The Four Chinese Nurses of St. Stephen’s College Hospital.



Stanley Military Cemetery, Hong Kong (Wikimedia)

The plain gravestone at the Stanley Military Cemetery in Hong Kong bears a simple inscription, “Met their deaths at St. Stephens, 25^th December 1941”. Then it lists a number of the known fatalities followed by … “and many unknown Chinese, Indian, Canadian and British Ranks of all units”.  The names of the four Chinese nurses that disappeared on Christmas Day 1941 are among the ‘many unknown’.  Their fate is mentioned in a letter from George H. Calvert, a former member of the Royal Hong Kong Regiment.

The hospital unit at St. Stephens College, a private school in Hong Kong once known as ‘The Eton of the East’, was functioning as a military hospital during the defense of the island. It became the scene of a massacre.  Patients and staff were killed, many by bayonet wounds while in their beds or while trying to protect their patients.

Sections of Japanese infantry known as the Tanaka Butai reached the Stanley area early that morning.  Lt. Colonel Black, a doctor in a white coat and a Red Cross arm band, carried a white flag out to the advancing troops to inform them the building was a hospital.  He was killed, as was Captain Whitney, another doctor who tried unsuccessfully to stop their entry.

The subsequent horrific treatment of the non-combatants is described in a number of web sites and books.  A few survived their injuries, their mistreatment and the subsequent years in a prison camp on the island.

Eleven female nurses (four Chinese, seven British) were separated and repeatedly raped.  The Chinese nurses and three of the British nurses were killed that evening.  Nurse Elaine Begg was one of these, her body subsequently identified during the clean-up by her husband, Stewart Begg, a sergeant major also captured at the hospital and who survived the initial slaughter. The two other British nurses killed were Mrs Marjorie Moore Smith and Mrs Alberta Buxton.  The Chaplain, James Barnett, had seen Mrs Buxton being hit with a steel helmet and kicked as he and other men were herded away to face their own ordeal. The bodies of the three British nurses were found in the grounds; one of the Japanese soldiers led a surviving nurse and the Chaplain to their location. Of the four Chinese nurses there is no further mention.

Elizabeth Fidoe was one of four British nurses who survived the ordeal and was to survive the war.  She later testified at the war crimes trial and is reported to have died in Britain in 1951.

In the aftermath the Japanese troops organized the cremation of the bodies from the hospital with those of the fallen troops, so the exact numbers of the St. Stephen’s victims are not known – reports vary between 13 and 180, some numbers including the military personnel killed close by; 60 is the number reported at the St. Stephen’s Chapel web site.  The stone in the Stanley Military Cemetery is a monument to them all. 

In 1948, S. D. Begg and Mrs E. D. Fidoe were recorded among the witnesses for the prosecution at the trial of Major-General Ito Takeo, the Infantry Commander during the assault on Hong Kong.  On 6 February 1948 he was sentenced to 12 years imprisonment for war crimes; his defence argued his culpability regarding the specific events at St. Stephens Hospital was lower than that of Major-General Ryusaburu Tanaka, the commander of the Left Flank Force that had entered the St. Stephens area.  Major-General Tanaka was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment. 

But of the Chinese nurses on Christmas day 1941 at St. Stephen’s hospital I found no specific reference other than the letter from George Calvert; there is only the knowledge that they were taken away, abused terribly and that they did not survive.

A stained glass window in the St. Stephen’s Chapel is a memorial to these times and all the people who suffered there during World War II.  At its centre it contains three words:  ‘Faith’, ‘Hope’ and ‘Love’.  They are written in Chinese characters.