Incidents

If incidents were needed to sting Britain into a fighting mood, the Japanese seemed determined to supply them last week as: 1) they bayoneted a British employe of a British-owned Shanghai mill, let him bleed to death; 2) prepared to isolate the British Concession in Tientsin for harboring Chinese assassins; 3) arrested a British military attache and an officer at Kalgan for spying. Yet as the week ended the British and Japanese Empires were still technically at peace.

Manhandled. Shanghai's muddy, winding, sampan-littered Whangpoo River divides the big modern buildings of the International Settlement from the factory-stacks of Pootung. Among its grimy factories stands the British-owned China Printing & Finishing Co., a cotton mill where Chinese workers last week were on strike. Guarding the plant while Chinese workers looked on was 45-year-old Briton R. M. Tinkler, a former Shanghai police inspector. When 40 Chinese strikebreakers attempted to enter the mill, a fight followed. Suddenly a landing party of Japanese marines appeared, started to march away strikers and strikebreakers together. Employe Tinkler protested, but Japanese marines batted him over the skull with a gun-butt. What happened next is not clear. Japanese claimed Tinkler threatened them with a revolver, observed that "he came into contact with Japanese bayonets." One thing was clear, however: Tinkler slowly bled from internal hemorrhage during the 20 hours the Japanese kept him incommunicado. That night he was taken, not to the International Settlement, but to a hospital in Japanese-controlled Hongkew where two Japanese & two German surgeons performed an emergency operation while Japanese sentries stood guard. Briton Tinkler died.

Said one of the Japanese surgeons: he might have lived if the operation had been performed in time.

Slumped across a table in the same British cotton mill the next night, the body of Mill-Employe Hector McAllister was found. Since there were no marks of violence, British suspected he had been poisoned.

The Japanese beat everybody to the protest, complained to British Consul General Sir Herbert Phillips against R. M. Tinkler's "lawlessness toward a Japanese uniform." Said an Embassy spokesman: "That Japanese marines should have disarmed Tinkler and manhandled him is to be expected under the circumstances. We are surprised he was not killed on the spot." British were investigating.

Surrounded? When Cheng Shi-kang, Chinese official of the Japanese-controlled Tientsin customs, was shot to death in a movie theatre in the British Concession during the bang-bang scenes of the motion picture Gunga Din, Japanese demanded that British authorities hand over four suspected Chinese. British, claiming lack of evidence, refused. Promptly Japanese hinted they would make a "test case." Japanese companies began removing their supplies from the British and French Concessions which Japanese authorities threatened to surround, isolate from the world.

Arrested by Japanese military officials in Kalgan and held on a charge of spying, was Lieut. Colonel Christopher R. Spear, Military Attache of the British Embassy in China. Also arrested was Lieut. John Cooper who went to aid him. Later Lieut. Cooper was released after signing this statement:

"I apologize for entering the Kalgan war zone without a military pass and shall never knowingly commit the same error in the future in any Japanese war zone in China. Any information I may have got since May 25 will never be transmitted to the Chinese side." Despite the intervention in Tokyo of British Ambassador Sir Robert Craigie, Lieut. Colonel Spear was still in prison.

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