Book Review: Strong to save

Book Reviews

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Strong to Save: Maritime Mission in Hong Kong from Whampoa Reach to the Mariners’ Club by Stephen Davies Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong Press (RAS Hong Kong Studies Series), 2017, 600 pages and 65 b/w illustrations. ISBN 978-962-937-305-4, HK$278 (Reviewed by Vaudine England) The first clue to Davies’ suitability for the complex task ahead of him in this book is found in the book’s dedication: ‘For my father, Reverend Clifford Davies, OBE, AKC, RN (rtd), 1906-1980, Priest, Seafarer, Actor-Dramatist, Musician-Composer, Poet, Author, Exemplar.’

Quite a bit about the young Dr Davies is found in those few lines; though certainly not a priest, he is a seafarer, dramatist and author, too.

Davies applies his not insignificant personality, in full boisterous humour, to his subject. This oomph, which oozes through the text, is tightly wound into his exquisitely tuned ear for the deceit of historical records which again, is inextricably intertwined with his overwhelming drive for fact and detail.

All of this is clear early on. Noting how sailors, on those rare occasions they were allowed ashore in tightly-regulated Canton, were soon suffering the effects of samshoo and descending into drunkenness, Davies then gently chides not the hapless sailor but the business men safe on shore: ‘Piety and a concern for the ordinary seamen, though never before complete strangers in the Western trading community in China, were [now] in the ascendant’. (p. 6) Clearly, most of the time, they were not!

He next tackles the minutiae of exactly what sort of Mission was founded where, when and by whom, with a forensic approach to historical enquiry.

Analysing a first image of a floating Mission, ‘Certainly the hills in the left background, and the trading junk and auxiliary steam vessel in the right background could suggest Victoria Harbour’, he allows, judiciously. He then proceeds to demolish his own thought: ‘although it is just as probably a generic Chinese coastal hill.’ Or perhaps it doesn’t exist at all? Happily, two conflicting accounts may both be true. Indeed, Davies allows the evidence, such as it is, to provide ‘the first concrete, if ambiguous evidence’ of mission work for seafarers in Hong Kong.

To the reader this is all invigorating stuff. One has to stay alert with Davies but the effort is certainly rewarded. No doubt it is merely the failure

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of my own religious upbringing not to know what a Bethel flag actually is, but that ignorance does not impede the story’s flow.

Alongside the Davies investigative verve is the simple fact that he knows his subject inside out. He can helpfully relate early verbosity—as in the name, ‘Mission to Seamen Afloat, at Home and Abroad’—to the modern reality where it is the ‘afloat’ bit, the visits to ships where the sailors live and work, that is now most important. Having romped through the mess of beginnings in Canton and Hong Kong, American and otherwise, ecclesiastical and secular, practical and moral, he introduces Hong Kong’s raw, polyglot society—where rules for seamen’s boarding houses were published ‘in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Hindostanee and Chinese’—and stresses the failure of the Missions to do anything for Asian seafarers until the mid-twentieth century.

To be blamed are ‘typical colonial paternalism’, a desire to keep government costs low, and ‘at best a distant condescension towards and at worst a wholesale neglect of those who were not westerners.’ (p. 16) One is taken through the thorny question of what is a lascar and the ‘explicitly discriminatory’ state of British maritime law until 1963, into the central role of Jardine, Matheson & Co in the succour to seamen—which continues to this day. In January 1861 the first meeting for the purpose of establishing a Sailors’ Home was held (at The Hong Kong Club), marking the start of what Davies calls Hong Kong’s ‘unique, two-in-one philanthropic as opposed to commercial solution to caring for both the spiritual and the material welfare of seamen who are far from home.’ (p. 33) Alas, ‘singularly hapless’ management led to financial collapse, and the seamen’s strikes almost finished off the whole idea. The Home and Seamen’s Institute were firmly on the side of the colonial authorities, thus firmly against the 80-90 percent of Hong Kong seafarers who were Chinese and on strike. Davies also tackles the conflicts between chaplains and seamen over the demon drink, highlighting the persistent tension between the secular and the missionary impulse to care for sailors. Along the way, we are treated to the re-shaping not only of legislation and the treatment of seafarers worldwide, and major shifts in worldwide shipping and trade, but the changing shape of Hong Kong’s harbour as he tackles harbour masters’ maps with gusto.

The tangled variety of different institutions—from the matshed Seamen’s Institute first opened in today’s Haiphong Road in 1891 and the Star Coffee House on Queen’s Road—is not all Davies’s fault. After all, as he notes, ‘the waters here are extremely muddy and the evidence slight, spasmodic and

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connected only by inference.’ Davies is not scared of such imponderables, however. He wades though the swamps of destitution (who was destitute, who should care?), through the mires of the property market and changing trade, yet is forced to conclude that ‘disentangling truth from muddled recollection is often impossible’. (pp. 79-85) Where there are records, they are dissected mercilessly, such as where provision is stated to be supplied to ‘white crews’, not Christians, foreign or any other but ‘white’. (p. 94) By the 1930s this was becoming untenable; more than 90 percent of ships crews were Asiatic. The new Sailors Home and Seamen’s Institute on Gloucester Road, Wanchai, faced the same old problems—lack of men at the Chapel, and in the rooms. Competition from the flashy new YMCA on Salisbury Road and falling numbers of British seafarers were part of the story, snobbery the other; most residents were Royal Navy so merchant seamen felt less welcome.

Davies’s excruciating attention to detail is shown (p. 194) when as war approached in the late 1930s, there was ‘the good news… that the Mission’s cat, Sugar, had given birth to three “nice little kittens”…’ Yet in his account of the war, it is Davies the seafarer and rambunctious story-teller who clearly revels in the drama of it all.

Davies’s central mission in tracing how seamen were and should be looked after remains the post-war focus, through the changing legislative and shipping landscape. By 1967, the Mariners’ Club opened and it is easy to see the transition from early evangelical, temperance, Anglican and colonialist Missions to today’s ‘open-minded, open-hearted’ organisation.

Davies details how vital plans to redevelop have been stymied, and lauds the work of Peter Ellis and his successor Stephen Miller in reshaping the broadest possible mission to seamen in tune with the times, including involvement with international labour rights and welfare networks. No matter what change is coming—for Davies notes the world of shipping and Hong Kong is at a juncture not dissimilar to the arrival of steam back in the nineteenth century—the Mission will be there to serve.

Any reader of this work would be foolish to stop there. The endnotes—85 pages—are the sort that add colour and fascination to it all. Even the Acknowledgements take on a life of their own. Davies excoriates the petty-fogging greed of governments which force their libraries (such as the British) to render access to newspaper archives a commercial venture. He is gentle on the workers in Hong Kong’s increasingly marginalised and under-

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funded archival institutions—the Public Records Office and Central Library amongst others—as he knows the short-comings are not those of the people at the front desks but the budget-strippers hidden behind walls of bureaucratic obfuscation and delay. He gives special thanks, as any writer of Hong Kong history must do, to Dr Christopher Munn and Dr Elizabeth Sinn, too.

Simply put, this is an important and invigorating work.