Scottish Samurai. Alexander McKay
father in both civilian and Coastguard dress uniform. The background to many of the photographs is the new Bridge of Don. Tom’s father is pictured in a stiff Victorian pose – tall, broad and bushy-bearded but, in his middle fifties, beginning to show his age. His mother, Mary, is resplendent in her hooped skirts. Martha, the only Glover girl and surely for that reason alone a little spoiled in a family of six brothers, is seen as a beautiful adolescent with her mother’s fresh country looks. The Glovers as depicted in these photographs look like in essence what they were – a large, reasonably well-off Victorian family at a time when the sons of the house were beginning to shake themselves free and seek out lives of their own.
Tom Glover is on record as having attended the Gymnasium as a day pupil until at least 1854. He would then have been sixteen years old and, with no known history of any higher education, he was ready to start work or training of some kind. Although no evidence is known to have survived, it is almost certain that at this time Tom joined Charles and Jim at the Marischal Street shipbroking firm run by James George. There he would have been given a grounding in shipping and clerical work, commuting daily with his brothers the couple of miles from the Bridge of Don station to the office in the town’s harbour area. But perhaps the idea of a life in insurance or shipbroking in Aberdeen did not appeal to him. Or more likely the opportunity to go abroad presented itself and he grabbed at it. It was common at this time for the Scots-dominated British merchant houses to seek out and recruit promising young lads for positions, initially as clerks, overseas. Many of these young men, after training, would be posted to the Far East. Most would spend their lives in exotic-sounding places simply as clerks – four or five hours a day routine trading office procedure and evenings in the club. But there was always the chance that opportunities would arise for the brightest to break free and establish themselves as independent merchants and make their fortune – enough of a chance, anyway, to tempt many of the young go-getters of the day. Although exactly how it came about is unclear, almost certainly this was the magnet which drew young Tom into a life of trading and adventure in the Far East.
The would-be merchant was very carefully selected. His passage and kit would cost his employer £300. For this kind of investment – three times his father’s annual salary – Tom would have had to be very fit and confident and able to convince his employers that he was potentially capable of taking over and managing a business at short notice.
Tom Glover’s exact movements after school are not known. But with the little evidence which has survived, a good guess can be made at the sequence of events which brought him to the Far East. Around this time there were two Glovers resident among the British expatriates in China: George B. Glover, commissioner of Imperial Customs, Canton; and T.G. Glover of Jardine, Matheson & Co., captain of the firm’s ship Mahamoodie which was based in Foochow. It seems likely that either or both of these Glovers were in some way related to the Glovers of Aberdeen. It would follow, then, that a recommendation for Tom came from a China-based Glover who may well have been an employee of Jardine, Matheson. In any case it would seem certain that there was some kind of clerical training, most likely with Charles and Jim at the Aberdeen shipbrokers, before Tom left for China in 1857.
A passport was issued by the Foreign Office to Thomas Glover in August 1856. Glover arrived in Shanghai ‘aged eighteen or nineteen’. Allowing six months from the issue of the passport until his arrival in China would have him leaving Aberdeen in the early part of 1857 and arriving in Shanghai in May or June of that year, shortly before his nineteenth birthday.
After eight years Tom was leaving the Granite City. In these years he had developed into a well-educated and self-assured young man. He was outgoing and likeable and most probably enjoyed the company of the available young women of the town. But the inner drive which propelled him through his life would not let him settle into a dreary office routine. Would his parents have guessed as they saw him off that it would be ten years before they saw their son again?
If one thing stands out in all the fleeting descriptions of Tom Glover’s life which have survived, it is his supreme confidence in himself. So it is not too difficult to imagine the eighteen-year-old brimming over with enthusiasm as he made his farewells to his family, most likely on the Victoria dockside in Aberdeen, from where there were regular sailings south. His brother Alex was seventeen when Tom left, Martha fifteen, and the late arrival, Alfred, a mere seven years old. All of these siblings of Tom would later become involved in their brother’s adventures in Japan.
CHAPTER TWO
FROM SHANGHAI TO NAGASAKI
The Shanghai where Tom landed in 1857 was far removed from the tranquillity of Aberdeen’s Bridge of Don. There were stops on his voyage out to acclimatise him gradually – West Africa, South Africa, India, Singapore, Hong Kong almost certainly – but Shanghai was an entirely new world for him, even if, as is likely, his Glover connections had written to him beforehand. Shanghai, literally ‘On the Sea’, was a city, a port, and the major commercial centre of China. Lying as it does between the Yangzi river to the north and Yupan Bay to the south, it was base for many of the hundreds of Western traders in the Far East at the time. Tom’s employers, Jardine, Matheson & Co., had a major branch of their business there although the head office of the company remained in Hong Kong. Tom’s first view of Shanghai was the seven-mile-long stretch of waterfront known as the Bund, behind which clustered the foreign settlement. Most likely Tom was met on his arrival by his Glover connections and shown round the bustling city where he would work and learn for the next couple of years.
Shanghai had been one of the first Chinese ports opened to Western trade and to this day it dominates mainland Chinese commerce. Following the humiliating defeat of the Chinese by the British in the Opium War of 1842, Shanghai had been subjected to unrestricted foreign trade, with the British, French and Americans holding designated areas of the city. Resident in the British sector, Tom would have learned of the then threatening Taiping Rebellion. This peasant revolt against the Manchu rulers of China, in which millions died, was led by a Chinese who believed himself to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ. The fanatical rebel army was in control of much of the country and the Western residents of Shanghai were afraid of an attack on the city.
In Shanghai he picked up the rudiments of Far Eastern trading, gaining experience the hard way – copying letters, making out Bills of Lading and learning the other routine duties of a major trading organisation. Jardine, Matheson’s office and warehouse complex occupied the prime riverside site of Shanghai, close to the Bund. Major firms – and none was bigger than Jardine, Matheson & Co. – operated in Shanghai with two or three partners, assisted by about ten European clerks – of whom Tom was one – and fifty or sixty Chinese staff. The Westerners were comfortably housed in a compound but the overpowering smell of sewage and seaweed from the Whangpoo river would be the thing most remembered at that time by many of the foreign residents. Glover’s company dealt mainly in silk, tea and opium. The early summer months were the busiest for the firm and during this season the traders worked night and day buying, transporting, packing and shipping tea and silk. At other times the pace was more leisurely, long lunches breaking the few hours spent sweating over paperwork at a desk.
During his first year, Tom would have wakened in the mornings to the sound of sentries patrolling the walls high above the settlement – British and French troops had been stationed in the city to protect the foreign residents. The yelling of their commands would have mixed with the heat, noise, dust and smells of Shanghai – a whirlwind of alien sounds and faces. The most notorious area was Blood Alley, where the price of a seaman’s beer included a twelve-year-old prostitute behind a dirty curtain. Shanghai at the time was beginning to earn its later title of the ‘Whore of the Orient’.
Tom persevered. He was there almost a year later, in April 1858, when HMS Furious anchored in the river. Aboard was the British delegation of Lord Elgin en route to Beijing to negotiate further rights for British traders in China. Elgin’s mission found the traders in Shanghai, presumably including Glover, very angry at what they saw as leniency towards the Chinese by the British government. They felt that their wishes – even more liberal trade agreements, including an expansion of the lucrative business in opium – were not being pursued in a vigorous enough fashion. The British delegation was also under orders to secure