Shanghai – First Impressions No.17 – Sin City’s Ralph Shaw Arrives, 1937 (and the last of the series)

Posted: September 6th, 2013 | No Comments »

A Cushy Berth – Ralph Shaw – 1937

Englishman Ralph Shaw had trained as a cub reporter in his native Derby before joining the army and shipping out to Shanghai. He managed to get out of the military, which didn’t suit him much due to the low pay and early nights, and land a job with the North-China. If we know anything about just how much sex was available and enjoyed in the International Settlement in its final days before the Japanese takeover then it is largely thanks to Shaw’s remarkably frank and graphic memoir Sin City which combines political analysis and newsroom memories with a long list of sexual escapades and encounters. Shaw chronicled long nights in the notorious Blood Alley bar street, knee tremblers in the cinema and his patronage of gangster Big Eared Du’s Silver Taxi Company, which basically provided fellatio on four wheels.

Garrison Man

Shanghai was a cushy berth – dead easy compared with Aldershot and Bulford. For the first time in my life I had a manservant or, rather, I shared his services with others who lived with me in a barrack room at the British Hospital in downtown Shanghai, only a few hundred yards from the Bund waterfront.

The ‘room boy’ took over the chores that we did ourselves back in Blighty – making the beds, ‘bumping’ the floor, polishing our buttons, cap badges, blancoing our belts, cleaning our boots and so on.

So we lived like little tin gods, mostly prostrate on our beds reading such pirated literature as ‘My Life and Lovers’ by Frank Harris while our man – an ever smiling Chinese gentleman – bustled about the room and generally helped us to stave off exhaustion.

After leaving the Dilwara (1) I had been assigned to the General Staff (i) office in the headquarters of the Shanghai Municipal Council on Kiangse Road, just beyond the Anglican Holy Trinity Cathedral. The ‘i’ denoted that we were an intelligence bureau and it was my job, as clerk, to type out on stencils a regular series of confidential reports which were sent to London, Hong Kong and other military nerve centers.

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Not a hundred yards away from us in Central Road was the Handy Bar run by an American, Jimmy James, late of the US 15^th Infantry, who had stayed on in China after discharge and had opened two restaurants both of which flourished under the title, Jimmy’s Kitchen.

The Handy Bar – Hyson called it the ‘Randy Bar’ – owed its popularity among hospital personnel to the fact that Jimmy had staffed it with a chorus line of Russian beauties, bar girls whose job was to entice solid cash from lecherous soldiers out on the spree.

Unlike British barmaids, the girls pulled no beer pump handles. In fact there was no draught beer available. Drinks came in bottles and were served by Chinese ‘boys’ who could be any age from 20 to 70 or thereabouts. The girls decorated the joint, sat with the lads and coaxed by various means ‘drinks’ – usually coloured water or tea – out of them.

Sapper Mann took me along to the Handy Bar where the long-legged, busty beauty of one girl, Nadya, had John Thomas up in appreciation long before she joined us at the Sapper’s invitation. He had the cash. I didn’t. He felt generous – willing and ready to play the host for  newcomer.

Leg! I loved ‘em. Nadya had a pair that dazzled the eyes – long, shapely, stocking-clad, supported by high-heeled, shiny shoes. And her neckline was low enough to suggest that a couple of size 38s might break loose if she bent any lower over the table. I, for one, was ready to catch them!

Dark-haired, brown-eyed, she resembled Dorothy Lamour though it would have been a pity to cover up those legs with a sarong.

She noticed that my eyes were bulging and immediately found that there was something wrong with one of her shoes. She stood up, placed one foot on the chair so that I got almost a worm’s-eye view up to suspender-belt height, bent forward, which temporarily had my eyes going up and down like a yo-yo, and began to fiddle about with the ‘offending’ footwear.

Like Olga Polovski, the Russian spy, she was in imminent danger. Poor old Olga, so the story had it, was going to be executed by a firing squad for conning Allied secrets in World War One. She appeared before the squad in a fur coat and, as the men in front of her took aim with their rifles, discarded the garment to stand completely and beautifully naked. She fell dead – riddled with fly buttons.

Certainly the strain on my flies was intense, a point which Nadya had duly noted. Tumescence had to be maintained – it meant generosity, drinks. The leg show continued. She had considered the lure of bosom and, after weighing up my reaction carefully, had come to the conclusion that while I might be a tit man it was for certain that legs would arouse benevolence as far as I was concerned. She was right.

Unfortunately, my financial embarrassment stopped me ordering another round and Sapper was obviously reaching zero mark. He suggested we should leave.

Ralph Shaw, Sin City, (Everest Books, 1973, London)

 

 

(1) The troopship SS Dilwara built by the British India Line in 1936 and operating under charter to the British government. The Dilwara could carry 1,150 troops a voyage.

 

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