THE ‘CHINAMAN’ AND THE BRITISH ENGINEER WHO BUILT IT
Of all the great coincidences of history, the extraordinary link between the Chinese revolutionary, Sun Yat Sen1 and a distinguished British locomotive engineer, is probably the least known. Briefly Sun Yat Sen had been awakened to the poverty and technological backwardness of China and believed that better education was the underlying requirement for improving the life of the Chinese people. He studied to become a doctor; medical consultation, he believed, provided an opportunity of infiltrating revolutionary ideas into the Chinese mind. On the pretext of intensifying his studies, he became a student of Sir James Cantlie at the Hong Kong College of Medicine for the Chinese, in 1884. Several failed uprisings, organised from Hong Kong, made it sensible for him to go abroad and he came to Britain, at the invitation of his former mentor. There followed, in 1896, that infamous incident in which agents in Britain, of the Manchus, abducted Sun with the intention of returning him to China. That they were forestalled in this intention was entirely due to James Cantlie, who, discovering that his former student was missing, went to extraordinary lengths, eventually visiting the Foreign Office to insist that the Chinese Legation give him up. In those days what Britain wanted, it usually got, and Sun was released, to some years later effect the defeat of the decrepit Manchu dynasty.2
Sun became a regular visitor to the Cantlie household in London and, a Christian, he stood as godfather to Sir James’s second son, Kenneth, born in 1899. The revolutionary clearly fired the boy’s imagination, because he would later write that he had a ‘fascination’ for China even though, and possibly because, he was unable to go there. The Cantlies were a Scots family and Kenneth was educated at Robert Gordon’s College, Aberdeen, followed by degree studies at University College, London. Through a childhood accident, Cantlie junior lost the use of his right eye; it made him unfit for military service in the first war and instead he was employed at Crewe by the London & North Western Railway. He served an apprenticeship under Bowen-Cooke, undertaking instruction at Crewe Technical College. His first appointment was in Argentina, on the Entre dos Rios Railway, a British-owned line, as Assistant Traction Superintendent and Train Ferry Supervisor. In 1924 Cantlie moved to India joining the Jodhpur Bikaner Railway as Assistant Locomotive Superintendent and then in 1928 becoming the Deputy Locomotive Superintendent.
Sun Yet Sen’s transformation of imperial China into a modern republic was beset with constraints from the outset. He was forced to give way to Yuan Shi Kai who was the first and by no means the last warlord who ruled great swathes of China, giving little more than lip service to any concept of national government, until in the late 1920s Chang Kai Shek, through activities little short of outright atrocity, managed to unite, briefly let it be said, the greater part of the country. This did not include the ‘concession’ areas that were ruled by foreign governments without any involvement even of the Chinese themselves; in these territories the KMT government had only a very limited sway. By this time Sun was dead. He died in 1925 and it was decided to erect a great mausoleum near Nanking
