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Intertitle: “... memories are hunting horns whose echoes die along the wind.”
James Bertram talks to James McNeish of unrest, war and revolution in Europe and Asia 1930-1950.
Here Bertram discusses the revolution in China, Madame Sun Yat Sen (or Soong Ch'ing-ling and the widow of the President of the Republic of China), Hong Kong, fund raising for hospitals in China, Rewi Alley and the concept of “Gung Ho” and Christopher Isherwood. The savagery of the Japanese war machine, fund raising in England in the late thirties and meeting Pearl Buck, taking a convoy through bandit territory in China, his return New Zealand in 1939 and subsequent return to Hong Kong after a wire from Madame Sun, the Japanese attack on Hong Kong in December 1941.
Biographical Note: Prior to the war Bertram performed aid work with the China Defence League, for whom he gave fund-raising lectures in a tour of the US, and led a convoy of supply trucks from Haiphong in Indochina to Yan'an. Part-way through this journey England declared war on Germany, and he returned to New Zealand. Shortly later he returned to Hong Kong to continue work for the China Defence League.
He spent a few months as relief press attaché to the British ambassador in Chungking, but returned to Hong Kong until it was seized by the Japanese in December 1941. A volunteer gunner, he became a prisoner of war in awful conditions until the Japanese surrender nearly four years later.
After the war Bertram returned to Japan as an adviser to the New Zealand delegation to the Far Eastern Commission.
- Adapted from Wikipedia.com