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

       PROLOGUE

      In the spring of 2007 in a crowded Beijing restaurant an elderly Chinese man rose to his feet and silenced his fellow diners with a song he had learnt as a child:

       Three blind mice, three blind mice,

       See how they run, see how they run

       They all ran after the farmer’s wife

       She cut off their tails with a carving knife

       Three blind mice, three blind mice.

      Although seventy-five years old, Nieh Guanghan had a strong tenor voice, and to the bafflement of the restaurant he reeled off a number of other English nursery rhymes, finishing with a rousing rendition of:

       London’s Burning,

       London’s Burning,

       Fire! Fire!

      The elderly Chinese guests had all learnt those and other songs by heart as children. They had gathered to share their memories of the man who had taught them to sing English nursery rhymes, and to whom they owed their lives, a young Englishman who became both their headmaster and their adoptive father at the height of the Sino–Japanese war in the 1940s.

      His name was George Aylwin Hogg, and in a few brief years during the three-sided war in China he achieved legendary status in the north-west of the country. Although unknown in his own homeland he remains well loved and remembered by those he met and cared for in the brief years he worked in China before his death in July 1945.

      It was in China in 1984 that I had first come across the story of Hogg, when I was working for the London Daily Telegraph as holiday relief in the Beijing bureau. After several barren days searching for a decent story I went to the British Embassy Club for a quiet beer. There I overheard a British diplomat complain that he had to fly to the town of Shandan in the remote north-west of the country, because the Chinese authorities had erected the bust of an Englishman in the town.

      Strange things were happening in Beijing at the time. Mao Tse-tung had died in 1976, allowing Deng Xiaoping to return from disgrace and begin the economic liberalisation that was to set China on the path to today’s burgeoning market economy. The first McDonald’s had opened in Beijing. Cars were just beginning to challenge the many millions of bicycles on the streets of the capital. Western businessmen were arriving with every flight at the international airport. Nevertheless, the idea that China would honour an unknown Englishman with a bust seemed preposterous.

      But it turned out to be true. In August that year some eighty elderly gentlemen gathered in Shandan to join local officials and a number of VIPs from Beijing to mark the reopening of a school and library. There were eloquent speeches to mark the reconstruction of a tomb and gravestone desecrated by Red Guards during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. Flowers and wreaths were laid on the grave. A statue was unveiled. Old men shed tears.

      The man whose memory was being was honoured had ended an epic journey – and his life – in this remote region of China in 1945. George Hogg’s work in the Chinese co-operative movement in the 1940s, and later as headmaster of a school for war orphans, would always have earned him the tribute of later generations. But what made him a hero to the Chinese was the ten-week journey he made in 1945, against all odds, over the highest mountains in western China with a school of young boys in the worst winter for twenty years, seeking and finding sanctuary from the Japanese on the edge of the Gobi desert. The elderly men who had travelled to Shandan in the summer of 1984 were all Hogg’s old boys who survived that terrible journey nearly forty years earlier.

      Sadly, I did not have time to take the two internal flights and make the then sixteen-hour car journey to join them at the graveside ceremony. The Telegraph had cut short my stint in China with a characteristically curt instruction to go to Hong Kong. I only had time to file a news story about the honour paid to an unknown Englishman before heading for Beijing airport.

      Back in London, I took a closer look at George Hogg, and discovered that he had been a great deal more than the heroic headmaster of a school in wartime China. In a book, in his letters and through his journalism he