January 8 1937- The Fox Tower – Eastern Peking: The 76th Anniversary of the Murder of Pamela Werner
Posted: January 8th, 2013 | 2 Comments »Just before dawn on January 8th 1937 in the wasteland in front of the ancient Fox tower the body of a young woman, lying at an odd angle and covered by a layer of frost. Her clothing was dishevelled, her body badly mutilated. On her wrist was an expensive watch that had stopped just after midnight. It was the morning after the Russian Christmas, which was thirteen days after the Western Christmas by the old Julian calendar, and the corpse belonged to nineteen-year-old Pamela Werner, an Englishwoman who’d been born and raised in Peking. When news of her murder broke it sent waves of fear through the city’s already nervous foreign community fearing the chaos and barbarism of a Japanese invasion of Peking.
76 years ago today….
I have just finished reading your fascinating book and I wanted to tell you that my grandfather, Edgar G. Jamieson, was the Consul General in Tientsin at the time of the murder. When you relate about the incident with Dennis in Tientsin, when he would not release the man to the Japanese who took refuge, my grandfather I believe was involved with that incident too – I found something on the internet that relates to that incident. I was born in 1948 in Tientsin. Also, my parents were in Wiehsien with Mr. Werner and Dr. Prentice and I have a picture of the day Wiehsien was released, when all the inmates rushed to the gates of the camp. I would love to have further dialogue with you re all this history, if you would correspond with me. My great grandfather was also a consul general.
Annette
Thanks for contacting me. I believe your grandfather arrived in Tientsin as CG shortly after Pamela’s murder. It was Affleck, his predecessor, who was CG at the time. However, he would have known DCI Dennis well and many of the other senior Tientsiners obviously – his major issue was, as you quite rightly say, the Tientsin Incident, which was messy and ended badly for the Brits (and worse for the Chinese!). However, that was Ambassador Craigie in Tokyo overruling Tientsin. Happy to chat – I’m on paul@accessasia.co.uk – glad you enjoyed the book