Robert Winter, aka Bill Luton

Posted: April 28th, 2022 | 1 Comment »

I’ve been meaning to ut this up for a while as a curiousity. In 2021 I co-wrote the BBC Radio 3 docu-drama Peking Noir, now a 6-part podcast (available here) about Shura Sosnitsky/Giraldi the mercurial Russian emigre intersex nightclub dancer/owner in Peking. Shura started as a character in my book Midnight in Peking and Peking Noir (co-written with Sarah Wooley) was an attempt to find out more about the character and, to be honest, speculate a bit too.

One major source on Shura was old Pekinger John Blofeld’s 1961 memoir City of Lingering Spendour. In that book he talks about meeting Shura, presenting at different times both as male and female. For Shura’s backstory – raised as a girl in pre-revolutionary Tomsk, fleeing to Harbin and then Peking, aspects of Shura’s dual personality and rumours of criminal lifestyle etc – Blofeld cites a knowledgable friend under the psyeudonym “Bill Luton”. Who was “Bill Luton”?

Bill Luton’s identity is quite important as he reveals a lot of information on Shura, Peking’s 1930s underworld, gay, and Russian emigre community. Can we trust “Bill Luton”? Well, quite possible would be my conclusion. Luton was in reality Robert “Bob” Winter, an American literature scholar who spent many years in China (his full obituary is here). Winter moved to China to teach at Southeastern University in Nanjing in 1923. In about 1926 he moved to Peking to develop the first full-fledged English literature and language program in China at the new Qinghua University. He stayed in Peking after the Japanese invasion in 1937 and so was certainly there throughout Shura’s time in the city and Blofelds. He also returned to Peking in 1946 and stayed after the revolution. Shura returned to the city in late 1945 or 1946, probably from Shanghai, and stayed until the Communist forced his deportation to the USSR after which he disappers (most probably killed soon after arriving back in the coutnry he fled in 1921 or in a gulag).

Winter was gay so would have moved within the 1930s demimonde where Shura was well known. he was connected and a gossip. He was also very left wing and pro-communist though of course this didn’t help him later – in 1968, during the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards ransacked his home, destroyed his books and letters, including some from Ezra Pound, and held him in detention for three months. He eventually died at 100 in 1987 in Beijing.

Now,

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