That Mystery Copy of Crow’s 400 Million Customers – a little follow up & hello to Mr Topshoj

Yesterday I posted about a slightly mysterious copy of Carl Crow’s 400 Million Customers that Joe McKernan, a used book dealer showed me. As yesterday’s post shows it seems to have been a locally produced Shanghai copy of the book and came out as an exact copy (down to dedication and page numbering) of the American edition published by Harper and Brothers of New York shortly before. All well and good…and very interesting as I didn’t know such editions existed.

Now to the seemingly illegible name in the front pages – and thanks to Paul Midler and his research and deciphering skills it would seem to have been owned by a Mr. S. Topshoj. A bit more digging reveals that this is probably correct. Topshoj was a Dane, possibly a Swede, who was the Chief Engineer of the Danish cable laying vessel Store Nordisk running between Hong Kong and Shanghai laying cables. He is listed as being in the region in 1937/1938, i.e. at just the right time to have purchased the book and a man with a probable interest in the title. The Store Nordisk was part of the small fleet of the Great Northern Telegraph Company (Det Store Nordiske Telegrafselskab A/S), a Danish firm whose Chinese Hong name was Da Bei, or Big North) that laid most of the cable (telegraphic that is) around China and Hong Kong at the time. They had headquarters in Shanghai (at No.7 Bund), Peking and Hong Kong – I blogged back in 2010 about the destruction of their former office building in Beijing’s Da Yuan Fu Hutong. Great Northern had been around for a long time in China and in the nineteenth century (1868) won the tender to lay cables to connect Russia with China, Japan and Hong Kong and then onwards to connect with Europe.

The cables (further contracts were won by Great Northern to extend the system all over China and beyond) led to a small fleet of cable laying boats – the CS Store Nordisk, as well as the CS Cella and CS Africa, that undertook the main cable laying work, with a Danish naval vessel, the Tordenskjold, laying some of the shore ends.

We can then assume that in 1937/1938 Mr Topshoj was sitting in his bunk, moving slowing across the South China Sea listening to the cable slowly play out the back (yes, I know, “aft”). The CS Store Nordisk was built in 1922 by A/S Nakskovskibs of Nakskov in Denmark. The ship continued to be a cable layer in Asia until sold to the Mitsui Ocean Development & Engineering Company in 1969 and renamed the Ohtaka. And so here is the Store Nordisk, perhaps with Mr Topshoj onboard reading Carl Crow…