Getting Stuck in for Shanghai: Putting the Kibosh on the Kaiser from the Bund; The British at Shanghai and the Great War by Robert Bickers

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9780143800293

eviewed by Peter Gordon
2 August 2014 — Getting Stuck in for Shanghai by Robert Bickers is another in the appealing Penguin China series of 100-odd page “Specials” on China and World War One. This particular volume covers the British “Shanghailanders” that went back to Europe to fight.

Bickers, as those who have read Empire Made Me—his full-length biography of Shanghai policeman Maurice Tinkler—may already know, is able to master both primary sources such as personal letters and contemporary newspaper accounts as well as the contemporary zeitgeist—a term I am using without irony in spite of the subject matter. The tone of this book is telegraphed by its subtitle: “Putting the Kibosh on the Kaiser from the Bund”.

This was not a terribly significant factor in the First World War. The soldiers numbered in the hundreds, fewer—one imagines—than from a moderately-sized town in Britain. Their stories from the front, captured in letters, are as stiff-upper-lip and horrific as any, but not hugely different from others’ one reads elsewhere. The interest in the book, beside Bickers’s skill at portraiture and finding the telling anecdote, lies in the tussle he depicts between patriotism and Shanghai’s “cosmopolitanism”:

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