The Lone Flag: Memoir of the British Consul in Macao during World War II

Chapter XI: Odds and Ends

Naturally various things happened during these years which do not exactly come under any of my chapter headings. So this chapter will be what service signallers would call “unclassified”. There was, for instance, the Milk Board, started by my wife to try and get the children adequate supplies of milk. For this, since it was chiefly the Portuguese children that benefitted, H.E. generously put up the money. It was organized on a group system and various volunteer workers looked after the groups. It was in the centralization of this that Argentina Gonsalves1 and Alfred Mooney joined us both to become invaluable personally and officially . The main trouble was that in a few, a very few cases the mothers got fat quicker than the children and rules had to be brought in to the effect that the milk went into the child in front of the group supervisor. The stocks of tinned milk dwindled, the children began to get better fed and the Milk Board, I believe, gradually faded out, though not before the d’Almadas had put in some very useful work. At least two of the years we ran big charity drives for the refugees and collected quite respectable sums of money. The refugees themselves did most of the work in the form of providing entertainment, organizing dances in centres, organizing lotto, housey-housey, whichever you like to call it and so on. And the sportsmen in the later drives put on exhibition games. This way we raised quite considerable funds. I would have been happier if they had been quicker spent but I believe there was still money in hand at the end of the war from the first drive.2 The last drive was the most spectacular, which we ran in conjunction with the Commissioner of Police, and for the Chapter XI Odds and Ends The Lone Flag 110 poor of Macao in general. After we had given poor Chinese and all refugee children in the centres a good Christmas feed and when we were planning distribution of clothes and so on the Commissioner had the funds transferred to his own name and I do not know to what Charities he gave them. The war ended before I had the chance to ask. But even if these drives had not earned a penny they were good things as they gave my family the boost in morale which comes from working together for a common end. Incidentally one refugee came to me for extra subsidy on the grounds that he had lost his money at lotto. When we started reproaching him for gambling he came back with the reply that he had only been gambling “for the boss’s charities”. In the chapter on Organization I briefly touched on the Rehabilitation Committee. It was I believe the first committee in the hundred years of Hongkong history on which the various communities had equal representation , only the British having less than any. I sat as Chairman and there were two from each other community. We chose key-post men from the refugees for the various departments, police, sanitation and so on and they, sometimes with small sub-committees, worked out detailed plans for the various departments. How detailed they were can be shown by the fact that drawings were even produced, with an estimate of necessary materials, of hand propelled funeral carts. At the broader end of the scale we suggested the continuance of the Japanese district bureaux at which all births, deaths, changes of residence and so on had to be registered; I am still of the very firm opinion that this would be advantageous in such an over-crowded Colony in Hongkong both for police and immigration purposes. An enormous amount of hard work was put in and, which is important, in an atmosphere both of frankness and of cordiality. I am afraid our plans were pigeon-holed and that the spirit of the Committee somewhat lapsed when the members returned to Hongkong. The work done deserved a better fate, though one can see that the H.K.P.U. (Hongkong Planning Unit),3 to join which we sent Leo d’Almada home before the war ended, being an official body formed in London, had to take precedence. Odds and Ends 111 From Government policy to servants, James and Joseph, Ah Wong, Ah Yu, the amahs and all. James, then our No. 1, left...