The Daily Telegraph’s Philip Pembroke Stephens Photographed Shortly Before his Death in Shanghai in November 1937

Posted: November 6th, 2026 | No Comments »

One of the saddest stories of the old China press corps and the Japanese war on China is that of Philip Pembroke Stephens (1903-1937)… I tell his final story in my book Through the Looking Glass, a history of the foreign press in China from the 1840s to the 1940s…

The London Daily Telegraph’s correspondent Philip Pembroke Stephens was killed by Japanese rifle-fire in November 1937 in Nantao, the old Chinese city of Shanghai. The American correspondent Harrison Forman witnessed the shooting, which occurred when Stephens climbed over a breach in the old wall dividing the Chinese city and Frenchtown. He stepped onto the platform of a water tower to get a better view of the fighting and a Japanese sniper shot him in the head, killing him instantly. Stephens was a well-liked correspondent who had given up an early career on the London stage and then a second career in the law to cover the Italian invasion of Abyssinia for the Daily Express and then the Spanish Civil War for the Telegraph before arriving in Shanghai shortly after Black Saturday (August 14 1937). His funeral attracted most of the remaining corps left in the city to mourn the loss of a friend and discuss the worsening situation. Randall Gould, Malcolm Rosholt, James Mills and Hallett Abend were all in attendance and Abend and Red Knickerbocker were among Stephens’s pallbearers.

So quite amazing to receive this letter obtained by the great old China ephemera collector Roy Delbyck. A photo of Stephens taken shortly before his death in Shanghai that he wished to be sent to his wife back in London… The heartbreaking letter is from CR Lewis to Mrs Stephens. He encloses a photograph of Stephens at the Hungjao Road Railway Crossing on November 9 1937, just a few days before his death. At that time the crossing – outside Shanghai North Railway Station on what is now Hongqiao Lu, was a frontline between the International Settlement and the Japanese occupying the Chinese districts of Shanghai (Zhabei and Baoshan).

What an awful letter to have to write…

Incidentally, CR Lewis was a roving reporter who worked for many English language newspapers in China and Japan in the 1930s. He had been a reporter with the Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury and the North China Star, an American run newspaper in Tianjin. He had also worked in Beijing for the Peiping Chronicle, The China Press in Shanghai and Reuters in China.

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