Why did 300 Chinese fathers vanish from Liverpool in 1946 after wartime service in British merchant navy?
Kept secret by the British government, the disappearance of sailors who’d braved German U-boats through the second world war left many Eurasian children to grow up not knowing what happened to their dads
It was 1946 when the “Shanghai father” Yvonne Foley believes she never met disappeared. He was not alone. As many as 300 Chinese fathers who had served in the British merchant navy out of Liverpool during the war vanished that year, leaving behind them families racked by fear and anxiety.
A protest led by a Mrs Lee in August 1946, reported in both the Liverpool Echo and the News Chronicle newspapers, proved fruitless. The reasons behind the disappearance of the men were kept a closely guarded secret by the British authorities – and it would be decades before the truth began to emerge.
“There are lots of dark shadows in this story,” Foley says.
During the 1940s, about 20,000 experienced mariners were recruited in Shanghai, Singapore and Hong Kong to supplement the British merchant fleet and undertake hazardous convoy duties in the waters of the North Atlantic, infested with German submarines, and beyond. Liverpool was the de facto headquarters of this Chinese merchant navy. Many of the men, like Foley’s father, a marine engineer, met and fell in love with local women and settled in the city.
Foley was told about her so-called Shanghai father. But her mother, Grace Isherwood, remarried and never explained why he had suddenly deserted his family.
“I just knew he came from Shanghai, he had lived in the French quarter and that he had chosen my name,” Foley says, while pouring green tea in the conservatory of her home in the English city of Chester. The room is adorned with Chinese ceramics and antiques, most acquired during the two periods in which she and her husband, Charles, lived in Hong Kong, during the 1980s and ’90s.
