All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French

Hardy Jowett – A Little footnote – Home to Peking from School via a Soviet Gaol

Posted: February 14th, 2017 | No Comments »

Yesterday I blogged about an old Pekinger Hardy Jowett who went from missionary in the 1890s to an officer with the Chinese Labour Corps in WW1 to a British official in Weihaiwei to an oil executive in Peking….and there was a little story I cam across that was interesting too…from 1930…

The London Guardian reports that Hardy’s son, Christopher, had a bit of an ordeal at the Sino-Soviet border, at Chita, when he was just 18. Here he was, returning from school on England, in October 1930, to Peking. But it seems he lost his passport and, rather unfortunately and no doubt alarmingly for his parents, ended up in a Russian Commie jail without warm clothing or food. It seems he did get moved to a hotel and the whole snafu eventually worked out but among the long list of ‘a funny thing happened to me on the way from school’ stories this must rank pretty nightly….



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