The buildings of St Stephen's College, Stanley, during the internment. Photo: Tim Ko

St Stephen’s College in Stanley, on the south coast of Hong Kong Island, is a prestigious school with boarding facilities and large playing fields, unusual for Hong Kong. But during the Second World War, the school was a far cry from the esteemed establishment it is today. Instead of boarding students, the building hosted the interned non-combatants of the Allied countries, with the exception of the French, whom the Japanese did not consider an enemy.

Hong Kong was invaded on 8 December 1941, the same time as the attack on Pearl Harbour (allowing for the International Date Line difference). The Allied troops surrendered 17 days later, on Christmas Day. The war was expected, and many civilians had evacuated to Australia, but others had stayed in the territory. Japan now had to decide what to do with the captured civilians.

The Allied civilians were asked to assemble on 21 January 1942 but were not told why. Some came prepared with food, clothes and other resources. Others came just as they were. They were then taken to St Stephen’s College. Arriving at the camp, there was a mad scramble for rooms. At the beginning, there were 2,400 Commonwealth internees, plus 300 Americans and 60 Dutch, comprised of 1,300 men, 1,000 women and 400 children. 180 of the youngsters attended compulsory lessons in the camp, the first compulsory education in Hong Kong’s history.

The American community remained in the camp for only a few months, as they were exchanged in Mozambique for members of the Japanese community living in the US. The only Japanese held by the Commonwealth, though, were fishermen who had worked on the seas north of Australia, and since they were too valuable to exchange because they knew too much, the Commonwealth internees stayed. Fortunately, the camp was run by the Japanese foreign affairs department, rather than the military, so conditions were better than those experienced by interned Allied soldiers. Credit should in particular be paid to the Japanese Lutheran reverend, Watanbe Kiyoshi, who smuggled messages and greatly needed medical drugs into the camp – acts that could, if spotted, have resulted in his execution.

The residents were constantly hungry, but conditions were far worse outside the camp, so much so that some local Chinese residents broke into the camp to try to steal things, using a hole in the barbed wire fence. The internees complained, and asked for the fence to be improved, but the Japanese insisted that the wire fence was perfect, and so the hole remained. The food was meagre and declined in quality over the period of the war. To supplement the rations, the inmates eventually grew their own food with seeds sourced from unusual places such as canned tomatoes.

Despite the harsh circumstances, many internees maintained a sense of creativity and even professionalism. Hong Kong was a place of fashion even then, but the camp residents had to make do with what they had brought with them and the textiles that the Japanese provided. One lady threatened to parade nude if more textiles were not supplied. The spirit of improvisation meant that even flour sacks were utilised, and old tyres were used for resoling shoes. One in every 18 internees was a professional medic. One of the dentists kept a record of his work in the camp, and, staying true to the spirit of capitalism in Hong Kong, he later collected 10,000 pounds from his IOU notes. The Observatory likes to boast that it continued its work throughout the war – interned weathermen collected weather details throughout all the troubles, and stored their data on multiple scraps of paper such as cigarette boxes.

There were three major escape attempts from the camp. One was a success and a small group managed to sail to Macau. Another was a failure; a group of four policemen was severely beaten, discouraging others from copying them. In total, 120 people died in the camp; some of them were executed and others were accidentally bombed by the Americans. Many of the deceased internees were buried in the graveyard next to the school.

For further reading, see "Hong Kong Internment, 1942-1945: Life in the Japanese Civilian Camp at Stanley", by Geoffrey Charles Emerson, published by the Hong Kong University Press as part of the Royal Asiatic Hong Kong Studies Series. www.hkupress.org