Ocean Devil: The life and legend of George Hogg. James MacManus

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ was an unusual woman, with an extraordinary past. Her latest biographer, Ruth Price, presents a well-documented case that Smedley was in fact an agent of the Comintern, the organisation set up in Moscow in 1919 to foment communist revolution around the world.

      She had been born in rural poverty in Missouri in 1892, and when she was ten her family had moved to the coal country of Colorado. Her father was a labourer by profession and a drunk by inclination. Her mother died from malnourishment when Agnes was sixteen. Her father rifled the few savings she had hidden away – $45 – and went to get drunk with the boys. Agnes was left at home with a younger sister and two brothers. She also had charge of a baby born to an elder sister who had died in childbirth. She took a decision then that she was to live by all her life. She would not play by society’s rules. She would not live as other women did, and certainly not as a drudge looking after four children and a drunk of a father.

      Making rudimentary arrangements for the children, Agnes left home to begin a life of semi-vagabondage that was to last for years. She arrived in New York in her early twenties, worked as a waitress during the day and by night studied at New York University. Here, during the years of the First World War, she became politically active among Indian exile nationalists seeking to overthrow the British Raj. Typically, Smedley was not content with political posturing. In 1918 she was convicted and jailed for gun-running and violating America’s Neutrality Act. Thus began her life as a radical, which was only to end with her death in 1950, while she was under investigation for espionage.

      Her biographer Ruth Price described Smedley as ‘a virago who challenged the world…Smedley sparked intense, divergent responses in a tremendous range of people in her lifetime.’ Political conservatives saw her as either a dizzy camp-follower of the Chinese communists or a dangerous revolutionary to be suppressed at all costs. Fellow journalists dismissed her fervent reportage as wholly slanted; others were offended by her morals: she publicly boasted of sleeping with ‘all colours and shapes’. Those who actually knew her saw either a troubled and unstable eccentric or an impossibly soft-hearted dreamer. ‘I may not be innocent, but I am right,’ was one of her sayings, but it might well have been, ‘I went too far – and then further.’

      By the time Smedley arrived in China in 1929 she had already been branded a dangerous radical by conservatives. The Frankfurter Zeitung refused to publish her first reports of Japanese atrocities after the invasion of Manchuria. But she was proved right, and became a leading correspondent for the paper until the Nazis took power in 1933. Her London publisher, Victor Gollancz, drew her to the attention of the Manchester Guardian, which also appointed her a correspondent in China.

      As in every other city that has hosted journalists in a time of crisis – Saigon and Salisbury, Rhodesia, in the 1970s, Jerusalem at almost any time and Beirut in the eighties – the foreign correspondents gathered at one particular watering hole to gossip, drink, fall in love and betray each other. In Saigon it was the bar of the Continental Palace, in Salisbury the Quill Club, and in Beirut the Commodore Hotel. In Hankow it was both the US naval canteen and the nearby Terminus Hotel. The modern history of Hankow is closely connected with that of the Yangtse Patrol, a US naval detachment which was there to protect the American presence and personnel in the city, and whose fleet of gunboats operated from the riverfront. As far as the press was concerned the real contribution of the patrol was its canteen, which like the US Navy was supposed to be dry. Since the Hankow press corps spent so much time there, one assumes they managed to circumvent the rules.

      Smedley was a key figure among the correspondents who gathered in the naval canteen or the Terminus Hotel, where strong drinks were obligatory. She introduced George Hogg to the other members of the press corps, and he quickly found himself a novice member of their fraternity.

      Years later Rewi Alley, a New Zealander and communist sympathiser who was also in Hankow at the time, and who was to play a crucial role in Hogg’s life in China, commented on Hogg’s relationship with Smedley.

       George was amazed at the liberated nature of Smedley’s social life and the openness of her communist views. She liked him because he wasn’t like others in the press corps. He had brought no views of his own to China apart from the pacifist ideals of his family. And Smedley thought those were faintly ridiculous because the Chinese were fighting for their survival. She believed that you had to fight for everything that you got in life. And he agreed with her. They were friends but I think that was all.

      Smedley liked Hogg, and wished to convert him to her own view of communism. She also let him use her bank account in Hankow to cash cheques, and became a source of good advice on where to go to find the story. George had known and loved strong, unconventional and ‘difficult’ women all his life. His mother and aunt were strong-minded people with unconventional views for the era in which they lived. Smedley was like a more dangerous version of Aunt Muriel, without, however, the strict middleclass manners and morals with which the Hogg family were brought up.

      There was another larger-than-life figure who enlivened and illuminated the Hankow scene. Sir Archibald Clark-Kerr had been appointed British Ambassador to China in early 1938, just after the embassy moved from Nanjing to Hankow. Clark-Kerr was an unconventional and colourful character. He and his blonde Chilean wife Tita made a point, both in Hankow and later in Chongqing, of holding parties that mixed nationalists, communists, journalists and businessmen. With golden curls, tiny, perfect features and the trace of a Spanish accent, Lady Clark-Kerr looked like an exotic doll. Behind the baby-doll image lay an intelligent and well-informed woman. The Ambassador and his wife were prominent members of Hankow’s social life, and made a point of forging good relations with the press corps.

      Agnes Smedley was almost as surprised as the other guests when she was invited to dine at the Ambassador’s imposing residence one night. She turned up in a borrowed dress, expecting to be vilified for her views on the British Empire. She had after all been jailed twenty years earlier in New York for gun-running for the nascent Indian nationalist movement. But Sir Archibald surprised her. She found him to be ‘a lean brown Scotchman with a keen tough mind and a scintillating sense of humour’ who clearly, if discreetly, shared her views on the nationalist government. Unable to reconcile his charm and sympathetic political views with his role as British Ambassador, Smedley concluded that he was a ‘good Scotchman fallen among diplomats’. More importantly for George Hogg, that night Clark-Kerr revealed two important facts that Smedley would pass on to him. They would change his life.

      The Ambassador told his guests that he was an enthusiast for a plan to set up industrial co-operatives in rural areas to replace China’s shattered industrial infrastructure and to help arm and equip the forces fighting the Japanese. Silence fell over the table as he explained that he had been much impressed by the New Zealander Rewi Alley, who was trying to persuade the government to back the idea. According to Smedley, one of the guests spluttered that Alley was an illusionist chasing a will o’the wisp. In that case, said the Ambassador, it might not be a bad idea if more people pursued that will o’the wisp.

      Clark-Kerr made it clear to his guests that he was going to help Alley, and would promote the idea of industrial co-ops to Chiang Kai-shek and his wife Soong Meiling. He was true to his word. The wife of the Chinese leader became an enthusiastic supporter and organiser of the plan to create small-scale factory workshops in rural areas. She was crucial to the early successes of the movement.

      Alley at that time was working as a municipal employee, inspecting factories in Shanghai. But he moved to Hankow for several weeks in 1938 to work on the co-operative project, and there he briefly met George Hogg. Smedley, who was also an enthusiast for co-ops, introduced the two men in the hope that Hogg would write an article about the project. He made a note to investigate the supposed rural renaissance of China’s industry, and left it at that.

      Having found lodgings at the Lutheran mission, Hogg had next to find the money to pay the rent. Bishop Roots may have been a good Christian, but he wasn’t in the business of giving free accommodation СКАЧАТЬ