My mother, Doreen Gibbons, who has died aged 96, was a civil internee in Shanghai, China, during the second world war.
In 1942, soon after Japanese soldiers took over Shanghai, her father, Frank Cook, who worked for the city’s municipal council, was taken to Haiphong Road camp as a “political prisoner”. Doreen described furiously pedalling her bicycle through Shanghai behind the lorry, tears streaming down her face.
Doreen, who was then 16, her younger sister Joan and their mother, Dorothy, were given a date to report to the Civil Internee Centre early in 1943. They were each allowed to bring one small trunk and a bed. She later wrote: “We all thought it would not be for very long … If only we had taken more shoes, as the rough paths soon wore out the ones we had. Most of us finished up wearing wooden clogs made out of the lavatory seats in camp.”
The camp’s entertainment committee organised Gilbert and Sullivan productions, a distraction from empty stomachs and constant anxiety. However, by 1945 performances were not allowed, rations grew smaller and the internees grew weaker. Not long after Japan surrendered to the allies that September, the gates of the camp were opened and soon the Royal Navy took over. Doreen’s father was reunited with the family and they all returned to Britain, to their grandfather’s house in Surbiton, where their cousins nicknamed Doreen and Joan “the stick insects”.
Doreen was born in what was then the Shanghai International Settlement run by a number of “treaty powers”. Her father had travelled there from London in 1921 for a job with the governing municipal council. Her mother, Dorothy (nee Burch), a bookkeeper, had sailed out to marry Frank in 1923. Doreen went to the Public School for Girls and told of happy memories of playing in the shade of the garden magnolia tree. When war broke out in Europe in 1939, the family were on leave in Britain. They thought it safer to return to China, but it was not long before the Shanghai International Settlement came to an end.
After the war, Doreen joined Shell in London as a secretary and in 1947 applied for a posting back in Shanghai. With the Chinese communist revolution soon under way, she was transferred to Hong Kong, where she met and in 1952 married Peter Gibbons, who worked for a dairy farming company. They had two sons, John and Steve, and in 1959 moved back to Britain, where I was born the following year.
Living in Tadworth, Surrey, Doreen became active in the local church, Mothers’ Union and WI. She lovingly tended her garden, and became an adept potter. She was in the Civil Defence Corps, canvassed for the Liberals and campaigned for the Common Market. She later worked as an administrator in adult education at Nork Park school, Banstead.
My parents retired happily to Horringer, Suffolk, in 1985 where they were longtime volunteers at the National Trust’s Ickworth House and where Doreen instigated a weekly mah jong party with her friends and neighbours.
Peter died in 2012. Doreen is survived by John, Steve and me, and six grandchildren, James, Daniel, Jordan, David, Yande and Natasha.
