Liverpool pays tribute to Chinese sailors
Print Edition
A dark chapter in Britain’s maritime history was remembered in the port city of Liverpool when tributes were paid to thousands of Chinese merchant sailors yesterday.
A commemorative plaque was fitted to the wall of a restaurant in Liverpool’s Chinatown, the oldest Chinatown in Europe. In the 1940s, the building was used as the office of the Blue Funnel Shipping Line, the gathering point for Chinese crews and the place they used to transmit money to their families in China.
Those sailors played a key role during World War II when many were killed as their cargo ships were torpedoed by enemy submarines or bombed by planes.
But in 1946, thousands of them were rounded up like cattle and shipped back to China and many left behind British wives and children.
Among the attendants at the ceremony was Woo Sing Zay, 89, who worked as a linkman in the Blue Funnel office just after the war. He was the man who looked after the welfare of the Chinese crews.
His older brother Woo Too Pay, now deceased, only just escaped being one of the many sailors who were rounded up by agents of the British government.
“When they came in the middle of the night to round up the Chinese, my brother was at sea. So he escaped being sent back to China,” Woo said. “He was very lucky. I asked my brother why so many Chinese were forced back after the war and he said the British government said they had a bad reputation for gambling and taking opium. But these guys were no trouble at all. What happened was terrible.”
Yue The Hay, 85, joined Blue Funnel in the 1940s, just after World War II. He said: “What happened in Liverpool in 1946 was terrible. A lot of Chinese sailors lost their lives in the war and we deserved better.”
According to Moira Kenny, who is working with a charity to record the history of this dark episode, what happened after the war was awful. “Chinese men were just grabbed from their homes, leaving behind wives and children and sent back. Many of the children thought they had been abandoned by their dads, but this was untrue,” she said.
Many of the wives were looked upon as common prostitutes. Those children are now in their late 60s and 70s and even today they weep as they recall that separation.
Many of them might have family and relatives in China who they have never even met. “Our hope is this new plaque will go towards getting more recognition of what happened. At least the story is being told, but there is still much more work to do,” she added.
Bill Anderson, a former merchant mariner, has often discussed with his father-in-law Lam Sing, a ship’s cook, the episode.
Anderson said: “They were plucked from the streets or dragged in the middle of the night from their beds as they slept. They were taken to the docks and herded like cattle into the ship’s hatches, not even in cabins. Even animals were not treated so badly. ”
Before Blue Funnel was founded in 1865 there was a small Chinese community in Liverpool, but many of the Chinese seafarers employed by Blue Funnel settled in the city.
By World War II up to 20,000 Chinese seafarers had made Liverpool their home.
Campaigners hope a disused pub, The Nook, which stands next to the old Blue Funnel office will be used as a museum so the story of the mariners will be remembered.
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