Blades of Grass: The Story of George Aylwin Hogg

By Mark Aylwin Thomas

George Aylwin Hogg was a man of remarkable dedication and honour. Though he died in 1945 at the age of thirty, Aylwins name and legacy is remembered in China to this daywhere as a wise and noble friend to the people of China, he immersed himself in the culture and life of the Chinese people whom he served in his mission.

In Blades of Grass: The Story of George Aylwin Hogg, author and nephew of the late Mr. Hogg, Mark Aylwin Thomas, explores his uncles own letters and writings and shares this astonishing life story of perseverance, service, and dedication. Thomas offers a personal and compelling window into the character of this remarkable man, and Hoggs own words lend an authentic and distinctive insight into his servicetraining young Chinese men in their vocations in the remote confines of Northern China in Shandan.

George Aylwin Hogg was part of a vision to create a unique form of industrial training on which to base the reconstruction of industry for a new postwar China. While a vignette of Aylwins life was portrayed in Roger Spottiswoodes 2008 film The Children of Huang Shi, the full picture of this remarkable lifeoften painted with Aylwins own wordsshows how this young Englishmans life was deeply interwoven in the lives of the men and people he served.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Mar 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781546289241

Mark Aylwin Thomas

Mark Aylwin Thomas was born a few months after Hogg’s death, was raised in England and has lived in Finland since 1974. He shares the same unusual middle name—of ancient Celtic origin—as his uncle, whom Thomas became fascinated with after attending a 1988 memorial event in China. Since then he has acted in the role of his uncle in a six-part miniseries for Chinese television, and he has been the guardian of his uncle’s papers and legacy.

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© 2018 Mark Aylwin Thomas. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse   02/28/2018

ISBN: 978-1-5462-8925-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-8924-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018902519

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I  dedicate this book to my Aunt Rosemary, who forever held so dear the fond memory of her remarkable brother, and to my maternal grandmother, Kathleen, who brought them both into this world. Also to my great aunt, Muriel Lester, who took her nephew to China.

T his volume is the second part of a two-part biography. It is an epic tale of a courageous adventurer, who became a legend in modern Chinese culture, not only for his tireless efforts training young men for technical work with the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives , but also for the way he wholly immersed himself in the local culture during the war-torn years 1938-45.

It’s a story of perseverance, service and dedication of a young man who touched the hearts of ordinary Chinese people.

An epitaph penned on my uncle’s untimely death reads "Through his being and working many blades of grass will grow where none grew before".

In this second volume we see how this remarkable character who bridged the gap between East and West and why his memory is so very highly regarded in China even today.

Contents

Preface

Chapter 1     Yellow Wind Cave

Chapter 2     Old Mr Three

Chapter 3     His Adopted Family

Chapter 4     Home Life in Shuangshipu

Chapter 5     Flood Relief at P’ing Men Xian

Chapter 6     Developing the School

Chapter 7     Beginning of the End of Gung Ho

Chapter 8     A New Start

Chapter 9     Apple Trees, Goats, and Conscripts

Chapter 10   The Clinic

Chapter 11   Trouble at the Mill

Chapter 12   Ghosh! We’re on the Move!

Chapter 13   Shandan

Chapter 14   The Great Blow

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Recommended further reading

Sources

Map of China

Chinese History Timeline

Transliteration of Chinese Sounds

Preface

A police Land Cruiser, gleaming white in the hot late-April sun, with every imaginable light flashing and siren shrieking, sped ahead of us to herald our coming. The heavy traffic had already been halted at every junction and crossroad on our route. The centre lane of the crowded main street had been cleared for our unhindered dash from the Jincheng Hotel at one end of Lanzhou to the railway station, which lay at the far end of that long, thin industrial city on the upper reaches of Huang He – the great Yellow River.

We had started on the third and last stage of a truly amazing week in the spring of 1988, which started with a memorial meeting in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People followed by banquets and speeches, and much VIP treatment for us foreign guests amongst whom were, for instance, delegations from the New Zealand government and their embassy in Beijing, delegations from China Friendship Societies of New Zealand and Australia, members of the International Committee for the Promotion of Chinese Industrial Cooperatives and a delegation of the New Zealand press. A three-hour flight whisked us over the provinces of Hebei, Shanxi, and Shaanxi, following the line of the Great Wall of China to the northwest to Lanzhou, the sprawling capital of Gansu Province where there were more greetings and meetings, more banquets and speeches. Now we were to travel by special train up onto the edge of the Gobi Desert, following the route of the old Silk Road, to the ancient oasis towns of Zhangye and Shandan; to Shandan, where my uncle, George Aylwin Hogg, had died forty-three years earlier.

As the monstrous pair of steam locomotives hauled our special train on its fourteen-hour journey up over snow-covered mountain passes onto the Gobi and into the narrow Hexi Corridor between the wide steppe of Mongolia and the high Tibetan massif of Qinghai, there was time in the otherwise-hectic schedule at last to think and reflect. I recalled a vivid dream that I had had when I must have been only five or six years old. I had thought about that dream many times over the years, but especially when I was preparing for this trip – this pilgrimage – to China. In my dream, I had been seeking my uncle’s grave. The image was still vivid in my mind: an arid, sun-baked hillside in a mountainous landscape, harshly bright in the high-altitude sun. There stood a simple headstone set beside a stream, shaded by a few small trees.

As I looked out of the carriage window waiting for my call to breakfast, there were certainly plenty of sun-baked slopes, but not a sign of water and only sparce vegetation such as saltwort and jiji grass. The colours and forms of the loess hills and the rocky mountains in the early morning sun were something to wonder at. Totally dry river beds were frequently in evidence, and in the ones that were close to the railway embankment, one could see immaculate masonry work reinforcing the would-be river banks and jutting into the river from the outside curve of a bank to break the force of water in case of a flash flood that could otherwise wash out the railway embankment in no time at all.

In the months prior to this trip, I had had another dream. I had dreamt of playing the part of my uncle in a film about his life in China. I had woken up thinking how fantastic it would be, but of course laughed it off as a wild impossibility. When I was actually invited to do exactly that, I could hardly believe my ears, but I had no hesitation in accepting. Ye Huan, my personal guide and minder, came excitedly into my compartment as I sat on my bed sipping at the ever-present cup of green tea – the best way to prevent dehydration in that extremely dry North China dust-laden air.

I tell you, Mr. Thomas, he said. Your luck is in. How would you like to return to China for a few months?

Well, of course I would like to, but how on earth is it possible? I exclaimed.

There are some guys from a film company on this train. They have been observing you for the past few days, and they would like to make you a proposal, explained Huan. Come and meet them!

Later that year, I returned to China and spent about three months making a six-part television miniseries acting the part of my uncle.

In Memoriam

George Hogg was one of the few foreign friends of China who really penetrated into the life of the Chinese people. Though he was called Ocean Secretary by his colleagues and friends, they never treated him as a foreigner because they never felt that he was in any way foreign to them. He really set one of the best examples of the new type of missionary. These were the words of Lu Guangmian, known to his Western friends and colleagues as K. M. Lu, written shortly after my uncle’s death.

I am still stunned by the news of George’s death. It is like the story of the early missionaries all over again – the men most needed, and in George’s case irreplaceable, go. What matters to me is to get men who will take up his work and catch his spirit. Thus wrote Bishop Ronald Hall, Anglican Bishop of Hong Kong.

In pursuance of this, the Bishop and the Rev. George Woods, MP, wrote to the News Chronicle, which published this appeal on 14 September 1945:

Wanted: Six men ready to risk their lives

Six courageous young men are needed at once to go to China to work for the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives. They are to take the place of one who did the work of six – George Hogg, brilliant thirty-year-old Oxford graduate who died recently of tetanus at Shandan, in northwest China, one thousand five hundred miles from Chongqing, and beyond the reach of medical aid.

If they are willing to take the same risk of disease, endure discomfort, eat only Chinese food, learn to talk the language like a Chinese, they should offer their services immediately to the secretary, Anglo-Chinese Development Society, 34 Victoria Street, London SW1.

Hogg, who worked with Rewi Alley, the inspiration of the Chinese Industrial Cooperative movement, was headmaster of the Shandan Bailie School, which trains junior technicians.

These schools are named after an American missionary, who introduced the system, which is helping to produce a democratically industrialised China.

This remarkable young Englishman lived as a Chinese and shared the food of the boys in any place they could find to set up a school – it might be a cave, an old temple, or a roadside depression roofed with canvas.

Anyone not prepared to take a similar risk need not apply.

The response was overwhelming. Several hundreds of young men offered their lives. The Shandan project continued to develop. Contributions sent in my uncle’s memory came from faraway countries. One from Oregon in the United States bore the hope that it might be used to start a small medical centre to save other lives. This and other suggestions materialised. A clinic consisting of a two-bed sickroom, a dispensary, and a clinical laboratory was set up in connection with the school. In 1947, a young New Zealand doctor and his wife, Bob and Barbara Spencer, went out to Shandan to set up a hospital with generous funds donated by the Women’s Cooperative Guilds of England and Wales. The Spencers spent three years in Shandan during which time they achieved no small number of miracles. Their story is told in Barbara Spencer’s book entitled Desert Hospital in China.

In August 1945, Rewi Alley wrote, I shall do my best to stay here and carry on, though there are all sorts of people calling me. George would never forgive me if I did not stay and do my best with this most basic work.

Rewi Alley, a New Zealander, died in Beijing on 27 December 1987 soon after his nintieth birthday after living in China for sixty years. The memorial events that brought me to China as a representative of my family were in commemoration of the life and work of Rewi Alley, China’s long-standing number-one foreign resident – a much honoured and respected gentleman. As the week progressed, packed with activity, it became increasingly obvious that we were not only remembering the life of one man, but of two. The second was George Aylwin Hogg, my Uncle Aylwin, who died in July 1945 at the age of only 30 after an action-packed seven years in China. All the time during that week of speeches, Aylwin’s name kept coming up, and I began to see that the Chinese people held his memory in equally high esteem as they did Rewi Alley’s. These two men had worked together in the chaotic years of the Sino-Japanese War and the Chinese Civil War to create a unique form of industrial training on which to base the reconstruction of industry for the New China that they believed was to come.

In the first volume I drew on the memories of family and friends about his childhood, boyhood, and his development into the young graduate who went on a visit to China directly after coming down from Oxford, never to return. I followed George Aylwin Hogg’s movements to the Far East via America and allowed his own letters and other writing form the bulk of the book.

In this second volume, Aylwin’s letters and articles tell of perhaps the most significant part of his life which became legend in his adopted land. It is advisable to read volume one prior to reading this volume two in order to gain the full background to the story.

The name Aylwin is of ancient origin derived from the earliest of all baptismal names, Aelfwine, which predates written history and most probably is rooted in the Gaelic and Celtic cultures. The name is translated as noble friend or wise friend, an apt name indeed in this case. He was certainly a wise and noble friend to the people of China.

Chapter 1

Yellow Wind Cave

A fter six weeks of being on the move, Aylwin arrived back in Baoji hoping to find news from home. Indeed, a pile of letters had arrived, and dutifully the office staff had forwarded them to somewhere along his route. He had no time to wait for their return, as next day he had to set off to Xi’an to meet Rewi Alley. The two of them got onto a train to go to Luoyang. About mid-journey they arrived at the familiar spot at Tongguan where Japanese gun batteries on the other side of the Yellow River could be seen from the railway, which was within firing range at that point. They weren’t firing that day, so the traveller’s were spared the twenty-mile walk through the hills. They were shuttled across the exposed section, on a rail trolley, to the train that awaited them out of firing range, in which they resumed their journey to Luoyang. On 16 February 1941, Aylwin wrote a letter home, referring to the outstanding Longmen Grottoes, which date back to the fourth century and are one of the three greatest examples of grotto art in China. Extending for about one kilometre, the Longmen (Dragon Gate) Grottoes are comprised of over 1,300 caves and 750 niches containing over 100,000 sculptures and 3,500 inscriptions and carved stone tablets:

Luoyang is an ancient capital that is steeped in history, did one but know it. Also sweating in curios did one but understand them. There is one beauty spot that I passed in a bus visiting here last year, where the whole mountainside of rock is carved into Buddhas, bodhisattvas, and all the divine guardians. Inside the mountain are caves full of Od’s boddikins. I hope to visit it soon.

Tomorrow I am leaving here for a trip back across the Yellow River, into the fringes of the country I came through in 1939. We have some co-ops up there. In spite of periodic Japanese attacks and suchlike annoyances, they are carrying on fine and have their own primary school and public baths. Some of them have been thrown out of work last year by a fresh invasion. They were offered back their jobs with higher pay by Japanese agents, but weren’t having any of it.

Then, in about ten days’ time, back to Baoji which will be full of things to do and hopefully your letters will have arrived by then. After staying in Baoji for a week or so and writing up the situation there, I hope to get a quiet month in Shuangshipu to finish off my book.

If I had to choose anywhere in particular to stay, I think I would like to stay here. I have many friends, and they are doing good work. What more could you want?

Here in South Shanxi was the border between the Kuomintang and the Eighth Route Army. Here, all the most important and worthwhile civilian jobs were being carried out by the guerrillas. The Kuomintang was trapped between them and the Zhongtiao Shan range of mountains, and the guerrillas were busily organising the resistance for when the Kuomintang would surely soon retreat in the face of the Japanese. Aylwin described his journey across the river, accompanying Xiao Ren into the mountains away from Luoyang, thus:

From Luoyang across the Yellow River and on northward for about fifty miles into the mountains. Here, thirty-three guerrilla co-ops are working and at the same time were literally holding their own sector since the Chinese troops had withdrawn temporarily from that district. The Japanese took advantage of this to send small parties of soldiers marauding; one village in which two co-ops are situated was completely destroyed, all grain, furniture, tools and doors being carried away by an army of ruffians following the Japanese soldiers. Fifty women too ill or otherwise unable to leave were raped in two villages here. A co-op member was shot in the leg as he ran, and was bayoneted. A co-op chairman, going back with his son too soon in his anxiety to see what had happened to co-op and family, was bayoneted and thrown down dead into the water of his own mill race. Six other co-op members were carried off, but later escaped.

Under such conditions, it was good to see the way in which other co-ops were carrying on with their work within earshot of the enemy guns; actually often much less than ten miles away. For those co-ops unable to continue work, as their machinery or source of raw material was now a battle-ground, a training course in accountancy and cooperative theory was held. Debates, sing-songs, and lectures are held out of doors, and curious peasants gather to hear and see what it is all about. The sole equipment for this guerrilla training-school is a blackboard for the teacher and a small knee board for each student, on which to take notes squatting cross-legged on the ground. It is really quite inconceivable that any kind of industry but cooperative industry could continue under guerrilla conditions. De-centralisation, individual initiative and loyalty, and consciously working towards an ideal are all essential. Self-discipline is most important of all.

One of the most striking features of this war area was the casualties from under-nourishment and disease. From one-third to a half of the population of village after village and town after town has died within the past few months of typhus, typhoid, relapsing fever, and ‘flu.

Under these circumstances it was encouraging to meet, on my return to Luoyang, two representatives of the International and British Red Cross, Messrs Barger and Wright, and to hear that they planned to cross immediately into the Shanxi area with drugs. These two are capable, and determined to do a good job. They have learned an amazing amount of Chinese in seven months by means of gramophone. Someone unkindly remarked that they sound very much like a gramophone running down, but all in all, for seven months it’s pretty good.

I also met Jean Chiang, an old friend from my Hankou days, a doctor able to eat bitter [Chinese expression for enduring hardship]. She now runs a maternity home in caves. I was amazed to see her cave full of babies in baskets, reminiscent of our co-op products in the joint warehouse.

Baoji, 10 April 1941:

I haven’t heard from you for months, but I suppose you are still alive, because if not someone should have told me. Funny thing the post is these days. I hope you have as last revised your old dictum that there is no such thing as lost in the post. I think I only get about half the letters that are written to me.

My last few letters have been written to you en route to various places. Now I am back