Behind the images: photography in Lost in Shanghai Part 2
Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s as seen by a colonial family
As far as I know my paternal grandmother Ethel didn’t keep a diary. But she did own a Kodak camera; a Folding Brownie which she carried around in her handbag. Over the twenty years that she and her family lived in China, Ethel took snapshots of daily life; of her children, friends and holidays. Her husband Rae, meanwhile, worked as an engineer maintaining the fuel installations servicing the booming coastal shipping trade.
Ethel came to China as a teenager. She met Rae in her early twenties. My grandparents married in Hankow, started a family and remained in the Treaty Port cities until the eve of the Second World War in the Pacific.
To our family, my grandmother’s Shanghai Album is a much-loved treasure. I’m thrilled that so many of her photos feature in Lost in Shanghai, the theatre show I’m touring this month around Australia.
To be clear, while Lost in Shanghai is largely about my Mum’s upbringing in early twentieth century Shanghai, this album is from my father’s side of the family. My Mum’s immediate family didn’t own a camera although her well-off uncle certainly did (more about that next time).
The snapshots taken by my grandmother Ethel show the early lives of her children, including my Dad, his brothers and their Chinese ayi or nanny ‘taking tea’ on the lawn!
My grandparents and their friends also commissioned portraits. This one below is by one of Shanghai’s most famous commercial photographers, Ah Fong.
Some of the images in the Shanghai Album have a colonial flavour, to put it politely. It doesn’t stop me admiring the sense of adventure of my family, leaving their staid homes to find fortune and curiosity in a far-flung outpost of the Empire.
Fortunately, both of my parents’ childhood homes still stand despite the turbulence and phenomenal growth of twentieth century China. The houses would be nearly a century old today. Until the 1990’s, Dad’s old home accommodated multiple families (at the same time) before its rebirth as a restaurant. In the early 2000s it was Asian fusion. In 2018 it was upmarket Shanghainese cuisine (super good food).
One of the last wobbly snaps in my grandmother’s album was during the finger-biting, month-long wait in Hong Kong in December 1940. Rae and Ethel were desperate to secure berths on a ship to take them away from the gathering storm in the Pacific. As each day passed, international shipping became a more dangerous proposition.
Eventually, they secured their passage.
My grandparents knew no-one in Australia. I wonder how they felt as the MV Neptuna sailed under the Sydney Harbour Bridge that summer’s day in early 1941? For the family it was the end of one great adventure and the beginning of another.
Not so for the MV Neptuna. Sadly, it met a violent end twelve months later. Requisitioned for war service immediately after my family’s passage to Australia, a Japanese air raid sunk the ship in Darwin Harbour with the loss of forty-five lives. That part isn’t in Lost in Shanghai, but I know it made a deep impact on my Dad. It still does.
My father's mother was named Ethel and she lived in Shanghai in 1918. He was born out of wedlock and given up for adoption in Japan in 1922. I wonder if your grandmother and my grandmother knew each other. She was British and named either Scott or Gibbison. Fascinating looking into these stories.
Did any of the family letters or diaries from that time survive? It would be wonderful to read their perspective.