Midnight in Peking - by Paul French
Nature is relentless and unchangeable, and it is indifferent as to whether its hidden reasons and actions are understandable to man or not
Galileo
On the morning of January 8th 1937, an old man named Chang Pao-chen was taking his songbird for a walk (apparently, a Chinese custom) along the Tarter Wall of Peking, the ancient Chinese capital which we today, with scrupulous correctness, know as Beijing. On reaching the Fox Tower, a watch tower built as part of the wall, he came across two rickshaw pullers pointing excitedly at the rubbish-strewn base of the tower, where a horribly mutilated body lay. In Peking in 1937, with the Nationalists and Communists at daggers drawn and the Japanese at the gates, life was cheap, but this body was different; this was a laowai, a European woman, and when Chang reported her to the authorities, the circus swung into action, for this was no ordinary laowai; her name was Pamela Werner, and she was the daughter of the former British Consul in Peking.
In the 1930s, there were a surprisingly high number of Europeans living in China. Most of them were White Russians chased out by the Bolsheviks and ending up pimping, whoring, slinging drinks in dingy bars or selling their muscle to Chinese warlords; they were a forgotten people doing whatever they had to do to get by, and it wasn’t uncommon to find one of them face down in a midden with no mourners at their funeral, but the daughter of one of His Majesty’s diplomats was another story. Although the body was found in Chinese territory (as opposed to the city’s Legation Quarter, where Chinese law did not run) and therefore officially the responsibility of the Chinese police, when it came to a body which actually mattered, there was no question of allowing the Chinese to work the case unaccompanied. Richard Dennis, a chief inspector of detectives from the British controlled treaty port of Tientsin was brought in to “assist”.
Thereafter, the investigation, while publicly conducted in an exemplary manner, turned and twisted up a series of blind alleys until it was quietly parked. Although Dennis himself was a straight arrow, he was informed - in that very British and consular manner in which nothing that is said can actually be ascribed to a particular source - that this case was going to remain unsolved. The reason was face, a very Chinese concept to be sure, but one which the imperial powers in Asia had taken to with a vengeance. The killer was almost certainly a white man, and in the imperial mind, white men had to be seen as godlike figures; it wouldn’t do to hang one for such an unspeakable crime.
Paul French, a historian and resident of China for a decade or so, has done an excellent job recreating the no-mans-land of Peking as it was in 1937, ostensibly under the control of the Nationalists, but now secondary to the acting capital of Nanking, and, with the Japanese pressing ever closer, about to change forever. He peels back the layers of history to show us who killed Pamela Werner, and why he was allowed to go free, but really, this is the touching and poignant story of Pamela’s father, Edward Theodore Chalmers Werner.
Old Man Werner was of that kidney which only existed in the days of Empire. Loyal servants of some mother-country which they hardly ever stepped foot in from one end of their lives to the other, they were tough as old boot leather, completely self-reliant and relentless in their causes. When the investigation was sidelined, Werner - familiar with the machinations of the British Foreign Office - realized there was a cover-up in progress and launched his own probe, and no better man for the job. A renowned Sinologist, he had spent decades in China, spoke several dialects like a native, was intimately familiar with the country, its history and customs, and knew exactly where to send his agents to look. It didn’t take him long to find the identity of the culprit, but getting past the British authorities was a far harder labour than getting past the Tarter Wall ever was. Decades after Werner’s death, French ran across Werner’s reports in the archives of the Metropolitan Police in London, where they had been sent by the Foreign Office, presumably after being stamped “read and ignored”.
Werner’s story is a sad one, but not without a certain beauty and poignancy . Half Prussian (the name would be pronounced Verner), he was born in New Zealand, and, except for his school years, hardly spent a day in England, even after he retired. A solitary, prickly man, he was not popular in the greasy-pole climbing world of British diplomacy, but still managed to progress further than any of his year’s intake into the foreign service. A lonely figure, in his forties he met and somehow won Gladys Nina Ravenshaw, an extraordinarily beautiful young woman, almost twenty years his junior, far wealthier and gifted and talented to boot. How a relatively obscure diplomat managed to pull a peach like this was a mystery to his fellow colonials, yet the accounts of them sailing together into a British clubhouse and smashing the place up with riding crops speaks of that real, magical spark that sometimes crackles between two people.
Unfortunately, as was all too often the case in those days, Gladys died very young. They never had any children of their own, but had adopted Pamela from a Catholic orphanage. Pamela’s history is unknown, but she believed (and was probably correct in doing so) that she was White Russian. Her photograph shows a willowy and not particularly pretty young woman, but her eyes are quite attractive, and certainly she must have had some kind of charisma, as her boyfriend was quite a handsome athletic type. In any event, Werner was not about to let her death be just another statistic, and he hunted down her killer with a determination sadly absent from the official investigation.
Unfortunately, he lingered too long in Peking, and got scooped up by the Japanese when the finally advanced into the city. Sent off to internment, a lesser man might have buckled under the weight of a Japanese prison camp, especially when, in a final irony, the man who killed Pamela was sent to the same camp. Not ETC Werner, though. Vinegary old colonial that he was, he survived everything the Japanese threw at him and walked to freedom when the liberation finally came. He returned to Peking, where his servants, still wonderfully loyal to him, had kept up his old house, but by the 1950s had been forced out by the Communists. When he returned to England, he hadn’t been “home” since 1917, and there he died at eighty-four years of age a couple of years later. I think the saddest line in the book is when French reveals that Pamela now lies beneath the Beijing ring-road, which was built over the British cemetery in Peking.
Still, Werner outlived the man who killed his daughter, and it must have been some comfort to the old boy that he died at a relatively young age. Perhaps now, Werner’s story finally told, there is a measure of justice for him. French speculates on the final moments of Pamela’s life, but he does so not from prurience but to remind us that she was a real, living, breathing young woman whose life was ended by murder; his account, while disturbing, is not salacious or needlessly offensive. If you’re in the market for pulp murder, this is not the book for you, but if you’re interested in a sad, forgotten story of an annihilated family who might have been much more, this is recommended.
Update 24/8/12 - apparently, the film rights have been sold and the story is to be made into a mini-series. May be worth watching out for.
Galileo
On the morning of January 8th 1937, an old man named Chang Pao-chen was taking his songbird for a walk (apparently, a Chinese custom) along the Tarter Wall of Peking, the ancient Chinese capital which we today, with scrupulous correctness, know as Beijing. On reaching the Fox Tower, a watch tower built as part of the wall, he came across two rickshaw pullers pointing excitedly at the rubbish-strewn base of the tower, where a horribly mutilated body lay. In Peking in 1937, with the Nationalists and Communists at daggers drawn and the Japanese at the gates, life was cheap, but this body was different; this was a laowai, a European woman, and when Chang reported her to the authorities, the circus swung into action, for this was no ordinary laowai; her name was Pamela Werner, and she was the daughter of the former British Consul in Peking.
In the 1930s, there were a surprisingly high number of Europeans living in China. Most of them were White Russians chased out by the Bolsheviks and ending up pimping, whoring, slinging drinks in dingy bars or selling their muscle to Chinese warlords; they were a forgotten people doing whatever they had to do to get by, and it wasn’t uncommon to find one of them face down in a midden with no mourners at their funeral, but the daughter of one of His Majesty’s diplomats was another story. Although the body was found in Chinese territory (as opposed to the city’s Legation Quarter, where Chinese law did not run) and therefore officially the responsibility of the Chinese police, when it came to a body which actually mattered, there was no question of allowing the Chinese to work the case unaccompanied. Richard Dennis, a chief inspector of detectives from the British controlled treaty port of Tientsin was brought in to “assist”.
Thereafter, the investigation, while publicly conducted in an exemplary manner, turned and twisted up a series of blind alleys until it was quietly parked. Although Dennis himself was a straight arrow, he was informed - in that very British and consular manner in which nothing that is said can actually be ascribed to a particular source - that this case was going to remain unsolved. The reason was face, a very Chinese concept to be sure, but one which the imperial powers in Asia had taken to with a vengeance. The killer was almost certainly a white man, and in the imperial mind, white men had to be seen as godlike figures; it wouldn’t do to hang one for such an unspeakable crime.
Paul French, a historian and resident of China for a decade or so, has done an excellent job recreating the no-mans-land of Peking as it was in 1937, ostensibly under the control of the Nationalists, but now secondary to the acting capital of Nanking, and, with the Japanese pressing ever closer, about to change forever. He peels back the layers of history to show us who killed Pamela Werner, and why he was allowed to go free, but really, this is the touching and poignant story of Pamela’s father, Edward Theodore Chalmers Werner.
Old Man Werner was of that kidney which only existed in the days of Empire. Loyal servants of some mother-country which they hardly ever stepped foot in from one end of their lives to the other, they were tough as old boot leather, completely self-reliant and relentless in their causes. When the investigation was sidelined, Werner - familiar with the machinations of the British Foreign Office - realized there was a cover-up in progress and launched his own probe, and no better man for the job. A renowned Sinologist, he had spent decades in China, spoke several dialects like a native, was intimately familiar with the country, its history and customs, and knew exactly where to send his agents to look. It didn’t take him long to find the identity of the culprit, but getting past the British authorities was a far harder labour than getting past the Tarter Wall ever was. Decades after Werner’s death, French ran across Werner’s reports in the archives of the Metropolitan Police in London, where they had been sent by the Foreign Office, presumably after being stamped “read and ignored”.
Werner’s story is a sad one, but not without a certain beauty and poignancy . Half Prussian (the name would be pronounced Verner), he was born in New Zealand, and, except for his school years, hardly spent a day in England, even after he retired. A solitary, prickly man, he was not popular in the greasy-pole climbing world of British diplomacy, but still managed to progress further than any of his year’s intake into the foreign service. A lonely figure, in his forties he met and somehow won Gladys Nina Ravenshaw, an extraordinarily beautiful young woman, almost twenty years his junior, far wealthier and gifted and talented to boot. How a relatively obscure diplomat managed to pull a peach like this was a mystery to his fellow colonials, yet the accounts of them sailing together into a British clubhouse and smashing the place up with riding crops speaks of that real, magical spark that sometimes crackles between two people.
Unfortunately, as was all too often the case in those days, Gladys died very young. They never had any children of their own, but had adopted Pamela from a Catholic orphanage. Pamela’s history is unknown, but she believed (and was probably correct in doing so) that she was White Russian. Her photograph shows a willowy and not particularly pretty young woman, but her eyes are quite attractive, and certainly she must have had some kind of charisma, as her boyfriend was quite a handsome athletic type. In any event, Werner was not about to let her death be just another statistic, and he hunted down her killer with a determination sadly absent from the official investigation.
Unfortunately, he lingered too long in Peking, and got scooped up by the Japanese when the finally advanced into the city. Sent off to internment, a lesser man might have buckled under the weight of a Japanese prison camp, especially when, in a final irony, the man who killed Pamela was sent to the same camp. Not ETC Werner, though. Vinegary old colonial that he was, he survived everything the Japanese threw at him and walked to freedom when the liberation finally came. He returned to Peking, where his servants, still wonderfully loyal to him, had kept up his old house, but by the 1950s had been forced out by the Communists. When he returned to England, he hadn’t been “home” since 1917, and there he died at eighty-four years of age a couple of years later. I think the saddest line in the book is when French reveals that Pamela now lies beneath the Beijing ring-road, which was built over the British cemetery in Peking.
Still, Werner outlived the man who killed his daughter, and it must have been some comfort to the old boy that he died at a relatively young age. Perhaps now, Werner’s story finally told, there is a measure of justice for him. French speculates on the final moments of Pamela’s life, but he does so not from prurience but to remind us that she was a real, living, breathing young woman whose life was ended by murder; his account, while disturbing, is not salacious or needlessly offensive. If you’re in the market for pulp murder, this is not the book for you, but if you’re interested in a sad, forgotten story of an annihilated family who might have been much more, this is recommended.
Update 24/8/12 - apparently, the film rights have been sold and the story is to be made into a mini-series. May be worth watching out for.