Examination of Witnesses (Questions 19-36)
PROFESSOR JACK
HAYWARD, MR
RON BRIDGE
AND MRS
ANN MOXLEY
1 DECEMBER 2005
Q19 Chairman: Could I welcome you very
much, Professor Hayward. You were the subject of the Ombudsman
investigation, so we are particularly glad that you have been
able to join us. Mr Bridge, you chair the Association. We are
very glad to have you and also Ann Moxley, a former internee.
We are very glad that you are able to join us. The Committee thought
that it would be extremely helpful if we had a little time with
you before we saw the Minister, because we wanted to get your
feelings about this. Could I perhaps ask Professor Hayward first?
Could I start, if it is not going to be too upsetting, by going
back even further and asking, just very briefly, about the experience
which has triggered the whole issue? Would you like to say what
happened, when it was, and how it was?
Professor Hayward: I was a very
young boy at the time, in my very early teens. Since then, I have
put that experience pretty firmly behind me. I did not dwell on
it. I do not think that it has marked me for life, though it may
have given my education a slightly peculiar twist, in that obviously
I did not have a normal schooling in the camp. Some of the words
that are being used in this whole affair have, I must say, somewhat
surprised me. The word "distress" keeps cropping up.
I have not felt particular distress. I have felt anger and outrage
at the central question that it seems to me has come up in this
matter and which is of cardinal importance. It is the question
of what it means to be British and what it means to have an identity
as someone who is British. I happen to regard it as having inestimable
value for me personally. People who apparently do not have that
view have decided that they can discriminate between different
categories of the British. Irrespective of the fact that I spent
some years in the camp, therefore, it seems to me that there is
a wider question. I do not want to go round, showing wounds and
bruises. That, to me, is not the central question. The central
question is why the British Government is repudiating and casting
a slur on some of its fellow citizens who were at the time British;
who are now British; who feel British; may not be biologically
British. The Japanese, as has been repeated on a number of occasions
in this affair, did not enquire of my family, myself, and others
like me what our blood links were with the United Kingdom. Perhaps
it was just as well that we were not in the hands of the Nazi
Germans, because then they might have been interested in blood
links. So all this seems to me, in a way, bizarre. What worries
me in this whole affair is that a muddle and a mess of people
in the Civil Service—who, as I think the Ombudsman has just
said, often rush to do what their political masters, after a long
delay, tell them to do something about—then get things wrong,
try to cover it up, and get themselves in an ever-worse mess;
but, in the process, add insult to injury to people who feel,
on the whole, that their own government is not where they expect
this to be coming from.
Q20 Chairman: And, when they come
up with this wretched £500 so-called "apology"
payment, you have told them what to do with it, have you not?
Professor Hayward: I told them
even before. Why I went through the Ombudsman and not through
the courts—which the Ministry of Defence go on about—is,
happening to be a political scientist, I know that the Ombudsman
has access to papers and people. She and her staff were able to
get at some of the information which a court, I suspect, would
not have done. Therefore when she, as she has done, reported to
you and to the Department, she is putting you in a position to
see how this mess was arrived at. There are smoking guns, and
more than smoking guns—if I may put it like that. It seems
to me that the result, therefore, is that the process of going
through to look at maladministration gets at the injustice, in
a curious way, that a court of law finds difficult to get at justice.
Q21 Chairman: Thank you very much
for that. Could I ask Ann Moxley to give us your perspective on
this?
Mrs Moxley: Yes. I totally agree
with what Professor Hayward has said. In fact, he has pretty well
said what I was going to say. If I may, I would just like to amplify
a bit on the question of why. My mother was a nurse. She had a
number of friends who were nurses and they were working in Hong
Kong at the time. We were in Shanghai, but they were in Hong Kong.
When the Japanese came in, they threw the nurses on top of their
patients, raped them, bayoneted them and the patients in their
bed, and chopped them up; and there were body parts everywhere,
I am told. I have just heard recently—I do not know whether
any of you heard a programme called The Reunion with Sue
McGregor—one of those people explained that she had been
a child who had been picked up. Her father and brothers had been
taken off, but her mother and she, and possibly a couple of sisters,
were taken into a camp. The only place they could put them to
bed was in those wards where this had happened. I do not know
whether the bodies were still there or not, but the floor was
covered in blood because she, as a child, could not move her legs.
It was sticky, and that is all she remembers about that. I do
not know whether all those children's great-grandmothers had had
the wit to give birth in Britain. It seems to me to be absolutely
nothing to do with where their grandparents were born. They were
given British nationality. In fact, the British consul in Shanghai
gave the Japanese the lists of people who were Britons. They were
interned as enemy nationals. To turn round now and say, "Well,
actually they weren't really enemy nationals", because something
happened subsequently—I do not know what—that took
their British nationality away—if it did—what the
heck has that got to do with whether they should be reimbursed
or not? I am lucky: I was reimbursed. I can show my grandparents'
birth certificates back to about 1500, because I happen to be
interested in genealogy. Does that make me more valuable therefore
as a Brit? Should I have had five times as much as them? It is
a nonsense. It is totally irrelevant. If they were there, they
should be paid the same as me, and the same as everybody else.
I think that it is quite disgraceful. I do not think that it is
understood or was understood in government, because I went to
an AGM of the ABCIFER some years ago now, where Kit McMahon—and
he was in at the time when John Major was Prime Minister—was
trying to sell us a scheme the Japanese were apparently wanting
to put forward, introducing bursaries and educational visits—a
pro-Japanese, pro-British kind of liaison. He was voted out 100
per cent. There was not a single person who did not vote against
him on that occasion. We all thought that it was a matter of principle
and should go ahead as a matter of principle that we were all
claiming together. That was five or six years ago—I am not
quite sure how long ago it was. Ron could tell us, I am sure.
Just after the meeting he turned to me and said, "You're
all fools. You'll never get the money, and you're going to waste
an awful lot of time and money". I said, "I don't think
this is about money, do you? It's about the principle". We
were all willing to spend our money then to try and get that principle
established, and I am very glad that we have. I hate the idea
of the present government or the MoD, or whoever is responsible,
actually watering it down, because it seems to be quite wrong.
We should be concentrating on who was there and making sure they
are being paid, and they should be paid the same as everybody
else. I feel very strongly about that, and so do a lot of other
people I know.
Q22 Chairman: Thank you very much
for that. Certainly from our experience some of the strongest
representations have come from those who have had the payment,
but who are incensed that people with whom they were interned
have not had it.
Mrs Moxley: There is an awful
lot of feeling about that, there really is. I did not realise
until very recently that people I knew, who live in this country,
in fact had not been paid. I am absolutely astounded that they
have not.
Q23 Chairman: Is not Professor Hayward's
point the one that you are making and others make: that it is
nothing to do with the blessed money? It is to do with the idea
that there are two classes of Britishness?
Mrs Moxley: Absolutely. That is
the essential. If you applied it to the country now and said that
everybody who did not have a grandparent born here was not entitled
to the Health Service, or education, you would not stay in office
very long, any of you! It is just not right, and should not be
muddled. There should be no irrelevant rules at all; that criteria
for the settlement should be proscribed by the treaty that was
abandoned. I think that was absolutely disgraceful, and I would
personally like to sue the person who made that decision—but
I suppose that is beyond it. However, Ron Bridge has a huge amount
of information and we should use it.
Q24 Chairman: Could I move quickly
to Mr Bridge and say this? One of the issues that arises is how
many people. Is it possible to say with any certainty how many
people have been affected?
Mr Bridge: When the announcement
was made, the only information that the Government had of the
numbers was an estimate that I had given them, because I had the
list of three camps with the ages. I took that to a firm of actuaries
and persuaded them to do it for free, and to tell me how many
of those people would still be alive. Applying that to the total
number that I knew had been in the camps, they came up with the
figure of 3,000 maximum that should be alive now. As far as the
total number in the camps is concerned, there are various documents
in the National Archives at Kew. They vary from 15,012, which
was the number of civilians the Japanese Government declared they
had in custody to the surrender documents on September 3, 1945,
to a figure of 16,586, which the Colonial Office had come out
with as the number of civilians held in January 1945—the
discrepancy there was probably because the Colonial Office were
not aware of deaths—and a figure of some post-war studies
that were done in the 1950s, which suggested that there could
be as many as 20,000. So I based all my calculations on the highest
figure. If people should wonder why there is this discrepancy,
it can be pretty well explained in that the members of the Volunteer
Forces in the Far East, who had been recruited by the Colonial
Office, were considered at the end of the war by the War Office—the
precursor of the Ministry of Defence—as being civilians,
because they had not been recruited under the auspices of the
War Office. The Japanese considered that merchant seamen were
civilians, and also the military DEMS crews—that is, the
defensively equipped merchant ships' anti-aircraft gunners—although
they were serving, they were considered in the Japanese camps
and in the Japanese records as civilians. There was also some
dispute as to whether policemen were civilians or military. So
that explains the discrepancy. However, I am pretty confident
that 20,000 was the maximum that were incarcerated, and I am pretty
confident that it is about 3,000 who are alive now. Having said
that, the Ministry of Defence had no records. They asked me for
records, which I tried to give them. In fact, I helped them in
a variety of things. A number of people who had received the £48
10s, which was the list they had for authority to payment as being
interned, were actually not interned, because the payments on
that scheme were slightly different. They had been captured by
the Japanese and in fact shipped home as members of the diplomatic
staff, and the rest of it. So those people got paid. Other people
who were in Red Cross homes or Church homes were also accepted,
because they did not know. This is cited in documents which I
have now seen, which I had no knowledge of at the time. However,
I do know people where I have been asked for verification that
they were in the camp, and where I quite categorically said, "No,
he was not there, but his father was in that camp", because
I have now got the list of something like 45,000 names. Not all
British of course, but you can then track it down.
Q25 Chairman: No, you are the absolute
expert on this, which is why we are pursuing you. What I was really
after was this. What is your best estimate? If the scheme had
been implemented as we thought it had been announced in November
2000, before the blood-link stuff came in, and if the worry from
the MoD is perhaps the floodgates argument, what is the number
of people that would come in if it was implemented as it was believed
in November 2000 it would be implemented? What is the number and
what is the cost?
Mr Bridge: Three thousand people,
which would be £30 million. In fact, I did do a paper to
that effect which I sent, because I assumed policy emanated from
Whitehall, to the Minister of Defence. It was sent on to the War
Pensions Agency in Blackpool, and I had an acknowledgement from
them to say that they were looking into it and would give me a
reply within 28 days. So I then wrote another letter to the Minister
and pointed out that, as it was policy, I thought that policy
emanated from Whitehall and perhaps he would like to answer my
paper. That was 19 June 2001. I am still waiting for a reply to
that paper. It was fairly obvious—it is obvious now—that
in fact they had made their minds up, "Don't confuse us with
facts. We're not shifting".
Chairman: You have been an absolutely
assiduous defender of this cause and, unlike most lobbyists, you
know more about what is going on than they do. We are very grateful
for that.
Q26 David Heyes: I agree entirely,
Chairman. I just want to put on record the experience of one of
Ron Bridge's members, a constituent of mine Celia Meade. She is
68 years old now and was taken into captivity as a four-year-old
in 1942. She meets the blood-link requirements. Her family were
second-generation colonial administrators, getting on with the
business of running the Empire, when the Japanese arrived. She
meets this bizarre, Nazi-like test of racial purity but she cannot
prove it, because the first thing that happened was the house
was bombed and all the records that would have allowed her to
prove it were destroyed. Despite her best efforts over the years,
she has not been able to produce a sufficient quality of information.
Despite being able to trace, like Ann Moxley, her family back
many generations, it has not been enough to meet the requirements.
Briefly, her circumstances were that her mother was raped by a
Japanese officer and then punished for not thanking him profusely
enough after the event. She witnessed that as a four-year-old
girl. She saw her nine-month-old brother die in captivity from
malnutrition. She survived on maggots gathered from the latrines
in the camp. I could go on. She suffered the most desperate privations,
which resulted in the death of her father shortly after the war,
broken mentally and physically. Both she and her mother, who did
survive, were delighted when the £10,000 awards were announced.
Little enough compensation as it was for what they had suffered,
they felt that at last there was some recognition for what they
had gone through. They therefore applied and, in June 2001, were
turned down because they could not meet the test. I think that
it is worth putting that on the record, but for me the question
that flows from it is this. Why on earth did the Ombudsman need
to get involved in this? Why did natural justice and common decency
not prevail? I would just ask you to comment on that, Ron.
Mr Bridge: I think there was a
case to be looking at it. The various departments of government
had resisted doing anything for a number of years. It was not
until we found a document at Kew, in which there was categoric
proof that the Foreign Office had in fact decided not to do its
best for British subjects under the Peace Treaty—where they
could have reopened the Peace Treaty under article 26, because
Japan had done a better deal. The footnote on that document is,
"We must never let this get out because, if it ever gets
out, there will be a monumental political row". That was
written in 1955, and whoever it was certainly had a crystal ball.
When this occurred, the Ministry of Defence were given the job
to do. They would not communicate at all with the civilians. They
did not want to know. In fact, the then Minister of Defence reported
to our lawyers that he was not the slightest bit interested in
civilians. The numbers that I gave I had to give to Number 10's
private office, and they would pass it on. When they made an announcement
and there was a meeting on the implementation, I asked "What
do you mean by the term `British'?", because I dealt with
war pensions and, at the time, war pensions were payable only
to those born in the United Kingdom. There were various definitions
of "British" and I said, "What do you mean?".
They came back on 24 November 2000 and said, "What we mean
is British under the then rules. It doesn't matter where they
live or what their nationality is now". Then they introduced
the grandparent. They still would not talk. I produced a paper.
It is not a long paper; it is only three pages. I would have thought
they could have at least discussed the matter. Subsequently, Andrew
Dismore, who is chairman of the all-party group on this, has tried
to get a meeting with various ministers. They do not want to know.
In other words, they are frightened of the facts. They have made
their minds up and that is it. They have dug a hole and, as far
as I can see, they are still digging. I would add just one point.
I was in a camp too. My paternal side are from Empire, having
been out there a long time, but my mother was born in Yorkshire—and
that was allowed as being part of the British Isles!
Chairman: It is good to have that on
the record!
Q27 Julie Morgan: I think that we
all very much admire your determination in fighting this case.
I notice in the memorandum which you gave to us that you did seem
to imply that you had been warned off from continuing with this.
I wondered if you could say a bit more about that.
Mr Bridge: The only contact I
have had with previous ministers was when, as you will know, various
government departments do have the odd reception, and I turned
up at them, and I was told quite categorically that I was wasting
the time of the Ministry of Defence; that I should get off it,
and there was no way that I would ever win. Frankly, all that
did was to steel my resolve that I will win in the end—and
I will win in the end. I am determined to. I have received
it. That is fine. But I have seen these people—people who
shared the same watery soup, the same mouldy bread—who were
there because they had a British passport and who are now being
rejected by their own government. It is actually downright criminal.
Q28 Julie Morgan: I agree with you.
So you were told that you, as individuals, could not succeed against
the might of the MoD?
Mr Bridge: That is right, yes.
Q29 Julie Morgan: You said earlier
on that you felt that the MoD had made a decision, and that was
that.
Mr Bridge: Yes.
Q30 Julie Morgan: That was the reason
you were not able to get any further in relation to this relatively
small group of people and relatively small amount of money. Could
you say a bit more about that?
Mr Bridge: If payments were to
be made to those who were entitled to a war pension under the
Personal Injuries (Civilians) Scheme 1983, which is the last piece
of legislation on that subject, they would have had to have been
born in the United Kingdom—because that legislation requires
the person to have been born in the United Kingdom. I received
the money on 1 February. As I had been born outside the United
Kingdom, my father had been born outside the United Kingdom, obviously
they were therefore not using it. I find it significant that the
bulk of rejection letters were sent out on one day, 25 June 2001,
and it was the day that a caveat to the war pensions policy, signed
by Hugh Bayley MP who was then the Minister, came into effect—widening
war pensions to those who could prove that their grandparents
were born in the United Kingdom. I think that they therefore latched
on to a change in a different field and hoped that they could
browbeat that through. I think that is what went through their
minds, though I do not have the mind of the Ministry of Defence,
fortunately. It goes a little bit further. There are enormous
repercussions, because some of the people who have been paid have
had to prove that their grandparents were born in the United Kingdom,
when in fact they were born in the Far East while their fathers
were serving in the British Army. They had British military birth
certificates. Those were not good enough for the Ministry of Defence,
however, as being British. They had to prove it in relation to
their grandparents. If you follow that logic through, it means
that every person born of the British military who has been stationed
in Germany since 1945 is not seen as British by the Ministry of
Defence. The repercussions of that are enormous.
Q31 Julie Morgan: Under their criteria
as it is now, do you think there have been many wrong payments?
Mr Bridge: I would suspect that
there have probably been about 150. I know from the documents
I have subsequently seen, signed by Mr Alan Burnham, that there
was something like 30-odd people from Rosary Hill, which was the
International Red Cross home in Hong Kong, who had been paid.
That is their own admission. I do know that there were about 25
or 30 who had come through and they asked me for proof of internment,
and I said, "They weren't interned. Their father was".
In those instances, their mothers were born locally. Once they
went into a camp, the Japanese had to feed them. So they gave
families options -wives who had children, generally under five,
and there were quite a lot of those in Shanghai—to stay
and live on the economy. Effectively, Japan at the time was interested
in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, did not want to
upset those born in the Far East and living out in the Far East—except
of course people with a European connotation—and they were
trying to placate them. It was also very much the whim of the
local military commander, the Japanese commander, as to who went
into camp. In fact, my grandfather and grandmother were left to
stay outside of camp. They were in their late-seventies and he
was very much an invalid, having been beaten up by the Japanese
in 1937—but that is a different story. The point was that
they were allowed to live on the economy because the local commander
thought, "Actually, a 78 or 80-year-old isn't really a threat
to Japan's military might".
Q32 Julie Morgan: Excluding the people
in the Rosary Hill camp, it was about 120 people, was it?
Mr Bridge: This is how I come
to the figure—when they talk about 1,400 still not paid,
or that sort of figure—that I think there is only about
800. I had 900 names sent to me, with dates of birth and, taking
the proportion of those who I knew were not in camp, and said
so—that they still had on the records and who they felt
were in camp—I said that I could not give a certificate
to them that they were in camp. I have had advances from people
who have been trying to bribe my signature. I am afraid my signature
is not for sale.
Q33 Julie Morgan: Are you aware of
any people who have died during this period, who were entitled
to this and did not get it?
Mr Bridge: Yes, quite a few died,
some of them abroad—who have gone abroad for their health.
Quite a few of them have died, yes. Obviously time is catching
up when people are in their late-seventies and eighties, and particularly
when they have been through an experience like that.
Julie Morgan: Which is why we need to
settle this. Thank you.
Q34 Chairman: Rounding off this section,
we are about to see the minister. What would you like to ask him—all
of you?
Professor Hayward: In a way, it
is the sort of question I would like to put to members of this
Committee as well as to the Minister. It is to say this. If you
were denied your British identity when you feel you are entitled
to it under the legislation that then existed, and you are either
a Member of Parliament or, in his case, a Minister of the Crown,
do you think this is conduct worthy of the office you hold?
Q35 Chairman: It is a formidable
question, which we will attempt to do justice to. Ann?
Mrs Moxley: I think that is a
super question. I suppose, at the other end of the scale, it is
perhaps a silly question but it is, "Haven't you got something
better to do than to mess about with all of this?"!
Q36 Chairman: That is also a formidable
question. Ron?
Mr Bridge: "You have picked
up a problem that was in existence before your time. Are you satisfied
that your department is prepared to make decisions contrary to
the facts, and to be too proud to try and establish the facts
before they make any decision?"
Chairman: Thank you very much indeed
for that, and thank you for coming along.
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