Читать книгу Ocean Devil: The life and legend of George Hogg - James MacManus, James MacManus - Страница 7

‘He seemed to have some inner vision of his own.’

George Hogg was born on 26 February 1915 in a large rented house in Harpenden, Hertfordshire, the youngest child of a prosperous middle-class family. His father Robert ran a well-known tailoring business, Hogg & Sons, in Hanover Square in the heart of London’s West End. George was given the middle name of Aylwin, an old family name, by which he was always known at home.

There were six children: the eldest, Gary, Barbara and Daniel, were separated by a gap of several years from Stephen, Rosemary and George – affectionately known as ‘Stake’, ‘Roke’ and ‘Hake’. They all had the advantages bestowed by class and wealth: a nanny and private education first at St George’s School in Harpenden and then, for the boys, Wadham College, Oxford. There were summer holidays in Salcombe, Devon, and winter sports breaks in Switzerland.

The Hoggs lived the life of a conventional middle-class family in the late Edwardian era. In one respect, however, they were very different. The Victorian age had bequeathed English society three overarching institutions: the monarchy, the Anglican Church, and the Empire. In this respect the Hoggs were non-conformists. The family’s political views were shaped by the Quaker pacifist philosophy which George’s mother Kathleen and his unmarried aunt, Muriel Lester, had embraced from an early age. Muriel campaigned on pacifist and anti-empire platforms all her life. She was briefly jailed in Holloway prison in London, and in Trinidad, on charges of sedition. She became a friend of Gandhi, and founded the Kingsley Hall mission which still continues its work as a community centre in East London.

Muriel Lester was very close to her sister Kathleen, and she was to have an early and powerful influence on her youngest nephew. Indeed, George’s first memory was of being taken to a beach by his mother and Aunt Muriel in the summer of 1918, when he was three, and given a sign to hold up which read ‘No More War’, while the ladies tried to impress their pacifist message upon the crowd of holidaymakers. George grew up in a family in which pacifism and international peace, very much the language of the left in the twenties, were advocated by the parents and absorbed by the children. Mealtimes in the Hogg household were serious affairs. There was always time for light-hearted family banter, but Kathleen made sure that the great issues of the day were discussed and debated. This was especially true when Aunt Muriel made one of her regular visits.

Muriel and Kathleen’s politics had been shaped by the poverty they saw in the East End of London in the last decade of Queen Victoria’s rule. They and their sister Doris were born in the 1880s in Loughton, in the Epping Forest area of Essex. Their upbringing was affluent, both their father and their grandfather having prospered from shipbuilding. The family were leading Baptists, and had moved to Loughton because it was a stronghold of Protestant non-conformism, with a Baptist church erected in 1813. The three sisters were baptised into the Church in 1898.

The arrival of the railway saw Loughton become a popular destination for East Enders. It soon became known as ‘Lousy Loughton’, a reference to the lice and fleas the impoverished visitors supposedly brought with them.

In her early teens, Muriel occasionally travelled through the slums by train when returning home from London. From the window of her first-class carriage the sight of shoeless children in ragged clothes playing in front of homes that were little more than hovels (and the unsympathetic comments of her fellow travellers) profoundly influenced her. She decided to become a social worker in the East End. Around this time she read the works of Tolstoy, notably his non-fiction masterpiece The Kingdom of God is Within You (1894), which was to become a vital text for Christian pacifists, second only to the Bible. Muriel later wrote, ‘It changed the very quality of life for me. Once your eyes have been opened to pacifism, you can’t shut them again.’

The Fellowship of Reconciliation, established in December 1914, gave Muriel Lester an international platform for her pacifist ideals. The organisation had been formed following a chance meeting at Cologne station in July that year between an English Quaker, Henry Hodgkin, and a German Lutheran, Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze. The two men talked while waiting for a delayed train, and found common cause in their detestation of the coming war. They parted with the words, ‘We are one in Christ and can never be at war.’ By the end of the war the Fellowship of Reconciliation had become an international body, with the three Lester sisters enthusiastic supporters. The ideals of the Fellowship and the moral imperative of pacifism were drummed into the young George Hogg from an early age.

The Hogg family moved to Harpenden before the First World War, and lived first in the rented house, ‘Red Gables’, where George would be born. Later they would build their own house in the town, ‘Wayfarings’. Harpenden changed little as the Hogg children grew up through the war years and the 1920s. It was a tight-knit commuter community, just thirty-five minutes by rail from central London. George’s father, like many of his friends, took the early train to London every day, leaving Kathleen and the nanny in charge of the children. With a population of only ten thousand, Harpenden still called itself a village at the time when George was growing up. The main street and surrounding residential areas quickly gave way to the green fields of Hertfordshire. Harpenden was well known for its school, St George’s, but was otherwise an unremarkable county town.

A group of families who shared the Hoggs’ Christian outlook formed the social world in which the children grew up. The Hunters, Nelsons and Proctors lived close to the Hogg home, and their children were in and out of each other’s houses at weekends. From an early age George formed close friendships with a group of boys with whom he went through school. David ‘Dippy’ Proctor, Robert ‘Bosh’ Nelson and Roger Hunter were sporty, naughty boys, typical of their generation. The honorary girl of the group, Bosh’s sister Winifred, known as ‘Muff’, was to become George’s first serious girlfriend.

The political views of George’s parents were something of a joke among his friends, and probably an embarrassment to him, since he recalled having to hide the family’s regular newspaper, the left-wing Daily Herald, when they came round.

Kathleen Hogg brought up her family in a strict, almost puritanical regime that would be regarded as repressive today. She is remembered by her nephews and nieces as a difficult, somewhat eccentric woman, who insisted on the observance of strict rules of behaviour, especially on Sundays and religious holidays. The Hogg family attended three services at Harpenden’s Methodist chapel on Sundays, and for the rest of the day were required to read improving books – the Bible, the prayer book or works by well-known missionaries. Any other book they chose to read had to be covered in brown paper and read well out of their mother’s view. As well as religious attendance, Sundays meant homework and piano practice. Kathleen was well remembered by her children and grandchildren seated at the top of the stairs brushing her hair and offering a stream of critical comments while listening to one of the children playing the piano.

This was an obviously loving family, but by all accounts Kathleen showed little emotion towards her children ‘There was no kissing and no hugging of the children,’ George’s great-niece Hilary Jarvis says. ‘It was very much a family of its time; showing emotion was not the done thing at all; manners were important, it was on the surface very stiff.’

George was very much his mother’s boy. He grew up as the adored youngest child, and can be seen in the family album dressed in velvet suits with a shining aureole of golden curls standing in a well-kept garden with various much older brothers and sisters. He soon learnt how to get round his mother’s stricter rules. He had a natural sense of fun, which bubbled through the gloomy Sundays with their required reading and long silences. George and his sister Rosemary, who was three years older, and to whom he would always be closer than to any of his other siblings, would frequently skip the longer Sunday-morning service at the Methodist chapel and go to play with neighbours’ children. Aware of this mischief, Kathleen, who stayed at home to prepare the lunch, would begin the meal by quizzing the children on the nature of the lengthy sermon. Fire-and-brimstone sermons were very much to Kathleen’s taste and she was determined that her children should benefit from them. George and Rosemary persuaded their elder brother Stephen, who had to attend chapel because he was in the choir, to report on the highlights, which were then dutifully repeated at lunch.

For all the strictness of the regime at home, George Hogg had a very happy childhood. He was once overheard saying to Rosemary, ‘If heaven isn’t much nicer than earth I shall ask God to let me come back.’ He was remembered by his nephews and nieces as the ‘the golden boy’ who was marked out by his parents at an early age for success. Given his later achievements this might be attributed to hindsight, but from the observations of his teachers at the time, and later those of the Warden at Wadham College, the great Maurice Bowra, it seems clear that there was something special about the youngest Hogg.

From the age of six George was taught at home by a governess. At ten he was sent to a school at Gland, on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, which had been set up on pacifist principles. Rosemary was returning for her second year, and had begged to be allowed to take her brother with her. The school’s aim was to break down all barriers of age, sex, class and nationality. All the staff shared the housework with the children.

The main effect on George of his Swiss education seems to have been liberation from the strict regime at home. At weekends he would go off hiking, bicycling or skiing with other boys, while Rosemary remained behind to wash and mend his clothes. Once a week there was a school meeting at which the pupils were free to criticise their masters and mistresses, and even the head, and to express their views on anything they thought unfair or wrong. To the young George Hogg this was revolutionary, and he was to introduce exactly the same practice when he became headmaster of his own school in China.

The year of emancipation ended with George’s return to England, where he joined his siblings at the co-educational St George’s school in Harpenden. The headmaster, Cecil Grant, was one of the great educationalists of his time, and his school provided imaginative teaching, designed to bring out and develop talent.

George showed promise as a writer for the school magazine. His parents were already convinced he had a gift for words. When he was ten his father had read him aloud Tennyson’s ‘The Eagle’ and asked him to describe an eagle. After a moment’s thought George replied: ‘A whirring mass of fierce glory.’

All the Hogg children had done well at St George’s, but the youngest child proved the ablest pupil. He was nicknamed ‘Pig’ at school – not because of his surname, but because of a characteristic sinal snort. The other name given him by his rugby-playing friends was self-explanatory: ‘Tuff’. Both on and off the playing field George proved a natural leader. His sixth-form master wrote of him many years later:

I sensed in him great reserves and a high sense of purpose. He was modest to a degree and showed true humility. Quiet and unassuming he nevertheless was a dominant influence in the form. It was a joy to observe in the years after he left a new generation of prefects, showing traits of character which they had unconsciously copied from him, so that his influence lived on. It was equally a feature of his [rugby] football that in the hardest game he always had something in reserve to call on in an emergency.

The golden boy had his mischievous side. One night he and his friends Roger Hunter and David Proctor stole a car belonging to Miss Terry, the French teacher. George, who had learnt to drive his father’s car at the age of sixteen, drove them to a scout troop camp, where they let the tents down and fled. George was demoted as a prefect for a fortnight, and caned by the headmaster.

At St George’s the youngest Hogg grew into a tall, goodlooking young man who delighted in singing and showing off his skills at the monthly Saturday-night dances. He was head boy at the age of seventeen, and almost naturally began a relationship with the head girl, Winifred ‘Muff’ Nelson.

The Nelsons provided a second home for the Hogg children in Harpenden. Although practising Christians, they were more relaxed in their observance of the faith, and their cheerful and fun-loving family life – a considerable contrast to the strict regime of his own home – made a big impression on George. So did another family in Harpenden, the Hunters, who also provided a home from home.

Muff Nelson, who had gained her nickname through her childhood affection for the nursery rhyme ‘Little Miss Muffet’, was a good-looking redhead with a great sense of fun. A year older than George, she had been drawn to him from the time they had played together as young children. She shared his passion for sport, and his love of dancing and singing. As an old woman looking back over her life Muff wrote to a friend: ‘I adored the boy and always hoped we would grow up together and get married.’ After his death she wrote rather more formally in the school magazine: ‘There were nothing but words of admiration and affection for George both while he was at the school and after he left it. We all associate George with the headmaster’s well remembered cough followed by the quiet words, “Well done, boy.” ’

Although he and Muff were very much regarded as a couple at school, that did not prevent George from casting his eye over some of his friends’ girlfriends. St George’s golden boy, head of school, captain of the rugby XV, a dazzler on the dance floor and with a fine singing voice, knew he was attractive to women.

On his last night in England before leaving for China, George, Muff and other friends held a farewell at the Silver Cup pub in Harpenden. He promised her he would return within a year. She was devastated when he did not come back, and more so when it became clear that he had found a new and exciting life in China, and had no intention of returning to resume their relationship. Nothing survives of their correspondence while he was in China, but George’s letters home reveal that two years after he left he became aware that Muff had developed a relationship with his good friend Roger Hunter.

Muff’s sadness at the long separation from George had been compounded by the death of her elder brother Robert, a marine commando who was killed at Deal in Kent in 1940 as a result of one of the very few Italian air raids of the war. In the summer of that year the invasion scare was at its height, and the Battle of Britain had yet to be won. In these circumstances it is perhaps not surprising that Muff reached for the security of marriage, even if it was to the best friend of the man she really loved. Almost from the beginning the marriage was a disaster, and Muff soon moved back from married quarters at a coastal command base to her parents’ home in Harpenden.

Understandably, it was the more thoughtful side of George’s character that his contemporaries remembered when they paid tribute to him in the school magazine after his death. His close friend David Proctor said: ‘My impression of him was of a thinker. He strove for perfection. He was a man of few words but those words always made sense.’ Maurice Bowra wrote to Kathleen: ‘He had great reserves of character and seemed to have some inner vision of his own which showed him where to go and what to do.’ This was a remarkable tribute, given that Bowra had many letters of condolence to write to parents of his former students who died in the war.

In September 1934, at the age of nineteen, George Hogg arrived at Wadham College to read ‘modern greats’, as it was then called (it evolved into what is now known as PPE – politics, philosophy and economics). He was by now an assured young man, over six feet tall. He had fair hair which had never quite shaken off its childish waves. It was no surprise that he walked into the college rugby first XV, and went on to captain the team in his last year. Had he been more heavily built he would certainly have got his ‘blue’. As it was he played regularly for the university’s second team, ‘The Greyhounds’.

Wadham, one of the smallest of the Oxford colleges, was an eccentric place in the 1930s, with an admissions policy that depended on the whim of the examiner rather than academic ability. Michael Mann, a contemporary of Hogg’s, recalls going up to Wadham on the recommendation of an old waiter in the King’s Arms pub, where most Wadhamites did their drinking. Mann had taken a room at the pub while trying various colleges for a scholarship in Spanish. The waiter told him Wadham had the best course, and Mann found himself sitting the exam with two other candidates, without any sign of an invigilator. One candidate seized the entire supply of writing paper and refused to surrender so much as a page. Mann tracked down the senior tutor and complained. He was sent to a stationer’s in town with half a crown to buy paper, and given an extra fifteen minutes to complete the exam. He got the scholarship, which was not surprising: of the other two candidates, one thought he was sitting for a Hebrew scholarship, and the other left the exam early.

Hogg’s time at Wadham was dominated by one of the great Oxford figures of the twentieth century, Maurice Bowra. Bowra did not become Warden of the college until 1938, a year after Hogg had left Oxford, but in a sense he had already fulfilled the role for years. Even as a Fellow he cast a long and lively shadow over college activities, influencing most aspects of undergraduate life. His riotous parties for students and distinguished guests were famous for his practical jokes. Among other things Bowra would make up fictitious careers and achievements for his guests, and then introduce them to each other, enjoying the subsequent confusion.

In the 1930s Bowra personified Wadham College. He was a celebrity don who set out to shock. With a characteristic touch of high-table humour he declared himself anti-prig, anti-elitist, anti-solemn and very anti-Balliol. The purpose of a university, Bowra believed, was to break down barriers of class, convention and national sentiment, and to ‘revel in the uninhibited exercise of the mind’. His attractive view of life appealed to many of his students, and George Hogg was certainly among them. Bowra could have been talking of Hogg when he described the aim of university life as being ‘to take young men who arrived in Oxford suppressed and unselfexpressed and recast them into individuals with something to say’. Bowra had been born in China, where his father worked as a customs officer, and this gave him a special interest in Hogg’s later work and wanderings.

George’s sister Rosemary, known to the family as ‘Roke’ or ‘Posie’, was three years older than him, but they had spent their childhoods together and had formed the closest relationship in the family circle. They adored each other, and during his Oxford years when Hogg wrote home to catch up with family news it was always Rosemary who was on his mind. She remembered him talking with huge enthusiasm about college life, and about Bowra’s role as both a tutor and party host. She said: ‘You could not say that Oxford made him, because there were so many other early influences, but he loved his time there, he loved everything about the place, especially the freedom.’ Oxford gave him the chance to get away from the enclosed world of home and Harpenden. He had never openly rebelled against the inhibitions of life at Wayfarings, but like most young men of eighteen he wanted freedom. No more grim and gloomy Sundays being forced to read one of his mother’s ‘Sunday books’.

George Hogg was not by nature a political animal, although the mix of liberal and left-wing views he grew up with at home would have been reinforced at Oxford. His student generation was highly political, and vociferous about the big issues of the day: the infamous Oxford Union debate ‘That this house will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country’ had taken place in February 1933, the year before Hogg went up. The majority of 275 for the motion, with 153 against, was a gift for the news editors of Fleet Street, created a national furore, and was roundly condemned by the political establishment. Winston Churchill, then a backbencher in his wilderness years, termed it ‘abject, squalid and shameless’.

The big issues of the day dominated the student union debates and inspired long and self-regarding editorials in the student newspapers: the powerlessness of the League of Nations as Japan, Italy and Germany trampled on the international agreements that they had signed in the decade following the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, and the question of rearmament in the face of the rise of Nazi Germany.

The views of the majority of students were predictable. They backed the republican side in the Spanish Civil War and roundly condemned the Italian invasion of Abyssinia. The League of Nations was damned as ineffectual. Some of those who had supported the King and Country resolution would later claim in The Times that they had really been voting for collective security and a stronger League of Nations. It was a thin argument which convinced no one. The two Oxford student magazines, Isis and Cherwell, published lengthy leaders questioning whether students were truly serious about such matters or were merely posturing.

As far as Wadham was concerned, much of the student debate took place in the King’s Arms or the college dining hall. There were no noisy demonstrations outside the Spanish or Italian embassies in London, nor angry letters to the national papers. George Hogg’s Oxford may have been a noisy, political place, but his own memories of his time there dwell on student pranks such as burning lavatory seats, the pleasures of toasting muffins in front of the fire, and the hard work of trying to get a rugby blue. His name appears in the college gazette, and occasionally in the student newspapers, but only to report his prowess on the rugby pitch. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that he was more concerned with having a good time than with worrying about Abyssinia or the struggle against fascism in Spain.

With the help of Maurice Bowra, Hogg took the best that Oxford had to give. It was an enchanted world, and one he recalled with great affection throughout his brief life. The experience did not, and indeed could not, have prepared him or any of the university’s graduates for the realities of a world in which fascism was building a powerful popular appeal in a Europe racked by depression; in which the militarism in Japanese culture was about to embroil China and the whole Pacific region in a tide of warfare; in which centuries of feudalism in the most populous nation on earth, China, were being bloodily replaced by a modern totalitarian political concept.

The political ideas that Hogg took to Oxford, pacifism and the Christian socialism of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, remained intact if dormant during his student years. As a tutor Maurice Bowra equipped him to test the ideals drummed into him by his mother. Oxford’s real gift to Hogg was to give him the freedom to live and enjoy himself beyond the confines of a repressive home life.

Rugby was probably as important as anything else for him at Oxford. Gerald Parker played in the college team with him, and in 2007, at the age of ninety, he recalled his captain well: ‘The Wadham team did very well against the other colleges in the two years I played with the team. Hogg was a very good captain and led by example on the field. There were no long pep talks before the game, it was pretty much “Follow me and do what I do on the field.” As a team we always had some beers together afterwards. We were not a political bunch really – rugby was the thing.’

Hogg spent his long vacations travelling. In 1936 he set out on a hitch-hiking tour of central and south-eastern Europe with £4 in his pocket and a Rhodes Scholar as a companion. The violent and sectarian politics of the Balkans, the hotbed of nationalist rivalries elsewhere in eastern Europe and the racism and militarism of Nazi Germany opened his eyes to the real world beyond the dreaming spires of Oxford.

In the early summer of 1937 Hogg left Oxford with a secondclass degree (two of his brothers, Stephen and Daniel, had obtained third-class degrees, while the eldest brother, Gary, got a second) and returned home to plan his future. He did not really know what to do. His friends were planning to disappear into the civil service or the City. The world around him offered little inspiration. In May the coronation had taken place of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth at Westminster Abbey. A month later the former King Edward VIII, now the Duke of Windsor, married the woman for whom he had abdicated, Wallis Simpson. While these royal events attracted widespread public attention and comment, they probably did not elicit much interest in the Hogg household, where Aunt Muriel’s views on the British Empire were firmly in place.

The Hoggs’ daily newspaper, the Herald, presented a bleak view of the world that summer. Hitler and Mussolini stated publicly that they would intervene in Spain after General Franco had suffered a setback at the battle of Guadalajara. In Russia, Stalin’s purge of the army led to a wave of executions of senior officers. A brief news agency item from Berlin stated that Heinrich Himmler, chief of the German police, had announced the establishment of a new concentration camp at Buchenwald to house those considered enemies of the state. Camps at Dachau and Sachsenhausen had already been set up. At the end of August most British newspapers carried a dramatic picture of a badly burnt Chinese baby crying in the wreckage of Shanghai’s bombed-out south railway station. The battle for the city had begun, and Japanese planes were being used to clear a path for their advancing army. Two thousand British women and children were evacuated from the city aboard the P&O liner Rajputana. A British battalion arrived to reinforce the garrison and protect the remaining expatriate population.

Aunt Muriel came to stay at Wayfarings in August. By now she was known to the press as ‘Mother of World Peace’, and regularly travelled the world on lecture tours. Untroubled by the outbreak of hostilities in the Far East, indeed probably because of them, she announced her intention to travel across America to Japan, China and India to promote her pacifist message. Japan was the rising imperial power, and Muriel wished to make contact with the Christian co-operative movement there. She believed that while the government might pursue the politics of imperial aggrandisement, the Japanese people wanted peace.

Kathleen was a passionate gardener, and took her sister into the garden to discuss the plan over some serious weeding. Muriel had taken George’s elder brother Daniel to India to meet Gandhi a few years previously. Why not take George with her on this latest journey?

George jumped at the idea. The problem was money. The Hoggs had few savings left after educating six children privately, and taking expensive annual winter holidays in Switzerland. Then there was the question of George’s career. The idea of taking time off after university to travel was a novel one. Most of George’s university friends were going straight into the professions. The Depression was far from over, unemployment was still high, and the international outlook was threatening. This did not seem the time to be travelling the world seeking adventure.

George solved the money problem by cashing in a small legacy. This would cover the £18.10s. third-class single fare to New York, and the passage from San Francisco to Japan. What little was left over would cover his expenses while he hitch-hiked across America to rejoin his aunt for the voyage across the Pacific. As for the return journey, he would find a way of earning his passage back from India.

It was settled that aunt and nephew would sail on the Queen Mary for New York in September 1937. The night before he left, George said his farewells to Muff Nelson and other friends in the Silver Cup (which is still one of the better pubs in Harpenden). The following day he was so engrossed in the new American bestseller that had just been published in Britain, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, that he had to be dragged from his armchair for the drive to Southampton.

There is, or was, in the Hogg family album a faded Box Brownie photograph of members of the family standing on the dockside at Southampton that September day, with the Queen Mary in the background. The group are facing a westering sun, with George in the middle, wearing a snappy trilby and suit, and his parents and Rosemary and Stephen around him.

Third-class cabins on the Queen Mary were at the front of the ship, and thus experienced the worst of the pitching and rolling in rough weather. And the weather was bad throughout the six-day voyage. Many of the 580 third-class passengers were European migrants to North America, and for their convenience the menus in the ship’s restaurant were printed in both English and French. No one read them. The restaurant was largely deserted, as the passengers remained confined in their cabins. The little deck space available to third class was closed. While Aunt Muriel took to her cabin, George talked his way into the second class and the chance of some fresh air.

In New York George went straight to a Fellowship of Reconciliation conference before he took to the road. To everyone’s surprise a delegate from China made a speech damning the Japanese attack on Shanghai and defending China’s right to meet force with force. He then resigned from the Fellowship. This triumph of nationalism over pacifism stunned the meeting.

George wrote to his mother, ‘I don’t think there are many real pacifists in the world…Aren’t you glad when you hear China has pulled off something good in the war?’ It is not recorded how this letter went down at Harpenden, nor whether George told Muriel that he had begun to question the politics with which he had grown up. But he consistently distanced himself from the family’s pacifist beliefs throughout his time in China, although return letters from his mother never challenge his apostasy.

Hogg spent several months in the autumn of 1937 hitch-hiking across and up and down the USA. By his estimate he covered 5,500 miles by car and lorry, sleeping where he could. On several occasions when he could not find anywhere to stay he was given a cell for the night by the local police. The experience was not always pleasant. He described one of his jailors, a police sergeant, as ‘a most sinister man. A steel tube took the place of a severed right hand and he was driving nails into the wall with it; no hammer was necessary. The bare room [of the police station] contained a few people standing around the stove; they spat expertly and frequently. “If you are in more of a hurry than I am,” said the sergeant, “there is always the sidewalk outside.” Only pride forbade an immediate retreat. His face was as hard as his steel tube hand; eyes blue, when you saw them, hollow cheeks and an Irish jaw. He showed me a musty pile of blankets in a filthy cell. “Up at four and we don’t feed anyone, get that straight,” he said.’

In the Deep South an introduction from Muriel took him to the Delta co-operative farm in Rochdale, Mississippi, where black and white sharecroppers were working together to pay off their debts and buy their land. The co-operative had been founded the previous year to take in workers who had been sacked from cotton farms after trying to start a union, and it made a big impression on the English visitor: here was theory in practice, an ideal that had actually been translated into working reality.

Still immersed in Gone with the Wind, Hogg travelled through the states and cities in which Margaret Mitchell had set her novel. He went to Richmond, Charleston and Savannah. The widespread evasion of the Prohibition laws, still supposedly in full force, made Hogg laugh: ‘Tennessee is dry!’ he wrote. ‘They voted dry because everyone makes a good profit out of illegal drink. The state police make good tips, the people get cheap liquor and the bootleggers make big profits. But the drink is still very cheap because the state can’t tax it!’

The final leg of his journey across the United States brought a stroke of extraordinary luck, the same good fortune that would carry him through his perilous years in China. Some days before he was due to meet Aunt Muriel in San Francisco, Hogg found himself well over a thousand miles to the east, in the plains of Texas. Forced to stand outside city limits because hitching was against the law in the city, he spent day after day watching cars accelerate past him. Finally one car stopped. The driver said nothing, but drove west for a half an hour before asking his passenger where he was going.

‘To Japan and China with my aunt,’ replied Hogg. After considering this statement the driver said, ‘I’m on my way to China too. I’m travelling with an Englishwoman named Muriel Lester.’ It turned out that the driver was a Dr Lacey from the American Bible Society, and that he was taking a shipment of Bibles to Japan. George went with him for the remaining 1,600 miles, and met his aunt on the quayside.

A fortnight later, in mid-November 1937, aunt and nephew arrived in Yokohama, and went to the port city of Kobe to stay with their host in Japan, Dr Toyohiko Kagawa. This remarkable man was a Christian leader in a nation where the Emperor was considered divine, and Shinto, the worship of ancestral and other gods, was the state religion. He preached pacifism in a society that been indoctrinated in the militaristic ethic, and had twice been imprisoned for trade-union activism. Kagawa had been born in 1888, orphaned at an early age, and brought up by American missionaries. Disowned by the rest of his family after his conversion to Christianity, he went to theological colleges in the United States and Japan, but rejected the endless doctrinal arguments and decided instead to work among the poor in the slums. He played a major role in the successful campaign for universal adult suffrage in 1925, and would go on to publicly apologise in 1940 for the Japanese invasion of China. This inevitably led to further arrest and imprisonment.

Among his other activities, Dr Kagawa had spent twenty years developing a co-operative system among farmers and small businessmen around Kobe. While Aunt Muriel sought meetings with government officials to give them the benefit of her views on militarism, George was shown co-op banks, farms, restaurants and market gardens. He also learnt from Dr Kagawa how a government dominated by the military had drawn on a deeprooted cultural and religious belief in Japanese racial superiority to sanctify, and thus legitimise, the Chinese campaign in the eyes of the people. Japan projected its role in China as a civilising mission, designed to bring peace and prosperity to a country racked by warlordism and corruption. The message resonated deep within the Japanese national psyche.

Hogg found himself in a nation gripped by chauvinist hysteria. The slow-moving invasion of China had begun in the 1890s, with an encroachment into the north-eastern region of Manchuria. But from 1931 the pace of conquest quickened. By the time George and Aunt Muriel arrived, Japan had occupied large areas of China, established a puppet state, Manchukuo, in the north-east, and taken control of the old imperial capital Beijing, then called Peking.

In Japan, criticism of the government was forbidden. Anyone who dared to publicly question official policy was dismissed from his or her job, and even risked assassination. Newspapers and radio were heavily censored. Foreigners could be accused of spying on the slightest pretext. Schools and universities used textbooks with strong nationalistic overtones, and many foreign academic works were banned. Even children’s hour on the official radio station almost always contained a story about the civilising mission of the brave Japanese soldiers in their struggle with the treacherous Chinese.

It would have been impossible for a visitor to be untouched by the mood of isolationism and paranoia. Hogg picked up a smattering of spoken Japanese, and his hosts translated press reports for him on a regular basis. He would thus have been aware of the portrayal of China, on radio and in the newspapers, as a nation torn apart by civil strife and liable to follow Russia into a Bolshevik revolution. It was effective propaganda, because it was partially true. The other side of this coin was the message that Japan’s mission in China was a civilising one. The purpose of the military intervention had been to stop a bloody civil war, and to prevent China from going communist. Japan certainly wanted to stop the spread of communism in China, but the propaganda masked Tokyo’s true aim, which was the establishment of regional hegemony, with China in the role of a vassal state.

Since the early 1930s Japan had been falling under the control of a fanatical wing of the army, bent on imperial expansion. The economic pressures of the Depression had revived age-old dreams of national glory. The war minister General Minami and his senior officers did much to create, and take advantage of, the climate of political extremism. The modest advances towards a parliamentary democracy and the development of pluralist politics in the 1920s were overwhelmed by the wave of nationalism that broke over Japanese politics in the last years of that decade. The civilian politicians in the cabinet provided little opposition as relatively junior officers, none too discreetly backed by their commanders, revived ambitions for Japan to assume its rightful place as ruler of the Asian mainland.

The apostles of empire were easily able to manipulate a long list of grievances to justify their pursuit of territorial ambition. School history lessons hammered home the message that Japan’s legitimate imperial ambitions in the nineteenth century had been thwarted by the greed of Britain and the other European powers. The list of grievances was long. Australia and America had introduced quotas on Japanese immigration after the First World War. These injected a new racial element into relations, since in their dealings with the Western powers the Japanese had previously sought, and often received, the status of Europeans in Asia due to their perceived social and economic superiority. New trade tariffs designed to protect the US economy from Japanese competition in the twenties only fuelled Tokyo’s resentment towards the West.

China was easy prey for the militant political class and war-minded army officers in Japan at the start of the 1930s. The Chinese offered only impotent protests as Japanese troops advanced into Manchuria and Tokyo made plain its plans for further territorial conquests. Boycotts of Japanese goods and repeated anti-Japanese demonstrations had had little effect. The social and political chaos in China in the 1920s, as the nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek struggled to assert itself over regional warlords and the fast-growing Communist Party, merely accelerated Japan’s ambitions.

On 18 September 1931, using the flimsy pretext of ‘Chinese provocation’ near the Manchurian town of Mukden, the Japanese began military operations to complete the conquest of Manchuria. The invasion was ordered by the army command, not the cabinet. The government was only consulted when it came to the question of reinforcements. From that moment until the Japanese defeat at the end of the Second World War the military were effectively in charge of the Japanese government.

The Christian co-op movement in Japan was one of very few voices raised against the government. But it was a weak and muted voice. Christianity had only been made legal in Japan in 1878. Shinto, the state religion, was a traditional set of beliefs rooted in the worship of spirits and of the Emperor, whose divinity was unchallenged. For centuries Shinto had co-existed with Buddhism, and had to some extent incorporated Buddhist beliefs. From the late nineteenth century it was used as a means of rallying the nation against Western imperialism. It focused on emperor-worship, and thus became a more overtly political religion. The core Shinto philosophy held that the Japanese emperor was descended directly from the Sun Goddess; that he was therefore of divine descent; that the Japanese islands and people were also of divine descent; and that Japan was therefore superior to other nations.

With his strong Baptist upbringing, George Hogg took a keen interest in the travails of the Christian Church in a country dominated by an alien and aggressive religion. There were only 300,000 Christians in a nation of seventy-three million. Persecution in the seventeenth century had wiped out most Christians, and the small community that had emerged after the legalisation of the faith was scattered, frightened and demoralised.

Fearful that history might repeat itself, Dr Kagawa and other Christian leaders worked hard to find an honourable compromise with the government’s aggressive nationalism. They carefully avoided condemnation of Japan’s military operations in China, causing Hogg to note wryly that at least the Church had not gone so far as to pray for a Japanese victory.