Then & Now | How Clive James’ Hong Kong connection inspired his poetry and leaving Australia allowed him to flourish

The late writer and presenter’s father, a one-time Japanese POW, is buried in Sai Wan Bay.

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Clive James pictured outside the BBC’s Broadcasting House in London in 2008. Photo: Getty Images

Jason Wordie

Published: 6:00pm, 5 Dec 2019Updated: 6:08pm, 5 Dec 2019

Since its mid-19th century beginnings, Hong Kong has figured – however tangentially – in the lives of many internationally acclaimed literary, artistic or cultural figures. W. Somerset Maugham, Martha Gellhorn, George Bernard Shaw, Noel Cowardall passed through. Australian author, poet and television presenter Clive James, who recently died in Britain, aged 80, had a more personal Hong Kong connection, which he intermittently used for his work.

His father, Albert Arthur James, became a prisoner of war of the Japanese in Singapore and lies buried at Sai Wan War Cemetery, in Chai Wan, where more than 1,500 Commonwealth casualties of World War II are commemorated. Many of those buried here were not involved in the brief Hong Kong campaign in December 1941 but after the fall of Singapore, in February 1942, several Allied servicemen were transported to Taiwan, then a Japanese colony, to work in the mines. Others, including James, were taken to Japan.

In the late 1940s, the remains of those who had died in Taiwan were exhumed and relocated to Hong Kong; following the Chinese civil war and the communist assumption of power on the mainland in 1949, war graves located in a British territory were considered more secure.

James survived the Japanese prison camps, but tragically died in September 1945, when the American B-24 transport aircraft on which he and other recently liberated POWs were travelling from Okinawa to Manila, in the Philippines, was diverted owing to a typhoon and crash-landed in Taiwan. Clive James wrote a moving poem, My Father Before Me (2004), partially quoted below, on visiting his father’s Hong Kong gravesite.

The grave of Albert Arthur James, in Hong Kong. Photo: Antony Dickson

This hillside, since I visited it first,

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Then & Now | How Clive James’ Hong Kong connection inspired his poetry and leaving Australia allowed him to flourish

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