Filling in the Gaps…The Story I Missed

Even when you think you’ve uncovered everything about someone’s life inevitably there are parts that remain hidden. There are also tangential stories about people who appear and disappear in your subject’s life that, for reasons of time or space, you don’t, or can’t, pursue. Sometimes you simply can’t find any answers and so you move on, continue and use what you can. But the missing bits niggle away and then, if you’re lucky, one day and out of the blue you fill the gaps. This just happened to me…and it’s a good story.

When I wrote my biography of Carl Crow a few years ago I uncovered a fascinating life of a man who’s experiences intersected with most of the major events and figures of China between the wars. It was enough to fill several volumes and I was greatly helped by the fact that Carl wrote over a dozen books, numerous articles for newspapers and magazines and left an archive of his notes and unpublished works. However, he was almost totally silent on his private life and I was largely unable to discover anything significant – he was married twice, had a daughter from his first marriage…that was about it. I knew his wife’s names, his daughter’s name, but very little else…Carl was maintaining radio silence on these matters. It seemed to be the way he wanted it; indeed it almost seemed, reading his archive, that he was intentionally obscuring the personal side of his life and hiding it away from any future biographer that might come along nosing around.

I didn’t worry overly much about it. My biography was not a particularly personal one. I chose to write about Carl because he fitted perfectly into a period in Chinese history – roughly from the death of the Qing Dynasty to the end of the Second World War – that interested me and my aim was to tell the history of this period from the perspective of one particularly connected and informed foreigner living in Shanghai. I wanted a more personal view of that tumultuous period in China’s history that would hopefully help me connect with that time. Carl could not have been better for that purpose having arrived in 1911, worked as a journalist and then running an advertising business, being a curious individual, ‘amateur anthropologist’, supporter of the Chinese Republic, politically curious and deeply involved in China’s cause against Japanese militarism. That he knew and met Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek, Madame Chiang, a brace of warlords and just about everyone, Chinese or foreign, who mattered in politics, diplomacy, journalism and commerce seemed an added bonus.

It all got written up and published…mission accomplished.

The book was generally well reviewed, people seemed to like it…I felt I’d done Carl justice.

Since then I’ve been glad to see people become interested in Carl. Journalists looking back at China in the republican period have quoted Carl and he seems to get mentioned in other people’s work a bit more. Several publishers have reprinted various of Carl’s books – there are now new reprint copies of his Foreign Devils in the Flowery Kingdom, 400 Million Customers and America and the Philippines available. I know that someone is planning to reprint his Travellers Guide to China soon. People have bought them and enjoyed them once again. I published a print of Carl’s map of Shanghai from 1935 which people enjoyed and this week I’m launching Carl’s previously unpublished war diaries of his 1939 trip up the Burma Road to Chungking. I feel Carl is now back in people’s minds, appreciated for his insights, enjoyed for his writing and his life celebrated by a new generation of people studying and writing about China. As I said earlier…mission accomplished.

Well almost. There has always remained one niggling issue about Carl – what became of his daughter Betty? I had ‘struck out’ on that one and it bothered me. I knew that Carl had returned to America briefly in 1916-1917 and that he, and his then wife Mildred, had had a daughter they called Elizabeth (‘Betty’). But I knew little else – a few references to her as a baby while they were still in California, a copy of one of his books inscribed to Betty and noting a trip they had made to Shanghai’s Lunghwa Pagoda, from the top of which they, ‘felt they could see the whole world.’ And then nothing. Carl and Mildred divorced in 1925, both remarried and I could find no further references to Betty. Intriguingly Carl’s (rather detailed) last will and testament in 1945 made no mention of either Mildred or Betty.

I did try…but got pretty much nowhere. I could track down no birth certificates, death certificates or references to Betty anywhere. My one contact with the Crow family was equally stumped and intrigued. I eventually let it go…the book had to be finished. But it niggled away at me, not least because speaking about the book and Carl at book festivals and events people always asked about Betty. Naturally readers were curious about Carl’s personal life and wanted to know more. I found some time and went back and looked again…in the interim time I’d become more skilled at searching genealogical records but the lack of crucial data on people in China stumped me.

I speculated and tried various avenues of enquiry…had she died young? Had she been a victim of the global flu pandemic after the First World War? Had she succumbed to one or other of the maladies that laid low plenty of foreigners in China between the wars? Eventually, I gave up.

Then, just as I was about to achieve (as the Americans say) ‘closure’ with Carl by publishing his wartime diaries, and consciously relegate him to my past and let the books and reprints and others keep him alive, out of the blue came the answer to what happened to Betty and Carl’s first wife Mildred after they separated in 1925. It turned out to be a great story in itself. But I’m not sure I would have included it in the book except maybe as a short paragraph or a footnote. So anyway, the post that follows is the story of Betty Crow and her mother Mildred that I never managed to get…it’s worth retelling and all turned out rather well too…it’s a happy story.

The Story of Mildred and Betty