but agreed to write occasional pieces for The Times as a special correspondent.12
Meanwhile, a 17-year-old Australian named John Pal pitched up in Shanghai looking for a job in the Maritime Customs Service. The Commissioner of Customs in Shanghai, Leonard A. Lyall, took a shine to the young man who had worked his passage from Sydney to London in the hope of joining the service only to be told there that all recruiting was done on the spot in Shanghai. Lyall was impressed with Pal’s initiative in making the long trip back to the East and offered him a post as the service’s youngest-ever recruit.13
Commissioner Lyall was known to hold a low opinion of expatriate Britons and their privileges. ‘The British residents in Shanghai are the spoilt children of the Empire,’ he once famously said. ‘Judges and consuls are provided for them; they are protected by the British fleet, and for several years they have had in addition a British army to defend them; and for all this expenditure the British taxpayer pays.’14
John Pal was given a uniform with brass buttons and a room in the customs’ spacious and well-run quarters at Quinsan Gardens, Hongkew. ‘It is generally reckoned,’ his training officer at the Custom House told him, ‘that each brass button has the value of a machine-gun in the eyes of the Chinese. Your authority on the waterfront is supreme, and don’t ever forget it.’15
Pal also learned the service had two classes of employee: one class dressed in civilian clothes, worked inside the Custom House, socialised with the business and consular communities and never got their feet wet, while the inspectorate of which he was a member fought an endless battle against crime and corruption on Shanghai’s waterways. With the semi-crippled Lyall egging him on, Pal patrolled wharfs and searched ships in the hunt for contraband, smugglers and tariff-dodgers. Whenever shippers failed to declare goods, the goods were seized and sold at auction, with the customs officer being paid 10 per cent of the sale price.
The biggest prizes were illegal shipments of opium. Shanghai was China’s biggest opium market by virtue of its geographic position and enormous population. Bales of opium came down the Yangtze from the poppy-fields of Szechuen or up the river from India, Turkey and Persia, or through the network of canals from Anhwei and Fukien, the two closest opium-producing provinces.16
Nothing was more important to the warlords in financing their armies or paying off Japanese loans than opium. Indeed, the Anti-Opium Association identified opium as the very lifeblood of warlordism. Peasants were forced under pain of death to grow poppies which were processed into sticky balls of the drug. At the wharfs, armed guards escorted the bales – worth around 10,000 taels each – to the opium cartel in the French Concession. Large bonuses were paid to customs officers who intercepted these shipments. The bales were then consigned to the bonfire.17
The poppy was the warlords’ leitmotif. They fought and killed one another for dominance of the opium crop in particular provinces in order to fund their armies. Armoured trains loaded with guns transported large bodies of troops to the various fronts; campaigns were planned to finish around harvest time; alliances were made and broken because of it. And with every year of that dreadful decade China slipped further into the abyss.18
The forces of righteousness fought back. The British-born, American-educated missionary Frank Rawlinson was chairman of the Moral Welfare Society and a member of the vice commission of the Municipal Council. He had come to China as editor of the Chinese Recorder in 1914 and turned it into the most popular Protestant magazine of the period.
Rawlinson was affronted by the power of American madams who ran a series of bordellos in the foreign concessions. Nothing had changed since the 1890s when they first paraded their success down Bubbling Well Road in ‘crest-emblazoned carriages’. They ‘had their fingers in all the concerns of the city’, an American journalist reported, and ‘were on terms of closest intimacy with Shanghai’s men of affairs, foreign as well as native’.19
Rawlinson’s first victory was a ‘moral welfare crusade’ in the early 1920s that forced the council to withdraw licences from brothels in the International Settlement. The most famous of these was The Line, an exotic bordello in a row of neat houses in Kiangsi Road within easy walking distance of The Bund. The madam was a San Franciscan named Gracie Gale, who served French champagne to her Western clientele and offered them beautiful British, French and American girls in a cosy clubhouse atmosphere. She invited Frank Rawlinson around for tea but her argument that she was providing a vital public service fell on deaf ears.20
One by one, the police closed down all of these establishments, with the result that they took their business to the less stringent climes of Frenchtown, while on the street corners of the British Concession large numbers of dispossessed prostitutes openly propositioned potential male clients.
No one was more aware of the prostitutes than Dr Anne Walter Fearn. ‘I knew them all,’ she says. ‘I delivered their babies, applied the stomach pump when they took an overdose. I closed their eyes in death, officiated at their weddings and for almost a quarter of a century listened to their heart-breaking stories.’21
As well as working as a hospital clinician, Dr Fearn was drafted in to work at the Door of Hope, a refuge for runaway prostitutes and mui tsai girls that had grown from a single room on Hankow Road into a well-run institution after the Mixed Court ruled in the early 1900s that any girl who could escape from a brothel and find her way to the Door of Hope would be safe in the eyes of the law. Thus the doorway represented an escape route from a life of misery and degradation for many women, although some died at the hands of pimps while trying to reach it.22
The most dangerous part of the demimonde was
the district known as ‘the Trenches’, which was to be found across Garden Bridge in the back alleys of Hongkew. ‘By knocking down walls to join ground-floor rooms, draping a few coloured streamers around and economising on the candle-power, Chinese owners and Russian entrepreneurs went into the night-club business with the help of half a dozen scattered Filipino bands,’ John Pal wrote in his memoir.
These dim dives hung so close together that if the bouncer knocked a man out of one, he fell into another; and though the flesh-hungry Oriental customers spoke no Russian, the language of the banknote overcame all difficulties. Shrewdly the refugee Russian girls, many of them blonde, beautiful and bewitching in the eyes of young and exiled Englishmen and Americans, sensed their power, and it was because of the nightly brawls for their affections, the clash of tempers, fits of jealousy and never-ending hostilities, that the district became known as the Trenches.23
Edna Lee Booker had just arrived from California as a reporter on the China Press when Dr Rawlinson launched a ‘Clean up the Trenches’ campaign. One night Edna drove with him along North Szechuen Road where the maze of brothels and opium dens extended into Chinese territory. The killing of an American sailor and a Chinese singing girl in a brawl had given him the necessary leverage to force General Ho Feng-ling, military governor of the Chinese Municipality, to take action.
Edna saw lines of rickshaws delivering foreign sailors to the brothels and clip joints. ‘The girls were a seasoned lot,’ she wrote in her memoir. ‘It was play for them to lure a seaman into a dive, ply him with liquor or dope, perhaps prepare him a pipe, and later rob him.’24
Edna’s newspaper created such a storm of protest that General Ho was forced to issue an edict: ‘In response to agitation on the part of the foreign community, the Chinese authorities have resolved that the Trenches be closed within a month.’ The Russian entrepreneurs merely shut down their establishments and joined the exodus of American madams to Frenchtown.
Shanghai Fury Page 21