Thursday, July 16, 2009

Growing up in Tientsin - the Ford of Heaven

There are not many "Foreign Devils" left who grew up in 1920s and 1930s Tientsin (now spelled Tianjin) when at one time there must have been several thousand of us whose parents hailed from Britain, America, Russia, France, Germany, Italy - you name it.

Remarkably, we shared an affinity that was the envy of the troubled outside world. We played out our rivalries in games. One year it was the German Eight who took top honours at the regatta on the Hai Ho, next the British, then the Russian. In basketball it was the 15th Infantry Regiment over the Trumpeldors, in soccer the Italian Marines over Tientsin Association Football Club. In baseball the Americans were hard put by a mixed bag of Limeys, Portuguese, Tartars, Greeks.

Never mind our diverse backgrounds, we were equally at home on a rip-roaring Fourth of July, Quatorze Juillet, Queen Victoria's Birthday. And on any day of the week we'd be side by side at the street stalls relishing the irresistible piroshky, jian bing quozi, tang d'er.

On the surface we were pretty staid judging by the well attended churches, synagogues, social clubs. Can any of us forget the spine-tingling choir at the Orthodox church on Easter Morning? Yet not far down the road at Little Club the all black band gave out their explosive red-hot jazz.

Came 1949 that unique world was gone forever, the Old China Hands scattered to the four corners. Fortunately, some wrote about their upbringing. I especially like Dicky Dyott's An Edge in Wordways and Vera Soblin's Please Don't Walk On My Grave (Part 2). But as always the case, others so heavily fictionalized their memoirs that it is difficult to distinguish between truth and fairy tale.

So much of my brother Brian Power's book about his upbringing in Tientsin the Ford of Heaven was fairy tale that I felt obliged to write a commentary replacing his fantasies with fact. You will see this if you go to my June 27 2009 posting and click on the line in the text "Brian's Real Upbringing in the Ford of Heaven" and when the page opens, look down the right hand side to the foot and click again on where it says "Read in classic mode".

Sunday, July 5, 2009

Tientsin, Ford of Heaven, the hometown of George and Philo Cox.





Perhaps a little more should be said about George Cox, the Weihsien prison camp tinsmith, who figured in the closing paragraph of my June 30 posting.

He was the ever popular George Edward Cox, born and raised in Tientsin, graduate of St Louis College, secretary at Credit Foncier de l'Extreme Orient, and serving with the Tientsin Volunteer Defence Corps at the time of Pearl Harbor.

He would be the first to acknowledge that he was outshone by his wife, Philomena Splingaerd who was granddaughter of Paul Splingaerd the most highly honoured foreigner in China during the Ching Dynasty, a Belgian raised to the ninth level of Mandarin as decreed by the Imperial Court. And recognized no less by his native country, he was knighted by His Majesty King Leopold II. (See The Belgian Mandarin, Paul Splingaerd, by Anne Splingaerd Megowan, herself a direct descendant, at http://www.xlibris.com/TheBelgianMandarin.html )

After the war, George and Philomena and son Kenneth and daughter Angela (born in Weihsien camp where my mother was appointed her godmother) settled in Vancouver, BC, Canada. In 1966, George entertained two well-known Weihsien ex-internees, Rev Father Raymond de Jaegher and Dr Guy Chan.

In the upper left photo, George is on the left, Fr de Jaegher in the centre, and Dr Chan on the right.

All through internment, Fr de Jaegher maintained contact with Chinese villagers and through them the guerilla forces operating in the vicinity. And it was also he who masterminded the escape of Tipton and Hummel in 1944. Following liberation, he authored the rare work on the Red take-over in China, The Enemy Within.

Dr Guy H Chan, a Canadian, was a highly regarded medical doctor in the camp. Imprisoned with him were his wife, May, a nurse, and their two sons, Guy and Eugene. Guy the younger, who also went into medicine, became Dr Guy Hugh Chan, opthalmologist in Philadelphia, PA.

The photo on the upper right was taken on the happy occasion when one of Philomena Cox's bosom friends from Tientsin, Grace Lambert, paid her a vist. Grace was on an extended holiday staying with her son Desmond and family in West Vancouver. From the left in the photo are Mrs Borioni (a close Tientsin friend of both Philo and Grace), Grace, Philo, and Desmond with his sons Jeremy and Timothy.