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CHAPTER 3

My Father

FRANK GUYVER BRITTON was born on 10 May 1879 in Liverpool, but moved quite soon to Elmdon, near Thaxted in Essex, when his father John inherited the family inn with a farm. Frank thrived amid the beautiful natural surroundings, happily climbing trees and collecting bird’s eggs. But his real love was music. As a very small boy he helped the organist at church by working the bellows, in the course of which he managed to work out how to play the instrument, and by the age of twelve he was regularly filling in for the organist.

Frank was only about ten when his mother ‘Lizzie’ died. Elizabeth Sarah was one of the three Daniels sisters of Littleton Drew in Wiltshire, a beautiful town in the lovely green English countryside. But her elder sister Amelia Jane (‘Millie’) decided that living in a country inn that was also a public house, with a yeoman farmer father who probably drank heavily and certainly disapproved of Frank’s cultural bent, was no place for her talented young nephew so she took him off to London.

Millie Daniels was married to Alfred James Bannister, whose ancestor Captain Samuel Wallis RN, of Corsham Court, near Bath, discovered Tahiti in 1767. Alfred Bannister, artist and calligrapher, was an important influence on Frank’s upbringing. Alfred was the son of a cellist and member of the Sacred Harmonic Society, who had sung in the first performance of Mendelssohn’s Elijah at the Exeter Hall in London, conducted by the composer himself. Their house in Sydenham, south-east London, near Crystal Palace, had a fine library. Frank devoured the books and set about learning to play Alfred’s father’s cello that stood in one corner, as well as the piano which was also there. It was an environment much to his liking. As a child in the organ loft in Elmdon Frank had been intrigued by the mechanics of the instrument, and it was not long before he took the piano apart in Sydenham and taught himself how to tune it. He graduated as a mechanical engineer in 1904 from the City College of London, and later became a member of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and the Institute of Metals.

Frank enjoyed books on history, exploration and travel, and was intrigued by what he learned about Japan, especially about William Adams, the first Englishman in Japan. When he heard that the Japanese Shipping line NYK (Nippon Yusen Kaisha) was looking for engineers, he decided to try his luck with them. The Russo-Japanese War was in full swing, which whetted his youthful eagerness for adventure.

He set sail for Japan in the Sado Maru in 1904, via the Cape of Good Hope, under sealed orders. Captain O.A. Cowin, its skipper, became a dear friend and later my godfather, though I never met him. The Chief Engineer was also an Englishman, by the name of Kerr. But when they reached the port of Shimonoseki in Japan, Frank was transferred to the Shinano Maru as Chief Engineer. The skipper was Captain John Salter. Frank was lucky to have left the Sado Maru, for she was torpedoed the very next day. Kerr and three other British officers were rescued, but spent eighteen months in Moscow as prisoners of war.

The Shinano Maru had been converted to act as an auxiliary cruiser, or large merchant ship scout, and played a crucial role in the famous Battle of Tsushima in May 1905. Captain Narukawa of the Imperial Japanese Navy was put aboard as naval liaison officer, and, together with fifteen other similarly converted merchant vessels, she was assigned to a numbered square within the Tsushima Straits between Korea and Japan, with orders to report any sighting of the Russian Baltic fleet to Admiral Togo on his flagship, the Mikasa. It was the Shinano Maru that subsequently made history by its signal on 27 May, at 4.45 am: ‘Enemy is in Square 203’. The Shinano Maru was capable of speed, and possessed a powerful wireless apparatus. Afterwards, Captain Salter and Frank Britton both received the Asahi Medal for their part in the Russo-Japanese War.

After the end of the war, Frank made seven voyages to the Ogasawara Islands, known then as the Bonin (uninhabited) Islands. In a letter to his uncle in Sydenham, Frank wrote that the Bonin Islanders – descendants of early Western whalers:

… will be very sorry when we are taken out of the ship as we are the only fresh Western faces they see, and we always do our best to cheer them up. One trip we brought down a gramophone and another time a magic lantern. They are a very good-hearted lot of people. One old man seventy years of age remembers Commodore Perry calling at the islands some fifty years ago.

Once, on the outward voyage, Frank’s ship dropped off a Japanese census-taker on a small island, and when they went back to collect him, the island was nowhere to be found. There was only a huge mass of floating pumice surrounding a few rocky outcrops. The island which the unfortunate census-taker visited may possibly have been one of the ‘ short-lived islands’ comprising the tip of the undersea volcano called Myojin-sho, also known as Bayonnaise Rocks, and designated ‘Izu Islands No. 81’ in a 1925 survey. It erupted again in 1952. And another island appeared in 2013, and is getting bigger and bigger! Maybe it is the census one back again! Kyodo News now reports that it has joined the island in the Ogasawara chain called Nishinoshima, and that as a result the boundary line of Japan’s EEZ (exclusive economic zone) is likely to expand a little.

Frank Britton finally decided to give up seafaring and remain in Japan. Engineers were in great demand. The NYK had been the only source of supply and Frank was the last non-Japanese engineer to be engaged by them, and only a few chiefs were still left in their employ and no juniors.

After leaving NYK, Frank first accepted a position as manager of the Yokohama Engine and Iron Works in the centre of Yokohama beside one of the creeks, set up by an Irishman named Edward Kildoyle. But, in 1906, Britton resigned to become manager of the Zemma Works built in 1900 in the village of Zen-ma in the town of Isogo, on Tokyo Bay on the outskirts of Yokohama.

The shareholders planned to reclaim land and enlarge the operation. In view of the coming 1911 Revision of the Tariff Treaty that would put prohibitive duties on foreign goods, they began negotiations with Babcock and Wilcox, the world’s foremost maker of ship’s boilers, to make boilers there instead of importing them. The upshot was that in 1910 Babcock took over the Zemma Works, and Frank eventually became Managing Director, Far East, of what was then the biggest foreign business in Japan. Due to Frank’s foresight, in 1930 they merged with Mitsui Bussan to become Toyo Babcock, leading to the post-war Babcock Hitachi that it is today.

In his younger days, Frank Britton took long walking trips, became fluent in the spoken language, and came to have a great faith and belief in Japan, for whose people and culture he developed a deep and sympathetic understanding.

Frank was very conscientious and worked tirelessly, all the rest of his life, for Babcock, England and Japan. His 300 workers adored him. He knew the names of each one personally and they came to him with their problems and looked upon him as a father. He never uttered a word of anger to his men. The secret of his remarkable forbearance is revealed in a letter to his uncle in 1909 when Babcock & Wilcox were first considering taking over the Zemma Works. He wrote:

If B&W bring out their own men it is doubtful if they can get on with or even stand the ways of the Japanese. I am irritated sometimes to such a point that I feel like giving them a good English thrashing, and to ensure keeping my temper I always keep cigars on me, and when I feel I cannot control myself any longer I light a cigar and reflect that if one lives in a foreign country one must put up with foreign ways. A cigar is the finest thing in the world to soothe the nerves, and I am quite sure cigars have saved my life many times over, for, without them, I should have struck some of the workmen with the result that the whole works would have been on to me like one man – not an uncommon occurrence in Japan.

When the First World War broke out in August 1914, Frank was one of the first at the British Consulate wanting to enlist, but he was ordered to stay and make munitions for the war, in which Japan was Britain’s ally. He ran the works day and night, contenting himself with ‘getting at the Boches indirectly if not with cold steel’. He did not forget the need for good public relations, and even designed and organized a march by his workers dressed like bombs! I forget what occasion the march was for.

Skilled at designing, he was also an inventor. He registered many patents, including a portable mudguard to be hung beside motor car wheels to prevent them drenching kimono-clad pedestrians on rainy days! It was very popular. And when gramophones were introduced, he did much for the local industry, devising useful improvements.