Around two o’clock Inspector Everson and three European officers broke up a small meeting near the station. Through an interpreter, he asked one of the students who was making a speech, ‘What is the nature of your speech?’ The student replied it was anti-Japanese. Everson asked him if he knew it was illegal to hold political demonstrations in the British Concession. The student replied he was simply carrying out the instructions of the students’ union. ‘I then picked out three of the ringleaders,’ Everson related, ‘and said, “Very well, I am going to lock you up.”’27
Fifteen demonstrators followed the officers and their three prisoners back to the station, entered the charge room and demanded to be arrested as well. Everson locked them all in the cells. This should have been a warning that matters were getting out of hand. Instead of securing the station, Everson decided to show a firm hand. Taking a small detachment of constables a few blocks down Nanking Road, he arrested another man carrying an anti-Japanese banner. This time, a ‘huge crowd of hundreds’ followed the police squad back to the station. On the way one of Everson’s constables was knocked to the ground and his six assailants were taken into custody.
Back at the station, protesters forced their way into the charge room and a violent struggle broke out in which students struck at police with the poles of their banners and Everson lashed out with his Malacca cane, while his comrades rushed the mob with wooden stools and forced them out into the street. Several students had been injured in the melee and the sight of their bloodied comrades enraged the crowd. Fearing a repeat of the 1905 incident, Everson ordered his officers to force the demonstrators east along Nanking Road. He locked the back gate of the police compound and placed an armed guard at the front of the building.
The Chinese were pushed back on to Nanking Road and up to the Wing On department store. Just as Everson thought the police were getting the upper hand, students assaulted two constables and attempted to take their pistols. The police fought back with sticks and batons but were gradually driven back against the wall of the police station. As the crowd surged forward, the traffic was brought to a halt and there were shouts of ‘Kill the foreigners’ in Chinese and English.
Everson, a quietly spoken Welshman, pulled out his pistol and shouted a verbal warning, ‘Ding, veh ding-ts-meh iau tang-sah.’ (‘Stop, if you do not stop I will shoot.’) ‘I knew it was useless,’ he said, ‘and pointed [the pistol] here and there in the crowd.’ Everson’s words were lost in the uproar but the sight of the pistol provoked the crowd into making ‘one blind rush to the station gate’.
At precisely 3.37 pm Everson gave the order to open fire. None of his squad of 23 armed Sikhs and Chinese heard him, so he snatched a rifle from one of his men and fired the first shot himself. His men then fired two volleys into the crowd, killing four men and wounding many others, five of whom later died. The police report simply stated, ‘The shooting had the immediate effect of dispersing the crowd and traffic became normal shortly afterwards.’
It was now just after 3.30 pm. At the races, Commissioner McEuen learned of the shootings – he was close enough to have heard the gunfire – and immediately turned out the emergency squad.28 He also communicated with Sterling Fessenden, who was commandant of the Shanghai Volunteer Corps. It was later claimed that had McEuen showed up at the Louza Police Station even as late as 3.15 pm and taken control of his force, the tragedy could have been averted.
While the bodies of the dead were being laid out, student leaders and unionists met at Kuomintang headquarters at 44 Route Vallon in Frenchtown. The Communist-led General Labour Union decided to call a strike in all areas of commerce, education and labour over the next few days. Telegrams were also sent enlisting the support of peasants, workers, merchants and students throughout the country. There was an instant public outcry against foreign privilege and the unequal treaties. In the street, Westerners were called ‘foreign pigs’ and spat on.
Agitators led by Li Li-san, a Paris-educated Communist, stirred up trouble among Chinese workers and bosses alike. At one point, Li convinced the Chinese Chamber of Commerce to underwrite the strikers’ pay until the Municipal Council ordered engineers to throw a switch at the Shanghai Power Company and shut down the electricity supply to Chinese-owned factories. The Chinese manufacturers suddenly saw the error of their ways and withdrew their support from the unions.
In this hostile atmosphere, the issue of factory reform was thrown into limbo. Sterling Fessenden mobilised the Volunteer Corps, which patrolled the streets for weeks, severely disrupting the business and social life of the city. ‘Strikes of workmen go on at Shanghai, Hankow and Hong Kong,’ Bill Donald wrote to friends. ‘War is wanted with Great Britain. The curious thing is that the Chinese believe they could fight anyone and defeat them. The valour of ignorance, of course.’29
Unfortunately for Fessenden and the municipal reactionaries, Dame Adelaide Anderson roared back into Shanghai a short time later as a member of the Foreign Office’s powerful advisory committee on the Boxer Indemnity Fund. Alarmed at the prospect of a Bolshevik China, the British Government had set up the fund as part of its policy to assist her faltering republican government in Nanking along a progressive, democratic path. Millions of pounds paid to Britain since 22 December 1922 under the terms of the Boxer Protocol would be devoted to ‘purposes which are beneficial to the mutual interests of his Majesty King George and of the Republic of China’.30
Dame Adelaide knew exactly what was required to solve the child labour problem in Shanghai – an inspectorate with powers similar to those in Britain setting minimum working ages for children and forcing mill owners to address health and safety issues. It would take her another five years of hard work to accomplish her objective. And in that time Shanghai would have drastically changed.
In the middle of the ‘Red wave’ of strikes, the Dogmeat General Chang Tsung-chang descended on Shanghai from Shantung and attacked the areas controlled by General Chi Shi-yuan with 60,000 troops. Having lost the support of his former ally General Sun Chuan-fang, Chi left his troops to fend for themselves and, like his predecessor, escaped down the Whangpoo in a ship bound for Japan.
With Chi’s leaderless troops looting, burning and raping among the population of the Chinese districts, Dogmeat Chang and Sun Chuan-fang decided it would be foolish to fight one another, so they arrived at a truce under which the Chinese districts were partitioned between them.31 The remnants of Chi’s army were pacified by the simple expedient of beheading a few and recruiting the rest into the ranks of the other two armies. The warlords then invited leading Chinese and foreign businessmen to a celebration at the Chinese Chamber of Commerce.
Chang’s Manchurian ally, the Old Marshal, sent his eldest son, 26-year-old Chang Hsueh-liang, down from Peking as his representative. The party was a lavish affair, but as soon as the foreigners had departed, the bandit chiefs presented the Chinese merchants with a bill for their costs in ‘liberating’ the city and as a guarantee of future peace and prosperity. According to John Pal, who had left the Customs Service to become a freelance reporter for Australian newspapers, the Chinese paid up.32
Dogmeat Chang moved his military headquarters into the handsome new administrative building at North Station in Chapei and claimed the opium bounty from the city’s drug traffickers for himself. He had no sympathy for the May Thirtieth political movement, which had grown up around the massacre of that date, and strongly opposed the abolition of child labour, describing the reformers as ‘crazy’.
According to the president of Peking University, Chang had ‘the physique of an elephant, the brain of a pig and the temperament of a tiger’. His nickname among his troops was ‘Old Sixty-three’ because someone had taken the trouble to establish that his erect member equalled a stack of 63 silver dollars. Indeed, he and the Young Marshal partied with such inordinate excess that even hardened Shanghailanders were amazed at the stories of their wild, drug-fuelled orgies.3
3
Despite Dogmeat Chang’s sordid reputation, the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai supported the warlords because they posed no threat to Westerners; however, they advocated armed foreign intervention to deal with the Communists, who were determined to end the unequal treaties and expel all foreigners. The chamber appointed the pro-Japanese propagandist George Bronson Rea as its Washington representative to lobby the Federal Government. It also held a special meeting to expel the journalist John Powell from its ranks because of his support for Chiang Kai-shek and outspoken opposition to its interventionist policies.34
Wallis Warfield Spencer, the American social climber who became Duchess of Windsor, chose this moment to make her en- trance on the Shanghai stage. She sailed up the China coast from Hong Kong in the Empress of Russia in late November 1924 after her first husband Earl Winfield ‘Win’ Spencer, a cross-dressing, bisexual naval officer, moved in with a handsome painter.
The 28-year-old Wallis immersed herself in the party scene with gay abandon; according to Wellington Koo’s second wife Hui-lan, the only Mandarin phrase she ever mastered was, ‘Boy, pass me the champagne.’ Her favourite nightspot was the Summer Garden at the new Majestic Hotel on Bubbling Well Road. One night she heard the band there playing ‘Tea for Two’, the signature tune from the 1925 Broadway musical No, No Nanette. ‘The combination of the melody, the moonlight, the perfume of jasmine, not to mention the Shangri-la illusion of the courtyard, made me feel that I had really entered the Celestial Kingdom,’ she wrote. ‘No doubt about it, life in Shanghai was good, very good, and in fact, almost too good for a woman.’35
Wallis’s exploits in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Peking in 1924–25 became the subject of official scrutiny after King George V exclaimed, ‘Who is this woman?’ when she later became the mistress of his son David, the Prince of Wales. According to the China Report, compiled by the British Secret Service at that time, she indulged in ‘perverse practices’ in one of Hong Kong’s singing houses; engaged in rigged games of roulette in Shanghai in exchange for sex, and entered into a bizarre ménage a trois with an American diplomat and his wife in Peking.36
However, a claim by the wife of Vice-Admiral Milton E. Miles, chief of United States Naval Intelligence operations in China, that Wallis was impregnated by the dashing Italian philanderer Count Galeazzo Ciano is impossible to substantiate. She certainly met Mussolini’s future son-in-law while he was on a brief visit to Peking in 1925 but her subsequent pregnancy and abortion, which supposedly left her unable to conceive children, remain unproven. She did, however, find time in Peking to have an affair with the naval attaché at the Italian Embassy, Alberto da Zara, who read Italian poetry to her, took her horse-riding and called her ‘Wally’.37
In the autumn of 1925 General Sun Chuan-fang decided Shanghai would be better off without the self-indulgent, barbaric Dogmeat Chang. Breaking the terms of their truce, he launched a surprise attack with his troops that ousted Chang from the railway station and drove his army back across the Yangtze. Sun then united all of the Chinese areas in a new Municipality of Greater Shanghai under a Chinese mayor.38 Having established things to his liking (and taken custody of the opium bounty), he moved up the Yangtze and on 25 November 1925 took control of Nanking.
Meanwhile, protests and strikes over the ‘May Thirtieth Martyrs’ had spread to neighbouring provinces until 28 cities were embroiled in what was described as ‘an amount of hostility that astonished even the most experienced observers’.39 The Chinese attitude came as no surprise to Milly Bennett, the nom de plume of the radical San Francisco-born journalist Mildred Jacqueline Bremler. She arrived in Shanghai in October 1926 and checked into Mrs Kathleen Daniels’s moderately priced American Boarding House.
At 29, Milly was escaping from a broken marriage and was almost penniless. While looking for work, she clashed with a number of British residents. ‘I was finding out,’ she wrote,
that practically all of the British in Shanghai were diehard reactionaries, and the only way to gain access to the business and social circles that they controlled was to echo their hidebound dogma that the Chinese were a dirty, low, mongrel race, that they should be everlastingly grateful for being booted round by the extremely superior British, and how what the Chinese really needed was the firm British government to guide them. The backbone, so to speak, of these British arbiters were small fry, cashiers in banks, vice-consuls, traders, newspapermen, folk who would be lucky at home to have a charwoman in once a week, but here could staff their flats as a princely ménage – every $300 a month employee had cook, helper, amah, table boy, six or eight fulltime, well-trained servants.40
To Milly’s dismay, her own countrywomen were as bad as the British. ‘It is appalling what can happen to the average American housewife when she gets within hailing distance of what she thinks is high society, especially if it happens to have a British accent,’ she wrote. ‘It makes my flesh crawl to hear American women go around imitating the la-de-da manners of the British.’
While Milly Bennett’s criticisms were undoubtedly true of some foreign residents, they were only part of the story. There was no better example of someone who had made the most of his chances than Inspector Roy Fernandez of the Shanghai Municipal Police. Roy was born in Coonamble, New South Wales, but following the break-up of his parents’ marriage and the death of his father, he was made a ward of the state and raised in an orphanage. ‘My father worked as a jackeroo from the age of 14,’ his son Roy Jr, a retired Australian diplomat, says. ‘He didn’t drink or smoke and sustained that despite a lot of chiacking from his mates. He’d saved £50 to go on holiday in Sydney but he met a bullocky who had been to China and he ended up in Shanghai.’41
Roy took a job in the Maritime Customs Service and then switched to the Municipal Police Force. He married Sybil Morgan, the eldest of Robert and Mary Ann Morgan’s five children, and rose through the ranks, starting as a constable in the police traffic office. He learned Chinese and was promoted to sergeant with the right to interrogate suspects. He was then promoted to the CID counterfeit squad which specialised in tracking down forged stamps and banknotes. He and Sybil raised two children, Roy Jr and Stephanie, in a modern flat in the horseshoe-shaped Cosmopolitan Apartments block and took their holidays in the United States and Europe.42
Firearms were an everyday feature of life in Shanghai and Roy Fernandez became a self-taught expert in detecting whether a suspect had fired a gun. His skill with the so-called ‘nitrate test’ saved more than one citizen from the executioner.
In an article written for the Sydney Morning Herald in 1954, Fernandez cites the case of a Chinese merchant he calls Wong, who was suspected of murdering his concubine. After an argument, Wong had left his revolver under the woman’s pillow when he walked out of her apartment. Half an hour later, a shot was heard and the landlord found her lying on the floor with a bullet through the heart. Instead of calling the police, he telephoned Wong who dashed back to the apartment, picked up his mistress, put her on the bed and retrieved his gun. He then went to a police station and reported that his concubine had committed suicide.
It seemed an unlikely story, so Fernandez tested Wong’s hands and the sleeves of his shirt, jacket and overcoat for the tiny particles of nitrate that escape with great force from the breech of a gun when it is fired and become embedded in the skin of the person firing the weapon. He covered the back of Wong’s hand and the sleeves of his clothing with wax, which was then peeled off and treated with a chemical called diphenylamine. The test proved negative except for the sleeve of Wong’s overcoat.
In the morgue, the policeman then tested the dead woman’s hand and the material of her dress around the gunshot wound. The hand was positive to the nitrate test and there was a quantity of unburned gunpowder on the dress. Fernandez says, ‘My findings were: Wong had not fired the gun. The two spots of nitrate found on the sleeve of his overcoat got there when he picked his mistress up off t
he floor.’ Thanks to Fernandez’s forensic skills, Wong walked free.43
One of Roy Fernandez’s closest friends was Gordon Bowden, a leading light among the expatriate Australian business community. Vivian Gordon Bowden, a brown-eyed, slimly built, energetic man with a clipped moustache, was born in the Sydney suburb of Stanmore on 28 May 1884. He was educated at Sydney Church of England Grammar School (known as Shore) and Bedford School in England. He learned the silk trade in Europe and at the age of 21 became a silk inspector in Canton on behalf of European purchasers.
Three years later in 1908 Bowden joined a branch of Bowden Gomei Kaisha, the family firm in Japan. He was looking after its interests in a salmon fishery at Kamchatka on the north-east Russian coast when he heard about the outbreak of World War I from a passing Russian sailor. Taking ship to England, he served with the Royal Engineers in France, earned a mention in dispatches and was demobilised with the rank of major. In 1917, he married an English girl, Dorothy Dennis, while on leave. He spoke fluent French, German and Japanese and had some Italian and Russian.44
In 1919 he was in the Caucasus with ‘The Black Sea Venture’, a bold attempt to resurrect the Anglo-Caucasian Oil Company. The company was registered on the London Stock Exchange and had been one of the star performers of Tsarist Russia’s booming petroleum industry. Indeed, George Morrison had attended a banquet in its honour at the Russian Legation in Peking as far back as December 1898. Anglo-Caucasian had been shut down following the Russian Revolution. When the Bolsheviks sabotaged any chance of restarting it, Gordon Bowden left Russia and rejoined the family firm in Japan.
Dorothy and Gordon’s first child, a daughter named Doreen, was born in Japan in August 1919. Towards the end of 1921, the family moved to China when Gordon was appointed managing director of the import–export house A. Cameron & Company (China) Limited of Shanghai. Bowden, a practical man with a literary bent – he had published two novels under the nom de plume Vivian Gordon – was prominent in the affairs of Shanghai’s expatriate community.
Shanghai Fury Page 24