Son's hunt for father exposes betrayal of war heroes
Friday, 1 February 2002
Government documents uncovered during a man's search for his lost father have revealed how thousands of Chinese servicemen who served Britain in the Second World War were forcibly repatriated in a climate of anti-oriental racism.
Government documents uncovered during a man's search for his lost father have revealed how thousands of Chinese servicemen who served Britain in the Second World War were forcibly repatriated in a climate of anti-oriental racism.
At least 2,000 Chinese, whose seafaring excellence was put to use by the wealthy Liverpool shipping lines, were rounded up by police officers between March and July 1946 and sent back to China, never to see their sons and daughters again.
The Chinese were considered "undesirable" and the city authorities were "anxious to secure the housing accommodation" they occupied, accord-ing to the minute of a Home Office meeting of October 1945 to discuss "repatriation of Chinese seamen", 117 of whom had British-born wives.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the policy, which is also exposed in correspondence between the Ministry of Transport and War and the Liverpool Chief Constable, is its omission from historical analysis of the period.
Professor Tony Lee, a Cardiff University historian, said research had "simply focused on the war" and that the new documents were "a surprise". But he said: "It doesn't surprise me that there's very little in the record. British historians have not really been in interested in the history of small ethnic groups."
The story was uncovered by Keith Cocklin, 55, a retired merchant seaman who began investigating the disappearance of his father, Soong Kwai Sing, just before his own birth in May 1946. Mr Cocklin, whose work is featured in a BBC North West documentary entitled Shanghai'd, was told his father had returned voluntarily to support the new People's Republic in China, which was not established until 1949.
His plea for information through a BBC local radio programme elicited the testimony of Steve Crawshaw, a former fitter who built bunks in cargo holds to sleep the returning Chinese. There were also witnesses to police raids in which the Chinese men were rounded up. "We just saw them getting into the trucks. If they ran, they [the police] ran after them," one witness, Larry Kee, said.
Correspondence with Maria Lin Wong, who had investigated her own father's disappearance, helped to lead Mr Cocklin to Public Record Office documents demonstrating the haste with which the policy was initiated after an end to Japanese occupation of China removed a key impediment. The documents record the acceptance by the Transport and War Office, in correspondence with Liverpool's Chief Constable, that the "undesirable" Chinese seamen "try every device to avoid repatriation but once they see that bribery, corruption and solicitors' letters will not avail, they will accept the inevitable".
Professor Lane said anti-Chinese sentimentflared during the war, when Chinese and Indian merchant seamen took strike action in protest over their pay – a third of that offered to British seamen. "This is the classical outrage of the imperial masters at the imperial subordinates daring to stand up for themselves," Professor Lane said. "The Chinese were very proud of their own culture and very aware of the negative stereotypes and quite scandalous attitudes some people had towards the Chinese."
Documents supporting repatriation list details of 1,000 convictions for opium smoking, 50 for gaming offences and countless cases of venereal disease and tuberculosis.
Mr Cocklin, who said his discoveries had made him want to "declassify" himself as a British citizen, knows his father was shipped to Hong Kong, then onwards to Shanghai on 9 March 1946 on the Ajax. His inquiries have failed so far to locate his father, who would now be in his mid-Eighties.
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