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

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СКАЧАТЬ holidays in Switzerland. Then there was the question of George’s career. The idea of taking time off after university to travel was a novel one. Most of George’s university friends were going straight into the professions. The Depression was far from over, unemployment was still high, and the international outlook was threatening. This did not seem the time to be travelling the world seeking adventure.

      George solved the money problem by cashing in a small legacy. This would cover the £18.10s. third-class single fare to New York, and the passage from San Francisco to Japan. What little was left over would cover his expenses while he hitch-hiked across America to rejoin his aunt for the voyage across the Pacific. As for the return journey, he would find a way of earning his passage back from India.

      It was settled that aunt and nephew would sail on the Queen Mary for New York in September 1937. The night before he left, George said his farewells to Muff Nelson and other friends in the Silver Cup (which is still one of the better pubs in Harpenden). The following day he was so engrossed in the new American bestseller that had just been published in Britain, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, that he had to be dragged from his armchair for the drive to Southampton.

      There is, or was, in the Hogg family album a faded Box Brownie photograph of members of the family standing on the dockside at Southampton that September day, with the Queen Mary in the background. The group are facing a westering sun, with George in the middle, wearing a snappy trilby and suit, and his parents and Rosemary and Stephen around him.

      Third-class cabins on the Queen Mary were at the front of the ship, and thus experienced the worst of the pitching and rolling in rough weather. And the weather was bad throughout the six-day voyage. Many of the 580 third-class passengers were European migrants to North America, and for their convenience the menus in the ship’s restaurant were printed in both English and French. No one read them. The restaurant was largely deserted, as the passengers remained confined in their cabins. The little deck space available to third class was closed. While Aunt Muriel took to her cabin, George talked his way into the second class and the chance of some fresh air.

      In New York George went straight to a Fellowship of Reconciliation conference before he took to the road. To everyone’s surprise a delegate from China made a speech damning the Japanese attack on Shanghai and defending China’s right to meet force with force. He then resigned from the Fellowship. This triumph of nationalism over pacifism stunned the meeting.

      George wrote to his mother, ‘I don’t think there are many real pacifists in the world…Aren’t you glad when you hear China has pulled off something good in the war?’ It is not recorded how this letter went down at Harpenden, nor whether George told Muriel that he had begun to question the politics with which he had grown up. But he consistently distanced himself from the family’s pacifist beliefs throughout his time in China, although return letters from his mother never challenge his apostasy.

      Hogg spent several months in the autumn of 1937 hitch-hiking across and up and down the USA. By his estimate he covered 5,500 miles by car and lorry, sleeping where he could. On several occasions when he could not find anywhere to stay he was given a cell for the night by the local police. The experience was not always pleasant. He described one of his jailors, a police sergeant, as ‘a most sinister man. A steel tube took the place of a severed right hand and he was driving nails into the wall with it; no hammer was necessary. The bare room [of the police station] contained a few people standing around the stove; they spat expertly and frequently. “If you are in more of a hurry than I am,” said the sergeant, “there is always the sidewalk outside.” Only pride forbade an immediate retreat. His face was as hard as his steel tube hand; eyes blue, when you saw them, hollow cheeks and an Irish jaw. He showed me a musty pile of blankets in a filthy cell. “Up at four and we don’t feed anyone, get that straight,” he said.’

      In the Deep South an introduction from Muriel took him to the Delta co-operative farm in Rochdale, Mississippi, where black and white sharecroppers were working together to pay off their debts and buy their land. The co-operative had been founded the previous year to take in workers who had been sacked from cotton farms after trying to start a union, and it made a big impression on the English visitor: here was theory in practice, an ideal that had actually been translated into working reality.

      Still immersed in Gone with the Wind, Hogg travelled through the states and cities in which Margaret Mitchell had set her novel. He went to Richmond, Charleston and Savannah. The widespread evasion of the Prohibition laws, still supposedly in full force, made Hogg laugh: ‘Tennessee is dry!’ he wrote. ‘They voted dry because everyone makes a good profit out of illegal drink. The state police make good tips, the people get cheap liquor and the bootleggers make big profits. But the drink is still very cheap because the state can’t tax it!’

      The final leg of his journey across the United States brought a stroke of extraordinary luck, the same good fortune that would carry him through his perilous years in China. Some days before he was due to meet Aunt Muriel in San Francisco, Hogg found himself well over a thousand miles to the east, in the plains of Texas. Forced to stand outside city limits because hitching was against the law in the city, he spent day after day watching cars accelerate past him. Finally one car stopped. The driver said nothing, but drove west for a half an hour before asking his passenger where he was going.

      ‘To Japan and China with my aunt,’ replied Hogg. After considering this statement the driver said, ‘I’m on my way to China too. I’m travelling with an Englishwoman named Muriel Lester.’ It turned out that the driver was a Dr Lacey from the American Bible Society, and that he was taking a shipment of Bibles to Japan. George went with him for the remaining 1,600 miles, and met his aunt on the quayside.

      A fortnight later, in mid-November 1937, aunt and nephew arrived in Yokohama, and went to the port city of Kobe to stay with their host in Japan, Dr Toyohiko Kagawa. This remarkable man was a Christian leader in a nation where the Emperor was considered divine, and Shinto, the worship of ancestral and other gods, was the state religion. He preached pacifism in a society that been indoctrinated in the militaristic ethic, and had twice been imprisoned for trade-union activism. Kagawa had been born in 1888, orphaned at an early age, and brought up by American missionaries. Disowned by the rest of his family after his conversion to Christianity, he went to theological colleges in the United States and Japan, but rejected the endless doctrinal arguments and decided instead to work among the poor in the slums. He played a major role in the successful campaign for universal adult suffrage in 1925, and would go on to publicly apologise in 1940 for the Japanese invasion of China. This inevitably led to further arrest and imprisonment.

      Among his other activities, Dr Kagawa had spent twenty years developing a co-operative system among farmers and small businessmen around Kobe. While Aunt Muriel sought meetings with government officials to give them the benefit of her views on militarism, George was shown co-op banks, farms, restaurants and market gardens. He also learnt from Dr Kagawa how a government dominated by the military had drawn on a deeprooted cultural and religious belief in Japanese racial superiority to sanctify, and thus legitimise, the Chinese campaign in the eyes of the people. Japan projected its role in China as a civilising mission, designed to bring peace and prosperity to a country racked by warlordism and corruption. The message resonated deep within the Japanese national psyche.

      Hogg found himself in a nation gripped by chauvinist hysteria. The slow-moving invasion of China had begun in the 1890s, with an encroachment into the north-eastern region of Manchuria. But from 1931 the pace of conquest quickened. By the time George and Aunt Muriel arrived, Japan had occupied large areas of China, established a puppet state, Manchukuo, in the north-east, and taken control of the old imperial capital Beijing, then called Peking.

      In Japan, criticism of the government was forbidden. Anyone who dared to publicly question official policy was dismissed from his or her job, and even risked assassination. Newspapers and radio were heavily censored. Foreigners could be accused of spying СКАЧАТЬ