Hong Kong 70 Years Ago: Herklots the biologist; North the civil servant

The website Gwulo: Old Hong Kong is superb. Those who have followed the daily updates that show entries from the diaries written by internees in Hong Kong before, during and after the Japanese surrender, 70 years ago, will have noticed the name of Dr Geoffrey Alton Craig Herklots (1902-1986).

I hope to write more about Herklots later but at the time of the Japanese invasion in December 1941 he was Reader in Biology at the University of Hong Kong; he had joined the university in 1928 to start the teaching of biology. He later wrote the books, Hong Kong Birds and The Hong Kong Countryside. In addition to his job in the University, Herklots also became involved in Government work. In 1937, for example, he was appointed Superintendent of the Botanical and Forestry Department. He set up a Fisheries Research Station in the University and he founded, edited and contributed to The Hong Kong Naturalist.

Herklots was part of the group of underfed, ill and exhausted internees led by Franklin Gimson (who had himself sworn in as Acting Governor) out of Stanley to re-establish British rule immediately after the Japanese capitulation. The intense activity of those few days, before the arrival of the Royal Navy taskforce, is described in Philip Snow’s The Fall of Hong Kong (Yale University Press, 2003). Against a background in which U.S. army generals and Chiang Kai Shek’s Nationalists were trying to ensure that the latter took over Hong Kong, there were local deals to be done with the Japanese and with a local triad gang in order to maintain law and order as armed, looting gangs ran riot.

Camellia hongkongensis
from The Hong Kong Countryside

In the newly restored Government Herklots became Secretary for Development and had a particular responsibility for fisheries and agriculture. He became greatly involved in the business of survival both before and after the surrender to the Japanese in December 1941. Before the Japanese crossed the border, the Director of Medical Services, Selwyn Selwyn-Clarke, asked Herklots to devise a ‘siege biscuit’ that would provide the population with basic nutrition. With Thomas Edgar, a master baker, and after numerous trials, a successful product was launched. On the day before the Japanese attacked, a successful biscuit was produced that also contained calcium carbonate and shark liver oil.

In the Stanley internment camp, Herklots played closely involved with the welfare and education of its inhabitants who were malnourished, in terms both of quantity and quality, terrorised and short of medical supplies (even Red Cross parcels were held and not distributed by the Japanese). Herklots was a member of the organising Camp Temporary Committee, continued with running the University as far as was possible, gave general lectures ('Tropical Seas', for example) and continued work on trying to counter nutritional problems in the internees. This extract from Gwulo shows what he was involved in:

Thursday 1 July 1943

More than 18 months of poor nutrition are taking their toll. One of the most alarming developments is the occurrence of eye problems due to B vitamin deficiency. The camp's doctors are trying to tackle the problem, and today Dr Kenneth Uttley writes in his diary:

     Now that Lane Crawford’s baker Mr Edgar has been interned here, I have set Herklots and him on to the problem along with myself; we have cut down the amount of sugar required and are making more efficient use of the soya bean residue left after making the soya bean milk for the children and invalids. We have at last what appears to be a fairly active yeast and Geoffrey and I dispense it daily at 2pm to the eye cases and certain other B2 deficient cases.  Geoffrey and Edgar are busy most of each morning working on the yeast and are thoroughly enjoying themselves. We even entertain the idea of making yeast for the whole camp, but that will have to wait.

     Former Secretary to the Health Department J. I. Barnes reports that he was almost blind from vitamin deficiency but 'fully recovered' his sight after two doses of yeast - he got the second because he was a 'special worker' and most cases only got one dose. His job was looking after the camp stores - he slept there at night to prevent theft.

The internees in Stanley had also done a lot of thinking and planning. Before the arrival from London of a new civil administration to work under the temporary military administration, the ex-internees worked hard. At the speed that characterises the way things were done in Hong Kong, Herklots launched his new scheme for fish marketing on 12 September, less than a month after the Japanese capitulation, a week before the formal Japanese surrender and only 13 days after Harcourt’s ships and troops arrived in the harbour.

Herklots sketched his encounter with a large jellyfish
(The Hong Kong Countryside)

The other internee re-establishing British rule of interest here is Roland Arthur Charles North (1889-1961), Secretary for Chinese Affairs in the pre-war government and acting Colonial Secretary. I have written about him here*, since I have his complete run of The Hong Kong Naturalist on my bookshelves.

Herklots and North (a member of the old guard in the Colonial Service with whom Gimson disagreed on the way in which Hong Kong should be governed in the future) were members of the Hong Kong Government that seized the day and which issued its famous first communique since Christmas Day 1941 at 11.00 on 30 September 1945 The communique signalled loud and clear in thirteen words both immense relief and the carrying of a very big stick. Was it, I wonder, drafted by Duncan Sloss (1881-1964), temporary Director of Information and Vice-Chancellor of the University from 1937 until 1948?

Rear-Admiral Harcourt is lying outside Hong Kong with a very strong fleet…

The University of Hong Kong's building for biology in the 1930s
In the 1960s it housed the University Press. Before its conversion for biology  in 1928
it had been used for staff housing. After biology moved to the Northcote Building
it was briefly used as a women's hostel; Han Su-yin, under her university name of
Dr Elizabeth Tang was its sub-warden.
(from Bernard Mellor's The University of Hong Kong. An Informal History)

*I have made some recent additions to this post of 20 October 2013.

Hong Kong Naturalist: A journal and an original subscriber - R.A.C. North

A few years ago I was pleased to buy a complete bound set of Hong Kong Naturalist. Founded by G.A.C. Herklots, it was published from 1930 until the Japanese invasion of 1941. I was pleased to find that the colour plates were intact except, strangely, in the last two volumes (bound differently and of a larger page size than the others) where they had been crudely torn out. They were bought on eBay from a bookseller in the south of England for much less than the price of postage. Each volume is signed inside the cover and I was surprised when I recognised the owner from the signature, R.A.C. North.

Roland Arthur Charles North CMG was Secretary of Chinese Affairs in the Hong Kong Government from 1936 until the surrender of Hong Kong to the Japanese invaders on Christmas Day 1941. He was a key figure in a controversy that occupied the Government of Hong Kong and the British Government after Japan unconditionally surrendered on 14 August 1945 and the re-establishment of British administration by the brilliant Colonial Secretary (two higher than North in the civil service hierarchy), Franklin Gimson, who had only arrived in Hong Kong a couple of days before the Japanese invasion. After the arrival of Admiral Harcourt with ships from the Pacific Fleet, British sovereignty was re-established in September 1945.

The controversy centred on the role of leading figures in the Chinese community during the Japanese occupation. Collaboration beyond the point of necessity was the charge. Some gave a dinner for the departing Japanese Governor after the surrender. Badly-nourished internees emerging from Stanley were enraged by seeing individuals who “had shouted ‘Banzai!’ yesterday singing ‘God Save the King’ today”¹. North, operating from the old French Mission Building [now housing the Orwellian-titled Court of Final Appeal], put out a press statement on 2 October to counter the public outrage at the acceptance of these leaders back into the fold of the new  administration saying that he had asked these individuals in January 1942, ‘to take upon themselves what should have been my duty in working with the Japanese’. The new Government crushed the view that one or more individuals should be put on trial and the leaders moved back into a position of influence with the government. The feeling though persisted amongst both the wartime Chinese residents who had been extremely badly treated by the Japanese and the British. I remember driving along a road in Hong Kong with a policeman friend in 1967. He suddenly exploded with ‘That road [named after one of the Chinese gentry involved] should be re-named. We don’t want collaborators like that being commemorated.’ But they were.

North, with the rest of the internees, was repatriated to UK after issuing his statement in October 1945; he arrived in Southampton on 9 November on the Royal Mail Lines ship Highland Monarch. He was appointed CMG (Supplement to London Gazette, 13 June 1946).

Thanks to a family website on ancestry.com and websites centred on his father, the artist John William North ARA (1842-1924), I have pieced the following account together.

J.W. North was a member of the Idyllic School of painters of Victorian England. A website which records his activities is maintained by his great-grandson by ‘his mistress, muse and model Maria Milton’². R.A.C. North was born to Selina Weetch, J.W. North’s wife, on 28 January 1989 at Beggearnhuish House, Nettlecombe, Somerset. Educated at Oxford, he joined the colonial service in 1912 as a Cadet 2nd Class. He married Leo Catherine Greening, a New Zealander, in 1928 in Hong Kong. According to one report, he offered to return to Hong Kong after his recovery from Hong Kong but was considered too old and retired in 1947 after working for a short time in the ‘Empire’ Office, presumably the Colonial Office. He was then 58. I seem to remember that normal retirement age from the colonial service was 55. He did return to Hong Kong, with his wife and daughter, in 1947 on his way to live in Australia; they left Southampton on P&O's Strathmore on 4 March 1947. From then until he died in 1961, aged 72, he lived with his family at Katoomba, New South Wales. After his death, his widow Leo (died 1976) and daughter, Philippa, returned to live in Somerset. Philippa died in 2005.

My guess is that what are now my copies of Hong Kong Naturalist were sold after Philippa’s death. But what had happened to them during the war. Had they been sent by North to safe keeping along with his family as the threat of war in the Far East grew? Had they been kept by him at Stanley during internment? The possibility of their being left in a ‘safe’ place in Hong Kong can be discounted since there was no such thing. From their appearance and binding (the last two non-matching volumes were bound by the Bookbinding Department, St Louis Ind. School, Hong Kong) they do not seem to have been stored in Hong Kong for long. The cockroaches then rife in houses and offices made short work of the glue in the bindings. The last two volumes are varnished to prevent attack and there are only slight signs of cockroach damage to the first eight. My guess is that the last two volumes were bound and then sent away from Hong Kong after the final part of volume X was published in February 1941.

Why is North interesting in terms of the biological sciences in Hong Kong. I think he is an illustration of the all-round civil administrator, now disappeared, with wide interests. The Hong Kong Naturalist represents the phenomenon, characteristic of a its age, of a journal that interested professional biologists, geologists, meteorologists and archaeologists as well as amateur natural historians and those interested in the natural world.

My volumes are in my bookshelf. However, other would-be purchasers of the Hong Kong Naturalist need no longer look for the uncommon printed and bound volumes. It can be viewed online at the website, Hong Kong Journals Online in its entirety:

http://hkjo.lib.hku.hk/exhibits/show/hkjo/home

R.A.C. North's volumes of The Hong Kong Naturalist
on my bookshelves

1 Snow, Philip. 2003. The Fall of Hong Kong. New Haven and London: Yale

2 http://www.southwilts.com/site/The-Idyllists/index.htm


Modified on 21 September 2015