drinks were obligatory. She introduced George Hogg to the other members of the press corps, and he quickly found himself a novice member of their fraternity.
Years later Rewi Alley, a New Zealander and communist sympathiser who was also in Hankow at the time, and who was to play a crucial role in Hogg’s life in China, commented on Hogg’s relationship with Smedley.
George was amazed at the liberated nature of Smedley’s social life and the openness of her communist views. She liked him because he wasn’t like others in the press corps. He had brought no views of his own to China apart from the pacifist ideals of his family. And Smedley thought those were faintly ridiculous because the Chinese were fighting for their survival. She believed that you had to fight for everything that you got in life. And he agreed with her. They were friends but I think that was all.
Smedley liked Hogg, and wished to convert him to her own view of communism. She also let him use her bank account in Hankow to cash cheques, and became a source of good advice on where to go to find the story. George had known and loved strong, unconventional and ‘difficult’ women all his life. His mother and aunt were strong-minded people with unconventional views for the era in which they lived. Smedley was like a more dangerous version of Aunt Muriel, without, however, the strict middleclass manners and morals with which the Hogg family were brought up.
There was another larger-than-life figure who enlivened and illuminated the Hankow scene. Sir Archibald Clark-Kerr had been appointed British Ambassador to China in early 1938, just after the embassy moved from Nanjing to Hankow. Clark-Kerr was an unconventional and colourful character. He and his blonde Chilean wife Tita made a point, both in Hankow and later in Chongqing, of holding parties that mixed nationalists, communists, journalists and businessmen. With golden curls, tiny, perfect features and the trace of a Spanish accent, Lady Clark-Kerr looked like an exotic doll. Behind the baby-doll image lay an intelligent and well-informed woman. The Ambassador and his wife were prominent members of Hankow’s social life, and made a point of forging good relations with the press corps.
Agnes Smedley was almost as surprised as the other guests when she was invited to dine at the Ambassador’s imposing residence one night. She turned up in a borrowed dress, expecting to be vilified for her views on the British Empire. She had after all been jailed twenty years earlier in New York for gun-running for the nascent Indian nationalist movement. But Sir Archibald surprised her. She found him to be ‘a lean brown Scotchman with a keen tough mind and a scintillating sense of humour’ who clearly, if discreetly, shared her views on the nationalist government. Unable to reconcile his charm and sympathetic political views with his role as British Ambassador, Smedley concluded that he was a ‘good Scotchman fallen among diplomats’. More importantly for George Hogg, that night Clark-Kerr revealed two important facts that Smedley would pass on to him. They would change his life.
The Ambassador told his guests that he was an enthusiast for a plan to set up industrial co-operatives in rural areas to replace China’s shattered industrial infrastructure and to help arm and equip the forces fighting the Japanese. Silence fell over the table as he explained that he had been much impressed by the New Zealander Rewi Alley, who was trying to persuade the government to back the idea. According to Smedley, one of the guests spluttered that Alley was an illusionist chasing a will o’the wisp. In that case, said the Ambassador, it might not be a bad idea if more people pursued that will o’the wisp.
Clark-Kerr made it clear to his guests that he was going to help Alley, and would promote the idea of industrial co-ops to Chiang Kai-shek and his wife Soong Meiling. He was true to his word. The wife of the Chinese leader became an enthusiastic supporter and organiser of the plan to create small-scale factory workshops in rural areas. She was crucial to the early successes of the movement.
Alley at that time was working as a municipal employee, inspecting factories in Shanghai. But he moved to Hankow for several weeks in 1938 to work on the co-operative project, and there he briefly met George Hogg. Smedley, who was also an enthusiast for co-ops, introduced the two men in the hope that Hogg would write an article about the project. He made a note to investigate the supposed rural renaissance of China’s industry, and left it at that.
Having found lodgings at the Lutheran mission, Hogg had next to find the money to pay the rent. Bishop Roots may have been a good Christian, but he wasn’t in the business of giving free accommodation to itinerant journalists. And money remained a problem.
Hogg’s job with Van Reekum Bros required him to spend from 9 a.m. to noon at a smart Hankow hotel where the Chinese businessman saw his customers. His wages just covered his rent, leaving no money to buy an essential piece of equipment for any freewheeling journalist in the city, a bicycle. He was so short of money that instead of the promised fortnightly letters home, he told his parents that they would get a longer monthly letter to save on postage. He also urged them to use lightweight paper and envelopes, as he had discovered to his dismay that he was charged for items over a certain weight. It is one of the more extraordinary features of the war years in China that the postal service insisted on such bureaucratic niceties, and indeed managed to function at all. But function it did, and although some of Hogg’s parents’ letters to Hankow failed to get through, many of them did reach their destination. Letters from the UK to China went by sea via Hong Kong, and thence by train. After the fall of Hong Kong to the Japanese in 1941 the main postal route to China from England was via a long and unreliable overland journey through Russia.
Hogg tried to raise money by teaching English at the Russian diplomatic mission, and then at Hankow’s university. He signed up to teach courses in English and economics in the new academic year which was to begin in September – but by then the Japanese were at the gates of the city, and the university closed.
However, his problems were partly solved, and his life changed, when he was offered a job as a stringer, or part-time correspondent, for United Press International. It came with a monthly retainer of US$80, a reasonable sum given that the local currency was in the grip of rampant inflation. Hogg immediately gave up his job with the Chinese businessman and bought a bicycle.
UPI, whose motto was ‘Around the world around the clock’, already had, in Jack Belden, a famous full-time correspondent in Hankow, and from time to time the agency sent out other star correspondents, such as Betty Graham, to cover the conflict. Belden was part of Agnes Smedley’s ‘Hankow gang’ and it is probable that it was she who introduced the young Englishman to the veteran American reporter. Belden would have been only too happy to have a young trainee to do the legwork around town for him.
The UPI job was a huge stroke of luck for Hogg. It gave him press accreditation, which provided access to people and events that were shaping the course of the war. It gave him all-important status in the press corps. Above all it gave him an education in the bedrock of journalism, news reporting. UPI had been founded in 1907 as a rival to Reuters and the Associated Press, and challenged their supremacy with livelier, more colourful stories. Roy W. Howard, the UPI chief in Washington, believed that rival agencies were far too sombre and boring in their reporting, and encouraged his correspondents to inject colour and human interest into their despatches.
George Hogg’s UPI reports have long since been lost, but his writing for the Manchester Guardian and in his letters home show how quickly he absorbed the demands of his editors in Washington. The new job ended plans for a teaching career. For the next eighteen months he would learn the art and craft of being a foreign correspondent. It was hard work, which brought scant praise from his editors. But he learnt how to shape a short news item, and how the right quote or telling detail can illuminate and enliven the most mundane story.
Hogg was lucky. There was nothing mundane about the story he had to cover. From the moment he set foot in China the undeclared war between Japan and China had gathered pace, providing gruesome copy for the newsmen as the casualties and the atrocities mounted.
In May 1938 the Japanese finally took the railway town of Xuzhou. After the brilliant rearguard action at T’aierhchuang, the Chinese commanders had failed to follow up their advantage. The nationalist armies were soon continuing their retreat across central China, taking up new positions in the great ring of mountain ranges that surround Hankow and its two sister cities.
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