[Excerpts] ...

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Life slowly settled down. It was not yet a model community, but all bent themselves to the task of giving it a good foundation. Elections were held to establish committees to deal with various aspects of camp activity: committees for discipline, housing, food, schooling, leisure activities, religious activities, work, and health.

At first each committee comprised three or four people. Later, when camp life settled down to its cruising speed, we were to limit each committee to a single elected person. Every six months we replaced or reelected them.

[excerpt]

We shouldn’t try to recruit everyone. Let us begin at the beginning! First we needed to establish a nucleus of scouting life, a patrol seven or eight strong. Junior Chan, a 14 year-old Chinese Canadian catholic, could make a good patrol leader; Zandy, a Eurasian; the de Zutter brothers, who were Belgians aged 12 and 14; and finally three or four British lads. There was a good mixture of catholics and protestants, with one orthodox element for good measure.

It was decided that Cockburn should be in charge; the rest of us would be assistants.

[excerpt]

Old Mr. Kelly was a protestant missionary who had married a Chinese girl late in life; and who had arrived in camp with four young children. He stood out with his dress and his habits for he had gone completely Chinese: clothing, food, speech and way of life.

His children ran about, dressed like Chinese children, accompanied by Dad who couldn’t always keep up with them. One day little Johnny accompanied by his sister Mary ventured close to an open cesspool. [We had no sewers in the camp and the latrines were connected to trenches which were regularly emptied by Chinese coolies.] The predictable happened. Out of curiosity our Johnny went too close and of course fell in. Luckily his sister Mary was on watch. She gave the alarm to passers-by who were able to fish out Johnny before he died of suffocation. As a result of this misadventure he acquired the unusual nickname of Cesspool Kelly .

[excerpt]

Cigarettes were another source of currency, at least for the non-smokers. We were entitled to a pack of a hundred cigarettes once a month from the canteen. That was not nearly enough for the serious smokers, but it was handy for those who could use them for barter. The children from Chefoo school — a protestant school which had arrived in camp complete with staff — used them to augment their bread ration, which was never enough to satisfy their hungry young stomachs.

[excerpt]

I liked him a lot, Brian, that tall sixteen year-old lad, the eldest of four children who had arrived in camp with their mother as part of the Chefoo School group. His father, Mr. Thompson, was in Chungking in charge of a protestant mission and had been separated from his family since Pearl Harbour. Although he was a protestant he had come to me, a catholic missionary, to ask for French lessons. We met twice a week, and thus I got to know him better.

http://www.weihsien-paintings.org/NormanCliff/Aftermath/GordonMartin/p_GordonMartin.html [excerpt]

On my right, between the hospital and the east wall of the camp, there is not a lot of space nor much vegetation, but nevertheless we held many a grand Scout function there and often operated a very profitable “Black Market,” most of all during the first months before the prison-like installations were so redoubtable and well coordinated. As the song lyrics said in the renowned musical revue in which 50 missionary priests went on-stage in shirts and white pants to entertain the public, everything passed over the wall: eggs, honey, sugar, soap, peanut oil and even, at times, pork quarters. In those good old days in our first months here, priests were the main specialists in these matters, due to a mixture of audacity and absence of commercial aspirations. To divide the goods and facilitate accountability in case of loss, each room, involved stored one or two items – some kept tobacco, eggs, sugar, we had the oil and jars of jam and sometimes alcohol as well.

[further reading]
http://www.weihsien-paintings.org/hanquet/book/Memoires-TotaleUK-web.pdf

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