Seven-times married ex-Hong Kong hangman on acting with Jackie Chan and Pierce Brosnan
A naughty boy I was a naughty boy. My stepbrother and I ran away from home in Portsmouth (England) after I fell out with my stepmother and broke into a factory and stole some money. The police caught us easily enough and the magistrate suggested the best place for me was sea cadet training school.
He sent me to the National Nautical School at Portishead, near Bristol, in 1946, at the age of 13. Most of the lads there had been in trouble of one sort or another. It was tough there, being locked in at night at 9pm and awake at 6.30am. When I was 15, I joined the Royal Navy.
I remember thinking Hong Kong was a quiet city " not many people and not much traffic, apart from thousands of rickshaws. The weather was beautiful and we were all very excited to have left miserable, cold, post-war England, where there was no money and everything was so expensive. We lived in steel Nissen huts at HMS Tamar (the Royal Navy's base in Hong Kong).
Death on the delta Seven men were killed during the Pearl River Incident (in which, on September 9, 1953, a British Royal Navy motor launch was attacked by a Chinese gunboat on the Pearl River). They were my mates.
Fellow seaman Gordon Cleaver (left) and Fleming. Cleaver was awarded a British Empire Medal for his role in a deadly clash with a PLA Navy vessel. Picture: John Fleming
I served in the same motor launch but I had a punch-up with the cook so the captain transferred me to another launch a few months before the incident. The skipper apologised to me for the transfer but explained that the other sailor was a bloody good cook.If I hadn't had that punch-up I would have been dead. I wrote a book about it (Hong Kong: The Pearl River Incident, The Untold Story of HMML 1323 [2002]).
My wife and baby son returned with me to the UK at the end of my posting but we didn't like it much. I borrowed money and sent them back to Hong Kong and requested to be drafted back, on compassionate grounds. The commodore said it sounded like "the cart pulling the horse" but told his staff officer to arrange it.
I have been married seven times altogether, though twice to the same woman, who was 40 years my junior. I don't really have any regrets. No way will I get married again. I am 85 now and that's me done.
Fleming says that, at the age of 85, he's done with marrying. Photo: John Fleming
There was no dining hall " a metal food bowl was taken to the cells and the meal was eaten on the floor. In the morning it was a race against the clock to empty all the night-soil buckets into the latrine. I was promoted through the ranks and eventually became chief officer and then acting superintendent at Chi Ma Wan Prison, on Lantau, in 1976. I had my own bungalow, a vegetable garden and there was a private beach.
At the first hanging I was just a witness because the superintendent wanted to see how I would react. It was an old man who had killed his wife in a rage " should have been manslaughter really. As he was hanging, I saw his arms and legs pumping madly like pistons. The superintendent told me not to worry because he had already gone and it was just his nerves.
Fleming played the ship's captain in the 1989 miniseries Around the World in 80 days with Pierce Brosnan.
One man we hanged had stabbed a baby repeatedly with a pair of scissors during a burglary, because he was afraid the baby's crying might wake the residents. I had no compunction about hanging them. I was one of the designated hangmen from 1961 to 1962 and was present at six executions.
Pierce rehearses his lines using headphones and I didn't like to disturb him but he often took them off and waved me over for a chat. A really nice guy.
I try to be a good parent but things are different these days " Peter is more rebellious and wants to spend all his time on computer games. He's bright, speaks English, Mandarin and Cantonese and his future is in Hong Kong.
This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
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