Norwood F. Allman’s Shanghai Lawyer: The Memoirs of America’s China Spymaster, Annotated, Illustrated and Embellished by Douglas Clark

Wonderful news that the good folk at Earnshaw Books have republished (and annotated no less) Norwood F. Allman’s classic Shanghai Lawyer….out in e-book format now and, in mid-April, in paperback…..

Diplomat, lawyer, judge, soldier, spy, spymaster; just some of the positions American Norwood Allman, held in his 30 plus years in China. Shanghai Lawyer is Allman’s first-hand account of his amazing life, from his arrival as a student interpreter during WWI, to serving as a Chinese and Mexican judge, practising before the U.S. Court for China, commanding the American militia in Shanghai, and, finally fighting the Japanese army in the battle for Hong Kong in 1941. Douglas Clark, author of Gunboat Justice, has trawled through public, private and personal archives to bring the story Allman tells in his acclaimed bestseller fully back to life.

You Never Had a Trip Back from Hong Kong Quite Like This…A Star Studded Lounge

I’ve been reading Lyndsy Spence’s The Mistress of Mayfair: Men, Money and the Marriage of Doris Delevingne, who may be better known to many as Doris Castlerosse. She was considered one of London’s most beautiful women in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as one of the city’s most sexually liberated.

Anyway, in 1936 Doris took a tour of the Orient – Java, Bali, Singapore, the Philippines, Malay States, Sri Lanka, China (where she certainly popped into Peking) and Japan – departing for home from Hong Kong. Now many of us have departed Hong Kong for London and bumped into the odd interesting person but Doris’s ship home had a great cast:

• William Rootes – luxury car maker and, at the time, engaged in an affair with Doris
• Geoffrey Rootes – his son and who was accompanied by a ‘nymphomaniac’ friend of Doris’s to keep him occupied
• Hon. Mrs Hubert Parker – born Loryn Bowser of Kentucky before marrying Hubert Lister Parker, Baron Parker of Waddington and a leading barrister
• Charlie Chaplin and Paulette Goddard – the film stars obviously
• Jean Cocteau – the French writer, designer, artist, filmmaker, opium addict etc etc

Beat that next time you’re in line at Chek Lap Kok and scanning your fellow passengers….

Ruth’s Record: The Diary of an American in Japanese-occupied Shanghai 1941-45

Yesterday I noted the forthcoming Royal Asiatic Society’s visit to the former Lunghua Internment Camp in Shanghai. I should mention the new book that inspired that trip….Ruth’s Record: The Diary of an American in Japanese-Occupied Shanghai 1941-1945 by Ruth Barr…

The year 1941 was a turning point for the world, but long-time Shanghai resident Ruth Hill Barr had no way of knowing that when she started her five-year diary on January 1st. Before the year was over, the Japanese Army had occupied Shanghai’s International Settlement, and she and her family were stranded as enemy aliens, soon to be placed in a Japanese internment camp. This book includes the full text of Ruth’s diary along with explanations and memories by her daughter Betty, revealing with fascinating detail the anguish and, incredibly, the continuity of life inside and outside the Shanghai camps during the war.

Free Screening of Broken Blossoms (1919) at Regent Street Cinema – 3/3/17

As part of the University of Westminster’s current Difference Festival the Regent Street Cinema is screening the 1919 film Broken Blossoms this Friday (3/3/17) at 5.30pm – admission is free and you get an introduction by Dr Anne Witchard (Thomas Burke’s Dark Chinoiserie and Lao She in London) and organ accompaniment by Donald Mackenzie. If you haven’t seen the film (directed by DW Griffith and starring Lillian Gish and Richard Bathelmess) you should – if for nothing else than it is an adaptation of one of Thomas Burke’s Limehouse Nights stories. Also, if you have visited the marvelously restored Regent Street Cinema this is a golden opportunity…booking (though it’s free) is here…

Cheng Huan is a missionary whose goal is to bring the teachings of peace by Buddha to the civilized Anglo-Saxons. Upon landing in England, he is quickly disillusioned by the intolerance and apathy of the country. He becomes a storekeeper of a small shop. Out his window, he sees the young Lucy Burrows. She is regularly beaten by her prizefighter father, underfed and wears ragged clothes. Even in this deplorable condition, Cheng can see that she is a priceless beauty and he falls in love with her from afar. On the day that she passes out in front of his store, he takes her in and cares for her. With nothing but love in his heart, he dresses her in silks and provides food for her. Still weak, she stays in his shop that night and all that Cheng does is watch over her. The peace and happiness that he sees last only until Battling Burrows finds out that his daughter is with a foreigner.

Royal Asiatic Society Shanghai – Lunghua Civilian Assembly Center Historical Site Tour and Talk – 9/3/17

Lunghua Civilian Assembly Center Historical Site Tour and Talk

Speaker & Tour Leader : Betty Barr & Sven Serrano

During World War II, Shanghai’s Japanese occupation forces held citizens of countries allied against Japan in internment centers. Lunghua Civilian Assembly Center (C.A.C.), located on what is now the campus of Shanghai High School, was one such facility.

RAS members, internment camp survivor Betty Barr and Shanghai High School International Division (SHSID) history faculty member Sven A. Serrano, guide an exploration of six surviving internment camp buildings on the campus.

Ms. Barr’s mother Ruth Hill Barr kept a clandestine diary during the family’s years in Lunghua. Titled Ruth’s Record: The Diary of an American in Japanese Occupied Shanghai 1941-1945, Earnshaw Press recently published this piece of living history which includes Betty’s explanations/clarifications and memories.

 Our tour on a school day, coincides with Betty’s annual meeting with SHSID students. The tour ends in the SHSID auditorium where Betty speaks about her wartime experience in the Lunghua C.A.C. and answers questions from students and RAS tour participants.

Address and directions provided to those who RSVP.

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)

Toyo Murakami Curios and Shirts of Kiangse Road

I’ve blogged quite a bit about various curio stores in old Shanghai and Peking run by foreigners (Hoggard-Sigler, Jean Lindsay, Western Arts Gallery in Shanghai and The Golden Dragon, and of course The Camel Bell in Peking). Here though, from the 1930s is a Japanese run curio store in Shanghai – at 270 Kiangse Road (now Jiangxi Road) at the corner with Ezra Road (Shashi No.2 Road) – that also sold silk shirts. Most of their curios appear to be Japanese – Satsuma etc – though they also sold Chinese curios. I’m afraid I know very little about the shop except that it was run by  Mr Toyo Murakami. I have no more leads on the store or the owner – sadly I don’t read Japanese and Toyo Murakami appears to be a very common name and so you can’t pin any of the leads down.

Mission to China: How an Englishman Brought the West to the Orient

Walter Medhurst is remembered in this new biography of the intrepid missionary, adventurer, printer, writer, translator, teacher and nineteenth-century pioneer to China by John Holliday…