forgotten-souls-a-social-history-of-the-hong-kong

fifteen, resented their exclusion from the charmed circle. Hence, particularly in summer 1850, the epithets of flunkeyism and toadyism were freely applied
to the attitude of the Governor��s commercial friends. Even among the latter, there arose occasionally acrimonious questions of precedence at the gubernatorial dinner table. Moreover the gradation of social rank thus originated in the upper circles reproduced themselves in the middle and lower strata of local society, which accordingly became subdivided into mutually exclusive cliques and sets.5
At the time of this division, about nine leading storekeepers who styled themselves citizen householders as distinct from the merchants and professional men were piqued at being excluded and questioned why their views should be entirely overlooked when they considered that they had the time and the will to attend to public business. They addressed a memorial to the governor:
Your memoralists have no intention to question your Excellency��s right to select the magistrates of the colony�K. Of the ten individuals whose names appear on the Circular, one is a government official, two at least are non-residents and three are merchants�� clerks; and however personally respectable each may be, we take leave to say that the magistrates of the Colony ought not to be made up of either of these classes, so long at least
as there are inhabitants equally respected and well-qualified who have long
been permanent residents in the Colony and are necessarily interested in its welfare.6
This memorial did nothing to check the steady decrease in the power and
influence of the citizen householder class in Hong Kong.7
The second formal distinction in the ranks of Hong Kong society was in the choice of jurors, whose names were promulgated in the general jury list which up to 1855 was nailed to the door of the Supreme Court. All men over twenty-one and
under sixty who earned more than $500 a year, understood English and were not
mentally deranged or criminals were eligible.8 This list was notoriously inaccurate and controversial. For instance, the China Mail complained of inappropriate choice in October 1848, when a tavern barman was called as juror to sit on the jury in a trial of an Englishman for piracy and murder. This barman had previously been brought before the magistrate for disorderly conduct at the Central Police Station. The magistrate had on that occasion decided that he should be sent to the Seamen��s Hospital, since the prisoner appeared to be temporarily insane from
the effects of drink.9
The list of jurors was further subdivided when a number considered of higher rank were picked out by the governor as ��special jurors�� to serve in the High Court of the Admiralty. By 1851, this court had been abolished but the distinction remained. In the same year, a new jury ordinance was brought in,
dropping the property qualifications and widening the list of eligible jurors to include, ��Every male person who in the opinion of the Sheriff and the Governor
may be classed as ��one of the principal inhabitants of the colony��.��10 This
vaguely worded classification left the final decision as to who were the principal
inhabitants very much in the hands of the civil service and governor. Those eligible for jury service were listed alphabetically with their occupation and place of residence. The male European population fell in this way into five formal categories, members of the Legislative Council, justices of the peace, special jurors, jurors and those not listed who were not considered respectable enough or whose knowledge of English was not considered good enough to be called for jury service. After the new jury ordinance of 1852 had been introduced, the Friend of China still criticized the jury lists:
Of the one hundred and forty-four names of persons written down as eligible for service a full one sixth �K are not so; some being dead, others for years absent from the colony, two or three under age, and incapacitated by reason of ignorance of the English language not so small a number.11
In the first jury list to survive, that of 1855, thirty special jurors were named
of whom three were German, one Jewish and one Portuguese, as against 103
ordinary jurors. The first Chinese to be included in 1858 was Wong Shing, listed
as a printer at the London Missionary Society. He had been educated at the Morrison Education Society School and was to become one of the great pioneers
in Chinese journalism. By 1859, a new jury ordinance was introduced into the
Legislative Council which provided that special jurors should be exempt from serving as common jurors. The China Mail commented: ��It was well enough for old clerks when turned into youthful partners to get their names placed on the Special Jury List, just as the weaker of them assume black hats in order to bolster
up their new dignity��. He continued that the ordinance for the first time conveyed a tangible benefit: ��Hence it is of importance that some intelligible principle should
be followed in making the division��. 12 He went on to show the anomalies that existed, that for example Mr. Costerton, the manager of the Mercantile Bank, was a common juror while Mr. Reid, the sub-manager, was a special. It can be seen
that in the years of the first period, the principles on which the division of society
should proceed were being worked out and principles and systems of division
becoming clearer and firmer among the expatriate community

The Informal Level
The informal system of stratifying society was part of the ��baggage�� that was ingrained in the minds of the settlers long before they arrived on these shores. In Hong Kong as in England, the upper and middle classes were drawing apart from those below them under the guise of gentility or respectability. The same kind
of delineation between the various strata and definition of where individuals and groups stood in the fledgling class structure was taking place in Hong Kong. The
existence of innumerable cliques dividing the inhabitants from one another is very well documented. H.T. Ellis wrote in 1855:
The English residents of Hong Kong, like many other small communities, are divided by exclusive feelings which rendered society far less agreeable than it might have been had better understanding existed among them. As each little coterie was headed by its own particular lady patroness, it was a
difficult matter to find any half-dozen who would meet any other half-dozen,
without their evincing mutual marks of contempt or dislike.13
Alfred Weatherhead, in a lecture on Hong Kong delivered in 1859 after
two and a half years working for the Hong Kong government as acting deputy registrar and later as a clerk of the Supreme Court, summed up his view of the prevailing class distinctions:
One would naturally be inclined to suppose that sojourners in a foreign country far removed from the endearing associations of home, away from their kindred and old connexions would cling more closely together �X that the absence of family ties and early intimate associations would lead them instinctively to combine more readily for mutual interest and social enjoyment
�X that petty class distinctions prevailing to such an absurd extent among ourselves, so destructive to real happiness and freedom would in great measure be obliterated abroad and that kindly feelings and genial social impulses would rule�K. Unfortunately the very reverse of all this obtains.
The exclusiveness, jealousy and pride of ��caste�� that have been so long and so justly attributed to our English brethren and sisters in our Indian possessions attain even more luxurious growth in China. The little community far from being a band of brothers is split up into numerous petty cliques or sets, the members of whom never think of associating with those out of their own immediate circle. All sorts of fanciful, yet rigidly defined distinctions exist and scandal, detraction and calumny under the slang term of ��gup�� (gossip) prevail to a frightful extent.14
Significantly, some of the founders of Hong Kong society, among them old and respected members, were in the process of being excluded from the ranks of the elite on the grounds that they belonged to the category of traders or professionals rather than that of merchants. They included John Cairns, owner and editor of the Friend of China and Thomas Ash Lane, one of the founders of
Lane Crawford��s store. Problems arose from the difficulty of separating merchants
from retailers. As Ellis said: ��Though some were called merchants and others storekeepers, such was the undercurrent of retail speculation that it was hard to define where one batch ended and the other began��.15 Some attempts were made to reverse the trend. A drama society was proposed as early as December 1844. Dramaticus in a letter to the Friend of China asserted that:
Society is cooped up in small knots of clans and cliques, unknown and uncared for by each other. There is an evident apprehension of contamination in any attempt at concentration or gregariousness�K. I have been a resident of Hong Kong from its birth and the conviction is strong upon my mind that much of the sickness and mortality has been ascribed to the climate which might more properly be imputed to ��ennui�� and the thousand natural results of dissipation and disgust.16
The Victoria Theatre was leased for the showing of plays. The society was
not without its critics who feared that drama would have a corrupting influence on
the minds of the young. The editor of the Friend of China counteracted:
The habit of indulging in scandal, malice and hatred is not to be acquired from the works of Shakespeare or Sheridan �X where, if such vices are brought forward, it is only to expose them �X and we uphold that a true lover of legitimate drama will never be uncharitable towards his neighbour.17
Not much had changed seven years later when it was suggested that dancing might promote social harmony. After a particularly successful fancy dress ball, the
commentator on the function reflected:
A nice little meeting every third or fourth week for dancing and music, such as are common in continental countries, would be a source of pleasure and enjoyment and would tend much to bring forth out of all the little cliques and patches of society which now exist, a better feeling among all parties; and would further bring out and foster those little amenities of social life in which the society of this island is wanting.18
Where on this social ladder each settler belonged was obviously of crucial
importance to the social wellbeing and prospects of those involved in, what seems to us, an unedifying scramble for position. For this reason it is important to examine the process of allotting each arrival a position in the community. The informal method of examining, judging and slotting the newcomer into the existing social order occurred soon after his arrival and depended on a number of factors which themselves gave rise to hurt feelings and bitterness. First there were introductions. It was important to arrive bearing as many introductions as one could:
I would strongly impress on auditors thinking of going (to Hong Kong) the ALL-IMPORTANCE of good introductions �X the more the better and if possible couched in terms warranting personal and domestic intimacy. You must not expect to win your way upwards in society as at home or imagine
that good breeding and external qualifications will secure you good standing
or favourable reception�K. You take up a certain position at the outset in
which you will be fixed for years�K. It is not unreasonably taken for granted
that you had some cogent reason for leaving home not likely to recommend you if known.19
The fact that Hong Kong was known to be an unhealthy ��hole�� lent a suspicion that colonists, choosing to make it their destination, had probably left England
under a cloud or had been paid off by their families to seek their fortunes abroad
for reasons that were seldom flattering to themselves. A doctor, for instance, leaving England to save himself from ��utter ruin��, in a letter to his father, confessed that he had got into debt and had besides felt obliged to marry a girl who was bearing his child:

There is one alternative left and I must embrace it at all hazards though you must admit it is a dreadful one for me; but I hope that by making such a
sacrifice you will believe my determination �K to receive your forgiveness.20
Letters of introduction, which demonstrated the bona fide of the person carrying
them, were an open sesame to the upper echelons of society.
On his arrival in Hong Kong, this same doctor wrote that he has not yet met the general to whom he had an introduction: ��It is necessary here to enclose your introductory note with your card and residence and then wait until he calls upon you or sends you an invitation��. 21 It took time to get organized. Having arrived
with letters of introduction, the first social duty was to get calling cards printed
using the socially acceptable engraved plates brought from England: ��Ladies and gentlemen having Engraved Plates can have them printed neatly and expeditiously at the Office of the paper��. 22 Then those people who were reckoned to be within one��s particular social circle were called on. If the newcomer considered himself a gentleman, the first port of call would be the governor where he would leave his card and inscribe his name in the special book. This made him eligible for invitations to dinners or garden parties or other social events organized by the governor. After that, he would call on those he had introductions to and on the wives of his colleagues at work. His card would be conveyed to the lady of the
3.1. The importance of connections, Lieutenant Frederick R. Hardinge [9/6/1], d. 18.12.1856 of dysentery, proclaims his credentials on his headstone.

house by a servant. After looking at the card, she would decide whether she was ��at home�� to the caller or not. If his standing was exalted enough, he would be encouraged to put his name forward to be balloted on by members of the Hong Kong Club, membership of which would settle his place among the elite of Hong Kong. The importance placed on the ritual of calling was remarked on by a disapproving visiting American:
These little communities, nevertheless, are subject to iron laws of etiquette, any infraction whereof, either purposely or through ignorance, makes society tremble to its foundations. A custom, which refers particularly to strangers, has been transplanted here from India, and is now in full force. The newly-arrived, unless he wishes to avoid all society, must go the rounds of the resident families and make his calls. The calls are returned, an invitation to dinner follows in due course of time, and everything is ��en train�� for a footing of familiar intercourse.23
It is necessary to ask next on what criteria the caller would be judged as worthy of the particular level of society to which he aspired by those he called on. He would be rigorously examined for signs of his background and breeding and here it would be useful to mention names within his home circle to give provenance to his being from a good family. Then he would be scrutinized as to his dress and education. Did he come from one of the accepted public schools and
have a proper acquaintance with Latin and Greek? Was he attired as a gentleman
should be? A visiting American doctor, when noting that, as a small concession to climate, white jackets with simple ribbons were allowed to be worn at balls, made a pertinent comment on the subject of British dress in the tropics:
It requires a great struggle in John Bull to throw down those starched
barricades which flank his chin and protect his whiskers. In Calcutta, even
in the dog-days nothing less than a collar, rigid as a plank, and a black cloth dress-coat is tolerated. Verily, the Saxon clings to his idols with a pertinacity which we cannot sufficiently admire. Make a certain costume the type of respectability with him, and he carries the idea all over the world.24
Besides dress and education, the type and level of the position filled by the caller or, if from the armed forces, his rank would need to be considered. A doctor in a letter home described in very disapproving terms how rank could be a
significant factor: Only last week a first lieutenant of H.M.S. ��Melampus�� called upon one of the
merchants but his card was returned and a message sent down to him by a servant that Mr. �X did not receive anyone below the rank of Commander.25
This system of discrimination, used to weed out ��undesirable�� newcomers or would-be members of the Hong Kong Club without the proper qualifications, gave rise to hurtful opportunities to administer snubs which would cause long-rankling divisions and the formation of opposing cliques.
Typical of the process was the way in which John Fortunatus Evelyn Wright
arrived and settled into Hong Kong society.26 Having had to retire early from the Royal Navy after a bout of African yellow fever left him with one leg shorter than the other, he obtained a post of fourth clerk in the post office through the
influence of a family friend, the Marquis of Clanricade. He arrived in June 1849. Not feeling confident enough of his position, he waited until the following April
to leave his card on ��His Lordship, the Bishop and his Lady��. His cards must have been acknowledged, because, in September 1850, he recorded: ��Paid calls. Mrs
Staveley [the wife of the general in command of the garrison] like Mrs Smith [the bishop��s wife] is a perfect lady, what a treat to converse with such people in a place like Hong Kong. Finished my calls by seeing Mesdames Gaskell, [Solicitor��s wife] Jamieson [wife of Captain Charles Jamieson of the opium-receiving ship] and the Johns [sea captain and his wife]��.27 In May 1850 he sent his letter of introduction to the new commanding general and received an invitation to dine and subsequently an invitation to a ball. It was not until he had been in Hong Kong for eighteen
months that he met the chief magistrate, Major William Caine, an event he
thought worthy of recording as the sole entry for the day in his diary.28 He never
mentions coming into contact socially with any of the merchant class. Wright��s place in the community seems to have been fixed among the middle-class group
that included the lesser civil service clerks, the professionals, ships�� captains,
commissariat storekeepers and the upper ranks of the tradesmen. Wright made
friends, found lodgings, dined and went on hiking, shooting or boating trips with groups from among these men.
A clear illustration of the layering of society in Hong Kong and its origins in British society was given in the following accounts of the ball for 280 people organized by the officers of HMS Agincourt in February 1845, which followed a regatta. The naval surgeon, Dr. Edward Cree, described the occasion:

3.3. A watercolour of the regatta organized by officers of HMS Agincourt by naval surgeon Dr. Edward Cree.
All the beauty and fashion of Hong Kong on board the ��Agincourt��; about forty ladies and four times as many men�K. At six dinner, but only half, about 140, could sit down at one time, although the table extended the whole length of the main deck. After dinner dancing commenced on the quarterdeck,
which was prettily decorated with flags of all nations, chandeliers of bayonets, variegated lamps, transparencies and flowers. On the poop were card-tables �K. Altogether the affair gave great satisfaction and will serve to bring Hong
Kong people together. Everyone was asked, but one or two stuck-up ladies imagined they were too good for the company, and stayed away, but they were not missed, as they are old and ugly. The belles of the party were Miss Hickson and Miss Bowra.29
The officers had obviously cast their nets wide to find enough of that rare commodity in Hong Kong, ladies, to make a good party. Miss Hickson was one of the three daughters of a naval sub-storekeeper working under the chief storekeeper Mr. MacKnight, and Miss Bowra was the daughter of a ship��s chandler. Neither of these pretty girls would have merited an invitation if the ball had been held in
England. When the different strata that made up the community did meet, as at
the Agincourt ball, it was a matter for comment. Thus, in its reporting, the Friend of China felt obliged to apologize for the breakdown of the usual social barriers at the ball. The reporter noted:
their readiness to drop, for the happiness of all, those vain and petty distinctions that make society cramp its usefulness and engenders nothing but prejudices and dislikes. Living on an island, where no house existed four years previously, it would have been melancholy, where they are so nearly equal in position, to have witnessed the assumptions of fastidious claims, that are so constantly and necessarily thrown aside by the noblest in Europe from the motive that all might be contented and happy in their relative ranks of life. At county race and regatta balls, horticultural meetings and assemblies for charitable and humane purposes, the Duchess sits beside the citizen��s wife and feels no descent from her proud and honoured place and confers by so
small a sacrifice a boon on her gratified companion.30
Flunkeyism and toadyism were the names given to the overly deferent behaviour to those above them of underlings who strove for position and advancement in this layered society. There was a jockeying for preferment in the everyday life in the colony that shows how far removed life in Hong Kong was from the ideals of the Victorian utopia, which envisaged a hierarchical society whose ordering was accepted by its members. An editorial headed ��Flunkeyism�� stated that this jockeying was:
inseparable from Colonial society; the smaller the community, the more
remarkable is the habit�K. The observer has a beautiful field for observation
in Hong Kong. There is this excuse for official Flunkeyism; it is too often essential to the prosperity of those who indulge in it. A deference to their superiors in office either promotes or retains them�K. Besides Flunkeyism has created an artificial rank which is dear to the official. It places him in a position to which he has no other claim; at Government House he takes precedence over those who are far above him in intrinsic rank.
Among the mercantile portion of the community and among those who care little for little-greatness there is less Flunkeyism�K. Unfortunately it is so often wedded to insolence that it provokes observation. It is remarked of real gentlemen that, while they despise toadyism, they are never insolent�K the smiles of colonial greatness can neither run them into insolence to their inferiors nor into unbecoming humility of demeanour towards their nominal superiors.
The distinctions which have been created at Government House �X the
attempt to establish a Court �X are too ridiculous to give serious offence�K.
Let him inspect the scale of precedence which is established at the Court of
Samuel the First, [Governor Sir George Bonham] and ask could Mr. So-
and-So feel angry because he was seated nearer the Aide de Camp than Mr.
Who-is-He.�K It is because merchants have no fixed rank, but the head of
a department in this Barrataria has; the merchant gives way although the
official, possibly, would be very glad to exchange his colonial appointment for a desk in the merchant��s office. It is because merchants have no fixed rank that
they frequently take such high rank among the genuine aristocracy. Theirs is the rank of character, of wealth, of integrity. In a free country like England scarcely a year passes that does not see a new title �X the formation of a new house. The house of a Peel or of an Ashburton is the result of successful commerce �X of commerce allied to great moral integrity and various qualities which, at the bar, in the army, or in the senate would ensure its possessor of an honourable distinction.31
This extract seems to suggest that a number of the officials in the civil service were not considered worthy of the place to which they aspired among the ranks of merchants. They lacked the necessary qualities that would put them on par with the merchant aristocracy in the eyes of Hong Kong society.
This ordering of the society of early Hong Kong extended into the realms of the Anglican Church where there existed a system of pew allocation in the newly built St. John��s Cathedral according to which seats were carefully allotted from front to back depending on status and wealth until well into the twentieth century. The church depended for its income on the subscriptions that were paid by worshippers for their seats which were allocated by a church seating committee:
The Church it appears regulates precedency in this little community. The Governor and Lieutenant Governor face the altar in the front row; behind
the first sit the Civil establishment according to their supposed rank �X then
a few merchants; behind them are ranged some military of the high degree
�X then a few more merchants and other persons. The trancepts [sic] and
wings, we presume, are so regulated by some canonical standard known only to the spiritually enlightened. It must be understood, however, that while the members of the government are provided with prominent seats without any reference to price (in the shape of a subscription) the other sitters are
accommodated according to the amount contributed. One firm (three or four
partners of which are Members of Parliament), has subscribed two or three hundred pounds to the building �X it ranks below heads of departments in the Colonial service; other firms and individuals are ��planted�� according to the sum that they could be prevailed upon to ��stump up ���K. Some absurd and funny enough stories are current of the jealous struggle for front seats and the rival claims to precedence; and if they were all related to boxes in the theatre we would possibly make room for them.32
The position of each person��s seat in church demonstrated clearly for all to see the wealth or standing of each member of the congregation. Everyone knew exactly who gave precedence to whom and who could with impunity look down on whom. The carefully chosen members of the Cathedral Seating Committee met once a year to sort out disputes and slot newcomers into an appropriate seat.33 The Chinese members of the Church of England took their place at the back or more likely attended native churches.
The Church of England contrasted sharply in this matter with the more democratic and cosmopolitan approach of the Roman Catholic Church where a lower-ranking congregation joined together in no particular order as for instance
at the consecration of the first Catholic church in 1843:
Here were men of every colour, the jet black negro, the deep brown Bengali, the light brown Madrassi, the tawny Chinese etc. robed in every variety of oriental costume. Two small knots of British, who with their fair complexions, high cheek bones, blue eyes and light hair, formed a strong contrast. Round the pillars stood or knelt groups of soldiers of the 55th Regiment from the wilds of Connemara and the mountains of Scotland; sepoys and native artillerymen from India mixed among Portuguese, Italians and other foreign seamen. Nor must the ladies be forgotten for in European costume there were seven or eight present.34
Further clues to the ordering of society in nineteenth-century Hong Kong can be found in the way people are addressed in the Cemetery, in the pages of the Blue Books and in the local newspapers. Those from the upper ranks of the merchant houses and the civil service, who were considered as belonging to the top tier of Hong Kong society, merited the appendage ��esquire��, and so were eligible, like
the landed gentry back in Britain, to be chosen as justices of the peace. Officers
in the army and Royal Navy, who considered themselves on par with, or perhaps even above, the merchants and civil servants by virtue of their ancestry back in England, relied on their background, regiment and rank to give them status. The regiments were clearly ranked in terms of prestige, those of the foot coming for instance above the Royal Artillery which ranked above the Royal Marines and, below all these, came the officers of the Indian Army. Officers or their parents had paid a sum of money for their ranks which accorded with the prestige of the chosen regiment. The Indian Army regiments like the Ceylon regiment were free and attracted for example the sons of impecunious clergymen.
Coming next in the social scale were those who had come from the non-commissioned officer ranks. They were addressed by the title ��Mister��. The warrant officers from the army and navy who ran the various military stores and successful self-made men, old China hands and auctioneers, were considered worthy of this title. Next down in the scales were the tradesmen and then the skilled workmen such as plumbers and carpenters and such who were nominated by Christian name plus surname. At the bottom of the pile were the less than respectable, the common soldiers and sailors, the police who were largely recruited from the ranks of the armed forces and the ex-merchant seamen and drifters who washed up on the shores of Hong Kong and were known as beachcombers. These unfortunates were usually addressed by surname only. In an account of the findings of the Supreme Court, for example, under the heading of ��Extortion��: ��Two European policemen, Patterson and Swimmer and a Chinaman also in the police force were arraigned on the above charge��.35
This ordering of society was echoed to a certain extent in the inscriptions engraved on the headstones in the Hong Kong Cemetery. Merchants and high- ranking civil servants had the letters esquire or esq. after their names. Examples include Alexander Scott [11A/6/5] and John Ambrose Mercer [11A/6/3], who both died in 1843, the same year that they were appointed justices of peace by Sir Henry Pottinger. The title ��Mister�� was more rarely used on the headstones and often signified a non-commissioned officer connection. Mr. W. Ball [10/5/1] was conductor of the Madras commissariat establishment and Mr. James F. Norman [9/2/6], commissariat assistant storekeeper. Mr. P.H. Spry [9/17/15] was paymaster to HMS Wolverine and Mr. Mansoon T. Sturgess [9/16/3] master of HMS Espiegle. Mr. James Brown [10/8/3] was a solicitor in William Gaskell��s office. Mr. William Sword Ash [9/16/11] was a young merchant��s clerk from Pennsylvania. The majority of the headstones however are more egalitarian in death, giving the person��s Christian name and surnames minus any title. The size and elaborateness of the memorial and the carving on it seldom give a clue to the
person��s status. Many of the imposing early chest tombs that one would expect to house merchants, civil servants or officers from the armed forces, in fact provided room for the bones of those from a much lower degree in the community. Chest tombs have been recorded that belong for instance to the chief gaoler, a Polish hotelier, an assistant at Lane Crawford, a sergeant in the army and an ex-soldier who ran a livery stable. It must have given great pleasure to the relatives of such people, many of whom came from the humblest backgrounds, to be
able to afford such ostentation in death.
Hong Kong could not have been an easy or relaxing place to live in. Perhaps two verses from a long anonymous poem entitled ��Ye Band Playeth�� and published in the Friend of China in August 1860 will give the authentic flavour of the time. It describes the parading in carriages and sedan chairs that took place each evening along Queen��s Road and around the parade ground near St. John��s Cathedral:
Tis five by the clock;
The Parade at Hong Kong Is dotted with groups, Of undoubted ��bon ton��.
�K
A stiff looking race,
Who seem out of place;
And whose pedigree one would have trouble to trace.
How it alters one��s grade,
When a million one��s made,
By spec in a mine or the opium trade.
If you��ve no objection, we��ll make quick dispatch Of this curious assemblage, this tropical batch, Of creatures who come from all parts of the globe.
What for? What to do? If their feelings we probe,
We should find that it is not for Glory or Fame,
But for want of the dollars that most of them came.

Of course we��ll except the fair dames, who no doubt,
Were tempted by love not by gold to ��come out��.
They know nothing of Malwa, of Patna and teas, But are simply contented to live at their ease: A hard thing to do in a place like Hong Kong,
Where few can remain at their ease very long.
And now in a word,
We��ll sum up the herd,
Of Chinese, Portuguese And respectable, staid and long coated Parsees.
And I��ll finish by saying to those in the trade
Steer clear of Hong Kong, you��ll not miss its Parade. There��s many a place in a more favoured land
Where, without being broiled, you may list to a band.
Rest contented with little: for gaining much wealth
Will not compensate you for losing your health.
So if you��d improve both your health and your race, Bolt as soon as you can from this feverish place.36
Few were happy to accept their assigned place, which was largely anyway determined by money, and there seems to have been a jockeying for status and advancement on the part of those determined to rise, and an equal determination on the part of those at the top to guard their privileges and keep their group select.

3.5. The military band playing on the parade ground. (Illustrated London News, 15 August 1857).

Section II

THE EARLY DENIZENS OF THE HONG KONG CEMETERY, 1845-1860
Chapter 4 Merchants, Clerks and Bankers
Who were the different groups of people who made up the cliques and coteries of this colony? How did they live and how did the groups differentiate themselves
from each other? These are the questions that will be addressed in the following chapters. Table 1 sums up the occupations, of the 332 civilian denizens of the Hong Kong Cemetery from this period whose occupations are known. Table 2 shows
how 157 military personnel found in the Cemetery during that period were divided
among the services.
Table 1 The Occupations of Civilians Who Died 1845�V60 Men Women Children Total
Merchants & Bankers 14 1 1 16
Civil Servants 19 7 9 35
Professionals 18 4 3 25
Merchant Navy 72 10 15 97
Tradesmen 14 3 5 22 Tavern Keepers 5 3 -8
Missionaries 3 6 7 16
Artisans 4 --4
Totals 149 34 40 223
Table 2 Military Personnel Buried in the Hong Kong Cemetery 1845�V60
Navy 38 �V �V 38
U.S. Navy 24 �V �V 24
Army 43 12 22 77
Commissariat 3 4 11 18
Totals 108 16 33 157
It has been impossible to place another thirty-three civilians in categories since nothing has been found out about who they were or what they did. The first table represents the best estimation that can be made. Some headstones are close to being illegible and guesswork has been involved. Some names, like John Smith, could stand for more than one person and it is difficult to assign them occupations with any exactitude. Some men changed their occupation, for example from merchant sailor to barman, during their time in Hong Kong and have been assigned to the occupation for which they were best known. Many professionals, especially doctors and lawyers, acted as civil servants and at the same time had private practices. The tables are more useful viewed as an indication of the strength according to the numbers of the various groups than as an exact scientific tool.
It must also be borne in mind that the death rate was exceptionally high among the lower rank soldiers during these years but no headstones exist for any soldier below the rank of sergeant, so the common soldiers and sailors who died in Hong Kong cannot be included. When the names of those listed on the various Royal Navy monuments to particular ships between 1845 and 1860 are added up, they total 288 mostly lower-ranking sailors. Between these years, when these sailors are added to the naval officers favoured with headstones, the number of sailors who were killed or died of disease in Eastern waters totals 326. This list includes the following monuments, the number after each name being the number of those from that ship who are commemorated as having lost their lives in the period 1845�V60: HMS Calcutta, 50; HMS Columbine, 20; HMS Scout, 13; HMS Serpent, 4; HMS Sans Pareil, 31; HMS Sampson, 20; HMS Sybille, 22; HMS Tribune, 24; HMS Winchester, 108; HMS Bittern, 11. This again is an underestimation of the true numbers, since at least three other monuments exist where the names of those killed have either disappeared from the monument due to weathering or been omitted altogether as in the inscriptions on the monuments commemorating the ships, HMS Nankin and Cleopatra. There were also a number of ships that buried their dead at sea and left no monuments. The number of civilian men buried during the period 1845 to 1860 only adds up to 145. From these figures, it can be seen that the number of deaths among the ordinary sailors, and probably soldiers too, must have been far higher than the number of civilians who died in this period.
Another indication of the strength of the various groups at that time is to look at who paid taxes and how much the various groups paid in property tax to the government. Two articles in the Friend of China, one written in 1851 and the other in 1852, shed some light on this subject. The first article divides the community as follows:
The Hong Kong civil community numbers some three hundred and fifty
individuals. Rather more than a third of them are trades people �X less than a third are merchants and their assistants �X a sixth of the whole are civil servants �X a ninth are ecclesiasticals and the remainder are of the class, ��professionals��. 1
This count would not include of course women and children or those groups not owning property who were not liable to taxation. The second article analyzed the gross rent paid on all houses and markets and includes the police rate paid to the
government which it said amounted in 1852 to 57,000 pounds sterling.2
Annual House Rental Inclusive of Police Rates
Paid by the Chinese 30,000 Pounds Paid by house owners in the European and foreign community 12,000
(including the Bank and the P. & O.) Paid by merchants and commission agents 8,000 Paid by the Hong Kong Club, hotels and taverns 2,000 Paid by English storekeeping premises 1,600 Paid by merchants with businesses along the coast or in Canton 1,000 Paid by merchants doing business with California and S. America 1,000 Paid for by missionaries 1,000 Paid by houses where the whaling ship business is transacted 500
TOTAL 57,100
As can be seen, a significantly large share of the annual rental was already being paid by the Chinese whose influence on governmental matters was still negligible. The above figures have been given as written in the articles without any attempt to
verify the information and are more usefully read as indications.


The Merchants
Starting at the top, the universally acknowledged, undoubted aristocracy in Hong Kong were the partners of the older and more successful merchant houses. First and foremost among them were the partners belonging to the houses of Jardine, Matheson & Co. and Dent & Co. The lifestyle of the merchant elite provided
the inspiration and touchstone for all those below them. While the merchants
never stinted themselves when it came to luxuries, they were equally open-handed when appealed to by those in want. Many widows and fatherless children had their passages home quietly paid by, for example, the Jardine partners without any hope of a return. If the merchants receive short shrift in this book, it is because so few of them were buried in the Cemetery that they do not really come within its scope, except as a yardstick for comparison when looking at the other groups. As Osmond Tiffaney commented early on: ��The young man has but one profession to choose, that of merchant; of lawyers, there are fortunately none, physicians are already thick as locusts and for ministers, he knows no-one would listen to him��. 3 It is therefore important to understand exactly what the rest of Hong Kong��s European population admired and aspired to.
The merchants buried in the Hong Kong Cemetery during the years
1845�V60 accounted for 9.5 percent of burials, but this figure is misleading if it
is taken to be proportional to their representation in the population. The more important merchants eluded death in the colony and were able to retire to spend their declining years in their estates back home. The only example of the death and burial of any member of Jardine, Matheson & Co. in the Cemetery is one nineteen-month-old baby. Robert Jardine Perceval [9/4/9] was the son of Alexander Perceval, a member of the Jardine family who arrived in Hong Kong as a clerk in 1850, becoming a partner in 1853. By 1862, after a stint in Canton and Shanghai, he headed the firm and in that year was made an unofficial member of the Legislative Council.4 He became the first president of the newly formed Chamber of Commerce. His little son, Robert, died in May 1852, and is buried in a very large chest tomb considering that he was such a small infant.
Out of the ten remaining listed merchants, which includes one wife of a merchant, to be buried in the Cemetery, seven were either foreigners, or from other treaty ports, or were visiting merchants. Henry Lehmann Esq. [9/12/5] from Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, was a member of the firm, Reiss and Co. He died aged twenty-eight in July, 1846. Samuel Rich [9/14/14] from Boston, Massachusetts and a partner of the firm, Rich & Co., was clearly a visitor. He died on the morning of 28 April 1846, while staying at the British Hotel. Henry William Rushton [9/12/4] from Liverpool died in July 1847 just three months after his arrival on the Braganza. James Crooke [9/16/13] was a commission agent from Canton and Charles Bateson [10/4/2], who worked for Holliday and Wise, had been travelling between Canton, Shanghai and Manila as a clerk
for the firm from 1846 to 1857, the year when he died, and had spent little time in
Hong Kong according to the records. The inscription on the chest tomb of Henry Davis [10/7/4] describes him as: ��for some years resident in Canton��. He had been
a clerk to Wetmore & Co., moving to Moul & Co. and was in Canton from 1847 to 1857, the year of his death from apoplexy. His address was listed in his probate file as late of No. 3, Minqua Hong, Canton and ��now residing at fifty-seven and a
half, Praya, Macau��. It is clear that these eight merchants, buried in the Cemetery, contributed little to the social life of Hong Kong. Mary Potter [9/18/21], the one
lady alluded to earlier, was the wife of a Shanghai merchant, Daniel Potter. With only one known exception, none of the members of that influential group whose
names would include Jardine, Dent, Gibb and Lyall are present in the Cemetery. They lived healthy lives in the peaceful, gardened luxury of Mid-Levels, well above the hurly-burly of Queen��s Road, from where they could overlook and influence the life of the colony and then retire home to Britain when threatened by illness or advancing age.
The one exception was William Forsyth Gray Esq. [9/18/20]. He had been in Canton since 1836 as a member of Dirom, Gray & Co. and moved to Hong Kong in 1843, where he lived until his death in January 1850. His
name was among the first batch of forty-three merchants chosen by Sir Henry
Pottinger to be justices of peace. He died from a fall when practising on the racecourse for the races which were scheduled for the next day. Quoting from his obituary in the paper:
The melancholy death of Mr. W. F. Grey [sic] has cast a gloom over society.
On Thursday afternoon his body was carried to its place of rest followed by a large number of the inhabitants, including the Governor and Lieutenant
Governor of the colony and many Naval and Military Officers�K. Before them
was the spot where two days before the deceased met the accident which deprived him of his life; and where at that very moment, if in life, he would have been participating in exhilarating and active amusements. Mr. Grey was connected with China for a long term of years and was endeared to the foreign community by his many virtues. Spirited, full of generous impulses, and a leader in all manly sports, he was practically a man of peace, ever ready to reconcile difficulties, he never fomented them. He has left a beautiful character to be cherished by his friends; we may add he leaves a blank in
society which will not easily be filled up.5

Particularly in early days, there was no a clear cut dividing line between merchants and tradesmen. Writing in 1856, the Royal Navy officer, H.T. Ellis, described this indefinite dividing line: ��Though some were called merchants and others storekeepers, such was the undercurrent of retail speculation that it was hard to define where one batch ended and the other began��. This was particularly the case because ��a little private pidgin possessed irresistible charms and the grandeur of their [the merchants] position was not sufficient to deter them from competing secretly with their fellow colonists who were openly in business and consequently beyond the pale of ��good society��.��6 Two notable characters who stood on the borderline between the two groups were John Burd [20/17/5] and Nicolay Duus [20/7/1]. They are examples of traders who came to be accepted into the elite society of the merchants after becoming consuls. Burd was made consul for Denmark in 1847 and in the next year, for the first time, was listed in the Hong Kong Almanac and Directory as a merchant with an address at 85 Queen��s Road, his Danish partner, Lange, being listed as absent in Bali. Burd was a redoubtable Scottish sea captain, who had sailed a Danish ship, Synden, to the Far East, arriving in 1838. The next year he was joined by his wife, who arrived on the John o��Gaunt from Liverpool. Burd was one of the first residents in Hong Kong when he took premises in 1842 at No. 1, Albany Godown, from where he advertised that he could store goods and merchandise of all descriptions in spacious and secure granite warehouses. He seems to have traded throughout the Far East
with special links to Bali. As early as 1843 he was advertising ��Bally�� rice and coffee,
Manila cordage, Singapore planks, anchors and chains, Bengal chutney and dhal, and Swedish coal tar and pitch. By 1846 he was letting out ��convenient tenements
at $15 a month��, and ��those two-roomed houses lately occupied by the Ghaut
Serang, well calculated for a sailor��s boarding house��. The Ghaut Serang was the organization which arranged lodging for Lascar sailors temporarily staying in Hong Kong and paid a yearly tax to the government for the privilege. Burd��s
business must have flourished, as by 1851 he was letting the whole or part of a large
commodious house previously used by the Freemasons as a Masonic hall. Burd died in February 1855 of a liver complaint, aged sixty-one years.
Nicolay Duus became consul for Norway and Sweden in 1857. He may have
made his way to Hong Kong via the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa. In the list of members of Zetland Lodge, he put his nationality as Dutch, though elsewhere he is listed as Danish.7 He was another very early resident in Hong Kong. In April 1843 he was advertising that he has been authorized ��by His Excellency, the Commander-in-Chief of Her Majesty��s Land Forces in China, to receive all packages addressed to the Officers or Messes of any regiment employed in the late war��. Duus bought and sold lorchas and traded in a wide variety of goods including patent toilets, Holland��s gin, Java coffee, copper sheathing, ships�� stores and a large variety of wines, sherry, champagne and port. In 1845, he was advertising that ��goods stored in dry brick insurable godowns will be sold on commission or forwarded to Macao or Canton in insurable colonial lorchas, commanded and partly manned by Europeans ��. From 1845 until 1848 he formed a partnership with the American trader, S.B. Rawle, as general and commission agents. Duus was first listed as a merchant in the Hong Kong Almanac and Directory
for 1848 and by 1855 he had risen into the ranks of special jurors in the jury list for that year. In 1850 he was living 4.2. Chest tomb of Nicolay Duus, merchant.

with his wife and several children in a bungalow overlooking the nullah.8 By 1860 two sons, John and Edward Hercule, were working for the well-known houses of Dent & Co. and Lindsay��s respectively. Nicolay Duus died in December 1861. His wife and son tried to continue the family business but soon sold out to their German ex-book-keeper, Alexander Lubeck.
As often happens, the elite status of the merchants provoked negative reactions from some of those below them in wealth and rank. A well-respected doctor complained in his letter home that he had little time for them:
They are unreasonable [in their complaints and grievances] and would
make you laugh amazingly at the amount of pride and self importance which many of them exhibit. Most of them have come out here very young and consequently with a very limited education �X money is all they toil for or hope for and when they get it their conceit is ridiculous�K. They really consider that the whole mercantile interest of Britain to be concentrated here and consequently take most extraordinary views of really unimportant occurrences for which in nine cases out of ten they have only their own pride and folly to blame.9

The Clerks in the Merchant Houses
From this period, two Scottish clerks belonging to Jardine, Matheson & Co. are buried in the Cemetery, William Walker MacIver [9/17/19] and John McCurrie [20/5/7]. MacIver is an example of how young and relatively uneducated the clerks could be when they began working for the merchant houses, giving some substance to the complaints of the contemporary press that merchants, who had begun their careers in Hong Kong as clerks, had had little education and were ignorant of the outside world. MacIver arrived in 1843 on the John o��Gaunt. 10
When he died aged twenty in 1849, he had already been six years in Hong Kong.
He could only have been barely thirteen when he left his school and native town of Stornoway on the island of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides in Scotland for the last time to make the journey to Liverpool and take ship for Hong Kong.
John McCurrie, who died in November 1851, aged thirty-four and lies in a chest tomb in a peaceful corner of the Cemetery shaded by jasmine trees, was a younger son of a chief from the Isle of Arran. He was listed in the 1850 Hong Kong Almanac and Directory as underwriter and general auctioneer for Jardine Matheson at East Point and had his own shroff, Atim.11 He was reported as auctioning goods, including port and tea, in October, only weeks before his death. During a fire in March 1851, the China Mail praised the good service of the fire engine from Jardine��s which was worked by ��Mr. Currie��s own Lascars��. This engine had three times the distance to travel, but arrived at Victoria before those of the military or the government. According to the obituary notice, McCurrie had been in charge of the Jardine warehouses at East Point for several years.
One young clerk from Philadelphia, William Sword Ash [9/16/11], the nephew of John D. Sword from Canton, was fifteen when he sailed for China in 1846 on Captain Drinker��s ship, Candace. After just over a year working and learning Chinese in Canton, in April 1848 he made the trip down the Pearl River to Hong Kong on the schooner, Paradox. The schooner capsized in a squall and poor young Ash was drowned with several others. His body was found on a nearby island a few weeks later and transported to Happy Valley for burial, a sad end for a promising young man of only seventeen years.12
The clerks in the merchant houses seem to have combined high living in their company messes, where the food and wine were of the very best quality, with intense boredom. Albert Smith, an impresario, arriving in 1858, recorded his impressions during his stay in a diary. His opinion of the clerks belonging to the
major firms in Hong Kong was not high:
The young men in the different houses have a sad mind-mouldering time
of it. Tea tasting considered as an occupation does not call for any great employment of the intellect and I never saw one of the young clerks with a book in his hand. They loaf about the balconies of their houses or lie in bamboo chairs, smoke a great deal, play billiards in the club where the click of the ball never ceases from earliest morning and glance vacantly at local papers.13
In another passage he deplores their lack of interest in anything that concerned the Chinese or their culture:
I was more than ever impressed with �K the most remarkable ignorance of every feature and phase of Chinese life peculiar to the ��Commercials�� here. The almighty dollar in its relation to tea, silk and opiums is the only study or source of thought with them. And what they can possibly do to get through the day beyond smoking and tea tasting is to me a matter of the most incomprehensibility.14
H.J. Lethbridge, in his introduction to Albert Smith��s book, suggested that Smith��s contempt for the ��commercials��, as he calls them, dated from his stay in Paris where he acquired his anti-bourgeoisie attitude. But enough writers and newspaper articles reflect the same view as Smith to make one feel it was based on reasonably good grounds.

The Bankers
Archibald Dunlop [9/8/14], who died in October 1851, is the only banker from the early period found in the Cemetery. Dunlop, who arrived in Hong Kong in 1845, had worked as an accountant for over thirty years with the Oriental Bank. He spent his last seven years in Shanghai where he was so highly esteemed as a Freemason that his lodge installed a stained glass window in the Shanghai Cathedral in his memory. He was one of the very few men that the Friend of China deemed to merit an obituary: ��His loss to the establishment, at this juncture, will doubtless be a severe one��. 15 The first bank to set up in Hong Kong in 1844 was the Bank of Western China, later known as the Oriental Bank. The bankers
in Hong Kong were accorded the privileges of the elite. In fact bankers continued to enjoy a status well above their fellow bank managers in England, who were much more likely to be classed as tradesmen. The position occupied by bankers was defined in the Friend of China when Charles Stuart left on promotion to become manager of the Bombay Branch:
In Mr. Stuart��s successor �K we shall hope to find a gentleman only about as well qualified as he was to take station in our Colonial Society; �X a station
midway as it were between the Members of the Government service and the Mercantile and (if it may be so expressed) the rising branch of the community of Victoria.16

The Merchants�� Outlook and Their Wider Reputation
The merchants by virtue of their wealth and their long experience in China were in no doubt about their rightful place at the top of the social pyramid. Alexander Matheson, in Macau, writing to James Matheson in Hong Kong in 1844 remarked:
I am disgusted beyond measure just now at finding from Cleverly [surveyor general] that Davis [Sir John Davis, Governor] has named all the streets in
Victoria after his personal friends �X many of whom have never been in China
�X never perhaps out of England �X and not even a lane has been called after a merchant, tho�� the merchants have been the makers of the place. Just fancy ��Shelley Street�� named after a swindler etc. etc. How much more natural, Jardine Street, Dent Street, Gibb Street, etc., would have sounded. No! the
devil a dollar shall I lay out in Hong Kong except for the sake of a profitable
investment.17
But they never considered Hong Kong as their home. The taipans, like the Indian nabobs before them, were consolidating their wealth with a view to strengthening their power base back in Britain, underpinning it by acquiring large landed estates which would allow them to gain representation in Parliament. They knew that a growing number in Britain disliked the trade in opium that was the basis for their wealth. Already, by 1844, according to the Friend of China: ��If we do not err, there are fifteen or more members of the House of Commons deeply interested in the welfare of Hong Kong and some of them are closely connected in business with firms from this colony��. 18 Furthermore, their interests were closely tied to Canton, where historically they felt they belonged, and much of their business was transacted there or in the other treaty ports. Hong Kong was seen as a bolt-hole if relationships with the Chinese deteriorated. For example, in January and
February 1847 a number of the main merchants with houses and establishments
in Hong Kong were in Canton setting up the Canton British Chamber of Commerce. The committee members included David Jardine, John Dent, Joseph Edger, Richard Gilman and John Wise.19 This meant that the merchants took less interest in matters pertaining to Hong Kong��s local affairs. They do not seem to have been prepared to put much time or effort into solving the problems of the
colony or in standing up to the governor, except where their interests were heavily at stake. It is worth quoting from the Friend of China in October 1848, where the editor tried to set out some of the reasons for the lack of ��public spirit�� among the merchants. The editor set out his objections and feelings as follows:
It is true in Hong Kong it has been common for the executive to treat such
matters with great indifference acting as if they held the delegated power of
absolute despotism and not as representatives of a constitutional monarchy. Equally true is it that the inhabitants have bowed to the yoke and that, from lack of public spirit of one or two influential men to take a lead in public matters, the British community has truckled to encroachments which would have been resisted by the free populace of any penal settlement�K. In Hong
Kong the influence of the resident merchants is paramount. Without their
approbation and active concurrence, a demonstration of feeling by petitioners or otherwise would be unavailing. The apathy exhibited by this class may be
difficult to explain. Some no doubt are engrossed in their mercantile pursuits
and have neither the time nor the inclination to give attention to public matters. Others have lived so long in China and came so young that they forget there are public duties incumbent upon every member of society in a free country.20
When, in 1850, the same paper suggested the formation of a town council for
Hong Kong on the lines of that being established in Shanghai, the editor again bemoaned the apathy of the merchants in matters not connected to trade:
The members of the large firms naturally expect to hold most of the prominent public positions, which confer honour, but they are not always
willing to give to their offices that share of attention which it demands.21
When the merchants felt their interests were threatened, they could combine with devastating power and efficiency, as they did when, led by John Dent, they defeated
Sir John Bowring��s ��darling scheme�� to create a promenade stretching from Central to Causeway Bay to be called ��Bowring Praya��. In Sir John��s own words:
One of the peculiar difficulties against which the Government has to struggle
is the enormous influence wielded by the great and opulent commercial houses against whose power and in opposition to whose personal views it is hard to contend.22
If a municipal council had been established at this early stage, it would have provided a more powerful platform for local views and might have curbed the powers of the governor and his civil service.
For the most part, the merchants came East to make money and to stay healthy for long enough to allow them to spend it at leisure in their retirement back home:
Men who have landed with scarce a dollar, by enterprise, industry and
patience have in a few years been enabled to carry home sufficient to enable
them to live in luxury all the rest of their lives, to build palaces and astonish their old friends and to take with them vast camphor trunks and cargoes of curiosities and copper-coloured complexions.23
There seems to have been a rather aggressive element among the traders of the Far East. The China Mail, which targeted the mercantile community in Hong Kong for its readership, would seldom criticize them. However, the editor had this to say about the merchants in Malaya and their dealings with the Malay Sultans:
We must next contrast these [the Sultans] with a burly independent
trader, eager after gain, probably not over-scrupulous about the means of obtaining it, ignorant of native character and heedless of native customs and etiquette�K. The European is loud, contemptuous and abusive; the Malay cool and vindictive.24
The description of the European traders given here could perhaps have also applied to a few of the European merchants in China. In April 1846, Charles Spencer Compton, a mercantile assistant with Jardine, Matheson & Co. and ��a hectoring sort of man, noted for his repeated acts of violence towards the Chinese��, knocked over the fruit stall in Canton belonging to a hawker he considered too noisy and, three days later, attacked a man, dragging him into the foreign quarter and beating him. He provoked a riot but, when summoned to the Consular Court and fined, the merchant community in Canton and Hong Kong rallied behind him. Sir John Davis, though appealing to London, was forced to back down.25
Towards the end of the period, John Fryer, in his first letter home after his arrival
in 1861 as principal of St. Paul��s College, painted a less than edifying picture of the wealthier British there.
The English are generally rich, proud, worldly-minded, money-making aristocratical people. Having come here to make money it is all they seem to think about, except their own pleasure, which is not always of a sinless description, as the cemeteries testify�K. Dress is carried to great excess. About six o��clock when the sun sets all the year round, they come out, dressed up regardless of expense, and parade the streets and public walks in their sedan chairs�K. At church there is a display of aristocracy and fashion.26
It is not really surprising that such men were rather reluctant to give time and thought to serious matters of constitutional directions and government policy pertaining to the place in which they considered themselves to be only temporarily domiciled.

How the Merchant Classes in Hong Kong Lived
On the other hand, the open-door hospitality and generosity of the merchants never ceased to impress visitors to Hong Kong especially when they were met with such a high standard of living:
I doubt if there be another class of men, who live in more luxurious state than the foreign residents in China. Their households are conducted on a princely scale, and whatever can be had in the way of furniture, upholstery or domestic appliance of any sort to promote ease and comfort is sure to be found in their dwelling. Their tables are supplied with the choicest viands the
country can afford, and a retinue of well-drilled servants, whose only business
it is to study their habits, anticipate all their wants�K. The expense of keeping
up such an establishment is, of course, very large; but so also are the profits
of a flourishing commercial house, and this easeful and luxurious mode of life, while it tends to preserve health in a climate hostile to the Northern race, furnishes a solace, sensuous though it may be, for the want of those more
enlightened recreations which a civilised land affords.
Bayard Taylor gave the following explanation for the luxury and lordly hospitality,
which he had first encountered in India:
The custom originated long ago in the isolation to which the foreign merchant was condemned, and the infrequency of visitors from the distant land, which he had temporarily renounced. Then all the houses were open to the guest and the luxury which had been created to soften their gilded exile was placed at his command.27
The merchants in Hong Kong seem to have copied the lifestyle and standards they had grown accustomed to in the British factory at Canton. The East India Company had catered as far as was possible to every comfort that the company servants could want in order to compensate them for living in the very restricted
grounds of the factory area. Alfred Weatherhead, deputy registrar general from 1857 to 1859, in a talk on Hong Kong given after his retirement from the government
there, said that going East was like a kind of bargain ��in which you barter away a certain portion of your existence for the sake of passing the remainder in greater pecuniary comfort �X health for gold��. 28 The merchants could increase the odds of remaining healthy by picking the kind of lifestyle that would ��promote cheerfulness
of temper��. Weatherhead summed up this lifestyle as follows:
We must lead a moderately bon vivant sort of life with every appliance of
comfort and luxury, with rare and choice wines, with ices and punkahs with carriages and traps with houses furnished in every style of elegance, with servants who understand our wants and attend to them�K. Luxury, kept on all sides within the limit of excess is the secret of health in the East.
That the upper class way was successful in evading the clutches of death in the colony is shown by the remarkable absence of the better known merchants and civil servants from the grassy terraces of the Hong Kong Cemetery.
Even as early as 1845, the living space in Hong Kong was being divided out according to wealth, with the heads of the merchant houses forsaking their company houses along the shoreline to move up the hill. The company houses continued to accommodate the young unmarried clerks in communal messes.
These houses included in their grounds the offices and warehouses of the company
and to live there felt too much like living over the shop, especially if the merchant
had a wife and children. The bungalows, built by the elite of the merchants and civil servants on the slopes of the Peak, overlooked the harbour . The tradesmen and lower-ranked civil servants continued to cluster along Queen��s Road, where the rents were cheaper.
The expensive, detached bungalows of the grander merchants were surrounded by lush private gardens. Insulated
4.3. The Pagoda House, home of the Dent merchants, by Dr. Edward Cree. from the sun by deep


verandahs, these houses would contain sizeable drawing rooms, dining rooms,
bedrooms, and bathrooms with water closets that flushed, even if they were not
connected to main drains.29 There would be living quarters for the servants and stabling for horses and carriages. Their entrances were guarded by gate keepers and they were given suburban names like Glenealy, the house of Archibald Campbell, a partner in Dent & Co., or Rosehill, the house of Robert Dundas Cay, the registrar general, or Greenbanks owned by C.J. Braine, another partner in Dent��s. The garden at Greenbanks, near the centre of Victoria, was written up in the Gardener��s Chronicle of March 1849. It had been stocked in 1845 with rare plants transplanted from the celebrated garden of Mr. Beale, an ardent collector of Chinese plants in Macau. A path through a winding shrubbery led to an orchid walk where the orchids were kept cool by shady bamboos. Above this were banks
of myrtles, gardenias and oleanders. A large collection of flowers in pots, prettily
painted in Chinese style were arranged on each side of the broad terrace in front of the mansion. To one side a flower garden was arranged in the English style around a lawn with a ��cool house�� for shading delicate plants from the sun and ��dashing rains��.30
The furniture that graced living rooms would be in the latest fashion.
Brussels carpets covered the floors. ��Reclining chairs in crimson purple morocco
which adjusted themselves to the posture of the sitter�� and ��unrivalled couches,
sofas and ottomans with horsehair cushions wooing balmy sleep�� to the ��fortunate possessors�� could be bought
from William Franklyn��s
warehouse. Besides these, he stocked mahogany dining tables and sofa or card tables
in rosewood. A bookcase filled
with learned leather-backed tomes such as the History of British India in five volumes, or
a panoramic history of the English kings and queens would lend an air of culture to the rooms and books such as Watt��s Divine and Moral Songs and ��elegant church services and prayer books�� showed their piety. The pictures on the walls
might include views such as Windsor Castle or Scottish highland cattle. The rooms would be lit by ornate chandeliers of richly cut opal glass filled with candles.
Cupboards, locked with Chubb��s celebrated patent detector locks to safeguard
the contents from the Chinese servants, were filled with ornate dinner services and
sets of cut glass for drinking white wine, claret, champagne or liqueurs. Jewellery and gold would be kept in treasuries with granite walls or in sturdy tin boxes
nailed to the floor to make it difficult for thieves to cart them away.
These wealthy men liked to dress according to their status in the latest fashion which was often unsuitable for the Hong Kong climate. Gentlemen
donned ��a close fitting starched shirt, a silk tie, the double collar of a waistcoat and the double collar of a coat or of a tight fitting white jacket��, as well as tight-fitting
breeches. There was a tendency in society:
to lay down strict rules [on matters of dress] in defiance of the requirements
of comfort and health, merely to suit those who have nothing else than their strict observance of little punctilios to raise them above �K the level of the mass of their fellow-men.31
Kid gloves and fancy velvets for waistcoats together with satin cravats and stocks
could be bought from Monsieur Dupuig at his establishment on Wellington
Street. Ladies could order dresses with crinolines of the latest fashion made up
from the finest cashmere, silk or muslin. Caps worked with lace and ribbons could

be ordered for the house, and for outdoors fashionable bonnets and Royal Maud shawls were imported from England. In July 1852, to keep up with the dictates of fashion, Mrs. Marsh, the milliner, was even advertising that she had received from the ship Malta, ��two splendid Bloomer Costumes complete with hats and feathers��. To mask the smells of Hong Kong there was an assortment of Her Majesty��s toilet perfumes to choose from and for the faint-hearted, ��inexhaustible smelling salts and aromatic vinegars��.
Much of the food eaten by the upper classes of Hong Kong was imported from England and the advertisements show that living on the edge of China had very little effect on the diet of the colonists. They imported York hams and kegs of butter, ox tongues and cheddar cheeses, pickles, and tart fruits as well as jams and jellies. In 1854, MacEwen & Co. was advertising real Scotch oatmeal, tapioca and asparagus in tins. There seems no end to the number of importers
advertising every possible kind of drink from fine aerated lemonade from the house
of Schweppes & Co. to Glenlivet whisky.32 The number of servants employed to look after a household seems wildly
extravagant by modern standards. According to Alfred Weatherhead, the very
least needed included a cook and his assistant, two house coolies to clean the house, two young boys to work the punkah, a boy to run errands, a gardener to look after the grounds, security men to man the gate and two chair coolies to each chair so the number of chair coolies would depend on the size of the family.
This adds up to at least thirteen staff. Dr. B.L. Ball, the American dental surgeon
visiting Hong Kong who stayed in the merchant establishment of Rawle, Duus & Co., had this to say on the subject of servants:
I determined at first that I should not have any servant. I noticed yesterday
at breakfast that there was one behind every chair but mine; some fourteen in all�K. I thought it needless for each one to have a servant to wait on him and preferred to wait on myself rather than ask anything of such repulsive looking characters. However I soon found that it was not easy without them. I found my boots went without blacking, that my mosquito net was full of
mosquitoes, that everyone but myself had a cup of coffee in the morning, that
no water was taken to my chamber, that there was no-one to bring me a cup of tea in the evening, that I needed a boy to get me a tailor, a washer-man, a boatman etc.
He bowed to pressure and hired a ��boy��, remarking in his diary three days later:
A servant here is considered as indispensable as a hat or coat�K. He is at your beck and call at all hours. If you dine with a friend your boy goes to wait on you and there he takes his place behind your chair at table.33
For this kind of service in 1848 a boy would be paid $6 or $7 a month.
Households were so arranged that the merchant and his wife played little part in their regulation:
All the management of the household is in the hands of native servants. The ��comprador�� furnishes the necessary supplies �X for which he generally obtains a fat commission �X the butler regulates the internal economy.34
The comprador did more than manage the household and procure the servants. He acted as banker to the family and company: ��Strangers deposit with him their specie and check on him when they want money��. 35 He also was responsible for paying all the household or company bills. A chit system operated whereby the wealthy never carried money. The currencies of Hong Kong were very complicated. Those recognized as legal tender included Mexican dollars, Austrian silver eagles, rupees, pounds sterling and Chinese cash. The Austrian and Mexican dollars had often been cut and needed to be weighed. It took

4.5. A group of compradors employed by European hongs, 1860s. (Courtesy of Wattis Fine Arts.)
training for a shroff to detect counterfeits. The Chinese cash coins for very small
transactions were threaded through the central hole onto heavy, unwieldy strings for transport. The comprador system led to clear distinction between those who could afford a comprador and those who could not. Those with compradors would sign a chit in a lordly manner for any goods or services they required. The chit would be presented for payment to the comprador who would take his normal cut from the amount paid out. The less wealthy carried money and did their own bargaining, bringing them more into contact with the Chinese providers and with the numerous ways in which they might be cheated. A visitor described how quickly the credit-worthiness of a newcomer hiring a sedan chair would be generally known:
The bearers make it their constant study to find out the habits of the European residents, so that a new-comer only requires to be about a week in the place, and it is ten chances to one, should he be dining out, and hail the first chair to take him home, the chair-coolies, without a word spoken on either side, will land him in front of his domicile. Nay, they have learned more; they already know something of his personal character, and whether
they ought to trust him and accept the paper he offers.36
For their leisure, the men turned to sport and the Hong Kong Club. This was the age of the horse in Hong Kong. Riding was the main form of exercise and a daily evening parade along Queen��s Road was enjoyed by all those who could afford to keep horses and carriages. Horse-drawn conveyances of many kinds including barouches and phaetons were advertised for sale. The government paid an allowance per annum of twenty-five pounds sterling to those civil servants it considered needed a horse to carry out their official duties. This was at a time when a Chinese police constable employed by the government was paid twelve pounds ten shillings a year. 37 In 1852, a visiting Russian civil servant describes the club and the promenade:
At six o��clock in the evening the whole population pours out of doors
along the seashore, along the avenue �X Officers on foot and on horseback,
businessmen, ladies make their appearance. On the meadow near the Governor��s house music is playing.
The Hong Kong Club, a stately building opposite the courthouse, kept its membership select:
The Club is a type of superlative palace: its founders spared no expense to impart �K the same opulence that is customary in London Clubs. A number
of big halls with windows facing the bay, a verandah, fire places, windows set
in marble; bronze and crystal everywhere, excellent mirrors, elegant furniture, everything brought from England�K. Then you��ll order dinner and pay three times what it costs right nearby in the tavern.38
Participation in horseracing and cricket, both extremely popular, was effectively commandeered by the upper classes and organized by clubs and committees. The sums needed to provide for a family in the manner considered necessary to demonstrate to Hong Kong��s society that the provider was a member of the elite precluded many from attempting to join the circle. Those civil servants who aspired to join the upper echelons often found their means inadequate and some seem to have supplemented their salaries in ways which did not bear too close scrutiny.
Chapter 5 Servants of the Crown
The civil service in this period (1845�V60) has been divided into four rather arbitrary categories which range through the ranks of local society from the governor at the head of the pyramid down to the police constables and gaolers at the bottom,
who were so poor that they could not afford a gravestone. The top group includes
heads of departments and their deputies and the consular service who considered themselves to be part of Hong Kong��s elite. The second group consists of the clerks who worked under the heads of departments. The third group is made up of
the ushers, bailiffs, police inspectors and head keepers at the goal and their family
members. These men seem to have come mainly from lower ranks of the army and were often illiterate, but were considered respectable members of the community.
They were well enough off to find wives for themselves, unlike the fourth and last
group which includes police constables and turnkeys. Their status was so low
and their pay so bad that they only stayed on until they could find a better job, and often made up for the lack of pay by flagrantly corrupt practices.

The Top Civil Servants
Civil servants of this class were given passages back to Britain when sick or retiring so relatively few died in Hong Kong. Fifteen civil servants, or members of their families, who can be said to have come from the top group, are to be found in the Hong Kong Cemetery. They consist of six civil servants, one member of the
consular staff, three wives and six children of civil servants. Those buried in the
Hong Kong Cemetery from the early period come from a variety of backgrounds. John Pope, Isabella Dyce Cay and Julia Hulme represent the more orthodox backgrounds. The rest include one German missionary, one Portuguese of mixed blood from Goa (buried in the Roman Catholic Cemetery), one Italian and one soldier��s son from the island of St. Helena whose career as a government servant will be examined in due course.
Julia Hulme [11A/13/1], the daughter of Chief Justice John Walter Hulme,
died of fever in 1845 just five months after their arrival. She and her father were members of the shipload of civil servants who accompanied the governor-to-be, Sir John Davis. Julia probably witnessed the quarrels between Sir John Davis and her father, which perhaps accounted for the Hulme family being left behind at Bombay on the pretext that there was no room for them on the ship. They arrived in Hong Kong one month after the governor. The later quarrels over the position of the judiciary, as opposed to the legislature, in the colony may have been made worse by personal dislike and bitterness engendered on that voyage to Bombay. Julia was spared by her death from ever knowing how close her father came to disgrace when
he was suspended from office. In November 1847, after the suspension of Chief
Justice Hulme on grounds of habitual drunkenness: ��The whole British community
(apart from the officials) left their [calling] cards at the Chief Justice��s residence��
and a ��sympathizing address�� was signed by 116 residents.1 Those 116 represented almost all the respectable citizens in Hong Kong, including tradesmen. The community also presented the chief justice with a gold snuff box and saw him
off on board ship with a champagne breakfast. When in the enquiry, Hulme was
vindicated, the Friend of China commented:
The eye of envy, hatred and malice followed him into the privacy of domestic life. At his own hospitable table or that of his friends, the spies of the worthless persecutor were near at hand to note every action and every word, which with ample embellishments were duly reported and ultimately embodied in a private despatch to the Foreign Secretary. No doubt the clique were under the impression that their poison had been administered cunningly �X that the knife had been driven home in an artistic manner. But the wicked are not always successful; their secret schemes are brought to light and they are covered with shame.2
This scandal, in which Sir John Davis was backed by Major Caine and other civil servants, deepened the rift that was opening up between the government and the other sections of the community, isolating the civil service.
Thomas Scales [11A/13/2], a little-known lawyer, was appointed locally as postmaster general. His appointment is an example of weaknesses that arose from the difficulty of finding suitably qualified and able local candidates to fill vacancies from the limited pool of talent in Hong Kong at that time. He was so
vilified and hounded by the press for the inefficiency of his office that in 1845 he
committed suicide. His final undoing reads like a farce. A box containing dispatches from the governor was sent by the colonial secretary to Scales with orders for a receipt. The postmaster refused to receive the box and, when it was presented a second time, threatened to cane the coolie who had brought back the box. A sergeant��s guard was then sent with orders to present the box again at the window and, if it was again refused, to break open the doors and extract a receipt. After another refusal:
No doubt delighted with his
commission the gallant sergeant
stormed and carried the Post Office
capturing the Post Master General himself. Poor Scales discovered when the Irish Sergeant��s hand was on his thorax and ��Sign the receipt or come to Government House, you blackguard!�� thundered in his ear that he was a very small man indeed.3
In this fashion the receipt was signed. On 24 July 1845, Scales was suspended from
office. He committed suicide one week later. Besides highlighting the sensitivity of the position of postmaster general at a time when every man wanted to be first to
receive his mail, this incident also illustrates the use of the soldiers on government business in the early years of the colony.
John Pope Esq. [9/16/14] and the Scottish registrar general, Robert Dundas Cay, were both chosen for their posts by the governor, Sir John Davis, before he left England, and both men arrived in the colony in 1844 on the same boat as the governor. Robert Cay buried his wife, Isabella Dyce Cay [40/3/1] and one infant son also called Dundas, in the centre of the largest plot for an individual grave in the entire cemetery. John Pope filled the post of civil engineer and clerk of works in the surveyor general��s office. He was the nephew of Sir William Cubitt, the eminent civil engineer. To a large extent, it is to him we owe the designs for the cathedral and the Government House. Fever carried him off in December 1847, in his twenty-seventh year.


116 Forgotten Souls
The problem of finding local talent to fill vacancies led to the appointment of an unusual assortment of people into government service. Karl Gutzlaff [13/8/4] was a German missionary who had been secretary and interpreter to Sir Henry Pottinger and had been put in charge of the administration of justice on the island of Chusan, which was occupied by the British during the First Opium
War. He later became registrar general in
the Hong Kong government. In his own estimation, Gutzlaff was a missionary
first and foremost, and only a civil servant
so that he could earn the funds he needed
to carry out his missionary designs. He will therefore be discussed later among
the missionaries.
The clerk of the councils and chief clerk of the colonial secretary��s office,
Leonardo d��Almada e Castro, was a Portuguese from Goa. This efficient and
loyal civil servant entered the service of the Crown as early as 1836 and had ��a long and honourable career of more than thirty-eight years in the Public Service of this Colony��. 4 Although the government found his service of great value, Castro encountered considerable prejudice from the British community. A letter to the
editor in 1847 asked why ��this Portuguese family�� should be allowed to ��fatten on
English gold��. The writer complained that, being a Roman Catholic, he might at any time receive absolution for breaking his oath, and that, as an alien ��by nation
and position [he] is unfit for the important and confidential office to which he
has just been appointed. And furthermore, he neither speaks nor writes English correctly��. 5 The editor of the Friend of China was in agreement with the letter
writer. Castro died in January 1875 aged sixty and is buried in St. Michael��s
Roman Catholic Cemetery.
Eliza Lena [9/1/9], who died in October 1848, was the wife of an Italian member of the government, Alexander Lena, who had spent many years in the British merchant navy. He had served in Charles Elliot��s expedition and won a commendation from the commodore. He joined the government in 1842, as
assistant to the harbour master, Lieutenant William Pedder R.N., and in May
1846 he was appointed to command two gun boats against the pirates. The editor of the Friend of China
commented: ��With much experience
of the navigation among the islands, he has a perfect knowledge of the native character and habits and will be less liable to be deceived by appearances than a stranger��. 6 He was promoted to assistant harbour
master with duties in Whampoa in 1847 but retired due to ill health in 1849. A letter to the Friend of China, signed by twenty-one captains of
merchant ships at Whampoa, praised
the way he had carried out duties ��of a most troublesome and irksome nature��. He was thanked by the sea captains for his judicious treatment of their crews and his ability to preserve peace and quietness among the large mass of shipping under his control.7
The only other headstone to family members of a high-ranking civil servant belongs to two of Charles Batten Hillier��s children, Ann Eliza Hillier [9/8/18] (d. 1847) and Hugh Charles Hillier (d. 1856). Charles Hillier, who had arrived in Hong Kong as second mate on a cargo ship, was befriended by Major Caine and given the post of assistant magistrate in 1843. He served in the administration for thirteen years, during which time he married the daughter of the famous missionary, Walter Medhurst, a member of the team who had translated the Bible into Chinese. Hillier proved his worth in the battle against crime though, like Major Caine, he was hampered by his lack of any kind of training in law. Never classed among the corrupt element, Hillier was highly praised in his farewell address:
An independent, painstaking and conscientious official is so great a rarity
that the departure of such a one from a limited community like Hong Kong is severely felt. Mr. Hillier whose uprightness and integrity as Chinese Magistrate was so great that both natives and foreigners reposed

almost unlimited confidence, the Chinese especially have lost a warm and steadfast friend.8
He was honoured on his departure by the Chinese, who formed a long procession to escort him and his wife to the harbour. Men carried two splendid sedan chairs, such as were used in religious processions for the gods, one chair containing a basin of water and the other a looking glass implying that his character was as pure as water and as unstained as glass. The procession wound its way down to the harbour, on their way ��notifying the Chinese population of their irreparable loss��. Hillier left to become consul in Thailand. Sadly, in October 1856 a few months after being appointed, he died of dysentery on board the U.S. ship, Don Quixote. Mrs. Hillier was left with less than one thousand pounds sterling on which to support herself and her four young sons, demonstrating to the civil and consular service in the Far East that integrity did not provide the wherewithal to look after the needs of those left behind.
The problem of finding local talent to fill posts needing specialist skills in early years led to a number of soldiers being co-opted to act in civilian posts. One such was Captain William Cowper [20/17/3] of the Royal Engineers who, according to the inscription on his chest tomb, ��was killed while on active service
before Canton�� in December 1856, at the beginning of the Second Opium War.
In his dispatch Admiral Michael Seymour praised Cowper as a gallant and capable soldier of great assistance in identifying and remedying the weak spots in the British position. Cowper had acted during the absence of the surveyor general, Charles St. George Cleverly, on sick leave in Britain as deputy surveyor for the government. He wrote the report on the Bowring Praya fiasco of 1855, on which occasion the merchant elite had blocked the governor��s attempt to take back waterfront property in order to build a boulevard facing the sea along
the entire length of the harbour from Western to Causeway Bay. The Friend of China in its obituary talked of ��the sadly undeserved unpopularity he had earned by implementing the necessary but unpopular policies of the Sanitary Ordinance��. It quotes him as saying: ��The community appears to think I had a pleasure of enforcing its provisions, but what have I had to do with the matter more than carrying out the orders of others?��9


Daniel Richard Caldwell
Daniel Richard Caldwell [19/1/1] is a fascinating, enigmatic, and ultimately
admirable character about whom it is extremely difficult to know if one is writing a fair account. Was he coloured or white? Was he a corrupt swashbuckler, or an
able man much maligned by his enemies and competitors in the government? Although Caldwell died well outside the time-frame of this chapter and
cannot be counted in its statistics, he was very much part of the society of this
period. No account of the period can be given without his inclusion in it. Caldwell
was present in Hong Kong
from its very inception, made
it his home and died there. He
highlights the difficulties and
pressures that a Hong Kong
civil servant faced in the early
years. Caldwell shows how an
adventurer in Hong Kong could
rise through the ranks but, at the
same time, become embroiled in
a web of corruption. His story
is unique in that he managed to
rise above the accusations and
animosities that surrounded him
and overcome the entanglement
in which he became so deeply
enmeshed, to die wealthy and
respected by all classes of society,
but especially by the Chinese.
The account of the life of this man
shows how low pay and a small
regard for the personal needs of

the servants of the Crown affected those in the civil service in China. It will, it is
hoped, deepen the reader��s understanding of the kind of society he lived in. The facts acknowledged by himself as true are that he was born in St. Helena
and moved to Singapore when five or six years old. It is alleged that his father was
a common soldier, perhaps in St. Helena as part of the guard sent to ensure that Napoleon could not escape his island exile. G.B. Endacott, in his Biographical Sketch-book of Early Hong Kong, classified him as ��a man of mixed blood��, but
John Wright, who was a good friend and godfather to one of his sons, described
him in his diary as ��slim but well built with peculiar largish blue eyes which the natives cannot at all understand��. The blue eyes would seem to make it unlikely
that he was Eurasian. Wright went on to say:
He is a most amusing, good-tempered person, sings a good song, tells capital yarns maintaining at the same time a most unassuming, gentlemanly bearing. His common name among the Celestials is ��Jam Quie�� which literally means, ��Conjuring Devil��.
According again to Wright, Caldwell enlivened one dinner party he attended
with ��some very clever juggling performance��.10 From this diary and other sources, Caldwell comes across as a very likeable, hospitable man who was exceptionally knowledgeable about many aspects of life in Hong Kong. He enjoyed entertaining friends and visitors to Hong Kong to boat trips or dinners enlivened by dancing, bagatelle or games of forfeits. Albert Smith, the impresario, on his visit to Hong Kong recorded in his diary:
At six thirty to dine with Mr. Caldwell passing one of the most agreeable evenings with his family that I had spent at Hong Kong. Mrs. Caldwell is Chinese and the little children speak in the language. At ten I went out with him, armed for a prowl about the low quarters and saw a wonderful deal.11
Daniel Caldwell was the head of a large family. Those buried in the Cemetery include his wife, Mary Ayow [23/4/1], his third son, Richard Henry [10/7/1] who died in July 1858 aged two, one daughter and his brother-in-law, Charles Barton [9/9/8], husband of his sister Sarah, who is described as of Mildenhall, Suffolk and
late of Singapore. Barton may have been a ship builder or a chandler in Singapore and was perhaps the same Charles Barton who owned a tavern in Penang.12 Their
little daughter, Euphemia, is buried in the Protestant Cemetery at Macau. When his brother, Henry, was forced to flee prosecution for fraud in Singapore, Daniel
helped his family settle in Hong Kong using his influence to help his brother become a solicitor. Later Caldwell assisted this same brother to make a sudden exit from Hong Kong to Macau to escape his creditors. Daniel Caldwell seems
to have been a committed Christian and devoted father. He and John Wright
were confirmed together in August 1851, by Bishop George Smith at St. John��s Cathedral and soon after, he married his Chinese ��protected girl��, Mary Ayow, in church. She had been his wife according to Chinese marriage rites for the previous
13
seven years.
Caldwell admitted to a wild youth misspent in Singapore until he was thrown out by his family in 1834 and fled to China. There he commanded an opium cutter owned by Captain Innes and manned by Chinese, which smuggled opium in the Pearl River delta. He was well paid, spending freely on women and high living. Illness eventually drove Caldwell back to Singapore, where he joined the commissariat department of the British Expeditionary Force. During Charles Elliot��s expedition to Chusan in the First Opium War, he came to the notice of Major Caine on account of his extraordinary language abilities. He could speak good colloquial Malay, Portuguese, Hindustani and Cantonese. When Major Caine became chief magistrate in Hong Kong, he recommended that Caldwell be retained as interpreter to the police court. In 1844 on the arrival of Chief Justice Hulme, Caldwell became interpreter to the Supreme Court as well, adding $400 to his salary to give him a total of $712 a year. This newfound wealth made it possible for him to take Mary Ayow as a ��protected�� Chinese girl and begin building a large family house.
In 1847, noticing the double pay, the authorities in England cut Caldwell back to one salary. This unexpected loss of income at a time when he had taken on large commitments pitched him into bankruptcy and the debtor��s gaol. His language skills were so desperately needed that an agreement was worked out with his creditors and Caldwell was offered his old post back on condition he resided at the Central Police Station. In 1849, he became acting superintendent of the police but by 1855 he had become disillusioned with government service. When he was refused an increase in salary, he resigned complaining that, ten years and many children later, he was still not earning what he had in 1845. A contemporary said that Caldwell saw little hope of advancement:
Mr. Caldwell��s marriage into a Chinese family is incompatible with what is according to the Governor��s notion of society. Hong Kong has an order
of chivalry known as the Justice of the Peace degree. Mr. Caldwell may be Superintendent of the Police but he is not permitted to hold a commission in that order.14
Having left the government, Caldwell turned to an old associate, Wong
Ma Chow, who, it was said, had once saved his life. He took a share in a coastal lorcha. This friendship with someone who was later found guilty by the Supreme Court of being an associate of pirates and triads, was to prove Caldwell��s undoing. Ma Chow had long been feeding Caldwell with information on pirates, almost certainly with ulterior motives. Caldwell��s successes in the capture and subsequent successful trials of a number of pirates were mainly due to this information. They gave him the reputation of being the only policeman with the ability to achieve real results. His superior, Charles May, was left in the shade. Perhaps this was one reason why May became an implacable enemy, and pursued Caldwell��s downfall with such vigour. Two of May��s charges rested on his word alone, namely that Caldwell had informed him that he belonged to a secret society and that he had told May that, although he would not take bribes, he would not object to his wife doing so. May owned a row of ramshackle houses in Lyndhurst Terrace let out at exorbitant rates to brothel keepers, so his animosity could not have been due to principles nor to a concern to root out corruption in the colony.15 Caldwell
would have been wise to distance himself from Wong Ma Chow. Instead, on his
conviction on piracy charges, Caldwell fought to get his friend better conditions in prison and a reduction of his sentence and, in addition, took Ma Chow��s wife into his own home after his conviction. He was nothing if not loyal, sparking rumours of deeper involvement.
Caldwell certainly used his position in the government to carry out his own
agenda. For example, in March 1859, he went so far as to persuade the authorities
to authorize him to take HMS Cruiser to bombard the city of Namtao in order
to compel the town to make reparation of the sum of $4,500. This sum was the
amount which had allegedly been stolen from a passage-boat he had an interest in.16 How far he was guilty of the corruption he was suspected of, and on which later charges were based, one does not know. Two enquiries both failed to
prove the bulk of the charges. The charges in the first enquiry were certainly not
designed to spare his feelings. Charge number four, of the nineteen, accused him of being in ��an alliance with some of the worst Chinese in this Colony through his wife, �X a Chinese girl from a brothel��. 17 Caldwell��s downfall as a result of
the enquiries would surely have followed had he not been a Freemason. He had
formed strong bonds of brotherhood with other masons including Dr. W.T.
Bridges, barrister and acting colonial secretary, who conveniently happened to ��accidentally�� burn the papers found by May in Ma Chow��s house in the course of a raid. These papers were said to have detailed the financial transactions that passed between Caldwell and Ma Chow and, had they been produced, might have proved the charges against him. In the second enquiry of 1861, under Sir Hercules Robinson, Caldwell was cleared of all but three of the thirteen
charges brought against him. In brief, it was finally asserted that he was unfit for government office by reason of his past associations with pirates and that, while
acting as government licenser of brothels, he had speculated in brothels, and on these grounds he was dismissed.

The Early Consular Establishment in China
This service was set up after the First Opium War to administer to the needs of
the Europeans in the newly opened Treaty Ports of Canton, Foochow, Amoy, Ningpo and Shanghai and to attempt to ensure that the activities of the seamen and others were kept within the bounds of legality. The consulars also liaised with their Chinese counterparts to smooth out disagreements as they arose. Three members of this group were buried in the Hong Kong Cemetery during this period: one secretary, one wife and a baby. Charlotte Hertslet [7/5/18], the wife of Frederick Lewis Hertslet is the first, dying in May 1850, in Amoy. Frederick Hertslet was recruited during Sir Henry Pottinger��s time and obtained his
position when his father, a sub-librarian at the foreign office, pointed out that he
had not had a pay rise for four years and had a large family to provide for. He had begged a China appointment for his eldest son. 18 Frederick was posted to Amoy as senior assistant accompanied by his second wife, Charlotte. She died in 1846,
aged twenty-six, five days after giving birth. The foreign office medical certificate,
avoiding indelicate precision about ladies�� illnesses, stated that Mrs. Hertslet had
suffered ��several very serious attacks of complicated disease��. Soon after, Frederick proceeded to England under medical certificate which stated that, ��further time
in China would be fatal to him��. 19 The other early recruit to the consular service was Odiarne Tremayne Lane [10/4/3], a cousin of Sir John Bowring, brought out to Hong Kong as his private secretary. Bowring obtained an appointment for Lane, at the age of nineteen, as second secretary at Canton but the unfortunate young man only survived two years. In 1856, soon after the factories had been burnt down, he had the misfortune to be killed by a falling wall which only just

missed Charles Winchester, the consul
for Ningpo and the admiral, Sir Michael Seymour.
The third burial from this period is the two-day-old baby, John Robert Morrison Milne [9/8/17], grandson of the pioneer Protestant missionary, Rev.
William Milne, who had founded the
Anglo-Chinese College in Malacca in
1819. The baby��s grandfather had been a
shepherd and then a carpenter��s Cpmsi;ar servoceapprentice in Aberdeen, Scotland, before becoming a Congregational
missionary in Malacca. Rev. William Milne, the baby��s father, had been part of
the mission in Macau where he learnt Chinese. His appointment to the consular service was backed by members of Parliament belonging to the Evangelical Party. Hammond, the permanent secretary, agreed to his appointment on condition
that he abstained from missionary pursuits, ��which must materially influence the
Chinese people��s social habits and might �K tend to engender angry feelings��. 20
William Milne died five years later still in office.
In early years, the consular service members were drawn from the same circle as the civil service and were often interchangeable.
The offer of a job to the son of
a civil servant was a means of rewarding loyal government officers by providing for their sons. The sons of Major Caine and Charles Hillier were both given appointments in the service. Up to 1860, the consular service was manned by candidates chosen by patronage, though latterly those who had attended the Chinese language classes at King��s College, London were usually given preference. Monetary constraints due to inadequate salaries meant that most consuls seem to have led lives of quiet frugality. It must have worried them that no provision was made for their families should they die in the service. For example, poor Mrs. Connor, who was still a minor and had been married less than a year when her husband died, was left destitute and pregnant in China.21 The only concession to widows was to provide their passage back to the U.K.


Civil Service Clerks
Three clerks from the middle ranks of the civil service dying in these years are present in the Cemetery. They include Donaldson Selby [11A/11/9], William Barnicot [16Cii/3/4] and George Napier [16Cii/8/7]. Selby, the first of the three to die, in September 1853, was sent out from England to be chief clerk in the treasury. He arrived in Hong Kong in August 1853. Soon after, he was ��attacked
near the Gap by three Chinese and had some difficulty in defending himself with
his walking stick��.22 He survived in Hong Kong less than two months, dying at his residence in Queen��s Road. His tombstone inscription includes the coveted title
of esquire, and the words: ��On Her Majesty��s Civil Service��. William Barnicot,
who died in February 1860, aged twenty-four, worked in the Colonial Secretary��s
Office. His carved and edged headstone gives him an air of respectability.
George Napier arrived in 1842 from Singapore, where he had been born, and worked at first as a clerk for Gemmell & Co. in Canton. Napier joined the civil service in Hong Kong in 1849 as clerk of works in the surveyor general��s department. He is known to have been in charge of the Hong Kong Cemetery. In May of that year the sexton wrote to the Friend of China praising his efforts:
The present condition of the Grave Yard is chiefly attributable to the Honourable Mr. Napier��s zealousy, whose gentlemanly courtesy and daily attention some time since for upwards of two months, has if possible stimulated my exertions to keep it in that state, which the heart of an Englishman should ever dictate.23
Napier was listed in the Blue Book of 1855 as an acting clerk in the
registrar��s office with a salary of two hundred pounds sterling a year. In 1859, he
left the civil service to work for Lane Crawford, the auction house, emporium
and ship��s chandlery. John Wright recorded a shooting expedition with him and
the lawyer, William Gaskell [16Cii/7/14]. Shooting was a pastime universally
enjoyed by anyone who could afford a gun. Wright described a morning��s
shooting with his friends:
Up at 3.30 for the shoot�K. The shooting was excellent on Mr. Napier��s part. He shot eight brace of snipe, Mr. Gaskell one brace and Mr. McKnight
ditto. I fired a good many times but shot nothing. Snipe shooting is deuced
hard work in these climates always being up to ones middle in mud and water
in the rice fields.24
One wonders what the Chinese farmers thought of the sport. Napier��s circle
of friends like Wright��s included the well-to-do tradesmen, as is shown by his will. He died in May 1861 and left his money in two equal shares to William Lane,
��storekeeper �K in charge of the business of Lane Crawford��, perhaps a relative of Thomas Ash Lane, the founder, and Douglas Lapraik, founder of the Douglas line of shipping, who was also to get his horse and pony. His saddle and bridle
went to the Basel missionary, Rev. William Lobscheid, and his ring to William Tarrant, owner and editor of the Friend of China. His will also specified that his boy, cook and cook��s mate were to get an extra month��s salary.25

5.8. A shooting expedition in Hong Kong, c. 1850, Chinese artist. (By courtesy of Martyn Gregory, cat. 77, p. 67.)

The Lifestyle of the Civil Servant Clerks
The fortunes and experiences of this middle group of civil servants come to life in
the pages of the diary of John Fortunatus Evelyn Wright. He knew and enjoyed
the company of a large number of people buried in the Hong Kong Cemetery, including his closest friends, Dr. William Aurelius Harland [10//3/3], Henry Fletcher Hance [4/1/1] and Daniel Caldwell [19/1/1]. In his diary, he described his daily social round and leisure activities. In each case, the people involved are
named, giving us a detailed picture of the leisure activities of Wright��s wide circle of friends and acquaintances. Wright is shown as gregarious and well liked. His
diary is particularly interesting in that this circle of friends included not only his fellow clerks in the civil service, but also doctors, lawyers, the top tradesmen
and officers from the merchant navy, with all of whom he seems to have been on an equal footing. In November 1850, he went to live with William Gaskell, the
solicitor, who that year had been made proctor of the Vice-Admiralty Court. Rats must have been a very prevalent nuisance for on 1 December of that year soon
after moving in, Wright complained: ��Last night a rat came to my bed and had
a nibble at my head and about two hours later returned to dig his teeth into one
of my toes causing it to bleed��. It does not sound like a promising start. Wright��s circle of friends did not include the merchants, high-ranking officers or the top civil
servants. St. John��s Cathedral and Zetland Hall, the Freemason��s headquarters, provided the two focuses for his life. He attended church twice on Sundays and also went to Union Church to hear Rev. James Legge��s sermons. At the same time he was working his way up the ranks of the Freemasons He spent Christmas with Harland and even assisted him ��in amputating a man��s leg who was under the influence of chloroform��. 27 There being no dentists in the colony, Harland pulled three of his teeth without anaesthetic.
Wright particularly enjoyed hiking with his friends over the mountains and may have helped Hance and Harland with their collections of flora and fauna. Both Hance and Harland have a number of local plants named after them.28 At this time the population of Hong Kong was so small that Wright was able to record:
I walked back over the mountains with nothing but my straw hat and my boots on. I found this much the coolest dress. Of course I knew we should meet with no strangers. I did not hesitate to show my friends my proportions �K and if judges of beauty the sight must have done them good.29
He carried on a flirtation with the wife of an absent captain whom he describes as ��a
rough old fellow�� and got caught up in the gossip:
Not at all happy in consequence of the cruel people here thinking that I go
to see Mrs. Wild too often. I will go and see her. God bless and protect and
make her happy. Could not resist calling for a short time today.30
When Mrs. Wild gave birth to a son she christened him Edward Wright Wild and asked John Wright to be the godfather.31 He occasionally confessed in his diary to consorting with Chinese girls and when one, Assai, had a baby, he called
five days running and gave her what amounted to about half a month��s salary.32 The child died on the fourth day and he did not mention her again. Wright showed that he was well aware of the dangers of drink: ��Poor Smart, [an assistant at Dent & Co.] �X he looks much altered�K. A man with an excellent berth but the bottle is his bane. What a number of persons kill themselves in this place with drink��. He managed to persuade his fellow clerk in the post office to give up
drink: ��Got Mr. and Mrs. Hudson to become teetotallers for six months, capital thing because both parties, particularly Mr. are sots��. 33 He saw many friends and acquaintances fall sick, some to die from their illnesses. The civil service clerks who became ill did not, like their heads of department, get free sea passages.
When T.W. Marsh, a colleague in the post office, fell sick, he had to turn to the
Freemasons for help with his passage home. In a lodge of emergency they agreed to assist him to the tune of two hundred pounds sterling. Dr. Rowe, whose will
Wright witnessed, was not so lucky: ��What an alteration in a man in only two or
three days since I last saw him. He is nothing but skin and bones and his body all covered with sores��.34 He died the next day.
Wright only once mentioned socializing with the Portuguese in the colony.
He attended a ball given by Mr. Grandpre, the deputy police superintendent at that time, and commented, ��A number of Portuguese ladies there who all looked nice and dressed most becomingly �X I had not the least idea so many nice looking females were in the place��.35
Wright��s reactions to the Chinese are rather mixed. He was ready to accept
Mary Ayow, the Chinese wife of his friend, Daniel Caldwell, of whom he said: ��Mrs
C. is an exceedingly well-behaved person and not without proper dignity��. 36 He was happy to escort her to the theatre and became god-father to one of her sons.37 The plight of the coolies, who displayed ��considerable content and happiness under miserable and trying conditions��, moved him to admiration. He also admired the patient quiet way his servant dealt with him over the accounts. The Chinese
certainly display the greatest patience on all occasions. Our cook for instance, who comes up with me to settle our daily account is most mild but as deep as a fox. Often I get in a great rage with him about the reckoning, telling him that he is wrong in his total, all of which he hears very quietly and, on going
over the items again, I invariably find myself to have been wrong.38
But when he suspected his servants of stealing a watch and chain, which had cost him over a month��s salary, he immediately accused them of theft and took them to the police station, writing in his diary: ��They won��t confess, the beggars. All
the servants in prison and nobody to take care of the house��. When the servants
were released from prison and came back to collect their belongings, he wrote: ��I had the pleasure of giving them a good thrashing, not to do them any harm, just a lashing with a cane to make them servile again��. 39 Yet, when the head of
the post office, Mr. Hyland, ill-treated his servant, Wright strongly disapproved:
��Mr. Hyland knocked his boy down, kicked and ill-used him in a most disgraceful manner, because the boy had not heard him order his tiffin��. 40 Wright himself succumbed to tuberculosis and had to go back to England in 1854, where he died shortly after his return.

Lesser Civil Servants
This group mostly worked in the non-commissioned officer role in the police or
the prison service, the two services then being almost indistinguishable. They were mostly ex-soldiers of lower-class origins and had worked their way up from
humble beginnings to become respected citizens in a far-off colony. Their births,
deaths and marriages were recorded in the press and their chest tombs and granite headstones show their comfortable economic worth and pride of rank. Two members of the group are buried in large and costly chest tombs: James Collins [11B/5/7] and Elizabeth Clifton [13/9/4]. Collins, an ex-sergeant from the army,
was the first head gaoler in Hong Kong and earned a wage of only $15 a month.
He died aged forty-three leaving a ��large family and a number of friends to deplore his loss��. 41 His wife Elizabeth lived on until 1853. His must have been one of the
earliest appointments as when he died, on 7 June 1849, he had held his post for
upwards of seven years.
Samuel Clifton had arrived in Hong Kong by 1846 when he married Elizabeth Quin who was probably the daughter of James Quin mentioned in the
paragraph below. Originally from the 67th Regiment, he left the army to work as
a clerk for the police establishment. He was promoted in 1850 to deputy police inspector but lost his eldest daughter, Emma Elizabeth [13/9/4] in 1845 and his wife, Elizabeth in December 1850 aged twenty-nine years. Clifton by then was listed as assistant superintendent. In 1852, he married again to Miss Fanny Jones, the granddaughter of Brigade-Major Charles Jones of the Royal Hussars, and had four more children. A number of property deals were recorded in Clifton��s name and he was obviously respected by members of the European community.42 For instance, James MacLehose, an inn-keeper, named him as trustee for his wife and children in his will. Clifton must have been a burly man of considerable strength. Thomas Steele, a tavern keeper who had been sentenced to twelve months for wilfully stabbing several men, had escaped gaol with two other men. During the recapture, Steele put up the most determined resistance. ��Nor did they succeed
in putting him in irons until every man near him, the sheriff included had received
blows from him, when he was knocked down by Inspector Clifton��.43 On another occasion, he was called to deal with an infuriated Chinese steersman of a passage boat. The steersman had slashed one member of his crew wounding him severely
and driven the rest below and was intent on smothering them by flinging stinkpots
(gl.) into the hold:
On going alongside Inspector Clifton found the miscreant in the act of lighting the fuse of another of those dangerous missiles: but, with a blow of
his staff he managed fortunately to divert it from its intended destination,
and with another well applied stroke on the forehead, he sent Mr. Steersman overboard.44
In 1854 Clifton went to Shanghai at the head of one hundred ex -soldiers to form a police force for the British concession there. However, he was later indicted for fraud and

5.9. Chest tomb in memory of Elizabeth Clifton,
extortion. Perhaps he took there
wife of Assistant Superintendent of Police Samuel the ways of policing he had learnt Clifton and of their daughter, Emma Elizabeth.
in Hong Kong. His son, Samuel Clifton [42/2/4], who died in Hong Kong in
February 1874, proudly proclaims on his headstone that he was ��of Shanghae��. Members of the Clifton family remained in Shanghai up to the Second World War when they left for Australia.
The others members of this group include James Quin [16Cii/7/20], Michael Ryan [11B/2/13], Robert Goodings [9/4/7], John Smithers [40/4/7] and members of the family of James Jarman. Quin, the first to die in 1851, had been a colour sergeant in the 53rd Regiment. He married a widow, Mary Maitland, at the Government House in 1845 and decided to stay on in Hong Kong. He was employed as second clerk in the magistrates�� court. Surprisingly, he must have been illiterate as he signed his will ��by his mark��, before dying of smallpox.45 He appointed Samuel Clifton to be his executor together with William Morrison [13/6/6], the colonial surgeon. Quin��s son, on leaving Hong Kong, attained the rank of captain in the Indian Army and then transferred to the Bombay police. In 1862, Quin returned to Hong Kong as superintendent of the police force. Michael Ryan of the 57th Regiment was clerk of the High Court when he married Elizabeth Knight in August 1846. He died aged twenty-six years and two months.
Robert Goodings had been a sergeant in the 98th Regiment. He left the army to become a policeman and rose through the ranks to become in turn, clerk, usher, gaoler and finally, in 1854, head keeper of Victoria Gaol. It seems that he too was illiterate as he marked the register with a cross when he married Mary Anne Marsh [9/17/1] in 1844. He buried her in 1856. Her headstone also commemorates the death in 1847 of a baby son, Collingwood. Mary Anne died giving birth to the last of her six babies and the baby also died soon after. Goodings��s pay as head gaoler was 125 pounds sterling a year with his wife getting 12 pounds 10 shillings to act as matron. Goodings married a second time, to Mary Roe, the widow of his friend, James Roe, and had another baby before succumbing to dysentery at the age of thirty-three. If his obituary is to be believed, he must have joined the army as a drummer boy at the very young age of thirteen because it says he ��had for upwards of twenty years been the servant of the home and local Governments in various capacities��. The gaolers were chosen in the early days from among the police constables but they were under-paid, untrained and since they could speak no Chinese, enforced the obedience of the prisoners largely by brutality. The prisoners formed chain gangs as they worked making the roads needed in the colony. John Fryer, principal of St. Paul��s College, in his first

132 Forgotten Souls
letter home wrote that he heard ��every hour or two, a long heavy clanking of chains as a great gang of prisoners go past in the road, carrying heavy burdens. They make them work very hard on the roads��. 46
James Jarman is unique in the Hong Kong Cemetery for organizing the only family plot encircled by a low granite surround. This encloses the headstones of his first wife, Sarah Jarman [9/6/7] who had died at the Central Police Station in 1856, and three of his children, James and Mary Eleathia [9/6/6] and Anne Jarman [9/6/8]. In 1857, he had married his first wife, the widow of John Thomas Mitton [9/9/10], a gaoler. Sarah died in 1856 aged twenty-six. Jarman married a second time to Mary Grey and went on to have six more children, four of whom survived. He also worked his way up
through the ranks of the police, becoming a deputy inspector in 1853. In 1857, he was appointed appraiser of the Supreme Court47 and in March 1859 was receiving fifteen pounds sterling extra a year as inspector of weights and measures. In 1863
Jarman was placed in temporary charge of Victoria Gaol. Questions were being asked in the papers as to why he had been so often passed over for promotion. One gets the feeling that his lowly background and lack of education blocked his prospects. In the course of a career in the Hong Kong Police of over twenty years
he was poisoned by the arsenic in his morning toast; he personally arrested Wong
Ma Chow, the alleged pirate and triad boss; and he was shot by an old friend, the auctioneer, James Brooks, whose grave in the Cemetery may be one of those that are now illegible. Brooks had been confined to his room for some days and Jarman went with Mr. Thompson, the chemist, to visit him. They were greeted on entering by Brooks in dishabille leaning over the banisters and pointing a
Smith and Wesson revolver straight at them. The poor man labouring under some terrible delusion of the brain (probably delirium tremens) fired a shot which passed
close to the chemist��s head and lodged in Jarman��s left shoulder. Brooks was taken to hospital where his guilty feelings at wounding an old friend in such a manner impeded his recovery.48
The ill effects of too much alcoholic intake were pervasive in the colony and Jarman was no exception. In 1869 he retired on pension. In his application to retire he confessed: ��Failing health now compels me to resign. Tropical climates have rendered the use of stimulants necessary��. He asked for a passage to England for himself and his family. The official reply was that he could only be offered one-third of the passage money as his service to the colony ��was not altogether meritorious��. 49 Jarman seems to have had a raw deal. In July 1869, he finally left the colony in receipt of a pension ��which does not by any means total up to a very formidable amount��. Perhaps his services were more appreciated by the Chinese community. They presented him with a gold medal then worth $200 and an address on a long silk scroll, signed by seventeen of the oldest and most respectable merchants and stamped by the seals of the fifty-six long-established hongs ending with the words:
With fragrant tears we see you leave your post
And think what tedious years you here have lost;
May fortune, peace and happy joys attend you
In generous measure, and may God defend you.
As the China Mail declared, few police officers could boast the possession of such a certificate.
John Smithers and his brother Thomas were among the more successful of
these minor officers. From chief usher and bailiff in 1850, he rose to become clerk
of the Supreme Court and sexton of St. John��s Cathedral with special permission
to live at the court house. He invested money in the bakery set up by William
Emeny. In January 1856 he inserted a notice into the Friend of China that: ��Trees,
plants and flowers for the adornment of the burial ground at Wongneichung will
be gratefully received��. So some of the magnificent older trees in the Cemetery may owe their present splendour to Smithers. Thomas, who drowned when a police boat capsized in a typhoon in 1850, was a respected inspector of the police seconded from Scotland Yard. After his death, John inserted a notice into the


134 Forgotten Souls
paper thanking the public for their generosity to Thomas�� widow and children. John married Caroline Cakebread in 1852, with Robert and Mary Anne Goodings as his witnesses, and had four children. In turn he was witness with Robert and Mary Anne Goodings when James Jarman married Sarah Mitton on the death of her first husband, John Thomas Mitton. This group of mainly ex-service minor officers in the Hong Kong civil service were a closely united group who socialized together, supported each other and intermarried. They and their families had made Hong Kong their home and they seemed content with their lives and status. They would have been unlikely to achieve as much if they had returned with their regiments to Britain.

Police Constables and Turnkeys
In Britain, the police took for granted public consensus and generally agreed
norms of social behaviour. But due to fears of unrest and instability, a different model of policing was established in Hong Kong which affected the way the force
here developed and their role. ��A colonial government, forcibly superimposed
from outside, is undemocratic by definition, and likely to face violent resistance,
at least initially. Therefore it is necessary to emphasize the coercive power of the police��. 50 The Hong Kong Police Force in early days was largely drawn from the ranks of the regiments stationed in the colony and their training was that of soldiers. They carried guns which they were quite capable of using. Their ranking system was based on the army model and they lived in messes not unlike in the army. Such men would have had few qualms about the use of force. It cannot have helped that in early years their authority, especially over soldiers,
was questioned. When two soldiers of the Royal Irish Regiment were arrested for causing an affray in a tavern in 1847, it appeared in evidence that ��the soldiers
called out that they might do as they pleased, that according to the orders
[from Major General d��Aguilar] they received in barracks, the bloody Peelers [policemen] had nothing to do with them��. 51 In this case the authority of the civil service was asserted and the soldiers punished in court.
In the Hong Kong Cemetery, the absence of graves of certain classes such as policemen and turnkeys is significant. It denoted their poverty and low status in society. They could only afford the granite marker of the pauper��s grave with no inscribed headstone. During the fifteen years of the early period, the headstones of only two turnkeys and one police sergeant have been found. In 1850, John Thomas Mitton [9/9/10] was transferred from the police to the prison. He was one of the very few policemen to remain in the force for a number of years, and to gain the respect of the community. He married Sarah Warwick who, after his death, went on to marry James Jarman. Mitton died in September 1852 aged only twenty-three. The first and second turnkeys earned twenty-four and fifteen pounds sterling a year respectively.52 The low pay of the turnkeys must have contributed to venality in the gaol. In 1855, Robert Goodings found the padlock to the storeroom had been broken and $90 of the prisoners�� money had disappeared. Goodings was sued by a seaman named Clark, who had deposited the best part of nineteen pounds sterling with him. The case was dismissed but the judge suggested that the government reimburse the sailor. There was obviously suspicion that one of the turnkeys was involved. The second gaoler in the Cemetery is John Hannay [10/1/5], a military turnkey, who died in August 1858. He has the distinction of being the oldest person to die in the first period at the age of sixty-seven, if his faded inscription has been correctly read. The only other man found in the Cemetery belonging to this group of men is John Warner [7/7/19] who joined the police from the 98th Regiment. In 1846, he married Maria Whittim, signing by his mark and became a police sergeant. Perhaps the fact that two of the above were married and one had affiliations with the military explains how, among all the police constables, they alone came to be honoured with headstones.
The ��stuff�� of which the police force was composed was seen by the large majority of Europeans as being ��of the most wretched quality��. In 1850, it was said that the pay of policemen was ��very far below what the humblest require in this colony; so that steady men only accept the situation in the hope of something else casting up��. The author of this letter to the China Mail who signed himself Idler continued:

But to the class generally, the chief objection is their readiness in yielding to
the temptation offered by the many public-houses; and many deaths among
our European constables here, I am certain, are to be ascribed to the excessive indulgence in ardent spirits, a great portion of what is sold by the low tavern-keepers being of the most abominable and deleterious description.53
The police force of the time was largely made up of discharged soldiers, Portuguese from Macau and anyone else who could be persuaded to work for very little money and under bad conditions of service. For example, the editor of the China Mail in 1848 remarked on the ��most cruel and ill-judged system�� where, because pay was stopped during illness and hospital expenses were charged to the patient, ��police seldom report themselves sick until disease has obtained ascendancy��. 54 The turnover was exceptionally high. Forty-nine soldiers had been discharged from 98th Regiment in 1846, to serve as policemen. Eight years later not one of them still remained in the force. Policemen would rarely have been able to marry due to their low pay, low status and the shortage of women in the colony. The lifestyle that their salaries forced them to lead would have been a barrier for any respectable woman contemplating marriage. Their inability to find wives meant that this class of men were driven to find solace in the brothels where they caught and spread the very virulent venereal diseases that weakened their resistance to illness. The will of James Sullivan, Police Constable No. 21, shows all too clearly the paucity of personal possessions among the police.55 When Sullivan died he bequeathed to his friend, James Ashby P.C. No.12, one cloth cap, one straw hat, two pairs of shoes, a box with some cloth shirts, a fork, knife, spoon and plate, and one bed with bedding and curtains. He signed his will with his mark. The list in the Hong Kong Gazette for 1856 of those who died intestate showed one policeman, Bernard Whelehan, as leaving only $1.84, whereas a tavern keeper, J.C. Ryan, left a respectable total of $517.97. It is hardly surprising that the police left the force to become tavern keepers.
The demoralized state of the police force is shown by the frequent dismissals and prosecutions of policemen. For instance in a short period of time in 1847, James McGowan was dismissed for being drunk on duty fourteen times. James Bryne was found lying drunk under the police office verandah while on
duty. He had already been reported twelve times for misconduct. He was jailed
for one month and fined $10. Arthur Robertson was sentenced to ten days in prison and a $20 fine for being asleep at his post while guarding a prisoner under
sentence of death.56
Norton-Kyshe quoted a perhaps somewhat exaggerated article from the Straits Times to give an example of the poor turnout of the Hong Kong European police:
Until the middle of last year, the clothes of the men were for the most part ragged, greasy and patched; many had the legs of their trousers so short that the whole of the ankles were visible; some wore boots in one of which they could have put both legs �K their boots moreover were old and shabby, the toes or heels of the men protruding through the leather�K.57
The police were supposed to wear their number on their collars but these were often not visible for various usually nefarious reasons.
The low pay combined with lack of training and the fact that they were in a position of power and able to ��squeeze�� the Chinese, meant that a large number of the police force were corrupt. Brothel keepers and the owners of gambling dens paid off the police as a matter of course. A constable named Randolph, when charged with extortion and demanding money with menaces in August 1856, said in his defence that it was the usual practice for the Chinese to pay $10 or $5 for their release whenever they were arrested by the police for gambling.58 The behaviour of these petty officials must have made the port seem anything but welcoming to the Chinese.
Little was done to stem these corrupt practices. The method of collecting the tax and police rates from the Chinese households seemed designed to invite ��squeeze��.
Policemen are furnished with papers in Chinese having the number of the
house or shop written in English; these papers state the tax is five percent,
but neither is the valuation given nor the amount of assessment specified.
The police have thus a carte blanche which they can fill up according to their
own notions of the property.59
The superintendent, Charles May, who had been sent from Scotland Yard to head this force consisting of English, Indian and Chinese policemen, never learnt a word of any other language in the twenty years he was in Hong Kong. Like their leader, few of the European or Indian police could speak Chinese. Besides this, many of the European police were also illiterate. A notice quoted in the Friend of China which had been posted in Victoria shows the educational shortcomings of even the sergeants:
Near Wast Peint, Notice 27th Febuary �X There is a Stray Paney with bridle
sadle �X in the pound at the Market station if Claimed it will be giving by A
Plying to the inspector of Palice. Signed J.S. Wildiame, Sejt. Palice. (sic)60
The turnkeys, chosen from the ranks of the police, were little better. Security in Victoria Gaol was so lax that in 1850, three prisoners escaped by finding a convenient bamboo ladder, which they had placed against the prison wall, and climbing out. They were recaptured dead drunk in town. When prosecuted for jail-breaking, they argued that they had had every intention of climbing back in again unnoticed.61 It was the Queen��s birthday and they had merely wanted to drink to her health.

The Problems of the Civil Service in Hong Kong
The administration of the first governor, Sir Henry Pottinger, which had to rely
on locally recruited talent and had to borrow on occasions from the army, had a
makeshift air. When Sir John Davis, the second governor, arrived from England
in May 1844, he brought with him on the same ship a colonial secretary, a colonial
treasurer, a court registrar, a civil engineer, and his nephew, William Mercer, to
act as his private secretary. He also brought with him a warrant to appoint Major
William Caine, who was already chief magistrate, as sheriff and provost marshal
of the Supreme Court. The Hong Kong colonial civil service could be said to have been born on the day Sir John and his entourage arrived. The cost of securing
Hong Kong as a colony does seem very high. When 250 pounds sterling a year
seemed a reasonable salary for a police inspector seconded from London, a total
cost of 35,876 pounds sterling for the year��s salaries for civil servants seems high.
This sum increases considerably when the costs of supporting a garrison of around a thousand men is also taken into account.62 Taking the list of civil servants from the Blue Book of 1845, there was one civil servant for approximately every nine
members of the public, and two soldiers for each one of the roughly five hundred
Europeans on the island. Perhaps this willingness to subsidize the garrison and civil service of such a small island shows how valuable it seemed to the authorities in England to have a base on the fringes of China.
Few men of the quality that would command respect among the settlers were prepared to take up the offer of a position in Hong Kong. It was so insignificant a place and had such a bad reputation for ill health in Britain that ambitious men of the type sought were not attracted to take up posts there. Sir John Davis, a former superintendent in the East India Company, who came from a family of nonconformist woollen merchants from Exeter, would not have been accepted as a member of the British aristocracy. Yet, it was rumoured that he was only induced to accept the post of governor when the offer was sweetened by the promise of a knighthood and six thousand pounds a year, which was three times as much as the president of the United States was currently earning.63 No qualified lawyer could be found who would accept the position of chief justice until the salary had been raised to the unprecedented height of two thousand pounds a year. The only civil servant who could perhaps command the respect of the merchants was the colonial secretary, the Honourable Frederick Bruce, son of the Earl of Elgin. He was considered too valuable to waste on Hong Kong and after not much more than a year in the territory was promoted to be lieutenant governor of Newfoundland.
The arrival of Sir John Davis and his entourage seems to have had a very
divisive effect on the Hong Kong community. It sparked what E.J. Eitel termed
��gradations of social rank which became subdivided into mutually exclusive cliques and sets��. 64 The determination of the governor and his top civil servants to take their place among the elite of the society does not seem sufficient explanation for the seemingly unreasonable dislike that Davis generated in the minds of the merchants and traders of Hong Kong. This can be seen, for example, in a letter Alexander Matheson wrote in November 1844 from Macau to Donald Matheson saying:
You are quite right to have as little as possible to do with Mr. Martin [colonial secretary], or in fact any member of the Govt. The only return you can look
for are insolence and ingratitude.65
An article in the Friend of China in January 1850 attempted an explanation of this dislike from the point of the tradesmen who felt that their position in the community had been downgraded. The editor quoted an article in the British press by Edward Gibbon Wakefield: ��The general applicability of which �K cannot fail to strike our Hong Kong readers��. The article described how:
like the caste of Brahmins, they [civil servants from Britain] hold themselves
apart from the rest of the community and immeasurably superior to it �K they
do not belong to the community at all but resemble the official class in India
which exclusively governs but does not settle.
Further it argued that these bureaucrats:
agree in thinking that colonists or settlers, people who come out all that way to improve their condition by their own exertions, are an inferior order of beings and they stick close together in resisting all attempts on the part of the
settlers to become officials, to get a share in governing the colony.
He complained that the civil servants used the patronage at their disposal to bolster their positions and to hold themselves together in a
family compact.�K The jealousies and rivalries and hatreds which belong to poor human nature but which in well ordered societies are subdued by various
restraints break out uncontrolled amongst officials of a bureaucratic colony.66
Some of the men chosen by Sir John Davis from the few local candidates
available to fill posts in the civil service turned out to be rogues and did nothing to raise the reputation of the fledgling service. One such was Charles Holdforth.
He was alleged to have come to Hong Kong to elude justice in Australia for horse stealing.67 He first secured a junior clerkship and was then offered the post of coroner in place of the popular voluntary sheriff, Edward Farncomb, who had opposed certain government measures. Next he was made sheriff. In that post, he managed to get the long-serving government auctioneer, Charles Markwick, dismissed from his position in favour of the more pliable George
Duddell, and together they proceeded to work various scams. When he finally
took his departure for California, he was so fearful of being arrested that he hid himself in the bowels of the ship. His career in Hong Kong had shown ��how an under-official of the Government could with the fostering care of his patrons in a few years accumulate a large fortune��. In California, he was brought before the Supreme Court of San Francisco for fraud. The authorities there no doubt
thought: ��They had an ordinary rogue to deal with and not the ex-Sheriff of Hong
Kong��. 68 Another bad choice was Adolphus Edward Shelley who gave his name to Shelley Street. He came from India with a letter of introduction from Lord Stanley on the strength of which he was made the auditor general. Davis in a private letter to Lord Grey accused him of being ��dissipated, in debt, negligent, guilty of falsehood, and quite unfit for high office��. 69 The presence in the service of this kind of adventurer was another factor that militated against the men in public service gaining the respect of the community.
For these reasons, the civil servants had an uphill task in their fight to maintain their positions as representatives of the Queen in Hong Kong��s hierarchy. Being in competition with the merchants and feeling it necessary to demonstrate their equal status by lavish entertainment and high living, they often found themselves in financial difficulties and turned to questionable methods of raising the necessary cash. It was strongly rumoured that a number, including Major Caine, resorted to money-lending at grossly inflated rates of interest.70 The temptation to augment their salaries in order to cope with the demands of their social position was often overwhelming. An undercurrent of corruption that lowered the reputation of the civil service at this time seems to have permeated the administrative hierarchy from top to bottom. The Song of the Squeeze, published in 1902, could just as well have been written for this period:
Let moralists chatter and spout;
Your chance with avidity seize,
One hand in front for the chapel plate,
The other behind for the squeeze.71
The opposition of the merchants to the government hardened when Davis attempted to recoup the costs of the establishment by imposing taxes, charges on services and an annual police rate based on property. He also created monopolies such as that for the sale of opium in the colony which he then farmed out to the highest bidder. The community blamed him for the downturn of the economy in the late 1840s. In 1847 an editorial in the Friend of China claimed that: ��Many of our friends are so disgusted with the mismanagement of this colony that they are giving up in despair��. It listed fourteen facts which it said afforded conclusive proof of the ��falling state of affairs��.72
The Hulme affair in 1848, when Chief Justice Hulme was sent home in disgrace accused of drunkenness, worsened the already isolated and vulnerable position of the civil service, and perhaps caused its members to turn inwards against each other. The backstabbing and in-fighting among the members of the government became so bad that by the mid-1850s it seems to have almost paralyzed the government. In a letter to the China Mail, on the subject of the founding of St. Andrew��s School, Paternus wrote:
A school of the kind proposed by you has been wanting for years�K. The plain truth is that in Hong Kong nothing of a public nature which may be for the
general benefit can be brought forward by one party without being opposed
by another; not because the good of the object is denied or can be denied but solely because it has been proposed by Smith and not by himself. So long as such a feeling exists, it serves us right to be taxed to our hearts�� content; having our harbour blockaded by pirates if not occupied by them; being made to pay extravagant prices for the necessities of life and so on.73
For a time, it seemed a real possibility that an alternative and cheaper form of administration could be introduced into Hong Kong in the place of the cumbrous and costly administration set up by Sir John Davis. The newspapers pressed for a municipal type of government headed by a mayor and corporation on the lines of those being set up in England to administer the new towns such as Birmingham. This model was in the process of being adopted in Shanghai in the 1850s. The then secretary of state in London had agreed to a modified form being tried in Hong Kong. That this did not happen seems to have been partly due to the
indolence and lack of interest of the merchants and partly to the lack of an effective
voice in other sections of the community who would have liked to push such measures through. The scheme was against the interests of the civil service and opposed by them since, under such a scheme, some would have been replaced by local volunteers.

Chapter 6
Professionals
Doctors, lawyers, architects and newspaper editors are included in this group. All four professions while continuing to practise privately at this date, moved into and
out of government service as needed. The conflicts of interests that arose from this
anomaly underlay some of the scandals that rocked the colony in the later years of
this period. For example as mentioned earlier, Dr. W.T. Bridges, a barrister, was
in his private capacity representing the Chinese opium farmer in an enquiry into malpractices at the same time that he was acting as colonial secretary. At this period, professionals did not enjoy high status in society. They moved in much the same circle as the second echelon of civil servants and the wealthier tradesmen. They lived in modest houses around Queen��s Road, D��Aguilar Street and Hollywood Road.
Only three lawyers are found in the Hong Kong Cemetery from this period. The charges for their services were high, particularly to the Chinese who needed their help to defend themselves from little understood and sometimes unfair cases brought against them in court. Most lawyers made good money and had the necessary funds to pay their passages back to Britain if illness threatened. The first to be buried in the Cemetery was James Brown [10/8/3], a solicitor of the Supreme Court and public notary. He was articled to William Gaskell [16Cii/7/14], who practised in Hong Kong from 1846 to his death in 1868, by which time he must have been one of the longest practising professionals in the colony. Brown was admitted locally in 1855, becoming a partner in the firm Gaskell & Brown in 1857, but he died in the same year, aged thirty-five. He was one of the first hundred men to volunteer for military training in the face of the Russian threat in 1854. He himself was prosecuted and fined $25 for flogging an unfortunate Chinese bookbinder. The bookbinder happened to share his shop with a shoe-maker whose night-time tap-tapping had disturbed Brown��s sleep.1 The second lawyer, John Day [20/19/1] from Milverton in Somerset, who died in September 1858 aged thirty-nine from an attack of acute dysentery, was a barrister from the Middle Temple. He arrived in Hong Kong in 1855. He was asked to be
examiner in the first Caldwell inquiry and then, in August 1857, was appointed
attorney general. According to his obituary he kept aloof from colonial matters and was therefore all the more trusted for his ��common sense, legal acumen and gentlemanly feeling�K. It would be well if we all considered how mean, how miserable our petty strivings for wealth, influence and position are, and sought more singly to live worthy lives��.2 The heartfelt finishing lines of the obituary sum up the editor��s feelings about animosities that plagued the colony at the time of his death. Day was succeeded by Frederick Green [4/7/7], another practising barrister, who first joined the government from the private sector as deputy
attorney general in 1855. Illness had affected the performance of Day��s duties and
on his death ��the vast mass of documents to be dealt with and arrears of business were passed over to Mr. Green��. He may have been overwhelmed by the amount of work because only three months later Green resigned on the grounds of ill health and died in February 1862.
The only architect from this period, Thomas Larkin Walker Esq. [10/5/2], has a fine carved headstone that must have impressed John Smithers [40/4/7], the sexton, whose headstone is an almost exact replica. Walker, who had a
private practice, was co-opted locally to act as deputy surveyor when the surveyor general, Charles St. George Cleverly, was absent on leave recuperating from illness. He was responsible for the surveyor��s report in the Blue Book of 1856. In May 1860, he was nominated by the governor to sit on the board of cathedral trustees together with the colonial
secretary, William Mercer, Cleverly, and
Henry Kingsmill, a barrister, whose wife, Frances Kingsmill [40/5/4], is buried in the Cemetery.3
A short account of the profession of journalism is included here because of its importance in the colony, although no journalists from this period are found in the Cemetery. John Carr, the second editor of the Friend of China, described the position occupied by journalists in Hong Kong society:
6.1. Headstone in memory of William Gaskell, d. 29.12.1868.

Here we have three newspapers, Mr. Shortrede is the proprietor, editor and publisher of the ��China Mail�� and on the Petty Jury List; ranking as a tradesman. Mr. Carr, proprietor and editor of the ��Friend of China��, is a petty Juror for the same reason; having been lately publisher of the paper. Mr. Cairns, former proprietor of the ��Hong Kong Register��, was on the same list for the like reason, Mr. Strachan, now printer and publisher of the last named paper, is on the Grand Jury and Mr. Mitchell, the editor, is a Grand
Juror and Justice of the Peace. We do not mention this as envying these
Gentlemen��s position or from any desire to become candidate for municipal honors, but in the hope that when the privilege of governing ourselves is granted we may not be excluded from giving our vote to the man we may think most able to administer funds, of which we subscribe to a portion.4
This extract is particularly interesting in that it shows the anomalous status of the editors, somewhere between the tradesmen and the civil servants. It also shows the importance placed on ranking as shown in the pages of jury list. A. Shortrede, whom
John Wright described as ��a fine looking fellow and what is better, a noble mind��, 5 was the son of the sheriff of Roxborough in Scotland and was closely linked by family ties to Sir Walter Scott. Shortrede had learnt the printing and publishing business in the hope that he could publish Scott��s novels. When ��disastrous circumstances
attending the latter years�� of Scott��s life made this hope impossible, he decided to go east. He had three brothers in the East India Company. In the last few years of his life, Shortrede achieved the social distinction of membership of the Hong Kong
Club. W.H. Mitchell is another professional who was co-opted by the government
as assistant magistrate, sheriff and coroner while still publishing and editing his paper, the Hong Kong Register. He resigned from the government in 1858 in the face of the attacks on his integrity by Attorney General Chisholm Anstey.
Doctors were primarily looked on as either surgeons, saw-bones as they were
called, or druggists. William Maxwell Wood, a ship��s doctor on board the USS
San Jacinto, lamented: ��My Chinese acquaintanceship was neither numerous nor aristocratic: neither was my English. I belonged to a profession which was socially of low caste with both people��.6 The scientific leap forward that led to an increased measure of respect for doctors was only just beginning to make itself felt. But the prevalence of disease in Hong Kong gave doctors an added importance and added
vulnerability: ��When Dr. Harland died of fever in the year 1858, it was noticed that
he was the fourth Colonial surgeon who had fallen victim to the climate��. 7 The

146 Forgotten Souls
four colonial surgeons, Dr. Francis Dill [20/5/6], Dr. Peter Young [16Ci/6/4], Dr. William Morrison [13/6/6] and Dr. W. Aurelius Harland [10/3/3], all died within a twelve-year period of malarial fever thus underlining the dangers associated with visiting their patients as they made their rounds.
All four combined private practice with government service and only in the case of Dr. Morrison was the clash of interests publicly questioned. Though strongly denying it, Morrison was accused of neglecting his government duties to prisoners in Victoria Gaol, because he was too busy seeing his wealthy private patients.8 Morrison shares with Dr. Harland, who succeeded him as colonial surgeon in
1857, the honour of having two of the most spectacular monuments in the Hong
Kong Cemetery and also perhaps the most appreciative epitaphs. Morrison��s declares that he was: ��Deeply and universally regretted��. Harland��s went further: ��He
was admired for his attainments / as a scientific enquirer, Trusted / for his skill as
a Physician / Beloved for his many noble qualities as a man��. E.J. Eitel echoed this feeling when he wrote: ��No event in Hong Kong was mourned so generally and so deeply as the death of Dr. Harland.9 Dr. Francis Dill, appointed in 1844 as the
first colonial surgeon, has a large chest tomb tucked away in a quiet corner of the
Cemetery under the branches of a jasmine tree. In his obituary he was described as being ��remarkable for his kind and forbearing disposition�� and as ��a steady and warm-hearted friend��. He was the son of an Irish parson and had been a surgeon on the East India Company ships. He is likely to have been the surgeon of the same name on the Atlas, who looked after John Robert, the young son of the missionary, Robert Morrison, when he was sent back to England after the death of his mother in Macau in 1821.10 A compassionate man moved by the desperate plight of destitute sailors who fell sick while in Hong Kong, Dill was a driving force behind the founding of the Society for the Relief of the Sick Destitute . The

first meeting, in July 1846, took place in his
house. According to the Friend of China,
this was the first attempt to raise an annual
fund for charity in Hong Kong.11 Dill also helped Chief Justice Hulme disprove the charges of being a habitual drunkard which had led to his recall to England. He testified that the rolling gait of the chief justice was caused by his bad varicose veins and not by drink.
Dill was succeeded in October 1846 by Dr. Peter Young, who shares a headstone with his brother Dr. James Young [16Ci/6/4]. The two Scottish brothers may have been the sons of Dr. F.H. Young, a naval surgeon, who was among the founders of Hong Kong Dispensary
later to become known as A.S. Watson
& Co. It opened its doors within a few months of the British occupation of the island in a temporary mat-shed on Possession Point and served as a dispensary for the soldiers and sailors of the British Expeditionary Force. Dr. James Young, a druggist, was put in charge of the new buildings for the Hong Kong Dispensary. He became an elder of the Nonconformist Union Chapel.12 Following the death of his wife, after only seven months of married life, he left Hong Kong to become a medical missionary in Amoy. He died in 1855 at Musselburgh near Edinburgh.13 Dr. Peter Young came out to Hong Kong on the East Indian Company steamer, Nemesis, as the ship��s surgeon.14 During the capture of the heights above Canton in March 1841, the wounded were brought down to Nemesis where ��they received every attention from the surgeon �K and particularly from Mr. Peter Young, who was then on board merely as a volunteer��.15 On returning to Hong Kong, he was
appointed a member of the Committee of Public Health in 1843. With the money
raised by a public subscription and additional help from Jardine, Matheson &
Co., a Seamen��s Hospital of fifty beds had been built. Dr. Peter Young was put
in charge, giving his services free of charge. He resigned from his post of colonial
surgeon in 1847, and died in October 1854.


The visiting American dental surgeon, Dr. Ball, gave us a glimpse into the lifestyle of the third colonial surgeon, Dr. Morrison, when he described how ��Dr. M��, unlike the other doctors who take sedan chairs,
usually appears in a low carriage drawn by a pair of handsome Chusan ponies. His boy rides with him, holding an umbrella over his head and takes care of the horses in his absence, being obliged continually, with a cloth, to
drive off the flies which torment them��.16
Ball also described how, like so many others, Morrison had been burgled. The robbers managed to extract his gold watch and some old and valuable family silver from bedroom where, at the time of the robbery, the doctor was sound asleep.17 Morrison had a cherished plan to build a sanatorium on the Peak for sick
servicemen. After his death the project was finally carried out, but the sanatorium
was abandoned after a short time, due to the number of men hospitalized there succumbing to dysentery. Morrison died in October 1853 aged forty-one of an abscess on his liver, leaving a wife and four children.
Dr. William Aurelius Harland [10/3/3], the son of a physician in Scarborough, graduated with honours from Edinburgh University in 1845 and
arrived in Hong Kong in the same year. He ran a private practice with offices in
Stanley Street. Harland invited a Chinese scholar to share his house and teach him to read Mandarin. He was thus able to devote time to the study of Chinese medicine, showing a respect for Chinese culture not often found among his fellow colonists. He succeeded Dr. Peter Young as resident doctor at the Seamen��s Hospital in 1854. According to his obituary, he spent his happiest years as surgeon
there since it gave him plenty of time to devote to his studies and he was indifferent
to money. In 1848, he performed the first operation in Hong Kong using anaesthetics. It was on an Indian whose arm had been crushed in an accident on board his ship and had to be removed. Previous to this, men who needed surgery still faced being tied down and dosed with heavy draughts of alcohol to deaden the pain.
The chloroform, (about two drachms) was poured upon a large piece of sponge, the outer part being covered with oiled paper to prevent evaporation. The patient being placed on a bed in the horizontal position, the sponge was applied to the mouth and nostrils and he was told to inhale it and in about three minutes he became quite insensible.18
The operation was then carried out. Dr. Harland was assisted by Drs. Young, Balfour and Dill and two surgeons from the Royal Navy, one of whom was Dr. Edward Cree whose diary has been quoted earlier.
Harland��s appointment as colonial surgeon in 1853 shows the importance of patronage at this time. It was obtained for him by his father, through the good offices of the Duke of Newcastle. Harland had suffered bouts of malarial fevers for some years before his death. In November 1850, John Wright reported in his diary: ��Dr. Harland very unwell. He informed me that he had tumbled down in a fit just as he had finished breakfast��. 19 He died suddenly in September 1858, of what was described as ��congestion of the brain��, brought on by exposing his head to the full rays of the sun. He had been fishing off Green Island with some friends and jumped overboard for a swim. However a different explanation was given by
E.J. Eitel, who said that he ��died of fever contracted while charitably attending on the Chinese poor��. 20 His obituary, one of the longest ever given by the local newspapers, speaks of his unselfish devotion to friends, his modesty, his talents and his manly worth. ��The presence of such a man �X of high intelligence, actuated by no selfish or unworthy aims, and thoroughly acquainted with the wants and failings of the Colony, �X was itself valuable��. 21 On his death, at the age of thirty-four, he bequeathed his natural history collection to Scarborough Museum in Yorkshire. This included his collection of shells, insects, birds and marine life. He left his herbarium, botanical books and instruments, and his double-barrelled gun to his friend, the botanist Henry Fletcher Hance. His three gold watches went to his family in England. His three silver cups, house, furniture and land (Inland Lot 504), with ��all the money in my possession�� went to his Chinese housekeeper, Leong A. Yung. She must have meant a great deal to him.22
Besides the four colonial surgeons mentioned above, no fewer than nine other doctors, if the doctors from the armed services are included, are buried in the Cemetery. They include Dr. William Lorrain [40/4/6] who is buried with his wife Jessie, and Dr. George Brice [20/3/4]. Dr. Lorrain is mentioned by the
Russian naval officer, Iosif Antonovich Goshkevich, as having a large collection
of shells gathered during his travels in America and India.23 He was the doctor who alerted the public to the horrors of what was then dubbed by the local press
as ��The Black Hole of Hong Kong�� after he found Ah-lum, his family and fifty of
his workmen incarcerated in a tiny room with no facilities. Ah-lum was the owner
of the bakery in Wan Chai which sold the bread laden with arsenic to almost the
entire European and Indian population at the beginning of the Second Opium
War.
Dr. Brice, a Scotsman from Edinburgh, died in 1862(?) aged forty-two.24
He lived on a chop-boat at Whampoa for many years, tending to the needs of sick
sailors from the vessels anchored there. In 1853, a portion of the chapel room of
the Whampoa Bethel had been partitioned off at the request of the residents so
that wards could be erected to accommodate sick or wounded sailors, the chapel congregation having dwindled to three or four persons. On the departure of the 25 He
American, Dr. Gregg, Dr. Brice took charge of this small hospital space. escaped with his chop-boat to Hong Kong at the beginning of the Second Opium
War. Brice is one of the few men who married his Chinese ��protected girl��, Yearn
Anow. The wedding between him and Yearn Arrow took place in the seamen��s
floating Bethel at Hong Kong in March 1859. His little daughter, Winefred [sic] Astor, who died one month after her father in 1862 and is commemorated with him on the headstone, must be among the earliest Eurasians buried in the Cemetery.26
Three naval surgeons, David Davidson [9/14/2], Robert Bankier [13/1/1], Henry French [13/8/1] of HMS Winchester, and the four army surgeons bring the total of deaths among doctors to thirteen. Dr. Bankier had been in Hong Kong certainly since May 1842, first as surgeon on board HMS Blenheim when at a court-martial he gave evidence in favour of a certain Lieutenant Christopher that he had fallen down, not as alleged by the prosecution as a result of drink, but in an epileptic fit. He was later in charge of the Royal Navy hospital ship, Alligator and after that the Minden. The principal medical officer to the forces,

John Pullin Hawkey [20/4/4], died in 1854, aged fifty-six. Dr. Thomas O��Flaherty Esq. [16Cii/6/24] of the 59th Regiment followed him to the Cemetery in 1855. Dr. William Orr [4/5/2], also of the 59th Regiment, and Washington T. Pitton Esq. [10/4/1], staff assistant surgeon, both died in 1857. Two family members of the army surgeons also died. In October 1848, the death of Henrietta Ferguson [20/8/6], the wife of the deputy inspector general of hospitals, was recorded of whom it was said, she was ��much esteemed by all who had the pleasure of her acquaintance��.27 Dr. Dane, chief staff surgeon for the army, lost his little daughter Eva Dane [9/7/1]. It would appear that being a doctor was a highly risky occupation.
The Medico-Chirurgical Society
By modern standards it would seem unthinkable that doctors should not come together in learned societies for the purpose of furthering medical knowledge. Yet, in the climate of the society in Hong Kong, it seemed almost miraculous that they
could do so. Writing about the Medico-Chirurgical Society in the Almanac and Directory of 1848, William Tarrant congratulated the doctors on their ability to
unite in the cause of better medicine:
In a small community like Hong Kong distracted by cliques and party feelings with the additional incitements on the score of professional rivalry, it is hardly possible to suppose that a small body of men could isolate themselves and
remain united for a sufficient length of time in the enjoyment of such cordiality
as would serve to ensure the promotion of a common object.
The society was founded in May 1845, when eleven medical men met at the house of Dr. Francis Dill. At its height, seventeen doctors were members. At regular meetings, lectures were given on subjects of topical interest. The members of this society seem to have been very forward-looking:
In the spirit of purest philanthropy and in accordance with the views of the founders of this Institution, Dr. Hobson in June 1845, proposed �K the formation of a Medical School for the instruction of Chinese youth in the knowledge and practise of this benevolent profession.28
Dr. Benjamin Hobson, a medical missionary and the first secretary of the society, had to leave the colony to take his ailing wife back to England after the death of his baby son, John Abbay Hobson [11A/3/7]. Jane Hobson died within sight of Dover. The climate of opinion was changing and Hong Kong had to wait another thirty-five years for Dr. Hobson��s vision to come to fruition. The good work that this society accomplished was short-lived, an illustration perhaps
of how the frequent deaths or departures from Hong Kong of key members made it very difficult to run this kind of a small society. By
1847 the society was languishing. Dr.
Harland and Dr. Bankier decided to widen the society��s membership and aims, and changed the name to the Philosophical Society. In January
1847, this in turn was reconstituted as the Asiatic Society of China, which was re-founded in 1950 and is now flourishing

under the name of the Royal Asiatic Society.
The Illnesses Faced by the Doctors and Their Responses
Life in Hong Kong was at best precarious.29 Death in its many forms came often with great suddenness. The colonists had to deal with a whole range of unpleasant illnesses ranging from smallpox, cholera, dysentery and malaria to boils, prickly heat, conjunctivitis, worms and venereal disease. At this time, the great advances of medical science had not yet taken place and the treatments of these various diseases were both daunting and often useless.
The connection had not yet been made between the mosquito and malaria. The ��deadly remittent and intermittent fever�� which killed so many were thought to be caused by the disturbance of the soil during the cutting of roads and digging for the foundations of houses:
During the rainy monsoon a fearful pestiferous gas is emitted from the soil which, if it does not produce fever and speedy death, has the result of enervating both body and mind.30
Dr. Benjamin Ball, the visiting American dental surgeon, reporting on the suddenness with which this fever terminated life, wrote:
On the day we landed, a man stopped here at the hotel, breakfasted as usual, was afterwards taken ill and went to the hospital and at six in the afternoon, he was dead and buried. He was, however, intemperate in both eating and drinking. On the next day, eleven persons and nine on the succeeding one fell victim to the disease and were buried on the days of their death.31
A contribution to the Dublin Magazine for July 1848 described the course of the fever:
The temperate and intemperate become alike the victims of this dreadful fever which generally commences with a slight headache and gradually increases until the whole head is so sore that no part can bear its own weight or pressure on the pillow. The body becomes so weak and enervated that the patient is forced to assume a recumbent posture, and the fever rages to an incredible degree. The eyeballs are in such excessive pain that light can ill be endured and yet the closing of the eyelids is intolerable.32
The poor sufferers were treated with purgatives, cooling lotions and the ��application of leeches to the burning temples��.33 The early garrison regiments such
as the 59th Regiment were decimated by fever.
Every day at this time �K three dead bodies put into the Hearse at once and
four men of a Fatigue Party with side arms [escorted them], at quick march, off to Happy Valley��.
So many died that the uniforms of the deceased, which had cost five pounds
sterling to be docked from the soldiers�� wages, now fetched only five shillings.
Shakos & coatees got among the Chinese and you would see Dozens of them parading about in full Soldier dress, many of the Shakos became footballs for the Chinese and other Pedestrians.34
The second most common cause of death was dysentery or cholera, the two being not clearly differentiated. The methods, advocated to avoid or cure these
diseases, could have made little difference. The colonial surgeon, Dr. Chaldicott, praised the efficacy of flannel:
Flannel next to the skin and especially in the shape of a bandage round the
abdomen has been fully recognized by Indian Medical Officers, especially as
a preventative of those fearful diseases �X Cholera and Dysentery.
He strongly recommended that every soldier should be ordered to wear one ��round the abdomen night and day��. 35 To wear such bandages in the heat of the summer would have been extremely unpleasant besides being pointless. In an article written at this time, Cholera, Its Prevention and Treatment, the author recommends a mixture of mustard and salt to be taken every ten minutes to induce vomiting followed by thirty drops of tincture of opium to be given in a glass of brandy and water. It also strongly recommends the use of an embrocation of heated turpentine to be rubbed over the bowels and extremities
to which the addition of one part of laudanum [morphine] would be an
important improvement.36 If this was not to hand a mustard poultice should be placed on the stomach and bowels. Another suggested cure for cholera involved ice and champagne. According to the article, a man who consumed forty pounds
of ice with his champagne was cured. When John Wright visited Mr. Hudson,
the P. & O. clerk, he reported: ��The poor fellow looks very ill �X the night previous he had eighteen leeches on his stomach��. 37 History does not relate if Hudson survived.
Professionals 155
The sun was considered extremely dangerous as a cause of sickness to be avoided by the prudent at all times, as is shown by two verses quoted from a poem published in the China Mail:
I am the Sun of Hongkong
Who is there that knows not my power? When I dart forth my rays, I set brains in a blaze,
And then mortals dread the death hour; They sicken �X they pine �X and they die �X No skill can their being prolong; And I laugh in my heart as I watch their vain art �X For I am the sun of Hongkong!
And when in the earth they are laid, And silenced their cries and their groans, Rich feast shall the worms then make on their forms, And house in their marrowless bones! And the beetle shall clatter his wing, And drone forth the funeral song, And in triumph I��ll wave my beams o��er the grave �X For I am the Sun of Hongkong!38
Great care had to be taken to guard against its rays. During the summer, ladies only ventured out of doors in the early morning or the cool of the evening. Men were considered stronger but they came in for constant warnings against exposing their heads to the sun:
During the warmest day this month we noticed four Europeans passing along with their umbrellas closed and under their arms, the thermometer at the time
91 degrees in the shade, and the sun near the meridian. Is it to be wondered at,
that such folly in many instances is not rewarded with sickness?39
In a letter to young soldiers, a non-commissioned officer of the 18th Royal Irish
Regiment warned:
Never expose your self to the sun unnecessarily. Some unthinking men run
out bareheaded to bring in a belt, a flannel or a cap case that may be drying in
the sun. You cannot do so with impunity.40
But a more real and potent danger to the lives of the European community was drink. Men at all levels of society, but in particular those at the lower end of the
social scale had a tendency to indulge as a way of grabbing at the fleeting happiness
born of forgetfulness, which banished the stresses and fears to which they were daily subjected. A doctor, signing himself M.D., writing to the Friend of China on the question of keeping healthy in Hong Kong, recommended: ��Temperance in the hot season particularly from Ardent Spirits��, and then went on to say: ��The
water system I consider to be equally bad [as spirits]; neither are good for the
European constitutions which require supporting during the unhealthy months��. 41 He advocates substituting beer or wine for water and spirits. The local water could
not safely be drunk, so his advice was widely taken and beer and wine were quaffed
as if they were water for the purpose of quenching thirsts. Rev. J. Lewis Shuck in a report from Hong Kong on the American Baptist Mission there wrote:
You have doubtless heard much of the sickness of Hong Kong. It is true that disease and death have committed great havoc here but I can see no evidence of its being insalubrious�K. The great mortality was owing to causes in no way connected to the climate. Intemperance, exposure to the sun,
damp dwellings and filthy streets have occasioned sickness but the common
cause has been the free use of vinous and fermented and distilled liquors. In
fine I ascribe the deaths not to Hong Kong fever, there is no such malady,
but to ��imprudence fever��. 42
The fear of disease and the tendency to drink are nicely bracketed by John Wright in two adjoining diary entries for June 1849. Soon after arriving, he went by boat
to Happy Valley:
a very inappropriate name, a portion of it being the Protestant and Roman Catholic burial grounds which consecrated spots have a surprising number of tombstones �X gave one a feeling of anything but happiness. Drank too
much and was sick. Bought a case of gin off the carpenter of the ��Protomelia��. 43
In fact Wright on the whole stayed clear of drink.
Again the sudden death of Lieutenant George Dawson [16Cii/6/25] and his wife Maria on the same day shocked the society as is recorded in the newspaper:
One of those frightening events occurred last week tending to throw
over society its deepest shade of gloom. We refer to the sudden deaths of
Lieutenant Dawson of the Ceylon Rifles, and his amiable and much loved
partner (neither of them five and twenty years of age) both of whom were at
the ball given at the Clubhouse on Monday 26th Ultimo and on the following
Saturday were side by side in the cold narrow grave in Wong-nei-chong.44
Wright gave us further insights in his diary. She was:
a ladylike and interesting person �K and dotingly fond of her husband but �K he thought very little of her and a great deal too much of the bottle �X O that horrid poison.45
She died of malaria and he of delirium tremens. The sermon preached at their
funeral at St. John��s Cathedral was on the fleetingness of life. A great incentive to
drunkenness was the cheapness and easy access to shamshoo, a Chinese rice wine concocted from ethanol, nitrates and alcohol.
The lowest class of Chinese, the very lepers who cripple about the street, have in their huts for sale a deleterious spirit known among users as ��Samshoo��. To Europeans �X particularly in warm weather �X this spirit is positively
poisonous; nothing has been more clearly ascertained than the effects of this horrid drug �X fever, stupor, apoplexy, congestion have carried off hundreds
of fine healthy young men who indulged in it only once. It is so cheap that a man may get drunk for a penny�K. Chinese boats are continually stealing under the bows of ships at anchor and the poison is introduced among
seamen ignorant of its influence.46
Besides excessive drinking, the easy access to women in the many brothels that had sprung up in Hong Kong meant that venereal diseases were rife, further damaging men��s health and lowering their immune system��s ability to cope with infections. The work of the doctors was not easy and the hidden, and as yet unidentified, dangers to which they were exposed lent a heroic quality to their attempts to restore their patients to good health.

Chapter 7 The Merchant Navy
No less than seventy-two officers of merchant navy vessels and ten of their wives and fifteen of their children who died in this period are buried in the Hong Kong
Cemetery, bringing the total to ninety-seven souls. A little under half of the civilians buried in the early period, whose occupations are known, served with the
merchant navy. Of the seventy-two officers, twenty worked for the P. & O., thirty-
one are described on their headstones as masters or captains of their vessels or
as master mariners, fourteen as officers of the ships and seven as engineers. The
ninety-seven men, women and children from this time found in the Cemetery and connected with seafaring have been divided into six main sections in this chapter. The undoubted aristocrats of the merchant navy were the captains of the tea and opium clippers who raced for so many years across the oceans between China and London, taking the new season��s tea to Britain and loading up with opium in
Calcutta on their way back to the China Coast. The twenty officers serving the
P. & O. came second in terms of social importance. The next category includes
the captains and officers of ocean-going ships linking Hong Kong with the ports
of the Americas, Australia, India and Europe. This is followed by the owners,
captains and officers who had charge of the locally based fleets of river steamers
and the opium hulks. The marine surveyors are then included in a brief section and finally an attempt has been made to show something of the experiences of merchant seamen when ashore in Hong Kong.
Victoria Harbour was at the very centre of Hong Kong��s attraction and contributed more than anything else to its growing importance. It was a safe, well-sheltered, convenient anchorage and very beautiful. In 1860, John Thompson, the photographer, waxed lyrical about its beauty:
I have seen the hill capped with a wreath of pearly cloud with a fringe of rose-pink or gold, and the edges of the stone buildings beneath gilded with sunshine looming through the deepening gloom. The islands in the distance seemed like ruby clouds resting on the horizon, while near at hand a tangled forest of masts and spars rose up darkly against the face of the sky. The harbour was ablaze with light, broken by the sombre hulls of the ships, or the picturesque forms of native craft, with their huge sails spread out like wings to catch the evening breeze.1
The constant traffic up and down the China Coast, to Amoy and Shanghai, to the Americas, Australia, India and the West meant that captains, officers and sailors of the merchant navy in port formed a shifting body of men who were at the same time an integral and essential part of Hong Kong��s society, whether they based themselves in Eastern waters or plied the longer routes from the ports of Europe and the Americas. They were the life blood of early Hong Kong, responsible for providing the merchants with their goods and bringing to the port the drinks, foodstuffs and furnishings considered so necessary to the European��s way of life. They also spawned the ships�� chandlers and repair yards and gave work to blacksmiths, carpenters and sail-makers. They provided custom to the taverns keepers, many of whom ran boarding houses with accommodation for up to forty sailors alongside their taverns.
The Captains of the Tea and Opium Clippers Owned by the Merchants
Like the merchants, few of this class of men died in Hong Kong. The only headstones known to be linked to the opium clippers come from a rather later date, although they must have been active during this period. The handsome marble headstone to the late Captain James Downie [38/1/5] of the Chinaman lies prostrate on its back. Downie was a Scotsman from Rosehearty, Aberdeen. He is likely to have captained other clippers before being put in command of the Chinaman, a clipper of 668 tons built in Greenock, Scotland in 1865, and owned by the Park Brothers.2 He died in 1868 aged forty-eight leaving an estate of only
$1,183. Another link to the opium clippers in the Cemetery is through an infant,
Archibald McMurdo [20/13/4]. He was the son of Robert McMurdo, who became famous as the captain of one of the earliest opium clippers, the famous Red Rover, a barque of 255 tons. It belonged to the Jardine, Matheson & Co.
fleet which pioneered the tea/opium run between London, Calcutta and Hong
Kong. Robert McMurdo went on to become a marine surveyor in Hong Kong in 1860 and acting harbour master in 1866. The reputation of this group of men puts them among the elite of the sea captains:
There were a few men, who held the necessary qualities of a tea-ship commander, whose endurance equalled their energy, whose daring was tempered by good judgement, whose business capabilities were on par with their seamanship, and whose nerves were of cast iron.3
The captains often came from the Royal Navy attracted by the high pay. An officer serving on a famous clipper, Falcon, bought by Jardine Matheson in 1836 wrote:
Among the officers were many sons of clergymen who, after a period of active service afloat, would retire to succeed ultimately to their father��s livings or to practise at the bar, not a few finding their way into Parliament.4
The American tea clippers that started arriving in the mid-1840s revolutionized the design of these vessels. By 1852, the races between the clippers taking tea back to London had become an annual event that provided great excitement

7.1.a and b. Headstone in memory of Captain James Downie of the opium clipper, Chinaman, d. 10.3.1868.
as well as high profits for the winning clipper, who could then charge a premium for arriving first with the tea. Everyone gambled on the results and the stakes were high. The period from 1850 to perhaps 1865 was the heyday for the American and British clippers.
The enduring influence on Hong Kong of the captains of opium clippers was secured through their progeny. Two such captains had sons who made their marks in Hong Kong. Captain Ryrie commanded Jardine Matheson��s Cairngorm and later the Flying Spur in the annual tea races between Hong Kong and London. His son, Phineas Ryrie [23/8/6], held the record when he died for being the longest surviving resident in Hong Kong, and was a member of the Legislative Council for twenty-six years. Captain Andrew Shewan commanded Lammermuir and later Norman Court, also for Jardines. His son, Robert Shewan [12A/3/14] and great-nephew, William Thompson Shewan [12A/3/10] are buried in the Cemetery. It is said that Andrew Shewan kept his wife in Shanghai, which accounted for his impatience to get back to China. The many achievements of Robert Shewan in the field of business will be discussed later in this book.
The Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company Line
The seamen of this company buried in the Cemetery during these years served on vessels that constitute a roll-call of its early steamers, the Lady Mary Wood, the Erin, the Pekin, the Rajah, the Formosa, the Norna and the Ganges. Unusually for the time, they range democratically from lowly seamen, like James Wing [16Cii/7/21], a fireman, and John Jones [16Cii/7/23] up through the ranks of the officers to William Sparkes [16Ci/5/11], chief engineer of the Granada. The list of
P. & O. officers continues to the very top of the company with the second person


162 Forgotten Souls
to be commander in Hong Kong, Maximilian Fischer [20/16/8] and his wife, Caroline [20/16/9], who lie side by side in large chest tombs.
Maximilian Fischer was an old China hand who had long been established in the New French Hong in Canton. In 1844, he was listed