Freddy Kaufmann and Peter Watson Meet Again in Shanghai, 1937

Read quite a number of memoirs of 1930s Shanghai and you’ll come up against the name Freddy Kaufmann. He was a well known figure in the city, the manager of several bars including Sir Victor Sassoon’s Tower Club in the Cathay Hotel. Kaufmann was immortalised in Auden and Isherwood’s Journey to a War when the two met him in Shanghai in 1939 and included him in this great description of the city…

The tired or lustful businessman will find here everything to gratify his desires. You can buy an electric razor, or a French dinner, or a well-cut suit. You can dance at the Tower Restaurant on the roof of the Cathay Hotel, and gossip with Freddy Kaufmann, its charming manager, about the European aristocracy, or pre-Hitler Berlin. You can attend race meetings, baseball games, football matches. You can see the latest American films. If you want girls or boys, you can have them, at all prices, in the bathhouses and the brothels. If you want opium you can smoke it in the best company, served on a tray, like afternoon tea. Good wine is difficult in this climate, but there is whisky and gin to float a fleet of battleships. The jeweller and the antique dealer await your orders, and their charges will make you imagine yourself back on Fifth Avenue or in Bond Street. Finally, if you ever repent, there are churches and chapels of all denominations.

Peter Watson (above) was a wealthy Englishman – gay, investing in Cyril Connolly’s Horizon magazine, a knowledgeable art collector. He visited Shanghai briefly in 1937 shortly after the Japanese attack on the city. He ran in to Freddy too – but Peter had known him before, in his previous life, before Shanghai – when he had been an actor moonlighting as the manager of the Jockey Club Bar (below) in Weimar Berlin. The Jockey Bar opened in 1929 in what was then Lutherstraße 2, in the Charlottenburg district of the city. There’s a good history of the Jockey here and a list of luminaries who hung out there – Dietrich, Hemingway, Cocteau – too long to list here. Freddy has decided the Nazis were not good news and lit out for the Orient.

Watson left Shanghai for Hong Kong and then on to America on Christmas Eve 1937…his boyfriend (Denham Fouts – below) stayed on and reportedly got a job working in the Tower Restaurant for a time. He returned to Peter some time later in England…a confirmed opium addict.

(BTW: Although i have heard many stories and reminiscences of Kaufmann I had not heard the Peter Watson connection until reading Adrian Clark and Jeremy Dronfield’s excellent biography of Watson, Queer Saint)