Colonialism and Male Domestic Service across the Asia Pacific 9781350056725, 9781350056756, 9781350056749

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Colonialism and Male Domestic Service across the Asia Pacific

Colonialism and Male Domestic Service across the Asia Pacific Julia Martínez, Claire Lowrie, Frances Steel and Victoria Haskins

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Copyright © Julia Martínez, Claire Lowrie, Frances Steel and Victoria Haskins, 2019 Julia Martínez, Claire Lowrie, Frances Steel and Victoria Haskins have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image: Ten domestic workers of various ethnic origins, each with an object related to their job, Singapore, circa 1900. (© Leiden University Library, KITLV29190) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-5672-5 ePDF: 978-1-3500-5674-9 eBook: 978-1-3500-5673-2 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Note on Authorship List of Abbreviations Introduction 1 Creating the Houseboy: Early Asian Influences on European Cultures of Domestic Service 2 Indigenous Houseboys and Asian Ideals in Darwin and Suva 3 Intercultural Influences on American Domesticity in the Philippines 4 Colonial Patriarchy and Representations of Masculinity in Photographs of Domestic Workers 5 Steamship Stewards: Encountering Asia on the High Seas 6 From India to Fiji: Cultures of Service in the Grand Hotel 7 Labour and Political Activism by Chinese and Vietnamese Male Domestic Workers Conclusion Bibliography Index

vi x xii xiii 1 25 47 77 103 137 169 195 219 225 253

Illustrations Figures 0.1 Ten domestic workers of various ethnic origins, each with an object related to their job, Singapore, c. 1900. University of Leiden, Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, 29190. 0.2 Native house staff employed by H. W. Dalfsen in Bandung, c. 1915, The Netherlands East Indies. University of Leiden, Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, 32825. 0.3 The Chinese servants of Government House, Victoria. Two cooks holding dead game birds, and one servant holding an iron, c. 1866–70. Photographer: Frederick Dally, courtesy of the Royal BC Museum and Archives, D-09468. 1.1 Portrait of John Wombwell with an Indian servant, artist unknown, India, c. 1790. Frits Lugt Collection, Fondation Custodia, Paris. 1.2 ‘A VOC Senior Merchant and His Wife’, Aelbert Cuyp, c. 1641. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands, SK-A-2350. 2.1 ‘Sam on eastern terrace – the piazza at Government House, Darwin’, 1938. Personal photographs of the Hon. C. L. A. Abbott during his term as Administrator of the Northern Territory. National Archives of Australia, M10, 11394836. 2.2 ‘George Cole and houseboy Jacky outside an Aboriginal dwelling’, Darwin, c. 1930. George Hulme Cole Collection, Northern Territory Library, PH0570/0146. 2.3 ‘Family group and ’Enry at our first station in Fiji’ from Thomas Reginald St Johnston. South Sea Reminiscences, T. F. Unwin, London, 1922. 3.1 ‘ “Boys” at 127 Caffe Marina, Ermita, Manila, P.I. From right to left: Choy (cook), Andres, Col. Brainard’s boy, Juan, Col. Bellinger’s boy, Bruno, Maj. Rassiter’s boy, Felix, Col. Richard’s boy’, 1910. D. L. Brainard’s Family Albums, 1884–1910, National Archives, College Park, Maryland, RG 200S-BR, vol. 3C, 179.

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3.2 Colonel Brainard with Coachman and Footman, Manila, c. 1898–9. Prints of D. L. Brainard’s Family Albums, 1884–1910, National Archives, College Park, Maryland, RG 200S-BR, vol. 3A, 146. 4.1 A Chinese male servant in the household of Lister Smith with Smith’s son William, Chilliwack, 1896. Chilliwack Museum and Archives, P Coll 120 No. 46. 4.2 A male servant with a European child, Singapore, 1930. J. A. Bennett Collection, courtesy of the National Archives of Singapore, 19980005147-005. 4.3 Billy Shepherd holding hand of Margaret Gilruth; ready to go on their daily horse-ride, Darwin, c. 1911–12. Jean A. Austin Collection, Northern Territory Library, PH0190/0021. 4.4 A young servant poses beside Margaret Gilruth seated in a window opening of Government House, Darwin, c. 1912. Jean A. Austin Collection, Northern Territory Library, PH0412/0011. 4.5 An American woman and a servant outside house, c. 1910–15. Philippines, Japan, and China Travel Album, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan, PHLH074. 4.6 A Dutch family having tea in a living-room, Netherlands East Indies, 1921. Dudok de Wit, L. C. Collection, University of Leiden, Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, 116969. 4.7 ‘303 – Chinese boy serving his master’, Singapore, c. 1890. Courtesy of the National Museum of Singapore, National Heritage Board, ACC-XXXX-12898. 4.8 C. A. Nieuwenhuijsen with a servant, in Manado, Netherlands East Indies, 1913. University of Leiden, Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, 118685. 4.9 European men and two Chinese houseboys, late nineteenth century. Courtesy of the National Museum of Singapore, ACC1996-00089. 4.10 ‘The stone house (Mount Kellet, next to the Peak), H. P. Smith with house servants and chair coolies, 1924.’ Hong Kong Public Records Office, Government Records Service, PH003517. 4.11 ‘Chinese staff employed by Dr. Gilruth. No. 1, Ah Chow (sitting), Ah Bong (table boy), Dobie Ah How and Houseboy’, Government House, Darwin, c. 1912–19. Gilruth Collection, Northern Territory Library, PH0190/0033.

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4.12 A mixed group of six domestic staff pose outside Government House, Darwin, Northern Territory of Australia, c. 1911–18. Jean A. Austin Collection, Northern Territory Library, PH0412-0020. 4.13 ‘Aniceto + Felix placed this on the table in kitchen for my notice. They were tickled to death. Felix, my cook, at right. Aniceto, my house boy, on left. Pedro, in middle. He used to be Mrs. McDonald’s house boy + was the one who told me that one day that I could go home. Funny. Keep this for me’, Philippines, c. 1910. Philippines, Japan and China Travel Album, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan, PHLH129. 4.14 ‘Felix – cook. Doesn’t he hold his hands gracefully. Veranda upstairs. Aniceto Sico – Houseboy. He says he looks like a chinaman’, Philippines, c. 1910–15. Philippines, Japan and China Travel Album, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan, PHLH126. 4.15 ‘Chef ’, Northern Territory of Australia, c. 1908. Phyllis Moyle Collection, Northern Territory Library, PH0112/0092. 4.16 Kitchen staff of the Bamfield Cable Station, British Columbia, 1903. Royal BC Museum and Archives, G-06951. 5.1 Route map, from Eastern and Australian Steamship Company’s Illustrated Handbook to the East, E&A, Sydney, 1904. National Library of Australia. 5.2 The Advocate, 23 May 1904, 72. Enclosed with Indian and Chinese discrimination 1897–1963, Herbert Otto Roth Papers, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand, 94-106-14/24. 5.3 ‘Ejima, Tsunenosuke – Nationality: Japanese – Alien Registration Certificate No 13077, issued 30 October 1921 at Thursday Island.’ National Archives of Australia, Brisbane, BP4/32, 6300171. 5.4 ‘Kurokawa, Kamezo – Nationality: Japanese – Alien Registration Certificate No 2049, issued 4 March 1918 at Thursday Island.’ National Archives of Australia, Brisbane, BP4/32, 6323500. 5.5 ‘Matsushima, Kumazo – Nationality: Japanese – Alien Registration Certificate No 4186, issued 14 February 1919 at Thursday Island.’ National Archives of Australia, Brisbane, BP4/32, 6317233. 5.6 Promotional images of dining-room stewards, c. 1951. P&O Archive, Caird Library, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, reproduced by kind permission of P&O Heritage Collection. www. poheritage.com/

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5.7 Promotional images of dining-room stewards on board the Chusan, c. 1950–54. P&O Archive, Caird Library, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, reproduced by kind permission of P&O Heritage Collection. 5.8 Members of the Canberra’s Goanese crew lighting candles at their specially created altar in the Goanese mess, 1965. P&O Heritage Collection, PH-07392-00. 6.1 ‘Catering for island tourists: The Grand Pacific Hotel at Suva, Fiji, recently opened for business’, Auckland Weekly News, 11 June 1914. Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries, AWNS19140611-48-6. 6.2 ‘A Verandah, Grand Pacific Hotel, Suva, Fiji.’ Archives NZ Galleries, USSCo Pocketbook (1927), R22848498, folio 39. 6.3 ‘Guests taking tea, 6 June 1950’, Whites Aviation Ltd. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand, WA-24784-F. 7.1 ‘301 – Chinese boy on duty’, Lambert and Co, Singapore, c. 1900. University of Leiden, Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, 50196. 7.2 ‘House-coolie, boy, cook and no. 2’, Hong Kong, from Oliver G. Ready, Life and Sport in China, London: Chapman Hall, 1904. 7.3 ‘Batman, cook and boy’, Tonkin, Indochina, c. 1895–9. Archives nationales d’outre-mer, Aix-en-Provence, France, FR ANOM 8 Fi435/90.

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Map 0.1 Asia Pacific. Map created by Ian Faulkner.

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Table 4.1 Numbers of servants and proportion of male servants for British Columbia, the Philippines, the Northern Territory of Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong and the Netherlands East Indies.

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Acknowledgements The authors wish to acknowledge the financial support of the Australian Research Council’s (ARC) Discovery Project grant (DP110100490, 2011–13), without which we would not have been able to embark on this broad-ranging transnational study of male domestic service. In 2010 we were also supported by the University of Wollongong’s University Research Committee grant that allowed Julia Martínez and Claire Lowrie to undertake a pilot study of domestic service in the American Philippines. This project grew out of a conference panel on domestic service given at the 2007 International Convention of Asian Scholars (ICAS5) in Kuala Lumpur. That panel included Julia Martínez, Claire Lowrie and Christine De Matos from the University of Wollongong, and Victoria Haskins from the University of Newcastle. It was funded by the Centre for Asia Pacific Social Transformation Studies (CAPSTRANS) and encouraged by Lenore Lyons, then director of CAPSTRANS. The ICAS5 panel set out to explore Victoria Haskins’ concept of ‘transcolonial constructions’ of the domestic worker in Australian and Asian geographical contexts. Claire Lowrie went on to develop this idea in her 2009 doctoral thesis on domestic service in Darwin and Singapore, which was published by Manchester University Press in 2016. In 2010 our colleague at the University of Wollongong, Frances Steel, joined us on the ARC grant application. Her book Oceania Under Steam: Sea Transport and the Cultures of Colonialism, c. 1870–1914 (2011) approached the study of trans-colonialism with an emphasis on the sea, bringing a Pacific Ocean dimension to our geographical framing. Frances also encouraged us to expand our study of domestic service beyond the colonial home, to include hotel staff and stewards on steamships. Heartfelt thanks to our colleagues at the University of Wollongong, University of Newcastle (Australia) and University of Sydney for their support. Thanks also to the members of the Centre for Colonial and Settler Studies at the University of Wollongong for their thoughtful comments on draft chapters, and to G. Balachandran (Graduate Institute, Geneva) for his critical feedback on the project. Thank you also to Claire Wright at the University of Wollongong for research assistance during the editing process.

Acknowledgements

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Thank you to those who generously invited us to present our findings, especially to Nitin Varma and Nitin Sinha, for the Servants Past Roundtable, European Social Science History conference (Belfast, 2018); Penny Russell, New Histories of Class Symposium (Harvard University, 2017); Marilyn Lake, Writing the Pacific, Rewriting Australia (University of Melbourne, 2014); Shirleene Robinson, History on a Tuesday seminar (University of Macquarie, 2014); and Margaret Jolly, Laureate Project Reading and Writing Group (Australian National University, 2014). We also wish to thank the organizers and audiences for helping us to develop our ideas at the following conferences: the International Convention of Asian Scholars (2011 and 2013); the Australian Historical Association conferences (2011 and 2013); Dragon Tails:  Third Australasian Conference on Overseas Chinese History and Heritage (2013); Sea Stories: Maritime Landscapes, Cultures and Histories (University of Sydney, 2013); Race, Mobility and Imperial Networks (RMIT University, 2015); the International Committee of Historical Sciences (Jinan, 2015); the American Historical Association conference (Atlanta, 2016); and the International Society for the Study of Chinese Overseas conference (Richmond, B.C., 2016). Our access to essential sources was facilitated by thirty-nine archives, museums and libraries located in eleven different countries. We are sincerely grateful for the assistance provided by the staff of these cultural repositories, which are listed in full in the bibliography. For allowing us to reproduce images from their collections, particular thanks goes to the Alexander Turnbull Library, Archives NZ Galleries, Archives nationales d’outre-mer, Auckland Libraries, Chilliwack Museum and Archives, Fondation Custodia, Hong Kong Public Records Office, P&O Heritage Collection, US National Archives, National Archives of Australia, National Archives of Singapore, National Library of Australia, National Museum of Singapore, Northern Territory Library, Rijksmuseum, Royal BC Museum and Archives, Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (University of Leiden), and Special Collections Library (University of Michigan). We would like to thank the excellent team at Bloomsbury Academic for making the publication process so enjoyable, particularly our enthusiastic editor Emma Goode. Sincere thanks also to our families and friends whose support has enabled us to complete this project.

Note on Authorship This book is co-authored by four authors, the result of a collaborative process of research and writing. Nevertheless, individual authors took the lead on particular chapters:  Martínez and Haskins, Chapter  1; Haskins and Steel, Chapter 2; Martínez and Lowrie, Chapter 3; Lowrie, Chapter 4; Steel, Chapter 5; Steel and Martínez, Chapter 6; and Lowrie and Martínez, Chapter 7.

Abbreviations ANOM

Archives nationales d’outre-mer, Aix-en-Provence, France

ASNCo.

Australasian Steam Navigation Company

ATL

Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand

BANC

Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley

BCA

British Columbia Archives, Victoria, Canada

BL

British Library, London

CL, NMM

Caird Library, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich

CPR

Canadian Pacific Railway Company

CSR

Colonial Sugar Refinery Company

E&A

Eastern and Australian Steamship Company

HC

Hocken Collections, University of Otago, New Zealand

HKGRO

Hong Kong Government Reports Online (1842–1941), Hong Kong University

HKMH

Hong Kong Museum of History

HL

Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

KITLV

Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, University of Leiden, Netherlands

K.M.T.

Kuomintang

MD, LOC

Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC

NA

National Archives, College Park, MD

NAA

National Archives of Australia, Brisbane, Canberra and Darwin

NAF

National Archives of Fiji, Suva

xiv

Abbreviations

NAS

National Archives of Singapore

NLA

National Library of Australia, Canberra, Australia

NMS

National Museum of Singapore

NTAS

Northern Territory Archives Service, Darwin, Australia

NTL

Northern Territory Library, Darwin, Australia

NYK

Nippon Yusen Kaisha (Nippon Yusen Company)

P&O

Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company

PMB

Pacific Manuscripts Bureau, Australian National University, Australia

PRM

Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, England

PRO

Public Records Office, Kew, London

SCL

Special Collection Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI

SFPL

San Francisco Public Library, San Francisco History Center, San Francisco, CA

SLSA

State Library of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia

TKK

Toyo Kisen Kabushiki Kaisha (Toyo Kisen Kabushiki Company)

USSCo.

Union Steam Ship Company of New Zealand

VOC

Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (Dutch East India Company)

WCA

Wellington City Archives, New Zealand

Introduction

Across the tropical colonies of the Asia Pacific region a culture of male domestic service evolved from about the 1880s, during an era of intensified (or ‘high’) imperialism. Indigenous and immigrant Asian men formed a significant component of the domestic service workforce, widely employed in private homes, hotels and on board steamships. The predominance of male servants in tropical colonies, including in South Asia and Africa, contrasted with employment practices in the temperate settler colonies, and in the British, European and American metropoles, where there was a preference for, and access to, localborn and immigrant women. Tracing the mobility of Asian workers across Asia and the Pacific, from China and India, southwards throughout Southeast Asia, Australia and Fiji, and across the Pacific to North America, we find ‘houseboys’ emerging as iconic figures throughout the colonial tropics. Both immigrant and indigenous male servants exerted a subtle, but significant, cultural influence, as they came to be closely associated with colonial success, luxury and prestige. They spoke to colonists’ common desire for physical comfort and served as a constant reminder to employers of their own personal stake in the colonial project. Acquiring a household of efficient servants was viewed as tangible proof of European mastery, a means by which employers sought ‘to romanticize the inequality and celebrate the consequences of conquest’.1 Yet male servants were also a visible presence in labour and political movements that soon challenged and subverted colonial rule. This book explores these relationships and their transformations to offer another perspective on colonial labour relations. Historians of Asian male labour mobility under colonial rule have been, until recent decades, more concerned with mass migrations of indentured workers for plantations and mines, attention commensurate with the sheer numbers Vicente L. Rafael, White Love and Other Events in Filipino History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 59, 75. 1

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involved and their global reach.2 Yet from the late nineteenth century, men were also visibly at work in European homes, and in hotels, clubs and steamships, all sites with greater intimacy and potential for transgression than the plantation or mine. It is these men who have become the subject of a rich, if fragmented, literature in the fields of cultural labour history and new imperial history. Until recently, most studies of male domestic service have focused on individual colonies. This has led to many fine-grained analyses of daily interactions in specific locales, but at the expense of the mobility of ideas and practices between colonial sites and across empires. We argue that apparently disparate sites came to share strikingly similar cultures of domestic service. The first major trans-colonial history of domestic service to make this observation – Claire Lowrie’s Masters and Servants – compares and connects the colonies of Singapore and the Northern Territory of Australia, demonstrating how Chinese men, in particular, were sought after by colonists in both locales.3 Julia Martínez and Claire Lowrie recognized a similar preference for Chinese male domestic workers in the American Philippines.4 Our book builds on this scholarship, engaging a broader spatial arena so as to address at greater length questions of circulation, interaction and comparison. We explore how ideas about domestic service moved between individual European metropoles and their colonies in Asia and the Pacific, as well as between different colonies and empires. Cultural understandings of domestic servitude were readily passed between mobile employers. Master–servant relations were a topic of endless fascination for newspapers, advice manuals and memoirs. Employers’ stories about their domestic successes (and failures) circulated among audiences outside the colony, shaping the ideas of future colonists as well as those of metropolitan law-makers. The peculiarities of individual colonies were thus subject to regional discussion in these trans-local interactions. Employers, travellers and professional photographers also produced images of domestic workers, including paintings, photographs and postcards. Such images were displayed and traded as objects of fascination, as a means of advertising

2 There is insufficient space to fully explore this expansive literature, but for an overview of the indenture phenomenon, see David Northrup, Indentured Labor, In the Age of Imperialism, 1834– 1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Kay Saunders, ed., Indentured Labour in the British Empire 1834–1920 (London: Croom Helm, 1984). 3 Claire Lowrie, Masters and Servants:  Cultures of Empire in the Tropics (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2016). 4 Julia Martínez and Claire Lowrie, ‘Transcolonial Influences on Everyday American Imperialism: The Politics of Chinese Domestic Servants in the Philippines’, Pacific Historical Review 81, no. 4 (2012): 511–36.

Introduction

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colonial success and even as propaganda designed to celebrate the supposed ease of European mastery. At the same time new cultural patterns were gradually incorporated, as colonists and immigrant workers encountered local indigenous forms of servitude. Immigrant servants also brought their own service cultures with them, adding to this cultural mix. Colonial homes, hotels and steamships were thus ‘contact zones’ where the domestic was intimately connected to the international.5 In this book, we juxtapose and connect, or where possible compare, these contact zones in the colonial Asia Pacific so as to present a history of male domestic service in the region and its significance for colonial histories in general.

Literatures and geographies of male domestic service The historical literature on male domestic service remains small by comparison with the rich literature on women in colonial domestic service, pioneered by historians such as Elsbeth Locher-Scholten and Ann Laura Stoler for the Netherlands East Indies, Nupur Chaudhuri for India, and Jackie Huggins, Victoria Haskins and Barry Higman for Australia.6 This may, in part, be attributed to the rise of women’s history and its emphasis on making visible the lives of women previously hidden from view. It is also a consequence of the subsequent interest in intimacies  – often associated not just with gender relations but specifically with women’s lives and concerns  – in new imperial histories of colonial power relations. Another factor relates to the contemporary Cf. Kristin L. Hoganson, Consumers’ Imperium:  The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 8; Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). 6 Elsbeth Locher-Scholten, ‘So Close and Yet So Far: The Ambivalence of Dutch Colonial Rhetoric of Javanese Servants in Indonesia, 1900–1942’, in Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism, ed. Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 131–53; Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 8; Nupur Chaudhuri, ‘Memsahibs and Their Servants in Nineteenth-Century India’, Women’s History Review 3, no. 4 (1994): 549–62; Jackie Huggins, ‘White Aprons, Black Hands: Aboriginal Women Domestic Servants in Queensland’, Labour History 69 (1995):  188–95; ‘ “Firing On in the Mind”:  Aboriginal Women Domestic Servants in the Inter-War Years’, Hecate 13–14 (1987–8): 5–23; Victoria Haskins, ‘On the Doorstep:  Aboriginal Domestic Service as a Contact Zone’, Australian Feminist Studies 16, no. 34 (2001): 13–25; B. W. Higman, Domestic Service in Australia (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2002). See also Paula Hamilton, ‘Domestic Dilemmas: Representations of Servants and Employers in the Popular Press’, in Debutante Nation: Feminism Contests the 1890s, ed. Susan Magarey, Sue Rowley and Susan Sheridan (St Leonards:  Allen & Unwin, 1993); Katie Pickles, ‘Empire, Settlement and Single British Women as New Zealand Domestic Servants during the 1920s’, New Zealand Journal of History 35, no. 1 (2001): 22–44. 5

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gender division of paid domestic work. At present nearly 80 per cent of domestic workers globally are women. Where men are employed it is usually as gardeners, drivers and butlers.7 In the introduction to their edited global history of domestic work, Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, Silke Neunsinger and Dirk Hoerder noted that the current dominance of women workers had led them to focus almost exclusively on women.8 However, as Victoria Haskins and Claire Lowrie have noted, while the feminization of domestic work commenced in the eighteenth century in Britain and Europe, in the formerly colonized world it was a more recent, twentieth-century development.9 Indeed, taking a global view, men continue to work in domestic service in some countries, with evidence also of the ‘re-masculinization’ of such work.10 This book provides an alternative historical context for the recent feminization of domestic work across Asia and the Pacific by exploring the broad colonial preference for male servants which continued well into the 1930s. To some extent this preference may be said to have expressed a particular idea of colonial domination  – of white superiority over supposedly backward, non-western peoples embodied in the figure of the dominated male.11 Yet, as we will show, the culture of male servitude was shaped by the expectations, material conditions and personal choices not only of the colonizing classes but of the workers themselves. The historical scholarship on colonial male domestic service is well established for Africa, South and Southeast Asia, the Pacific and northern Australia. Monographs by Karen Hansen on Zambia and Janet Bujra on Tanzania, and more recent work by Jeremy Martens, Prinisha Badassay and Robyn Pariser, among others, focus on experiences of men as domestic servants in colonial

7 Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, Silke Neunsinger and Dirk Hoerder, ‘Domestic Workers of the World: Histories of Domestic Work as Global Labor History’, in Towards a Global History of Domestic and Caregiving Workers, ed. Dirk Hoerder, Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk and Silke Neunsinger (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 1. 8 Ibid. 9 Victoria Haskins and Claire Lowrie, ‘Introduction: Decolonizing Domestic Service: Introducing a New Agenda’, in Colonization and Domestic Service: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Victoria K. Haskins and Claire Lowrie (New York: Routledge, 2014), 1–18, 4, 6–7. 10 B. W.  Higman, ‘An Historical Perspective:  Colonial Continuities in the Global Geography of Domestic Service’, in Colonization and Domestic Service, 19–37; Raka Ray, ‘Masculinity, Femininity, and Servitude: Domestic Workers in Calcutta in the Late Twentieth Century’, Feminist Studies 26, no. 3 (2000): 691–718; Raffaella Sarti and Francesca Scrinzi, ‘Introduction to the Special Issue: Men in a Woman’s Job, Male Domestic Workers, International Migration and the Globalization of Care’, Men and Masculinities 13, no. 1 (2010):  4–15; Majella Kilkey, Diane Perrons and Ania Plomien, Gender, Migration and Domestic Work: Masculinities, Male Labour and Fathering in the UK and USA (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 11 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978).

Introduction

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Africa.12 Hansen underscored the role of colonial labouring hierarchies in normalizing African racial subordination.13 In British Tanganyika, employment in domestic service was potentially prestigious for African men but also economically restrictive.14 This literature also reveals synergies between African and Asian colonial practices. In this book, we both combine a concern with local spaces of intimate interdependencies (so pronounced in the work on Africa) and attend to exchanges and circulation of people, ideas and practices, thereby offering another perspective on the ‘shared preoccupations’ and ‘similar patterns in the maintenance of European colonial order’.15 In emphasizing the trans-imperial transmissions of colonial knowledge, Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper challenged historians to look to ‘other routes’ beyond the ‘metropole–colony axis’. Questions regarding how ‘knowledge of individual empires’ became ‘collective imperial knowledge . . . shared among colonizing powers’ continue to remain relevant two decades later.16 As Simon Potter and Jonathan Saha have recently observed, imperial historians ‘have not explored links between empires as thoroughly as those within empires’.17 Our exploration of male domestic service began from within the British Empire, but has extended to look beyond it to French, Dutch and American Karen Hansen, Distant Companions: Servants and Employers in Zambia, 1900–1985 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989); Janet Bujra, Serving Class:  Masculinity and the Feminisation of Domestic Service in Tanzania (Edinburgh:  Edinburgh University Press, 2000); Jeremy Martens, ‘Settler Homes, Manhood and “Houseboys”: An Analysis of Natal’s Rape Scare of 1886’, Journal of Southern African Studies 28, no. 2 (2002):  379–400; Prinisha Badassay, ‘ “And My Blood Became Hot!” Crimes of Passion, Crimes of Reason: An Analysis of the Crimes of Murder and Physical Assault against Masters and Mistresses by Their Indian Domestic Servants, Natal, 1880–1920’, Journal of Natal and Zulu History 23 (2005): 64–93; Robyn Pariser, ‘The Servant Problem: African Servants the Making of European Domesticity in Tanganyika’, in Towards a Global History of Domestic and Caregiving Workers, 271–95; Robyn Pariser, ‘Masculinity and Organized Resistance in Domestic Service in Colonial Dar es Salaam, 1919–1961’, International Labor and Working-Class History 88 (2015): 109–29. 13 Hansen, Distant Companions, 30. 14 Pariser, ‘Masculinity and Organized Resistance’, 109. 15 Martin Thomas, Violence and Colonial Order: Police, Workers and Protest in the European Colonial Empires, 1918–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 13. See also Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, ‘Introduction:  The Politics of Intimacy in an Age of Empire’, in Moving Subjects:  Gender, Mobility and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire, ed. Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 1–28. 16 Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, ‘Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda’, in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 13, 28. 17 Simon J. Potter and Jonathan Saha, ‘Global History, Imperial History and Connected Histories of Empire’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 16, no. 1 (2015), https://muse.jhu.edu/ article/577738. See, however, Volker Barth and Roland Cvetkovski, eds, Imperial Co-operation and Transfer, 1870–1930: Empires and Encounters (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). See also Paul A. Kramer, ‘Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons:  Race and Rule between the British and United States Empires, 1880–1910’, Journal of American History 88, no. 4 (2002): 1315–53. 12

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colonies and their mutual relations of emulation, competition and rivalry. In keeping with more recent research, our focus is not so much on European metropoles as ‘imperial centres’.18 Instead we are interested in tracing horizontal inter-colonial connections originating in and mediated through influential regional hubs such as Calcutta and Hong Kong where mobile workers were typically recruited.19 These connections were made more complex by recruitment from mainland China, a place beyond empire but deeply enmeshed in this regional transfer. Our geographical focus includes Southeast Asia, northern Australia and the southwest Pacific where a more recent scholarship challenges the emphasis on divisions deriving from area studies, national historiographies and typologies of colonial difference. For instance, Philippa Levine’s comparative study of late nineteenth-century contagious diseases legislation in India, Hong Kong, Queensland and Straits Settlements is premised on the colonial world as ‘a highly mobile place’, shaped, in particular, by the migration of people from Asia in search of work.20 Historians of labour mobility, too, have been forced to confront the cultural impact of such displacements and networks and their role in shaping colonial transformations. As Tony Ballantyne observes, it is only when historians move beyond ‘fixed vantage points’ that the mobility which underwrote imperial systems, including ‘economic traffic and cultural interdependence’, can be revealed.21 Histories attempting to bring colonies across Asia and the island Pacific into the same analytic frame, however, remain relatively rare. As we observe here, Australia, particularly in its northern tropical and archipelagic setting, was a key crossroads and consequently a strategic location for a connecting perspective.22 We also argue that an emphasis on colonial mobilities, and the 18 Stoler and Cooper, ‘Between Metropole and Colony’, 13. 19 This kind of spatiality underpins Tony Ballantyne’s metaphor of the ‘web’. See Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). See also Alan Lester, ‘Imperial Circuits and Networks: Geographies of the British Empire’, History Compass 4 (2006): 124– 41; Durba Ghosh and Dane Kennedy, eds, Decentering Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial World (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2006). 20 Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics, Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York: Routledge, 2003), 16. 21 Tony Ballantyne, ‘Mobility, Empire, Colonisation’, History Australia 11, no. 2 (2014): 8. 22 Regina Ganter with contributions by Julia Martínez and Gary Lee, Mixed Relations: Asian-Aboriginal Contact in North Australia (Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2006); Julia Martínez and Adrian Vickers, The Pearl Frontier: Indonesian Labor and Indigenous Encounters in Australia’s Northern Trading Network (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015); Marilyn Lake, ‘Colonial Australia and the Asia Pacific Region’, in The Cambridge History of Australia, ed. Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre (Port Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 535–59. For the ‘inland’ reach of Indian Ocean networks, see Samia Khatun, Australianama:  The South Asian Odyssey in Australia (London: Hurst, 2018).

Introduction

7

attendant reconsideration of boundaries and scale, demands closer attention to entanglements of Asian, European and indigenous influences. This book is concerned with what Lisa Lowe refers to as the ‘circuits, connections, associations, and mixings of differentially laboring peoples’.23 Though colonists claimed domestic service as distinct from the ‘coolie’ trade, these labour networks and relations were not always separate. Domestic service was presumed to be more prestigious than general labouring roles. In this context, the position of ‘houseboy’, which connoted intimate service within the home, entailed a degree of trust not necessarily granted to outdoor workers such as gardeners. In some places, however, workers were diverted from plantations to colonial homes, and at times employers took their managerial cues from other sites, like plantations and shipping. Exploring such interconnections may help further extend the historiography of male servitude. In what follows we begin with early seventeenth- and eighteenth-century colonial experiences in India and Macau, before moving to consider late nineteenth- and twentieth-century northern Australia, Fiji, the Philippines, Singapore and Hong Kong. We juxtapose, and at places draw comparisons, between these colonies and Indochina, the Netherlands East Indies and British Columbia. The private home is our key site of enquiry. However, we also study service in the more public setting of hotels and steamships, sites equally saturated by colonial power. This expanded framework appears more suited to the wider world of movement and exchange that informs our conceptualization of colonial domestic service. Throughout our study urban space figures prominently, and especially port towns. Port towns acted as ‘crossroads’ where goods, ideas, cultures and people from different parts of the world mixed and mingled. These urban spaces were marked by their cultural, social and religious heterogeneity. At the same time, they reflected and reinforced colonial systems of political and economic stratification and the principles of racial segregation and hierarchy on which they were based.24 In the period of our study, the predominance of local and immigrant men employed in service roles was especially marked in urban areas. Women’s mobility into towns and cities in search of work was either actively discouraged or closely monitored and highly regulated by colonial authorities Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 21. 24 John Sydenham Furnivall, The Netherlands India: A Study of Plural Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1944), 446; Rhoades Murphey, ‘On the Evolution of the Port City’, in Brides of the Sea:  Port Cities of Asia from the 16th–20th Centuries, ed. Frank Broeze (Honolulu:  University of Hawai‘i Press, 1989), 225; Brenda S. A. Yeoh, Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2003), 1–3. 23

Map 0.1  Asia Pacific. Map created by Ian Faulkner.

8 Colonialism and Male Domestic Service

Introduction

9

and indigenous and immigrant communities alike. Urban space fashioned a particular culture of masculinized domestic service, we suggest, because it offered residents routine opportunities to compare or emulate the practices of those around them. Domestic labour shortages, master–servant conflicts and other related issues were prominent preoccupations in urban areas, further fostering among colonists a sense of shared struggle with the ‘servant problem’. All the while, immigrant and local domestic workers negotiated the dialectical forces of cultural exchange and racial segregation on their own terms.25 Sometimes they acted as mediators for employers struggling to navigate the cosmopolitan urban spaces in which they dwelled.26 At other times, as we examine in this book, they used colonial cities in ways that contested and even challenged colonial authority. Moreover, urban areas, and notably ports, fostered particular cultures of colonial service as they catered for the intermittent influx of visitors according to the schedules of the steamship lines. Institutions such as hotels and clubs were established to provide service in ways that mirrored the private home. Like in the port itself, in hotel bars and steamship saloons, travellers from temperate settler colonies, tropical colonies and European metropoles rubbed shoulders with one another and with citizens of the ‘extra imperial’ world. Many came with high expectations and tended to judge the service they received based on their own domestic experience. For those who had never experienced personal service by men, encounters with Asian bellboys and waiters in grand hotels and male stewards on steamships provided a novel taste of an orientalized service culture. Impressions recorded in diaries and letters suggest that such experiences in these temporary dwellings were both unsettling and stimulated new aspirations. Our sources reflect servants’ primary concern with their life outside the colonial home. In the evenings some servants went back home to their own families. Others slipped out to nightly entertainments and in search of more intimate relationships. Bonds of friendship and a sense of collective identity were often fostered in public parks and on streets where servants gathered after work,

Domestic workers of the current era also contend with (and contest) the patriarchal and racialized divisions of post-colonial urban spaces. For a discussion of Singapore, see Brenda S. A. Yeoh and Shirlena Huang, ‘Negotiating Public Space:  Strategies and Styles of Migrant Female Domestic Workers in Singapore’, Urban Studies 35, no. 3 (1998): 583. 26 See, for example, Christopher Munn, ‘Hong Kong, 1841–1870:  All the Servants in Prison and Nobody to Take Care of the House’, in Masters, Servants, and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562–1955, ed. Douglas Hay and Paul Craven (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 366. 25

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Colonialism and Male Domestic Service

again pointing to the ways in which urban space fostered particular cultures of labour and sociability, as well as routine opportunities for the exchange of ideas and knowledge. Colonial employers rarely acknowledged their workers’ emotional and social lives, however, and were prone to imagine that they lived only to serve them. Domestic service relationships offer historians a window on the successes and failures of colonial projects. For domestic workers, having intimate access to colonial employers gave them new avenues to express social as well as political protest. Domination could be a fragile fantasy, and subservience a façade easily cracked by assertions of independence.27 The increased presence of women in domestic service from the 1930s may well have reflected the decline of colonial power and anxieties about colonial authority over non-European men. In their ethnographic work on domestic service in contemporary Kolkata, Seemin Qayum and Raka Ray conceive of an evolving ‘culture of servitude’ in which ‘social relations of domination/subordination, dependency, and inequality are normalized and permeate both the domestic and public spheres’.28 Our research would also suggest that such relations were unstable, and domestic workers historically found ways to push back against colonial assumptions of inequality. All the colonial sites considered in this book were either dominated by men or they made up a significant proportion of the domestic workforce. Race and ethnicity varied according to location. In most Asian colonies local men dominated: Indians in India; Chinese in Hong Kong; and Vietnamese in Indochina. That said, religious affiliations and internal migrant networks could also be crucial factors. These networks might broaden to embrace employers in other colonies seeking to recruit immigrant Chinese or Indian men for their social cachet and a presumed reputation for skill, obedience and loyalty. As they came to occupy leading positions in domestic service hierarchies, workers found themselves obliged to uphold such hierarchies. In colonies with a strong preexisting culture of domestic service, colonists could not avoid adapting to local practices and expectations. Singapore, as a colonial trading entrepôt, attracted male domestic workers from other parts of Asia. Figure 0.1 illustrates this deliberate self-fashioning in a stylized way, depicting the typical colonial household as employing a mix of Indian, Malay and Chinese workers, the last most often coming from Hainan

Locher-Scholten, ‘So Close and Yet So Far’, 141. 28 Seemin Qayum and Raka Ray, ‘Male Servants and the Failure of Patriarchy in Kolkata (Calcutta)’, Men and Masculinities 13, no. 1 (2010): 112. 27

Introduction

11

Figure 0.1  Ten domestic workers of various ethnic origins, each with an object related to their job, Singapore, c. 1900. University of Leiden, Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, 29190.29

Island. The predominance of male servants was also most pronounced in Singapore, where they accounted for 95 per cent of the domestic workforce in 1883 and 64 per cent in 1921.30 In Hong Kong, Chinese men, mostly Cantonese, made up a majority of domestic servants supplemented by Japanese, Filipino and Vietnamese men.31 In 1891 approximately 88 per cent of domestic workers in British households in Hong Kong were men, declining to 57 per cent by 1921.32 Chinese households in Singapore and Hong Kong had always employed young Inverted commas are used around photographic captions to indicate that the description is from the original. Where the description was provided by the archival institution, inverted commas are not used (as in this photograph). The photograph also appears in an album held by the National Heritage Board Collection, National Museum of Singapore where it is titled ‘20. Servants of a European Resident’. Photographs taken by G. R. Lambert and Co., Singapore, c. 1890, were often duplicated in this way. 30 Isabella Bird, The Golden Chersonese: The Malayan Travels of a Victorian Lady (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1990), 116; J. E. Nathan, The Census of British Malaya 1921 (London: Waterlow, 1922), 239. 31 David Pomfret, Youth and Empire:  Transcolonial Childhoods in British and French Asia (Stanford: Standford University Press, 2015), 62. 32 This percentage assumes that most of the ‘Chinese in the employ of foreigners’ were servants. Population according to the Census of 20th of May, 1891, University of Hong Kong, Blue Book, 1891, M2; Hong Kong: Report on the Census of the Colony for 1921, University of Hong Kong, Sessional Paper, 1921, 217, 183. 29

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Colonialism and Male Domestic Service

female bond servants called mui tsai.33 By the 1930s Chinese female servants, called maijie (or mahjeh in Cantonese), increasingly replaced Chinese male servants in both colonies.34 In the American Philippines, men and boys accounted for 75 per cent of domestic workers in the early twentieth century.35 Immigrant Chinese men constituted approximately 17 per cent of the servant population in Manila; while outside the city, Filipinos and indigenous men predominated, though some of these locals were themselves of mixed Chinese heritage.36 In French Indochina, the regions of Annam, Tonkin and Cochinchina employed mostly indigenous male servants and some Chinese men, but here too, many of the Chinese men were long-time local residents.37 Compared with Hong Kong and Singapore, both dominated by recent male immigration, in Indochina the proportion of male servants was lower, perhaps due to the more balanced sex ratio.38 Young Vietnamese female bond servants were also employed.39 The Netherlands East Indies was an exception in Southeast Asia; here women outnumbered men, yet male domestic workers still made up 40 per cent of the workforce in 1930 (Figure 0.2).40 These workers were primarily Javanese, but as Chapter 1 discusses, greater ethnic diversity had been encouraged during the early colonial period.41 Similar patterns may also be found in northern Australia and in some South Pacific islands. Male servants comprised over 60 per cent of the domestic workforce in the Northern Territory of Australia in 1911. Aboriginal men were employed alongside Chinese men before 1911, after which the Chinese

33 Ah Eng Lai, Peasants, Proletarians and Prostitutes:  A Preliminary Investigation into the Work of Chinese Women in Colonial Malaya (Singapore:  Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1986), 45–55; Maria Jaschok, Concubines and Bondservants: A Social History of Chinese Customs (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1988), 8. 34 Christine Chin, In Service and Servitude:  Foreign Female Domestic Workers and the Malaysian ‘Modernity’ Project (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 69–92; Nicole Constable, Maid to Order in Hong Kong: Stories of Filipina Workers (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 41–56. 35 Census of the Philippine Islands 1903:  Volume II Population (Washington, DC:  US Bureau of the Census, 1905), 865. 36 Ibid., 933–4, 894. 37 Christopher Goscha, ‘Widening the Colonial Encounter:  Asian Connections inside French Indochina during the Interwar Period’, Modern Asian Studies 43, no. 5 (2009): 1192; Alexander B. Woodside, Community and Revolution in Modern Vietnam (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), 11; Frank Proschan, ‘Eunuch Mandarins, Soldats Mamzelles, Effeminate Boys and Graceless Women’, GLQ: Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 8, no. 4 (2002): 448–51. 38 Pomfret, Youth and Empire, 5, 63. 39 Ibid., 63–5; Lai, Peasants, Proletarians and Prostitutes, 45–55; Jaschok, Concubines and Bondservants, 8. 40 Census of 1930 in Netherlands India, Volume VIII: Summary of the Volumes I-VII (Batavia: Department for Economic Affairs, 1936), 124–5. 41 Locher-Scholten, ‘So Close and Yet So Far’, 133.

Introduction

13

Figure 0.2  Native house staff employed by H. W. Dalfsen in Bandung, c. 1915, The Netherlands East Indies. University of Leiden, Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, 32825.

population declined because of restrictions on immigration.42 The culture of maledominated domestic service was replicated elsewhere in the British Pacific. In Nauru, under Australian administration, Chinese ‘houseboys’ were also employed.43 Indigenous women were widely employed in domestic service in German New Guinea and by the French in the New Hebrides, although the employment of men was not unknown. This was in distinct contrast to Anglophone Pacific colonies, notably British New Guinea where men predominated in service.44 In British Fiji, Melanesian, Indian and indigenous Fijian men were commonly employed G. H. Knibbs, Census of the Commonwealth of Australia 1911: Part XII Occupations, 1300, 1314. The so-called full-blood Aboriginal population was not counted in the 1911 census. As a result substantial numbers of Aboriginal male and female servants who were employed in the Northern Territory are not included in this statistic. 43 See Thomas Cude Diaries (1921–47), MLMSS 4390, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales. For an overview of Chinese immigration to the Pacific, see Paul D’Arcy, ‘The Chinese Pacifics: A Brief Historical Review’, Journal of Pacific History 49, no. 4 (2014): 396–420. 44 Anne Dickson-Waiko, ‘Colonial Enclaves and Domestic Spaces in British New Guinea’, in Britishness Abroad: Transnational Movements and Imperial Cultures, ed. Kate Darian-Smith, Patricia Grimshaw and Stuart Macintyre (Carlton:  Melbourne University Press, 2007), 219–20; Margaret Rodman, Daniela Kraemer, Lissant Bolton and Jean Tarisesei, eds, House-Girls Remember: Domestic Workers in Vanuatu (Honolulu:  University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007). Peter J. Hempenstall suggests that the position of domestic servant was an ‘elite’ one for native men; see Pacific Islanders under German Rule: A Study in the Meaning of Colonial Resistance (Canberra: ANU Press, 1978), 143. 42

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Colonialism and Male Domestic Service

as domestic workers.45 Fiji also served as a regional recruitment hub from where servants intermittently accompanied Europeans for the duration of their travels throughout the Pacific.46 This tradition of male domestic service was also common for relatively isolated sites of colonial employment, such as cable stations and the emerging island infrastructures for aviation.47 Men constituted a significant proportion of the domestic service workforce in North America, particularly on the Pacific coast and areas that formed part of what Henry Yu has described as the Cantonese Pacific.48 In California, Chinese men dominated until 1880 by which time they had also gained in popularity in New  York.49 In Hawai‘i until 1920, the majority of domestic servants were male, first Chinese and later Japanese.50 Chinese men were common in domestic service in British Columbia until the introduction of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1923.51 On Vancouver Island in 1901, male servants made up 73 per cent of the total domestic workforce, and Chinese men comprised approximately twothirds of the male servant population.52

Colonial masculinities and the gendered politics of domestic service Colonial discourse sought to underline European dominance by describing male domestic workers, regardless of age, as ‘houseboys’ or, more generally, ‘boys’. Domestic workers were also often treated as single men without family 45 Legislative Council Fiji, Census, 1911, Council Paper No. 44 (1911). 46 Frances Steel, ‘Servant Mobilities between Fiji and New Zealand:  The Transcolonial Politics of Domestic Work and Immigration Restriction, c. 1870–1920’, History Australia 15, no. 3 (2018). 47 Julia Martínez, ‘Asian Servants for the Imperial Telegraph: Imagining North Australia as an Indian Ocean Colony before 1914’, Australian Historical Studies 48, no. 2 (2017): 227–43; William Stephen Grooch, Skyway to Asia (New York: The Reader’s League of America, 1936), 38–9, 42–3. 48 Henry Yu, ‘The Intermittent Rhythms of the Cantonese Pacific’, in Connecting Seas and Connected Ocean Rims:  Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans and China Seas Migrations from the 1830s, ed. Donna Gabaccia and Dirk Hoerder (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 393–414. 49 Andrew Urban, Brokering Servitude, Migration and the Politics of Domestic Labor during the Long Nineteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2018). 50 Evelyn Nakano Glenn, ‘From Servitude to Service Work:  Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Work’, Signs:  Journal of Women in Culture and Society 18, no. 1 (1992): 9; Andrew Urban, ‘Imperial Divisions of Labor: Chinese Servants and Racial Reproduction in the White Settler Societies of California and the Anglophone Pacific, 1870–1907’, in Towards a Global History of Domestic and Caregiving Workers, 296–323. 51 Paul Yee, Saltwater City: An Illustrated History of the Chinese in Vancouver (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1988), 81–2. 52 This includes domestic workers in the house and the garden but not laundry workers. City of Victoria and Vancouver Island 1901 Census, http://vihistory.ca/search/searchcensusocc. php?show=y&year=1901 (accessed 28 November 2016).

Introduction

15

Figure 0.3  The Chinese servants of Government House, Victoria. Two cooks holding dead game birds, and one servant holding an iron, c. 1866–70. Photographer: Frederick Dally, courtesy of the Royal BC Museum and Archives, D-09468.

or community obligations. While the Asia Pacific region serves as our primary canvas, similar relations have been observed in colonial Africa and the Americas, and even to some extent in the European metropoles. As Robert Morrell argues with respect to South Africa, the term ‘boy’ was used to deny the capacity of African men to attain adulthood.53

Robert Morrell, ‘Of Boys and Men: Masculinity and Gender in Southern African Studies’, Journal of Southern African Studies 24 (1998): 616. 53

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Colonialism and Male Domestic Service

In her 1995 study, Colonial Masculinity, Mrinalini Sinha observes that meanings of masculinity were ‘rearticulated in accordance with continually changing political and economic imperatives of colonial rule’, or what she designates the ‘imperial social formation’. She focuses on the development of the relational stereotypes of the manly Briton and the effeminate Bengali in late nineteenth-century India. These generalized identity markers arose in response to the political challenge of the emergent western-educated middle class who demanded a share in the exclusive privileges and rights enjoyed by the British colonial elite. As Sinha elaborates, masculinity denotes ‘multiple axes of domination and subordination . . . as much to do with racial, class, religious, and national differences as with sex difference’.54 The construction of a ‘natural’ gender hierarchy between ‘manly and unmanly men’ in relations of colonial domestic service obviously related to quite different and specific ‘practices of ruling’.55 Here a stress on the effeminacy of colonized men nullified a sexual rather than an overtly political threat. Representing men as child-like boys or emphasizing their feminine appearance or mannerisms helped deflect potential sexual tensions in relations with their white mistresses. In her account of male domestic workers in contemporary North India, Radhika Chopra addresses the constant negotiation of a suitably ‘incomplete’, ‘muted’ or ‘manageable’ masculinity, one posing no threat to the women of the household, and which enabled the domestic incorporation of individual male servants.56 This useful counterpoint  – that gender is not only constructed but also, in a sense, eroded or ‘decomposed’ through everyday negotiations – finds historical echoes in our work, for instance, in the value placed on a servant’s silence and unobtrusiveness. At the same time, the broader social proscription of interracial intimacies, reinforced by the notion of the colonial mistress as socially out of reach, was also important in shaping servant–employer engagements. But as Claire Lowrie found in her reading of women’s writings on Darwin and Singapore, there was a notable absence of comment about the sexual danger of the houseboy, a pattern which appears common across colonial Asia and the Pacific.57 Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). See also Mrinalini Sinha, ‘Giving Masculinity a History:  Some Contributions from the Historiography of Colonial India’, Gender & History 11, no. 3 (1999): 445–60. 55 Sinha, Colonial Masculinity, 5, 2. 56 Radhika Chopra, ‘Invisible Men:  Masculinity, Sexuality and Male Domestic Labor’, Men and Masculinities 9, no. 2 (2006): 158–9. 57 Claire Lowrie, ‘White Mistresses and Chinese “Houseboys”:  Domestic Politics in Singapore and Darwin from the 1910s to the 1930s’, in Colonization and Domestic Service, 211. A notable exception was Papua; see Chilla Bulbeck, Australian Women in Papua New Guinea (Cambridge: University 54

Introduction

17

Male employers rarely wrote explicitly about the sexuality of male domestic workers. Homosexual attraction between master and servant, described by historians Robert Aldrich, Ronald Hyam and Mark Clement, was not a topic for public debate, and discretion was required to protect both parties from unwelcome social or legal repercussions.58 But for those for whom England represented sexual repression, argues Patricia Laurence, ‘China and India, as well as other parts of the East, presented British men of a certain class and means with imaginative as well as erotic possibilities’.59 Lowrie has also traced the navigation of homosexual desire in master–servant relations in Singapore and Darwin, as well as the openness towards homosexuality among some ethnic groups employed as servants.60 In other respects, the construct of the effeminate and docile servant was central to the expression of white ruling-class masculinity, where the command of a loyal complement of servants marked out one’s sense of superiority and rightful authority. The rejection in some colonies of male servants as compromising white independence and self-possession paradoxically affirmed this sense of superiority and authority. In settler New Zealand, as Charlotte Macdonald argues, ‘white masculinity was not to be questioned by the potentially emasculating prospect of domestic servility or effeminate subordination of colonial subjects’. New Zealand was a ‘white man’s country’ without the troublesome contiguous tropical zone that sullied Australia’s claim to the same status. Here ‘self-governing men were supported by domestic women’ and not by Asian or indigenous men.61 In a small number of instances, however, white settler families in New Zealand recruited male servants from neighbouring colonies, notably Fiji. When these relations broke down, invariably through an employer’s use of physical force, public commentary denounced the figure of the white master or mistress wielding absolute authority.62 of Cambridge Press, 1992), 206; Amirah Inglis, The White Women’s Protection Ordinance: Sexual Anxiety and Politics in Papua (London: Sussex University Press, 1975). Robert Aldrich, Colonialism and Homosexuality (London:  Routledge, 2003), 406; Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 59, 106; Mark Clement, ‘Queer Colonial Journeys: Alfred Russel Wallace and Somerset Maugham in the Malay Archipelago’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 26, no. 2 (2017): 161–87. 59 Patricia Laurence, Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes, Bloomsbury, Modernism, and China (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 186. 60 Claire Lowrie, ‘White “Men” and Their Chinese “Boys”: Sexuality, Masculinity and Colonial Power in Singapore and Darwin, 1880s–1930s’, History Australia 10, no. 1 (2013): 42–7. 61 Charlotte Macdonald,  ‘Why Was There No Answer to the “Servant Problem”? Paid Domestic Work and the Making of a White New Zealand, 1840s–1950s’, New Zealand Journal of History 51, no. 1 (2017): 21, 23. 62 Steel, ‘Servant Mobilities between Fiji and New Zealand’. For a later and differently gendered culture of recruitment from the Pacific Islands, see Rosemary Anderson, ‘Distant Daughters: Cook Islands Domestics in Wartime New Zealand, 1941–46’, Journal of Pacific History 48, no. 3 (2013): 267–85. 58

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Colonialism and Male Domestic Service

Infantilized, feminized or asexual representations of male domestic workers should not, however, blind us to their agency and, in certain contexts, power. Eunuchs serving in noble households in Persia, China and Ottoman Turkey, for instance, are known to have gained positions of considerable political influence and status.63 Work on Africa demonstrates that employment as a domestic worker in colonial-era homes did not necessarily conflict with fluid local notions of masculinity. In Natal, men’s willingness to engage as domestics was tied to traditional age hierarchies and labour proscriptions, with work in the home regarded as especially suited to younger men. Martens concludes that it was not African men but ‘white Natalians’ who found alarming the idea of men performing what they considered ‘women’s work’.64 Hansen similarly documented domestic work as ‘a man’s job’ in colonial Rhodesia.65 Robyn Pariser also records the high status of such work in Tanganyika, with respectability tied to higher wages and better access to European goods and knowledge.66 Our research suggests that some of these conclusions are more broadly applicable. In addition, we found instances of male domestic workers depicted in ‘manly’ ways, as the chivalrous protector or father figure, notably in the absence of the white master. It is important to acknowledge the hierarchies within the domestic workforce, with some men achieving positions of considerable autonomy and authority in homes, hotels and ships. Furthermore, as Martínez and Lowrie have suggested, the formation of strong views about ‘appropriate masculine roles in domestic work’ may have taken time to emerge, particularly for indigenous workers with no prior experience or local traditions of service.67 Despite the frequent feminization of Chinese servants, for men raised on the concept of wen masculinity – which prized the softer attributes of the gentleman scholar over the martial wu – their attire, demeanour and long hair was in no sense a sign of femininity. Working closely with a colonial bachelor in households that often eschewed the company of women was in keeping with the teaching that wen men should avoid the distracting company of women.68 Katherine M. Ringrose, The Perfect Servant:  Eunuchs and the Social Construction of Gender in Byzantium (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 64 Martens, ‘Settler Homes, Manhood and “Houseboys” ’, 393–4. 65 Karen Hansen, ‘Household Work as a Man’s Job: Sex and Gender in Domestic Service in Zambia’, Anthropology Today 2, no. 3 (1986): 18. 66 Pariser, ‘Masculinity and Organized Resistance’, 110–12. 67 Julia Martínez and Claire Lowrie, ‘Colonial Constructions of Masculinity: Transforming Aboriginal Australian Men into “Houseboys”’, Gender & History 21, no. 2 (2009): 314. 68 Kam Louie, Theorising Chinese Masculinity: Society and Gender in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 63

Introduction

19

Throughout the Pacific there are indications that Islander men did not countenance employment in domestic service. In New Zealand, Maori men seldom served in settler households.69 The dominant settler construct of Maori as a superior native race as well as enduring social and economic autonomy within tribal communities were some important factors that created little ground for ‘natural’ notions of indigenous servitude.70 In Fiji, one commentator remarked, native men ‘scorned’ domestic service, and ‘of all occupations’ the Fijian ‘likes soldiering the best’.71 The entanglement of imperialism and militarism in the shaping of indigenous masculinity resonates powerfully across the Pacific, with ‘hyper-masculine’ notions of innate martial masculinity bolstered by colonial education, sport and military training.72 Yet we are also concerned to highlight slippages and gaps, to explore how indigenous Fijians, in particular, engaged strategically with opportunities presented by domestic service employment. It is clear, however, that the status of such work changed over time, both in the sites we consider and, more broadly, with domestic service increasingly being understood as denigrating for men. We will return to this point in the book’s conclusion. While Colonialism and Male Domestic Service is primarily concerned with the way in which concepts of race and class were mobilized in domestic service relations, as we have seen, the gendering of such work was equally important. Unpaid domestic duties were in most cultures associated with women, and yet many colonies, particularly in Africa, explicitly banned or otherwise discouraged the employment of female domestic workers by European men to minimize the dangers of interracial sexual relations. In colonial Zambia, for example, where there were on average nine servants for each colonial household in the 1930s, the state actively promoted male domestic service. The state recognized women’s important role in agriculture while fearing their sexuality within the intimate space of the colonial home.73 A small number of men worked for missionary families in the mid-nineteenth century but were usually confined to outdoors labour. See Tony Ballantyne, Entanglements of Empire: Missionaries, Māori, and the Question of the Body (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2015), 85, 116, 118. 70 Macdonald, ‘Why Was There No Answer’, 10–13. Her analysis centres mostly on Maori women. 71 Percy S. Allen, Stewart’s Handbook of the Pacific Islands (Sydney: McCarron Stewart, 1921), 409. 72 There were, of course, important regional differences. See Margaret Jolly, ‘Moving Masculinities: Memories and Bodies across Oceania’, Contemporary Pacific 20, no. 1 (2008): 1–24; Ty P. Kawika Tengan, Native Men Remade:  Gender and Nation in Contemporary Hawai‘i (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2008). 73 Hansen, ‘Household Work as a Man’s Job’, 18–23. There could sometimes be additional twists to such exclusions, with some commentators, for example, noting colonial masters’ interest in preventing newly arrived white wives from finding out about prior sexual intimacies with African women. In such instances, the employment of male servants might reflect a fear of betrayal by former native lovers: H.B.H., ‘The “Black Peril” in British East Africa’, Empire Review and the Journal of British Trade 35, no. 245 (1921): 195–6. 69

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Colonialism and Male Domestic Service

Reading across colonial archives The historiography of colonialism has taught us that colonial conquest was an inherently nationalistic enterprise, and historians have often highlighted the exceptionalism of, say, British or French colonial styles. But in approaching archives with a trans-colonial methodology we saw that officials and visitors were more cosmopolitan in their outlook than previously recognized. In particular, the personal memoirs of the educated colonial elite reveal a willingness to observe and even mimic the practices of other colonies. We have sought to follow the threads of colonial conversation from archive to archive, in search of such interactions. Stoler describes this process as reading ‘along the grain’ of colonial archives, and she promotes this as a way to complicate the ‘grand narratives of colonialism’.74 Trans-colonial thought as expressed by colonial officials was not a progressive or anti-colonial force, as the discussions about the so-called ‘servant problem’ reveal. Thus, while we have sought to tease out the sharing of ideas, policies and laws associated with colonial labour relations, we have framed this discussion in the context of the subaltern resistance by the domestic workers themselves. Unpacking the subaltern within the colonial archive has nevertheless required us to engage in speculation, or what historian Penny Edwards refers to more positively as ‘the exercise of historical imagination’.75 Company archives have further enriched our appreciation of these connected imperial worlds. In facilitating routine trans-colonial mobility, shipping lines literally bring diverse spaces and the connections between them into a single interpretive frame. Not only do company archives reveal particular labour practices on ship and assumptions behind them, they have also enabled us to contextualize the impressions individual colonists recorded in private diaries and letters, so many of which were produced during periods of sea travel or layovers in ports. It can be challenging to discern how individual domestic workers responded to the treatment meted out by colonial employers. Literacy rates would have been low among domestic workers, but even if they had recorded their impressions, these would rarely find their way into official archives. Acknowledging the dearth of written records left by the workers themselves, 74 Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain:  Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 50. 75 Penny Edwards, ‘Archival Detours, Sourcing Colonial History’, in Sources and Methods in Histories of Colonialism:  Approaching the Imperial Archive, ed. Kirsty Reid and Fiona Paisley (London: Routledge, 2017), 32–46.

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our aim has been to gain access, wherever possible, to their voices, even when filtered through a third party. We use a small number of oral histories and court testimonies that contain first-person evidence. Newspapers also provide fragmentary insights, though, in most cases, only the more sensational cases are reported.76 The rare examples of self-commissioned servant photographs capture how domestic workers saw themselves or wished to be seen.77 Nonetheless, as Swapna Banerjee notes for colonial Bengal, the dearth of material from domestic workers means that most of our evidence comes from ‘the discourse of their employers’.78 Like Clare Anderson’s Subaltern Lives, which uses colonial documentation to reconstruct the lives of convicts, sailors and indentured labourers across the Indian Ocean region, we have located considerable evidence detailing the personal details, working conditions and activities of domestic workers.79 This includes hotel and steamship company personnel files and correspondence, the personal letters and memoirs of private employers, government reports on domestic worker organization and personal immigration files. All of these sources, as we highlight in the following chapters, afford possibilities of getting closer to the motivations and concerns of servants. In this respect, we attempt also to read colonial archives ‘against the grain’, engaging critically with colonial sources and perspectives in a spirit of ‘strategic antagonism’, which, as Antoinette Burton argues, is necessary for historians hoping to avoid reproducing the past and its gendered and racialized assumptions.80 One of the obvious challenges for trans-colonial historians is working with sources in diverse languages, both of the various imperial powers as well as Asian and Pacific languages and dialects. Most of our primary materials are in English, but we have also made use of colonial records in French and Spanish. A few Chinese-language sources were also located and translated into English. Where possible, we have sought to supplement the lack of Asian and Pacific

76 We have benefitted from the recently expanded digitized newspaper collections such as TROVE in Australia, Singapore’s online newspapers and Old Hong Kong newspapers: https://trove.nla.gov.au/ newspaper/; http://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/; https://mmis.hkpl.gov.hk/old-hk-collection. 77 For a discussion of colonial photography, see Jane Lydon, ‘Democratising the Photographic Archive’, in Sources and Methods in Histories of Colonialism, 13–31. 78 Swapna Banerjee, ‘Down Memory Lane:  Representations of Domestic Workers in Middle Class Personal Narratives of Colonial Bengal’, Journal of Social History 37, no. 3 (2004): 682. 79 Clare Anderson, Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). For a more global approach, see Clare Anderson, ed., A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). 80 Antoinette Burton, Empire in Question, Reading, Writing and Teaching British Imperialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 104. See also Victoria Haskins, ‘Decolonizing the Archives: A Transnational Perspective’, in Sources and Methods in Histories of Colonialism, 47–70.

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language sources by drawing on the existing literature produced by scholars with expertise and language proficiency relating to each individual colonial site.

Overview of chapters The following chapters explore diverse aspects of trans-colonial domestic service. Chapter  1 offers a global overview of the early history of male servitude: beginning in feudal Europe; moving on to seventeenth-century Asia; and culminating in the colonies of the mid- to late nineteenth century. Retaining men and boys as personal servants was a tradition that European colonists shared with the elites of Asia, but the scale of Asian households went beyond what most Europeans had previously experienced. This chapter explores how the forms of male servitude that came to be viewed as characteristic of European colonial cultures were the result of complex, drawn-out processes of adaptation and cross-fertilization. From the seventeenth century, with the burgeoning global slave trade, colonial cultures of servitude became increasingly transnational and, in turn, influenced domestic service in the metropoles. Young men from Africa, India and China were brought in to serve in the homes of the English and French elite. This fashion for imported domestic workers encouraged a new generation of colonists to venture out in search of more of this quintessentially orientalist experience. The employment of indigenous men in colonial homes is considered in Chapter 2. Indigenous men in north Australia and Fiji responded to colonists’ attempts from the 1870s to engage them in domestic service. While employers favoured Chinese and Indian servants, persistent labour shortages and gendered policies aimed at protecting indigenous women ensured that indigenous men were recruited alongside or in preference over the former. The racialized hierarchies that underpinned British colonialism meant that, in both Darwin and Suva, employers were sceptical about the capacity of indigenous men to provide service. Aboriginal Australian and Fijian men, for their part, resisted the assumed authority and superiority of masters and mistresses. Ever conscious that this was their land, they refused to circumscribe their lives around the burdens and demands imposed on them as houseboys. The American Philippines, the subject of Chapter  3, offers a unique opportunity to explore trans-colonial transmission of culture in one location. When American imperialists arrived in Manila at the turn of the twentieth century, they described an ‘old world’ colonial society in which Spanish and

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British traditions operated alongside those of the Filipinos and Chinese. Into this already cosmopolitan environment the Americans brought a range of views about the correct management of domestic workers, whom they judged and treated according to imposed racial categories. While the United States liked to imagine its rule as inherently liberal, American employers were anything but united on this front. Everyday negotiations for domestic power played out in disputes over food preparation, clothing and hygiene. The seemingly casual use of physical violence as a disciplinary measure reveals the stark difference between American labour standards and colonial labour practice. In Chapter 4 a close examination of colonial photography reflects on selected images from collections across Southeast Asia, northern Australia and British Columbia of Asian and indigenous male domestic workers in colonial homes. That such photographs were so popular is a testament to the iconic status of the ‘houseboy’. Through the use of choreography, props and captioning, some images strove to emphasize unquestioned white mastery and devoted native servitude, depicting servants tending to employers or poised ready to serve unseen masters. Other representations of servants as father figures, husbands and gentlemen, and rare portraits commissioned by workers, were far more ambiguous and suggest diverse ways in which male servants asserted their own sense of authority, sexuality and masculinity. The colonies we examine in this book were connected by the steamship networks that plied the Indian and Pacific Oceans and many regional seas. Chapter 5 explores the evolution of a culture of ocean-going domestic service, in which Chinese, Indian, Malay and Japanese men took employment as stewards. By the early twentieth century, passenger liners powerfully symbolized the strength of ties between colonies and their metropoles. Like the colonial hotel, their capacity to provide European passengers with the ultimate in comfort and personal service was a matter of colonial pride. By the 1920s Japanese ship owners had also staked their claim in this maritime competition. A strict hierarchy of service roles was overlaid with a racialized positioning of European and Asian workers, but within the tight confines of the ship, this colour line was often a source of tension. Furthermore, by investigating the shipboard social interactions between stewards and passengers, we seek to emphasize how steamers may have provided a tangible means of transmitting cultural patterns that helped to shape domestic service culture across the colonies. In a continuation of this move beyond the colonial home, Chapter 6 explores domestic work in the more public setting of the colonial hotel. In tropical port towns across Asia and the Pacific, the grand hotel became an iconic landmark

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promoting European comfort, envisaged as a monument to colonial prestige. In Suva, Fiji, the Grand Pacific Hotel opened in 1914 to cater to the growing transpacific steamship trade. The owners engaged their service staff directly from Calcutta, rather than recruit from the local population of Indian indentured workers or indigenous Fijians, positioning Indian hotel staff as highly trained and uniquely suited to uphold exacting standards of service. This chapter traces how interactions between hotel management, Indian staff and guests reveal fractures in this polished façade. While framed as a space apart, by the interwar years labour relations in the Grand Pacific were inseparable from the controversies surrounding the political and economic status of Indians in Fiji and the wider empire. In previous chapters we have shown how houseboys were represented as emasculated and subservient; their presumed loyalty hailed as proof of the success of the colonial enterprise. But such imaginings did not reflect the lived realities of domestic workers. Even as they worked to support the colonial project, we cannot presume that servants were committed to it. Chapter  7 considers domestic workers as both labour and political activists from the 1910s through to the 1930s. Focusing on Hong Kong, Singapore and French Indochina, we trace how domestic workers formed a core group in early anti-colonial protests, using their unique access to Europeans to political advantage. Individual acts of resistance ranged from theft, to poisoning, to outright murder. In joining labour movements and national and regional political organizations, domestic workers were able to lobby collectively against poor working conditions and to join protest movements against colonial authorities. Far from being silent figures, patiently awaiting orders, male domestic workers were active agents in both the private and public spheres of a trans-colonial world, negotiating, insisting and protesting.

1

Creating the Houseboy: Early Asian Influences on European Cultures of Domestic Service

Anne Elwood, wife of Colonel Elwood, writing of her stay in India in the 1820s that head servants were ‘always termed “Boy” ’, added that the professor of Hindustani Dr Gilchrist ‘somewhat fancifully conceives [that Boy] may be derived from the Indian word Bhaee or Brother’.1 This is one of the earliest published references to the ubiquitous designation of male servants in colonial households. By the late nineteenth century the ‘houseboy’ was an iconic figure that drew inspiration from domestic service experiences across the globe, extending back to the earliest years of colonial expansion. Newspapers, handbooks and memoirs increasingly transmitted orientalist accounts of male domestic workers for their European readership. These typically glib narratives did little to hint at the complex history of colonial male domestic service. While there is no conclusive evidence to suggest a pre-colonial origin for the term ‘boy’, it is undoubtedly the case that much of what were later understood as colonial cultures of domestic service drew inspiration from various pre-colonial Asian cultures. Even if European colonizers arrived with their own notions of domestic service, they were obliged to adapt to pre-existing local traditions of servitude. As Elsbeth Locher-Scholten remarked in the context of colonial Java, domestic service was ‘hardly a Western invention’.2 Victoria Haskins and Claire Lowrie have emphasized the importance of tracing pre-colonial Asian Mrs Colonel Elwood Anne Katharine, Narrative of a Journey Overland from England, by the Continent of Europe, Egypt, and the Red Sea, to India, Including a Residence There, and Voyage Home, in the Years 1825, 26, 27, and 28, vol. II (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1830), letter XLV, 2–3. 2 Elsbeth Locher-Scholten, ‘So Close and Yet So Far: The Ambivalence of Dutch Colonial Rhetoric of Javanese Servants in Indonesia, 1900–1942’, in Domesticating the Empire:  Race, Gender and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism, ed. Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 134. 1

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influences in order to avoid Eurocentric readings of colonial history.3 Swapna Banerjee, writing on colonial Bengal, similarly highlights the importance of local cultures of domestic service and explains how Indian traditions were themselves a mix of diverse Persian, Arabic and Hindu influences.4 Over several centuries Europeans’ notions of domestic service were profoundly influenced by their experiences in India, China and Southeast Asia. European and Asian cultures interacted from the seventeenth century, at which time male Asian servants first began to be brought to Europe so that elite families might enjoy the cultural cachet associated with the ‘exotic orient’. Colonial understandings of male servitude developed over time to reflect the increasingly powerful self-image of European colonizers. Accepted wisdom was passed on from colony to colony, whether by word of mouth or through published guides for would-be colonists. Within each colony slightly different variations developed, depending on the era and the nature of the colonial presence. While the first colonists, typically young bachelors, had reason to value  the knowledge of indigenous servants, particularly as guides and intermediaries, the use of imported domestic servants to supplement indigenous labour was the predominant pattern across Asia and the Pacific. This was often in aid of continuity of service, but in other instances, it reflected colonists’ anxieties about indigenous populations. Not all local peoples were willing to work for Europeans. Colonial incursions often evoked resistance, and during periods of hostilities the employment of local labour was necessarily fraught. Some colonial authorities sought to limit such employment in order to ‘protect’ indigenous peoples from labour abuses. By importing servants from elsewhere, colonists hoped to maintain control over the master–servant relationship. Regardless of the ethnicity of employers or employees, a shared culture of domestic service prevailed in the colonial Asia Pacific by the turn of the twentieth century. What is striking is the way in which local cultures of domestic service came to be spread by mobile colonizers and servants. Together, they transplanted new cultural practices, moving, for example, from British India to East and Southeast Asia and into the Pacific. Male domestic labour was the mainstay of that culture. Prior studies have not sought to explain the early origins of male servitude in the Asia Pacific region and the ways in which those 3 Victoria Haskins and Claire Lowrie, ‘Introduction: Decolonizing Domestic Service: Introducing a New Agenda’, in Colonization and Domestic Service: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Victoria K. Haskins and Claire Lowrie (New York: Routledge, 2014), 8. 4 Swapna Banerjee, Men, Women and Domestics: Articulating Middle-Class Identity in Colonial Bengal (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), 40.



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labour patterns and preferences spread. In this chapter we outline early domestic service practices in search of evidence of cross-cultural adaptation that might help to explain how this came about.

African, Indian and Chinese servants in England While this chapter will focus on the cultural influences upon Europeans as they travelled and lived in Asia, it is important to acknowledge that early European cultures of domestic service had already been subject to diverse cultural influences at home. Across Europe the nobility displayed their social status and prestige in the form of large households of lackeys. One medieval Earl of Northumberland, for example, had a household of 175 servants, only nine of whom were women.5 In her study of French ancient regime domestic service, Cissie Fairchilds explained how the category of ‘servant’ became more specialized over time. Servants in seventeenth-century French noble households included occupations such as soldiers, goldsmiths and furriers. Only after 1700 was the term confined to those performing more menial household tasks. This change coincided with an increase in the proportion of female servants, with the employment of male servants restricted to the nobility. Fairchilds suggests that one could assess the ‘social rank and aspirations of a man’ by the number and gender of his servants. Middle-class families, who typically employed a single female servant, rarely employed men in order to protect themselves from perceptions of social climbing.6 From 1669 to 1752 in London the percentage of male domestic workers rose slightly from about 20 per cent to 30 per cent.7 In England, a luxury tax of a guinea a head on male domestics was imposed in 1777, both reflecting and reifying the association between privilege and male servants.8 If the employment of male servants was regarded as the privilege of the nobility, the employment of non-European men appears to have been largely Cissie Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies: Servants and Their Masters in Old Regime France (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 9, 11. 6 Ibid., 9, 11, 181–8. 7 Tim Meldrum, Domestic Service and Gender, 1660–1750: Life and Work in the London Household (London: Routledge, 2014), 16. See also Carolyn Steedman, Labours Lost: Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 8 J. Jean Hecht, Continental and Colonial Servants in Eighteenth Century England (Northampton, MA: Department of History, Smith College, 1954), 18; see also Susan Brown, ‘Assessing Men and Maids: The Female Servant Tax and the Meanings of Productive Labour in Late-Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Left History 12, no. 2 (2007): 12, 17. 5

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the privilege of property-owners who returned from exotic overseas locations. African slaves were brought to England from the 1570s, the majority of whom were used as household servants. In the first half of the seventeenth century the number of African male servants was limited to ‘a handful of black pages’, with a distinct preference for young boys. Brought back to be pets and playthings, these child slaves were compelled to wear collars inscribed with their owner’s name, and were typically dressed in expensive costumes or colourful livery as a statement of wealth and status. Indeed, it became a convention of aristocratic portraiture to include a black child so dressed. From the mid-seventeenth century African male servants increased in number as it became fashionable for titled and propertied English families to have one or two slaves. Historian Peter Fryer ties this directly to colonialism, noting that the sons of West Indian planters who were sent to England for their education were attended by African servants who soon gained an iconic status as ‘Black Boys’.9 In later years, popular novels such as William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1847 Vanity Fair would depict ‘Mr Sambo’ as the affable and trusted servant.10 In India in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, an African slave, especially imported from Bourbon or Mauritius, or purchased in Calcutta, was the ‘ultimate in luxury’ for a European gentleman of fashion.11 After the 1789 Proclamation prohibited such importation, slave traders in Calcutta turned instead to the profitable business of breeding African slaves.12 As an African slave cost about ten times more than an Indian servant, most English preferred the latter.13 Judging from the regular advertisements concerning missing slave boys, they were frequently mistreated.14 Indian male servants were also fashionable in England from the late seventeenth century, imported for similar reasons and under similar circumstances to those from the West Indies.15 Rozina Visram identifies a painting from 1672 as the first portrait of an ‘Indian page’ in England.16 With the fashion for orientalism, Indian domestics were ‘much prized for their exotic charm, with 9 Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1984), 8, 9, 19, 21–3, 25, 31; for African servants in Britain in the eighteenth century and before, see Hecht, Continental and Colonial Servants, 33–49. 10 Fryer, Staying Power, 8, 9, 19, 21–3, 25, 31; William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (London: Punch, 1847). 11 Rozina Visram, Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History (London: Pluto Press, 2002), 4. 12 Visram, Asians in Britain, 361; Fryer, Staying Power, 77–8. 13 Visram, Asians in Britain, 78. 14 Thomas G. P. Spear, The Nabobs: The Study of Social Life of the English in Eighteenth Century India (London: Oxford University Press, 1932), 53. 15 Hecht, Continental and Colonial Servants, 50. 16 Visram, Asians in Britain, 5–7.



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all its associations of luxury and splendour’. In England before 1772 they were legally chattels belonging to their masters.17 Some ‘rare advertisements’ also depict Indian domestics wearing slave collars.18 Following the Somerset Ruling of 1772, which determined that employers had no right to forcibly remove slaves from Britain, the importation of African slaves as servants declined, but Indian servants remained popular.19 Famously, Warren Hastings, Governor-General in Bengal, returned to England with his family in 1785 accompanied by two Indian boys, aged thirteen or fourteen, and four maidservants, his wife dismissing the latter shortly after arrival.20 British families traditionally repatriated their Indian servants at their expense. However, by the middle of the eighteenth century, employers discharged their servants on arrival in England, leaving them to fend for themselves – a practice encouraged by the constant demand for servants to accompany people heading out to India.21 Historian J.  Jean Hecht concluded that only small numbers of Indian servants (male and female) entered Britain. Those who did were almost exclusively employed by returning ‘Nabobs’, who occupied a rather precarious parvenu status among the upper class, but the Indian servants themselves were not despised.22 Chinese servants also found their way to England during the eighteenth century, albeit only for a relatively brief period. In the 1760s and 1770s the chinoiserie trend emerged – a fashion for Asian art and design inspired by the new trade with East Asia and China. It became fashionable for upper-class English households to engage Chinese boy servants, a practice possibly encouraged by British women who were in Macau from the 1750s.23 Unlike many Indian servants, Chinese male servants were not chattel slaves, but in debt-bondage, which was prevalent in China during this period.24 The chinoiserie fashion in Hecht, Continental and Colonial Servants, 51–2. 18 Visram, Asians in Britain, 12–13. The newspaper reports of runaway Indian servants recorded by Visram seem to deal exclusively with young male servants described as ‘boys’. 19 Hecht, Continental and Colonial Servants, 52. 20 Fryer, Staying Power, 78. Also in Visram, Asians in Britain, 7. 21 Hecht, Continental and Colonial Servants, 51; Visram, Asians in Britain, 10–11. The East India Company directors ordered that security bonds for servants’ maintenance and repatriation had to be provided before any servants left India, but regulations proved ineffective: see Michael H. Fisher, Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain, 1600–1857 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004), 216–21. 22 Hecht, Continental and Colonial Servants, 54. 23 Fryer, Staying Power, 72, 500, quoting Victoria Sackville-West, Knole and the Sackvilles (New York: George H.  Doran, 1922), 191. Cf. John Steegman, The Rule of Taste from George I  to George IV (London:  Macmillan, 1936), 39:  ‘Chinese boys, for a time, were almost more in demand than Negroes’; Austin Coates, Macao and the British 1637–1842, Prelude to Hong Kong (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 131–6. 24 Angela Schottenhammer, ‘Slaves and Forms of Slavery in Late Imperial China (Seventeenth to Early Twentieth Centuries)’, Slavery and Abolition 24, no. 2 (2003): 144. 17

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Europe had passed its peak by the 1790s.25 In the lead up to the French Revolution the European admiration for the ‘wonderous Cathay’ declined as more negative views of Chinese – ‘lazy, unproductive, indulgent, exotic as well as alluring and promiscuous, despotic, corrupt, childlike and immature, backward, derivative, passive, dependant, stagnant and unchanging’ – began to appear.26

European Orientalism in Asia: Indian, Javanese and Chinese servants Writing in 1920, historian W. H. Moreland noted how Europeans in India had enthusiastically adopted local customs from the time of the Mughal Emperor, Akbar the Great, who ruled from 1556. Moreland emphasized that ‘the profusion of servants, which attracts attention in India in the present day, is no modern phenomenon, but is in fact an attenuated survival of the fashions prevailing in the time of Akbar’.27 In Goa, he wrote, the Portuguese had ‘imitated the social life of their neighbours’ with ‘men of quality attended through the streets by pages, lacqueys, and slaves in great number’. He claimed that slavery was ‘a Hindu institution’, which the Portuguese followed as ‘the custom of the country’, pointing out that the majority of the population of Goa were slaves and that this status was hereditary under Hindu and Muslim systems of law.28 More recently Swapna Banerjee has argued that the custom of keeping large households of servants originated with Muslim nawabi (royal) culture, dating from Ottoman rule in the medieval period. It was then taken up by wealthy Hindu households, and later adopted by the British as the new nabobs of India.29 Banerjee found that male servants predominated in Indian and British households only after British colonization, the increase a direct consequence of colonial labour polices and the resulting surplus of male labour in urban centres.30 But male servants were not employed merely because they were available:  British men, the majority of early arrivals, actively sought them out. Historian Elizabeth Collingham describes the British use ‘of magnificent 25 Fryer, Staying Power, 73. 26 John M. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2004), 197. 27 W. H. Moreland, India at the Death of Akbar: An Economic Study (London: Macmillan, 1920), 89. 28 Ibid., 91–3. 29 Banerjee, Men, Women, and Domestics, 40; Salim Kidwai, ‘Sultans, Eunuchs and Domestics: New Forms of Bondage in Medieval India’, in Chains of Servitude, Bondage and Slavery in India, ed. Utsa Patnaik and Manjari Dingwaney (Madras: Sangam Books, 1985), 85. 30 Banerjee, Men, Women, and Domestics, 30.



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31

ceremony’ in eighteenth-century India. The British had observed how the Mughal princes asserted their ‘independent political legitimacy’ in not unfamiliar ways ‘through flamboyant displays of wealth and power’.31 With the establishment of the Governor-General office in India in 1773, whose powers were increased in 1784, the pomp of early British rule had reached its height. Lord Valentia defended the expenditure on Government House, stating: The sums expended upon it have been considered as extravagant by those who carry European ideas and European economy into Asia; but they ought to remember, that India is a country of splendor, of extravagance, and of outward appearances: that the Head of a mighty empire ought to conform himself to the prejudices of the country he rules over.32

The British were aware that they lacked local legitimacy as rulers, being mere merchants and administrators, not noblemen, and marked as ‘impure’ in religious terms. Keeping large numbers of servants provided the outward appearance of high rank as well as creating bonds of patronage with the local community.33 As early as the 1620s, as an Italian traveller, Pietro della Valle, remarked, even a very ordinary European in India might employ numerous servants in a manner reserved only for the aristocracy at home. The Dutch and English kept either slaves or servants paid as little as three rupià a month ‘so that everybody, even of mean fortune, keeps a great family and is splendidly attended’.34 In Figure  1.1, John Wombwell, the Yorkshire paymaster to the East India Company in the late eighteenth century, is depicted in Indian dress, smoking a hookah on a Lucknow terrace. Behind him stands a young male Indian servant, wearing a red turban and sash and holding a white feather fan. This type of cultural adaptation was not uncommon among the so-called White Mughals.35 In later years this degree of overt luxury would be extended to civilian and military officers, whose company salaries allowed them to maintain a lifestyle to which they could not have aspired in Britain.36

Elizabeth M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies:  The Physical Experience of the Raj, c.  1800–1947 (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), 15. 32 Ibid., 16, quoting Viscount George Valentia, Voyages and Travels to India, Ceylon, the Red Sea, Abyssinia, and Egypt (London: William Miller, 1809), I, 235–6. 33 Ibid., 19. 34 Edward Gray, ed., The Travels of Pietro Della Valle in India. From the Old English Translation of 1664, by G. Havers (London: Hakluyt Society, [1892] 2010, two volumes), 42, 157. 35 William Dalrymple, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India (London: Penguin Books, 2004). 36 Collingham, Imperial Bodies, 15. 31

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Figure 1.1  Portrait of John Wombwell with an Indian servant, artist unknown, India, c. 1790. Frits Lugt Collection, Fondation Custodia, Paris.

In the Netherlands East Indies, Dutch traders and officials were also influenced by local cultures of domestic service. From the 1640s onward Dutch Governor-Generals in Batavia (now Jakarta) were said to have adopted a life of ‘worldly pomp’ quite unlike the austere culture of the Netherlands. Historian Jean Gelman Taylor describes how the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or VOC) directors took on a ‘variety of attendants when waiting on Asian rulers’ and observes that men ‘who spent thirty or more years in Asia could not fail to be influenced by their immediate surroundings’. They replaced their traditional Dutch maidservants with mostly male slaves of diverse origins. In Dutch artist Aelbert Cuyp’s depiction of a merchant of Batavia



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Figure 1.2  ‘A VOC Senior Merchant and His Wife’, Aelbert Cuyp, c. 1641. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands, SK-A-2350.

(Figure 1.2) the male slave dressed in Dutch silk clothing holds a golden parasol, or pajong, over the merchant and his wife. The pajong was usually reserved for the highest-ranking Javanese nobility.37 The Dutch were also subject to Chinese influences in the early colonial period. Like the British they were active slave traders and roughly half of Batavia’s population in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were said to be slaves from ‘Malabar, Bengal, Sumatra, Bali and above all Sulawesi’.38 But for most of that period the largest ethnic population in Batavia was Chinese, well outnumbering Europeans.39 When the British captured Java in 1811, Stamford Raffles wrote that the 30,000 slaves working in Java were mostly from Bali and the Celebes (Sulawesi) and were ‘the property of the Europeans and Chinese alone’. The Dutch, Raffles claimed, had created a class of domestic servants by E. M. Beekman, Fugitive Dreams: An Anthology of Dutch Colonial Literature (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 282. 38 Hans Hägerdal, ‘The Slaves of Timor:  Life and Death on the Fringes of Early Colonial Society’, Itinerario 34, no. 2 (2010):  21; Jean Gelman Taylor, The Social World of Batavia:  European and Eurasian in Dutch Asia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 70; James William B. Money, Java; or, How to Manage a Colony, Showing a Practical Solution to the Problems Now Affecting British India, vol. 2 (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1861), 250. Slavery was not abolished in the Netherlands East Indies until 1860. 39 Leonard Blussé, Strange Company: Chinese Settlers, Mestizo Women, and the Dutch in VOC Batavia (Dordrecht: Foris, 1986), 19. 37

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rearing child-slaves from outside of Java, in preference to local Javanese whom they believed to be unreliable.40 Europeans in mainland China and in Portuguese Macau and British Hong Kong also employed Chinese domestic servants in the early period, although the practice in mainland China was attended with considerable obstacles. Both male and female servants were part of traditional Chinese society, and just as in Europe, male servants were more often associated with elite households. The wealthiest families were able to purchase adolescent boys as servants, called sai man (or hsi min in Mandarin) meaning ‘little people’. A master who paid for the marriage of a sai man would also retain his servant’s wife and children in the family as hereditary servants.41 Male stewards, responsible for managing the domestic staff and greeting guests, were a common presence in wealthy Chinese homes. Other male servants were employed to provide one-on-one care to male members of the household in a similar manner to that of the European valet.42 Eunuchs, who were generally castrated as young boys, typically served as palace servants, including attending to palace women. During the Ming dynasty (1368– 1644), eunuchs became more common beyond the palace, with nobles and wealthy landlords requiring men to be castrated before they took them on as servants. Eunuchs remained part of the imperial household until the Chinese Revolution of 1911.43 It may be that the eunuch servant tradition influenced the later colonial representation of Chinese male servants as feminized or desexualized figures.44 Europeans in China, however, were not encouraged to imitate Chinese traditions of domestic service. In 1684 the Qing government lifted a ban on

Thomas Stamford Raffles, The History of Java (London: Black, Parbury, and Allen, 1817), 86. 41 James L. Watson, ‘Transactions in People: The Chinese Market in Slaves, Servants, and Heirs’, in Asian and African Systems of Slavery, ed. James L. Watson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 236. 42 Johanna Menzel Meskill, A Chinese Pioneer Family:  The Lins of Wu-Feng, Taiwan, 1729–1895 (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1979), 219, 29; Carl Crow, The Travelers’ Handbook for China, Including Hong Kong (Shanghai:  Dodd, Mead, 1921), 14–15; Rubie S. Watson, ‘Wives, Concubines and Maids: Servitude and Kinship in the Hong Kong Region, 1900–1940’, in Marriage and Inequality in Chinese Society, ed. Rubie S. Watson and Patricia Buckley Ebrey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 231–2. 43 Shih-shan Henry Tsai, The Eunuchs in the Ming Dynasty (Albany:  State University of New  York Press, 1996), 18; Mary Anderson, Hidden Power:  The Palace Eunuchs of Imperial China (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1990), 13. 44 Claire Lowrie, Masters and Servants:  Cultures of Empire in the Tropics (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2016), 60–61, 78–9; Frank Proschan, ‘Eunuch Mandarins, Soldats Mamzelles, Effeminate Boys and Graceless Women’, Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 8, no. 4 (2002): 447. 40



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overseas trade with Europeans, and the English East India Company, which was still unwelcome in the southern Chinese trading port of Canton (Guangzhou), began operating from trading headquarters in the Portuguese settlement of Macau, an island located ten miles from Canton. The British remained in Portuguese Macau for almost a century, where European merchants lived in sumptuous style with numerous servants, many of whom were slaves imported from Africa, India, Malacca, the Dutch East Indies, and China.45 The British were finally permitted to establish themselves in Canton in 1771.46 Foreign traders, known as ‘supercargoes’, who did business in Canton in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, did no domestic work for themselves. They depended entirely upon Chinese house servants hired for them by assigned Chinese compradors, with the most senior supercargoes often having their own servants or slaves to assist them as well.47 In 1831, however, the Imperial Commissioner of Duties in Canton, Hoppo Chung, banned foreign merchants from employing Chinese in ‘menial’ positions and from using sedan chairs carried by Chinese porters. Europeans, mere traders, were perceived as ‘overstepping their station’ and also considered a corrupting influence. The edict advised that Chinese ‘must not be the companions of foreigners, who are crafty and deceitful, and not to be trusted’.48 The domestic service relationship was inevitably caught up in a deteriorating political situation. In 1835 Lord Napier complained that the viceroy of Canton had interfered with his servants and tried to cut off his food supply to induce him to leave Canton.49 The collapse of the Canton factory system soon followed (1839–40) along with the start of the first Opium War in 1839. In the same year merchant James Matheson took steps to replace his Chinese servants with Indian servants, explaining that ‘we wish to be entirely independent of the Chinese’.50

45 Jonathon Porter, Macau, the Imaginary City:  Culture and Society, 1557 to the Present (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), 130. 46 John M. Carroll, Edge of Empires, Chinese Elites and British Colonials in Hong Kong (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 19–20. 47 Paul A. Van Dyke and Maria Kar-Wing Mok, Images of the Canton Factory 1760–1822:  Reading History in Art (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2015), xvi. 48 Diary of Harriet Low Hillard, 25 May 1831, in Katherine Hillard, ed., My Mother’s Journal: A Young Lady’s Diary of Five Years Spent in Manila, Macao, and the Cape of Good Hope from 1829–1834 (Boston: G. H. Ellis, 1900), 97. 49 Alexander Michie, The Englishman in China during the Victorian Era: As Illustrated in the Career of Sir Rutherford Alcock, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1900), 39. 50 Letter by James Matheson in Toon Koo to Charles Lyall in Calcutta, 1 December 1839, cited in China Trade and Empire, Jardine, Matheson & Co. and the Origins of British Rule in Hong Kong 1827–1843, ed. Alain Le Pichon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 406.

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It was not until the close of the second Opium War in 1859 that the British in Canton reported with some confidence the resolution of their difficulties in obtaining servants.51 By the 1870s British households employed around ten servants. This was far less than wealthy Chinese households, as Mrs John Henry Gray, wife of the Consular Chaplain in Canton, observed after visiting a Howqua house with at least a hundred retainers.52 In Portuguese Macau, however, in contrast to Canton, Europeans remained free to enjoy the luxury of servants throughout this period of political turmoil.53 The British acquisition of Hong Kong (in 1841)  was to have a profound effect on British domestic service culture: in fact, historian Christopher Munn commented that Hong Kong may well have been founded ‘because of a shortage of servants’.54 British employers addressed servants in Canton pidgin English, a trading language that reflected trans-colonial influences, comprising English and Portuguese with some Hindi and Malay words, ‘all fitted into a Cantonese syntax’.55 Chinese servants in Hong Kong behaved somewhat differently to those in Canton, making concessions to colonial cultural preferences, and serving food in the English or Anglo-Indian style. But otherwise, notes Munn, ‘their dress and manners remained Chinese’.56 By the early nineteenth century the kitchen appears to have become a key site of transfer for Asian cultural practices of domestic work. With Anglo-Indian cookery established in Hong Kong and Singapore, there is evidence that it had also acquired some cachet in the Netherlands East Indies. British traveller James Money praised the Dutch colonial system in his 1861 publication How to Manage a Colony, but he was less than complimentary about Javanese cooks. Travellers, he recommended, would be well advised to bring a French-speaking Indian cook with them. Money claimed that even the Dutch preferred Indian to Javanese cooks and would pay good wages to any Indian cook willing to stay on in the Dutch East Indies.57

Intelligence published in Overland Friend of China, 24 August 1859, cited in ‘China’, Illawarra Mercury, 24 November 1859, 4. 52 John Henry Gray, Fourteen Months in Canton (London:  Macmillan, 1880), letter XV, 14 July 1877, 173. 53 Porter, Macau, 136, 137. 54 Christopher Munn, ‘Hong Kong, 1841–1870: All the Servants in Prison and Nobody to Take Care of the House’, in Masters, Servants, and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562–1955, ed. Douglas Hay and Paul Craven (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 366. 55 Christopher Munn, Anglo-China, Chinese People and British Rule in Hong Kong 1841–1880 (Richmond: Curzon, 2001), 66. 56 Munn, ‘Hong Kong, 1841–1870’, 366. 57 J. W. B. Money, Java or How to Manage a Colony, vol. 1 (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1861), 18. 51



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Power and hierarchy among domestic servants British control over domestic servants in India in the early nineteenth century was always less secure than they liked to imagine, and certainly servants themselves exerted a notable degree of influence. This can be gauged in the large retinues and elaborate servant hierarchies that the British felt they were obliged to accept, and in the power and self-assertiveness displayed particularly by the male servants who headed these households. In both India and China, British colonial publications described in detail the complicated hierarchy of domestic servants and their respective positions of authority within the household. British guides to India offered extensive lists of servants, along with their local titles and responsibilities, and advice to newcomers to follow these ‘rules’ to the letter. Yet, as Collingham suggests, servants might have invoked this tradition in order to ensure that the British employed more workers.58 Living in India in the 1830s, Julia Maitland, for instance, employed twenty-seven servants in total – aiming to be economical. They included ‘one butler, one dress-boy [valet], one matee [kitchen-hand], two ayahs, one amah [wet-nurse], one cook, one “tunnicutchy” [housemaid], two gardeners, six bearers, one water-carrier, two horse-keepers, two grass-cutters, one dog-boy, one poultry-man, one washerman, one tailor, one hunter, and one’s amah’s cook’.59 Even a single British man in Bengal, according to a guide for newly arriving Cavalry and Infantry cadets in 1844, was advised to employ thirteen servants.60 Male employment was distinctive and characteristic of this period. In India, the cook was ‘always a man’.61 But most importantly for the public display of status, the British were required to employ their own personal footman. Termed a khidmatgar (also spelt as khitmutgar or kitmatgar), this liveried servant prepared the table for meals, and stood behind his employer’s chair, waiting exclusively on him when dining out.62 Lined up behind the dining table, ‘dressed in liveries of Eastern fashion, or more commonly in pure white linen with white turbans, which among the higher classes are sometimes decorated with a narrow Collingham, Imperial Bodies, 18–19. 59 J. C. Julia Maitland, Letters from Madras during the years 1836–1839:  By a Lady (London:  John Murray, 1843), letter XII, Rajahmundry, 3 October 1837, 51. 60 Robert Crowther, A Practical East India Guide (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1844), 84. 61 George W. Johnson, The Stranger in India, or Three Years in Calcutta, Volume One (London: Henry Colburn, 1843), 45. 62 Ibid., 40. 58

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gold or silver band, surmounted by the crest of the family’, these servants, as Colesworthey Grant observed in the 1840s, ‘present a very extraordinary and imposing array’.63 The term khidmatgar was Arabic in origin, from khidmah meaning service, but the status of these servants was not necessarily menial.64 Nor were their services restricted to the British, even within British homes. As Lady Maria Nugent recorded in her journal in the 1810s, ‘every servant has a servant’ and that even her maid’s khidmatgar had an old man to wait upon him.65 On arriving in India, many British were surprised that servants asserted their independence and status. Anne Katherine Elwood, wife of Colonel Elwood, wrote in the 1820s that head servants held a role similar to that of an English butler, adding:  ‘They are, however, sometimes such fine gentlemen that they will scarcely do any thing but perhaps wait at table, and they occasionally give themselves great airs.’66 Advising her readers not to attempt to manage the servants, as the mistress was ‘much in the power of one’s domestics’, Elwood also wrote of the need to abide by Indian customs, insisting that, ‘In India, no domestic will perform any act which is supposed to be inconsistent with his caste, and “upna dustoor nuheeñ” (it is not our custom) is the invariable answer upon such occasions.’67 In Bombay she found that servants expected ‘to provide themselves with everything, food, clothing, even habitation.’ She continued, ‘In fact, it is difficult to induce them to sleep at your house at all, and it was necessary to enter into a sort of arrangement that only a certain number were to be absent at a time.’68 George W. Johnson similarly encouraged newcomers to surrender power to the khansamah, whom he described as combining ‘in one person the English house-steward, butler, and house-keeper’. This personage was literally the ‘lord’ of the household goods, the Hindi term khansamah deriving from the Persian khān for lord and sāmān meaning household stores.69 Johnson advised that he should be ‘well recommended, and past the middle age’ and employers would then ‘leave the hiring of other servants to him, rendering him responsible for their conduct’.70

Colesworthey Grant, Anglo-Indian Domestic Life. A Letter from an Artist in India to His Mother in England (Calcutta: W. Thacker, 1849), 80–81. 64 Banerjee, Men, Women and Domestics, 40. 65 Lady Maria Nugent, A Journal from the Year 1811 Till the Year 1815, Including a Voyage to and Residence in India (London, 1839), 218. 66 Elwood, Narrative of a Journey, letter XLV, 2–3. 67 Ibid., letter XLV, 4, 12. 68 Ibid., letter XLV, 13. 69 Garland Cannon and Alan S. Kaye, The Persian Contributions to the English Language, An Historical Dictionary (Weisbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2001), 99. 70 Johnson, The Stranger in India, 37–8. 63



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Recognition of the head servant’s power and authority also applied in French India. Captain Louis-François de Paulle de Mautort, who arrived in Pondicherry in 1780, employed twenty servants who lived in his house with their families. Mautort relinquished the responsibility of his household to his broker, or dubash, who hired and organized the servants. The dubash acquired considerable autonomy, using his authority to hire his own family, including his brother and his wife’s twelve-yearold brother.71 A century later in Canton in the 1870s, the Consular Chaplain’s wife noted that several of their ‘boys’ and ‘coolies’ were relations of the comprador they employed, who was responsible for hiring other servants.72 Mrs Gray suspected that the comprador had a hand in encouraging the notion that a new servant was required for every individual task, writing, ‘An English lady told me the other day, that her parrot was very ill, her compradore advised her to engage a bird coolie to take it to the White Cloud Mountains for change of air and scene.’73 In the Dutch East Indies in 1860, however, James Money observed that colonial employers had banned personal servants from acting as dubash. He wrote, The abominable Dustooree habit formerly existed in Java, as it still does in India. It consists in every Native, through whom any payment is made to another, levying toll on the money passing through his hands. The Dutch resisted it and by making every instance of it punishable as a petty theft . . . at last succeeded in abolishing it.74

In British India the handling of money did not lie solely with the khansamah. In some cases it devolved to the sirdah (or chief bearer) who would dust, make the bed, and assist the master to dress, acting as a personal valet.75 The power of the sirdah was undoubtedly enhanced by their more intimate relationship with their master, although the British sources are silent on that point. Grant described the house-bearer in opulent houses as ‘a very important personage’ who ranks as confidential body-servant,  – attends his master when dressing  – possesses a degree of control over the other servants  – has charge, probably, of the silver and the stores (in preference to the khansaman) and the entire responsibility of the whole of his master’s property, – acting in short . . . as valet de chambre.76 Danna Agmon, ‘The Currency of Kinship:  Trading Families and Trading on Family in Colonial French India’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 47, no. 2 (2014): 147–8. 72 Gray, Fourteen Months in Canton, letter VII, 4 May 1877, 77. 73 Ibid., letter IV, 15 April 1877, 35. 74 Money, Java, 24. 75 Johnson, The Stranger in India, 41. 76 Grant, Anglo-Indian Domestic Life, 83. 71

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He also had his own assistant (like the khitmadgar and the khansamah) who would take care of the cleaning, the shoes, lamps, and beds. With very few exceptions, the head servant was male, and strictly so in late nineteenth-century India, China and Hong Kong.77 Writing of the Hong Kong comprador ‘or major domo’ (the latter term having Spanish roots, also meaning steward or head butler), George Wingrove Cooke described this employee as ‘a long-tailed, sleek Chinaman, who is his general agent, keeps his money, pays his bills, does all his marketing, hires his servants, and stands security for their honesty, and of course cheats him unmercifully’.78 When Baltimore merchant Osmond Tiffany Jr. visited Canton in 1844 he came to the conclusion that Chinese servants respected the comprador far more than they did their European employers: Every person in the establishment . . . has one of these saucy, puffed up youngsters to attend his pleasure. They have a horror of offending the compradore . . . but they fear no one else. They are tolerably obedient to the person employing them, and as supercilious as possible to other people.79

This assessment was written shortly after the end of the first Opium War. The port of Hong Kong had been ceded to Britain, and the British Superintendency of Trade was moved there from Macau. The determination to elicit respect was now a key theme in British writings, as demonstrated by an 1851 diary entry by Hong Kong Post Office clerk John Wright. Wright recorded that ‘Chinese servants were far too impudent’, writing, ‘I had the pleasure of giving them good thrashing, not to do them any serious harm, but just a lashing with a cane that made them servile again.’80 As Munn observed for the early years of British Hong Kong, the role of the servant was crucial to British success, acting to bridge the gulf between Europeans and the local community, while simultaneously insulating the British ‘from the strange and difficult world that lay outside the home’.81 In emphasizing European dependence, Munn argues that Chinese servants in return worked

In colonial Saigon, the capital of Cochinchina from 1862, the role of the khansamah was often taken by a woman. The French colonial house was usually organized by a Vietnamese concubine or congaï who hired and supervised the mostly male household servants, including ‘a cook, a boy, a gardener, a coachman and a stable help’. See Gregor Muller, Colonial Cambodia’s ‘Bad Frenchmen’: The Rise of French Rule and the Life of Thomas Caraman, 1840–87 (London: Routledge, 2006). 78 Cooke cited in Munn, ‘Hong Kong, 1841–1870’, 373. 79 Osmond Tiffany, Jr, The Canton Chinese or the American’s Sojourn in the Celestial Empire (Cambridge, MA: James Munroe, 1849), 216. 80 Munn, Anglo-China, 144. 81 Munn, ‘Hong Kong, 1841–1870’, 366. 77



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‘very much on their own terms’. They were ‘quick to assert their interests and resist impositions’, demonstrating attitudes that had ‘developed during the precolonial Canton system, when Europeans rather than Chinese had been the subordinate class’.82

Servants, women, intimacy and distance In his 1843 advice book on India, George Johnson pondered British women’s responses to Indian servants, writing that ‘ladies, who would fly dismayed from a naked footman in England, here, with perfect nonchalance, allow themselves to be fanned by naked bearers . . . and do not feel delicacy outraged by finding the sirdar-bearer and his mates in a similar state of nudity, performing all the household work of the bed-chamber’.83 Collingham suggests that the ‘seminudity’ of servants was ‘negated by the European trick of adjusting their perception of brown skin’.84 An alternative explanation might be that British women only ever feigned delicacy in order to satisfy the strictures of Victorianera etiquette, and like their male counterparts in India were willing to adjust to the new cultural forms that emerged in this period. The employment of men as personal servants to women went against the customs of both countries, in fact. Neither in India nor in England, as Collingham comments, would women have allowed male servants inside their bedrooms.85 Likewise in China, the personal servant to elite women, a necessity given their bound feet, was always female.86 The custom of Chinese men waiting on European women was not a local one, but a carry-over from the habits of European bachelors. The usual social mores were set aside in the face of more practical considerations. For example, in order to allay the heat, the British came to rely on the presence of men close to or within their bedrooms to work the cooling punkah fans (see Figure 4.10), with the servant designated the punkah wallah. This mechanical innovation replaced the traditional feather fan (see Figure  1.1) and was introduced by the end of the eighteenth century in an adaptation on Arabic technology.87 In mid-nineteenth-century British Indian Ibid. 83 Johnson, The Stranger in India, 28–9. 84 Collingham, Imperial Bodies, 108. 85 Ibid., 105. 86 Gray, Fourteen Months in Canton, letter XIV, 8 July 1877, 165. 87 Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell, Hobson-Jobson, The Definitive Glossary of British India, ed. Kate Teltscher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 433. 82

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households, fans were to be found installed ‘not only in every sitting room, but in the sleeping apartments, suspended over the beds’.88 This position of punkah wallah would be transferred to the tropical colonies of the Asia Pacific, even to far-flung north Australia (see Chapter 2). The presence of servants in the bedroom raises the question of whether these intimate spaces were also sites of sexual encounters between employers and employees. If rumours were rife about romances between mistresses, masters and their servants in the European context,89 there does not appear to have been a similar pattern in India. Rosemary Raza observed that up until the mid-nineteenth century, British women could mix freely with Indian men, and they gave ‘virtually no indication that they considered themselves [sexually] threatened’ by them. Raza also points out that ‘almost all’ of the servants in Anglo-Indian homes were men ‘who also attended in bedrooms, performing the functions of maids in Britain’. While newcomers and Indians were shocked, neither Anglo-Indian women nor men saw it as cause for alarm.90 Controversy swirled more readily around gendered responsibilities for childcare. In the 1830s Julia Maitland, as we have seen, employed four females in her complement of twenty-seven servants – two ayahs and one amah (wetnurse) to look after the children, along with one housemaid.91 Before that time in India, male servants were often employed to look after both female and male children. Male servants also played a role in childcare in colonial Southeast Asia as we discuss in Chapter 4. Indian men were thought to be more reliable than Indian women, and less likely to corrupt their charges. That attitude changed, however, with commentators soon raising the impropriety of men attending to young girls. ‘Yes  – even little girls are entrusted to native men!’ wrote an outraged Honoria Lawrence in the Calcutta Review in 1844, ‘It would be hard to believe this, if custom had not familiarised us with the evil.’92 This new attention to the spectre of European–Indian intimacy marked a decided shift in colonial culture. By the mid-nineteenth century, as William Dalrymple describes it, ‘three hundred years of fusion and hybridity’ was brought to a conclusion and ‘later delicately erased from embarrassed Victorian history books’.93

88 Grant, Anglo-Indian Domestic Life, 21. 89 Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies, 20. 90 Rosemary Raza, In Their Own Words:  British Women Writers and India 1740–1857 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), 165–6. 91 Maitland, Letters from Madras, 52. 92 Raza, In Their Own Words, 54, quoting Honoria Lawrence, ‘Review of The Child’s Wreath of Hymns and Songs; Selected by Mrs C. J. Simons’, Calcutta Review 1, no. 2 (1844): 568. 93 Dalrymple, White Mughals, 395.



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The so-called Indian Mutiny of 1857–8, now described as the First War of Independence, marked an important turning point in British views of Asian male domestic service.94 British newspaper reports obsessively focused upon the murders of English women and children, representing British vulnerability at the hands of Indian men. In deliberate contrast, the Chambers’ Journal in London published an unnamed English woman’s story of her time in Parel, the location of the official residence of the Governor of Bombay since 1771. Acknowledging the ‘horror of the terrible revolt’, the anonymous writer nevertheless sought to remind readers of Indian ‘fidelity and humanity’ even towards their ‘alien rulers’, by offering a vignette of an intimate domestic encounter.95 Finding herself ill with a fever, she had sent her European maid and ayah away so that she could sleep. On waking she found she was alone with a male servant: On a mat on the ground, at the foot of the sofa, sat the tall figure of a very handsome native, his arms crossed on his bosom, and his large black eyes fixed earnestly on my face. He was dressed in a peon’s attire – that is a sort of short white blouse girt round the waist by a sash; a turban on his head, and a sword beside him. That he was devout, a short strip of paint between his eyebrows testified. I felt at first a little uneasy at finding myself the object of that fixed stare; but it was only a significant of the watchfulness of a careful attendant.96

The man stayed by her side to nurse her, helping her to drink, fanning her and smoothing her pillow. He was, she concluded, a kind nurse and ‘a civil, quiet, amiable man’, and she extended the recognition of his humanity by naming him (Juan). The writer was careful to avoid any hint of sexual impropriety, noting how he held the drink to her lips ‘very respectfully’. He carried a sword, being employed to guard the chambers of the ‘young ladies’.97 This romanticized portrayal of the servant in the traditional masculine role of protector is striking. Similar responses to Chinese male servants by American, Australian and British women in Southeast Asia and northern Australia later in the century are discussed in Chapters 3 and 4. But this was an exceptional and unusual account, in the context of war. 94 Alison Blunt, ‘Embodying War: British Women and Domestic Defilement in the Indian “Mutiny”, 1857–8’, Journal of Historical Geography 26, no. 3 (2000): 403–5. See also Fae Dussart, ‘ “That Unit of Civilisation” and “The Talent Peculiar to Women”: British Employers and Their Servants in the Nineteenth-Century Indian Empire’, Identities 22, no. 6 (2015): 706–21. 95 ‘Indian Servants’, Ovens and Murray Advertiser, 9 February 1858, republished from Chambers’ Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Art. 96 Ibid. 97 Ibid.

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Others regarded the domestic relationship as part of the problem. Writing around the same period, Grant had been struck by the ‘great gulf between master and man in India’ where ‘servitude is the only connecting bond’. He argued that given Europeans were ‘regarded as birds of passage: the domestic in India, therefore, can never, as in England, look upon himself in a place of permanency, – as forming part and portion of the family’. Even those British who arrived with favourable dispositions towards Indians became indifferent, careless and severe. The problem was exacerbated by the language barrier that led the British to view servants as devoid of feeling, or motivated only by self-interest. In a criticism that extended to the broader colonial project he concluded, ‘The feelings thus engendered toward the servants extend themselves to the people at large.’98 Fear and mistrust were prevalent emotions in much mid-century colonial writing, as news of the ‘Mutiny’ spread to Southeast Asia. In Singapore, according to historian Rajesh Rai, Indians, hitherto viewed favourably by the British as ‘useful to the security and development of the colony’, came to be viewed ‘as a “menace” ’.99 Singapore’s population in this period was already predominantly Chinese,100 and Chinese servants were viewed as a safer option. They were mostly from Hainan Island, well known for its role in supplying labour for the ‘coolie’ trade.101 In Hong Kong, Alfred Weatherhead, a government clerk, compared the ‘dignified gravity’ of Chinese servants to the supposed ‘fawning, cringing servile deportment of Bengali servants’.102 Even as he was writing in a period when the politics of violent Indian resistance was widely discussed, his insistence upon the stereotype of Bengali ‘servility’ masked the potent British fear of their Indian servants. In China, British military aggression limited their capacity to employ servants. The onset of the second Opium War in 1857 coincided with a decline in the number of Chinese servants employed in Canton. One newspaper article suggested that Europeans had divested themselves ‘of the nuisance of large retinues, one Chinese servant of all work being enough for the most self-indulgent bachelor’.103 No mention was made of the war that might have explained this reduction. Just months after the article was published, British 98 Grant, Anglo-Indian Domestic Life, 67. 99 Rajesh Rai, ‘The 1857 Panic and the Fabrication of an Indian “Menace” in Singapore’, Modern Asian Studies 37, no. 2 (2013): 365. 100 In 1860 there were 2,445 Europeans, 10,888 Malays, 12,971 Indians and 50,043 Chinese. See Carl A. Trocki, Singapore, Wealth, Power and the Culture of Control (London: Routledge, 2006), 42. 101 George William Skinner, Report on the Chinese in Southeast Asia, December 1950 (Ithaca, NY: Department of Far Eastern Studies, Cornell University, 1951), 16. 102 Weatherhead cited in Munn, ‘Hong Kong, 1841–1870’, 375. 103 ‘A Picture of Canton’, South Australian Register, 8 June 1857, 3.



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Admiral Seymour’s naval forces bombarded Canton. In that same year the British government in Hong Kong introduced registration of Chinese servants employed by Europeans, a move intended to increase British control.104 By the 1870s, however, as we have seen, the situation in Canton had reverted to old customs with large households of staff under the control of a Chinese comprador.105 In Hong Kong in 1881 there were nearly 22,000 Chinese domestic servants, of whom 5,529 worked for the 3,040 resident Europeans and Americans, while the rest worked for Chinese masters. According to Jung-Fang Tsai, by the turn of the century the British elite employed from twelve to fifteen Chinese servants.106 In India in 1871 large households of servants remained part of British life, with a new emphasis on racial hierarchy that cut across more intimate connections between master and servant. Scottish chaplain Macleod described the house of his host in Bombay who employed some forty male servants: The servants wore turbans and white cotton garments. They went barefooted, moved about like ghosts, and salaamed or stood in that respectful silence so becoming towards our superior race. By day or by night, so far as I could judge, they replied with equal readiness to the shout of ‘Boy!’ or ‘Bhai!’ which, they tell me, means ‘brother’ . . . and their response of ‘Sahib!’ was as quick as a near Irish echo.107

Echoing Anne Elwood’s 1820s account that opened this chapter, what is most striking here is Macleod’s casual allusion to racial superiority. By the high imperial age from the 1880s, when we commence our Asia Pacific case studies in the following chapters, European colonists readily express themselves with a confidence bolstered by their belief in white racial superiority.

Conclusion By the second half of the nineteenth century, the employment of male domestic workers was already steeped in the history of European encounters with Asian societies stretching back some two hundred years. In the following chapters we ‘China’, Colonial Times, 14 July 1857, 3. 105 Gray, Fourteen Months in Canton, letter IV, 15 April 1877, 35. 106 Jung-Fang Tsai, Hong Kong in Chinese History: Community and Social Unrest in the British Colony, 1842–1913 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 105–6. 107 Norman Macleod, Peeps at the Far East: A Familiar Account of a Visit to India (London: Strahan, 1871), 22–3. 104

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explore the trans-colonial development of a broad regional culture of domestic service in the period of high imperialism. As we shall see, the employment of male servants would remain, for at least the first three decades of the twentieth century, a potent symbol of colonial power in the Asia Pacific region. At the same time, as new political challenges unsettled European imperialism, anti-colonial resistance was driven in various forms by the domestic servants themselves. But it is important to recognize that these male domestic workers and their masters were the inheritors of earlier traditions of household service that had developed over a long period of time. As we have seen, a hybrid and evolving culture emerged out of the engagement between European and Asian cultures, and it would provide a rich, complex, and fertile ground for the colonial domestic encounters to come.

2

Indigenous Houseboys and Asian Ideals in Darwin and Suva

In the Fijian capital of Suva and in Darwin in Australia’s Northern Territory, indigenous men joined the ranks of those employed as houseboys in colonial history. In both places white residents expected assistance from Asian servants, mostly migrant workers who arrived either as free or indentured labourers. Their engagement of indigenous men alongside, or in preference to, both indigenous women and non-indigenous workers arose out of various factors, including persistent labour shortages and official policies that were both racialized and gendered. A discernible set of common cultural values and presumptions surrounded indigenous male employment in domestic service. This study of Aboriginal male servants in Darwin, and Fijian male servants in Suva, reveals no direct exchanges between the two locations and populations, but does highlight common patterns in men’s attitudes towards short-term employment in white homes and the relationship between such work and their wider cultural priorities. For these reasons we attempt here both a comparative and connected history, or rather an ‘encompassing comparison’, in that, even in the absence of direct traffic between Darwin and Suva, their respective patterns of male service can be understood within a wider Asia Pacific and trans-imperial arena of moving people, ideas, norms and institutions.1 This approach allows us to explore the specific dynamics of labour recruitment and regulation in two quite distinct sites of tropical colonialism, as well as the commonalities which indicate a shared pattern of indigenous service – thus staying attuned, as Frederick Cooper has

For more on methodological developments in imperial history, see Simon J. Potter and Jonathan Saha, ‘Global History, Imperial History and Connected Histories of Empire’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 16, no. 1 (2015), https://muse.jhu.edu/article/577738. 1

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emphasized, to ‘the multiple possibilities, pathways, and dead ends that exist within a broader history’.2 As we noted earlier, the existing literature on indigenous male domestic service in Asia and the Pacific is bound largely by single-colony approaches. It is richest for Darwin, while work on the Pacific is far more scattered, with male servants discussed typically only in passing in broader accounts of colonial race, gender and spatial relations.3 This chapter revisits Darwin, a key site in Lowrie’s comparative study, Masters and Servants, but reorients the focus of enquiry from Asia to the Pacific, linking two ports where the arrival of large numbers of Asian workers transformed cultures of colonial domesticity and indigenous labour. The comparative emphasis operates at two levels here: between indigenous service in Darwin and in Suva, and between indigenous and Asian servants in each location. In both towns, Asian servants generally enjoyed a higher status. This was reflected in wage rates and in the nature of the work assigned to them. Employers expected that Chinese men in Darwin and Indian men in Suva would assume their positions with ease and perform tasks effectively, without close supervision. Regarded as the ‘ideal’ servants, their livelihoods were seemingly circumscribed and their identities determined by their employment within the white colonial home. Indigenous men, in contrast, engaged in far more casual, flexible and intermittent ways with paid domestic work. They were wont to ‘go walk-about’, maintaining connections to kin, village or country, balancing obligations within and outside of the home. Employers had to modify their expectations accordingly, to varying degrees of satisfaction on both sides. Such negotiations invariably fuelled dismissals of native men as incompetent and unreliable, further cementing a racialized hierarchy of domestic labour. We draw extensively on recorded oral histories of white residents in Darwin, collected from 1979 through an initiative of the Northern Territory government. Former male domestic workers were, unfortunately, not interviewed at the time, Frederick Cooper, ‘Review Essay: Race, Ideology and the Perils of Comparative History’, American Historical Review 101, no. 4 (1996): 1135. 3 For Darwin, see Ann McGrath, Born in the Cattle:  Aborigines in Cattle Country (Sydney:  Allen and Unwin, 1987); Julia Martínez and Claire Lowrie, ‘Colonial Constructions of Masculinity: Transforming Aboriginal Australian Men into “Houseboys”’, Gender & History 21, no. 2 (2009): 305– 23; Victoria Haskins, ‘ “The Beautiful Boys” – Aboriginal Houseboys in Darwin’, Northern Territory Government Department of Tourism and Culture, https://dtc.nt.gov.au/arts-and-museums/northernterritory-archives-service/stories-from-the-archives/houseboys-darwin (accessed 6 February 2017). For the Pacific, see Claudia Knapman, White Women in Fiji 1835–1930: The Ruin of Empire? (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1986); Anne Dickson-Waiko, ‘Colonial Enclaves and Domestic Spaces in British New Guinea’, in Britishness Abroad:  Transnational Movements and Imperial Cultures, ed. Kate Darian-Smith, Patricia Grimshaw and Stuart Macintyre (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2007), 205–30; Edward P. Wolfers, Race Relations and Colonial Rule in Papua New Guinea (Sydney: Australia and New Zealand Book Co., 1975). 2



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but a number of Europeans remarked upon their experience of employing them. To a lesser extent we make use of the Fiji Oral History project interviews, recorded in the late 1990s with senior members of Fiji’s European and part-European communities.4 The oral histories from Darwin exhibit nostalgia for a time when Aboriginal men were ‘lovely’ boys and ‘loyal’ servants, which, as Victoria Haskins has noted, we might read ‘as an index of the tensions and resentments among Darwin’s older residents’ in the wake of voting and equal pay rights granted to Aboriginal people from the 1960s.5 Balancing this tendency in such recollections, we also draw heavily on correspondence in official records, letters, diaries and newspaper articles, all of which offer insights into the immediate impressions, challenges and frustrations of employers and colonial administrators. As in other chapters in this book, the voices of the domestic workers do not come to us firsthand, but the surviving commentaries of employers do afford a possible means of getting closer to the actions, motivations and concerns of their servants.

Patterns of indigenous employment Darwin and Suva are diverse in their histories and demography, and about 5,000 kilometres apart, divided by the Arafura and Coral Seas, although in terms of latitude they are not so far apart and share a tropical, coastal climate.6 Darwin, initially known as Palmerston, was established in 1869 as an outpost of British settlement on the northern coastline of Australia, six years after the colonial government of South Australia annexed northern Australia. White settlement of the region was sparse and plans for its economic exploitation vague and conflicting, although the emphasis was on pastoralism and plantations. At around the same time, Suva, on the southern coast of Fiji’s largest island, Viti Levu, attracted prospective agricultural settlers from Australia, New Zealand and the United States, many of whom seized land from indigenous people. The Fiji Islands were annexed by Britain in 1874, partly in response to these encroachments. Suva was declared the colonial capital in 1882. At the time of Darwin’s establishment Australia was composed of a number of self-governing British colonies from which the Aboriginal people were all but Sponsored by the Fiji Museum and the Pacific Manuscripts Bureau. See http://asiapacific.anu.edu. au/pambu/catalogue/index.php/fiji-oral-history-project-in-association-with-fiji-museum-part-1part-europeans-and-europeans-transcripts-of-audio-recording-series-pmb-audio-1–35;isad. 5 Haskins, ‘The Beautiful Boys’. 6 Twelve degrees twenty-five for Darwin, and 1,378 kilometres to the equator; eighteen degrees eight for Suva, 2,006 kilometres to the equator. 4

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entirely excluded politically, economically, and socially. The region of central and northern Australia known today as the Northern Territory was still under the jurisdiction of South Australia in 1901, when the colonies federated to form the Commonwealth of Australia. In 1911, the federal government took over the Territory’s administration and appointed an official executive representative, based at Darwin, as well as a Chief Protector of Aboriginals. There was no recognition of Aboriginal sovereignty or land rights.7 The Commonwealth Northern Territory Aboriginals Ordinance of 1911 treated the Aboriginal people as ‘wards of a state in which they had no say’, with the power to remove them to reserves ‘complet[ing] the process of dispossession, detribalization and control’.8 Fiji was ostensibly governed in the interests of the indigenous people whose land rights were recognized from the outset. Fiji’s first governor (1875–80), Sir Arthur Gordon, established a tiered system of leadership headed by a new advisory body, the Great Council of Chiefs, and the Native Regulations Board. Gordon sought the codification of indigenous land tenure and customary law, notably through the Native Lands Commission which aimed to register lands in the name of communal units. Fijians retained control over 80 per cent of their territory (although, crucially, not in Suva itself) and paid taxes in kind, a form of insulation from the cash economy, used for the administration of native policy.9 In Gordon’s words, Fiji was not envisaged as a ‘white man’s colony’,10 but he hoped to attract large-scale investment. Some of the best land was made available for sugar plantations, after a Land Claims Commission confirmed the alienation of about half the land sold prior to Cession. Officials also encouraged Fijians to lease other areas.11 From the outset Fiji and Northern Australia both relied on indentured Asian labour to develop their emerging economies, in preference to white immigration. Beginning in 1874 the South Australian government recruited Chinese ‘coolie’ (contracted) workers, originally from Singapore, and later in greater numbers from Hong Kong and southern China, to construct the telegraph line and the 7 Donovan, A Land Full of Possibilities, 184–6. 8 Gordon Reid, A Picnic with the Natives: Aboriginal-European Relations in the Northern Territory to 1910 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1990), 189–90. 9 The Native Lands Commission struggled to define traditional social structure and tenure. It ceased work in 1905 but was revived in 1911, and this eventually led to the ‘mataqali’ being defined as the land-owning social unit; see Peter France, Charter of the Land:  Custom and Colonization in Fiji (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1969). 10 Lorenzo Veracini, ‘ “Emphatically Not a White Man’s Colony”:  Settler Colonialism and the Construction of Colonial Fiji’, Journal of Pacific History 43, no. 2 (2008): 192. 11 Bruce Knapman, Fiji’s Economic History, 1874–1939 (Canberra: ANU Pacific Research Monograph, 1984); Michael Moynagh, Brown or White? A  History of the Fiji Sugar Industry, 1873–1973 (Canberra: ANU Pacific Research Monograph, 1981).



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railway, as well as for work in the gold fields. In addition, the pearling industry brought divers and crew from Japan, the Philippines and west Timor.12 In Fiji, the colonial authorities restricted the recruitment of indigenous labour, expanded pre-colonial indenture from neighbouring islands, particularly the New Hebrides (Vanuatu) and Solomon Islands, but most significantly, established a new scheme of Indian indenture. Between 1879 and 1916, 60,000 men, women and children were indentured from India to Fiji.13 Chinese men had been widely employed in Darwin households as servants and cooks throughout the second half of the nineteenth century.14 However Federation brought with it the ‘White Australia policy’, under which nonwhite immigration  – particularly of Chinese people  – was severely restricted. The twentieth century would see a shift to reliance upon indigenous male domestic labour in Darwin, mirrored in other townships of northern Australia, including Broome in Western Australia and Cairns in Queensland. At the time of the federal takeover in 1911, Darwin’s population was relatively small: 1,387 residents, including 442 Chinese, 374 Europeans and 247 Aboriginal people, and smaller numbers of Japanese, Filipinos, Timorese and Malays.15 With the rapid growth of the white population and a ready supply of servants from Asia no longer available, the government administration would do what it could to supply indigenous labour  – ‘the only class of domestic service available’  – to meet the burgeoning demand in Darwin.16 It was not uncommon for colonial officials to arrive at their posts with an entourage of Asian male servants, as did Gordon and his key advisors. In early colonial Fiji, householders in urban areas generally employed Melanesian, Indian or, to a lesser extent, Fijian, as well as part-European (‘half-caste’) servants. In rural areas, prospective servants were selected from the available pool of Indian or Melanesian plantation labour. In the 1880s and 1890s Solomon Islanders were in particular favour, but after the abolition of Melanesian indenture in 1904, Europeans employed Indians and Fijians as domestic servants in greater

Claire Lowrie, ‘In Service of Empire:  Domestic Servants and Colonial Mastery in Darwin and Singapore, 1890–1930’ (PhD diss., University of Wollongong, 2009), 89–90. Importing Indian labour to Darwin had been suggested, but never eventuated. See Julia Martínez, ‘Asian Servants for the Imperial Telegraph:  Imagining North Australia as an Indian Ocean Colony before 1914’, Australian Historical Studies 48, no. 2 (2017): 227–43. 13 Chinese also settled in Fiji, but as free migrants rather than indentured workers, and in larger numbers only from the early 1920s. 14 Lowrie, ‘In Service of Empire’, 94. 15 National Archives of Australia (hereafter NAA), Census figures for Darwin, 1911, A1/15 11/16191. 16 Northern Territory Administrator John Gilruth, 1917, quoted in Martínez and Lowrie, ‘Colonial Constructions of Masculinity’, 310. 12

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numbers. By 1911 Suva’s population was much larger than Darwin’s: 7,789 for Suva and surrounding suburbs (4,349 in Suva Town), including 3,320 Indians, 1,376 Europeans, 1,246 Fijians, 968 Pacific Islanders and 74 Chinese. The 1911 census listed occupations for the first time: 205 Fijian men worked as cooks and domestics in Suva, compared to 314 Indian men.17 After serving their terms of indenture (a period of five years), time-expired plantation hands were entitled to a free return passage to India after serving another five years of ‘industrious residence’: but over 60 per cent remained in Fiji. India halted the supply of indentured labour in 1917, yet Indians continued to arrive as free migrants as they had done since the early twentieth century. By the 1920s over half of the Indian population (some 40 per cent of Fiji’s population) was Fiji-born. As a result, Suva had more of a continuous multiracial history of domestic service than Darwin but a less extensive pattern of indigenous employment in European homes.

Recruitment, regulation and wages The employment of indigenous male servants began in an ad hoc fashion from the mid-nineteenth century, followed by measures to regulate recruitment and the conditions of labour. In Fiji, Melanesians and Indians were indentured to work on plantations and not as domestic servants. Attempts to train individuals for work in the home were not widely successful, leading to complaints and petitions to import trained servants from India. In 1887 Governor Charles Mitchell stressed that such demands were an ‘excrescence’ on the original intention of plantation indenture. If people availed themselves of the system to procure servants, they and not the government ‘run the risk of incompetence or unsuitability on the part of those indentured to them’.18 In part a response to concerns about informal engagements, the 1890 Masters & Servants Ordinance imposed a contractual system. Any contract between an employer and a prospective domestic worker longer than one month had to be formalized before a magistrate. No contract could be longer than twelve months and both parties were free to dissolve the agreement by advance warning. Servants were to be paid in cash at the end of each month and the employer was required to provide food, lodging and medical care. Legislative Council Fiji, Census, 1911, Council Paper No. 44 (Suva: Government Printer, 1911). 18 National Archives of Fiji (hereafter NAF), CSO, 87.1983, 26 August 1887. 17



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This ordinance defined ‘native’ servant as any Fijian, Pacific Islander or Indian, but it made special provision for Fijians. Employers had to seek approval from a District Commissioner who had to be satisfied that the person in question could continue to fulfil family and provincial obligations, such as building houses or canoes, planting gardens and fishing.19 Unlike the plantation Labour Ordinances, the Masters & Servants Ordinance did not require a Fijian to secure the permission of either his village or district chief to be released for service. Yet in practice specific customary expectations still applied, as one European complained in 1909: ‘It is held to be not the correct thing to pay a douceur [lit. ‘sweetener’] to get a boy,’ but it was ‘impossible to get a Fijian to work any fixed period without the “yagona” money’. The yagona was a customary cash payment that accompanied European requests for labour. Negotiations with village leaders also centred on the payment of taxes and bonuses and often took weeks to finalize.20 In Darwin, too, the government intervened to regulate the employment of Aboriginal male servants, but there were no allowances for the men’s familial or communal obligations. Under the terms of the Aboriginals Ordinance 1911, the Chief Protector of Aboriginals controlled the employment of domestic servants, along with all other workers, through a licence system. Stipulations upon employers were vague, the only condition being that the Protector could refuse to grant a licence if he was not satisfied that the wages and conditions of employment were ‘reasonable and just’.21 There was an expectation that low wages would be compensated for with the provision of basic food and clothing.22 These employment agreements, as Julia Martínez and Claire Lowrie point out, were mere formalities and the Protector ‘rarely’ imposed penalties on employers for breaches. ‘Official intervention,’ they write, ‘was limited to ensuring a steady supply of workers and the maintenance of discipline.’23 In Fiji no wage scale was laid down by law and payment was negotiated on a case-by-case basis. In the early 1890s the standard wage was just 5s per week (£1 a month), but the shortage of servants engendered rising wages and No. 1 of 1890: An Ordinance Relating to Masters and Servants, The Ordinances of the Colony of Fiji (Suva: Government Printer, 1914). 20 Fiji Times, 9 June 1909. There were ongoing official concerns about bribery of chiefs to secure labour; see ’Atu Bain, ‘A Protective Labour Policy? An Alternative Interpretation of Early Colonial Labour Policy in Fiji’, Journal of Pacific History 23, no. 2 (1988): 126. 21 ‘Regulations under the Northern Territory Aboriginals Act, 1910’, Northern Territory Times and Gazette, 8 December 1914. 22 Julia Martínez, ‘When Wages Were Clothes:  Dressing Down Aboriginal Workers in Australia’s Northern Territory’, International Review of Social History 52, no. 2 (2007): 276. 23 Martínez and Lowrie, ‘Colonial Constructions of Masculinity’, 309, 310. 19

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class-based resentment. Servants could take their pick of employers, choosing to engage for the ‘highest bidder’ and often only for piecemeal service on a dayby-day basis, rather than a formal contract. Indian servants were favoured but hard to come by, and able to command a ‘monstrous wage’ of £3 a month plus food and quarters, lamented an editorial in the Fiji Times in 1909.24 By the late 1920s Indian cooks and table servants were paid about £5 or £6 per month (car drivers received a minimum £8) and most preferred to live in their own homes. Fijian cooks were paid less, from £4 to £6 a month, and houseboys and waiters earned between £2 and £4 a month (the plantation wage for Fijians was £24 per annum).25 Remuneration fluctuated according to the degree of demand, the capacity of particular employers and the expectations of individual servants. Yet in Suva an Indian male domestic servant always secured a higher wage than a Fijian. Chinese male domestics had been at the top of the service hierarchy in colonial Darwin and earned accordingly an estimated 25 shillings a week in the early 1880s.26 After the introduction of immigration restrictions, however, the few who remained in service became unaffordable for most employers, with the Government Resident himself lamenting in 1910 that Chinese domestic servants demanded ‘abnormally high’ wages.27 According to Elsie Rosaline Masson, Chinese servants were paid £6 per month in 1911, rising to £14 by 1917.28 Aboriginal workers, in contrast, ‘render[ed] excellent service in return [for a] pittance’,29 and were affordable to all classes of white employers. At the time of the 1929 Bleakley report into the status and conditions of Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory, domestic workers in townships usually received a regulation wage rate of 5 shillings a week, of which 3 shillings were paid as ‘pocket money’ and 2 shillings placed in a government Trust Account.30 Employers were generally expected to provide clothing, food, and tobacco or cigarettes, and many doled out an additional sixpence a week for ‘the pictures’ and ginger beer.31 From the late 1930s, wages had increased to £1 a week for 24 Fiji Times, 9 June 1909. 25 British Library (hereafter BL), Indians in Fiji, IOR/L/E/7/1469, file 6008(ii), Colonial Reports  – Annual No. 1453, Fiji, Report for 1928 (London, 1929). By the mid-1930s, Indian servants received between £6 and £7 per month; Evening Post, 9 January 1936. 26 ‘Our Domestic Servants’, Northern Territory Times and Gazette, 14 October 1882. 27 Quoted in Martínez and Lowrie, ‘Colonial Constructions of Masculinity’, 305–23, 308. 28 Elsie Masson, An Untamed Territory:  The Northern Territory of Australia (London:  Macmillan, 1915), 42, 44. 29 Quoted in Martínez and Lowrie, ‘Colonial Constructions of Masculinity’, 309. 30 J. W. Bleakley, The Aboriginals and Half-castes of Central Australia and North Australia:  Report (Melbourne: Government Printer, 1929), 6. 31 Northern Territory Archives Service (hereafter NTAS), Eunice Burstow in Transcript of Interview with Tom Burstow, NTRS226, TS 23, tape 2, side B, 5; Transcript of Interview with Margaret Bell,



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men (women earning half that), with 10s a week in the hand and 10s into the trust account.32 This was apparently accompanied by a substantial increase in the license fee that would have restricted their employment to better-off residents.33 Evidence suggests that while the employment of Aboriginal workers by workingclass white families declined during the 1930s,34 it continued unabated by the more privileged families under strengthening government controls, and indeed may have increased as competition for their services decreased.35

Restrictions on the employment of indigenous women Indigenous men in Darwin and Suva were employed in preference to women, but for different reasons. In Fiji, women were framed as essential for stabilizing and preserving the ‘traditional’ way of life in rural communities. In Australia’s northern townships, indigenous women were frequently associated with immorality and disorder. Both discourses signalled indigenous female sexuality as a concern and in doing so limited women’s participation in the paid domestic labour force. The dependence of Darwin’s white women on male Aboriginal servants was noted from the second decade of the twentieth century, beginning with Elsie Masson’s 1915 wry depiction of the ‘exasperated’ mistress watching her servant’s wife sitting idle.36 In the colonial period, however, Aboriginal women and children, rather than men, had worked for white residents of Darwin. A visitor to the township in 1873 observed in excess of a hundred Aboriginal people coming in every morning to undertake domestic work in exchange for food, NTRS226, TS 158, tape 1, side A, 19; Transcript of Interview with Hugh Carey Barclay, NTRS 226, TS 6, tape 16, side B, 344. 32 NTAS, Transcript of Interview with Hazel Mackey, NTRS226, TS 625, tape 2, side A, 6 (Mackey thought she may have paid 10s a week in the hand plus 10s a week in trust in the late 1930s, but was not sure); for the late 1940s, see Eunice Burstow in Burstow Interview, NTRS226, TS 23, tape 2, side B, 5; Bell Interview, NTRS226, TS 158, tape 1, side A, 19; Barclay Interview, NTRS226, TS 6, tape 16, side B, 344. 33 From 5s for a three-month license to two guineas (42s, or £2 2s): see NTAS, ‘Chief Protector of Aboriginals, North Australia  – Recommendations in Regard to Charges for Licence Fees’, n.d., c. 1929–30; Northern Territory Pastoral Lessees’ Association, General Records, 1914–1962, NTRS 3547, box 1; NTAS, Transcript of Interview with Patrick McDonald, NTRS 266, TS 655, tape 2, side 1, 8. 34 ‘The Abo. Problem’, Northern Standard, 14 February 1928, 2; NTAS, Transcript of Interview with Sidney Bowie, NTRS226, TS 440, tape 4, side 2, 77. 35 Burstow Interview, TS 23, tape 2, side B, 5; NTAS, Transcript of Interview with Dulcie Stahl, NTRS226, TS 122, tape 2, side A, 52–3; Transcript of Interview with Dorothea Lyons, NTRS226, TS 84-1/2, tape 3, side 1, 31. 36 Masson, An Untamed Territory, 48.

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which they took back to their campsites in the evening. ‘Very seldom do the young men work,’ noted William Brackley Wildey, suggesting that the older men encouraged women rather than men to work, from whom they could obtain a greater share of the payment of ‘Tom Tom’ (a mix of flour, sugar and tea).37 Even as the importation of Chinese labour beginning shortly after this brought the colonial system of male domestic service to Darwin, two decades on it was still Aboriginal women rather than men who worked in private houses, removing the ‘town skirts’ they wore at their employers’ homes when they departed for their camps in the evening.38 The imposition of government control in the twentieth century seems to have been the singular key factor in generating the masculine nature of Aboriginal domestic service. As historian Ann McGrath has shown, the new federal administration of Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory ‘conspicuously intervened in interracial sexual relationships’ between Aboriginal women and white men, legislating against carnal knowledge, consorting, marriage and employment, all in the name of women’s protection.39 The injunction against single men and Asians employing women signalled sexual threat and inevitably would have coloured attitudes towards their employment; but the notoriety of the Kahlin Compound itself probably had the greatest impact. Established by the Commonwealth Protector of Aboriginals, Baldwin Spencer, in 1913 as a ‘necessity’, due to the supposed failure of white employers to effectively ‘control and protect’ their Aboriginal domestic workers at night, the Compound was located on a beach conveniently near the Myilly Point residences of the civil servants who employed them.40 It also functioned as a kind of lock hospital, where women found to be suffering from venereal disease (being subject to forcible examination), were detained and held, sometimes literally in chains.41 With a regular if somewhat transient population of around 500 people of various areas and language groups,42 the Compound provided no separate quarters for William Brackley Wildey, Australasia and the Oceanic Region, with Some Notice of New Guinea: From Adelaide  – via Torres Straits  – to Port Darwin Then Round West Australia (Melbourne:  George Robertson, 1876), 118. 38 Alfred Searcy, In Australian Tropics (London: George Robertson, 1909), 350. 39 See Rozanna Lilley, ‘Paperbark People, Paperbark Country:  Gender Relations, Past and Present, amongst the Kungarakany of the Northern Territory’ (Honours thesis, University of Sydney, 1987), 68–9. Citing Ann McGrath, ‘ “Black Velvet”:  Aboriginal Women and Their Relations with White Men in the Northern Territory, 1910–1940’, in So Much Hard Work:  Women and Prostitution in Australian History, ed. Kay Daniels (Sydney: Fontana Collins, 1984), 268–70. 40 Bleakley, The Aboriginals and Half-castes, 12. 41 Lilley, ‘Paperbark People, Paperbark Country’, 74–5. For an account of infected women chained at the Compound, see ‘Northern Territory:  A Black Australia Policy’, Sydney Morning Herald, 8 October 1927, 13. 42 Bleakley, The Aboriginals and Half-castes, 12. 37



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married couples or single women, and no official supervision overnight.43 During the 1920s and 1930s, according to a Darwin historian, the Aboriginal women in the Compound were widely perceived as ‘town whores’ and the Compound itself as a ‘brothel’.44 Darwin residents were fearful of the spread of diseases via women who came to work in town.45 As a result of such fears, and of the increasing migration of Aboriginal people to Darwin from other areas, who could not be adequately controlled at Kahlin Beach, the Compound was eventually relocated to Bagot, some miles inland, in 1938.46 An increasing aversion to the employment of Aboriginal women, heightened by the policies of government, propelled the preference for Aboriginal male servants. In 1929 mixed-descent girls and young women who had been removed from their parents and recruited into domestic service from the Kahlin Halfcaste Home, were described as ‘the only source’ of labour.47 However, they were always a minority of the domestic workforce, available only to a select few. In 1936 the Chief Protector of Aboriginals, Cecil Cook, declared his intention to effect the ‘gradual displacement’ of about twenty-five Aboriginal women working in the town by unmarried Aboriginal male workers, and, ultimately, to proscribe their presence in the township entirely.48 By then, men were already in the majority, a tally in 1936, for instance, enumerated thirty-three men to only fifteen Aboriginal and ten ‘half-caste’ women in domestic service in Darwin.49 Such policies were not universally endorsed. In 1937 the report of a government enquiry into the land industries in the Territory, headed by William Payne and John Fletcher, lamented the government’s failure to ‘train [Aboriginal women] and place them in domestic service’: ‘It means that the white women who are expected to maintain the White Australia Policy are forced to carry out, unaided, all the heavy and enervating duties of household management in a tropical climate no less severe than Rabaul [in Papua New Guinea].’50 The A Superintendent and Matron lived in a house located midway between the Compound and the Half-caste Home, which was locked up at night. See Bleakley, The Aboriginals and Half-castes, 13. 44 Lilley, ‘Paperbark People, Paperbark Country’, 91. 45 Bleakley, The Aboriginals and Half-castes, 12. 46 Report on the Administration of the Northern Territory for Year 1937–38 (Canberra: Government Printer, 1939), 24. 47 Bleakley, The Aboriginals and Half-castes, 15–16. 48 NAA (Darwin), C.  E. Cook, Memo to the Administrator, 8 July 1936, F1 1938/46  ‘Half-caste Aboriginal Protection Policy’. 49 NAA (Darwin), ‘N.T. Aboriginals Trust Account, Statement of Wages due from Employers to Trust Accounts Four Weeks Arrears as at 30th June, 1936’, F1 1938/17  ‘Trust Fund Aboriginal Employment’, 114–15 (item number 331637 on NAA’s online search function). The gender of the individuals was not specified. We are relying on the names to identify gender. 50 Report of the Board of Inquiry Appointed to Inquire into the Land and Land Industries of the Northern Territory of Australia (Canberra: Commonwealth Government Printer, 1937), 70. 43

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popular press made much of the sufferings of white housewives in Darwin, confronted with the peculiar nature of the ‘servant problem’: In her house the bride will have no electric fans overhead, as they have in the East, no staff of competent native boys to save her from every output of energy . . . She can hire an aboriginal man as a houseboy, but as houseboys the aborigines are the worst in the world. They are lazy, and can only be told one thing at a time. They will leave her at any moment to go ‘walkabout’ or gamble in the bush with other houseboys, and she has no redress. She may get a half-caste girl, but these are untrained and incompetent.51

Nevertheless, by 1938 the recorded numbers of Aboriginal men working in Darwin had more than doubled, while the number of women working remained the same.52 This significant increase in the wake of the Payne-Fletcher report might be partly due to the arrival of a new Administrator for the Territory, Charles L. A. Abbott, in March 1937. Abbott, who employed Sam Kundook as house servant (Figure 2.1), was sympathetic to the use of Aboriginal labour and expressed his approval of Aboriginal men migrating to Darwin, as long as they found ‘work as houseboys and are good workers’.53 In Fiji there was little explicit official discussion about the employment of women as domestic servants. A handful of Europeans in the pre-colonial and immediate post-annexation periods employed Fijian as well as indentured Melanesian or ‘part-European’ women, but in tenuous circumstances that reflected their own lack of control. In 1870, for instance, settler Edwin Turpin recorded that the paramount chief of the Cakaudrove province had ‘cajoled my Servant girl away’ on account of her complaints ‘of Mrs. Turpin’s bad treatment, he has promised to give me a small girl in exchange’.54 Others dismissed the figure of the Fijian female servant as ‘more trouble than she is worth’, besides being, Litton Forbes insisted in 1875, ‘a consummate thief ’.55 From the outset, however, Fijian women were not free to leave their villages to seek paid employment, 51 ‘What Life Is Like for Women of Darwin’, Australian Women’s Weekly, 12 March 1934, 4. 52 There were sixty-nine men and seventeen women earning wages in 1928; see NAA (Darwin), ‘Northern Territory Aboriginals Savings Bank Trust A/C, Statement of Amounts Due from Employers to Due Date of Four-Weekly Payment Immediately Preceding 30/6/38’, F1 1938/17 ‘Trust Fund Aboriginal Employment’, 95–7. It is possible that some of the men were drovers rather than house workers (the 1936 list seems to be only servants). ‘Half-caste’ girls were not identified in this list, and we are relying on the names to identify gender. See also Martínez and Lowrie, ‘Colonial Constructions of Masculinity’, 305–23, 309. 53 Cited in Martínez and Lowrie, ‘Colonial Constructions of Masculinity’, 310. 54 National Library of Australia (hereafter NLA), Edward J. Turpin, ‘Diaries and Narratives, c. 1870– 1894’, mfm G 3736. 55 J. W. Anderson, Notes of Travel in Fiji and New Caledonia (London: Ellissen, 1880), 69; Litton Forbes, Two Years in Fiji (London: Longmans, Green, 1875), 87.



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Figure 2.1  ‘Sam on eastern terrace – the piazza at Government House, Darwin’, 1938. Personal photographs of the Hon. C. L. A. Abbott during his term as Administrator of the Northern Territory. National Archives of Australia, M10, 11394836.

as dictated by the 1876 Native Labour Ordinance. Colonial controls no doubt combined with pre-colonial indigenous norms that demarcated boundaries and restricted mobility along gendered lines.56 The expansion of urban settlement increased European demands for domestic assistance, a prospect met with caution in some quarters. Fijians had ‘wellgrounded objections’ to employers removing girls from their homes to work In 1883 all women were prevented from entering labour contracts; see Bain, ‘A Protective Labour Policy?’, 123. For Papua New Guinea, see Waiko, ‘Colonial Enclaves and Domestic Spaces’, 211–12. 56

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in the towns, stressed an 1892 editorial, and attempts to enforce continuous residence in white homes ‘would render the idea of service repulsive’.57 In British (later Australian) Papua, colonized men were recruited in preference to women out of fear of native women’s sexuality.58 Yet more significant, perhaps, was the perception of indigenous women, to use Anne Dickson-Waiko’s phrase, ‘as the anchor for village life’.59 Following the 1896 publication of a wide-ranging report into indigenous depopulation in Fiji, women were targeted as the ‘saviours’ of the race, with greater official intervention into mothering practices than other identified causes for the decline.60 To undertake domestic labour in white households was undoubtedly at odds with this aim of arresting depopulation through maternal reform, which centred on the ‘immobilization’ of women in their villages.61 Nevertheless, during the 1920s white settlers began employing Fijian women in preference to men, and concerns were soon raised about women ‘drifting’ from their villages to cohabit with European and Chinese men.62 Indian male servants also represented ‘better value’, for Fijian boys were ‘learning to prefer other work’ and demanded nothing less than ‘£1 a week’, missionary wife Mrs W. R. Steadman complained. The Indian man ‘cooks, scrubs, washes and irons quickly and well, – and does as much work as three Fijian boys’. Indian women, she noted, were not considered, for they ‘never go out to work. They live a mostsheltered life.’63 By the 1930s Europeans referred far more often to their Fijian ‘housegirls’ than ‘houseboys’ – as one asserted, women were ‘our main-stay of

Fiji Times, 20 August 1892. 58 Bulbeck, Australian Women in Papua New Guinea, 215. 59 Waiko, ‘Colonial Enclaves and Domestic Spaces’, 216. She notes that ‘in German New Guinea, by contrast, single colonised women were recruited for domestic service’ (219). 60 Vicki Luker, ‘Mothers of the Taukei: Fijian Women and “the Decrease of the Race” ’ (PhD diss., Australian National University, Canberra, 1997); Margaret Jolly, ‘Other Mothers:  Maternal “Insouciance” and the Depopulation Debate in Fiji and Vanuatu, 1890–1930’, in Maternities and Modernities: Colonial and Postcolonial Experiences in Asia and the Pacific, ed. Kalpana Ram and Margaret Jolly (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1998), 177–212. There are some indications, although drawn from cases of indentured Melanesian rather than Fijian women, that Europeans might have looked less favourably upon female domestics for the potential disruption posed by their own child-rearing; see NAF, CSO 82.2964, 19 September 1882 and 91.2275, 25 July 1891. 61 For a broader reference, see Veracini, ‘Emphatically Not a White Man’s Colony’, 198. 62 Timothy Macnaught, The Fijian Colonial Experience:  A Study of the Neotraditional Order under British Colonial Rule Prior to World War II (Canberra:  Australian National University, 1982), 104. 63 ‘Life in Fiji’, The Mail, 24 December 1927, 15. Early marriage and the disinclination of parents to send their girls to school meant that Indian women were more focused on domestic duties in their own homes, opined A. M. Griffiths at the first Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference in 1928, although a few ‘who were not financially well-off ’ worked as cooks and nurses in European homes: enclosed in BL, IOR/L/E/7/1469, file 6008(ii), Indians in Fiji. 57



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housekeeper’.64 Still, others insisted that Fijian women did not want to work, but were ‘quite useful, however, at minding the babies’.65 In contrast to the Northern Territory, official statistics from Fiji plot a growing feminization of domestic labour. In 1936 there were 234 Fijian men, 182 Fijian women and 733 Indian men in domestic service. Ten years later, these figures were 175, 434 and 529, respectively – a significant increase in indigenous female employment.66 These changes warrant further investigation, but with Fiji designated a New Zealand and United States airbase in the Second World War, demands for men’s labour in war-related tasks may have encouraged women’s urban employment.67

From ‘raw’ natives to part of the family: Employers’ perceptions of indigenous servants Colonial experiences in Asia provided models to emulate in Darwin and Suva, where Chinese or Indian male servants embodied efficient, competent and dignified service. Aboriginal and Fijian men seldom lived up to these expectations. Themes of ‘savagery’, spatial divisions and restrictions on assigned work, and the relationship between household labour and men’s wider cultural priorities, further distinguished patterns of indigenous from Asian male domestic service. An emphasis on civilizing or domesticating the ‘savage’ indexed the additional burden of household management in these colonies. One assessment (from Papua) maintained that indigenous men had no tradition of service and prospective servants came to their employers ‘raw’.68 Employers invariably dismissed their indigenous workers as careless and clumsy, lazy and stupid, 64 Pacific Manuscripts Bureau (hereafter PMB), Fiji Oral History Project, Audio 2 – Hubert ‘Jumbo’ Sabben (interviewed 18 July 1998); see also Philip Snow, The Years of Hope: Cambridge, Colonial Administration in the South Seas and Cricket (London: Radcliffe Press, 1997), 31, 117, 240. 65 ‘Visitor from Fiji’, Evening Post, 9 January 1936, 17. 66 Legislative Council Fiji, A Report on the Fiji Census, 1936, Council Paper No. 42 (Suva: Government Printer, 1936); A Report on the Results of the Census of the Population, 1946, Council Paper No. 35 (Suva: Government Printer, 1947). 67 Jacqueline Leckie, ‘Workers in Colonial Fiji: 1870–1970’, in Labour in the South Pacific, ed. Clive Moore, Jacqueline Leckie and Doug Munro (Townsville:  James Cook University of Northern Queensland, 1990), 54–6. Betty Freeman recalled that during the war, most European households retained an Indian houseboy, although Fijian women, ‘usually ex-nurses, would occasionally be available for domestic service, Betty Freeman, Fiji – Memory Hold the Door (Balgowlah, New South Wales: B. Freeman, 1996), 92. For a sociological study of a later period, see Caryl Pollard, ‘Domestic Service in Suva, Fiji: Social and Occupational Mobility of Fijian Housegirls’, Journal of Pacific Studies 13, no. 1 (1987): 46–67. 68 ‘The Truth about Paradise:  Stripping the Glamour from the Tropics’, Evening Post, 31 December 1932, 14.

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or trapped by a childlike innocence and playfulness. Training was regarded as key, with the Territory’s Chief Protector of Aboriginals Cecil Cook seeing ‘no reason’ why an Aboriginal ‘should not be trained to be as efficient, clean and intelligent an attendant as a Chinese or Malay’.69 Early European assessments in Fiji placed little store in the capacity of indigenous men to equal India’s ‘faultless cooks and other excellent attendants’ who were ‘quick, wide-awake, and neathanded’. To Constance Gordon Cumming (the Governor’s niece), who resided at Government House in 1875, Fijian servants ‘look very intelligent, but prove hopelessly stupid, or rather utterly careless about learning our strange new ways’. Yet, like Cook, she put faith in training, and soon regarded Fijian men as ‘most graceful table servants and good police’. She believed they regarded the drills associated with waiting table as akin to meke (ceremonial dance). From this perspective, at least, existing practices of bodily discipline had seemingly predisposed Fijians to excel at certain types of colonial service.70 The irreversible influences of the ‘bush’ were frequently juxtaposed with the modern technologies of the home to emphasize the unsuitability of indigenous male servants and to communicate the burden of running an efficient household in the tropics. Colonial commentators routinely denounced Fijians as ‘cannibals’ to justify the British takeover, and especially to justify the use of force to suppress (and code) resistance or rebellion.71 Yet domestic servants were never depicted as cannibals, even lapsed or former. Following Kaushik Ghosh, new associations with ‘primitivism’ were required to make Fijian men appear suited to such work, replacing notions of wild, uncontrollable savagery.72 Their distance from civilized norms was now perceived not as threatening, but only rather frustrating. Witnessing indigenous male servants plucking live fowls or clubbing pigs to death sometimes elicited horror.73 Yet employers more often communicated their irritation, such as when servants treated fragile plates and cups like ‘shells . . . [found] in the seas that surround “Sydney” or “London” ’, or failed to grasp the ‘respective uses of fingers, forks, spoons, knives, or sticks, according to our

Cited in Martínez and Lowrie, ‘Colonial Constructions of Masculinity’, 310. 70 Constance Gordon Cumming, At Home in Fiji (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1882), 141. 71 Tracey Banivanua Mar, ‘Cannibalism and Colonialism:  Charting Colonies and Frontiers in Nineteenth-Century Fiji’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 55, no. 2 (2010): 255–81. 72 Kaushik Ghosh, ‘A Market for Aboriginality: Primitivism and Race Classification in the Indentured Labour Market of Colonial India’, in Subaltern Studies X:  Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Gautam Bhadra, Gyan Prakash and Susie Tharu (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 14. Banivanua Mar notes the ‘breathtaking contrast’ as Fijians were ‘represented from within the yoke of colonialism as the “kindest and best-hearted native race in the world” ’: ‘Cannibalism and Colonialism’, 275. 73 Anderson, Notes of Travel, 69. For similar anecdotes, see Pacific Islands Monthly, 24 September 1935. 69



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established notions’.74 The average servant could fetch firewood and water, start a fire and prepare root crops, but in both Suva and Darwin employers were dismayed to find servants lighting fires in the oven.75 A district commissioner in Fiji recorded with amusement the first meal proudly prepared by his ‘worthy factotum’ which consisted of:  ‘One tin of mutton (unopened), One carafe of water from the bedroom, and Three pieces of boiled yam in an enamelled washbasin!’76 Chinese and Indian cooks, by contrast, were held in high esteem and were expected to be accomplished at preparing elaborate meals.77 There is little reference to Aboriginal men preparing traditional indigenous meals for their employers in Darwin (although one employer recollected his servant preparing kangaroo for his own friends).78 Employers here were more preoccupied with how and where their workers were fed, which seems to have been an index of class and status. Poorer families recollected their workers being fed table scraps and leftovers.79 The daughter of a Darwin builder recalled: ‘Mother always believed that they should be fed the same way as we did, but of course they were fed from enamel plates and enamel mugs, and they just sat down in the backyard and ate, which seems wrong to me now; but that was the accepted thing then. At least she did give them the cooked meal, which I believe many didn’t.’80 Hazel Mackey, a government official’s wife in the 1930s, used to cook their Aboriginal servant Willie his own stew every day, and was proud of the vegetables she made sure were in it.81 But Bernadette Wing, the wife of the company manager for the Holmes Estate and right at the top of Darwin’s social set, was scathing about those employers who prepared separate meals for their servants. That, in her view, was ‘treat[ing] them like “blacks” ’, and she boasted that ‘our people had the same food that we had . . . I thought they were all nice human beings.’82

Forbes, Two Years in Fiji, 102; Anderson, Notes of Travel, 69. 75 Fiji Times, 19 June 1909; Martínez and Lowrie, ‘Colonial Constructions of Masculinity’, 314. 76 T. R. St Johnston, South Sea Reminiscences (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1922), 33. 77 Julia Martínez and Claire Lowrie, ‘Transcolonial Influences on Everyday American Imperialism:  The Politics of Chinese Domestic Servants in the Philippines’, Pacific Historical Review 81, no. 4 (2012):  511–36; Cecilia Leong-Salobir, Food Culture in Colonial Asia:  A Taste of Empire (Oxford and New  York:  Routledge, 2011). This did not preclude issuing manuals of instruction, such as Flora Annie Steel and Grace Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook (London: Heinemann, 1909). 78 Barclay Interview, NTRS226, TS 6, tape 16, side B, 343, 345. 79 NTAS, Transcript of Interview with Louis Harmanis, NTRS226, TS 63, 66; Transcript of Interview with Thomas O’Connor Scott, NTRS266, TS 616, tape 1, side B, 15. 80 NTAS, Transcript of Interview with Valerie Fletcher, NTRS226, TS 551, tape 1, 9–10. 81 Mackey Interview, NTRS226, TS 625, tape 2, side A, 13. 82 NTAS, Transcript of Interview with Bernadette (Bunny) Wing, NTRS226, TS 611, tape 1, side A, 5–6. 74

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This separation of eating points to a broader set of cultural attitudes about the spaces deemed appropriate for indigenous servants. Recalling her family’s ‘Aboriginal boy, Jumbo’, former Darwin employer Betty Dangerfield told her interviewer that he ‘was wonderful’:  ‘Oh, he did all the outside work. The sweeping, the watering, the garden, raking up. You didn’t have them inside.’83 There was a pattern in Darwin, at least among the less well-to-do employers, of Aboriginal men being restricted to work outside the house and prevented from entering the house.84 Even for the wealthier families the tendency remained to engage Aboriginal men for outdoor work, and women to work in the house itself.85 Arthur Black, a manager with a very ‘Pukka Sahib’ (top-notch) British telegraph company in the mid-1930s, explained that the general rule was ‘a lubra in the laundry and a boy around the garden’.86 Or, as Jene Thompson, who lived at Myilly Point in Darwin in the 1940s, put it: ‘A girl for the house, and a boy for the garden.’87 In the largest households kept by the very wealthy, Aboriginal male domestic staff continued to be responsible for the outdoor work, including cleaning the outdoor toilet, wood-chopping and washing the car, as well as for work like cleaning the silver, sweeping and laundry.88 Experiences in the New Hebrides (present-day Vanuatu) indicate that this proscription was not uncommon, though less pronounced in Fiji.89 In Suva a spatial division of labour was evident when households relied on a racially mixed staff and assigned them to different tasks. As noted, Solomon Islander servants were more available than Fijians until the abolition of Melanesian indenture. They were hired to wash, scrub and do general household work, but were not regarded as competent cooks. Indians were usually hired for the kitchen as well as the laundry, even though their wages were higher. Typically though, as Martínez and Lowrie summate for Darwin, ‘the less wealthy the household, the fewer servants employed and the less obvious the division of labour’.90 The ‘energetic’ and ‘thrifty’ housewife made do with ‘a Solomon boy,

83 NTAS, Transcript of Interview with Betty Dangerfield, NTRS226, TS 187, tape 1, 10. 84 Dangerfield Interview, NTRS226, TS 187, tape 1, 10; McDonald Interview, NTRS226, TS 655, tape 2, side 1, 8. 85 See NTAS, Transcript of Interview with W.  E. (Bill) Eacott, NTRS226, TS 758, tape 1, 10–11; Transcript of Interview with James Watts, NTRS226, TS 605, tape 1, side A, 15; Transcript of Interview with Edna Tambling, NTRS226, TS 125, tape 2, side A, 20. 86 NTAS, Transcript of Interview with Arthur Black, NTRS226, TS 14, 8. 87 NTAS, Transcript of Interview with Jene Thompson, NTRS226, TS 422, tape 2, side A, 2. 88 Lyons Interview, NTRS226, TS 84-1/2, 29, 30; Bell Interview, NTRS226, TS 158, tape 1, side A, 19, 21. 89 Margaret Rodman, Daniela Kraemer, Lissant Bolton and Jean Tarisesei, eds, House-Girls Remember: Domestic Workers in Vanuatu (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005), 22. 90 Martínez and Lowrie, ‘Colonial Constructions of Masculinity’, 313.



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who chops wood, washes, cleans the house, peels the potatoes, and does a bit of plain cooking’. This relieved her of the ‘coarse housework’, but not the burden of household management, for she took it upon herself to supervise everything her servant did.91 High-status homes were insulated from labour shortages, and here white women were ‘better looked after’ than in Sydney, as Lady Scott, wife of Fiji’s former Attorney General, celebrated after hosting a supper in 1930: ‘I have my eight native boys and my dear little half-caste personal maid, and I never have to lift a finger.’92 The service hierarchy in larger and wealthier residences placed Fijian men at the bottom. One such household run by ‘an energetic little white’ proprietress employed a white housekeeper as ‘deputy’, an ‘admirable Chinese head-boy or butler, three or four Indian men as cooks, kitchen hands, and waiter, two half-caste girl housemaids, a Solomon Island boot-boy, and a Fijian gardener, truly a South Sea Island League of Nations in miniature’.93 Darwin’s elite households also celebrated the roll-call of assistance readily at hand. Bernadette Wing, for instance, maintained a large household consisting of a young local Chinese girl who cooked, a Malay-Aboriginal woman from Goulburn Island mission to look after the children, a mixed-descent housemaid from the Kahlin Home, and ‘two black boys’, as well as a ‘Chinaman’ who came regularly to do the family washing.94 Wing’s long-term houseboy, Nipper, ‘did everything  – swept the verandahs and, you know, polished the shoes and all that sort of thing’, assisted by the second Aboriginal man.95 One of the most flamboyant and well-remembered uses of indoor Aboriginal male domestic labour was as punkah-wallahs, a cultural import from the British Raj, with servants employed specifically to pull manual fans for cooling and keeping away insects. The best hotels in Darwin during the 1920s and 1930s also had punkah fans with Aboriginal boys or men working them in their firstclass dining rooms,96 as did Government House, right up to the Second World War.97 In private homes, it appears this was generally only for public display.98 ‘Our Fiji Letter’, Otago Daily Times, 25 February 1893, 5 (supplement). Fiji Times, 19 March 1930. Nancy Walker, Fiji: Their People, History and Commerce (London: H. F. & G. Witherby, 1936), 27. Wing Interview, NTRS226, TS 611, tape 1, side A, 3–5. Ibid., 4, 5. NTAS, Transcript of Interview with Ellen Cramond, NTRS226, TS 483, tape 3, side A, 1; Transcript of Interview with Sarah Feeney, NTRS226, TS 1011, tape 1, side A, 33; Transcript of Interview with Beryl Cashman, NTRS226, TS 25, tape 1, side 1, 11. 97 Dangerfield Interview, NTRS226, TS 187, tape 2, 5; NTAS, Transcript of Interview with Lionel Lockwood, NTRS226, TS 265, tape 1, side B, 13–14. 98 Dangerfield Interview, NTRS226, TS 187, tape 2, 5; Lockwood Interview, NTRS226, TS 265, tape 1, side B, 13–14; NTAS, Transcript of Interview with Bessie Robinson, NTRS226, TS 112, tape 3, side 1, 49. 91 92 93 94 95 96

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Figure 2.2  ‘George Cole and houseboy Jacky outside an Aboriginal dwelling’, Darwin, c. 1930. George Hulme Cole Collection, Northern Territory Library, PH0570/0146.

Arthur Black admitted that he did not use the punkah fans in his own home for ‘normal living’, but when he hosted dinner parties availed himself of the services of a ‘regal old native called Berber’ who worked in his company dining room.99 Perhaps the most ostentatious use of Aboriginal male domestic labour, however, was a fashion during the 1920s to have a man receive visitors at the door, as recalled by Bessie Robinson: My dear, you had cards in those days when you called on anybody. You put your card. The native came up with a – they used to have pearl shells (pearl shells were all over Darwin), and they used to have pearl shells with three knobs on the bottom of them, and the native would come to the door and he’d hold the pearl shell out and you would put your card in it, and then he would take it inside and see if his mistress would see you, you see. And then he would say, ‘All right, missus home. Would you come in please.’100

There is significant evidence of strong bonds forming between employers and their staff (Figure  2.2). In Darwin, former employers recalling the boys and men who worked for them expressed gratitude and appreciation for the work they did. ‘They were tremendous, absolutely tremendous,’ recalled Dorothea

99 Black Interview, NTRS226, TS 14, 33–4. 100 Robinson Interview, NTRS226, TS 112, tape 3, side 1, 49.



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Lyons, a solicitor’s wife.101 Edna Tambling, a teacher who lived at Myilly Point in the late 1930s, described the local Aboriginal people as ‘marvellous people for working’: ‘We always had beautiful boys and old women that you know, helped me all the time . . . You know, I can’t say that [they] . . . were anything but a great help.’102 Many reported that they came to like and admire Aboriginal people through their relationships with their workers. Bernadette Wing appreciated the ‘wonderful service’ she received, explaining how it gave her a strong affection for Aboriginal people generally.103 Likewise Betty Duke, initially unnerved by the presence of ‘black’ men in Darwin, came to appreciate ‘our full-bloods’ through her Melville Island servant, ‘the loveliest lad that you could ever wish to meet’.104 Similar expressions of affection, and even friendship, dominate other recollections, coloured with nostalgia. Thus Hugh Barclay distinguished his houseboy in the 1950s as being ‘one of the old type. The old ones were quite reliable but the younger ones I’m afraid didn’t have the same standards as their elders’.105 Similarly many employers in Fiji delighted in their indigenous servants as ‘cheerful’, ‘willing’ and ‘amusing’ workers – and ‘neither servile nor presumptuous’ as Nancy Walker put it.106 If Indian men seemed the ‘ideal servants’ in their ‘perfect decorum, erect carriage, and unchanging expression’, the ‘enthusiastic blundering attention’ of Fijian servants, as Agnes King, who travelled to Fiji in 1912 remarked, was more endearing.107 District commissioner Reginald St Johnston referred to Henry Lago, whom he hired along with his wife Louisa as a washerwoman, as a ‘treasure’ (Figure 2.3). They remained with the family for three years, ‘a long time for Fijians, who soon get restless in one place’. He lamented that ‘we never had their like again’.108 The presence of indigenous male servants in the home working closely with white women might be expected to excite fears around sexual impropriety or danger. This was certainly the case in Port Moresby where a White Women’s Protection Ordinance of 1926 imposed the death penalty upon Papuan men 101 Lyons Interview, NTRS226, TS 84-1/2, 6; see also NTAS, Transcript of Interview with Betty Duke, NTRS226, TS 791, side A, tape 1, 5. 102 Tambling Interview, NTRS226, TS 125, tape 2, side A, 20–21. 103 Wing Interview, NTRS226, TS 611, tape 2, side A, 2. 104 Duke Interview, NTRS226, TS 791, side A, tape 1, 4–5. 105 Barclay Interview, NTRS226, TS 6, tape 16, side B, 342; see also Thompson Interview, NTRS226, TS 422, tape 2, side A, 2 (recollecting that Aboriginal workers became ‘unreliable’ in the 1950s, so employers turned to labour-saving devices instead). 106 Walker, Fiji, 21; Helen Cato, The House on the Hill (Melbourne: Book Depot, 1947), 25. 107 Agnes King, Islands Far Away: Fijian Pictures with Pen and Brush (London: Sifted, Praed, 1921), 37. 108 St Johnston, South Sea Reminiscences, 33.

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Figure 2.3  ‘Family group and ’Enry at our first station in Fiji’ from Thomas Reginald St Johnston. South Sea Reminiscences, T. F. Unwin, London, 1922.

for rape and attempted rape, and a life sentence for indecent assault.109 When drafting the legislation, Lieutenant-Governor Hubert Murray enquired of Fiji’s officials as to ‘whether assaults by natives on white women occur in Fiji, and, if so, how the offenders are punished’. Governor Cecil Rodwell replied that such assaults were ‘practically unknown’.110 Two similar anecdotes in Darwin and Suva suggest that white women were generally complacent in the belief that their servants did not possess sexual feelings towards them or at least the inclination to act upon them. Agnes King remarked that the Fijian servants ‘do not understand much about knocking at doors, but slip silently into the rooms on their bare feet to attend to their duties’. She recalled, I got quite a fright the first time I suddenly found that I was not alone in my room, but that a dark figure was noiselessly arranging my mosquito net while Amirah Inglis, The White Women’s Protection Ordinance:  Sexual Anxiety and Politics in Papua (London: Sussex University Press, 1975), 54–5; see also Chilla Bulbeck, Australian Women in Papua New Guinea (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1992), 206. 110 NAF, CSO 20.949, 22 December 1919 and 12 March 1920. 109



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I was dressing for dinner. He looked at me steadily for a moment, his jet black eyes glittering strangely in the candle light, then quietly went on with his work. I was later to become great friends with these servants.111

In Darwin, Bernadette Wing recalling that they used to have to change clothes several times a day in the heat, explained, We’d play tennis or what[ever], come home, and you’d just take your clothes off and drop them – and Buck Up would come round. Now you’d never hear him you know. And you’d just be getting undressed or something, and Buck Up would just walk round, grab your clothes and I would say: ‘Oh!’ The first time he came and walked in the room I was only half dressed, and he said: ‘Only me missis.’ Picked up the clothes. [Laughter.] Nothing worried him you know.112

Indeed, there seemed to have been little concern about any sexual threat. Those rare incidents of sexual advances by indigenous men towards white women in their own homes typically involved men who were not attached to them as servants and had no ongoing personal relationship with the family, such as messenger boys or vagrant men wandering neighbourhoods at night.113 In Levuka in 1920, for instance, a butchery messenger boy named Ulaisi was sentenced to twelve months hard labour and twenty-one lashes for exposing himself to Pearle Gladys Beale when he came to her house to deliver goods.114 In 1938 in Darwin a messenger boy named Packsaddle, employed by a local Chinese firm, was accused of having attacked a Mrs Cousins when she came to the door, with the intent of raping her, and with assaulting another woman, a Mrs Weedon, when she came running in response to Cousins’ cries.115 It is worth noting, however, that even though Packsaddle was not a domestic worker, the case prompted immediate reflections upon the relationships between women and male servants in the home. The then Chief Protector Cook admonished white women for treating the Aboriginal men who worked in their homes like a ‘pet pussycat’, which suggests that these relations were a source of some sexual unease, even if the fears were perhaps less intense than in Papua.116 It appears, King, Islands Far Away, 11. 112 Wing Interview, NTRS226, TS 611, tape 1, side A, 4. 113 For a discussion of break and enter in Suva, see NAF, CSO, 85.271. Much later in the 1950s, exaggerated reports of prowlers in Suva’s white neighbourhoods were in many instances Fijian men visiting Fijian housegirls at their workplaces in the evenings; Dominion, 16 August 1955, enclosed in Wellington City Archives (hereafter WCA), Suva Staff, Union Steam Ship Company (hereafter USSCo.) Records, AF061:73:1. 114 NAF, CSO, 20.8890. 115 NAA, ‘Association for the Protection of Native Races Re Trial of Packsaddle’, A432 1938/593. 116 Mackey Interview, NTRS226, TS 625, tape 2, side A, 7–8; Fiona Paisley, ‘Race Hysteria, Darwin 1938’, Australian Feminist Studies 16, no. 34 (2001): 48. As in Darwin in 1938, indigenous male 111

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however, that indigenous men’s mobility, rather than their sexuality, occasioned far greater unease.117

‘Going walkabout’: Mobility and autonomy The Kahlin Compound, a six-acre beach site at a gully on the edge of the Port Darwin Bay,118 enabled Aboriginal men from the missions on the Tiwi islands (Bathurst and Melville) and further afield to come ashore to take up work in Darwin.119 Prior to its establishment in 1913, Aboriginal workers had been drawn mainly from local families who lived in town camps. In 1915 Elsie Masson described a Darwin houseboy George, a ‘slender youth of about sixteen’, who had ‘paddled [with his countrymen] in a canoe all the way from their home on the Daly River to see a little town life in Darwin’. He was, however, soon replaced by a local Larrakia man.120 Darwin’s indigenous male servants would increasingly come from the Catholic missions on Melville and Bathurst Islands, within a day’s sail of the city.121 So close was the association that in the 1940s there was even a residential area of Bathurst Island known as Myilly Point.122 Others came from Goulburn Island mission, a Methodist mission situated off the coast of Arnhem Land.123 Some workers came from the Katherine region, or Delissaville (on the Cox Peninsula across from Darwin over the Port Darwin bay),124 while the occasional locals continued on, such as the Larrakia couple Mack and Mary employed by the Drysdales for two generations.125 Employers sometimes engaged and collected male servants directly from their home missions in the region, in which case conditions laid down by the mission included (at least, sexual violence was attributed to the ‘carelessness’ of white women in their dress and familiarity around ‘their native servants’. See Inglis, Not a White Woman Safe, 85–6. 117 Claire Lowrie observes a similar phenomenon regarding Chinese houseboys and white mistresses’ relationships; see ‘White Mistresses and Chinese “Houseboys”: Domestic Politics in Singapore and Darwin from the 1910s to the 1930s’, in Colonization and Domestic Service, 210–31. 118 Bleakley, The Aboriginals and Half-castes, 12. 119 NTAS, Transcript of Interview with C. E. (Mick) Cook, NTRS226, TS 179, tape 1, side A, 4. 120 Masson, An Untamed Territory, 44. 121 Duke Interview, NTRS226, TS 791, side A, tape 1, 4; NTAS, Transcript of Interview with George Anson, NTRS226, TS 612, tape 1, 8–9; Dangerfield Interview, NTRS226, TS 187, tape 1, 10; NTAS, Transcript of Interview with Creed Lovegrove, NTRS226, TS 82, 20. 122 NTAS, Transcript of Interview with A. L. (Jim) Edwards, NTRS226, TS 674, tape 3, side A, 7–8. 123 Lazarus Lamilami, Lamilami Speaks: The Cry Went Up, A Story of the People of Goulburn Islands, North Australia (Sydney: Ure Smith, 1974), 202–4. Other missions in the vicinity of Darwin were, on the mainland, Oenpelli and Roper River (both Church Mission Society) and two other island missions, Millingimbi (Methodist) and Groote Eylandt (for ‘half-castes’ only, Church Mission Society), but none of these seemed to be supplying Darwin with labour. 124 Lovegrove Interview, NTRS226, TS 82, 20–21; Lyons Interview, NTRS226, TS 84-1/2, 19. 125 Robinson Interview, NTRS226, TS 112, tape 4, side 2, 32.



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by the late 1940s) that the employee return during the Wet Season to see their families.126 But more typically men were engaged out of the Compound under government authority.127 The forced grouping provided a labour pool for Darwin’s white residents. Fijian villages in districts proximate to Suva might be regarded in a similar way, yet whereas the compound epitomized Aboriginal dislocation and dispossession, the village was framed as the stronghold of traditional life. Fijian leaders meditated the flow of men from village to port through the yagona payment and the lawa-i-taukei (native regulations) which tied men to communal service. Rather than a six- or twelve-month engagement in domestic service, temporary and occasional labour held greater appeal, no doubt because this more closely mirrored pre-colonial patterns and freed men up to meet a range of obligations.128 This suggests that being continuously ‘on call’ for European employers was inherently disagreeable. A report to the Colonial Office in 1928 summated that a Fijian man was ‘a small-holder, owning his own land and house and capable of supporting himself and his dependents from the produce of the land’. In most cases he also received an income from leased lands. An estimated 10 per cent of the adult male population worked away from home for wages on a casual basis, with a much smaller number wholly financially independent of the village. Those who worked for money typically did so for a short period to contribute towards social amenities such as a boat or a church before returning to live as an agriculturalist. Cyclical, short-term employment, the report concluded, did not ‘seriously impair’ the indigenous social system or weaken ‘tribal and customary control’.129 The predominant characterization of Fijians as following the ‘way of the land’ (as opposed to the ‘way of money’) was not uncontested. Fijian men arrived in Suva from the time of its designation as the capital, many of whom resented the burdens of communalism and the strictures of chiefly authority in their home districts. Male ‘vagrancy’ and loosening ties to village life troubled indigenous and European leaders for decades. The Masters & Servants Ordinance stipulated that employers provide servants with lodgings, usually a small bure or room in the garden. Other men camped along Suva’s foreshore, at the native market or along Barclay Interview, NTRS226, TS 6, tape 16, side B, 342. 127 Duke Interview, NTRS226, TS 791, side A, tape 1, 4; Anson Interview, NTRS226, TS 612, tape 1, 8–9. 128 Frances Steel, Oceania Under Steam: Sea Transport and the Cultures of Colonialism, c. 1870–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 187–90. 129 BL, Indians in Fiji, IOR/L/E/7/1469, file 6008(ii), Colonial Reports – Annual No. 1453, Fiji. Report for 1928 (London, 1929). 126

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shop verandas at night. A proposal to erect a compound for Fijian ‘strangers’ in Suva was rejected on the grounds it would encourage ‘native vagrancy’.130 Despite perennial complaints from village and district leaders about their absent men, officials saw little available remedy. Until 1912 ordinances prohibited indigenous men from residing in districts other than their own unless under indenture, yet they could remain absent from their home village for up to sixty days without approval before being fined.131 Similar fears of indigenous vagrancy were behind a curfew system introduced in Darwin in 1920, which allowed only Aboriginal people employed under permit in the town, and excluded all between sunset and sunrise, unless their employers had the Protector’s approval to keep them overnight. Those exempted stayed in ‘native huts’ or, later, space under the employer’s house (Darwin houses often being raised up on high timber stumps).132 From 1932, all Aboriginal servants working in Darwin were also required to wear identity disks (small metal circles known as ‘dog-tags’), although disdain of some workers and employers meant the practice was not uniform.133 In 1936 the Chief Protector Cook proposed a policy whereby no Aboriginal man would be permitted to reside within the proscribed areas of Darwin and its satellite suburb Parap unless he was, first, unmarried and, second, that he resided on his employer’s premises with approved accommodation, that included bathing and laundry facilities and a separate toilet. This latter requirement would be well entrenched by the 1940s.134 The relocation of the Compound at a further distance from the town, requiring truck transportation for workers to and from Darwin, was also flagged.135 The practice of ‘going walkabout’ was at the forefront of employers’ recollections of their indigenous male servants. In Darwin many employers See, for example, NAF, CSO, 82.1495 and 83.237. 131 Under the Im Thurn administration (1900–12) legislative amendments fostered the formation of a more permanent indigenous proletariat with less dependence upon the village economy. The 1912 Fijian Employment Ordinance stipulated that ‘any male Fijian who has been voluntarily absent from his village for a period of two years’ could independently enter into a contract for paid employment, and from 1913 taxes were to be paid in cash rather than kind. 132 Thompson Interview, NTRS226, TS 422, tape 2, side A, 2; Wing Interview, NTRS226, TS 611, tape 1, side A, 6; Robinson Interview, NTRS226, TS 112, tape 4, side 2, 31; Stahl Interview, NTRS266, TS 122, tape 2, side A, 60; NTAS, Transcript of Interview with Judy Ozanne, NTRS226, TS 747, tape 1, side A, 2; Tambling Interview, NTRS226, TS 125, tape 2, side A, 25. 133 ‘Darwin Aborigines Now Labelled’, Melbourne Herald, 9 September 1932; Clipping, Northern Standard, 6 March 1934; “JAC”, memo, 10 February 1932, enclosed within NAA, ‘Employment of Aborigines – Re-issue of Identification Discs’, A1 1934/4166; see also various memos, enclosed within NAA (Darwin), ‘Trust Fund Aboriginal Employment’, F1 1938/17. 134 Lilley, ‘Paperbark People, Paperbark Country’, 87. Barclay, NTRS226, TS 6, tape 16, side B, 343, 344–5. 135 NAA (Darwin), C. E. Cook, Memo to the Administrator, 8 July 1936, ‘Half-caste Aboriginal Policy Aboriginal Protection Policy’, F1 1938/46. 130



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recalled their worker taking his leave and not returning, if at all, for some weeks or even months. It appears that the Aboriginal workers themselves insisted on maintaining their independence to come and go, and the employers were left to make the best of it. Significantly, while the legislation provided for oneyear permits, in practice the great majority of employers apparently relied on three-month contracts and expected to replace their houseboy if need be at the expiration of this term.136 Some employers, such as Hazel Mackey, heartily approved of their servants’ regular trips back to country. She claimed that Darwin employers did not want to ‘change’ the Aboriginal people and that she herself would ‘have hated to see [Willie] working a nine to five job’ (even as she acknowledged that he would have made a fine mechanic if he had had access to training). For Mackey, Willie’s periodic absences were proof that white society did not really suit Aboriginal people, and the justification for differences in the treatment of Aboriginal workers. After describing with pleasure how the errant Willie would return looking shame-faced and bearing wildflowers for her, Mackey confided:  ‘But this is the trouble you see – every now and again they have to go walkabout. They have to go back to their roots.’137 As Martínez and Lowrie have observed, such attitudes also evidence the white desire for a vicarious experience of indigeneity.138 This apparent openness was not as evident in Suva as far as the available sources suggest, perhaps because Fijians were not as marginalized on their own territory and their cultural practices could not be similarly subject to romantic nostalgia. Although the colonial state wished to preserve the integrity of village life, communalism  – and especially the practice of kerekere (acquiring things by asking for them of one’s kin group)  – grated against European notions of self-sufficiency and independence. The Fiji Times opined in 1921: ‘Indians have ambition so become useful members of society; Fijians are bound up by kerekere and the communal system; they are lazy and would take another generation to bring them around to industrious manhood.’139 Others associated communalism with unreliability and irresponsibility, lamenting Fijians’ divided obligations. The manager of Suva’s Grand Pacific Hotel, a site discussed at greater length in 137 138 139 136

Lyons Interview, NTRS226, TS 84-1/2, 5–6. Mackey Interview, NTRS226, TS 625, tape 2, side A, 13. Martínez and Lowrie, ‘Colonial Constructions of Masculinity’, 315, 320. Fiji Times, 20 January 1921. Stereotypes attaching to Fijian houseboys also shaped perceptions of Indian workers, for example: ‘The coolie is fortunate in the possession of any relatives whom are on the point of death; and whenever he feels that he is in need of a nandi (a walk), one dies conveniently in the part of the group that he desires to visit’: Poverty Bay Herald, 6 January 1913, 2.

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Chapter 5, regretted that a Fijian man ‘will give good service for a time’, until a wedding, funeral, feast or other festivity demanded his attendance. He returned when it suited him. Labour problems on ships were not as pronounced, for Fijian stewards ‘could not wander off at will’.140 Employers had to learn to check their frustrations if they expected to retain servants for any length of time. Engaging a man from a neighbouring island, rather than a local, might reduce the amount of ‘humouring’ and ‘patience’ required to keep him interested in the work, J.  W. Anderson advised, while Thomas Lucas warned employers that servants were liable to be ridiculed by their kinsmen (who were ‘too proud to work’) and suggested creating distance from the village if they hoped for continuous service.141 Anderson warned that anger was pointless, for the response would be ‘short and decisive’: ‘ “au sa lako” (I go), and he goes there and then’.142 An Australian couple resident in Fiji, May and Oz Cook, realized this too late. Their servant Joeli ‘cleared out’ after Oz ‘reprimanded him’ for being ‘very cheeky’: ‘We have been pretty disappointed in him, for we really did all we could for him.’143 Even the prison appeared as a prospective recruiting ground, separated from indigenous tribal influence. Irish travel writer and novelist, Beatrice Grimshaw, during her visit to Fiji in 1907, related the case of a Fijian prisoner Reubeni, who, during his sentence for failure to pay taxes, delivered official messages around town. On one outing, a European man proposed he work as his servant on his release. Reubeni apparently replied: ‘I will come; I think your service will be quite as good as the jail.’144 Even allowing for the employers’ tendency to downplay the compulsion that was inevitably involved in the houseboy system, it seems that the servants did enjoy certain controls over the conditions of their employment. Presumably employers who did not conform to such expectations found their workers less likely to return from ‘walkabout’ and more difficult to replace. Furthermore servants exerted some control over the actual work they did. A  number of employers recalled that the Aboriginal men would not do the ironing, a hot and unpleasant task in the days before electric irons.145 Hugh Barclay recalled of the 140 WCA, Butler to General Manager, 12 August 1949, USSCo Records, AF080:216:1. 141 Anderson, Notes of Travel, 69; Thomas Prestwood Lucas, Cries from Fiji and Sighings from the South Seas (Melbourne: Dunn and Collins, 1884), 27. 142 Anderson, Notes of Travel, 69. 143 May Cook, Fijian Diary 1904–1906:  A Young Australian Woman’s Account of Village Life in Fiji (Ashwood, Victoria: Penfolk, 1996), 155. 144 Beatrice Grimshaw, Fiji and Its Possibilities (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1907), 22–3. 145 For example, NTAS, Transcript of Interview with Emma Lawrence, NTRS226 TS 464, tape 2, 10–11; Bell Interview, NTRS226, TS 158, tape 1, side A, 19.



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Aboriginal man that he employed, that he had ‘tried getting him to do a bit of work in the garden in his spare time’ (in addition to his household duties) ‘but he always regarded himself as purely an inside boy and I soon gave up’.146 Ruby Selman, the matron of the Kahlin Half-caste Home, found the ‘very good black boy’ she engaged to work in her own home rebelled altogether at the suggestion he might have to work cleaning the girls’ Home.147 And even Dorothea Lyons’ patronizing comment about the preference of Aboriginal workers to have just the one job a day  – ‘because genetically they’re not built like us to cope with things’148 – suggests that the ability of employers to impose upon their workers was constrained to some extent. Indigenous servants were often young men looking for adventure and the experience of a wider world, and even as they came and went from service, one of the appeals of domestic work appeared to be the opportunities it provided to form new bonds of sociability with other colonized men. Lazarus Lamilami came to Darwin in the 1920s from Goulburn Island where he had had mission training as a carpenter, but felt ‘it wasn’t enough for me’, and chafed against the restrictions of the Christian mission lifestyle. He found work in the home of a local white butcher, doing ‘jobs around his house, and then I used to go out and visit and different places’.149 In Suva it was common for men of diverse races to congregate at night, socializing together in gambling dens, in kava and opium saloons, often to perform meke (dances and songs). One disgruntled employer complained that at daybreak domestic servants ‘crawl home to commence their day’s work, unfit for anything but sleep’.150 In Darwin, too, gambling was a defining feature of life as a male servant, as was the regular Wednesday night ‘picture night’, where Westerns were shown for them. The male servants drew upon their own networks and found positions for their friends (presumably, relatives and countrymen) when they departed. One Darwin employer explained how she ‘had a whole succession’ of Aboriginal men working for her and was never ‘left in the lurch’: ‘one would come around and say, “Me go walk-about missus. I been bring this one up” . . . some other little fellow . . . who didn’t have a job’.151 Nor was this uncommon in Suva, with one employer noting, ‘with good treatment you can always rely on [the Fijian] putting in a couple of years if he is allowed’, but that ‘you can get others through Barclay Interview, NTRS226, TS 6, tape 16, side B, 346. 147 NTAS, Transcript of Interview with Ruby Selman, NTRS226, TS 322, tape 1, side B, 18, 22. 148 Lyons Interview, NTRS226, TS 84-1/2, 29. 149 Lamilami, Lamilami Speaks, 202–3. 150 Fiji Times, 22 January 1887. 151 Bell Interview, NTRS226, TS 158, tape 1, side A, 21. 146

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the same boy if he cannot stay’.152 But by the late 1940s Hugh Barclay in Darwin had difficulties finding a replacement for his servant when he went away on his regular trips back to his family at Bathurst Island: ‘We tried replacing him but it wasn’t satisfactory, and so we gave that up and did without.’153

Conclusion The history of indigenous male domestic service in Darwin and Suva was mediated by a wider Asia Pacific colonial context, both with respect to imported cultural expectations about ideal and efficient patterns of service (including by way of the trans-colonial experiences of individual Europeans), and to the co-presence of Chinese and Indian men in the prospective labour pool. Indigenous and non-native (migrant) men experienced and negotiated colonial rule in very different ways in Darwin and Fiji. It was also the case that the respective relationship of Aboriginal and Fijian men to the colonial state differed markedly, as reflected in divergent policies of dispossession and ‘protection’, as well as the nature of labour controls and their spatial expression in the compound versus the village. Yet despite these differences, the status of indigenous male servants within a racialized labour hierarchy was broadly similar in Darwin and Suva, as were employer attitudes towards them. This was demonstrated in the perceived burden of training them to the desired standards, securing their continuous, long-term service, and in marking off the port town as the preserve of white residents while also encouraging and managing the flow of essential indigenous labour into the area. It was arguably the influences from Asia, then, that generated commonalities in two quite distinct colonial settings. This in turn suggests the importance of approaching the histories of white settler–indigenous relations in close connection to and comparison with the resident Chinese or Indian populations alongside whom they lived and laboured.

Fiji Times, 28 July 1909. 153 Barclay Interview, NTRS226, TS 6, tape 16, side B, 345. 152

3

Intercultural Influences on American Domesticity in the Philippines

The Americans who came to reside in the Philippines in the early twentieth century took up a life of colonial privilege that was, for most, beyond anything they might have experienced at home. It was expected that they would employ numerous servants to see to their every need. The question of how to secure domestic help was a preoccupation that opened many accounts of colonial life in the Philippines. In the writings of some Americans we find the master–servant relationship described as something unfamiliar, involving processes that left them feeling ambivalent about their role as colonizers. For others the relationship was framed more as an uncomplicated indulgence, without any recognition of the need to delve deeper into the politics of servitude. The emphasis on male servants, in particular, was described in an almost celebratory manner, as seen in Hamilton Wright’s Handbook of the Philippines: The most humble American finds himself able to live in a big, low-ceilinged dwelling, with numberless servants, all costing exceedingly little. One boy may bring him tea in the morning when he awakes; another will prepare the shower bath; while a third, who has properly whitened his boots, may assist him to dress. Another boy serves him at breakfast, and still another acts as cochero, or driver.1

The ethnicity of the servants is left unspoken, and while Filipino men were widely employed, the American elite rather controversially preferred to bring in overseas-born Chinese servants to act as cooks and houseboys. In addition to Chinese and Filipino servants, Japanese men were also sometimes employed as gardeners.2 1 Hamilton M. Wright, A Handbook of the Philippines, 2nd edn (Chicago, IL: A. C. McClurg, 1908), 38. 2 Governor-General Forbes employed a Japanese gardener, Fukumoto, at his house in Baguio. Fukumoto was sent to Forbes as ‘a present’ by the previous Governor-General Luke Wright who had become the US Ambassador in Japan. See Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC (hereafter MD, LOC), Forbes Papers, Journal Volume II, November 29, 1906, 153. For the

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In published memoirs and private letters and diaries, Americans carefully structured a narrative of themselves as benign imperialists, sidestepping or ignoring the surrounding violence of the American war of occupation. In claiming the intention of educating the Philippine people in the ways of ‘the higher civilisation of mankind’,3 the Americans sought to differentiate themselves from the exploitative practices of British and other European colonists. Yet most Americans were more than willing to embrace the customs of the ‘old world’ colonial cultures by employing numerous live-in servants in their homes. A close examination of the relationship between American employers and their servants reveals the contradictions between the principles and practices of American imperialism. As historian Vicente Rafael has remarked in White Love, the colonial home in the Philippines was a site where the rhetoric of American exceptionalism was shown to be hollow.4 The central aim of this chapter is to explore how American domesticity in the Philippines was shaped by cultures of domestic service from different time periods and places. As the first detailed study of how pre-colonial and colonial cultures influenced imperial domesticity in one particular colony, this chapter makes an important contribution to the global history of domestic service. We analyse how Spanish, British, Filipino and American traditions and ideas came into contact through the interactions between American employers and Chinese and Filipino domestic workers in colonial homes. Julian Go has argued that Americans sought to assert their colonial power through imposing their ‘preferred cultural forms and practices’.5 In terms of their approach to domestic service, however, we illustrate that at least some Americans explicitly commented on how Spanish and British colonial traditions influenced their own domestic practices. Moreover, others were willing or forced to adapt to the cultural traditions preferred by their servants. Chinese and Filipino servants brought their own ideas about such work to American homes, and in cases where they had worked for Spanish or British employers, communicated the ideas of their previous employers. Employer–servant relations were frequently marked by the struggle between these often competing ideals. Ultimately though, as we

1930s, see The People of the Philippine Islands vs Guendo Nishishima, Supreme Court Online, GR No. L-35122, 12 August 1932, www.lawphil.net/judjuris/juri1932/aug1932/gr_l-35122_1932.html. McKinley cited in Vicente L. Rafael, White Love and Other Events in Philippine History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 21. 4 Rafael, White Love, 14; Vicente L. Rafael, ‘Colonial Domesticity: White Women and United States Rule in the Philippines’, American Literature 67, no. 4 (1995): 640. 5 Julian Go, American Empire and the Politics of Meaning (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2008), 6. 3



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argue in this chapter, American colonists determined who was to be employed in their homes; the nature, conduct and conditions of their work; and what forms of discipline were appropriate.

Trans-colonial cultures of domestic service in the Philippines When the Americans occupied Manila, after more than 300  years of Spanish rule, the social mores of the elite of that city reflected the diverse influences of Filipino, Chinese, British and other Europeans, all of whom were employers of servants. For some the dominant culture remained Spanish. Caroline Shunk, wife of Army Colonel William Shunk, who arrived in Manila in 1909, perceived the city as ‘truly Spanish’, writing:  ‘We Americans may disfigure this ancient stronghold with flats and hotels . . . but the city is Spanish despite us.’6 By 1921, the Spanish presence in Manila had declined but other foreign influences in the city remained strong with 17,800 Chinese, 6,731 Americans (outside the army and navy), 1,955 British, 1,611 Japanese and 635 other Europeans.7 At the time of the American occupation the Tagalog language and culture in Manila was manifested in the complex master and servant relationships that had survived Spanish rule, including the keeping of sagigilid or ‘hearth slaves’ who lived in the master’s house, and alipin who included both those in temporary debt bondage and those captured in war.8 It was not uncommon for debtors to give themselves as alipin into domestic work in order to repay their debt, a custom found throughout Southeast Asia. If this system was practiced in Manila, it is not clear, however, that American employers were aware of its existence. The British cultural and economic presence was also strong in Manila. Between 1762 and 1764 the British controlled the city after the Spanish defeat in the Seven Years’ War, and British capital continued to dominate the colony.9 The Americans found an English Club, a Tiffin Club, a Jockey Club and tennis and cricket grounds on their arrival, and even in the 1920s, Governor Francis Burton Harrison described the British in Manila as forming ‘a large and very important colony, influential both in business and in society’.10 William Cameron Forbes, 6 Caroline S. Shunk, An Army Woman in the Philippines (Kansas City: Franklin Hudson, 1914), 21. 7 Francis Burton Harrison, The Corner-Stone of Philippine Independence: A Narrative of Seven Years (New York: Century Co., 1922), 275; Willis Bliss Wilcox, Through Luzon on Highways and Byways (Philadelphia: Franklin, 1901), 271. 8 Vicente L. Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1988), 143. 9 Rafael, White Love, 5. 10 Harrison, Philippine Independence, 275; Wilcox, Through Luzon on Highways and Byways, 20.

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who served in Manila as Commissioner of Commerce and Police and later as Governor-General, held a banquet for ninety-five people in Manila in 1904, soon after his arrival. His guest list reveals the breadth of his acquaintances, including twenty-two Filipinos, fifteen Spaniards, thirteen Chinese, fifteen Americans, fifteen English, some Germans and others.11 American homes in Manila and elsewhere in the Philippines were to varying degrees exposed to this cultural diversity. There were certain characteristics that seemed to stand out to newly arrived Americans and which they felt they should adopt, including the custom of employing numerous live-in servants.12 Accounting for American receptivity to this practice, Helen Taft, wife of the first civilian Governor, William Taft, explained that both Filipinos and Europeans in Manila expected a degree of ceremony and were not impressed by what she termed American ‘democratic simplicity’.13 Edith Moses, wife of Professor Bernard Moses, president of the Civil Commission to the Philippines, having previously lived in China, was quick to employ five Chinese and at least six Filipino servants.14 In a more modest position, American Dwight Longfellow, an engineer who lived in a ‘mess’ with two other men in public service in Capiz on Panay Island, employed a cook and two Filipino houseboys. He claimed that they had no option but to adapt to local customs, given that the Filipinos had ‘no respect for a man that will carry anything’.15 Caroline Shunk, stationed with her military husband in Pampanga province, similarly described herself as bowing under the pressure of local custom. She wrote: ‘One has to keep many servants as each does one kind of work and nothing can induce the natives to depart from an established routine.’16 A  few, like American teacher Mary Fee who was stationed in Capiz, tried to reject this practice, writing, ‘The Filipinos, the Spanish, and even the English who are settled here cling to medieval European ideas in the matter of service. If they have any snobbish weakness for display, it is in the number of retainers they can muster.’17 Employing a young man as a personal attendant or valet was standard among military officers. Colonel David L. Brainard, for example, arrived in the Houghton Library, Harvard University (hereafter HL), W.  Cameron Forbes, 30 August 1904, 57, Journal, Series 1, MS Am 1365, Volume 1, W, Cameron Forbes Papers, 1900–1946. 12 Julia Martínez and Claire Lowrie, ‘Transcolonial Influences on Everyday American Imperialism: The Politics of Chinese Domestic Servants in the Philippines’, Pacific Historical Review 81, no. 4 (2012): 515–16. 13 William Howard Helen Taft, Recollections of Full Years (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1914), 125. 14 Edith Moses, Unofficial Letters of an Official’s Wife (New York: D. Appleton, 1908), 209–11. 15 Dwight Webster Longfellow, Letters from the Philippines (Minneapolis: DOT, 1906), 104, 72. 16 Shunk, An Army Woman, 39. 17 Mary H. Fee, A Woman’s Impressions of the Philippines (Chicago, IL: A. C. McClurg, 1910), 241. 11



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Figure 3.1  ‘ “Boys” at 127 Caffe Marina, Ermita, Manila, P.I. From right to left: Choy (cook), Andres, Col. Brainard’s boy, Juan, Col. Bellinger’s boy, Bruno, Maj. Rassiter’s boy, Felix, Col. Richard’s boy’, 1910. D.  L Brainard’s Family Albums, 1884–1910, National Archives, College Park, Maryland, RG 200S-BR, vol. 3C, 179.

Philippines in 1898 and lived in a mess with other officers. They shared a Chinese cook and each of them also employed their own Filipino personal servant.18 As will be discussed further in Chapter  4 photographic sources are particularly revealing, with Brainard’s family photograph album including an image of the Chinese cook, Choy, alongside the Filipino male personal servants Andres, Juan, Bruno and Felix. They are each assigned to their employer; Andres for example, being described as ‘Col. Brainard’s boy’. Even young unmarried lieutenants would take meals with their personal attendants standing behind them.19 Eleanor Butler Roosevelt, whose husband Theodore Roosevelt Jr served as the Governor-General of the Philippines from 1932 to 1933, noted with amusement that her teenage son treated the Filipino Angus L. Campbell, The Manila Club: A Social History of the British in Manila (Manila: St Pauls Press, 1993), 40; National Archives, College Park (hereafter NA), D. L. Brainard Family Albums, 1884–1910, item 176, box 3C, Papers of Brig. Gen. David L. Brainard, 1854–1938, series BR, RG 200. 19 Shunk, An Army Woman, 38. 18

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Figure 3.2  Colonel Brainard with Coachman and Footman, Manila, c. 1898–9. Prints of D.  L. Brainard’s Family Albums, 1884–1910, National Archives, College Park, Maryland, RG 200S-BR, vol. 3A, 146.

houseboy Pablo like his own personal valet.20 In addition to cooks and houseboys, Americans in Manila also commonly employed gardeners as well as footmen and coachmen. Colonel Brainard preserved four photographs which suggest he took some pride in his entourage.21 A newly hired coachman would usually move his family onto the premises and live in the stables. Governor Taft had three coachmen and a gardener, all with their families living on the grounds. The result, according to Taft, was a ‘regular Filipino settlement in the neighborhood of the stable’.22 Live-in servants were becoming unfashionable in the United States,23 and in the Philippines, most Americans complained about the additional costs or inconveniences MD, LOC, Eleanor Roosevelt, Letter to Her Mother, 24 August 1932, Theodore Roosevelt Jr Papers, container 6 – Family Correspondence 1858–1962. 21 NA, Brainard Family Albums, 1884–1918, items 146–9, box 3A. 22 MD, LOC, William H. Taft, Letter to Charles Taft, 15 October 1900, William H. Taft Papers, reel 18, series 1. 23 David M. Katzman, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 44. 20



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associated with live-in families. Helen Taft described the practice as a ‘patriarchal arrangement’ that she had been forced to accept. She argued that her ‘protest was met with the simple statement that it was el costumbre del pais’ (the national custom).24 Edith Moses tried to avoid this tradition by employing only single men. When one of her servants married he sought to hide the fact, and when discovered, he begged her not to let her husband, ‘el Señor’, take his wife away. Moses relented and persuaded her husband that it ‘was narrow-minded to force our customs on these people, where the principles of government were not involved’.25 Some Americans at least were willing, albeit reluctantly, to adapt to or adopt the cultural practices of their servants. In addition to employing numerous servants, Americans also adopted the practice of favouring male servants so common in tropical colonies. In the Philippines in 1903, 75 per cent of servants were male.26 The term for a Filipino houseboy in Spanish was muchacho, known also as criado, bata or utusan.27 In the early years American bachelors did not employ Filipina women as servants, but most households engaged the services of a Filipina laundress (lavandera), who collected the laundry to clean offsite, rather than living-in. In households run by American women, Filipina women would also fill the roles of maid and nurse-maid for children, though some American elite preferred Chinese women as nurses or amahs.28 Resident English woman, Mrs Dauncey, maintained that Filipina female servants were considered to be ‘lazy and useless’ compared with the men.29

American attitudes towards Chinese versus Filipino domestic labour The American administration in the Philippines gave official preference to Filipino labour under the policy of ‘tutelage’ and opposed the importation of Chinese labour. Governor Taft argued that they should instruct the Filipino people in ‘the dignity of labor’, but in an address to the Union Reading College, 24 Taft, Recollections of Full Years, 118–19. 25 Moses, Unofficial Letters, 209–11. 26 Census of the Philippine Islands 1903: Volume II Population (Washington, DC: United States Bureau of the Census, 1905), 865. 27 Richard T. Chu, Chinese and Chinese Mestizos of Manila, Family, Identity, and Culture, 1860s–1930s (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 208. 28 MD, LOC, William H. Taft, Letter to Harriet C. Herron, 19 January 1901, W. H. Taft Papers, reel 19, series 1. 29 Campbell Dauncey, Mrs, An Englishwoman in the Philippines (London: John Murray, 1906), 27.

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where he advocated the employment of Filipino domestic workers, Taft was equivocal, stating, ‘I know that the habits of the Filipino servant are trying to the American who first comes to these islands.’30 Filipino workers were represented in most American accounts as inherently unsuitable and in need of constant supervision, a common colonial trope, just as Chinese workers were valued as efficient and reliable domestic servants.31 Such conceptions of the Chinese were also professed in American territories and colonial possessions including California, Hawai‘i, Puerto Rico and Guam.32 While Filipinos were often hired as domestic workers in American homes, the elite regarded Chinese cooks and head servants as a status symbol, and employed them in blatant disregard of the official policy of labour preference.33 According to 1903 census data, Chinese workers were an important component of the service sector shortly after the American arrival, and remained so until the census of 1939, when the Americans were leaving. There were 6,763 Chinese chauffeurs in 1903, but this number fell to 3,416 in 1939. In other domestic service roles, however, Chinese workers increased. There were 998 Chinese household workers, including housekeepers, housewives and servants in 1903 and 11,685 in 1939. After 1937 as the situation in China became increasingly dangerous, Chinese women came to the Philippines in greater numbers and their arrival may have skewed these figures. Even in the category of cooks and waiters, however, both of which were regarded as male domains, there were 2,931 Chinese workers in 1903 and this number rose to 5,499 in 1939.34 When war correspondent Murat Halstead interviewed Admiral George Dewey for his 1898 publication, The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, he William H. Taft, Address to Union Reading College, Manila, 17 December 1903, cited in John B. Devins, An Observer in the Philippines; Or Life in Our New Possessions (New York: American Tract Society, 1905), 396. 31 Christine Chin, In Service and Servitude:  Foreign Female Domestic Workers and the Malaysian ‘Modernity’ Project (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 1998), 69–73; Christopher Munn, ‘Hong Kong, 1841–1870:  All the Servants in Prison and Nobody to Take Care of the House’, in Masters, Servants, and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562–1955, ed. Douglas Hay and Paul Craven (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 365–401; Julia Martínez and Claire Lowrie, ‘Colonial Constructions of Masculinity:  Transforming Aboriginal Australian Men into “Houseboys”’, Gender & History 21, no. 2 (2009): 305–23. 32 Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of California (San Francisco: History Company, 1890), 347, 391, 412; Shunk, An Army Woman, 14; Lucy M. Salmon, ‘A Statistical Inquiry Concerning Domestic Service’, Publications of the American Statistical Association 3, no. 1 (1892): 95; Phyllis Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920–1945 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 67. 33 For alternative views that were more critical of Chinese workers in the Philippines, see Greg Bankoff, ‘Wants, Wages and Workers: Laboring in the American Philippines, 1899–1908’, Pacific Historical Review 74, no. 1 (2005): 59–86. 34 Wong Kwok-Chu, The Chinese in the Philippine Economy, 1898–1941 (Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1999), 72. 30



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found him very much in favour of Chinese servants. For Halstead it seemed only fitting that American officials enjoy the benefit of Chinese servants who were ‘constant, handy, obedient, docile, so fitted to minister to luxury’.35 Indeed, highranking Americans were advised that they should not expect to secure suitable Chinese servants in Manila but should instead recruit servants before their arrival in the Philippines. On his voyage to Manila in May 1900, Governor Taft stopped over in British Hong Kong where he engaged five Chinese house servants who had been sent from Shanghai and were waiting for him on board. Taft had already discussed the prospect of obtaining Chinese servants for his new home, observing in a letter to his brother: ‘A good Chinese cook and a good Chinese boy and a good Chinese laundryman are a thing of joy forever.’36 In choosing Chinese servants, Taft may have been drawing on his knowledge of other American possessions where Chinese men were commonly employed, as noted above. In his letters home, he explained that he followed the advice of his predecessor, Admiral Dewey. Dewey had asked his own servant, Ah Maw, to arrange for a Chinese cook and four other Chinese servants for Taft.37 Illustrating the connection between colonial shipping lines and cultures of male servitude that we will explore in Chapter  6, Taft recounted the process of recruitment, including the letter sent from Ah Maw to a steward on board the Brooklyn, Ah Ling: My Dear Ah Ling . . . The Admiral asked me to write to you and ask if you please find som [sic] good Chinese servants for Mr Taft. He like to have a very good cook just like myself, the Admiral said, and two men to wait on the table, a butler and a second man just like you. Now, would you be so kind as to try and find some very nice people that will take good care and understand their business.38

Such employment preferences were first introduced to the Philippines by the Spanish who recruited servants from the significant resident Chinese and Chinese mestizo population.39 Wealthy Chinese merchants also employed Chinese cooks, probably from Macao. In 1903 in Manila 44 per cent of cooks Murat Halstead, The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions (Chicago, IL: Our Possessions, 1898), 39. 36 MD, LOC, Letter from William H. Taft to His Brother, Charles Taft, 18 May 1900, William H. Taft Papers, series 1, reel 18. 37 MD, LOC, William H. Taft to His Brother, Charles Taft, 2 June 1900, William H. Taft Papers, series 1, reel 18. For more on Taft in the Philippines, see Michael Adas, ‘Improving on the Civilizing Mission? Assumptions of United States Exceptionalism in the Colonisation of the Philippines’, Itinerario 22, no. 4 (1998): 44–66. 38 MD, LOC, Letter from William H. Taft to His Brother, Charles Taft, 2 June 1900, William H. Taft Papers, series 1, reel 18. 39 In 1898 there were some 23,000 Chinese and 46,000 Chinese mestizos in the Manila area. See Lucille Chia, ‘The Butcher, the Baker, and the Carpenter: Chinese Sojourners in the Spanish Philippines 35

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were Chinese while 56 per cent were either Filipinos or mestizos.40 After the extension of the US Chinese Exclusion Act to the Philippines in 1903, however, Chinese workers became harder to secure.41 This exclusion was framed in terms of protecting Filipino workers from competition with Chinese migrant labour. But as merchant Charles Ilderton Barnes noted, despite the policy everyone wanted ‘his own Chinaman’.42 Aware of this difficulty, Secretary Elijah Root gave Governor Taft and the members of the Philippines Commission permission to continue importing Chinese servants for their own use. Both Taft and Dewey were so taken with their servants that they sought, and were granted, permission to bring them back to the United States.43 Even in the 1930s, the Governor-General Theodore Roosevelt Jr, relied on a Chinese amah and a Chinese ‘number one boy’, as well as male and female Filipino servants.44 In her memoirs, Eleanor Butler Roosevelt recalled the traditional role of the ‘venerable Chinese paragon, Ah King, the number-one boy’ at Malacañan Palace, who had been employed for over thirty years and ‘ruled the domestic staff ’.45 The preference for Chinese domestic staff might in part be explained by the first years of American occupation when Filipino men were regarded as a potential danger for American employers. Murat Halstead claimed that the Filipinos were ‘not admirable in menial service’.46 He believed that if the local people were not granted some degree of self-government they would fight back, and thus their employment in domestic service was potentially dangerous. Philippine Commissioner, Dean Worcester, like Taft, also brought in Chinese servants from Hong Kong. He justified his decision as a means ‘to avoid the possibility of treachery in our own household’.47 He retained three of the old and Their Impact on Southern Fujian (Sixteenth-Eighteenth Centuries)’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 49, no. 4 (2006):  509–34, 515; Antonio S. Tan, ‘The Chinese Mestizos and the Formation of the Filipino Nationality’, Archipel 32, no. 1 (1986): 141–62, 144; Chu, Chinese and Chinese Mestizos, 199. 40 Chia, ‘The Butcher, the Baker, and the Carpenter’, 509–34, 515–16. 41 Paul A. Kramer, Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 401. For Chinese exclusion from the United States, see Adam McKeown, ‘Ritualization of Regulation:  The Enforcement of Chinese Exclusion in the United States and China’, American Historical Review 108, no. 2 (2003): 377–403. 42 Charles Ilderton Barnes cited in Edgar Wickberg, The Chinese in Philippine Life, 1850–1898 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), 112. 43 Adam David Burns, ‘An Imperial Vision:  William Howard Taft and the Philippines, 1900–1921’ (PhD diss., University of Edinburgh, 2010), 117–19. 44 LOC, MD, Eleanor Butler Roosevelt, Letters to Her Mother, 1 and 27 March, 24 August 1932, box 6, Theodore Roosevelt Jr Papers. 45 Eleanor Butler Roosevelt, Day Before Yesterday: The Reminiscences of Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. (New York: Doubleday, 1959), 269. 46 Halstead, The Story of the Philippines, 39. 47 Special Collection Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (hereafter SCL), Dean Worcester, Letter Home, 23 February 1899, Hong Kong, Worcester Collection, box 3, folder 16.1.



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Filipino house servants to clean the floor, but wrote in a letter home:  ‘It may interest you to know that twelve soldiers guard the house, night and day, so that there would seem to be small chance of our being burned out or otherwise molested.’48 As we will explore in the final chapter, the trope of domestic danger did not diminish over time. In Hong Kong, Singapore and French Indochina, Chinese and Vietnamese servants were believed to be nationalist and later communist saboteurs seeking to undermine European colonialism. Even the Chinese cook to President Manuel Quezon was accused of being a communist in the late 1930s.49 For many Americans setting up households during the war of occupation, the fear that their Filipino servants might be part of the ‘insurrection’ only added to the general stereotype of untrustworthiness.50 When American teacher Herbert Priestley came to live in Luzon, his Filipino ‘boy’ disappeared, and was later found in jail. Priestley discovered that he was in fact an escapee who had been jailed for stealing a revolver from a captain and aiding the insurrectos.51 In her memoir, Caroline Shunk mentioned being somewhat alarmed when their Filipino servant Decio had to go to hospital and his brother filled in. She described the man as ‘stalk[ing] stolidly about in shirt-tail, short drawers, and bare feet, smoking enormous cigarettes. He speaks not a word and looks an insurrecto of the deepest dye.’52 Mary Fee, an American teacher, described visiting a military house, where a punkah string was being pulled by a ‘murderouslooking ex-insurrecto’.53 Vicente Rafael argues that the presence of such servants and their silent ‘insolence’ was deeply unsettling for American householders, highlighting ‘the undoing rather than the collaborative production of domestic order’.54 Democrat Governor-General Harrison described the Christmas Eve uprising of 1914, which was inspired by Ilocano revolutionary Artemio Ricarte, as ‘consist[ing] of a gathering, at the Botanical Gardens in Manila, of several

48 SCL, Worcester, Letter Home, 8 March 1899, Hong Kong, Worcester Collection, box 3, folder 16.1. 49 Note that Quezon also employed an elderly Chinese body servant. John Gunther, Inside Asia (New York: Harper, 1939), cited in Argus, 28 June 1939, 15. 50 Greg Bankoff reviews the figures for criminal cases involving domestic workers during the Spanish era. In 1885, for example, only 109 servants stood trial out of a total of 6,991 cases. See Greg Bankoff, ‘Servant-Master Conflicts in Manila in the Late Nineteenth Century’, Philippines Studies 40, no. 3 (1992): 281–301. 51 Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (hereafter BANC), Herbert Ingram Priestley, Letter to His Mother from Nueva Caceres, Camarines, Luzon, 25 September 1901, Priestley Papers, box 1, folder 1:2, BANC MSS 94/13 cz. 52 Shunk, An Army Woman, 91. 53 Fee, A Woman’s Impressions, 81. 54 Rafael, White Love, 71.

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dozen ignorant men, without arms, mostly of the cook and coachman class, who were arrested by the city police’.55 Harrison was dismissive of the uprising and apparently did not take the prospect of servants as political activists very seriously. Outside of Manila, however, Filipino and other indigenous men predominated in service.56 When it came to their relationships with these domestic workers, American depicted themselves as engaged in a project of ‘benevolent assimilation’ and ‘uplift’.57 The everyday reality of master–servant encounters, however, was one of exploitation.

American exploitation and Filipino domestic workers American officials liked to promote their presence in the Philippines as being other than colonialism, neither ‘exploitative nor enslaving’ and entailing the cultivation of ‘the felicity and perfection of the Philippine people’.58 GovernorGeneral Harrison, writing in 1921, contrasted the American treatment of servants with that of British colonials. Americans, he claimed did not ‘assume the air of haughty superiority toward the “native” which marks the British “raj” . . . such a manner does not come easy to an American’.59 According to Harrison, the English refused to allow Filipino servants to speak English so as to deny ‘all possible social intercourse’.60 Certainly, when the English woman Dauncey set up her new house in Iloilo in 1904, she made sure to check whether potential servants could speak English. She refused to hire anyone who could, ‘for nothing will induce us to take servants who can understand what we are saying, which would make life impossible in these open houses’.61 But given that the cook she hired had worked for Americans and did speak English, her stern claims may have been more rhetoric than reality. Of all the memoirs, Mary Fee’s was one of the most self-consciously liberal and yet she later decided that she was naïve in her views. When she told an American army man that she was pleased with her servant Romoldo, he told her, ‘You ain’t particular’62 and she paused to reflect: 55 Harrison, The Corner-Stone of Philippines Independence, 151. 56 Census of the Philippine Islands 1903: Volume II Population (Washington, DC: United States Bureau of the Census, 1905), 933–4, 894. 57 President William McKinley cited in Rafael, White Love, 21. 58 Rafael, White Love, 21. 59 Harrison, The Corner-Stone of Philippines Independence, 45. 60 Ibid., 275. 61 Dauncey, An Englishwoman in the Philippines, 27. 62 Fee, A Woman’s Impressions, 114.



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At that time I was still in the somnambulance of philanthropy which brought us pedagogues to the Philippines. I  am willing to admit to-day that I  vastly overrated Romoldo’s services, and yet, considering the untutored state of his mind and the extent of his salary, they were a good investment. There has been among some Americans here a carping and antagonistic spirit displayed toward Filipinos, which reflects little credit upon our national consistency or charity.63

Fee’s change of heart was due in part to her discovery that her new female servant, Tikkia, recommended by Romoldo, had left her husband to live with him. Her initial response had been to fire them both, but she was persuaded that it was practical to keep Romoldo, who spoke both Spanish and the local Visayan language. Fee related her friends’ advice: ‘What on earth are these people’s morals to you? Romoldo is a good servant. . .’ ‘We are not in America now’, was his parting remark; and I am still learning what a variety of moral degeneration that sentence was created to excuse.64

The friend was not merely asking that Fee overlook a moral infraction; he was also scolding her for being overly involved in the personal lives of her servants. Fee may have seen this as a natural extension of her role as a ‘master of the home’. As historian Sarah Steinbock-Pratt has observed, Fee ‘took pride in asserting her will over her employees’.65 Edith Moses was more conscious of maintaining social distance. She contrasted the American observance of what amounted to a household colour line with the elite Spanish Filipinos for whom servants were lifelong members of the household. For the latter there was never a question of a servant being dismissed or leaving: ‘There is, consequently, a family feeling between them and a freedom of intercourse that we, democrats though we are, would not tolerate.’66 While claiming to be a ‘democrat’, Moses was more inclined to resurrect the trope of the ‘happy’ slave. When a Filipino servant made a mistake, he ‘smiles as if he thought it a joke’, she remarked, concluding that ‘they are not creatures of routine, nor . . . thorough in the work . . . but they are neither sulky nor saucy’.67 She wrote of servants as if they were children: ‘They need constant watching, but are merry little fellows . . . always playing jokes on each other and giggling.’68 Her Ibid., 114–15. 64 Ibid., 117. 65 Sarah Steinbock-Pratt, ‘ “We Were All Robinson Crusoes”:  American Women Teachers in the Philippines’, Women’s Studies 41, no. 4 (2012): 382–3. 66 Moses, Unofficial Letters, 348. 67 Ibid., 346. 68 Ibid., 209. 63

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condescending description echoes British representations of indigenous male servants in Fiji as playful and child-like (see Chapter 2). American ambitions to introduce the ‘dignity of labour’ to the Philippines did not extend to the regulation of wages and conditions for domestic servants, who were left at the mercy of their employers’ benevolence. Chinese servants, being in demand, were in a much stronger position than Filipino servants to bargain for reasonable wages.69 Governor Taft paid his Chinese cook and ‘number one boy’ $15 American per month, while the ‘number two boy’ received $11.25 American per month.70 This compared favourably with wages for female domestic workers in the United States at around $3 per week, though in 1876 Chinese male servants on the West Coast had been demanding as much at $8 per week, or double the wages paid to Taft’s cook.71 When the 1903 Chinese Exclusion Act prevented the importation of new Chinese labourers, many domestic workers abandoned their jobs in Manila to work on the construction of the Baguio Road. Those left behind were in a better position to bargain for higher wages.72 In 1904 William Cameron Forbes, the future Governor-General, arrived in Manila to find that the cost of servants was already on the rise. Forbes paid monthly wages of $22.50 gold to the steward, $25 to the cook (who was supposedly the best in Manila), $15 to the ‘boy’, and, he added in brutally dehumanizing language, the cost of ‘feed for Chinamen not to exceed $5 per month per pigtail’.73 By 1907 experienced Chinese cooks in particular were able to command wages of between $40 and $70 in silver per month (with the silver peso worth half a gold dollar).74 The American occupation also resulted in a significant wage increase for Filipino servants. Under the Spanish, Filipino head servants had received five or six pesos (Mexican dollars) per month. But, as the English woman Dauncey recorded, they felt lucky to secure a mayordomo (head boy) for ten pesos per month and a second boy for six pesos. She predicted social problems resulting from American largesse, for in paying Filipino servants ‘twice as much, if not MD, LOC, Helen Taft, Letter to William H.  Taft, 10 June 1900, William H.  Taft Papers, reel 24, series 2. 70 MD, LOC, William H.  Taft, Letter to Charles Taft, 2 June 1900, William H.  Taft Papers, reel 24, series 2. 71 Lucy M. Salmon cited in Margaret Lynch-Brennan, The Irish Bridget:  Irish Immigrant Women in Domestic Service in America, 1840–1930 (New York: Syracuse Press, 2009), 91; Andrew Urban, ‘An Intimate World: Race, Migration, and Chinese and Irish Domestic Servants in the United States, 1850–1920’ (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 2009), 118. 72 New York Times, 27 September 1903. 73 HL, Cameron Forbes, journal entry, 5 September 1904, 61, Forbes Papers, series 1, MS Am 1365, Volume 1. 74 Straits Times, 13 August 1907, 6. The silver peso was worth half a gold dollar. 69



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more’, servants would become ‘drunkards, or gamblers or both, or worse’.75 But others noted that Americans were in fact obliged to pay higher wages, Mary Fee arguing that where an elite Filipino employer would pay a coachman $2.50 in gold per month, an American would have to pay from $3 to $6.76 In comparison to Chinese servants, however, and in spite of the rhetoric of American benevolence, Filipino servants received far less remuneration for their work. As we have seen, paying Asian migrant domestic workers higher wages than local-born or indigenous men was a pattern replicated in the Northern Territory and Fiji. In the provinces, many elite Filipino households retained the use of bonded child labour, and servant wages were generally lower. Some Americans were caught up in this more traditional form of employment relations.77 William Freer, for example, an American teacher living in Solano, Nueva Vizcaya in 1906, had two unpaid male servants – Raymundo, the thirteen-year-old son of his landlord and Raymundo’s eleven-year-old cousin Francisco, taken in at the request of the landlord, so that both boys might learn English.78 Similarly, one of teacher Herbert Priestley’s students, Roman, who was about fourteen, asked to come and live with Priestley and his wife. He was to help their other boy, Tomas, with the housework. Tomas was paid $3 per month in gold, but Roman was only given board and pocket money. Priestley was quick to justify this, writing to his mother: ‘Now don’t think we are imposing on them, for they are both liberally paid.’79 But despite his reassurances, he later wrote that the boys were given only rice to eat and that they ‘eat it very dry without salt’, a habit which surely speaks of deprivation rather than of choice.80 A few months later Roman left their house as his mother no longer wanted him to work there.81 While Priestley supposed that ‘I shan’t bring him or anyone else home I guess’, just five months later another school boy Pedro was working ‘for his board’, whom he described as ‘willing but very flighty’.82 The following year another school boy, Apolonio, whom Priestley justified taking in because he had ‘seemingly reached his educational limit’, Dauncey, An Englishwoman in the Philippines, 27. 76 Fee, A Woman’s Impressions, 241. 77 Michael Salman, The Embarrassment of Slavery: Controversies over Bondage and Nationalism in the American Colonial Philippines (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 78 William B. Freer, The Philippine Experiences of an American Teacher, A Narrative of Work and Travel in the Philippine Islands (New York: Charles Scribner, 1906), 48. 79 BANC, Priestley, Letter to Mother, 25 January 1902, Priestley Papers, box 1, folder 1:6. 80 Ibid., 6 February 1902, Priestley Papers, box 1, folder 1:7. 81 Ibid., 17 June 1902, Priestley Papers, box 1, folder 1:11. 82 Ibid., 3 August 1902, Priestley Papers, box 1, folder 1:13; 25 January 1903, Priestley Papers, box 1, folder 1:18. 75

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was given board and clothes in return for ‘waiting on the table and helping on Saturday mornings’.83 Spanish practices of employing bonded domestic labourers also persisted and influenced wage rates. In Capiz, for example, American engineer Dwight Longfellow recorded paying his servants less than four pesos, and noted that Filipino ‘houseboys’ could be employed for as little as two pesos a month or $1.00 gold. He attributed the low wages to the Spanish tradition of ‘taking small boys’ into their homes for a year and ‘giving their parents a few pesos’ in return. Children could be indebted fifteen to twenty pesos to their masters for clothes at the end of a year.84 Longfellow paid his male servants a little more, giving them $1.75 gold per month and the cook $5.00 gold per month.85 The payment in food instead of wages was another means by which employers could save costs. Most Americans acknowledged buying plain rice only to feed their servants. Edith Moses, however, proudly described how she provided the staff vegetables, pork and a pound of rice per person.86 Dauncey, who employed only Filipino servants, also believed herself to be generous with food. She remarked that when handing out the servants’ daily allowance of rice she did not measure it, but ‘let them take it, for, after all, it is all the poor souls live on’. In addition, she gave them extra money to buy fish, which she believed was an ‘unheard-of extravagance’ on her part.87 As live-in domestic workers, Chinese and Filipino servants suffered from a failure on the part of employers to distinguish between working and leisure hours. Priestley, for example, expected his Filipino servants to be constantly available without acknowledging their additional work. When he took in two American boarders, he wrote that ‘it makes no work for us, as we have two good servants who do all the work’. Their board, which amounted to about $30 a month, covered most of the household food expenses.88 He made no mention of how the servants would cope with a double workload. They clearly found this unreasonable, leaving the job a few weeks later. Priestley ‘bravely responded “Good”, tho it broke my heart because it means trouble in getting another’. Within days, however, he had two new servants ‘to struggle with’.89

83 Ibid., 2 December 1903, Priestley Papers, box 1, folder 1:28. 84 Longfellow, Letters from the Philippines, 65. 85 Ibid., 107. 86 Moses, Unofficial Letters, 22. 87 Dauncey, An Englishwoman in the Philippines, 35. 88 BANC, Priestley, Letter to Mother, 5 October 1902, Priestley Papers, box 1, folder 1:15. 89 Ibid., 29 October 1902, Priestley Papers, box 1, folder 1:15.



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Filipino servants often found other ways of resisting overt exploitation. Accounts of alleged theft might be read as an innovative way to gain extra money or food in cases where wages were inadequate. Employers habitually expressed fears of theft. Priestley lost $16 in gold after leaving it in the pocket of his coat when it was sent to the laundry. The washerwoman, who claimed to know nothing of the money, was the ‘wife’ of his cook and this was sufficient for the pair to be blamed. Priestley complained: ‘They are so darn rascally deceptive, and there is no help for it.’ He declared that the cook ‘steals from us every day, on the money we send him to market with. There is not help for that either.’90 Dauncey was very distrustful and fitted out her store-room with ‘tall glass jars for protection against cockroaches, and tins to keep mice off, and wire-netting for rats, and naphthaline to astonish the scorpions and spiders; and last, but by no means least, a good strong padlock for human beings!’91 When she suspected that her Filipino cook was trying to get access to the storeroom key, she wrote, These Filipinos have a full measure of the cunning of the brown-faced person all the world over . . . Everyone tells me doleful tales about the way the muchacho or boy robs them, so I thought it would be better to start from the first by giving as few opportunities as possible for trouble of this sort.92

The claims of colonial employers that they were helpless victims at the mercy of unscrupulous servants served to mask and justify their exploitative practices relating to wages and rations. Such accounts also shed light on employers’ anxieties about the potential of servants to challenge their authority in the home. Indeed, if we accept that some servants cheated their employers, accounts of theft and attempted theft suggest that servants found ways of circumventing the power of their employers even in the most unequal domestic service relationships.

Servant resistance, food and cultural imperialism in the kitchen Everyday power struggles between masters and servants also took place in the kitchen. Having come to live in a colony where the food culture and preparation methods were all quite different, this was inevitably an area of potential conflict. 90 Ibid., 14 June 1903, Priestley Papers, box 1, folder 1:23. 91 Dauncey, An Englishwoman in the Philippines, 34. 92 Ibid., 35.

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Despite their intentions, American cultural preferences did not always determine food practices. Here as in other parts of colonial Asia, it was often the cook who decided which foods were suitable to present to the colonizer.93 In the case of elite homes in Manila, Chinese cooks were notorious for maintaining their kitchen domain inviolate. When he first set up his house, Taft complained that while their cook was satisfactory, he looked forward to the arrival of his wife Helen (Nellie) to offer her advice. Yet the cook was not receptive and would not even let her into the kitchen.94 Taft continued to frame the cook as a ‘good deal of tyrant’ and perceived that the other servants ‘do not like his severity’. Yet he accepted he was good at his work and they could not do without him.95 Indeed, Taft admitted to his brother that his situation in Malacañan Palace was far better than he had had at home, ‘and the method of living with a good many servants . . . leads one to considerable luxury’.96 This included lavish meals, where breakfast might consist of ‘eggs in every form, and bacon, coffee and fruit’, while for lunch ‘crabs or small lobsters or shrimps, beefsteak, cheese and salad, banana fritters or griddle cakes and fruit’.97 The cook was however accommodating of the Tafts’ preference for fewer courses and learned to prepare some American dishes. Other accounts indicate that Americans were introducing new menu items that would have been unusual in Spanish, Chinese or Filipino cuisines, such as porridge or ‘Quaker Oats mush’.98 Edith Moses, however, was sure that her Chinese cook Lai Ting barely tolerated her suggestions, notably the introduction of iced drinks at dinner, as yet another ‘ “Melica side” vagary’.99 Living in the provinces, Dauncey complained that the food had little variety. She refused the hot cakes prepared by her Filipino cook, who previously worked for an American family, ‘for they are deadly anywhere, especially in the tropics’.100 Unlike Taft, her cook’s daily shopping list had a strong Spanish-Filipino influence, 93 Cecilia Leong-Salobir, Food Culture in Colonial Asia: A Taste of Empire (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2011), 21. 94 MD, LOC, William H. Taft, Letter to Helen Taft, 15 June and 1 July 1900, William H. Taft Papers, reel 24, series 2; Letter to His Brother Charles, 21 September 1900, William H. Taft Papers, series 1, reel 18; Letter to His Mother-in-Law, Mrs Herron, 19 January 1901, William H. Taft Papers, series 1, reel 19. 95 MD, LOC, William H. Taft, Letter to Charles Taft, 4 October 1902, William H. Taft Papers, series 1, reel 19. 96 MD, LOC, William H. Taft, Letter to Charles Taft, 11 August 1900, William H. Taft Papers, series 1, reel 18. 97 MD, LOC, William H. Taft, Letter to Mrs Herron, 19 January 1901, William H. Taft Papers, series 1, reel 19. 98 Longfellow, Letters from the Philippines, 90. 99 Moses, Unofficial Letters, 25. 100 Dauncey, An Englishwoman in the Philippines, 34.



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including chicken and small fish, green peppers, eggplants (aubergines) and tomatoes.101 The dry provisions she provided suggested a more British menu, with tea, salt, butter, lard, tinned fruits, potatoes and macaroni. The other important food item was bread. Each day Dauncey sent a ‘boy’ to buy bread from the Chinese shop. While some people related ‘fearful anecdotes’ about the ‘horrors’ of Chinese bread making and only ate homemade bread, she insisted on the Chinese variety as ‘much more light and digestible than that made by the house-cooks’.102 If this preference indicates Dauncey was rather more integrated into the local culture, she was also unusual in her choice of a Filipino cook, though this was more common outside of Manila. In Manila homes, most cooks were Chinese and it was ‘considered rather common to have a native cook’. Dauncey could not work out why, ‘for the Filipinos are excellent cooks’.103 Those in less elite establishments might complain about the quality of their Chinese cooks, such as Priestley, when living in an army barracks in Manila. He worried over what he regarded as their lack of concern for cleanliness and hygiene.104 Elsewhere in the provinces where Chinese cooks were hard to come by, most Americans had Filipino cooks. Living in the more remote areas it made sense to employ a local cook who would understand the local produce. Similarly, while Chinese cooks were preferred in the cities of British Malaya, on the remote outstations indigenous cooks and houseboys were more common. Owen Rutter, who worked in British North Borneo, repeated the familiar racialized comparison between local and Chinese labour and evoked the language of slavery in his comment that: ‘If caught young, both Dusuns and Muruts make good houseboys; they are seldom as clean as Chinese but they are far more resourceful, and are often invaluable when travelling.’105 American assessments of Filipino cooks were mixed. Freer’s cook in Solano was Igorrote, one of the indigenous hill peoples, though he went by the Christian name of Clemente. Freer claimed that unlike other Americans who had to put up with unreliable servants the Igorrotes made ‘excellent servants’. Clemente cooked in Spanish style, making adaptions to suit Freer’s palate.106 Living in the provinces, Herbert Priestley ‘wonder[ed] over, and lament[ed] upon’ his new cook:  ‘He swims the grub in lard, poaches the egg so that the yolks are little round pills, and the whites are somewhere else, fries camotes so they look like Ibid., 33. 102 Ibid., 34. 103 Ibid., 141. 104 BANC, Priestley, Letter to Sister, Ethel, 29 August 1901, box 1, folder 1:1, Priestley Papers. 105 Leong-Salobir, Food Culture, 67. 106 Freer, The Philippine Experiences, 59. 101

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poker chips.’107 He found that there was particular reason to be cautious when in a nearby town an American teacher, Miss Kent, contracted cholera. He wrote, ‘She really was very careless, I think. She and another girl . . . let their muchacho use river water to wash dishes, cook, etc. and they themselves brushed their teeth in it!’108 Priestley himself paid a man $1 per month to carry twenty gallons (seventy-six litres) of water each day to the house from the well that was half a mile away.109 During this outbreak of cholera in Manila there were 4,386 deaths, but in the provinces, Warwick Anderson estimates that tragically the death toll might have been as high as 100,000.110 Not only food preparation but also methods of cleaning and arranging furniture were frequent points of contention, indicative of struggles over authority in the home.111 The use of tea towels to dry dishes was unknown in the Philippines, where, as in Spain, dishes were simply left to dry. After numerous attempts to have dishes ‘washed in my way’, Emily Bronson Conger eventually ‘gave up trying’ and let the servants wash them ‘as they did their own, by pouring water on each dish separately, rinsing and setting to dry on the porch in the sun, the only place where the vermin would not crawl over them’.112 On moving into her new home in Capiz, Fee embarked on a cleaning spree. She employed ‘some American brawn and muscle’ in an African-American trooper borrowed from the 10th Cavalry to ‘supplement’ what she dismissed as ‘the deficiencies in the housecleaning instincts’ of her Filipino servant Romoldo. She objected to the customary use of kerosene to ward off ants on the wooden floors and chairs which left them ‘too greasy’.113 Following this episode, she and Romoldo embarked on a silent war over how best to arrange the chairs and tables. This continued for two weeks until she finally ‘came off victor’.114 Ultimately, Edith Moses was doubtful about the possibility of achieving an American standard of cleanliness in ‘this land of not particular standards’, remarking that the ‘strenuous and conscientious New Englander would soon kill herself in her efforts to live up to her ideals’.115 Camotes are sweet potatoes. BANC, Priestley, Letter to Mother, 5 July 1903, Priestley Papers, box 1, folder 1:24. 108 BANC, Priestley, Letter to Mother, 13 July 1902, Priestley Papers, folder 1:12. 109 Ibid., 2 December 1903, Priestley Papers, box 1, folder 1:28. 110 Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies:  American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 68. 111 Fee, A Woman’s Impressions, 69. 112 Emily Bronson Conger, An Ohio Woman in the Philippines (Akron, OH: Press of R. H. Leighton, 1904), 140. 113 Fee, A Woman’s Impressions, 109. 114 Ibid., 110. 115 Moses, Unofficial Letters, 14. 107



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Discipline and punishment: Violence in the home In considering the American occupation of the Philippines it is important to recognize the degree to which violence and the threat of violence shaped labour practices, which were largely coercive and ‘imbued by the idea of force’.116 Paradoxically, our research into labour relations in the home suggests that it was the very Americans who preached a paternalistic policy of tutelage who seemed to resort to violence. Dean C.  Worcester, writing in 1898 as an Assistant Professor in Zoology at the University of Michigan, advocated a more liberal form of colonialism than had been practiced during the Spanish colonial period when, he argued ‘the great mass of people’ had been ‘deliberately kept in ignorance’. He argued for assimilation, noting that the Filipino people he met were ‘naturally fairly intelligent’, and were ‘most anxious for an opportunity to get some education’. In relation to domestic service, he saw his role as that of teacher. He described how they had been able to secure ‘good servants who asked for nothing but food and an opportunity to pick up a little English or Spanish’.117 But Worcester, who is often remembered for his controversial book condemning slavery in the Philippines, was apparently comfortable with the use of physical violence to discipline domestic servants. He described beating his servant as a means to teach him more ‘moral’ behaviour. He believed that Filipinos were inclined to lie and did so without any sense of moral guilt. He recalled a time when one of his servants ‘sulked for days because I had beaten him for telling me a most inexcusable lie’.118 On a separate occasion, the servant, believing that he had done something wrong, presented Worcester with a rattan cane and asked him ‘to give him his whipping then, as it made him nervous to wait, and he wanted to have it over with!’119 Worcester sought to justify his behaviour, arguing, ‘Too much kindness is very likely to spoil him, and he thinks more of a master who applies the rattan vigorously, when it is deserved, than of one who does not.’120 Under the British imperial system extreme violence was seen to ‘bring the authority of the Crown into disrepute’ and was at least in theory subject to legal intervention by the early twentieth century. As Fae Dussart has explored

Greg Bankoff, ‘ “These Brother of Ours”: Poblete’s Obreros and the Road to Baguio 1903–5’, Journal of Social History 38, no. 4 (2005): 1054. 117 Dean C. Worcester, The Philippine Islands and Their People (New York: Macmillan, 1898), 476. 118 Ibid., 476–7. 119 Ibid., 477. 120 Dean C. Worcester, Slavery and Peonage in the Philippine Islands (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1913). 116

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with respect to British India, in practice British employers were frequently violent towards their servants with little concern for legal sanctions.121 We can judge from the casual manner in which beatings in the Philippines were discussed, that many employers did not regard such punishment as being in contravention of the law or in opposition to the American ‘civilizing mission’. Other Americans recognized the contradictions, but blamed the local culture for the mistreatment of servants. Dwight Webster Longfellow, who worked as a Civil Engineer employed by the Philippines government to build roads in Capiz on Panay Island from 1908 to 1911, described violence as a common occurrence.122 In a letter home he maintained that Americans learned to be ‘despots’ in the Philippines, treating their servants as virtual ‘slaves’ and using physical violence as necessary. He wrote: ‘The man of the house here made a good servant out of a very poor one by the end of a good whip and his fists.’ Longfellow insisted that it was necessary to treat them this way lest ‘they begin to run things themselves’.123 The use of violence extended even to those American teachers who had come to the Philippines with philanthropic motives.124 Herbert Priestley, who was living in Luzon in the early years of American occupation, described his regular use of physical violence. Signing off one letter to his mother in America, he casually remarked:  ‘The ubiquitous muchacho is banging around my chair with his broom, so I must give him full swing.’125 In a more sustained attack, he described going to the billiards hall to bring the servants home to prepare his supper, where he kicked and beat his ‘boy’ Juan, explaining, I believe it isn’t the custom in America to kick the servants upon their sitters, but it is done here occasionally upon just provocation. It would be nicer to pay them off and let them go in peace, but here they are so scarce that you can’t fire them. One of them I laid down on the floor, or rather requested him to prostrate himself, stern uppermost – which much undervalued portion of the anatomy I then proceeded to belabor with a stick.126 Fae Dussart, ‘ “Strictly Legal Means”:  Assault, Abuse and the Limits of Acceptable Behaviour in the Servant/Employer Relationship in Metropole and Colony 1850–1890’, in Colonization and Domestic Service: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Victoria Haskins and Claire Lowrie (New York: Routledge, 2015), 157–66; Martin J. Wiener, An Empire on Trial, Race, Murder, and Justice under British Rule, 1870–1935 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 18. 122 Longfellow, Letter from the Philippines, 8. 123 Ibid., 72. 124 For more on teachers and violence, see Steinbock-Pratt, ‘We Were All Robinson Crusoes’, 382–4. 125 BANC, Priestley, Letter to Mother, 4 October 1903, Priestley Papers, box 1, folder 1:26. 126 Ibid., 25 January 1903, Priestley Papers, box 1, folder 1:18. 121



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Priestley wrote that the ‘boy’s sensitive nature seems injured’ but went on to reassure his mother that Juan was still working for them and was ‘happy’, despite being fined one peso from his monthly wage of eight pesos. The suggestion here is that this level of violence, though not part of American home culture, had become a part of American colonial culture as it was played out in the occupation of the Philippines, where colonial rule encouraged violence as a form of ‘discipline’. Priestley again tried to justify his treatment of servants to his mother, arguing that even his wife, Bess, used physical force: You should come to Caceres to learn to get  along with poor house help. You would either do that or become very profane. If you could see the gentle Mrs Priestley ‘land with a right hander’ on the cheek of a sinfully perverse cook you would realise that the provocation must be serious. Yet such is the terrible truth.127

When their cook Felix was away sick, Priestley expected the ‘boy’ to take over the cooking but beat him when he failed to perform this function properly. He accused him of being ‘wilfully and stupidly perverse’ and wrote that he ‘would kill us with lard’ if they did not watch him. Again, those living in America could not appreciate such challenges, for ‘the stupidest American hired girl couldn’t be more provoking’. He went on:  ‘I slapped him over soundly this morning, which resuscitated his energy and obedience somewhat, but during the transaction he spilled some hot water on his hand, and so is feigning being disabled by it.’128 In Worcester’s accounts, the use of a rattan cane was framed as a formalized punishment and one to which both master and servant ‘resigned’ themselves. In Priestley’s account too, it is clear that violence was considered to be integral to servant management. At the same time, however, it is apparent that Priestley often acted in frenzied anger on the spur of the moment. Suffering from a nervous condition he blamed on the climate, Priestley decided to leave the Philippines the following year.129 Far from being ashamed of the use of violence, similarly with British employers in India, many Americans seemed determined to prove their right to be colonial masters by demonstrating ‘strict’ discipline.130 Dauncey, as an English woman, had initially written with disapproval of the excessively lenient style of American rule over Filipinos, described here as Malays: Ibid., 5 July 1903, Priestley Papers, box 1, folder 1:24. 128 Ibid., 21 June 1903, Priestley Papers, box 1, folder 1:23. 129 Anderson, Colonial Pathologies, 137. 130 Dussart, ‘Strictly Legal Means’, 158–9, 166–7. 127

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I am told that the United States does not pose as either ‘white’ or ‘ruling’ in these islands, preferring, instead, to proclaim Equality, which seems a very strange way to treat Malays . . .I only hope it won’t mean that we shall have unmanageable servants and impudence to put up with.131

Army wife Caroline Shunk, however, expressed annoyance that the British should regard themselves as the stricter colonial masters. She wrote defensively, ‘It is with pride that I say that, after ten years of American rule, no one living in Manila . . .would think of putting up with the insults and threats with which the drivers of public conveyances and beggars browbeat all visitors to Hong-Kong.’132 Moses was similarly of the opinion that ‘impertinence’ could not be tolerated and was upset that Americans had a reputation for ‘spoiling’ their servants. She recalled with some disapproval, that in the homes of Filipino masters, servants were permitted to argue with their employers, even in front of company.133 Curiously, towards the end of her stay in the Philippines, Dauncey’s attitude shifted towards the American style of rule, now arguing the case for politeness over harshness: All round I  hear stories of the miseries and horrors people go through with their Filipino servants, and ‘the inevitable muchacho’ is a standard joke in the American papers. But our retainers just jog along in perfect peace . . . I must take a little credit to myself too, for having treated them with the utmost consideration and politeness, showing them things patiently over and over again, and never once speaking sharply or angrily.134

As she left the Philippines she wondered how her servants would cope ‘with the impatience and curses with which the average white man thinks he impresses his dignity upon the coloured person’.135 Dauncey’s initial notion of American respect for servants was something of a myth in the Philippines, and it seems that with time she came to understand that.

Conclusion Like the British and Spanish colonists before them, Americans in the Philippines employed an entourage of live-in domestic servants and favoured Chinese Dauncey, An Englishwoman in the Philippines, 13. 132 Shunk, An Army Woman, 153. 133 Moses, Unofficial Letters, 347–8. 134 Dauncey, An Englishwoman in the Philippines, 192. 135 Ibid., 344. 131



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servants in particular. In some respects they were obliged to adapt to the culinary practices and domestic cultures of their servants. Chinese and Filipino servants found ways of asserting not only their cultural power in the home but also their economic power. Most successful in this unequal negotiation were Chinese servants who demanded relatively high wages. Filipino servants were more likely to opt to leave the job when conditions became unfavourable or to find alternative means to seek remuneration from their employers. American home life, with its own cultures of domestic service, was not easily transposed to the colonial setting, and it was inevitable that some degree of negotiation and adaptation was required. American colonists exhibited a marked degree of self-reflection in their writings, most apparent in the first decade of the twentieth century when they were most conscious of having to justify their role in this new colonial conquest, both in terms of their relationship to the indigenous peoples and in the inevitable comparison between their own traditions and the pre-existing colonial traditions. Written impressions of life in the colonial home range from accounts of overt delight about the luxury of living with an entourage of servants, to those when doubt and defensiveness come to the surface. The new responsibility for the well-being of servants was often portrayed as a burden that might prove to be their undoing. Repeatedly we read admissions of the ‘terrible truth’ of their intimate encounters with Chinese and Filipino men; confessions of intolerance, of frustration and of physical abuse. Inevitably, the blame was turned around so that the climate, the culture and the people of the Philippines were held responsible for any cracks that appeared in the smooth façade of American domestic colonial power.

4

Colonial Patriarchy and Representations of Masculinity in Photographs of Domestic Workers

In the previous chapters, our analysis of North Australia, Fiji and the Philippines suggests that masters and mistresses shared the recognition that colonial power relations could be challenged and reinforced through everyday engagements with servants in the intimate setting of the home. The home was an unusual contact zone, in that what were private interactions were in some cases brought into the public arena through the publication of personal memoirs. Photographs were another important means by which stories of colonial intimacy were shared with an international audience. Photographers were mobile professionals who operated in multiple colonies.1 The photographs that they produced, along with those produced by amateurs as cameras became affordable from the turn of the twentieth century, circulated between colonies and from colony to metropole. Photographs travelled in letters home and within private photograph albums. They also moved as postcards, as part of museum exhibits and in published photographic collections, memoirs and travel brochures.2 Within the colonial archives of Southeast Asia, northern Australia and British Columbia, photographs depicting Asian and indigenous ‘houseboys’ tending to their white colonial employers or poised ready to serve an unseen master abound. Studio photographs and amateur snaps alike were often carefully Gretchen Lui, From the Family Album:  Portraits from the Lee Bros Studio, Singapore, 1910–1925 (Singapore: National Heritage Board, 1995), 6; Roberta Wue, ‘Picturing Hong Kong: Photography through Practice and Function’, in Picturing Hong Kong: Photography 1855–1910, ed. Roberta Wue (New York: Asia Society Galleries, 1997), 28; Karen Strassler, ‘Modelling Modernity: Ethnic Chinese Photography in the Ethical Era’, in Photography, Modernity and the Governed in Late-Colonial Indonesia, ed. Susie Protschky (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015), 201. 2 Jane Lydon, Eye Contact:  Photographing Indigenous Australians (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2005), 6; Wue, ‘Picturing Hong Kong’, 28, 34–9; Pamela Pattynama, ‘Interracial Unions and the Ethical Policy: The Representation of the Everyday in Indo-European Family Photo Albums’, in Photography, Modernity and the Governed in Late Colonial Indonesia, ed. Susie Protschky (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015), 139. 1

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choreographed (including with props) and thoughtfully captioned. The selfconscious arrangement of these images worked to reinforce colonial power relations by naturalizing displays of white mastery and devoted native servitude. The production of photographs, sketches and paintings of domestic servants in Britain and Europe indicate that this tactic of colonial rule had its roots in class-based forms of oppression.3 Whereas white colonists frequently depicted domestic workers as ‘boys’, visual representations of male servants suggest that most were adults. Colonial photographs offer opportunities to probe multiple viewpoints, mixed messages and hidden scripts, through which such men can be understood also as father figures, workers with significant authority and status, husbands and gentlemen.4 At the same time, photographs of male servants highlight the potential of intimate service performed for masters, mistresses or children to destabilize or at least blur colonial hierarchies and divisions. A number of historians have explored the visual representation of female servants in colonial and metropolitan contexts.5 The historical photography of male servants, however, has been almost entirely neglected.6 This chapter addresses this gap by analysing photographs of male servants from a number of colonial locations across Asia and the Pacific taken or commissioned by their white employers. While not the focus of this chapter, photographs of servants employed by Asian and indigenous elites also exist.7 These sources, notably for the Netherlands East Indies, are beginning to attract historical analysis.8 3 See, for example, the illustrations throughout the following:  Carolyn Steedman, Labours Lost:  Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2009); Sarah Maza, Servants and Masters in Eighteenth-Century France: The Uses of Loyalty (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983). 4 Christopher Pinney, ‘Introduction: “How the Other Half . . .” ’, in Photography’s Other Histories, ed. Christopher Pinney and Nicolas Peterson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 6–7. 5 See, for example, Michael Aird, ‘Tactics of Survival: Images of Aboriginal Women and Domestic Service’, in Colonization and Domestic Service: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives, ed. Victoria Haskins and Claire Lowrie (New York: Routledge, 2015), 182–90; Suzanne Conway, ‘Ayah, CareGiver to Anglo-Indian Children, c.  1750–1947’, in Children, Childhood and Youth in the British World, ed. Shirleene Robinson and Simon Sleight (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 41–58; Kenneth Gaw, Superior Servants: The Legendary Cantonese Amahs of the Far East (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1988); Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather:  Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 132–81. 6 An exception is Claire Lowrie, ‘ “What a Picture Can Do”:  Contests of Colonial Mastery in Photographs of Asian “Houseboys” from Southeast Asia and Northern Australia, 1880s–1920s’, Modern Asian Studies 52, no. 4 (2018): 1279–315. 7 See, for example, Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, University of Leiden, Netherlands (hereafter KITLV), Studio Portrait of a Chinese Girl with Her Babu, Surabaya, Java, c. 1925, photographer: Wah Sun, 179510; Hong Kong Museum of History (hereafter HKMH), Servant Girls (‘Mui Tsai’), Hong Kong, c.  1910–20, P1998.337; National Museum of Singapore (hereafter NMS), Chinese Lady with Her Child and Amah, Singapore, c. 1910, ACC-94728. 8 See Susie Protschky, ed. Photography, Modernity and the Governed in Late-Colonial Indonesia (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015).



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By focussing on visual evidence, this chapter is able to illuminate the subtle constructions of gender, masculinity and sexuality within the domestic service relationship. It also illustrates how visions of masculine authority were shaped not only by the perceptions and anxieties of white colonizers but also by colonized men as the active subjects of photographs. As we note throughout this book, first-hand accounts from male domestic workers are rare, making it difficult to understand how these men saw themselves.9 Nonetheless, as historians of photography have long argued, photographs are products of (unequal) negotiation between the photographer, the subject of the image and the viewer. As such, a degree of domestic worker agency, ranging from pose, facial expression, or attire, can be discerned in even the most choreographed photograph.10 Furthermore, rare photographs commissioned by domestic workers themselves provide additional opportunities to consider the attempts of workers to represent themselves on their own terms. Domestic workers also occasionally took photographs of their employer’s children or other workers employed in the home, offering further insights into the ways in which household employees related to each other. This chapter brings ‘into focus’ the stories of domestic workers as far as possible and seeks to draw out broader patterns and implications through reference to colonial memoirs, newspapers and a range of secondary literature.11 The analysis of images of male domestic workers across six colonial sites has been made possible by the mass digitization of historical photographs in the last fifteen years and the open access to these images provided by archives and museums. More than 1,000 photographs were surveyed for this chapter, with seventy-four analysed in detail and fourteen reproduced here.12 Digitized photographs are an elusive source material to work with in that they are often 9 The National Archives of Singapore holds two interviews with Chinese men who worked as servants and one with a Malay man who worked as a driver. More interviews with male servants have been conducted, but they are not available to researchers. Ann Stoler and Karen Strassler, for example, conducted three interviews with former Javanese male servants in the 1990s. In the early 1970s, Charles Mow interviewed about ten Chinese men who worked as domestic servants on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Hong Kong University’s Oral History Archive has four interviews with former Chinese female servants but none with Chinese male servants employed in private homes. The Northern Territory Archives Service holds at least three interviews with former Aboriginal female servants but none with Chinese or Aboriginal male servants. We could not locate any oral history collections for the Philippines. 10 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 2, 6, 10; Lydon, Eye Contact, 2, 5, 32. 11 Michael Aird, ‘Growing Up with Aborigines’, in Photography’s Other Histories, ed. Christopher Pinney and Nicolas Peterson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 25. 12 These include twenty-one photographs from the Northern Territory, seventeen from the Netherlands East Indies, twelve from Singapore, ten from the Philippines, eight from British Columbia and six from Hong Kong.

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catalogued with only a date and a description. Information about the origins of the images or their intended purpose is hard to come by. Nonetheless, as this chapter shows, professional and amateur photographs of male domestic workers have the potential to provide rich insights into the way employers and domestic workers saw themselves and wanted to be seen.

Colonialism and domestic service in Southeast Asia, the Northern Territory and British Columbia This chapter draws on examples of photographs from six colonial sites to highlight shared notions of status and masculinity that permeated domestic service relations in colonial history. Two of these sites, British Columbia and Australia’s Northern Territory, were nominally part of settler colonies and were established in 1866 and 1869, respectively. While we usually associate settler colonization with British settlement and the dispossession of the indigenous populations, both these colonies were characterized by their small, maledominated white populations, large Aboriginal populations and significant mixed-race communities.13 As a tropical colony, the Northern Territory was even further removed from the settler colony model. From the early nineteenth century up until the 1930s, western scientific convention was divided on whether or not the ‘white race’ could not settle permanently outside of the temperate regions of the world.14 The other sites considered are the British colonies of Singapore and Hong Kong; the American Philippines; and the Netherlands East Indies, each so-called exploitation colonies which maintained small white populations living alongside large indigenous populations and relying heavily on immigrant labour. These colonies varied considerably in terms of the duration of occupation. The colonization of the Netherlands East Indies began in 1619 when the Dutch East India Company or VOC established a trading colony Daiva Stasiulis and Nira Yuval-Davis, ‘Introduction:  Beyond Dichotomies’, in Unsettling Settler Societies: Articulations of Gender, Race, Ethnicity and Class, ed. Daiva Stasiulis and Nira Yuval-Davis (London:  Sage, 1995), 3; Adele Perry, ‘The State of Empire:  Reproducing Colonialism in British Columbia, 1849–1871’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 2, no. 2 (2001); Henry Reynolds, North of Capricorn:  The Untold Story of Australia’s North (Crows Nest:  Allen and Unwin, 2003), vii–xvi. 14 Warwick Anderson, ‘Immunities of Empire: Race, Disease, and the New Tropical Medicine, 1900– 1920’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 70, no. 1 (1996):  94–118; Alison Bashford, ‘ “Is White Australia Possible?” Race, Colonialism and Tropical Medicine’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 23, no. 2 (2000): 248–71. 13



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Table 4.1  Numbers of servants and proportion of male servants for British Columbia, the Philippines, the Northern Territory of Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong and the Netherlands East Indies Location

Year

Total no. of Total no. of servants male servants

Male servants by percentage

Cities of Victoria and Vancouver, and Vancouver Island Philippines Northern Territory Singapore Hong Kong Netherlands East Indies

1901

1,624

1,192

73

1903 1911 1921 1921 1930

571,955 156 19,369 37,626 343,051

431,388 95 12,354 21,433 138,119

75 61 64 57 40

Based on census data.15

in the port city of Batavia (Jakarta). By 1800 the Dutch government had gained control of most of Java and by the 1870s they were actively expanding their colonial presence.16 Singapore was secured by the British through the negotiation of a treaty with the Sultan of Johore in 1819. The trading port came under centralized London administration when it became a Crown Colony in 1867. Hong Kong was first occupied by the Britain in 1841 and formally ceded to Britain as a colonial possession in 1843.17 As discussed in Chapter 3, the American presence in the Philippines was unusual in that they occupied the islands following the Spanish–American War of 1898 and were thus living in a society that had been a Spanish colony since 1521. As shown in Table 4.1, the two non-British colonies of the Netherlands East Indies and the Philippines had by far the largest populations of male domestic workers in the

The census data for the Northern Territory is complicated by the fact that the so-called full-blood Aboriginal population was not counted in the census, and as a result the substantial numbers of Aboriginal male and female servants who were employed in the Northern Territory are not accounted for. See City of Victoria and Vancouver Island 1901 Census, http://vihistory.ca/search/ searchcensusocc.php?show=y&year=1901 (accessed 28 November 2016); Census of the Philippine Islands 1903: Volume II Population (Washington, DC: United States Bureau of the Census, 1905), 933–4, 894; G. H. Knibbs, Census of the Commonwealth of Australia 1911: Part XII Occupations, 1300, 1314; J. E. Nathan, The Census of British Malaya 1921 (London: Waterlow, 1922), 239; Hong Kong: Report on the Census of the Colony for 1921, University of Hong Kong, Sessional Paper, 1921, 217, 183; G. H. Knibbs, Census of the Commonwealth of Australia 1911: Part I Ages, 6, 8; Census of 1930 in Netherlands India, Volume VIII: Summary of the Volumes I–VII (Batavia: Department for Economic Affairs, 1936), 124–5. 16 Adrian Vickers, A History of Modern Indonesia (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2005), 9, 13–14. 17 Elizabeth Sinn, Pacific Crossing: California Gold, Chinese Migration and the Making of Hong Kong (Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press, 2013), 12. 15

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early twentieth century and the Philippines also had the largest percentage of male servants compared to female servants.

Surrogate fathers and absent mothers: Representations of colonial parenthood In temperate and tropical colonies child care was the primary domain of female servants including ayahs, amahs and nursemaids, along with the children’s mothers. Perhaps unsurprisingly then, there are numerous photographs in archival repositories of Asian and indigenous female servants with children.18 Nonetheless, photographs of male servants with children illustrate that colonized men played at least a supporting role in childcare.19 Photographs of Indian men caring for children confirm our assertion in Chapter  1 that male servants sometimes worked as child-carers in British and Indian homes in India.20 African ‘nanny boys’ outnumbered women in paid childcare in colonial South Africa and Zimbabwe.21 Vietnamese men were hired as carers to children in French homes in Indochina.22 In the temperate settler colony of British Columbia, Chinese men were also entrusted with childcare duties particularly in large families. Thus, thirty-year-old Chi Jim, who was employed in Chilliwack in British Columbia in 1901, shared the burden of caring for Percival Lindsay’s ten children with the children’s mother.23 Figure  4.1, a carefully constructed studio photograph of an unnamed Chinese male servant 18 See, for example, KITLV, Babu with Three Children, Netherlands East Indies, c. 1905, 86058; Northern Territory Library (hereafter NTL), Jim and His Mother’s Aboriginal Servant, c.  1910s, John Oxley Library Collection, PH0171/0048; National Archives of Singapore (hereafter NAS), Chinese Amah with Her Charge, Singapore, 1930, ACC 94402; HKMH, Francis Charles Alfred Cornwall, with His Amah (nursemaid), Hong Kong, 1932, P1997.6. 19 See Figures  4.4–4.7 in this chapter; and Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power:  Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 2002), 171; Karen Hansen, Distant Companions:  Servants and Employers in Zambia, 1900–1985 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 152. 20 ‘British Voices from South Asia Exhibition’, Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State University, 8 April–6 August 1996, www.lib.lsu.edu/sites/all/files/sc/exhibits/e-exhibits/india/px3d8.jpg (accessed 20 March 2018). See also Raka Ray, ‘Masculinity, Femininity and Servitude:  Domestic Workers in Calcutta in the Late Twentieth Century’, Feminist Studies 26, no. 3 (2000): 697. 21 Charles van Onselen, Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersand 1886–1914, 2 New Nineveh (New  York:  Longman, 1982), 27–9; Karen Hansen, ‘Household Work as a Man’s Job: Sex and Gender in Domestic Service in Zambia’, Anthropology Today 2, no. 3 (1986): 18. 22 David Pomfret, Youth and Empire:  Transcolonial Childhoods in British and French Asia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), 63. 23 Chad Reimer, Chilliwack’s Chinatowns:  A History (Vancouver:  Initiative for Student Teaching and Research in Chinese Canadian Studies and Chinese Canadian Historical Society of British Columbia, 2011), 57.



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Figure 4.1  A Chinese male servant in the household of Lister Smith with Smith’s son William, Chilliwack, 1896. Chilliwack Museum and Archives, P Coll 120 No. 46.

holding an infant William Smith, suggests that this arrangement was not uncommon. Similarly choreographed studio images of Chinese male servants were produced in Singapore during the same period, including Figures 4.7 and 7.1. Such images were often sold as postcards or within albums, satisfying the appetite of metropolitan audiences for depictions of the exotic and unusual nature of life in tropical colonies.24 The circulation of studio photographs of seemingly 24 McClintock, Imperial Leather, 123; Anneke Groeneveld, Toekang Potret: 100 Years of Photography in the Dutch East Indies, 1839–1939 (Amsterdam: Fragment Uitgeverij, 1989), 36.

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devoted Asian male servants provided a means through which the power of the colonizers could be captured and preserved, with white superiority presented as objective ‘fact’.25 Yet in Figure 4.1 the young Chinese man’s self-assured stare down the lens of the camera and his confident cradling of the child suggests a nurturing role more akin to that of a surrogate father. The painted landscape in the background illustrates how photographs of male servants and children were strongly influenced by older traditions of painted portraiture. As we have seen in Chapter 1, male domestic servants were portrayed in paintings from India and Southeast Asia. Paintings of servants with children in their care were produced in India, the United States and Australia.26 In Figure  4.2, a Chinese male servant with a child in Singapore adopts an almost identical position to that assumed by the servant in Figure  4.1. Figure  4.2 is less stylized and was produced more than thirty years later. Emphasis on the male servant as a provider of fatherly care and protection is illustrated by the overlaid hands of the man and the child. The child is dressed in traditional Malay attire with a Bugis-style sarong.27 Photographs of British men in Singapore dressed in Malay sarongs and of Dutch women in Netherlands East Indies in Javanese kain kebaya (batik skirt and long sleeved blouse) or Dutch men in batik trousers were not uncommon.28 While these costumes were fairly standard attire for Dutch and British colonists relaxing at home, they nonetheless represent a slippage between European and ‘native’ ways of life.29 Colonial authorities and social commentators lamented the perceived potential of Asian servants to racially and culturally ‘contaminate’ white children, but this photograph suggests a sense of pleasure in the process of ‘dressing up’.30 Rafael, White Love, 77; Victoria Haskins, ‘Her Old Ayah:  The Transcolonial Significance of the Indian Domestic Worker in India and Australia’, in Responding to the West, ed. Hans Hägerdal (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), 103, 114. 26 See Sir Joshua Reynolds’s paintings of Indian ayahs from the 1860s; Thomas Waterman Wood’s paintings of African American ‘mammies’; and Robert Dowling’s ‘Masters George, William and Miss Harriet Ware with the Aborigine Jamie Ware’, 1856. Conway, ‘Ayah, Care-Giver to AngloIndian Children’, 41–8; Elizabeth O’Leary, At Beck and Call:  The Representations of Domestic Servants in Nineteenth Century American Painting (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996), 183–4. 27 The authors wish to thank Adrian Vickers for identifying the sarong. 28 NAS, Englishmen and Servants, c.  1900, Boden-Kloss Collection, ACC 606; KITLV, Europeans Drink Tea in the Garden of a House in the Netherlands East Indies, c. 1890, 151433; KITLV, Drill Master De Vries and Mr Van Gastel of the Mueara Knini Petroleum Company with Clerk to Babat Near Sekajoe, Netherlands East Indies, 1900, 150764. 29 Jean Gelman-Taylor, ‘Costume and Gender in Colonial Java, 1800–1940’, in Outward Appearances: Dressing State and Society in Indonesia, ed. Henk Schulte Nordholt (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1997), 90, 95, 103–4. 30 Stoler, Carnal Knowledge, 116–33; Pomfret, Youth and Empire, 55–7, 63. 25



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Figure  4.2 A male servant with a European child, Singapore, 1930. J.  A. Bennett Collection, courtesy of the National Archives of Singapore, 19980005147-005.

The outdoors setting indicates that the photograph was taken by an amateur, perhaps even the child’s parent. The protective and even fatherly position which the male servant adopts testifies to the possibility of affectionate relations, suggestions of which are also evoked in the memoirs of children raised in the colonies.31 Rather than a comment on the troubling nature of the colonial venture then, the photograph depicts the colonial home and colonialism itself as a familial and even kindly cultural encounter. Ann Laura Stoler and Karen Strassler, ‘Memory-Work in Java:  A Cautionary Tale’, in Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power. 31

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Memoirs written by white women who employed male servants also emphasized the fatherly role that these men played in their lives. Reflecting on her time on Elsey Station in the Northern Territory, Jeanie Gunn described how her Chinese cook, Hong Pak Cheon, constantly patronized her and refused to ‘be instructed’, acting as ‘a born ruler’ and ‘master’. She noted that he worked hard to ‘protect her from everything’.32 In 1940s Singapore, Francis Beresford had a similar experience with her Chinese cook, Wong. As she explained: ‘He was known as the Boy, but he was the Father of the House, and he knew it.’ Beresford lived in a ‘mess’ (a share house) with another young woman in postwar Singapore. Perhaps in part because of their youth and single status, Wong took on the role of a parent, insisting that they ate whatever he put in front of them, attending to them when they were sick, and keeping ‘vigil at the sittingroom window’ to await their return at night.33 While Beresford and Gunn reflected on the paternalism of their Chinese servants in nostalgic (if at times condescending) terms, other white mistresses were not so positive. In accounts from British Malaya and Hong Kong, British women complained about their Chinese and Malay servants’ disregard of their orders. They maintained that the insolence of male servants was symptomatic of a patriarchal disregard for women.34 The visual and literary depictions of male servants as surrogate fathers to white children and (occasionally) as patriarchs of the household, raise questions about the role of white fathers in the home and the colony. Colonialism had been envisioned in paternalistic terms as a ‘white man’s burden’, with white middleclass men of British and European heritage tasked with the responsibility of bringing ‘civilized’ advancement and rationality to ‘child-like’ and ‘primitive’ people.35 In this context, one would expect that photographs which portrayed Asian and indigenous men as father figures may have been confronting for white colonial audiences. In Britain and Europe during the eighteenth century the male employer of servants was envisioned as a pater familias who extended fatherly care to his Aeneas Gunn, We of the Never-Never (London: Hutchinson, 1908), 51. 33 Francis Beresford, ‘Mr Wong:  Gentleman’s Gentleman’, Straits Times, 7 September 1948; Francis Beresford, ‘Life on One Cent a Minute in Singapore’, Straits Times, 6 May 1948. 34 Emily Innes, The Cheronese with the Gilding Off (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1974), 19, 21; ‘Untitled’, Straits Times, 25 January 1904; Andrea Sankar, ‘The Evolution of the Sisterhood in Traditional Chinese Society: From Village Girls’ Houses to Chai T’angs in Hong Kong’ (PhD diss., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1978), 138–9. 35 John Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth Century Britain: Essays on Gender, Family and Empire (New York: Pearson Longman, 2005), 193; Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization:  A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 1995), 42. 32



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servants.36 In the colonial context, male employers sometimes adopted this kind of paternalistic approach to their servants.37 From the late nineteenth century, however, British and European conceptions of masculinity set it apart from domesticity, a development that was felt across the colonial world. While the presence of a male head of the household was still considered essential for practical and moral reasons, the management of the home was the purview of the mistress.38 White paternalism remained a focus of the rhetoric of colonialism in exploitation and settler colonies well into the twentieth century. However, it was usually envisioned in terms of governance and administration.39 It was perhaps for this reason that white fathers seem to have escaped moral judgement for allowing servants to play a role in raising their children. In contrast to white men, white women who relied on servants for childcare in Southeast Asia and in other colonies such as South Africa were regularly condemned in the local press and in popular fiction for neglecting their primary occupation as mothers.40 In the Northern Territory, where domestic servants were less readily available, white Australian women were rarely condemned for neglecting their domestic responsibilities. Yet here too there was a large degree of discussion about the childrearing and homemaking practices adopted by white women. Politicians anxious to build a thriving white Australian nation lamented the perceived inability of settler women to cope with the climate and raise their children without becoming ‘wan, old, weary and unhealthy at thirty’.41 In the context of the marked social expectations of white women in the home it is perhaps not surprising that those who chose to outsource childcare were judged harshly. From the late nineteenth century, imperialist and nationalist rhetoric began to emphasize the ‘special role’ of white women in the colonization Cissie Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies: Servants and Their Masters in Old Regime France (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 139, 145; Tim Meldrum, Domestic Service and Gender 1660–1750: Life and Work in the London Household (London: Routledge, 2014), 37. 37 Stoler and Strassler, ‘Memory-Work in Java’, 183–4. 38 Karen Harvey, ‘Men Making Home: Masculinity and Domesticity in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Gender & History 21, no. 3 (2009): 522–3; Cecilia Leong-Salobir, Food Culture in Colonial Asia: A Taste of Empire (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2011), 67–70. 39 Warwick Anderson,‘The Trespass Speaks: White Masculinity and Colonial Breakdown’, American Historical Review 102, no. 5 (1997):  1346–7; Elsbeth Locher-Scholten, Women and the Colonial State: Essays on Gender and Modernity in the Netherlands Indies, 1900–1942 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000), 16–18; Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the Question of Racial Equality (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008), 348. 40 See, for example, ‘They’re “Fine Ladies” – East of Suez – and So Helpless’, Straits Times, 23 September 1937. For Africa, see Jeremy Martens, ‘Settler Homes, Manhood and “Houseboys”: An Analysis of Natal’s Rape Scare of 1886’, Journal of Southern African Studies 28, no. 2 (2002): 396–7. 41 NAA (Darwin), ‘Letter to the Hon. Minister for Home and Territories from H. Gregory’, 23 March 1920, A1/15, 1920/6227; Claire Lowrie, Masters and Servants:  Cultures of Empire in the Tropics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 138–42. 36

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process. As wives to white men, mothers to white children and as mistresses to Asian and indigenous servants, white women were envisioned as maintaining white prestige in the exploitation colonies of Southeast Asia and building new white nations in British Columbia and the Northern Territory.42 In most photographs of male servants and children, including Figures  4.1–4.4, white mothers are noticeably absent. At least in the Singaporean context, the reliance on servants was perhaps not a source of shame for colonial mothers. While public condemnation of so-called idle memsahibs was rife, other social commentators were quick to point out the practical challenges of child-rearing on the colonial frontier and the necessity of white women’s access to domestic labour.43 The family photographs of Jean A.  Austin provide further clues about the way white women saw their contribution to the colonial venture. Austin (nee Gilruth) was the daughter of the first Commonwealth Administrator of the Northern Territory, Dr John Gilruth, whose post spanned from 1911 to 1918. Included within the Austin collection are photographs of the youngest Gilruth child, Margaret, in the care of the Aboriginal gardener and general servant, Billy Shephard, and the Chinese dhobie (laundry man), Ah How. In at least four photographs, including Figures  4.3 and 4.4, these men are pictured with Margaret as she goes about her day, with Billy accompanying the child on her daily ride.44 An additional photograph of Billy and Margaret smiling atop a horse can be found within the Helena Wayne collections held at Oxford University’s Pitt River Museum. Wayne was the daughter of the Gilruth children’s governess, Elsie Masson, and it was Masson who took the images in this collection during her time in the Northern Territory between 1912 and 1914.45 It is likely that the images within the Austin collection, including Figures 4.3 and 4.4 were also taken by Masson.46 Rafael, ‘Colonial Domesticity’; Adele Perry, On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race and the Making of British Columbia, 1849–1871 (Toronto:  University of Toronto Press, 2004), 139–93; LocherScholten, ‘So Close Yet So Far’, 143; Marilyn Lake, ‘Frontier Feminism and the Marauding White Man’, Journal of Australian Studies 20, no. 49 (1996): 14–15. 43 John Butcher, The British in Malaya, 1880–1941: The Social History of a European Community in Colonial South-East Asia (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1979), 79–80. 44 See also NTL, Margaret Gilruth Sitting on Steps Outside Government House with Straw Bonnet and China Doll. Aboriginal maid servant and Billy Shepherd also in picture, Darwin, c. 1912, Jean A.  Austin Collection, PH0412/0019; NTL, Shephard, Dobie (Ah How?) and Margaret Gilruth Washing Verandah at Government House, Darwin, c. 1911–12, PH0190/0012. 45 PRM, Margaret Gilruth on Horse Near Gate with Servant, Sheppard, Darwin, c.  1912–14, photographer: Elsie Rosaline Masson, Helena Wayne Collection, University of Oxford, 1998.306.41.1. 46 This assertion is based on the same images appearing in the Austin and Wayne collections and the similar conclusion made by Jane Lydon. See, for example, PRM, ‘Dobie Ah How’, Darwin, c.  1912–14, photographer:  Elsie Rosaline Masson, Helena Wayne Collection, University of 42



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Figure 4.3  Billy Shepherd holding hand of Margaret Gilruth; ready to go on their daily horse-ride, Darwin, c. 1911–12. Jean A. Austin Collection, Northern Territory Library, PH0190/0021.

Masson went on to write a memoir about her time in the Northern Territory, published in London in 1915, which included recollections of domestic servants recounted in Chapter 2, and also featured a number of photographs of domestic servants.47 Despite Masson’s absence from Figures  4.3 and 4.4, when viewers Oxford, 1998.306.48.1; NTL, Chinese Servant Kneeling on Step Outside Government House, Darwin, c. 1911–18, Jean A. Austin Collection, PH0412/0007. See also Jane Lydon, Photography, Humanitarianism, Empire (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 83. 47 Elsie Masson, An Untamed Territory:  The Northern Territory of Australia (London:  Macmillan, 1915), 48–9.

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Figure  4.4 A young servant poses beside Margaret Gilruth seated in a window opening of Government House, Darwin, c. 1912. Jean A. Austin Collection, Northern Territory Library, PH0412/0011.48

observed Margaret Gilruth in close proximity to Asian and Aboriginal men, riding horses in ‘untamed land’ and encountering exotic wildlife (note the feathers in Figure 4.4), they would have known that Masson accompanied her, watching over her white charge while also being engaged in a colonial adventure. If we

48 Ah How is described by name in only one of the photographs with Margaret. We have ascertained his identity from a study of other photographs in which he is named. See, for example, Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (hereafter PRM), Dobie (Ah How), Darwin, May 1913, photographer: Elsie Rosaline Masson, Helena Wayne Collection, 1998.306.11.



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Figure 4.5  An American woman and a servant outside house, c. 1910–15. Philippines, Japan, and China Travel Album, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan, PHLH074.

turn our attention away from the symbolic significance of parenthood within colonial societies and to questions of sexuality, the absence of white women in photographs with male servants assumes a rather different significance.

Averted gazes: Photography and the secret lives of servants White mistresses and male servants worked together closely in the colonial home planning meals, marketing, budgeting and, as we have seen, caring for children.49 Yet they were almost never photographed together. Figure 4.5, a picture of an American woman with a Chinese male servant, is the only photograph that we have seen that depicts a white woman alone with a male servant.50 Significantly

Leong-Salobir, Food Culture, 64–5. 50 In another photograph in this collection the same American woman is pictured with an older white woman and a different Chinese servant, possibly a gardener. SCL, Two American Women and a Local Man in the Garden, c. 1910–15, Philippines, Japan and China Travel Album, PHLH070. 49

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Figure 4.6  A Dutch family having tea in a living-room, Netherlands East Indies, 1921. Dudok de Wit, L. C. Collection, University of Leiden, Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, 116969.

the woman, formally attired with hat and gloves, stands physically apart from the Chinese man. On the few occasions when white women were pictured with male servants they were usually flanked by their husbands, fathers, brothers or children, and often engaged in activities that necessitated the presence of servants, as in Figure 4.6 of a family taking tea.51 White, Javanese and Chinese mistresses were regularly photographed one-onone with their female servants in Southeast Asia and the Northern Territory.52 The rarity of photographs of mistresses with male servants, then, probably 51 See also Chilliwack Museum and Archives, ‘Hulbert Hop Yards. Joe Arnold, Joe Banks, Rachel McLeod’, c.  1896, Chilliwack (British Columbia), PP500132; SCL, American Woman and Others in a Car with Servant Boy Attending, c.  1910–15, Philippines, Japan and China Travel Album, PHLH143. For British Columbia, see also Paul Yee, Saltwater City:  An Illustrated History of the Chinese in Vancouver (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1988), 21. 52 NTL, Woman and Maid (possibly Mrs Mugg and Cissie McLeod), Darwin, c.  1911–18, Jean A. Austin Collection, PH0412/0025; KITLV, Maria Cornelia Klein-Koli with Her babu, Semerang (Netherlands East Indies), 1914, 183564; KITLV, Javanese Woman with Servant, Netherlands East Indies, 1870, photographer:  Woodbury and Page, 32131; KITLV, Chinese Woman with Servant, Surabaya (Netherlands East Indies), c. 1881, photographer: J. B. Jasper, 105643; NA, ‘Mrs Peterson, Hotel de Oriente, Manila, PI’, c. 1898–9, Prints of D. L Brainard’s Family Albums, 1884–1910, RG 200-BR, vol. 3A, 44, photograph B; NMS, Chinese Lady with Her Child and Amah, Singapore, c. 1910, ACC-94728.



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reflects concern about the possibility of physical, if not sexual contact between them which marked public debate in the early twentieth century.53 White women occasionally discussed their male servants in eroticized terms. For example, Philinda Rand Anglemyer, an American teacher working in the Philippines in the early twentieth century, described her cook as ‘picturesque’ and noted that looking at him evoked in her a ‘feeling of pleasure’.54 In addition to concerns about sexual contact, the spectre of physical aggression perpetrated by male servants against their female employers loomed large in colonial New Guinea and parts of Africa.55 As we noted in Chapter  2, in the sites discussed in this book, instances of sexual assault and violence were very unusual. Nonetheless, in contexts where (real and imagined) sexual relationships between white women and male domestic servants represented a symbolic and practical threat to white imperial patriarchy, the maintenance of appropriate distance within photographs was essential.56 In striking contrast to the lack of photographs of white mistresses with male servants, there are dozens of photographs of male domestic workers and white masters in Southeast Asia.57 Male servants and their male employers were often depicted in quite intimate scenarios. Depictions of master–houseboy intimacy Christine Chin, In Service and Servitude:  Foreign Female Domestic Workers and the Malaysian ‘Modernity’ Project (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 1998), 71; Victoria Haskins and John Maynard, ‘Sex, Race and Power:  Aboriginal Men and White Women in Australian History’, Australian Historical Studies 36, no. 126 (2005):  206; Kate Bagnall, ‘Across the Threshold:  White Women and Chinese Hawkers in the White Colonial Imaginary’, Hecate 28, no. 2 (2002):  21; Rosanne A. Sia, ‘Making and Defending Intimate Spaces: White Waitresses Policed in Vancouver’s Chinatown Cafes’ (MA diss., University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 2007), 5–15; Yee, Saltwater City, 52–3. 54 Sarah Steinbock-Pratt, ‘ “We Were All Robinson Crusoes”:  American Women Teachers in the Philippines’, Women’s Studies 41, no. 4 (2012): 372–92. 55 Chilla Bulbeck, Australian Women in Papua New Guinea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 206; Amirah Inglis, The White Women’s Protection Ordinance: Sexual Anxiety and Politics in Papua (London: Sussex University Press, 1975), 54–5; Timothy Keegan, ‘Gender, Degeneration and Sexual Danger: Imagining Race and Class in South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies 27, no. 3 (2001): 459. For two examples of violence perpetrated by Chinese male servants against white see Karen Dubinsky and Adam Givertz, ‘ “It Was Only a Matter of Passion”: Masculinity and Sexual Danger’, in Gendered Pasts: Historical Essays in Femininity and Masculinity in Canada, ed. Kathryn McPherson, Nancy M. Forestell and Cecillia Morgan (Toronto:  Oxford University Press, 2003), 73–4; Lowrie, Masters and Servants; ‘Globe Hotel Murders’, Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 31 October 1918. 56 McClintock, Imperial Leather, 33. 57 For Singapore, see Figures 4.10 and 4.12 in addition to the following: NMS, Portrait of European Man and Malay Man by Robert Lenz at Stamford Road, Singapore, c. 1895–1910, ACC-2008-02253; NMS, Rickshaw Puller with a European Passenger and Attendant, Singapore, c. 1900, ACC-200101343. For the Philippines, see Figure 3.2 in Chapter 3) and the following: NA, ‘Col. Potter’, Manila, c. 1898–9, Prints of D. L. Brainard’s Family Albums, 1884–1910, RG 200-BR, vol. 3A, 24, photograph B. For the Netherlands East Indies, see Figure 4.11 and the following: KITLV, A European Man with a Visitor on the Front Porch of His Home in Java, c. 1920, 49067; A Doctor and His Chinese Servant at the Doctor’s House in Soebang, Java, c.  1907–12, 41735. For Hong Kong, see Figure  4.13 and HKMH, Sir Henry Blake, Governor of HK, c. 1893–95, P1964.173. 53

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Figure 4.7  ‘303 – Chinese boy serving his master’, Singapore, c. 1890. Courtesy of the National Museum of Singapore, National Heritage Board, ACC-XXXX-12898.

were often the subject of colonial postcards, pointing to the mobility of these kinds of images.58 The far-flung locations of the archives where master–houseboy photographs are currently held is also suggestive of cross-colonial exchange. The photographic series that included Figures  4.7 and 7.1 was produced by G.  R. Lambert and Co., a studio that served wealthy British clientele in Singapore. The photographs feature the same Chinese servant on what appears to be the same day,

For intimate depictions of the master–houseboy relationship on postcards from British India, see ‘British Voices from South Asia Exhibition’, www.lib.lsu.edu/sites/all/files/sc/exhibits/e-exhibits/ india/pc3d17.jpg (accessed 20 March 2018). 58



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and yet Figure 4.7 is housed in the National Museum of Singapore, while Figure 7.1 is held with the Netherlands East Indies archive of the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies at the University of Leiden. The different ways in which male domestic workers’ relationships with their masters (as opposed to their mistresses) was depicted is evidenced by Figures 4.5 and 4.7. Compare the distance between mistress and servant in Figure 4.5 with the intimacy of Figure 4.7 where the hands of master and servant appear to touch as the servant pours the broth. Intimacy is also communicated in a photograph from the Netherlands East Indies (Figure  4.8) where the Javanese man’s arm seems to rest not only on the back of the chair and but also on the shoulder of his Dutch employer. Photographs of master–servant intimacy may well have been intended to depict white male superiority. Figures  4.7 and 4.8 emphasize the devoted one-on-one care that white men supposedly received from colonized men. The implication that Asian men were inferior and servile is underlined by the young age and bare feet of the Javanese man in Figure  4.8. Yet at the same time, these photographs contain potentially subversive messages about the nature of the master-servant relationship. Stigma and secrecy surrounding homosexuality, and in some contexts the threat of prosecution for engaging in sodomy, means that documented evidence of sexual relationships between masters and their male servants is hard to come by.59 Yet while it may have been discussed in more coded language than that associated with interracial heterosexual liaisons, the possibility of sexual encounters between white masters and male servants became the subject of public comment and anxiety.60 This was against a backdrop where convictions of Chinese, Malay, Indian and, very occasionally, European men for so-called unnatural acts in Southeast Asia, the Northern Territory and British Columbia were a part of life.61 It might be noted that in Singapore a trade in Hainanese boys for brothels was well established in the late nineteenth century, with six male brothels in 1899, at least three of which were frequented by Europeans.62

Bartoleme Carale, ‘Criminal Adultery and Fornication in the Philippines’, Philippine Law Journal 45 (1970): 351; Tom Boellstorff, The Gay Archipelago: Sexuality and Nation in Indonesia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 38, 234. 60 Robert Aldrich, Colonialism and Homosexuality (London: Routledge, 2003), 4. 61 Claire Lowrie, ‘White “Men” and Their Chinese “Boys”:  Sexuality, Masculinity and Colonial Power in Singapore and Darwin, 1880s–1930s’, History Australia 10, no. 1 (2013): 43–4; Marieke Bloembergen, ‘Being Clean Is Being Strong: Policing Cleanliness and Gay Vices in the Netherlands Indies in the 1930s’, in Cleanliness and Culture: Indonesian Histories, ed. Kees Van Dijk and Jean Gelman-Taylor (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2011), 120–45; Perry, On the Edge of Empire, 32–5. 62 Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 144. 59

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Figure  4.8 C. A.  Nieuwenhuijsen with a servant, in Manado, Netherlands East Indies, 1913. University of Leiden, Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, 118685.

In Europe and China, as well as in the colonial world, the imbalance of power between masters and servants often fostered ‘sexual expectations and demands’ and this may have left male servants vulnerable to sexual coercion and assault.63 We found no direct evidence of sexual relationships between masters and their male servants, but homoerotic depictions of Asian and indigenous servants Kam Louie, Theorising Chinese Masculinity: Society and Gender in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 34; Cissie Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies, 187; Meldrum, Domestic Service and Gender, 118; Heike Schmidt, ‘Colonial Intimacy: The Rechenberg Scandal and Homosexuality in German East Africa’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 17, no. 1 (2008): 55. 63



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can be found in white men’s fictional accounts and letters.64 Photographic postcards from British India also depicted houseboys in ways that were sexually suggestive.65 The positioning of master and servant in Figures 4.7 and 4.8 may indicate a greater degree of familiarity between them. The absence of images of white men alone with female servants adds further weight to the argument that the photographic archive sheds light on the sexual dynamics of the colonial household, revealing the acceptable limits of what could be captured in posed scenes such as these. A  small number of images picture Dutch, Chinese and Anglo-Australian masters with their wives, their children and their female servants.66 Of the hundreds of images surveyed for this chapter, no photographs of white men alone with female servants were located. In the Northern Territory, photographs of white men with male servants were far less common than in Southeast Asia. Apart from the photograph of George Cole and Jacky (Figure 2.2) in Chapter 2, we know of only one other photograph of a white man alone with a male servant.67 Research for this chapter also uncovered no images of white Canadian men with Chinese servants. The lack of such images perhaps reflects the greater emphasis placed on white men’s resourcefulness and self-reliance in settler colonies and the celebration of white working-class masculinity from the late nineteenth century.68 In contrast, in the urban environment of Singapore, Manila, Batavia and Hong Kong demonstrations of white middle-class men’s racial mastery over ‘other’ men remained a more important measure of manliness.69 Intended and unintended messages about white male power and sexuality come through even more strongly in photographs of groups of white men and their male servants, such as Figure 4.9 from Singapore. The two young Chinese 64 Gary L. Atkins, Imagining Gay Paradise (Hong Kong:  Hong Kong University Press, 2012), 30; Boellstorff, The Gay Archipelago, 118–19; Lowrie, Masters and Servants, 77. 65 ‘British Voices from South Asia Exhibition’, www.lib.lsu.edu/sites/all/files/sc/exhibits/e-exhibits/ india/pc3d18a.jpg (accessed 20 March 2018). 66 For the Netherlands East Indies, see KITLV, Studio Portrait of a Chinese Man with His Child and a Servant, Surabaya, Java, 1911, photographer: Javasche Photograaf, 178702; Mr and Mrs Foltynski with a Guest and Their Servants, Batavia, 1915, 13281; Chinese Family with Indonesian Servants, Batavia, c. 1900, photographer: Tan Tjie Lan, 408060. For the Northern Territory, see State Library of South Australia, NTL, ‘Police Officers at Pine Creek’, Northern Territory, 1914, B 17971; ‘The Residency and House Party. Gilruth Family in Driveway’, Darwin, 1912, PH0100/0039. 67 State Library of South Australia (hereafter SLSA), ‘Portrait of Constable Willshire’, Alice Springs, 1896, B 54017. 68 Martin Crotty, Making the Australian Male:  Middle-Class  Masculinity in Australia, 1870–1920 (Carlton:  Melbourne University Press, 2001), 20; Perry, On the Edge of Empire, 38. See also Jock Phillips, A Man’s Country? The Image of the Pakeha Male – A History (Auckland: Penguin Books, 1996), 4. 69 Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities, 199, 200; Lowrie, Masters and Servants, 84–6.

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Figure  4.9 European men and two Chinese houseboys, late nineteenth century. Courtesy of the National Museum of Singapore, ACC-1996-00089.

men seated cross-legged on the ground are outnumbered by six adult British men variously standing or seated in chairs. The status of the white men as ‘rightful rulers’ is emphasized by the props of the solar topee (pith helmet), considered to symbolize white colonial authority.70 This image and several others in which white men are depicted in groups with their male servants, present the colonial venture in racialized homosocial terms as a ‘boys’ own adventure’, yet one that nevertheless depended on the assistance of local men.71 At the same time, unanswered and perhaps unanswerable questions remain about the nature of the relationship between the various white men depicted here, and between each of them with the young male servants. The image implies both comradeship and eroticism. 70 Xavier Herbert, Capricornia (North Ryde: Angus and Robertson, 1987), 8; Somerset Maugham, The Casuarina Tree: Six Stories (London: Heinemann, 1926), 108. 71 See also NMS, Two European Men Having a Meal in a Garden, Early Twentieth Century, ACCXXXX-12753; NAS, Englishmen and Servants, c.  1900, Boden-Kloss Collection, ACC 606; SCL, ‘Bourns, Myself and Two Servants, When the Worse for Wear, Guimaras, Iloilo Province – 1890’, photographer: Dean C. Worcester, Photographs of the Philippine Islands, PHLA854; KITLV, Two Men Drinking Beer on the Verandah of a Home in the Netherlands East Indies with a Servant in the Background, c. 1910, 178818; Two European Men Drinking Beer with the Sumatra Post on the Table in Front of Them, Deli, Netherlands East Indies, c. 1890, photographer: Kleingrothe, 155291.



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As well as hinting at secret areas of the master–servant relationship, gaps and omissions within the photographic record also shed light on colonial attitudes towards relationships between domestic servants. From the 1920s and 1930s Chinese husband and wife domestic teams became increasingly common in Hong Kong and Singapore. Aboriginal husband and wife domestic teams were also common in the Northern Territory in that era.72 Yet there is no photographic record of these marital and domestic partnerships. None of the half a dozen or so images of Billy Shepherd include his Aboriginal wife Lucy. Yet she resided at government house with him.73 Similarly, there are at least two photographs of Sam Kundook, an Aboriginal man who worked as a servant for Administrator Charles L. A. Abbott and his family in Darwin in the late 1930s, including Figure 2.1 in Chapter 2. Yet neither of those images include his wife Silver who was also employed in government house.74 This pattern was repeated in Fiji. In Figure  2.3 Henry Lago, a Fijian male servant, is included in the photographs of the St Johnston family. His wife Louisa was also employed in the home but remains unseen. Erasing the indigenous men’s wives could be read as an attempt to deny their patriarchal authority as husbands. Domestic workers were often photographed in ways that explained their role in the household.75 Thus in Figure 4.10, eight individual Chinese men are described as the ‘chair coolies’ and ‘house servants’ of their master, H. P. Smith. Judging by the awkward stance and facial expressions of some of the men, this appears to be an informal ‘line-up’. With the imposing building as backdrop and Smith part reclining with cigar in mouth, it nevertheless immediately speaks to his commanding presence as master. A  ninth figure stands behind Smith, possibly an Anglo-Chinese youth reliant in some way on Smith’s patronage or a clerk in his accountancy firm. In amateur and professional photographs from

Lowrie, Masters and Servants, 107. 73 See, for example, Figures 4.6 and 4.15 in this chapter. For reference to Lucy, see Paul Rosenzweig, The House of Seven Gables:  A History of Government House, Darwin (Darwin:  Historical Society of the Northern Territory, 1996), 61; National Library of Australia (hereafter NLA), ‘Papers of Charles Lydiard Aubrey (1886–1975) and Hilda Abbott’, 1906–71, box 3, folder 1, Life in Darwin. ‘Chapter 13 of Life in Darwin’, box 3, folder 1, MS4744. 74 NAA (Canberra), Sam Kundook, Houseboy, Darwin, 1945, Personal Photographs of the Hon. C. L. A. Abbott during His Term as Administrator of the Northern Territory, image number M10, 3/142; Victoria Haskins, ‘ “The Beautiful Boys”  – Aboriginal Houseboys in Darwin’, Northern Territory Government Department of Tourism and Culture, https://dtc.nt.gov.au/arts-and-museums/ northern-territory-archives-service/stories-from-the-archives/houseboys-darwin (accessed 6 February 2017). 75 Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies, 145; Christopher Munn, ‘Hong Kong, 1841–1870: All the Servants in Prison and Nobody to Take Care of the House’, in Masters, Servants, and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562–1955, ed. Douglas Hay and Paul Craven (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 368. 72

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Figure 4.10  ‘The stone house (Mount Kellet, next to the Peak), H. P. Smith with house servants and chair coolies, 1924.’ Hong Kong Public Records Office, Government Records Service, PH003517.

Hong Kong, the Netherlands East Indies and Singapore, the names of domestic servants were almost never included in the captions written by employers.76 This ensured that even though the servants were physically and visually present, they were also rendered anonymous, more important as a collective whole attesting to the employer’s wealth and social standing. The names of domestic servants were recorded more frequently in captions and written descriptions on photographs from the Philippines, the Northern Territory and British Columbia.77 Yet the inclusion of names did not in all cases result in a more sympathetic representation. The Chinese servants in Figure 4.11 from Darwin, for example, are named but they are also described in relation to the job they performed for their employers. This 76 We found only one photograph where a servant was described by name from Singapore and none from the Netherlands East Indies or Hong Kong. See NAS, ‘Photograph of Colonial Secretary House Servant Ah Fong with a Child, Ah Koom’, Singapore, 1932, ACC 148356. 77 For examples of photographs where servants were named, see Figures 4.6, 4.14, and 5.1. See also NA, Victor and Jack, Hotel De Oriental, Manila, c. 1910, D. L. Brainard’s Family Albums, 1884– 1910, RG 200 S – BR, vol. 3A, 158; SLSA, ‘Cheon’, c. 1922, General Collection, B 27404/10; British Columbia Archives (hereafter BCA), Richard Wolfenden’s Cook Ah Suen with His Son Ling, Taken at the Wolfenden Residence at 120 Menzies Street in Victoria, 1911, B-01359; BCA, Ah Foo, Charles Frederic Newcombe’s Cook, Victoria (British Columbia), c. 1885, F-05112.



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Figure 4.11  ‘Chinese staff employed by Dr. Gilruth. No. 1, Ah Chow (sitting), Ah Bong (table boy), Dobie Ah How and Houseboy’, Government House, Darwin, c. 1912–19. Gilruth Collection, Northern Territory Library, PH0190/0033.

obscuring of servants as individuals, even where their names are provided, is illustrated in more stark terms in the photograph of Chinese and Filipino servants in Chapter  3 (Figure  3.1). The Filipino servants are described in relation to their employers in a way which suggests ownership, with Andres described as ‘Col. Brainard’s boy, Juan, Col. Bellinger’s boy, Bruno, Maj. Rassiter’s boy’ and ‘Felix, Col. Richard’s boy’. Half of the photographs from the Northern Territory and the Philippines analysed in this study and a quarter from British Columbia included the names of domestic servants. In other photographs, however, the servants are portrayed in the fashion favoured by British and Dutch colonists, described simply as ‘dobie’ or ‘laundry man and gardener’.78 The conscious denial of the personal lives of servants and the careful photographic separation of male and female servants may also have indicated anxieties about the settler colonial project in British Columbia and the Northern Territory. The refusal of Aboriginal populations to ‘disappear’ and the growth of ethnically mixed populations made the dream of creating ‘white men’s countries’ NTL, ‘Dobie’, Darwin, c.  1911–18, Jean A.  Austin Collection, PH0412/0002; New Westminster Archives, ‘Laundry Man and Gardener’, New Westminster (British Columbia), c. 1910, IFP0223. 78

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ever more remote.79 Social anxiety about relationships between male and female servants came to a head in British Columbia in 1924 in response to the murder of a white nanny, Janet Smith, allegedly by a Chinese servant, Wong Foon Sing, employed in the same home. While he was acquitted, the case resulted in greater regulation of Chinese workers in the province and an attempt to impose a ban on white female servants and Chinese male servants being employed together in the same home. Fears about coerced or consensual sexual relationships between Chinese men and white women underscored the attempt.80 In this context, it is not surprising that no photographs of Chinese male servants with white female servants appear to exist, despite the fact that they were employed side by side in the elite households of British Columbia. Where relationships between servants were depicted in photographs, the emphasis was on communicating a labour hierarchy based on race, gender and position. In Figure 4.12 Billy Shepherd is seated alongside another dark-skinned male servant (an arrangement representing seniority) while the Asian female and male servants stand together in the background. In contrast to the adults’ livery and self-assured stance, the Aboriginal servant girl wears no shoes and is positioned at a distance from the group, leaning against the building. The status of the older female servant and her relationship to the men around her, however, is rather more ambiguous. As well as influencing employers’ attitudes and colonial governance, hierarchies of age, race and gender also determined how the domestic workforce was organized. In the Philippines, Singapore and the Northern Territory, Chinese male servants were usually put in charge of the rest of the staff due to racialized perceptions that they were more ‘civilized’ than Filipino, Malay, Indian and Aboriginal servants.81 There is evidence that the preferential treatment Chinese servants received and the position of authority they assumed created tension and conflict with Aboriginal male servants in the Northern Territory.82 Occasional reports of violence between Chinese servants were also reported in the Northern

Julia Martínez, ‘Ethnic Policy and Practice in Darwin’, in Mixed Relations:  Asian-Aboriginal Contact in North Australia, ed. Regina Ganter with contributions by Julia Martínez and Gary Lee (Crawley:  University of Western Australia Press, 2006), 126–9; Peta Stephenson, The Outsiders Within: Telling Australia’s Indigenous-Asian Story (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2007), 62–5; Perry, On the Edge of Empire, 97. 80 Scott Kerwin, ‘The Janet Smith Bill of 1924 and the Language of Race and Nation in British Columbia’, BC Studies: The British Columbian Quarterly 21 (1999): 83–110. 81 Chin, In Service and Servitude, 71; Julia Martínez and Claire Lowrie, ‘Transcolonial Influences on Everyday American Imperialism:  The Politics of Chinese Domestic Servants in the Philippines’, Pacific Historical Review 81, no. 4 (2012): 520–25; Lowrie, Masters and Servants, 32, 115. 82 Gunn, We of the Never-Never, 93–4. 79



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Figure  4.12  A mixed group of six domestic staff pose outside Government House, Darwin, Northern Territory of Australia, c.  1911–18. Jean A.  Austin Collection, National Territory Library, PH0412-0020.

Territory and in British Columbia, and in a later chapter we touch on tensions that erupted in violence in Fiji between Indian hotel staff.83 While colonial racism may in some cases have resulted in divisions between workers of different ethnicities employed in the same home, it also had the potential to unite them. As we will illustrate in Chapter  7, while British employers viewed Chinese servants in a hierarchy from the ‘No. 1 boy’, the ‘No. 2 boy’ and the ‘house-coolie’ (Figure 7.2), this did not prevent those servants from joining together in political movements designed to bring down the colonial state. Hierarchy and conflict were part of the job. However, so were intimacy, collaboration and shared struggle.

In their own image: From houseboys to colonial gentlemen Thus far this chapter has focused on photographs commissioned or produced by employers of servants. Figure  4.13 is the only self-commissioned servant For the Northern Territory, see ‘A Chinese Cook’s Philosophy: From Murder to Preparing Dinner’, The Advertiser, 17 March 1906; ‘Station Hand Shot: Chinese Cook Imprisoned’, The Advertiser, 21 April 1926. For British Columbia, see Yee, Saltwater City, 82–3. 83

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Figure 4.13  ‘Aniceto + Felix placed this on the table in kitchen for my notice. They were tickled to death. Felix, my cook, at right. Aniceto, my house boy, on left. Pedro, in middle. He used to be Mrs. McDonald’s house boy + was the one who told me that one day that I could go home. Funny. Keep this for me’, Philippines, c. 1910. Philippines, Japan and China Travel Album, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan, PHLH129.

photograph that we located. It is a studio portrait which three Filipino domestic servants paid to have taken and then presented to their employers, an American couple who lived in Manila sometime between 1910 and 1915. Dressed in western-style suits complete with ties and tie pins, Aniceto, Pedro and Felix are depicted as well-to-do gentleman. Their pose of leisured and dignified respectability was one associated with masters rather than servants. They are the epitome of bourgeois masculinity – educated, refined and urban. Figure 4.13 is a stark contrast to Figure 4.14, a photograph of Felix and Aniceto taken by their employer with their role in the home (‘cook’ and ‘houseboy’)



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Figure  4.14  ‘Felix  – cook. Doesn’t he hold his hands gracefully. Veranda upstairs. Aniceto Sico – Houseboy. He says he looks like a chinaman’, Philippines, c. 1910–15. Philippines, Japan and China Travel Album, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan, PHLH126.

clearly identified. In the handwritten description on the back of Figure 4.14, the unnamed American mistress noted Aniceto’s discomfort about the way he was represented. He complained that the uniform or perhaps the pose made him look ‘like a chinaman’. Given the sheer number of photographs which depict male servants as servile, devoted and one dimensional, commissioning a studio photograph offered a means of talking back to employers. This was not an option that very many domestic servants could take up but it was perhaps more common than

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the photographic archive would suggest. A small number of self-commissioned servant photographs have been located outside of formal archives. In his history of Singapore, Kenneth Gaw includes a studio image of two ‘black and white’ amahs (Chinese female servants) from the 1920s that he located in an antique shop in Singapore and that was intended to be sent home to the women’s relatives in China.84 Michael Aird’s study of Aboriginal women and photography in colonial Queensland includes a studio image commissioned by Katie Williams, an Aboriginal woman who worked as domestic servant in the 1920s. Williams was Aird’s great-great aunt and the photograph is part of his extended family’s private collection.85 Further indications that domestic servants commissioned their own images is provided by the oral history interview of Lim Ming Joon, a Hainanese man who worked as a servant in 1930s Singapore. Lim recalled how his Armenian employer gave him a camera, an act that ultimately inspired him to leave domestic service and open a photography studio. Lim’s studio serviced mainly Chinese workers who commissioned photographs of themselves to be sent home to their families in China. As Lim put it, Chinese workers ‘liked taking photos’.86 For those employers who thought of their servants as possessions, providing them with neat attire or even elaborate livery was a means of maintaining social status.87 When servants adopted the clothing and pose of their masters, however, the implications were rather different and had the potential to disrupt the colonial hierarchy. In Southeast Asia, Asian migrants and indigenous people who embraced western clothing elicited respect from European colonizers. The western suit, in particular, embodied ‘power and the ability to enforce power’ as Jean GelmanTaylor has put it.88 By dressing in this way, having their photograph taken and presenting it to their American employer, Pedro, Aniceto and Felix seem to have been well aware that they were turning the power dynamic of the master–servant relationship on its head. Indeed, they were ‘tickled to death’ to do so. The American woman’s remark that Pedro had given her permission to ‘go home’ someday further Gaw, Superior Servants, 98–9. 85 Aird, ‘Tactics of Survival’, 182–90. In addition to the photograph from 1924, two other studio images of Katie from the 1920s were reproduced in her daughter’s autobiography. Kathleen Lena, My Life: An Aboriginal Elder Remembers (South Port: Keeaira Press, 2012), 11–12. 86 NAS, ‘Transcript of Interview with Lim Ming Joon’, 23 September 1983, ACC 000334/07, 24, 36. The interview was translated from Mandarin to English by EthnoLink Language Services, certified by the National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters, www.ethnolink.com. au/translation/naati-accredited-certified-translations-australia. For further discussion of selfcommissioned servant images, see Lowrie, ‘What a Picture Can Do’. 87 Julia Martínez, ‘When Wages Were Clothes:  Dressing Down Aboriginal Workers in Australia’s Northern Territory’, International Review of Social History 52, no. 2 (2007): 278–9. 88 Gelman-Taylor, ‘Costume and Gender’, 100. 84



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illustrates the desire of these men to assert control not only over their mistress but also over the entire colonial project. As with the other Filipino people in this period, Pedro, Felix and Aniceto used their clothing and the photographic medium to ‘assert themselves as civilized citizens capable of self-government’.89 The American mistress found the studio photograph of Aniceto, Pedro and Felix, and the circumstances under which it was produced, ‘funny’ rather than threatening. Yet in some homes domestic servants were punished or ridiculed if they donned western dress.90 In constructing a photographic archive of the Philippines, Dean C.  Worcester, an American zoologist and colonial official, requested that his indigenous subjects remove their commonly worn western attire and don ‘traditional’ costumes or pose naked, perhaps to communicate the urgency of American ‘tutelage’ and ‘uplift’.91 At the same time, however, the donning of western dress might indicate this project had been achieved.92 Nonetheless, for some Filipino men the adoption of the western suit was a political act and a means through which they could subtly advocate for equality.93 In some cases, such as in the Netherlands East Indies, employers commissioned images of their servants in western dress.94 This also had the potential to call into question colonial hierarchies. Figure  4.15 of Hong Pak Cheon, a Chinese cook who worked in the Northern Territory of Australia is part of a set of two that were probably commissioned by his employer, Jeanie Gunn.95 A pocket watch is pinned to Cheon’s chest, he is carrying an umbrella and appears to be wearing a solar topee. The image speaks to colonial modernity and implies a degree of authority. In Figure 4.16, the Chinese kitchen staff at Bamfield Cable Station in British Columbia are wearing Chinese attire rather than western suits. At the same time, they possess bowler hats and, like Cheon, are armed with umbrellas. Three in the group are carrying books which could perhaps be recipe books or

Sarah Steinbock-Pratt, ‘ “It Gave Us Our Nationality”:  US Education, the Politics of Dress and Transnational Filipino Students Networks, 1901–45’, Gender & History 26, no. 3 (2014): 565. 90 Campbell Dauncey, Mrs, An Englishwoman in the Philippines (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1906), 38–9; Martínez, ‘When Wages Were Clothes’, 271. 91 Mark Rice, Dean Worcester’s Fantasy Islands: Photography, Film and the Colonial Philippines (Quezon City: Ateneo De Manila University Press, 1999), 55–6. 92 Steinbock-Pratt, ‘It Gave Us Our Nationality’, 567. 93 Susie Protschky, ‘Tea Cups, Cameras and Family Life: Picturing Domesticity in Elite European and Javanese Family Photographs from the Netherlands Indies, ca. 1900–42’, History of Photography 36, no. 1 (2012): 60. 94 Steinbock-Pratt, ‘It Gave Us Our Nationality’, 565–8. 95 NTL, ‘Ah Cheon’, Northern Territory of Australia, c. 1908, PH0147/0071. In British Columbia too, employers sometimes photographed their Chinese servants in formal western attire with suits, waist jackets, hats and pocket watches. See, for example, BCA, The Bowron Family’s Chinese Manservant, British Columbia, c. 1900, C-09746. 89

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Figure 4.15  ‘Chef ’, Northern Territory of Australia, c. 1908. Phyllis Moyle Collection, Northern Territory Library, PH0112/0092.

Cantonese–English phrase books.96 At the very least, their inclusion suggests that the men and the young boy were literate.97 In her study of photography in Australia, Sophie Couchman observes that Chinese people often had studio photographs produced in which they depicted themselves in their best dress with hats and watch chains, books and umbrellas. Self-presenting as middle-class, modern, educated and respectable colonists was one tactic Australian-born and China-born Chinese employed when responding to the racist and discriminatory policies governing immigration and employment which were put in place by colonial and national governments in Australia from the late nineteenth century.98 Regardless of whether the objects in these

96 Authors’ correspondence with Charles Mow, 30 September 2016. 97 In another photo seemingly taken on the same day the men are posed without props. BCA, The Kitchen Staff of the Bamfield Cable Station, British Columbia, 1903, G-06964. 98 Sophie Couchman, ‘In and Out of Focus: Chinese and Photography in Australia, 1870s–1940s’ (PhD diss., La Trobe University, Melbourne, 2009), 124, 7–8.



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Figure 4.16  Kitchen staff of the Bamfield Cable Station, British Columbia, 1903. Royal BC Museum and Archives, G-06951.

images were props or personal possessions, the domestic workers appear as men possessing a degree of social status. Gunn herself many have arranged for Cheon to be depicted in this way, raising interesting questions about their relationship, which others have suggested had romantic undertones.99 She remarked that Cheon was a gentlemen, who ‘protect[ed] her from everything, even herself ’ and ‘honoured’ her.100 Viewed in this light, photographs of male servants in western dress or posed with civilized accoutrements indicate their employment may have conferred a degree of masculine respectability and independence, quite removed from the diminutive status of the loyal, devoted ‘boy’.

Conclusion This chapter has addressed both the overt messages and hidden scripts about gender roles, masculinity and sexuality contained within photographs of male servants in a range of colonial settings. Viewed together, the photographs 99 Kevin Wong Hoy, Cheon of the Never (North Melbourne: Arcadia, 2012), 27–8. 100 Gunn, We of the Never-Never, 96.

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produced by employers and by servants shed light on perceptions and aspirations that are harder to access solely through written records. What was included and omitted from such photographs suggests that questions surrounding colonized men’s paternal authority, interracial sexuality and bread-winning masculinity were fertile ones in defining the parameters of the employer–servant relationship and notions of status within colonial societies more generally. What the photographic record across Asia and the Pacific illustrates most clearly is that visions of colonial masculinity and patriarchal power were multifaceted and flexible, and developed through everyday interactions, negotiations and shifting sets of relationships within the home. Some employers used the photographic medium as a means of demonstrating their authority over other men, and to immortalize what appeared to be stark divisions in colonial society. The key message encapsulated by other photographs appears to be more celebratory, both of the domestic luxury afforded by the employer’s position, but also of the ‘quality’ of their employees. Male servants variously appear as productive workers, protective carers of white children and potential providers. Still, other photographs reveal servants as respectable, modern and independent gentlemen, not necessarily constrained by their employment within the colonial home, and confidently navigating the changing world around them.

5

Steamship Stewards: Encountering Asia on the High Seas

In 1914 Chinese steward Ah Pong appeared in court in Melbourne, Australia, charged with wilful disobedience of a lawful command given by Captain David Marshall of the steamship Vestalia, owned by a Glaswegian company of the same name. A young man, Ah Pong, came to court ‘dressed in well-fitting European clothes’ and speaking fluent English. He had shipped at Shields in England on a three-year contract as chief steward, earning a wage of £7 per month.1 Upon arrival in Melbourne the vessel was converted to a troopship and Marshall appointed a British chief steward, demoting Ah Pong to second steward, though at the same wage. Ah Pong was indignant, declaring he would not be second ‘to any English steward’ or ‘wash dishes for anyone’. In his testimony, Ah Pong denied having refused orders, stating he told Marshall: ‘All right; pay me up and send me back home.’ The captain told the court he would happily have thrown him off the ship, but for the fact that the Immigration Restriction Act prevented Chinese from landing in Australia without exemption papers. Ah Pong was duly fined 20 shillings and sent back to the ship.2 This rare glimpse of the self-fashioning and expectations of a Chinese steward hints at the ongoing difficulties Chinese workers experienced in an industry that typically reserved its most senior positions for white men. Ah Pong’s story appeared in the Age newspaper under the title ‘Chinese Steward’s Dignity’. The title was ironic; the Australian press, like most of Australia at the time, had little tolerance for Chinese workers’ claim to dignity. Despite the many cases of radical protest by immigrant Chinese workers across the globe since the late nineteenth century, the entrenched European notion of Chinese as ‘coolie’ labour For more on Chinese seamen in Britain, see Gregor Benton and Edmund Gomez, The Chinese in Britain 1800–Present: Economy, Transnationalism, Identity (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 2 ‘Chinese Steward’s Dignity’, Age, 19 November 1914, 10; Williamstown Advertiser, 21 November 1914, 2. 1

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was retained.3 In the context of steamships, debates and concerns over dignity were mostly about white male workers. As passenger travel and expectations of service expanded under steam, the role of the steward and other catering staff became more central to shipboard life. It was a commonplace assertion that other crew disdained stewards because of the tips they received in exchange for the performance of ‘body service’, which most merchant seamen performed only ‘in an emergency or as an act of charity’.4 Others insisted that although such work on shore might be regarded ‘as domestic drudgery, below the dignity of men’, at sea such tasks were performed to gain an honest livelihood ‘without being in any way derogatory to manhood’.5 Yet stewards, the well-known British maritime author Frank T. Bullen concluded, indicating he was as vulnerable to such prejudice, could ‘never quite be rid of the feeling they are menials’.6 Ah Pong’s dismissive reference to washing dishes also shines a light on the stratification within the catering department itself, and not simply between different steamship departments. Shipping companies favoured Asian men over European workers as stewards for reasons similar to those canvassed elsewhere in this book  – preferences steeped in racialized and feminized stereotypes of docility, devotion and loyalty. Moreover, shipping companies paid great attention to service on board, recognizing that a flawless performance from an efficient service crew conferred a public image of success, and secured a competitive edge in this large-scale commercial arena. As this chapter illustrates, companies chose Asian stewards with an eye to European colonial preferences, paying particular attention to ethnicity, physical appearance, costume, service experience, and language skills. In spite of the image of Asian workers as more obedient and less radicalized than their unionized white counterparts, Ah Pong’s protest reveals the presence of individual resentment against the discriminatory treatment of

Lisa Yun, The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves in Cuba (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2008); Tu T. Huynh, ‘ “We Are Not a Docile People”: Chinese Resistance and Exclusion in the Re-imagining of Whiteness in South Africa, 1903–1910’, Journal of Chinese Overseas 8, no. 2 (2012): 137–68; Gary Kynoch, ‘Chinese Mineworkers and the Struggle for Labor in South Africa, 1904–1910’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 36, no. 2 (2003): 309–29. For a broader discussion on the ‘coolie question’, see special journal editions: ‘Thinking Labor Rights Through the Coolie Question’, International Labor and Working-Class History, ed. Mae M. Ngai and Sophie Loy-Wilson, 91 (2017); and ‘Labour History and the “Coolie Question” ’, special issue of Labour History, ed. Diane Kirkby and Sophie Loy-Wilson 113 (2017). 4 Frank Bullen, The Men of the Merchant Service. Being the Polity of the Mercantile Marine for Longshore Readers (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1900), 179, 180. 5 ‘Seafarer’ Walter Manning, Below and Above the Water-line (Christchurch: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1908), 27–8. 6 Bullen, The Men of the Merchant Service, 181–2. See also Sari Mäenpää, ‘Galley News:  Catering Personnel on British Passenger Liners, 1860–1938’, International Journal of Maritime History 12, no. 1 (2008): 246. 3



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Chinese crews on and off the ship. Individual protests of this nature broke into collective labour protests as Asian crews grew increasingly organized by the early 1920s. Colonial attitudes towards Asian workers clearly resonated across the diverse labour sites we consider in this book. However, the ship differed as a site of service in some ways. First, hierarchies of authority were more layered. In the home, the master or mistress and the ‘customer’ were one and the same, in that they received the direct personal benefit of their servants’ labour. On ships, stewards served passengers rather than their employers. The ship’s captain or master along with the chief steward (who were always men) and the shipping company behind them, policed the relationship between crew and passengers. Passengers, in turn, like the patrons of hotels that we discuss in Chapter 6, did not need to concern themselves with staffing arrangements or payment of wages. To some extent though, this resembled the situation in large colonial households where Europeans gave over the task of organizing the household servants to a head servant. Second, unlike most colonial homes, all steamship departments were marked by direct labour competition between white and Asian workers. In some regional trades, notably along the transpacific routes, white workers sought to displace Asian stewards altogether. This occurred from the late 1870s and was intimately related to the ‘border protection’ of emerging white settler states, as ships and their crews were recruited into claims over space and control over mobility. Another key difference between domestic service in homes compared with ships is that service roles on ships endured as male-dominated positions far longer than in the home. So too did the preference for Asian workers on many routes, in spite of the labour disputes mentioned above. Indeed, such preferences continue to find echoes in the present-day cruise tourism industry.7 Finally, it should be noted that shipping companies operated under different registries, and these controls, which stipulated crewing requirements and restrictions, were typically port specific. To examine the colonial history of Asian male service at sea thus entails confronting diversity and a lack of uniformity, all of which we seek to keep in play as we connect shipboard relations to the larger themes of this book. 7 Pamela Nilan, Luh Putu Artini and Steven Threadgold, ‘Contemporary Balinese Cruise Ship Workers, Passengers and Employers:  Colonial Patterns of Domestic Service’, in Colonization and Domestic Service:  Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Victoria K. Haskins and Claire Lowrie (London: Routledge, 2015), 309–27; Christine Chin, Cruising in the Global Economy: Profits, Pleasure and Work at Sea (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).

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Service work on ships has received significant historical attention, yet the focus has rested predominantly with the stewardess, a position introduced in Britain from the mid-nineteenth century to aid female emigrants with their intimate concerns and to oversee the sexual division of passengers in steerage. The role expanded as competition between liner companies intensified toward the end of the century, with women hired to provide more extensive service to female passengers.8 Stewardesses were, however, carried only in small numbers when compared to stewards; the latter had oversight over passengers’ needs in the various public areas of the ship, as well as attending passengers in their cabins. The existing scholarship represents a corrective to the longstanding representation of the maritime world as dominated by men. In adopting a gendered analysis, historians have recovered women’s fundamental contributions on board ship and in port economies. They have also engaged themes of diverse maritime masculinities, but the steward has largely escaped any sustained critical attention.9 The first sections of the chapter focus on interactions between stewards and other crew, including hiring preferences, labour conditions, and the rise of collective protest. As much as shipping employers might have tried to dictate the service relationship, in the confines of the ship, within which passengers and crew passed extended periods of often tedious travel, there was ample time and incentive for more unrestricted conversations. In the final section, we examine the nature of these encounters. For passengers embarking on a trip to the colonies, these exchanges may have represented their first encounters with Asia, as well as their first experience of a service culture dominated by Asian labour. By investigating these multifaceted shipboard engagements, we seek to emphasize how steamers may have provided tangible sites and means for transmitting cultural values and ideologies that may have helped to shape domestic service across the colonies. Our analysis relies on a range of source

8 For example, Lorraine Coons, ‘From “Company Widow” to “New Woman”:  Female Seafarers Aboard the “Floating Palaces” of the Interwar Years’, International Journal of Maritime History 20, no. 2 (2008):  143–74; Sari Mäenpää, ‘Women Below Deck:  Gender and Employment on British Passenger Liners, 1860–1938’, Journal of Transport History 25, no. 2 (2004):  57–74; Jo Stanley, ‘Co-venturing Consumers “Travel Back”:  Ships’ Stewardesses and Their Female Passengers, 1919–55’, Mobilities 3, no. 3 (2008): 437–54; Frances Steel, Oceania under Steam: Sea Transport and the Cultures of Colonialism, c.  1870–1914 (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2011), ch. 5. 9 Margaret S. Creighton and Lisa Norling, eds, Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 1700–1920 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Mäenpää addresses British, but not Asian, stewards, and concludes that ‘the history of catering personnel remains unwritten’; see Mäenpää, ‘Galley News’, 260. But for a later period, see Paul Baker and Jo Stanley, Hello Sailor! The Hidden History of Gay Life at Sea (London: Longman, 2003).



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material, including shipping company brochures and business records, labour union minutes, newspapers and passenger diaries and published accounts of travel. Apart from Ah Pong’s account in the opening section of this chapter, no surviving accounts by stewards have been found. We attempt to gauge their interests and concerns through the words of their employers and the passengers who were dependent on them.

Stewards as crew: Roles and ethnic diversity With the growth in passenger travel, the catering section of steamships (also known as the providore or victualling department) expanded significantly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On the largest passenger liners, notably on the Atlantic in the interwar period, over 60 per cent of the crew were catering and service staff.10 The structure of the catering and service department was closely analogous to the hotel, including kitchen and pantry staff, saloon stewards (waiters), and bedroom and bathroom stewards and stewardesses. In addition, deck stewards performed such tasks as arranging the allocation of deck chairs and attending to the needs of those with seasickness. On smaller vessels the responsibilities of the steward were diverse, as one maritime author put it in the late 1920s: ‘The steward is the waiter, dishwasher, parlour-maid, office boy, and every other form of domestic servant.’11 Stewards usually entered the providore department as ‘boots’, responsible for many tasks including polishing passengers’ boots and acting as night watchmen in the saloon, or as messroom stewards, waiting on the master and officers and performing ‘every form of domestic service which officers are entitled to’. Any sign of awkwardness, negligence, poor manners or uncleanliness hindered promotion to saloon class.12 Once promoted, stewards continued to be closely scrutinized, especially on the larger liners where the quality of passenger service shaped the public assessment of the ship as well as the steamship company. Reasons for dismissal recorded in the personnel files of the British Orient Steam Navigation Company, for instance, indicate a preoccupation with maintaining respectful distance and decorum: ‘Familiar with passengers’; ‘Dilatory and not sufficiently attentive’; ‘Clumsy. Responsible for too many breakages’; ‘Given to

Nautical Magazine 124, 4 (1930), 366; Illustrated London News, 21 October 1933. 11 J. Lennox Kerr, The Young Steamship Officer (London: Thomas Nelson, 1933), 91. 12 Manning, Below and Above the Water-line, 29–30. 10

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abusive outbursts’; ‘Dirty, untidy’; ‘Not suitable for a position in contact with passengers. Rather uncouth.’13 The position of deck steward was deemed the most prestigious. As a British steward with twenty years of experience remarked in 1934, ‘You do not walk up a gangplank right into the deck-steward game. You have to serve a thorough apprenticeship before you reach the promenade deck . . . 25 per cent of the candidates drop out before they make the grade.’14 These attitudes and expectations derived from a British labour context, although the emphasis on working through the ranks also characterized the early recruitment of Asian labour. Non-white crew entered British shipping following the relaxation of the Navigation Acts in 1849 which had previously restricted ship crewing to British labour. The premier British firm, the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (P&O), began to employ Indian men first as ‘general servants’ in the galley, as officers’ servants or to attend to Indian passengers.15 In the nautical cookery schools established in Britain in this period, it was not uncommon for one-third of the men in training to be Asian.16 From the late nineteenth century, Anglo-Indian stewards and cooks hired under European articles of agreement (or simply ‘articles’, which regulated the terms and conditions of employment) were replaced with cheaper saloon crews from Goa on ‘Asiatic’ articles of agreement. At the same time deckhands and firemen were recruited from other parts of India, as different regions were beginning to be associated with different labour specializations. Articles designated ‘Asiatic’ stipulated lower wages, more restricted dietary scales, smaller space allowances on board, and more limited mobility than enjoyed by European crew.17 One maritime official suggested in 1903 that crew from Goa, a Portuguese colony in western India, were favoured by a number of British shipping companies because they were attentive and ‘not so familiar with the passenger as English stewards are’. English stewards were perceived as ‘very independent’ and determined to leave the ship immediately on arrival in port. The Goanese, by contrast, were ‘very polite and obliging, and do everything they can to make things pleasant’.18 Employers sought to justify the long working hours of Indian Caird Library, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich (hereafter CL, NMM), Stewards – Report on Character, 1893–1912, Records of Orient Steam Navigation Co Ltd., OSN/24/2; CL, NMM, Stewards – Report on Character, 1903–27, Records of Orient Steam Navigation Co Ltd., OSN/24/3. 14 ‘Good Morning, Steward!’, Saturday Evening Post, 14 May 1934, 111. 15 G. Balachandran, Globalizing Labour? Indian Seafarers and World Shipping (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012), 100, 101. 16 Sari Mäenpää, ‘From Pea Soup to Hors D’oeuvres: The Status of the Cook on British Merchant Ships’, Northern Mariner 11, no. 2 (2001): 44, 52. 17 Balachandran, Globalizing Labour?, ch. 3. 18 William Deacon and Victoria Docks, Report of the Committee Appointed by the Board of Trade to Inquire into the Mercantile Marine: II – Minutes of Evidence (London: Cd. 1608, 1903), 98. 13



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saloon crews by suggesting they were indifferent to the length of service, as they could earn tips and would want to be available for their favourite clients whenever sent for.19 According to Gordon Jackson, British shipboard service culture derived from the particular expectations of the colonial administrative and business elite who were accustomed to large numbers of native servants in their homes in India.20 Given the growing reputation of English stewards for independence and gruffness, the passenger ‘who has spent a few years out East, dealing solely with native servants’, as an article in the Nautical Magazine concluded, was liable to take offence and in future choose to travel by a foreign vessel.21 At the same time, for young British passengers, the voyage between Britain and India might serve as a kind of initiation into colonial civil service, where racial hierarchies were established at sea, rather than transposed from land. The German political commentator Franz Josef Furtwängler argued that the steamer voyage was one of ‘breaking in’ to so-called gentlemanly ways. During his residence at a Madras hotel he witnessed an assault of a servant, aged in his late forties, by ‘an Oxfordbred’ magistrate and his wife. The widespread brutality of the English military and official classes in India, Furtwängler concluded, started ‘from the moment the young government official, officer, soldier or merchant steps on board the ship that takes him “east of Suez”. On board, instructions are issued to him by the experts, how he must treat all natives aloofly and with contempt.’22 The ethnicity of stewards differed according to the national flag of the shipping line and with stewards usually drawn from the colonial and semicolonial possessions of the respective imperial powers. British firms tended to employ Indian and Chinese stewards (although they did not mix them in service roles on the same ship), the French employed Vietnamese stewards, while Dutch steamers carried Javanese stewards. Regional trades in the Pacific were dominated by North American, Australasian and Japanese shipping operators. Here, British and Anglo-American, as well as Chinese, Filipino and Japanese stewards predominated. British metropolitan preferences for Indian service crew Public Records Office (hereafter PRO), MT 9/2778 F.  3308, 1938; G. Balachandran, ‘Conflicts in the International Maritime Labour Market: British and Indian Seamen, Employers, and the State, 1890–1939’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 39, no. 1 (2002): 95. 20 Gordon Jackson, ‘Introduction’, in Shipping, Technology and Imperialism:  Papers Presented to the Third British-Dutch Maritime History Conference, ed. Gordon Jackson and David M. Williams (Hants, UK: Scolar Press, 1996), 16. 21 Hal Winter, ‘British Passengers on Foreign Ships’, Nautical Magazine, 6 December 1933, 496. 22 BL, Case of an Alleged Assault upon a Native Servant by His English Employer at Spencer’s Hotel, Madras; Mar.–Nov. 1927, extract published in Vorwarts (Social Democratic Daily of Berlin), IOR/L/ PJ/6/1941, file 1641. 19

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were not transposed to the Pacific, partly in response to white labour hostility in the British settler colonies, as we discuss later in this chapter. In the Indian and Pacific Ocean trades, Chinese stewards were engaged typically on routes that touched at ports in China. Chinese stewards were employed by the Ocean Steam Ship Company (also known as the Blue Funnel Line, established in 1866), which traded between Britain, China and later Australia. In its trades between Australia, China and Japan, the Eastern and Australian Steamship Company (E&A, established in 1873)  also employed Chinese stewards (Figure 5.1). E&A was proud to record in the 1930s that it had a ‘highly trained and efficient European staff ’ occupying all managerial positions, with a personnel composed of Chinese ‘who have been specially trained in their duties since they entered the Company’s service as “larn pigeon boys” ’ (referring to their early reliance on ‘pidgin’ English). Furthermore, the E&A promotional material claimed, that with the ‘grandsons and great-grandsons’ of the first Chinese servants serving on board its ships, ‘ “E. & A.  service” has become a tradition’.23 As this comment suggests, service roles may have been regarded as a hereditary position, passed down the family line. In any case, it was not uncommon for the providore department to be crewed intergenerationally, with the E&A’s Eastern in 1920, for instance, carrying nine Chinese stewards who ranged in age from seventeen to fifty-three years old.24 Stewards chose to work on ships for many reasons, some engaging on short-term contracts as a means of travel or to fund their education, while others made the sea a life-long career. Another Australian company, the Sydney-based Burns Philp and Company which was established in 1883, extended its northern Australian interests in stores and coastal shipping further north into Melanesia and invested heavily in plantations and copra production to secure cargo for its vessels. In 1902 it opened a Darwin–Java–Singapore service, and on this route employed Indian men in the engine department, Malays on deck and Chinese in the victualling department, all of whom served under white senior crew.25 On occasion, stewards from Goa, rather than China, were employed, as was the case on the Mangola in the late 1920s.26 On the other side of the Pacific, the New York–based Pacific Mail Steamship Company (established in 1848) was an early actor in the transpacific trades from CL, NMM, ‘E&A Line to the East’, brochures and pamphlets of the Eastern and Australian Steamship Co Ltd., EAS/6/1. 24 NAA (Brisbane), various files of Chinese stewards, BP3/4. 25 Kenneth D. Buckley and Kris Klugman, The History of Burns Philp: The Australian Company in the South Pacific (Sydney: Burns Philp, 1981), 85–6. From 1904, it was a six-weekly service. 26 NAA, Crew List ‘Mangola’, Burns Philp, 19/12/29, J2773, 1327/1929. 23



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Figure 5.1  Route map, from Eastern and Australian Steamship Company’s Illustrated Handbook to the East, E&A, Sydney, 1904. National Library of Australia.

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San Francisco to Asia from 1867 and Sydney from 1875. Pacific Mail employed Chinese crew across all steamship departments, with senior positions reserved for white men, a racialized labour hierarchy typical elsewhere. As on the Indian Ocean, the early years of steamship crewing were not marked by overt divisions or specializations, as steamship companies appeared to be making do in developing a relatively new industry. This is illustrated by a sample of vessels employed in the San Francisco–Sydney trades in 1881. The City of New York carried fourteen saloon waiters from China and a kitchen staff predominantly of Americans and Europeans, but with a Chinese second pantryman and scullion. The Zealandia’s chief steward, a twenty-eight year old Londoner, had a staff of sixteen British and Australian general servants, alongside four Chinese general servants and nine Chinese pantry staff. The City of Sydney carried an English chief steward, sixteen cabin waiters from China, and a mixed pantry staff of Chinese, Americans and Irish, as well as men from the West Indies.27 African American men were also on occasion employed as table servants, barbers, and as head steward.28 Over time, and like the men on E&A ships, Pacific Mail’s Chinese stewards soon came to symbolize fine service – referred to as ‘the famous blue-gowned boys’.29 Similar stereotypes attended Chinese as those associated with Goan crew, who were favoured for their apparent trustworthiness. In contrast, captains swore against English, Scotch, Irish and Americans, maintaining ‘there is no getting along with them’.30 The Canadian Pacific Railway Company (CPR) in its ‘Empress liner’ route from Vancouver to China and Japan which opened in 1886, also employed Chinese stewards, as did the American Dollar Line (established in 1900)  in its trades to Asia. Howard Eastwood, an American pianist on the SS President Coolidge, noted that the Chinese waiters in the 1930s had homes in Kowloon and Hong Kong. Eastwood also noticed men of mixed race, including Chinese-English and Chinese-Indian waiters, the latter he speculated might be descendants of Sikh policemen who served in Hong Kong.31 In addition to Chinese stewards, Filipino See transcriptions of State Archives and Records Authority of New South Wales, Reels of the Shipping Master’s Office, Inwards Passengers Lists at http://marinersandships.com.au/shipdate_2. htm. 28 As recorded in passenger accounts of Pacific Mail travel; Richard Tangye, Reminiscences of Travel in Australia, America and Egypt (London: Sampson Low, 1883), 115; ATL, William Hepburn Diary, 1879, fMS-Papers-3948. 29 E. Mowbray-Tate, Transpacific Steam: The Story of Steam Navigation from the Pacific Coast of North America to the Far East and the Antipodes, 1867–1941 (New York: Cornwall Books, 1986), 240. 30 As related to James Anthony Froude, Oceana, or England and Her Colonies (London: Longmans, Green, 1886), 203. 31 San Francisco Public Library, San Francisco History Centre (hereafter SFPL), Howard Eastwood, ‘My Trip to the Orient and Return’, 15 August 1933, Small MS Collections, 1/14. 27



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men also served on American ships, reflecting the expanding Pacific empire of the United States. After the Spanish–American War of 1898 an estimated 3,000 Filipino seamen entered the US merchant marine, predominantly as stewards.32 On ships employing ethnically diverse crew, colonial racial groupings were mapped onto specific departments. This pattern of arranging service roles according to ethnicity was one which was also observed in private homes where servants of different ethnicities were employed as we have seen. With particular reference to the China trade, one British shipmaster stressed that the ‘best combination’ was Chinese deck crew and Chinese cooks and stewards, Indian stokehold hands and Malays and Filipinos as quartermasters, a division seen also on Burns Philp ships. If one were compelled to carry an entire Chinese crew, ‘I always mixed them: seamen from Canton, firemen from Ningpo, cooks and stewards from Hainan.’ He opined that ‘they all hated one another so cordially that there was no fear of them combining against their European officers’.33 The recruitment of diverse Chinese crew had been facilitated by the 1842 Treaty of Nanking, which had ceded Hong Kong to the British, and granted Europeans access to five ports across China. Hoihow on Hainan Island was also opened for trade under the 1858 Treaty of Tientsin.34 With a lack of employment opportunities at home, many Hainanese men (also known as Hylam or Hailam) sought work overseas and came to dominate as steamship stewards. Hainanese emigration figures rose from some 6,000 in the 1880s to 40,000 by 1907 and continued to rise after 1911, particularly with men heading for Singapore.35 A sense of the relative number of Hainanese compared with Cantonese stewards can be gauged from War Registration files for Queensland between 1916 and 1921. Of the Chinese stewards passing through Queensland, 40 per cent were Hainanese, and the rest were Cantonese. Some ships appear to have made a shift from Hainanese to Cantonese saloon crews during this period. In 1916 all twenty-one steward registrations for the E&A St Albans were from Hainan, while after the war, all seventeen registrations for 1920 were from Canton (Guangdong).36 The SS Gabo, however, owned by the China-Australia Mail Steamship Line, continued to carry stewards from Hainan in 1920. 32 Leon Fink, Sweatshops at Sea: Merchant Seamen in the World’s First Globalised Industry, From 1812 to the Present (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 164. 33 Cited in Richard Woodman, More Days, More Dollars:  The Universal Bucket Chain, 1885–1920 (Stroud: History Press, 2010), 24. 34 Robert Nield, ‘China’s Southernmost Treaty Port’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch 52 (2012): 65. 35 Nield, ‘China’s Southernmost Treaty Port’, 72. 36 Numbers calculated using ninety-one Wartime Registration files for Chinese stewards, NAA (Brisbane), BP3/4.

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Steamships were not isolated labour sites, and service workers of similar origins could be found working in both ships and hotels. For instance, Hainanese men also worked in a similar capacity in colonial homes and hotels such as in the famous Raffles Hotel in Singapore, while service workers from Goa were found in every large hotel in India.37 Individuals might move between different labour sites, as was equally the case with European workers, where ship stewards might consider work in private homes during periods of underemployment. One British man, on his way to a domestic service agency, related encountering a group of idle seafarers outside the offices of the mercantile marine. He engaged two of them, aged in their late twenties, as ‘Mariner Maids’, reporting enthusiastically on the success of the experiment, which in this instance, unlike on-board ship, had displaced female domestic staff.38 Others retired from the sea to take up similar roles ashore. In the Australasian colonies many former chief stewards were to be found ‘running the best hotels, managing swell clubs, and conducting the finest restaurants’.39 With the increasing feminization of household domestic service in places like Singapore and Darwin, especially by the 1930s, former male Chinese servants typically found employment in hotels and clubs.40 In 1932, when the global depression left an estimated 2,000 Chinese seamen unemployed in Singapore, three separate lodging houses were established for them. These houses confirmed the ethnic division of labour; one being for Cantonese, said to be mainly engine drivers and stokers; another for the Hainanese stewards; and a third for Foochow (Fuzhou) deckhands.41 By the early 1970s the majority of saloon crews serving on British vessels of the P&O and Orient Line were Hakkas from North Kwantung and the New Territories in Hong Kong. It was noted that Hong Kong was merely a ‘convenient centre at which to gain employment at sea’, and recruitment from that port was ‘no indication of any ties or affinity to the Colony’.42 Advocate (Melbourne), 23 June 1932, 27; Mary Poynter, Around the Shores of Asia:  A Diary of Travel from the Golden Horn to the Golden Gate (London:  Allen and Unwin, 1921), 87. They were also found in many British and Anglo-Indian clubs. For instance, see Benjamin B. Cohen, In the Club:  Associational Life in Colonial South Asia (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2015), 113. 38 Nautical Magazine 114, 6 December 1925, 569–70. In an earlier example, house servants appointed to the Queensland Governor William Cairns in 1875 were former stewards on the P&O Pera. See Alfred Percival Maudslay, Life in the Pacific Fifty Years Ago (London: George Routledge, 1930), 65. 39 Manning, Below and Above the Water-line, 42. 40 Lowrie, Masters and Servants, 107, 122–3. 41 Seamen at this time sought reform of the Ghaut Serang system whereby the serang took a commission of 10 per cent to supply crew to the shipping companies. ‘Chinese Topics in Malaya’, Straits Times, 22 December 1932, 19. 42 CL, NMM, Asian Crew Manual (1973), 7, P&O Records, P&O/7/8. 37



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Japanese steamers, such as the transpacific fleet of the Toyo Kisen Kabushiki Kaisha (T.K.K.), generally employed Japanese stewards, although occasionally the position of chief steward was reserved for Americans.43 The steamships of the Nippon Yusen Kaisha (N.Y.K.), which operated services across the Pacific, throughout Asia and to Australia, employed predominantly Japanese crew. The crew manifest for the Nikko Maru en route to Sydney from Yokohama in 1906, for instance, indicated that the ship’s European master was in charge of thirtynine Japanese stewards supplemented by one Australian stewardess. In addition to the eight Japanese cooks on board there were also two Cantonese cooks.44 By 1921, a Japanese stewardess had replaced the Australian woman on the Nikko Maru. Stewardesses were appointed especially to attend to female passengers. They would never outnumber male stewards, nor be employed in their place as they were in private homes throughout Southeast Asia and parts of the Pacific, such as Fiji, by the 1930s. In fact, it was not until the late 1950s that shipping companies began hiring women as ‘waitresses’ in the place of male saloon stewards, such as in the Matson Line trades between San Francisco and Sydney (a decision not without controversy). No records of Chinese women employed on steamships have been found, although with the rise of airlines in the 1930s Chinese women trained as flight attendants, while in the 1950s Pan American World Airways began recruiting Japanese-American stewardesses for its transpacific and round-world services.45 From this brief (and partial) survey of steamship operators in the Indian and Pacific ocean trades, the industry preference by the first decades of the twentieth century for an ethnically streamlined stewards department is clear. Ah Pong’s position as chief steward also appears to be rather anomalous, insofar as whites generally held the most senior positions. We now turn to explore at greater length the impact of emerging racialized divisions between crew through instances of labour protests and growing unionization.

Labour protests In the early years of steam shipping, as some crew manifests indicate, white workers and Asian workers may have laboured side-by-side. As we explored in Chapter 4, in private homes in British Columbia and (very occasionally) in the Northern As was the case on the Nippon Maru; San Francisco Call, 10 December 1901, 5; 6 August 1913, 9. 44 http://mariners.records.nsw.gov.au/1906/07/021nik.htm (accessed 19 August 2014). 45 http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/926080.shtml; Christine R. Yano, Airborne Dreams:  “Nisei” Stewardesses and Pan American World Airways (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). The 43

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Territory, white governess and maids worked alongside Chinese male servants. For the most part, however, domestic labour in the colonial homes of the Asia Pacific region was performed by Asian migrants and indigenous people. The steamship then was a rare labour site where Asian men might come into direct contact with white workers of the same rank. Over time, the divisions between steamer departments were policed more strictly along lines of race, and spatial divisions, including sleeping quarters and in some cases even paths for moving around the ship, more clearly separated. At the same time, while inter-ethnic solidarity was not unknown, discourses such as ‘cheap labour’ that framed non-white workers as unwelcome competition became ever more ubiquitous. In the British settler colonies, states sided with unions to secure white labour supremacy in the mercantile marine more readily or explicitly than occurred in Britain itself. Chinese employment on steamships was a target of protest from the late nineteenth century, revealing the extent to which ships, more immediately than homes or hotels, were recruited into wider debates about regional geopolitics and, in the context of settler colonies, nation-building. In Sydney, seamen employed by the Australasian Steam Navigation Company (ASNCo.) went on strike in 1878 in protest against the importation of Chinese crews from Hong Kong to work the Australian coastal trades at less than half the equivalent wages of white seafarers. Initially the ASNCo. trialled Chinese on their Pacific routes to Fiji and New Caledonia, arguing they tolerated tropical conditions better, and were more sober, civil and reliable. The strikers demanded the wholesale exclusion of Chinese from New South Wales, and when this did not succeed, their exclusion from steamers. Mobilizing considerable financial and moral support, Australasian seamen declared victory thirteen weeks after forcing the ASNCo. to dramatically reduce Chinese crews. Within three years the company terminated Chinese recruitment altogether.46 Settler colonial labour demands extended to American vessels. Pacific Mail faced protests when in April 1885 seamen’s unions in Australasia targeted its transpacific steamers.47 The company acceded to demands not visual archive is thus much poorer for Asian stewardesses, although their presence may have been stylized in steamship posters; see, for example, University of Southern California Library, ‘A Woman in Blue Kimono Holding a Fan’, Toyo Kisen Kaisha Oriental Steamship Company, 1917, lithographic print poster, http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/cdm/ref/collection/p15799coll58/id/31444 (accessed 4 January 2017). Note that T.K.K.  was taken over by N.Y.K.  in 1926, http://www.theshipslist.com/ ships/lines/tkk.shtml (accessed 4 January 2017). 46 Ann Curthoys, ‘Conflict and Consensus’, in Who Are Our Enemies? Racism and the Australian Working Class, ed. Ann Curthoys and Andrew Markus (Neutral Bay, New South Wales: Hale and Iremonger in association with the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, 1978), 52–8. 47 ‘Strike against Chinese sailors’, Australian Town and Country Journal, 18 April 1885, 42.



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to employ Chinese labour as cooks, servants and firemen, but decided not to renew its expiring contract for the San Francisco–Sydney route. The service was assumed by the Oceanic Steamship Company of San Francisco in combination with the Union Steam Ship Company of New Zealand (USSCo.). Oceanic followed the Pacific Mail tradition in employing Chinese stewards and engine-room crew, however the USSCo. had already yielded to white labour demands and only employed British crew on its ships. Oceanic initially resisted demands to remove Chinese crews, the manager insisting he would use the labour ‘that suits me best’. As he informed the USSCo., ‘it surprises us here to see how people in the Colonies have yielded from time to time to every demand made upon them by laborers’.48 Oceanic was eventually obliged to replace Chinese with European seamen, after New South Wales included stipulations in its renewed mail contract that only European crews were to be employed, but the company continued to struggle to secure sufficient white crew at San Francisco. Ship-owners also faced domestic agitation in the United States when the International Seamen’s Union of America put forward a resolution in 1904 to ban ‘Mongolians’ from cooks’ and stewards’ departments on American vessels, all the while acknowledging the difficulty in achieving this.49 Following union pressure, new legislation proposed to reduce the number of Asian crew employed on American-owned vessels running from the Pacific coast to China and Japan. The La Follette Act (Seamen’s Act) of 1915 was designed to improve the conditions of seamen serving in the American merchant marine. It also contained a clause that 75 per cent of crew must be able to understand commands in English (Britain’s Merchant Shipping Act 1906 also introduced a language test). Those who opposed this argued that it would ‘sound the death-knell of the American flag’ and give Japanese-manned ships an advantage. As the president of Pacific Mail put it, it would mean ‘giving the Pacific Ocean to Japan’.50 Yet because the US Department of Commerce ruled that sign language and ‘pidgin’ English were acceptable, many Chinese were in fact continued on American ships.51 Indeed, as we outlined in Chapter 3, in 1900 Ah Ling, a Chinese steward employed on the American ship Brooklyn, was tasked with helping Governor William Taft to secure Chinese servants for his home in the Philippines. The servants were Frances Steel, ‘Anglo-Worlds in Transit:  Connections and Frictions across the Pacific,’ Journal of Global History 11, no. 2 (2016): 251–70; HC, Spreckels to Mills, 7 March 1888 and 22 September 1888, USSCo. Records, AG-292-005-001/016. 49 ‘To Bar Chinese from Vessels’, San Francisco Chronicle, 8 December 1904, 13. 50 New Zealand Herald, 4 February 1914, 6. 51 Mowbray-Tate, Transpacific Steam, 241. 48

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recruited by Ah Ling from Shanghai. Taft found them waiting for him in Hong Kong on board the US transport Hancock, bound for Manila.52 This example highlights the role that the mobility of domestic labourers and the steamships themselves played in transmitting cultures of service across the Asia Pacific region. Back in the Indian Ocean trades, multi-racial crewing was targeted in the Australian Commonwealth Act 12 of 1901, which stipulated that vessels carrying Australian mails would be obliged to carry only white crew, part of a broader push to legislate for a ‘White Australia’.53 Burns Philp was able to sidestep these restrictions in its Singapore service, as this route was not supported initially by a federal mail contract. Further restrictions were introduced with the Navigation Act of 1910 (brought into force in 1921), which reserved the Australian coastal trade to ships paying crew Australian wage rates and operating under Australian conditions. Ships in Burns Philp’s Singapore trade did not carry passengers or cargo between two Australian ports, and were therefore exempt.54 Shipping companies running non-mail services also circumvented stipulations for ‘all white’ crew by registering their vessels in London or Singapore rather than Sydney.55 Some passengers sought to find fault with Chinese stewards simply to make a political point in favour of white workers. Writing during a voyage from Fremantle to Singapore, the controversial Western Australian journalist Geoffrey Dell remarked in 1904 that the Chinese crew ‘aroused in us a latent antipathy to the colour’. He doubted their efficiency:  ‘For a time the Chinese stewards seemed to us ideal, with their noiseless tread, exceeding taciturnity and impassive demeanour, while hovering about the tables.’ As time wore on, however, ‘we grew to notice on the part of these stewards an inattention to detail that contrasted but indifferently with the white service enjoyed in another vessel on the return trip’. When he commented on their lack of training, he was told that the ‘boys’ were ‘shipped raw’ from Singapore every trip.56 One extreme example of anti-Chinese sentiment occurred in 1910 when a European cabin boy on a British steamer shot himself in the chest reportedly in reaction to 52 MD, LOC, Letter from William H. Taft to His Brother, Charles Taft, 2 June 1900, Presidential Papers, William H. Taft Papers, series 1. 53 Robert Huttenback, Racism and Empire: White Settlers and Colored Immigrants in the British SelfGoverning Colonies 1830–1910 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976), 279. 54 Buckley and Klugman, The History of Burns Philp, 238. 55 For specific instances, see Bruce A. Wilkinson and Ross K. Wilkinson, The Main Fleet of Burns Philp (Canberra: Nautical Association of Australia, 1981), 68, 105, 114. 56 ‘The Indispensable Alien. Orientals in the North-West. Ships’ “Boys” and Porters’, Western Mail, 23 July 1904, 45.



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having to board with a Chinese cabin mate: ‘He said he preferred to die than sleep in the cabin with a Chinese man.’57 Shipping companies continued to argue for the comparative superiority of non-white crew in the face of protests against their employment. In one incident on a Pacific Mail steamship in 1916, two white stewards had a ‘fist fight in the dining saloon during dinner’. Their disruption necessitated the employment of Chinese ‘as the only solution of running steamers to the Orient and satisfying the passengers on board’.58 The Marine Cooks and Stewards Association of the West Coast of the United States, established in 1901 as an exclusively white union, lamented that it would be an ‘easy matter’ for the company to procure a competent Chinese crew, as ‘almost anyone who possesses a smattering of English will be able to qualify’.59 Following accusations that Pacific Mail violated contract labour laws when it signed on forty-two Chinese stewards on another steamer in 1916, the Immigration Commissioner Edward White ruled that the labour laws in question did not apply to seamen.60 Seafarers were ‘an “anomalous class” ’ not only in labour laws but also US immigration law.61 The La Follette Act, which had also decriminalized desertions in US ports, troubled opponents of Chinese immigration given the high rates of desertion by Chinese crew. In 1917 seamen were for the first time included explicitly within immigration laws, which ‘authorised US port authorities to demand bonds of US$500–1,000 from shipowners for allowing Asian seafarers off the ship’. Yet such bonds were rarely demanded. British shipowners, frustrated by the expense of hiring replacement crew in US ports, pushed that notifications be issued that Asian crews could be ‘detained’ on vessels unless employers furnished this bond to restrict their shore leave. Thus, it was not the application of any US immigration laws that stopped Asian crews from going ashore, but, as G.  Balachandran shows, the ‘voluntary’ restrictions imposed by shipping companies, which were applied ‘with particular strictness and consistency on vessels carrying Chinese crews’.62

‘Cabin Boys Colour Line’, Argus, 28 March 1910, 6. 58 San Francisco Chronicle, 22 October 1916, 44. 59 BANC, Marine Cooks and Stewards Association of the Pacific Coast Minutes, 1910–1931, vol. 4:1, 26 October 1916, MSS 2004/178. 60 Before the ship steamed for Asian ports the men were examined and passed by the San Francisco Collector of Port in accordance with the language test stipulated in the La Follette Act; San Francisco Chronicle, 24 October 1916. 61 Anna Pegler-Gordon, ‘Shanghaied on the Streets of Hoboken:  Chinese Exclusion and Maritime Regulation at Ellis Island’, Journal for Maritime Research 16, no. 2 (2014): 231. 62 G. Balachandran, ‘Indefinite Transits: Mobility and Confinement in the Age of Steam’, Journal of Global History 11, no. 2 (2016): 201–2. 57

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In the early 1920s, the US Shipping Board introduced a policy of preference for American citizens as crew. Unlike Chinese, Filipino workers were readily considered citizens, yet the Marine Cooks and Stewards Association sought to ‘eliminate’ Filipino crew ‘wherever possible’.63 It was still difficult to secure suitable crew, as service roles seemingly went against the ‘Republican spirit’, argued the British Nautical Magazine in 1923, and this, it asserted, justified rejecting the employment of Anglo-American stewards. The magazine still relied on the colonial stereotype of Chinese as inherently servile, claiming that ‘foreign stewards have to be imported for the sake of smooth running and . . . foreign crews for the sake of economy’.64 The 1920s witnessed a raft of maritime labour protests and the rise of non-white unionization across Asia and the Pacific, partly as a result of the 1920 International Labour Conference. Seafarers from Goa had organized comparatively early, with a Goa Portuguese Seamen’s Club established in 1896, though restricted to P&O saloon crews. Goan stewards serving on other lines were targeted by a new union in 1919, the Asiatic Seamen Union. In 1920 the Club was transformed into the Portuguese Seafarers Union, and following a union merger, the Indian Seamen’s Union in 1921.65 Chinese stewards also became increasingly unionized. Ironically in 1922, the year before the Nautical Magazine stressed the efficiency of foreign crews, Chinese labour protests in Hong Kong laid up hundreds of vessels from over twenty shipping lines for almost three months while the newly established Chinese Seamen’s Union demanded and eventually received a 30 per cent pay rise.66 The walkout was described as the ‘most uniform action ever taken by Chinese’ and extended to all labour that would disrupt ships’ movements, including lighter-men, laundry employees and sampan navigators.67 Chinese domestic workers on shore would also strike in sympathy, as we will explore in Chapter  7. Shipping firms recruited strikebreakers from Ningpo (Ningbo), the Philippines, and the East Indies to replace Hong Kong seamen.68 On some

BANC, Marine Cooks and Stewards Association of the Pacific Coast Minutes, 1910–31, vol. 8:1, 20 March 1924, MSS 2004/178. 64 Nautical Magazine 110, 1 July 1923, 17. For similar assessments of Anglo-American stewards in earlier decades, see Steel, ‘Anglo Worlds in Motion’. 65 Balachandran, Globalizing Labour?, 230–31. 66 Northern Standard, 28 March 1922; Ming Kou Chan, ‘Labor and Empire:  The Chinese Labor Movement in the Canton Delta, 1895–1927’ (PhD diss., Stanford University, 1975); For more on Chinese labour movement, see Jean Chesneaux, The Chinese Labor Movement, 1919–1927, translated from the French by H. M. Wright (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1968). 67 San Francisco Chronicle, 7 March 1922, 17. 68 Chan, ‘Labor and Empire’, 277–8. 63



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vessels, such as the E&A St Albans, the passengers and officers were left to act as their own stewards and to clean their own cabins after the Cantonese crew walked out upon the arrival of the steamer in Hong Kong from Australia. It was reported that only by ‘a clever ruse’ were a number of Ningpo men ‘smuggled’ on board. The steamer ‘crept out’ of port to Manila where Filipino stewards were engaged to replace them. These men were supplemented by white crew at Sydney for the return voyage.69 During the strike, Pacific Mail also looked to engage European cooks on its vessels.70 Labour organization and unrest also characterized Japanese shipping. Even as the Nautical Magazine in 1925 praised the British shipowner’s supposed ‘discovery’ of Japanese men as suitable steamship crew, for their ‘nautical leanings’ and ‘no union worth speaking of ’,71 the Nihon Kaūn Kumiai (Japan Seaman’s Union) was already four years old. By the mid-1920s, Japanese stewards were as equally active as Chinese, with the N.Y.K. stewards and cooks going on strike in Tokyo in 1927. N.Y.K. tried to employ Chinese stewards to break the strike, but reportedly struggled because these men refused to accept the low wages proffered.72 In 1927 the Japan Ship Stewards’ Union merged with the larger Japan Seaman’s Union and in 1929 the N.Y.K. Liners Stewards’ Union followed suit.73 In 1927 the Chinese seamen’s union for the port of Kongmoon (Jiangmen) in Guangdong also began to agitate for higher wages.74 Sector-wide strikes were punctuated by protests about the collective conditions on board individual ships. The multi-racial manning on Burns Philp vessels was denounced as a cynical ploy to prevent men combining and striking for better conditions (and thus rendering them preferable to ‘expensive’ white Australian crew).75 Yet specific departments could still impede smooth operations. For instance, in Sydney in 1926, the Chinese stewards on the Marella went on strike, refusing to work on the night of a large dance, having been on duty all day.76 A few months later the Marella’s Chinese victualling crew objected

‘Passengers as Stewards’, Argus, 11 March 1922, 11. 70 BANC, Marine Cooks and Stewards Association of the Pacific Coast Minutes, 1910–31, vol. 7:1, 2 March 1922, MSS 2004/178. 71 Nautical Magazine 113, 2 February 1925, 132. 72 ‘Stewards Strike on Japanese Line’, Berkeley Daily Gazette, 25 March 1927, 16. 73 International Labour Office with introduction by Janet Hunter, Japanese Economic History, 1930– 1960, Volume V, Industrial Labour in Japan (London: Routledge, 2000), 106. 74 ‘Chinese Seamen’s New Demands’, Straits Times, 16 December 1927, 10. 75 Arthur Blakeley, Navigation Bill Speech, Australian House of Representatives, 28 January 1926, 1. 76 ‘Chinese Stewards’, Sydney Morning Herald, 1 October 1926, 10. 69

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to a European cook in their galley and refused to go on board until he was removed, delaying the vessel by two hours.77 The left-wing leadership of the Sydney Kuomintang (K.M.T.) was active in setting up special seamen’s groups in the mid-1920s. One Chinese seaman interviewed stated that they ‘objected very strongly to being called “boy” and it seemed ridiculous to call a grown-up man by such a term’. Sydney K.M.T. President Samuel Wong suggested that the shipping companies trading between Asia and Australia should ensure that men were addressed by their position title, such as steward.78 Forms of address remained contentious. Even as late as 1973, an Asian Crew Manual issued by P&O to its officers emphasized that ‘Chinese Stewards must never be called “boy”, but by name’.79 Legislative changes ultimately forced Chinese off some trades that connected to Chinese ports, adding to their exclusion from routes linking white settler states around the Pacific. In 1932, the United States introduced an amendment to the Jones-White Act (Merchant Marine Act 1928), which decreed that all officers and two-thirds of crew on mail contract ships were to be American citizens, thus formalizing the earlier Marine Board recommendation in the 1920s. As a consequence, the Dollar Line, with a fleet of nineteen vessels, replaced Chinese dining-room stewards with Americans.80

Shipboard encounters Until the labour exclusion measures outlined above, ships that plied between the white settler strongholds of Australia, New Zealand and the United States were sites of routine and occasionally intimate contact between European passengers and Asian stewards. For many Europeans, this was their first experience of Asia. As Oxford historian James Anthony Froude remarked in 1885 when sailing on the Pacific Mail’s City of Sydney, the Chinese cabin boys and under-stewards were ‘the first with whom we had come in contact in a domestic capacity’.81 This was more pronounced in itineraries that linked directly to Asia, where Chinese stewards offered passengers the opportunity to prepare for and familiarize Age, 4 February 1927, 7. 78 ‘Chinese Seamen’, Townsville Daily Bulletin, 10 August 1926, 4. 79 CL, NMM, Asian Crew Manual (1973), P&O Records, 5 (original emphasis). 80 ‘Dollar Line Crew, Chinese Stewards Being Replaced by Americans’, Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 15 September 1932, 12. The company still employed Chinese cooks, however. See ‘Chinese Is Freed’, New York Times, 20 February 1937, cited in Pegler-Gordon, ‘Shanghaied on the Streets of Hoboken’, 236. 81 Froude, Oceana, 199. 77



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themselves with what lay ahead. Henry Potter, travelling from the United States to China in 1902, noted that ‘one encounters the Chinese often long before he has reached their own land’, mentioning in the same breath servants in Californian homes, labourers on the railways and in mines, as well as the ‘cabin “boys” on some Pacific steamships’.82 Passengers frequently marked Chinese stewards as ‘other’ and were purportedly puzzled by their physical appearance, recording impressions of ambiguous gender identity linked closely to style of clothing and hair. A New Zealand passenger on the Pacific Mail’s City of Sydney in 1882 remarked on the Chinese waiting staff thus: ‘What queer looking folks they are with their pigtails plaited up on the back of their heads, and their curious dress. A stranger could not tell whether they were men or women, but I  was told that they all belong to the masculine gender.’83 Froude was also struck by the attire of what he termed the ‘little brown fellows’:  they wore ‘flowing dresses of blue calico with gilt buttons or clasps, a soft smile on their faces, and their pigtails coiled in a knob upon their heads, to be let down when in full dress at dinner-time’.84 In 1898 John Dale travelled between Sydney and Hong Kong per the E&A Airlie. He remarked that even ‘the “stewardess” ’ was ‘a Chinaman, with a pigtail, who looks very modest when attending upon the ladies in their cabins’.85 As in the colonial home, such feminized depictions sought to belay any fears of Chinese men as a potential sexual threat to European women. Stewards’ uniforms were often markedly different to other crew, notably those workers who were far less visible to passengers, as the photographs from the Iris in 1904 record (Figure 5.2). The vessel was a cable-repairing steamer, jointly owned by the British, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand and Fiji Governments, and managed by the Pacific Cable Board. Protests flared up in 1904, when Auckland was designated a depot for the vessel, meaning it would be in port four months of the year for coaling, provisioning and docking. Australasian seamen’s unions and trades councils made many deputations to political leaders to have the Chinese crew removed, with the New Zealand Government ultimately advising the Cable Board that their employment was ‘inadvisable’. They were eventually replaced in 1906.86 Here the stewards, referred to in some accounts as ‘Peking boys’, wore

Henry Codman Potter, The East of To-day and To-morrow (New York: Century Co., 1902), 11. 83 Colonist, 9 May 1882, 3. 84 Froude, Oceana, 199. 85 John Dale, Around the World by Doctor’s Orders (London: Elliot Stock, 1898), 121, 122. 86 See correspondence in the University of Auckland Library Special Collection, FSU Auckland Branch, 91/3, box 2; Grey River Argus, 10 December 1904, 3. 82

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Figure  5.2  The Advocate, 23 May 1904, 72. Enclosed with Indian and Chinese discrimination 1897–1963, Herbert Otto Roth Papers, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand, 94-106-14/24.



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orientalized costumes, yet the firemen were dressed in standard sailors’ hats and trousers.87 Presumably the attire of the former only compounded objections to the presence of these men in New Zealand waters. The appearance of Chinese stewards was also tied up with ideals of consistent service, and might be used as a counterpoint to denounce other workers as slipping below the ideal. An English woman, Jessie Colmer, travelled from Hawai‘i to Japan by Pacific Mail’s Korea in 1908. On the third day at sea she recounted the daily change in stewards’ uniform: The first was very pretty and reminded one of our Hospital nurses, a blue tunic with white cuffs to the elbows and little black caps with red tassels, then yesterday the blue was exchanged for long white linen garments – resembling night shirts, with their black trousers just visible below – to-day the white linen is thin muslin through which the black trousers are quite visible.

Even as the Chinese stewards looked ‘so funny’ to her, she enjoyed watching them at work, remarking that it was a ‘vast improvement’ to ‘the lackadaisical attitude of the black man’.88 It seems unlikely, however, that the same crew had multiple costumes, and perhaps they were distinguished by rank, capacity or nationality. This last uniform appears to be a typical shirt of the Philippines (for more on clothing and masculinity in the Philippines, see Chapter 3). A Pacific Mail brochure also boasted that each of their steamers, including the Korea, carried a Filipino string band for the entertainment of guests, a performative role we discuss at greater length below.89 After the 1911 Revolution in China, Chinese workers began to discard many of the visual trappings of Chineseness, most notably cutting off their queues which had symbolized obedience to the Emperor, and adopting western clothing. But for Euro-American travellers who looked for the orientalist experience, steamship operators would ensure that older style costumes were retained. They took great pains to create the comforting illusion of a timeless, unchanging Asia. Sir Evelyn Wrench, former editor of The Spectator and founder of the English-Speaking Union of the Commonwealth, took a honeymoon tour on the CPR’s Empress of Canada from Vancouver to Hong Kong in 1937. He remarked, ‘as soon as we got on board we thought we were really heading for far ‘Chinese on the Iris’, Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners’ Advocate, 30 July 1904, 7. 88 BANC, Jessie Colmer, ‘Diary of a Tour Round the World’, 12 May 1908, MSS 92/811 c (original emphasis). 89 Pacific Mail brochure, America, Manila, Honolulu, Russia, Japan, China, India:  Pacific Mail (n.d. but c.  1910–15), 15, www.atlantictransportline.us/content/PDFfiles/PanamaPacificBrochure.pdf (accessed 19 August 2016). 87

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Figure  5.3 ‘Ejima, Tsunenosuke  – Nationality:  Japanese  – Alien Registration Certificate No 13077, issued 30 October 1921 at Thursday Island.’ National Archives of Australia, Brisbane, BP4/32, 6300171.

parts’. The stewards were Chinese, ‘dressed in white night-gowns, black trousers, white socks and black slippers’, attire not dissimilar to the Iris stewards depicted three decades earlier.90 In other respects attempts by stewards to use shipboard space in a similar fashion to European crew, such as demanding a dining table for eating meals, were shot down as ‘too Western’.91 This approach was not followed on all shipping lines. Photographs of N.Y.K. Japanese stewards in the 1920s indicate they wore plain white, westernized uniforms, while a chief steward, Tsunenosuke Ejima, wore a standard suit (Figures 5.3–5.5). With dress a marker of status this may have communicated Japan as an independent nation-state rather than a dependent colony, with the white uniforms signifying a ‘modern’ worker in contrast with the more elaborate costumes of a ‘serviteur’. Yet there was much variation, even in one company. In 1950 it was noted that stewards from Goa were the only Indian crew on a P&O liner who dressed in western fashion. Lascar deckhands and the boatswain, by contrast, ‘appeared in Indian costume, with red and silver turban’.92 Promotional BL, Sir Evelyn Wrench, Travel Diary – Canada, Seattle, Honolulu, Hong Kong, Philippines, Japan, 1937, Add MS 59588. 91 Balachandran, Globalizing Labour?, 123. 92 ‘British Liner Here with Odd Crew’, New York Times, 16 June 1950, 51. 90



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Figure 5.4  ‘Kurokawa, Kamezo – Nationality: Japanese – Alien Registration Certificate No 2049, issued 4 March 1918 at Thursday Island.’ National Archives of Australia, Brisbane, BP4/32, 6323500.

Figure  5.5 ‘Matsushima, Kumazo  – Nationality:  Japanese  – Alien Registration Certificate No 4186, issued 14 February 1919 at Thursday Island.’ National Archives of Australia, Brisbane, BP4/32, 6317233.

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Figure 5.6  Promotional images of dining-room stewards, c. 1951. P&O Archive, Caird Library, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, reproduced by kind permission of P&O Heritage Collection. http://www.poheritage.com/.

images from P&O in the early 1950s indicate that dining-room stewards were staged variously in faux-oriental costumes as well as in Europeanized white jackets, indicative perhaps of expectations on board specific ships or along particular routes (Figures 5.6 and 5.7). In many instances stewards also played performative roles, often entertaining passengers, usually only in first class, in the evenings. ‘Blackface’ minstrel performances by colonial and British stewards were a set piece on Pacific steamships by the late nineteenth century. Japanese stewards assumed the role of entertainers on the N.Y.K. fleet. On the Yawata Maru, between North Australia,



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Figure  5.7 Promotional images of dining-room stewards on board the Chusan, c.  1950–54. P&O Archive, Caird Library, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, reproduced by kind permission of P&O Heritage Collection.

Manila and Hong Kong in 1914, Mary Hall remarked on the ‘entertaining’ crew:  ‘The afternoon we left Townsville, the stewards gave an exhibition of Japanese fencing. The costume worn for this display consisted of a short divided skirt . . . the head was encased in a helmet.’ She noted that while the passengers showed little musical talent, ‘the deck steward, a man of many parts, came forward and played very tunefully and sweetly on two pieces of hollow bamboo rather resembling a shepherd’s pipes’. Later in the trip, the stewards’ dance and ‘funny play’ was for her the ‘crowning event’ of a perfect voyage.93 This underscored the centrality of stewards in shaping the mobility experience, while servants in the colonial home did not assume the role of entertainer to any notable extent. The ship developed its own traditions, related to the confinement at sea and connected to older rituals to mark the journey such as crossing the line ceremonies. Mary Hall, A Woman in the Antipodes and in the Far East (London: Methuen, 1914), 264, 265, 268. 93

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There was also the suggestion of spectacle in some service roles. The composition of the providore department was standardized across steamship companies, however, there was a specific position which appears to have been reserved only for vessels which employed Chinese service crew – that of ‘biscuit boy’ or ‘Biscuits’. During tea service a ‘diminutive China boy’ dressed in a white service uniform with yachting cap followed the deck steward carrying a tray of biscuits. As the ‘dispensers of amusement for all passengers’, this position assured large tips.94 From the point of view of white, male passengers, a distinguishing hallmark of a fine steward was his capacity to play the servant to the hilt – quickly observe and absorb his patron’s ‘fads’, such as serving tea at the desired hour each morning, and catering to them efficiently.95 Froude was pleased to relate a familiar trope, noting how ‘noiselessly the little creatures moved about in slippered feet, and were infinitely obliging and engaging’. After waking one morning he found ‘my faithful “Jonnie” had arranged clothes and washing things with silence and neatness of a Brownie’.96 The American Howard Eastwood on the Dollar Line’s President Coolidge sang the praises of his waiter, Chong: ‘He had a good memory, and after sizing up your likes and dislikes, he will often bring you things you want, without you having to ask for them.’97 While Evelyn Wrench, on his return journey to Canada at the end of his China honeymoon, adjusted to a change of crew, praising ‘Yung’, their ‘marvellous cabin-steward, who anticipates our slightest want and who folds M’s night-gowns with the pretty pleats in front as no maid has ever folded them since we have been away’. He noted that he and his wife were ‘so impressed’ that ‘were it not for immigration laws we should like to take with us a China “boy” as joint “maid-valet”!’ They also singled out a waiter named Achang as ‘silent but very efficient’.98 Echoing the racialized attributes of Asian servants that employers in private homes celebrated, emphasis on the prominent, orientalized visibility of stewards on deck merged here with praise for silent efficiency. Assurances as to the invisibility of discreet stewards were given in a Pacific Mail brochure, which described the Korea as having upper deck staterooms on the starboard side,

‘John Chinaman at Sea  – Sailors and Stewards  – and Gamesters’, Sunday Mail (Brisbane), 6 February 1927. 95 Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand (hereafter ATL), Frederick Barkas Diary, 24 July 1923, MS-Papers-2491-32. 96 Froude, Oceana, 199, 202. 97 SFPL, Howard Eastwood, ‘My Trip to the Orient and Return’, 17 July 1933, Small MS Collections, 1/14. 98 BL, Sir Evelyn Wrench, Travel Diary – Canada, Seattle, Honolulu, Hong Kong, Philippines, Japan, 1937, Add MS 59588. 94



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while servant and crew quarters were on the port side with a ‘working passage’ to ensure service was performed ‘without intruding upon the passengers’ quarters’.99 Out of view of passengers in their own quarters, crew refashioned shipboard space in ways that suited them. Stewards from Goa were predominantly Catholic, with special devotion to St Francis Xavier, and constructed chapels in their quarters where they recited the rosary each day and mass on Sunday (Figure  5.8). At Christmas it was a longstanding custom for the captain and officers to visit the crib erected by crew and to contribute an alter offering.100 Other uses of crew quarters facilitated trade in goods, including smuggling. When the Burns Philp vessel Montoro was taken out of the Singapore service for refitting to enter the Papuan trade, it was discovered that woodwork in the stewards’ accommodation had been hollowed out to smuggle sovereigns out of Australia.101 On other ships, the accommodation section was where Chinese stewards knew ‘how to relax’, as Hollister Noble, novelist and writer for the New York Times wrote in 1927: The entire glory-hole  – the quarters for saloon and deck stewards, bell-hops, mess-boys, and ‘biscuit’ boys – is filled with native products, such as bags of rice, boxes of tea, Chinese prints, bamboo mats, wooden bowls, chop-sticks, paper lanterns, toasted melon-seeds, magic charms and a weird variety of baked nuts and preserved sweets.

Chinese passengers travelling third class on their return to China from the United States (including deportees, as well as California truck farmers, restaurant owners and laundry magnates going home for a visit) in effect became ‘Chinese’ again through their proximity to the stewards. These passengers soon shed their Western dress and customs and, in Noble’s words, ‘the true Oriental emerges’ as gambling, tea drinking and opium smoking took over.102 These observations of communal activities among Chinese passengers and crew remind us that private meeting spaces were absent from accounts of domestic service in the largest colonial homes. Chinese servants working in smaller domestic establishments would have had to leave their employer’s house in search of a club, cafe, or a

99 Pacific Mail brochure, America, Manila, Honolulu, Russia, Japan, China, India: Pacific Mail (n.d., c. 1910– 15), 18, www.atlantictransportline.us/content/PDFfiles/PanamaPacificBrochure.pdf (accessed 19 August 2016). 100 ‘No “Short Cuts” When Sailors Say Rosary’, Catholic Weekly (Sydney), 26 February 1948, 1; CL, NMM, Asian Crew Manual (1973), P&O Records, Part Two, B:1, 2. 101 Wilkinson and Wilkinson, Burns Philp, 71–2. 102 Cited in ‘John Chinaman at Sea – Sailors and Stewards – and Gamesters’, Sunday Mail (Brisbane), 6 February 1927, 17.

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Figure 5.8  Members of the Canberra’s Goanese crew lighting candles at their specially created altar in the Goanese mess, 1965. P&O Heritage Collection, PH-07392-00.

gambling establishment to enjoy similar leisure pursuits, and in Singapore at least such gambling regularly resulted in arrest by the police.103 It was not unusual for Euro-American passengers to record a sense of attachment, albeit paternalistic, developing with service staff over the course of the sea voyage. Wrench wrote that he and his wife made friends quickly with their ‘nice little Chinese waiter’, a twenty-three-year-old man named Chang. He ‘has become our faithful serviteur and tells us his family affairs’. When he left the ship in Hong Kong he presented them with a basket of flowers and a photo of himself and asked them to write to him. As Wrench concluded, Chang was ‘our first real contact with China and to whom we had got so attached’.104 Similarly, on a return voyage to San Francisco, Eastwood took his last breakfast as the Golden Gate loomed up ahead, gave his steward Chong his cumsha (tip) and bade him farewell, noting he was ‘the first Chinaman I  really ever cared ‘Gambling Suppression’, Straits Times Weekly Issue, 27 August 1890, 5; Untitled, Straits Times, 16 February 1921, 8. 104 BL, Sir Evelyn Wrench, Travel Diary – Canada, Seattle, Honolulu, Hong Kong, Philippines, Japan, 1937, Add MS 59588. 103



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for’.105 Such accounts raise further questions about the stewards’ performance of emotional labour, so central to service work, and how shipping companies may have perceived of its importance to their corporate reputation.

Conclusion Labour conditions on board steamships were negotiated differently to those within colonial homes. By virtue of their inherent mobility stewards were more likely to be well travelled, while the high degree of organization among seamen meant they would have been quickly initiated into the ideals of global labour activism. There was an inherent disconnect between the image that steamship companies sought to portray of passive obedience, and the qualities required to fulfil that role. Even as Asian stewards performed orientalism in their dress and manner, they were obliged to have some knowledge of the English language and be alert to cultural nuances so as to satisfy the passengers’ everyday needs. On the one hand, there was a superficial character to the engagements between passengers and Asian stewards as a passing relationship, but that very fleeting quality meant that passengers were more likely to relax their guard. With the stewards taking orders from their superiors and the dictates of the shipping company rule book, passengers were relieved of the responsibilities of the employer. This could have left some indifferent to shipboard working conditions, although they recognized the importance of tips, but others may have found it easier to form attachments knowing they were clients, not masters. Yet for some passengers at least, their shipboard experiences stimulated desires to replicate the service relationship in their own homes. At the end of a day’s work, servants in the home were able to return to their own residence and families, or go out for entertainment. Stewards were confined to the ship until they reached port, and increasingly, as seen in US waters, their confinement continued even then. Social life on board and off ship may have been spatially restricted, but as we have seen in some ways that confinement gave rise to more ingenious usage of limited space and encouraged the forging of new bonds and forms of collective identity.

SFPL, Howard Eastwood, ‘My Trip to the Orient and Return’, 3 September 1933, Small MS Collections, 1/14. 105

6

From India to Fiji: Cultures of Service in the Grand Hotel

In 1922, Moti Lall, from Bangalitola1 in Patna, India, wrote to the manager of the Grand Pacific Hotel in Suva, Fiji. Lall had previously worked for the Grand Pacific, in the positions of bed boy, bell boy and head boy, and now sought reemployment and a steamship passage back to Fiji. He assured the manager that for this act of kindness he would ‘ever pray for your long life and prosperity’.2 He was soon informed that there were no current vacancies. Lall’s letter came at a difficult time for the Grand Pacific. The hotel opened in 1914 under the management of the Union Steam Ship Company of New Zealand (USSCo.). The company recruited its first contingent of hotel workers, which likely included Lall, from Calcutta. Following the abolition of Indian plantation indenture in 1917, labour recruitment for other colonial industries faced new challenges, and the Grand Pacific subsequently turned to Indian workers already residing in Suva, whether Fiji-born, time-expired plantation hands or free immigrants.3 By the early 1920s growing protest among Indians in Fiji over their social and economic standing, revealed in cases of legal complaint and other modes of resistance, also made their impact felt on hotel operations. In keeping with the broader aims of this book, we locate the grand hotel along a spatial spectrum of service work locations, which includes the home, the club and the steamship. The hotel was an ‘in-between’ space of white 1 Known today as Bangali Tola. 2 WCA, Lall to Soutar, 30 March 1922, USSCo. Records, AF080:212:5. 3 All remaining plantation indenture contracts in Fiji were cancelled on 1 January 1920. See K. L. Gillion, Fiji’s Indian Migrants:  A History to the End of Indenture in 1920 (Melbourne:  Oxford University Press, 1968); Brij V. Lal, ‘ “Nonresistance” on Fiji Plantations: The Fiji Indian Experience, 1879–1920’, in Plantation Workers, Resistance and Accommodation, ed. Brij V. Lal, Doug Munro and Edward D. Beechert (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1993), 187–216; Rachel Sturman, ‘Indian Indentured Labor and the History of International Rights Regimes’, American Historical Review 119, no. 5 (2014): 1439–65.

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sociality, not as private as the home, nor as exclusive as the club, yet it also shared features common to both. As in the club and as on the ship, the threeway dynamic between Asian servants, their employers and guests opens a window on several facets of such encounters. Like the club, the grand hotel fostered an atmosphere of privilege, with boundaries that delimited access and where ideas about acceptable colonial whiteness were both communicated as well as contested. Like the home, the hotel also reproduced the paternalism of the master–servant relationship, yet as the history of the Grand Pacific Hotel reveals, this was never assured, but rather a continual source of tension and contention. Revisionist scholarship on colonial grand hotels has lamented the lack of sources on hotel staffing and labour relations, instead relying on travel narratives and inferences drawn from the built environment.4 Yet we have fortunately a more extensive archive on the Grand Pacific and its operations. This is largely due to the fact of its trans-colonial ownership, where hotel managers in Suva were obliged to routinely report to the shipping company’s head office in New Zealand. The hotel records are more voluminous than might be expected, because of conflicts of authority between successive hotel managers and the USSCo.’s Suva branch managers, who oversaw the company’s principal business in Fiji and possessed a stronger footing in its managerial hierarchy. Their petty rivalries generated a continuous stream of correspondence with head office. While Moti Lall’s letter appears to be the only surviving document of that nature from an Indian worker, the many explicit employer commentaries on staffing issues afford a means of getting closer to the motivations and concerns of Indian servants of the Grand Pacific. This chapter traces the rise of the grand hotel as an imperial institution across Asia and the Pacific, and then moves on to focus on the running of the Grand Pacific Hotel in Suva, Fiji. It charts the initial movement of hotel labour from India to Suva, its relationship to Indian domestic service in Fiji’s European homes, and the images and representations of hotel servants in emerging colonial hierarchies of labour. The chapter then contrasts these ideals with the complexities in everyday engagements between hotel management, Indian staff and guests, and the impact of the shifting social and economic status of Indians in Fiji and the broader empire. Srilata Ravi, ‘Modernity, Imperialism and the Pleasures of Travel: The Continental Hotel in Saigon’, Asian Studies Review 32, no. 4 (2008): 467, note 5; Maurice Peleggi, ‘The Social and Material Life of Colonial Hotels: Comfort Zones as Contact Zones in British Colombo and Singapore, ca. 1870– 1930’, Journal of Social History 46, no. 1 (2012): 127. 4



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Locating the grand hotel Grand hotels began to be built across Asia and the Pacific around the 1870s, particularly in ports and cities in British India and Ceylon. The appellation ‘grand’ broadly references a trend towards larger buildings, with neoclassical architecture, lavish interiors, an emphasis on luxury and, most importantly, a trained staff and aspirations to high standards of service.5 Hotels were built in the tropics ‘in parallel to the imperialist advance’, as Maurice Peleggi remarks, and were in themselves a monument to the consolidation of colonial power, promoting and reaffirming European high culture and identity.6 They were built principally to cater to the needs of growing numbers of empire travellers, as the opening of the Suez Canal and the construction of larger passenger liners improved the speed, predictability and safety of long-distance shipping networks. In this sense the colonial hotel replicated models of convenience and comfort of railway hotels of an earlier era. As existing accommodation facilities were inadequate to cater for the growing empire traffic, the grand hotel was conceived to fill an important gap, supporting emergent conceptions of elite travel and leisure. Certainly in the Pacific for most of the nineteenth century, hotels, hostels and guesthouses usually doubled as drinking establishments, catering mainly for expatriate male workers and offering only very rudimentary facilities.7 In colonial South Asia, clubs rather than hotels were recommended to travellers, for the latter could not compare favourably for cuisine or comfort until as late as the 1940s.8 Concerns about the lack of suitable facilities notably for women, particularly underpinned the construction of grand hotels. This was the case with the Grand Pacific Hotel in Suva. The USSCo., a key player in regional maritime trades, expanded its operations in the early twentieth century, including introducing transpacific routes between Australasia and North American ports, as it hoped to attract American travellers further south into the

For a general overview, see Elaine Denby, Grand Hotels:  Reality and Illusion:  An Architectural and Social History (London: Reaktion Books, 1998). For American antecedents, see A. K. SandovalStrausz, Hotel:  An American History (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 2007). For China, see Peter Hibbard, The Bund Shanghai:  China Faces West (New  York:  Odyssey Books and Guides, 2007). 6 Peleggi, ‘Colonial Hotels’, 125; Ravi, ‘Pleasures of Travel’, 476. 7 Ngaire Douglas, They Came for Savages: 100 Years of Tourism in Melanesia (Lismore: Southern Cross University Press, 1996). 8 Benjamin B. Cohen, In the Club: Associational Life in Colonial South Asia (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 68–72. 5

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Pacific, beyond Hawai‘i.9 Yet the company was well aware that Americans had high expectations of hotel accommodation. Such expectations were being met and reinforced by new hotels, such as the Moana Hotel in Waikiki, established in 1901. In Southeast Asia too, there was a shift towards grand hotels. The famous Raffles Hotel in Singapore, first established in 1887, was rebuilt in 1899 replacing the original colonial bungalow. The site for the Grand Pacific Hotel was originally a canoe-landing spot for the indigenous inhabitants of what was known as Old Suva Village.10 They were relocated to Suvavou (‘new Suva’), a site on the opposite side of the harbour, in order to clear the area for the construction of Government House when the colonial capital relocated from Levuka, on the outlying island of Ovalau, in the early 1880s. In 1909 the USSCo. successfully lobbied the Fiji government for a fifty-year lease of the harbour-front site along Victoria Parade, with right of renewal for twenty-five years at the nominal rent of £1 per annum.11 The displacement of indigenous people to make room for colonial sites of administration and leisure was repeated elsewhere. A.  K. Sandoval-Strausz elaborates that ‘hotels became unmistakeably imperial when outsiders built them to accommodate guests who required the subordination or ejection of local residents’. Hotels presented a form of ‘self-imposition’ prior to becoming sites of hospitality, where the guest, rather than the displaced host, ‘controlled the character of the welcome’.12 In Suva, however, not only was the history of indigenous occupation erased, the project was funded by a foreign shipping company, deliberately built at a distance from establishments frequented by most local Europeans, and staffed by people hired from other colonies. Built proximate to Government House, the town hall, and opposite the cricket grounds, the hotel, like the club, served a dual function in catering for members of the resident population as well as transient strangers. The USSCo. anticipated that the Grand Pacific would attract a more ‘desirable class’ of local patrons, notably councillors and sportsmen, while the more ‘objectionable class of customers’ would continue to frequent hotels and guest houses in Suva’s commercial centre at the opposite

9 Frances Steel, ‘Lines across the Sea: Trans-Pacific Passenger Shipping in the Age of Steam’, in The Routledge History of Western Empires, ed. Robert Aldrich and Kirsten McKenzie (London: Routledge, 2013), 315–29. 10 J. J. McHugh, ‘Recollections of Early Suva’, Transactions and Proceedings of the Fiji Society 2, no. 1 (1943): 213. 11 Hocken Collections, University of Otago, New Zealand (hereafter HC), USSCo. Records, McLennan to Holdsworth, 25 September 1908, AG-292-005-001/086. 12 Sandoval-Strausz, Hotel, 123–4.



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Figure 6.1  ‘Catering for island tourists: The Grand Pacific Hotel at Suva, Fiji, recently opened for business’, Auckland Weekly News, 11 June 1914. Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries, AWNS-19140611-48-6.

end of Victoria Parade, closer to the steamer wharf.13 The Grand Pacific Hotel maintained further barriers to entry through high service charges, dress codes and other controls.14 The Grand Pacific was not built to the scale of hotels in the main maritime hubs. It was less ornate, more in keeping with colonial civic buildings in the style of Palladian or neoclassical architecture (Figure  6.1). ‘The plainer and simpler it is the better,’ insisted the shipping company head, James Mills.15 Guest comfort was valued over ostentatious display. Designed for tropical conditions and open to the trade winds, the hotel was celebrated as ‘the coolest building’ in Suva. A wide second-story verandah ran around the building in the style of a ship’s promenade deck. It had thirty bedrooms on the second level, which opened out onto spacious balconies. Some had private bathrooms, an innovative feature by colonial standards.16 The ground floor consisted of a lounge, dining room, drawing room, writing room, billiard room and bar, amenities similar to 13 HC, McLennan to Holdsworth, 25 September 1908, USSCo. Records, AG-292-005-001/086. 14 Non-Europeans were refused entry to dine or lodge at the hotel, but by the interwar period the hotel’s public spaces were routinely patronized by both Indians and Fijians, with the bar open to anyone in possession of a liquor permit, granted by the colonial state to those of ‘good character’. Hotel management side-stepped objections raised by European guests, as it recognized the position was ‘too delicate to alter’; see WCA, USSCo. Records, Moon to General Manager, 2 February 1948, AF080:215:5; Butler to General Manager, 11 February 1955, AF080:217:6. 15 HC, Mills to Holdsworth, 9 July 1908, USSCo. Records, AG-292-005-001/086. 16 WCA, Wheeler to McLennan, 18 November 1916, USSCo. Records, AF080:211:4.

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those provided in clubs. Dormitories for servants were separate from the main building.17 The Grand Pacific stood back from Victoria Parade, sequestered in its own grounds and surrounded by water on three sides. From the hotel’s balcony guests could watch the ‘fascinating procession of natives who form a constant stream along the road’.18 This detached and elevated vantage point affirmed the mastery of the white visitor. As the Western Pacific Herald put it, ‘The tourist can sit back, enjoy the breeze, feast his eyes on a glorious landscape, smoke his cigar, or drink his glass of cold lager. From this eminence life feels good.’19 Hotel domesticity might be regarded as one of masculine restoration, from where ‘the colonial male’ could ‘recharge himself for another foray into the imperial frontier’, as Daniel Goh argues in his study of Raffles Hotel.20 Yet it also provided the assurance of safety and comfort to women travelling in the company of men. Clubs ‘always served as pseudo-homes’, Benjamin Cohen argues, occupying a middle ground ‘that made them home-like, but not the same as one’s home’.21 Mrinalini Sinha notes that in colonial India they played ‘a vital role in the homogenization of the domestic life of the European abroad’, separating British men from native women, as well as alleviating housekeeping challenges for single itinerant men.22 Similar to clubs, some men preferred to stay in a hotel than set up a home, while for local residents the hotel might serve as a useful adjunct to home, thus meeting the needs of solitary male travellers as well as couples. The hotel also relieved its patrons of the responsibilities of an employer, which in turn might shape their interactions with servants in important ways. This struck a New Zealand traveller, Thomas Ross, in 1914, visiting his cousins who were overseers on a rubber plantation in Ceylon. They hosted him at the Galle Face Hotel rather than in their private residence, and he learned that they put up at the hotel ‘whenever they tire of their own cookery’. Ross was unsettled by the way they addressed the ‘Cingalese’ waiters:  ‘it was “Boy how dare you give us a dirty cup”, “Boy bring the sugar”, “Boy bring us some more tea” as if the Hotel with its servants belonged to them’. Returning later for dinner, Ross remarked on the crowds giving orders, and was shocked when his cousin yelled 17 A Day in Suva (Dunedin: USSCo., 1921), 22; Otago Daily Times, 13 May 1914, 8. 18 A Day in Suva, 22. 19 Western Pacific Herald, June 1914, cited in Elsie Stephenson, Fiji’s Past on Picture Postcards (Suva: Caines Jannif, 1997), 179. See also Ravi, ‘Pleasures of Travel’, 477–9. 20 Daniel P. S. Goh, ‘Capital and the Transfiguring Monumentality of Raffles Hotel’, Mobilities 5, no. 2 (2010): 180. 21 Cohen, In the Club, 14–15. 22 Mrinalini Sinha, ‘Britishness, Clubbability, and the Colonial Public Sphere: The Genealogy of an Imperial Institution in Colonial India’, Journal of British Studies 40, no. 4 (2001): 499, 500.



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for the waiter at the top of his voice, which ‘made every one look and made the boy jump for our order’.23 The public space of the hotel dining room, more than the home and arguably the more exclusive confines of the club, presented a stage for the overt performance of race prestige, where guests did not have to fear the consequences if ‘their’ servants walked out.24

Indian domestic servants and hotel labour in Fiji By 1914 when the Grand Pacific Hotel opened, the established Indian community in Fiji had evolved into a diverse community with varied interests and aspirations, including Fiji-born Indians working in varied professions, and free migrants, among them Gujaratis and Punjabis. Indians in service represented only a small minority of this community. Nor was there an obvious pathway from plantation indenture into domestic service. Of the 44,000 Indians in Fiji by the 1910s, only 15,000, or one-third, were indentured from India, most of them from the United Provinces. Two-thirds of those worked on plantations, while the rest worked in other employments such as dairy farming, gardening, the police, and as office clerks.25 On the expiry of their contracts, most indentured workers favoured taking up leases of land near sugar mills or establishing businesses, rather than entering domestic employment. As discussed in Chapter 2, the urban population in Suva by 1911 included 3,320 Indians, 1,376 Europeans, 1,246 Fijians, 968 Pacific Islanders and 74 Chinese. Of these 205 Fijian men were working as cooks, servants and laundrymen, as compared to 314 Indian men.26 The Grand Pacific management presented two quite distinct images of its Indian staff. On the one hand they sought to distinguish their labour recruitment from the parallel mobilities of indentured plantation workers to Fiji, self-consciously seeking to present a more ‘dignified’ image that communicated status and imperial self-assurance. This was partly embodied in the status and person of the manager. Yet when recruiting its first manager, the Grand Pacific sought someone with experience in running a first-class hotel, as well as being ‘well grounded’ as they put it ‘in the working of a coolie staff ’. Following an HC, Thomas Ross, ‘A Holiday with Pen, Pencil and Camera’ (1914), AG-356-1 (emphasis in original). 24 For instance, a European colonist in Papua recalled learning quickly the ‘right and the wrong way to manage my servants’. The former entailed building relationships and keeping an eye on their welfare: ‘I can assure you, it is not by shouting “Boy! Do this” or “Do that!” ’: ‘Another White Woman in the Papuan Bush’, Pacific Islands Monthly, 19 July 1932. 25 Gillion, Fiji’s Indian Migrants, 146, 101–2. 26 Legislative Council Fiji, Census, 1911, Council Paper No. 44 (Suva: Government Printer, 1911). 23

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international search Charles Lugon, a London-based Swiss national, was appointed for an initial two-year term at £350 per annum.27 Switzerland was renowned for its hotel expertise.28 Lugon was expected to instruct himself in the operation of hotels in colonial and tropical conditions during stopovers in India and Ceylon.29 Lugon engaged twelve Indian men to serve in the Grand Pacific as dining room staff, bearers, cooks and a butler. The company which supplied the staff was Calcutta-based Mackinnon Mackenzie & Co., which as shipping agents for the USSCo. also provided crew for its Indian-manned cargo vessel plying the New Zealand–India route. The recruitment process was apparently satisfactory, but the death of the head butler shortly after arriving in Fiji betokened other ill omens. A replacement butler, along with two additional waiters, had to be sent for. The hotel service staff came to Fiji on two-year contracts, with the option of renewal. They were paid significantly less than Indian domestic servants in Fiji, who, as mentioned in Chapter 2, were able to command high wages, particularly in Suva (up to £4 per month). The waiters earned £2 per month, the butler £3 and the chief cook £5. These wages had to be supplemented with tips.30 With the inclusion of local Indian men hired as sweepers and groundsmen, the hotel staff quickly swelled to about forty men.31 European women were also employed, including a Belgian housekeeper who arrived with Lugon, and a receptionist, while the wives of the manager and the head barman offered informal assistance. In 1913 the USSCo. director James Mills’ own preference had been to hire Chinese staff, a preference that conformed to the trans-colonial image of Chinese as the ‘true servant’:  efficient, clean, intelligent and unobtrusive, as we argue elsewhere in this book. Yet a key concern was whether an Indian staff might not be more adept at conversing in English with guests. This consideration for English already marked a contrast to the home or plantation where it was generally considered ‘cheeky’ or insolent for Indian servants to speak English to their employers. In their classic guide to household management, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, first published in 1888, ‘memsahibs’ Flora Steel and Grace Gardiner emphasized learning Hindustani to communicate with

WCA, Hughes to Lugon, 30 August 1913, USSCo. Records, AF080:210:3. 28 For more on Swiss expertise, see Denby, Grand Hotels, 111–35. Applications were received from all over the world, including from a manager of the Galle Face Hotel in Colombo. 29 WCA, McLennan to Mills, 22 July 1913, USSCo. Records, AF080:210:3; Mills to David Mills, 5 September 1913, USSCo. Records, AF080:210:3; McLennan to Managing Director, 20 September 1913, USSCo. Records, AF080:210:3. 30 WCA, Hughes to Messrs Mackinnon Mackenzie Co., 14 April 1916, USSCo. Records, AF080:211:3. 31 WCA, Whitson to Holdsworth, 23 August 1915, USSCo. Records, AF080:211:2. 27



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servants, an approach followed also in Fiji.32 As an employee of the Colonial Sugar Refinery Company (CSR) recalled, it was regarded as ‘better for discipline’ that ‘the coolie should not speak to you in English’,33 and those trained as houseboys in CSR quarters by an Anglo-Indian memsahib spoke together in ‘pukka [i.e. proper] Hindi’.34 Ultimately Mills decided that it would be better to engage Indians rather than Chinese, for they were ‘perhaps better understood in Fiji’.35 His Pacific branch manager concurred, citing the advantage of filling up any vacancies from illness or unsuitability from the Indian population in Suva, and cautioning against mixing Chinese and Indians. Hiring supplementary Indian staff locally might also make for greater seasonal flexibility in employment such as already obtained between ship and shore in maritime employment.36 While the best approach might be to engage a good serang (in the maritime context, a ‘headman’ of Indian seamen) and to let him choose his team, the Suva branch manager advised that it would be best to recruit men directly from India, as the free Indian population in Fiji was ‘particularly unreliable’ and the servants already working in homes and other hotels were ‘practically useless’.37 Such attitudes referenced decades of frustration over securing suitable domestic help in the colony. British colonists variously engaged Fijian men, other Pacific Islanders indentured from Melanesia (notably Solomon Islanders), as well as Indians, as we explored in Chapter 2. In the early 1880s they often petitioned colonial officials to recruit trained servants directly from India.38 Officials refused, arguing it was a private matter. In any case immigrant ships were to be employed solely for the importation of agricultural labour, which had commenced in 1879 five years after British annexation (although about twenty men and women from the first ‘coolie ship’ were in fact assigned as domestic servants to Europeans, including to a number of officials).39 They suggested colonists approach a Calcutta agency in a private capacity, yet recruiters there advised that ‘no good servant would recruit in the way which an ordinary Coolie does’. Fiji might instead follow the example of British Guiana and Trinidad, Steel and Gardiner, Housekeeper and Cook, 12; Freeman, Fiji. 33 NAF, Thomas Orr Macmillan, ‘My Story’, n.p. 34 Freeman, Fiji, 89. 35 WCA, Mills to Holdsworth, 24 June 1913, USSCo. Records, AF080:210:3. 36 WCA, McLennan to Mills, 22 July 1913, USSCo. Records, AF080:210:3. 37 WCA, Morgan to Mills, 28 August 1913, USSCo. Records, AF080:210:3. 38 NAF, Colonial Secretary’s Office Minutes (hereafter CSO), October 1883, 83.2822, 24; 17 March 1884, 84.592. 39 NAF, CSO, March 1884, 84.592, 29. One couple was convicted the following year of assaulting their servants; NAF, William Seed, Levuka to Colonial Secretary, CSO, 25 August 1880, 80.156. 32

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where children of emigrants were trained as ‘fair house servants’.40 Yet many colonists regarded this as unsatisfactory, insisting that a different class of people ‘from the ordinary immigrant’ was required – typically identified as ‘Madrassies’, with servants from Madras widely favoured as the ‘best’ in India.41 The disinterest from Fiji’s officials related partly to wariness about the terms of employment in the home and their inability to regulate it. The Indian Immigration Ordinance stipulated certain limits on working hours and conditions of work, at least on paper, but householders desired servants to be at their disposal at all hours of the day. A Masters and Servants Ordinance, which came into force in 1890, imposed a series of controls over domestic labour in response to ongoing concerns about informal engagements. By the early twentieth century, some Europeans had resigned themselves to recruiting plantation hands and training them as servants, as seen also in Queensland, with those living in the CSR districts enthusing about the results: it was ‘wonderful to watch the evolution of smart, white-robed boys from the miserable, dirty-looking immigrants who are landed from the coolie ships each year’. Six months’ training ‘generally results in a fairly competent servant’.42 Particularly on large plantations, the manager was in a position to select suitable servants, but this was less practicable on smaller estates. In 1905 the Planters Association pressed for an amendment to the Indian Immigration Ordinance 1891 to extend working hours, complaining that domestic servants refused to work more than five and a half days a week. Like plantation hands, Indian servants were knocking off at midday on Saturdays, not returning to work until Monday morning. In response to the complaint, the Colonial Secretary reiterated that ‘there is no such thing as an Indian indentured house servant’ and under the law (governing plantation indenture) employers had no right to ‘require an indentured labourer to work as a house servant at all’. Further enquiries in Calcutta and Madras about recruiting trained servants through a separate immigration stream held out little hope that they could be induced to accept Fiji wages, as they could easily earn more in India. Natal, South Africa, began importing servants from India under a special agreement, but ultimately Fiji’s officials believed the necessary legislative amendments NAF, Fiji Government Emigration Agency, Calcutta to Agent General of Immigration, Fiji, 27 May 1885, CSO, 85.2102. 41 Ibid.; Edmund C. P. Hull, The European in India, or Anglo-Indian’s Vade-mecum (London: Henry S.  King, 1871), 119. Steel and Gardiner noted that household expenses were cheaper in Madras Presidency than in other parts of India and that many servants were Christian. See Housekeeper and Cook, 41. 42 ‘Life in the Islands’, Evening Star, 13 September 1904, 7. 40



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were too complex to attempt, and planters in Fiji would object to the associated costs, including a £16 application fee and £7 return passage for each servant.43 Disgruntled employers continued to dismiss the supposedly ‘indifferent service’ provided by well-paid Indian domestics, while old timers would come to blame this state of affairs on a new influx of European settlers not connected to the CSR who had inflated wages to the ‘almost prohibitive rate’ of £4 per month from 1s per day at one time, ‘or even less’.44 These sorts of tensions did not immediately impact on hotel operations. The Grand Pacific sought to distance its Indian staff from the socio-political context of indenture, and to instead cultivate an image of the silent, dignified and discreet liveried bearer in the service of colonial elites familiar in other Asian colonial contexts. However in Fiji this project had to contend with white settler colonial prejudices reflected in many contemporary travel guidebooks and narratives about Fiji. For instance, for Beatrice Grimshaw, an Irish journalist and travel writer commissioned to produce a series of travel pamphlets, ‘Indian immigration’ was a ‘vexed question’ that could not be discussed in her 1907 guidebook to the Pacific islands.45 Others were more overtly hostile, such as journalist Winifride Wrench, on an empire tour in 1913 to promote the Overseas Club founded by her brother Evelyn. When it came to Indians Wrench could not look beyond the stereotype of ‘coolie men’ whom she decried as ‘miserable, weedy specimens’, preferring to interact with Fijians, ‘savages as they are’, than with ‘low-caste natives from India’.46 Australian travellers, increasing in numbers, seldom recorded their interest in the Indian population, perhaps as Nicholas Halter suggests, because it troubled their own struggles in preserving White Australia.47 If indigenous inhabitants had the virtue of serving as authentic objects of tourist attention, immigrant workers were vulnerable to being viewed as mere labourers. At the Grand Pacific, however, Fijian motifs were conspicuously absent.48 As on the steamships discussed in Chapter  5, orientalized service NAF, CSO, 11 December 1905, 05.5546 and ensuing commentary. 44 NAF, Attorney General, 2 August 1906, CSO, 05.5546; Poverty Bay Herald, 6 January 1913, 2; ‘Domestics in Fiji. A Growing Problem’, New Zealand Herald, 21 March 1925, 13. 45 Beatrice Grimshaw, Three Wonderful Nations (Dunedin: USSCo., 1907). 46 BL, New Zealand and the South Sea Islands, 17 October 1912–19 March 1913, Wrench Papers, vol. 31, Add. MS 59571. 47 Nicholas Halter, ‘ “To See with Their Own Eyes”: Australian Travel Writing on the Pacific Islands, c.1880–1941’ (PhD diss., Australian National University, Canberra, 2015), 225–30. 48 Contrast this with the Royal Hawaiian Hotel at Waikiki; see Christine Skwiot, ‘Genealogies and Histories in Collision:  Tourism and Colonial Contestations in Hawai‘i, 1900–1930’, in Moving Subjects:  Gender, Mobility and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire, ed. Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 190–210. 43

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Figure 6.2  ‘A Verandah, Grand Pacific Hotel, Suva, Fiji.’ Archives NZ Galleries, USSCo Pocketbook (1927), R22848498, folio 39.

cultures spoke instead to colonial fantasies. Visiting shortly after the Grand Pacific opened, the shipping company’s secretary Thomas Whitson reflected, You feel as if you were transported to the mysterious East and the presence on the stairs and balconies of the silent white-robed attendants contributes to the illusions. It is difficult to imagine oneself in Fiji, the building itself creates an Oriental atmosphere which seems to envelop one in mystery, and under which you are lulled into forgetfulness of your surroundings.49

Indian servants appear to have been an essential prop in such fantasies, with promotional literature singling out the Indian presence, and the Herald Handbook of Fiji noting that drinks were served ‘in truly oriental style by white-turbaned waiters’.50 Promotional photographs, such as Figure 6.2, depicted servants in a way which conjured the image and romance of the Raj. As one female traveller, Charlotte Cameron, remarked on the ‘Hindoo’ servants during her month-long stay in 1923: ‘One comes along now sweeping up the dust; he wishes me to move my chair, addressing me as “memsahib”. These servants recall to my memory India, which I have not visited since the Imperial Durbar at Delhi in 1911.’51 WCA, Whitson to Holdsworth, 23 August 1915, USSCo. Records, AF080: 211:2. 50 Cited in Albert J. Shutz, Suva: A History and Guide (Sydney: Pacific, 1978), 28. 51 Charlotte Cameron, Two Years in Southern Seas (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1923), 118. 49



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Resistance and cross-cultural encounters in the Grand Pacific Hotel From the start, the Grand Pacific Hotel was less a secure bastion of white imperial prestige, more a site for competing identities and claims, rivalries and discord.52 Lugon arrived in Suva accompanied by his Indian staff (typically referred to in hotel correspondence as the ‘indentured staff ’) to find the hotel still under construction. Left ‘practically idle’, as Lugon reported, for ‘certain Castes can only be put to the particular work for which they are engaged and permitted by their Caste’, they mixed with the local community and had, lamentably in his opinion, ‘contracted reprehensible habits and generally deteriorated’ through contact with the ‘Fiji born free Indian element’. It was ‘well nigh impossible’ thereafter ‘to redeem them’.53 Lugon had many complaints: the servants could not cope with a rush of guests: they were temperamental, inclined to ‘fall to pieces’, ‘lose their heads’ or become enraged. Such racialized conceptions of labour capacities were familiar tropes which bosses mobilized in other contexts as well, for example to denounce Indian seamen who were invariably framed as hopeless and fatalistic when disaster struck at sea.54 But in addition Lugon regretted the difficulty, in contrast to his observations of hotels in India, of obtaining efficient casual assistance locally.55 Lugon’s comments reflected both his lack of colonial experience and the limits of his own competence in running a colonial grand hotel. He found the tropical climate ‘exacting and trying’ and the hotel patrons a ‘type altogether different’ from those he had encountered before ‘in the leading first class Hotels’.56 For their part, USSCo. managers expressed disquiet at his ‘very extravagant notions’ and it was not without a sense of relief that they accepted Lugon’s resignation shortly before his two-year term ended, commiserating that he was ‘more adapted’ to a hotel that continually handled hundreds of guests.57 Lugon’s experience with his Indian staff seemed to point to the virtues of emulating shipboard labour and hiring practices. Following his inspection of Eric T. Jennings reached a similar conclusion for Indochina. See Eric T. Jennings, ‘From Indochine to Indochic:  The Lang Bian/Dalat Palace Hotel and French Colonial Leisure, Power and Culture’, Modern Asian Studies 37, no. 1 (2003): 161. See also his account in Imperial Heights: Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), ch. 8. 53 WCA, Lugon, 6 August 1915, USSCo. Records, AF080:211:2. 54 Steel, Oceania under Steam, 109–10. 55 WCA, Lugon to Eva, 6 and 9 August 1915, USSCo. Records, AF080:211:2. 56 WCA, Lugon to Eva, 6 August 1915, USSCo. Records, AF080:211:2. 57 WCA, Morgan to Hughes, 8 October 1914, USSCo. Records, AF080:211:1; Hughes to London Board, 15 October 1915 and Holdsworth to Lugon, 3 September 1915, USSCo. Records, AF080:211:2. 52

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the hotel in 1915 near the end of Lugon’s time as manager, the USSCo. secretary, Thomas Whitson, recorded his disapproval of the manager interacting directly or individually with the hotel’s servants, and endorsed the earlier recommendation for a serang to hire and oversee the staff as on the Aparima, the company’s Indian-crewed vessel in the India–New Zealand trade.58 After Lugon’s departure, it was proposed that a new manager travel by one of the company’s (Europeancrewed) island steamers to observe kitchen operations, for it was ‘desirable’ that he gain as much knowledge as possible ‘without having to obtain it from the native servants’.59 Perceived as menials, rather than skilled in their trade, such attempts to create distance and enforce hierarchies between European staff and Indian servants disavowed the company’s dependence on them, and anticipated the sorts of frictions that would continue to mar hotel operations. Most of the servants originally engaged by Lugon wished to return to India after he resigned, as a hotel with few guests afforded them little opportunity to earn sufficient tips. A number of them stated to the housekeeper that they would remain ‘only so long as Mr Lugon stays’.60 On one pretext or another, including shipping shortages during the First World War, the company failed to find return passages for the departing staff, while managing however to ship out on a returning ‘coolie’ vessel Wahid Hussein, a waiter who they regarded as a ‘disturbing element’, and Nubbi Buksh, a ‘discontented’ bearer they feared would ‘play up’.61 Some of the remaining men sought legal recourse through a European solicitor, protesting that coolie ships still came and went, yet it took more than a year to arrange their return passage, as it happened only as far as Colombo, rather than to their homes in Calcutta. Their departure coincided conveniently with the arrival of a replacement contingent of staff also from India in late 1916. Unfortunately not much is known about them, except that the move to abolish indentured labour migration from India seems to have complicated the contracting process, while uncertainties about the application of Indian passport regulations to this class of labour added further to the delay.62 By this time the hotel was welcoming its third manager. The USSCo. looked to New Zealand for Lugon’s replacement but finding no one suitable, the company promoted the hotel’s head barman for an initial six-month term at WCA, Whitson to Holdsworth, 23 August 1915, USSCo. Records, AF080:211:2. 59 WCA, Eva to Hughes, 22 September 1915, USSCo. Records, AF080:211:5. 60 Ibid., 13 April 1915, USSCo. Records, AF080:211:1. 61 Ibid., 12 May 1915, USSCo. Records, AF080:211:1. 62 WCA, Eva to Wheeler, 13 September 1916 and 7 November 1916, USSCo. Records, AF080:211:4; 25 September 1916, USSCo. Records, AF080:211:4 and ensuring commentary; Eva to Mackinnon Mackenzie, 7 December 1916, USSCo. Records, AF080:211:5. 58



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£200 per annum. He resigned in order to enlist for the Western Front.63 Fresh advertisements for the position did not disclose the hotel’s name or location in order to avoid attracting men ‘who are on the lookout for a showy position at a high salary’.64 The company nevertheless received forty applications, and A. W. Andrews from Australia was appointed manager in September 1916. Two inter-related themes now dominated management correspondence: difficulties in ‘handling’ Indian servants, and keeping them out of lawyers’ offices and the courts. Their legal resistance to overwork and ill-treatment in the context of plantation indenture had led employers and colonial officials to stereotype Indians in Fiji as ‘inveterate law-fighters’ who ‘will quarrel legally over anything’.65 Indian workers rarely succeed in courts because of their inability to marshal the necessary ‘expert’ evidence.66 But courts served nevertheless, in John Kelly’s words, as their ‘best protection and only recourse’, for ‘coolies’ only had available to them the role of ‘humble petitioners’.67 For employers and colonial officials, however, courts were a nuisance they could not do without. Andrews reported being preoccupied by the challenges of training and ‘controlling’ the Indian staff, and the ‘attention and study’ required to avoid lawyers’ fees and court costs.68 Following his equally swift departure after only eight months, among other reasons due to his inability to cope with the servants’ ‘passive resistance’, the new head barman Allen was elevated as manager. However, according to company reports, the real manager was his wife who nevertheless remained unnamed.69 Her style did not sit well with the Indian staff. The waiters brought successful proceedings against her for continual shouting and bullying. Undeterred by the conviction and having to pay a fine, she continued to harass the staff until ordered to leave the hotel for rifling through the cooks’ quarters on suspicions of stealing provisions.70 After workers from India were deemed too difficult to handle, USSCo. turned to casual employees among Suva’s resident Indian population in the hope they would be ‘more amenable to discipline’ and ‘more contented’. After this too was WCA, Secretary to General Manager, 2 November 1915, USSCo. Records, AF080:211:2; Hughes to D Mills, 8 December 1915, USSCo. Records, AF080:211:2. 64 WCA, Wheeler to Irvine, 21 August 1916, USSCo. Records, AF080:211:3. 65 Our Island Trip, S.S. Manapouri (Sydney, 1904), 16, 17. 66 Gillion, Fiji’s Indian Migrants, 120. 67 John Kelly, A Politics of Virtue:  Hinduism, Sexuality, and Countercolonial Discourse in Fiji (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 70–71. 68 WCA, Andrews to Fiji Manager, 17 April 1917, USSCo. Records, AF080:211:5. 69 WCA, Andrews to Fiji Manager, 17 April 1917, USSCo. Records, AF080:211:5; Andrews to USSCo., 28 July 1917, USSCo. Records, AF080:211:5; Carter to Wheeler, 24 April 1918 and Carter to Aiken, 23 April 1918, USSCo. Records, AF080:212:1. 70 WCA, Carter to Aiken. 23 April 1918, USSCo. Records, AF080:212:1. 63

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declared a failure, the ‘secret of success’ was seen once again to lie in an Indian headman possessing knowledge of the staff ’s own language. The company gave up their attempts to recruit a headman after it proved ‘impossible to obtain one of the Caste’ in Fiji.71 In 1919, when an interim manager also admitted his inability to ‘control’ the staff, it was proposed to discharge Indian servants altogether and appoint Chinese chefs to the galley and Fijian servants to the dining room and bedrooms.72 In any case, by this time the Indian staff had the measure of the place, and were effectively running the hotel themselves, or in the words of helpless company officials, working ‘when they felt like it’.73 From the start, the USSCo. felt challenged by the nature of the hotel’s operations and the scale of its maintenance and surveillance. The hotel was unlike a ship in its setting, and could not be sealed off from everyday contact with its neighbourhood and other parts of the town. From the company’s point of view, such conditions seemed to encourage the servants to be a law unto themselves or to take advantage of their employment and the hotel’s facilities for their own ends. The servant quarters were built as close as possible to the main building to keep an eye on the workers, and to prevent people not employed at the hotel using the accommodation.74 Yet such proximity gave rise to anxieties about hotel stores being smuggled through the ‘back doors’.75 Cracking down on such losses, whether real or imagined, became a major managerial concern and led to debates over the appropriate amount to set as reward for information about pilfering and wilful damage. One of their suppositions, that a large reward ‘would probably influence the Indian servants to steal’ (in order presumably for the culprit and informant to share the reward), suggests both a high degree of paranoia about the Indian staff, and a total breakdown of authority.76 Nor were local workers a satisfactory solution as they refused to live on the premises and remain on call night and day, while Suva’s 10 pm curfew on Fijians and Indians interfered with the casual staffing of late-night shifts.77 European derision for ‘law-fighters’ was heightened by the arrival of the famous Indian barrister, Manilal Maganlal Doctor, in 1912. Manilal had travelled WCA, Carter to General Manager, 14 March 1918, USSCo. Records, AF080:212:1; 16 July 1918, 10 August and 9 September 1918, USSCo. Records, AF080:212:2. 72 WCA, Carter to Aiken, 21 May 1919, USSCo. Records, AF080:212:3. 73 WCA, Cresswell to General Manager, 31 July 1919, USSCo. Records, AF080:212:3. 74 WCA, Hughes to Eva, 30 April 1915, USSCo. Records, AF080:211:1. 75 WCA, Carter to Aiken, 9 September 1918 and 10 February 1919, USSCo. Records, AF080:212:2. 76 WCA, Mander to General Manager, 28 February 1928, USSCo. Records, AF080:213:2. 77 In 1915 an Indian bar assistant at the hotel was assaulted by Indian constables for breaching the curfew, with the constables eventually convicted. WCA, Eva to General Manager, 30 April 1915, USSCo. Records, AF080:211:1. 71



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from Mauritius to assist Indians with court proceedings against abuses on Fijian plantations. He came to Fiji at Gandhi’s suggestion, following a letter that the Indian leader received from a former plantation worker, Totaram Sanadhya, detailing the conditions of Indian workers in Fiji.78 The grievances that would eventually force Indian hotel workers to seek legal redress were different from those of plantation workers, and arose well after those cases that had led to Manilal’s presence in Fiji:  yet the Grand Pacific Hotel’s staffing policies could not be indifferent to broader shifts in the legal and political standing of Indians in the colony. Indenture was abolished in 1917, following controversies over penal sanctions and high prosecution rates. All remaining contracts in Fiji were cancelled at the beginning of 1920. In January of that year the mainly Indian workers employed by the Public Works Department and Municipal Council in Suva went on strike against rising costs of living. The strike was followed by a series of smaller ‘riots’ into February, including when a ‘mob’ of 200 Indian men armed with sticks reportedly set out to attack a manager of another hotel, whom they accused of flogging an Indian servant and insulting Indians passing the premises. Attempts to quash the disturbances resulted in the death of one man, the prosecution of about 150 men and women, and the prohibition on Manilal and his wife residing in areas of the colony substantially populated by Indians.79 During this period of unrest, Indian staff at the Grand Pacific quit ‘at a moment’s notice’, with one of them unsuccessfully suing the hotel for unpaid wages.80 They were replaced by Fijian servants, yet by 1921 an Indian staff again predominated. By this time turnover was so high, with waiters often staying only for a few days at a time, that the hotel found itself unable to supply a list of employees to head office.81 In colonial establishments of this nature, upholding white prestige was a major imperative for native staff ‘discipline’. As the Grand Pacific’s history shows, this was far from being a recipe for commercial success, nor, from the Mrinalini Sinha, ‘Totaram Sanadhya’s Fiji Mein Mere Ekkis Varsh: A History of Empire and Nation in a Minor Key’, in Ten Books That Shaped the British Empire; Creating an Imperial Commons, ed. Antoinette Burton and Isabel Hofmeyr (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 175. See also Fiona Paisley, ‘Sexuality, Nationalism, and “Race”: Humanitarian Debate about Indian Indenture in Fiji, 1910–18’, Labour History 113 (2017): 183–208. 79 BL, Indian Indentured Labour in Figi [sic]: Reports on the cost of living and wages; case of Mr D Manilal, prosecuted for occupation of native land; disturbances by Indians at Levuka; parliamentary questions, IOR/L/PJ/6/1673, file 2705: Jan. 1919–Apr. 1922. 80 WCA, Acting Manager, Suva to Secretary, Trans-Pacific and Island Services, 10 February 1920, USSCo. Records, AF080:212:4. 81 WCA, Soutar to General Manager, 7 October 1921, USSCo. Records, AF080:212:5. During the strike, Indian houseboys also stopped work, with the suggestion, by disgruntled householders, that they were compelled to. The Fiji Times opined that ‘if the houseboys have any manliness about them, they won’t allow a lot of outsiders to bully them’, 21 January 1920. 78

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evidence of its longest serving manager, Ernest Cresswell, was it one for effective management. Cresswell, who had been previously a ship’s steward before being appointed manager in 1920, managed to stay for nine years by violating every rule in the colonial management guidebook. Initially he was intent on having a hand in all operations, including cooking, notwithstanding that by doing so he risked ‘losing caste’ in the eyes of the Indian staff.82 This was a mere hint, however, of future transgressions. Reportedly on money-borrowing terms with his Indian staff, Cresswell’s debts included £60 to Kanji, the head houseboy, a sum he had borrowed to clear his personal debts following a failed mining venture. A  maritime analogy both charted Cresswell’s decline and traced the racial anxieties which so complicated the management of the Grand Pacific Hotel. Cresswell dressed as a ship’s fireman in the tropics, in singlet and trousers, and his language was said to be ‘just as bad as . . . one hears from Firemen’.83 By the end of his tenure Cresswell was reported to have ‘completely degenerated’, living in a bure (Fijian hut) on the hotel grounds in the company of a ‘half-caste’ woman. For his part, Cresswell insisted it was impossible to run a hotel in any other way and would gladly prefer ‘to go back to sea’.84 In the interval between monthly steamer visits the hotel fell quiet, leaving European and Indian staff plenty of free time to engage with one another. Breaches of race and class boundaries were common, though they never ceased being used for character assassinations in petty rivalries between European managers. Indeed, as Kanji’s case suggests, an Indian servant might become a trusted confidant (so trusted that Cresswell never honoured his debt). Other white staff, including the junior barman, were known to ‘consort with Fijian and Indian women’, while the USSCo.’s branch manager W. E. Hancock condemned Cresswell’s replacement, William Shirley, for the way he ‘laughed and joked’ with the native staff.85 Yet Hancock ironically found himself at the receiving end of precisely the same accusation from the hotel manager who related how he was ‘too friendly with a certain few of our Indian boys, and a great Gossip’.86 The uneven intensity of hotel life might also generate tensions among the diverse Indian staff, especially between those in direct contact with guests and others 82 WCA, Gray to Aiken, 5 January 1920, USSCo. Records, AF080:212:4. Cooking and shopping was advised against in contemporary household management guides, in the name of upholding prestige; see Cecilia Leong-Salobir, Food Culture in Colonial Asia: A Taste of Empire (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2011), 65–6. 83 WCA, Carter to Aiken, 22 February 1929, USSCo. Records, AF080:213:3; Hancock to Millar, 11 July 1937, USSCo. Records, AF080:213:8. 84 WCA, Cresswell to Aiken, 17 April 1929, USSCo. Records, AF080:213:3. 85 WCA, Hancock to General Manager, 12 August 1932, USSCo. Records, AF061:71:1. 86 WCA, Shirley to General Manager, 2 December 1932, USSCo. Records, AF061:102:1.



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working more ‘backstage’. In 1917 the chief cook stabbed the butler, Shamsul Haque, to death, earlier reports casting the victim as a ‘regular agitator’ and a ‘troublesome man’, while in another case a waiter was convicted of attempted murder after stabbing a sweeper.87 Class and ideologies were also in play:  an electrician dismissed for ‘laziness’ was said to be partial towards ‘communistic ideas’ which created ‘dissatisfaction amongst the Chinese and Indian staff ’.88

The decline of the Grand Pacific Hotel So empty was the Grand Pacific between monthly steamer visits that, rather than the centre of Suva’s social life, by the late 1930s it was known colloquially as ‘the morgue’. This phrase belonged to British journalist Cedric Belfrage, who described the Grand Pacific as ‘a ritzy but morgue-like joint full of imported respectability and capacious lavatories, striving with might and main to avoid serving the customers any of the vulgar native fruits and dishes’.89 Such criticisms of the hotel’s seeming detachment from Fiji would grow in the coming years, so did its reputation as ‘a splendid hotel shockingly run’.90 According to a group of Australian visitors, guests at the hotel had only to bring three things to ensure their comfort: ‘their own food, their own liquor, and their own boy to look after them’.91 In deflecting such criticisms successive managers began to take recourse to blaming the hotel’s guests. Rather ironically, considering the hotel’s original raison d’être and its heavy emphasis on racial and class exclusivity, it was now alleged that ‘wealthy imperial types’ arrived at the establishment with ‘inflated expectations’. The rise of American shipping in the Pacific added another dimension to such criticisms, with passengers being perceived as ‘spoilt and over-catered’ for, holding unrealistic expectations of amenities, and demanding constant attention similar to what they could find on board ship or at leading hotels in Colombo and Java. Comparisons with large colonial households were also rejected, the complaints of the Dutch Consul General in Australia eliciting the dismissive remark that he ‘maintains an elaborate household at Sydney with Javanese servants’ and had come to Suva ‘expecting a proportionately similar WCA, Showman, 3 November 1916, USSCo. Records, AF080:211:4; Wheeler to Eva, 10 December 1917, USSCo. Records, AF080:212:1; Mander to Wheeler, 1 October 1923, USSCo. Records, AF080:212:6. 88 WCA, Hancock to Wheeler, 13 June 1933, USSCo. Records, AF061:102:1. 89 Extracts filed in WCA, 19 January 1939, USSCo. Records, AF080:214:1. 90 WCA, Kennedy to Aiken, 20 February 1919, USSCo. Records, AF080:212:2. 91 WCA, Aiken to Carter, 24 January 1929, USSCo. Records, AF080:213:3. 87

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establishment’.92 Local managers also now routinely repudiated the aspirations, parallels, and informal benchmarks that had earlier guided the hotel’s operations, with Hancock insisting that ‘you cannot run a hotel as you can a ship; they are worlds apart’.93 Fiji’s ‘ethnic compartmentalism’, which placed Europeans at the top, Fijians in the middle and Indians at the bottom, came under challenge in the interwar period as Indians continued to assert their political and economic aspirations.94 While an assertive native staff may have unsettled the USSCo.’s aspirations to offer hospitality in Suva befitting its white colonial clientele, older attitudes and hierarchies endured in contexts of imperial travel that continued to be shaped by interests and perspectives outside the Pacific. For instance, P&O which offered cruise tours to Fiji from Sydney in the 1930s, issued circulars warning its passengers ‘not to fraternise with coloured people’ in Suva, leading to angry protests from the port’s Indian community.95 At the same time in Fiji itself, handling such agitation was beginning to be claimed as a mark of managerial accomplishment. Hancock took pleasure in his self-styled status as the shipping company’s burra sahib (big boss) in Fiji, and pride in claiming a greater sensibility towards the effects of ongoing political and social transformations within the empire than his superiors in New Zealand: the hotel staff knew ‘of the matter in which the British Government have given in to [sic] India itself ’ and ‘you can no longer treat the Indian as you were able to do ten years ago’.96 The rise of commercial aviation shortly before the Second World War expanded into the Pacific packaged with more demanding expectations of hotel service, as flight itineraries were tighter and more exacting than shipping. Pan American World Airways used the Grand Pacific as its overnight base. Its clientele was ‘of the highest type’, including diplomats and industrialists, and demanded the attention of room boys, bath boys and bar boys. The current staff, Pan American’s regional manager complained, were too slow responding to bells and ‘are oft-times insolently indifferent’.97

WCA, Greenland to Ritchie, 3 November 1938, USSCo. Records, AF080:271:9. 93 WCA, Hancock to General Manager, 14 April 1936, USSCo. Records, AF080:213:6. 94 Vicki Luker, ‘The Half-Caste in Australia, New Zealand and Western Samoa between the Wars’, in Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race, 1750–1940, ed. Bronwen Douglas and Chris Ballard (Canberra: ANU E-Press, 2008), 319. See also Brij V. Lal, Broken Waves: A History of the Fiji Islands in the Twentieth Century (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1992). 95 ‘ “Insult” to Fiji Indians:  Community Protests against P&O Circular’, Pacific Islands Monthly, 25 November 1937, 30. 96 WCA, Hancock to General Manager, 2 September 1935, USSCo. Records, AF080:213:6; Hancock to Falla, 21 May 1936, USSCo. Records, AF061:71:1. 97 WCA, Phil Delany, 30 September 1941, USSCo. Records, AF080:214:5. 92



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Contact with American military during the Second World War, however, relaxed many of these boundaries. The hotel was placed under military control in 1942 for the exclusive use of US Army officers. It was soon clear that lowerranking military, who frequented the downtown hotels, were more ‘lavish with their tips’. Indian staff walked out to seek employment in those establishments or in army messes where their labour was also in high demand.98 Post-war adjustments were rocky, for while the Indian servants were reportedly ‘not the same as they used to be’, blame was attributed to Americans who had ‘spoiled’ them during the war. Expressing a lack of confidence in a new hotel manager and repeating the tired trope that servants ‘quickly [took] advantage’ of lax supervision, the Suva branch manager, D.  Butler, eventually dismissed one Indian man and reported on its ‘salutary effect upon the others’.99 Butler also made repeated suggestions to appoint a female housekeeper to ensure the room boys’ work was ‘carried out thoroughly’, arguing it was time the hotel benefitted from ‘that touch which a woman’s supervision gives’.100 In 1947 a staff deputation requested a wage increase, the first since 1934, on account of the increased cost of living. Before the approved 15 per cent increase, the butler earned £7/8/0 per month, the head room boy £5/4/0, waiters £4/4/0, and sweepers, pantry boys and the bar boy £4. Kitchen staff were exempt as their monthly wages had increased over the preceding thirteen years, the chief cook’s, for instance, from £15/6/0 to £20, while the second cook’s had more than doubled from £5/5/0 to £13/10/0.101 Wage trends in the two decades preceding 1934 are hard to calculate as hotel accounts recorded the total wage bill rather than individual wages. However it would appear that by the late 1920s table servants and cooks in Fiji earned between £5 and £6 per month, while car drivers started at £8 per month. By the mid-1930s Indian house servants were earning £7 per month.102 Notwithstanding all the vicissitudes, the hotel was not wholly unsuccessful in retaining some long-serving staff, with at least three of the thirty-nine Indian men employed in 1948 having served over twenty-five years, far longer than any European.103 They had now become the public face of the hotel and part of its

98 WCA, Butler to General Manager, 3 March 1943, USSCo. Records, AF080:214:6. 99 Ibid., 4 June 1947, USSCo. Records, AF080:215; 12 August 1949, USSCo. Records, AF080:216:1. 100 WCA, Butler to Millar, 23 August 1944, USSCo. Records, AF080:214:6; 4 June 1947, USSCo. Records, AF080:215:4; 13 September 1948, USSCo. Records, AF080:215:7. 101 WCA, 17 March 1947, USSCo. Records, AF080:215:4. 102 BL, Indians in Fiji, IOR/L/E/7/1469, file 6008(ii), Colonial Reports – Annual. No. 1453 Fiji, Report for 1928 (London, 1929), 48; Evening Post, 9 January 1936, 17. 103 WCA, 4 November 1948, USSCo. Records, AF080:215:7.

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Figure 6.3  ‘Guests taking tea, 6 June 1950’, Whites Aviation Ltd. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand, WA-24784-F.

ways, taking it upon themselves to uphold its ‘traditions’ irrespective of their racial or cultural origins (Figure 6.3). In this respect at least, thanks ironically to its Indian staff, the hotel had managed partly to realize its aspirations to being a half-way club, where a high turnover of European staff meant that it largely fell to Indian servants to uphold club traditions and rituals, of which the ‘master’ (i.e. the native head waiter) might become the principal protagonist and embodiment.104 The records relate an interesting account from 1950 of the head waiter of the Grand Pacific Hotel informing a guest entering the dining room without a jacket that he needed to dress for dinner. The peeved guest, a European resident from Jamaica, objected to being instructed thus by an Indian. He retorted that the servants should in fact ‘be clad in loin cloths’, adding somewhat illogically that this was more ‘hygienic’, and asserting that ultimately Fijians rather than Indians ‘would look more in keeping with the place’.105 This encounter revealed an emerging expectation of an authentic ‘South Sea Island’ experience in Fiji, rather than what now appeared to be a fading empire story, 104 Cohen, In the Club, 101, 107. See also Peleggi, ‘The Social and Material Life of Colonial Hotels’, 144. 105 WCA, J. S. Phillips, 28 October 1950, USSCo. Records, AF080:216:7; Butler to General Manager, 14 November 1950, USSCo. Records, AF080:216:5.



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as reflected by another guest who questioned the ubiquity of the Indian hotel servant. Tourists were used to seeing them do such work in India and Singapore, but ‘when a tourist comes to Fiji he expects to see a Fijian do the work’. Though the hotel by this time employed a mixed staff of Indian and Fijian waiters, he cast the former as lording it over the latter and preventing Fijian waiters from earning tips by relegating them to serving only water.106 Managers, in turn, continued to castigate the Fiji-born Indian as ‘arrogant’ and ‘most cunning’.107 For many American visitors, the hotel epitomized an outdated if not backward empire. Staying there was like going back in time, ‘an adventure into the tropics of colonial days’.108 At the same time they found the ‘historic precision’ of British hotel service intensely irritating, with Indian room boys intruding too early in the mornings to serve tea or make up the bed.109 In short, Fiji’s ‘tropical personality’ had been ‘liquidated into a British Crown Colony of which the Grand Pacific Hotel is the essence’.110 Empire travellers, on the other hand, were embarrassed by the contrast with Honolulu. An Australian guest, visiting Suva in the company of an American, was left ‘ashamed of the British way of life, if this was the best hotel you could offer’, his suggestion to ‘turf out’ the Indian staff and replace them with Chinese revealing how closely the empire remained associated with the ‘British way of life’ in the tropics.111 Yet there was still room for imperial and Indian nostalgia. Some guests still expected to see Indian servants in ‘snowy white’ costumes.112 Others were advised to make more practical adjustments to a changing empire – a tour company, for instance, informing its New Zealand travellers that Indian hotel staff ‘respond[ed] well to a friendly approach but not familiarity’; and while tipping was recommended ‘it is not advisable to be too lavish in this direction’.113

Conclusion In 1959 the USSCo. did not renew its lease and the Grand Pacific was sold to Singapore interests. The hotel ceased trading in the 1990s and fell into disrepair, WCA, L’Estrange to Manager, Auckland, 15 September 1958, USSCo. Records, AF080:218:4. 107 WCA, Butler to General Manager, 28 July 1952, USSCo. Records, AF080:217:2; 28 December 1953, USSCo Records, AF080:217:5. 108 San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park, HDC 457 Matson Line Papers, box 16, Business Reports, 1956–60, A Report on the South Pacific Route, 1956. 109 ‘What an American Thinks of Fiji’ (Stanton Delaplane, travel writer for the San Francisco Chronicle), Fiji Times, 23 January 1957, enclosed in WCA, USSCo. Records, AF080:218:2. 110 WCA, Norma Lee Browning, Chicago Tribune Press Service, enclosed in Butler to General Manager, 16 January 1956, USSCo. Records, AF080:218:1. 111 WCA, L. V. Bartlett, Orange NSW to H. H Dobie, 16 July 1952, USSCo. Records, AF080:217:2. 112 WCA, John and Jean Wilson, 2 April 1955, USSCo. Records, AF080:217:6. 113 WCA, Whites Travel Service Enclosing a Guidebook to Fiji, 16 February 1953, USSCo. Records, AF080:217:2. 106

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but was restored and reopened in 2014 as ‘an icon of the South Pacific for over a century’.114 Its ‘monumentalisation’ in the present as an ‘architectural and historical landmark’ is indicative of the broader consumption of colonial nostalgia through restored grand hotels throughout Asia and the Pacific.115 It gestures to the ambitions motivating their establishment, and the colonial prestige and self-assurance they supposedly embodied, rather than the messy and fractured past that the records of the Grand Pacific Hotel’s first five decades of operation enable us partly to reconstruct. Precisely because it catered for mobile people who often came with some experience of similar establishments, the Grand Pacific was frequently assessed in comparative and connected frames. Empire travellers, it seems, seldom failed to communicate the ways in which Suva’s hotel did not live up to expectations of faultless service and superior comfort. The Grand Pacific, while unique in its local setting, was not a singular site, but linked in imaginative and material ways to other hotels along imperial maritime networks. Such comparative assessments, along with the reputational stakes of a commercial establishment, marked hotel operations to a greater degree than other sites of colonial service explored in this book. Other settings more public than the home, notably clubs and steamships, provided inspiration and informal benchmarks, yet these echoes soon proved more of an irritant and burden for Grand Pacific management as guests’ desires jostled with the local restrictions imparted by the realities of a relatively small port and a colonial government largely disinterested in developing or catering for tourism. With respect to cultures of service, the hotel expressed and consolidated hierarchies that emerged through the mobilities of colonized labour from the Indian ‘metropole’ to tropical locations across Asia and the Pacific. There was a close relationship between Indian plantation indenture and domestic service, both in Fiji, as well as Natal, Mauritius and British Guiana, insofar as settlers diverted agricultural labourers into service in their private homes, unable to access any separate scheme of indentured domestic servitude from India. In Fiji this bred resentment and frustration, complaints of inflated wages and restricted working hours. The Grand Pacific Hotel fared differently, at least initially, because the shipping company used its agency networks in Calcutta to recruit workers independently of the existing traffic to Fiji’s sugar plantations.

http://grandpacifichotel.com.fj/ (accessed 29 January 2017). 115 Maurice Peleggi, ‘Consuming Colonial Nostalgia:  The Monumentalisation of Historic Hotels in Urban South-East Asia’, Asia Pacific Viewpoint 46, no. 3 (2005): 255–65. 114



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Indian hotel workers were envisioned as ‘superior’ to those in the home and on the plantation, highly trained and upholding exacting standards in the service of colonial elites. Not only did such expectations fail to materialize, in Suva, other hierarchies soon emerged, for example, between men recruited directly from India and those hotel workers who were Fiji-born, with the latter being ‘marked’ by their colonial experience, as too assertive, autonomous, and hence unreliable. While the staff from India proved far from docile or inadaptable, ‘colonial experience’ was also an ambiguous marker spanning a spectrum from failure to adapt, as seen with Lugon, to slippage and ‘transgression’. The Grand Pacific’s operations, as documented by successive European managers, reveal Indian workers’ individual and collective resilience and resistance. Whether this took the form of dictating their own working hours and patterns, seeking out local employment, challenging abuse through the colonial courts or petitioning for wage increases, workers were prepared to confront the hotel’s often erratic and dysfunctional management and adapt to its less rosy prospects as the predicted demand never materialized. Over time, challenges to the economic and political strictures placed on Indians in Fiji and, more broadly across the British Empire, also had an imprint on the hotel. Indian workers both rejected idealized projections of servile obedience and acquiescence and asserted more overtly their own centrality to colonial commercial, political and cultural life.

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Labour and Political Activism by Chinese and Vietnamese Male Domestic Workers

In April 1930, Cheng T’ing-seng, a Hainanese cook in Singapore, was arrested and sentenced to two years imprisonment for organizing a meeting at the home of his absent British employers. Those in attendance were members of the Malayan Communist Party and communist representatives from Burma, Indochina, the Netherlands East Indies and Siam.1 A second cook, Yang Lu-ts’ai, assisted Cheng in providing access to the house through the servants’ entrance.2 Yang escaped arrest by fleeing the scene on a bicycle.3 By the 1930s domestic workers were deeply involved in the Communist Party. Indeed, another man arrested along with Cheng was Wong Juat Pho (aka Lee Kwan Jun), a former Hainanese domestic worker who had risen to the provisional committee of the Malayan Communist Party.4 Domestic workers were also labour activists, engaging in strikes, petitions, and other forms of protest to improve wages and working conditions. Colonial authorities, while most concerned with anti-colonial protest, also viewed these activities as subversive; the right to organize was not widely accepted in colonies across Asia until the late 1930s.

‘Alleged “Reds” Rounded Up:  Conference Interrupted by Local Police’, Straits Times, 30 April 1930; ‘South Seas Communist Party:  Nassim Road Meeting’, Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 7 May 1930; Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia (London: Allen Lane, 2004), 53. 2 ‘South Seas “Reds” in Malaya’, Straits Times, 9 June 1930; ‘South Seas Communist Party:  Nassim Road Meeting’, Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 7 May 1930. 3 ‘Alleged “Reds”: Echo of C.I.D Raid at Nassim Road’, Straits Times, 15 May 1930; Ching F. Yong, The Origins of Malayan Communism (Singapore: South Seas Society, 1997), 146; ‘South Seas “Reds” in Malaya’. 4 ‘Broken Up Communist Meeting:  Nassim Road Raid. Two Years’ Sentence for “Red” Officials’, Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 9 June 1930; ‘Alleged “Reds”:  Echo of C.I.D Raid at Nassim Road’; Yong, The Origins of Malayan Communism, 146; Cheah Boon Kheng, ed., From PKI to the Comintern, 1924–1941: The Apprenticeship of the Malayan Communist Party (Ithaca:, NY Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University Press, 1992), 55. 1

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Since the 1970s historians of colonial Asia have acknowledged in passing the involvement of male domestic workers in protest and activism.5 Yet in contrast to the rich literature on class, capitalism and servant activism in colonial Africa, there are as yet no studies dedicated to this subject in the Asia Pacific region.6 A feminist emphasis on the home and the family informs much of the extant literature on colonial domestic service in Asia. This work responded to labour histories that privileged men’s work in the public sphere, in organized trade unions, and as politicized members of the working class. Domestic workers were rarely included in these early studies, as historian Marcel van der Linden argues, because the private home was perceived as outside the scope of workingclass labour organization.7 This tendency is also marked in Indian labour historiography, both because servants left few written documents, and because they were not deemed to be ‘a constitutive segment of the working-class’.8 In this chapter we place Chinese and Vietnamese male domestic workers at the heart of labour and political activism in early twentieth-century Singapore, Hong Kong and Indochina (Vietnam). Chapters 5 and 6 explored Asian men’s labour activism on ships and in hotels. Strong worker organization characterized the maritime world, and was not unexpected in the hotel where men also worked in rostered groups. It is less obvious, however, that servants in private colonial homes would have presumed to engage in labour and political protests. The master and mistress represented the personal face of colonial authority and to dispute this carried overtones of anti-colonialism. In this regard, then, domestic worker activism was all the more subversive. The study of domestic worker activism is also important in that it takes up a new direction in the historiography of domestic work, that being a focus ‘beyond the home’.9 Employers often depicted their servants as single men without responsibilities, whose private time was spent in frivolous and even See, for example, Alexander B. Woodside, Community and Revolution in Modern Vietnam (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), 164; Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, 53; Wai Kwan Chan, The Making of Hong Kong: Three Studies of Class Formation in Early Hong Kong (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 182. 6 For histories which detail the labour activism of servants in Tanganyika and Zulu and Indian laundry workers, see Robyn Pariser, ‘Masculinity and Organized Resistance in Domestic Service in Colonial Dar es Salaam, 1919–1961’, International Labor and Working-Class History 88 (2015): 109–29; van Onselen, History of the Witwatersand, 74–94; Kelesto Atkins, ‘Origins of the Amawasha: The Zulu Washerman’s Guild in Natal, 1850–1910’, Journal of African History 27, no. 1 (1986): 41–57; Maureen Swan, ‘The 1913 Natal Indian Strike’, Journal of Southern African Studies 10, no. 2 (1984): 249–50, 56. 7 Marcel van der Linden, ‘The “Globalization” of Labor and Working-Class History and Its Consequences’, International Labor and Working-Class History 65 (2004): 143. 8 Swapna Banerjee, ‘Down Memory Lane:  Representations of Domestic Workers in Middle Class Personal Narratives of Colonial Bengal’, Journal of Social History 37, no. 3 (2004): 688. 9 This was the title of a symposium held at Oxford University, 7–8 September 2017, organized by Sacha Hepburn and Olivia Robinson, https://beyondthehome.wordpress.com/ (accessed 31 March 2018). 5



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immoral pursuits such as gambling, visiting brothels and smoking opium.10 When employers acknowledged their involvement in political and labour protest they perceived such activities either as sinister or misguided. We are concerned to emphasize how these workers contributed to changes in colonial social and political life. In engaging in public protest such workers demonstrated a broad and sophisticated awareness of national and regional politics. In particular we see this in their engagement with communist activism throughout Asia in the late 1920s and 1930s. This chapter also seeks to illuminate the trans-colonial solidarities that underpinned servant activism and destabilized colonial rule. As Christopher Goscha, Tim Harper and Sophie Loy-Wilson have argued, the surge of anticolonial and labour activism in colonies across Asia between the 1910s and 1930s was fuelled by cross-border connections.11 We consider how the political activism of Chinese and Vietnamese domestic workers was influenced and connected by Chinese nationalism, Vietnamese nationalism and the Communist movement of the interwar period. Elsewhere we have highlighted how officials and employers shaped the trans-colonial nature of domestic service culture. In this chapter we reflect instead on how the workers themselves were able to draw on and collaborate with new political agendas across the region. The dearth of accounts from male servants limits our analysis of their perspectives and motivations. We know of only three recorded oral histories from Asian male servants, held by the National Archives of Singapore, including one interview with a Malay driver and two interviews with Hainanese domestic workers in Singapore.12 Neither of the Hainanese men revealed any knowledge of political activism, but it is perhaps not surprising that they would prefer to avoid contentious subjects. As Han Ming Guang has noted, this unwillingness to discuss communist political activism during the 1920s and 1930s is a trend in Hainanese oral histories.13 In their interviews with Javanese men who had Frank Proschan, ‘Eunuch Mandarins, Soldats Mamzelles, Effeminate Boys and Graceless Women’, Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 8, no. 4 (2002):  450; Christopher Munn, ‘Hong Kong, 1841– 1870:  All the Servants in Prison and Nobody to Take Care of the House’, in Masters, Servants, and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562–1955, ed. Douglas Hay and Paul Craven (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 374–6. 11 Christopher E. Goscha, Thailand and the Southeast Asian Networks of the Vietnamese Revolution (Surrey: Curzon, 1999), 2; Sophie Loy-Wilson, ‘ “Liberating” Asia: Strikes and Protests in Sydney and Shanghai, 1920–39’, History Workshop Journal 72, no. 1 (2011):  91; Tim Harper, ‘Singapore, 1915, and the Birth of the Asian Underground’, Modern Asian Studies 47, no. 6 (2013): 1805. 12 Hong Kong University’s Oral History Archive has four interviews with former Chinese female servants but none with Chinese male servants employed in private homes. We could not locate any oral history collections for the French Indochina. 13 Ming Guang Han, ‘External and Internal Perceptions of the Hainanese Community and Identity, Past and Present’ (MA diss., University of Singapore, 2012), 68–9. 10

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worked as servants in colonial Indonesia, Ann Laura Stoler and Karen Strassler noted a similar reluctance to discuss political activities.14 Thus, in documenting domestic worker activism, this chapter relies largely on government reports, police records, private memoirs and newspaper articles. In the case of Vietnam, we have also drawn on letters penned by domestic workers themselves as they protested over working conditions in the late 1930s.

Anti-colonial and nationalist domestic worker activism, 1890–1910s In Hong Kong and Singapore, employers sought to deal with what they claimed were common ‘problems’ of servant insolence, neglect of duty, and absence without leave, by drawing on the provisions of the Masters and Servants Laws. These laws, which criminalized servant disobedience, were imported into the colonies alongside other English legal traditions.15 In Hong Kong and Singapore in the late nineteenth century and in Indochina in the early twentieth century, colonial authorities also attempted to introduce compulsory registration for domestic servants. Registration was intended to provide employers with information about their employees’ personal and criminal histories.16 However, these schemes were not effective. In 1902, the colonial legislators of Hong Kong once again attempted to deal with the ‘servant problem’ by passing the Employers and Servants Ordinance which allowed for criminal punishment including hard labour for breach of contract. In 1932 breach of contract was decriminalized but the ordinance technically stayed in force until 1968.17 Just as employers looked to the legal system to uphold their rights, Chinese and Vietnamese domestic servants also, on occasion, reported their employers to the police or took them to court for failing to pay wages, unfair dismissal Ann Laura Stoler and Karen Strassler, ‘Memory-Work in Java:  A Cautionary Tale’, in Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, 178–9. 15 Munn, ‘Hong Kong, 1841–1870’, 366. 16 For Hong Kong, see ibid., 397. For Singapore, see Ordinance No. xxii of 1886: An Ordinance to Provide for the Registration of Domestic Servants and to Declare and Amend the Law Respecting Contracts of Domestic Service’ (Straits Settlements Legislative Council, 1886); Ong-Siang Song, One Hundred Years of the Chinese in Singapore (London: Murray, 1923), 482. For Indochina, see ‘Registration of Domestic Servants’, Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 23 July 1912. 17 Hong Kong Public Records Office, ‘Correspondence from Governor Henry A. Blake to Joseph Chamberlain Regarding an Ordinance to Amend the Law Relating to Employers and Servants No. 45 of 1902’ (1902); Joe England, Industrial Relations and Law in Hong Kong (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 162–3. 14



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or assault.18 In addition to asserting their individual rights, domestic workers in Vietnam, Hong Kong and Singapore used forms of collective bargaining. The isolating nature of domestic work, particularly in more modest homes that employed only one servant, and the fact that many domestic workers ‘lived-in’, may have restricted their ability to collaborate. This atomization of servants is suggested in Figure 7.1. However, as Figures 7.2 and 7.3 illustrate, in well-to-do homes and within police and military barracks, multiple male servants often worked side-by-side. This ensured that there were numerous opportunities for the development of collective ties. In addition, male domestic workers socialized together when not working, visiting eating-houses, gambling, drinking alcohol and frequenting opium dens.19 In Saigon, male servants carved out a communal identity by adopting a uniform of a white suit accompanied by bright silk belts. According to David Pomfret, they did this to protect their higher status and wages in relation to the female servants employed within French households.20 And, as we shall discuss in this chapter, male domestic workers also met together as members of political parties and unions. In Hong Kong and Singapore, Chinese servants’ membership of dialect-based community societies called kongsi (公司, also gongsi) and labour guilds ensured that organized strikes and boycotts designed to improve working conditions were a feature of the political landscape from the late nineteenth century.21 In Singapore, where the majority of domestic workers were Hainanese, their kongsi (sometimes referred to in colonial parlance as a secret society) organized and supported the migrant labour workforce and played a role in their recruitment into particular homes.22 In Hong Kong recruitment of servants was organized by a Chinese compradore (middleman) rather than the kongsi, meaning the domestic workforce tended to be less unified than in Singapore.23 However, as with Singapore, Chinese domestic workers were connected through dialectbased ‘coolie houses’ which provided a sense of community as well as a form of

18 See, for example, ‘Un Scandale’, Avenir du Tonkin, 30 September 1910, 2. For Hong Kong, see Munn, ‘Hong Kong, 1841–1870’, 387. 19 David Pomfret, Youth and Empire: Transcolonial Childhoods in British and French Asia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 63; Chan, The Making of Hong Hong, 148; John Butcher, The British in Malaya, 1880–1941: The Social History of a European Community in Colonial South-East Asia (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1979), 80. 20 Pomfret, Youth and Empire, 63. 21 Chan, The Making of Hong Kong, 112; Maurice Peleggi, ‘The Social and Material Life of Colonial Hotels: Comfort Zones as Contact Zones in British Colombo and Singapore, ca. 1870–1930’, Journal of Social History 46, no. 1 (2012): 21. 22 Carl A. Trocki, Opium and Empire:  Chinese Society in Colonial Singapore, 1800–1910 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 11. 23 Chan, The Making of Hong Kong, 150–51, 55.

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Figure  7.1 ‘301  – Chinese boy on duty’, Lambert and Co, Singapore, c.  1900. University of Leiden, Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, 50196.

social welfare in the event of unemployment.24 From the late nineteenth century labour guilds for servants began to emerge in Hong Kong, resulting in stronger occupational links between servants.25 The earliest evidence of a domestic worker union in Indochina is from 1909, when one French observer claimed that Vietnamese cooks working for 24 Tsai, Hong Kong in Chinese History, 107. 25 Ming Kou Chan, ‘Labour vs Crown:  Aspects of Society-State Interactions in the Hong Kong Labour Movement before World War II’, in Between East and West: Aspects of Social and Political Development in Hong Kong, ed. Elizabeth Sinn (Hong Kong: Centre of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong, 1990), 135–7.



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Figure 7.2  ‘House-coolie, boy, cook and no. 2’, Hong Kong, from Oliver G. Ready, Life and Sport in China, London: Chapman Hall, 1904.

Figure 7.3  ‘Batman, cook and boy’, Tonkin, Indochina, c. 1895–9. Archives nationales d’outre-mer, Aix-en-Provence, France, FR ANOM 8 Fi435/90. (The caption has been translated from French. The original caption is ‘Ordonnance, cuisinier et boy’. Note that a batman denotes a servant for an army officer.)

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Chinese employers in the port of Haiphong in Tonkin (northern Vietnam) had formed ‘a secret society’. The writer alleged that everyone knew of its existence but were afraid to speak out because of the power of the group, which had an estimated 200 members. He feared the potential anti-colonial overtones, writing: ‘I believe that the Government should crush them as soon as possible, otherwise, very soon, there will be an anti-French secret society. Today they are revolting against individuals, but later it will be against the Government.’26 French concern over the anti-colonial threat posed by domestic workers had been raised by the 1908 attempt to poison members of the French garrison in Hanoi. Vietnamese domestic workers were widely employed by the military in Hanoi (the capital of French Indochina). This foiled plot was said to involve several hundred Vietnamese soldiers, servants and cooks. The servants and cooks had planned to poison a banquet intended for the French officers and soldiers, leaving the Vietnamese soldiers free to attack the city.27 The plot failed because the datura poison only caused some 200 French artillery and infantry soldiers to become ill but did not seriously incapacitate them. It was claimed that the authorities were tipped off because one of the cooks confessed his actions to a Catholic priest. The priest notified the authorities and French soldiers were dispatched to round up the conspirators. Thirteen Vietnamese soldiers, servants and cooks were executed while four others were sentenced to life imprisonment for their role in the plot.28 French authorities maintained that the plot was inspired by the writings of the Vietnamese anti-colonial leader Phan Boi Chau (1867–1940) who advocated the overthrow of French colonial rule and a return to Vietnamese independence.29 The cooks, servants and soldiers had been introduced to his ideas by teachers at a restaurant which they frequented. Colonial officials also maintained that the rebel leader De Tham was involved in coordinating the attack.30 Phan Boi Chau, who at the time was living in Japan, used the punitive response of

‘La Société Secrète des Beps and Boys’ (‘The Secret Society of Cooks and Boys’), trans. Julia Martínez, Avenir du Tonkin, Edition du Matin, Chronique de Haiphong, 13–14 September 1909, 2.  27 Joseph Buttinger, Vietnam: A Political History (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1968), 126–7. 28 David Marr, Vietnamese Anticolonialism 1885–1925 (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1971), 193–4. 29 David Marr, Reflections from Captivity:  Phan Boi Chau’s Prison Notes, Ho Chi Minh’s Prison Diary, trans. Christopher Jenkins, Tran Khanh Tuyet and Huynh Sanh Thong, ed. David Marr (Athens: Ohio University Press, Southeast Asian Translation Series, 1978); Goscha, Networks of the Vietnamese Revolution, 29–30. 30 Marr, Vietnamese Anticolonialism, 193. 26



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French authorities to bolster his support base within Indochina and among the Vietnamese community living in neighbouring Siam. He referred to the plotters as ‘Heroes of Hanoi’ committed to ridding Vietnam of foreign domination, and described one of the executed cooks, Ong Hai, as a glorious martyr who gave his life to the cause.31 At the same time as Vietnamese servants were engaging in anti-colonial activism, Chinese servants working in Hong Kong were demonstrating a fervent commitment to Sun Yat Sen’s campaign for a Chinese republic. The close proximity of Hong Kong to the Chinese mainland made it an ideal base for planning and orchestrating revolutionary activity against the Qing dynasty.32 Domestic workers in Hong Kong were active members of Sun Yat Sen’s underground resistance movement which was consolidated into the Tongmenghui (Revolutionary Alliance) in 1905.33 Leaders working in China and Hong Kong cultivated close links with the hui-t’ang secret societies connected with domestic workers and sometimes took up work as servants themselves in order to recruit revolutionaries.34 In one account it was reported that some thirty waiters and porters from hotels in Hong Kong travelled to Waichow (Huìzhōu) in Guangdong, southern China, in 1911 to assist in the fight against Chinese government troops.35 Following the overthrow of the Qing dynasty and the formation of the Republic of China in 1912, Chinese communities in Hong Kong and Singapore were united in patriotic celebration. In Hong Kong, domestic workers and other members of the Chinese community raised funds to support the new Republic. Staff employed at the Hong Kong Hotel, for example, donated 10 per cent of their monthly income to assist Sun Yat Sen to form the Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party, or K.M.T.).36 In Singapore, the huaqiao (overseas Chinese) community also demonstrated their loyalty to Sun Yat Sen by forming a local Kuomintang to provide financial and moral support to the new Republic.37

Michael Vann, ‘Of Pirates, Postcards, and Public Beheadings: The Pedagogic Execution in French Indochina’, Historical Reflections 36, no. 2 (2010): 47–8. 32 Tsai, Hong Kong in Chinese History, 238. 33 Ibid., 241. 34 Ibid. 35 Winston Hsieh, ‘Triads, Salt Smugglers, and Local Uprisings:  Observations on the Social and Economic Background of the Waichow Revolution of 1911’, in Popular Movements and Secret Societies in China, 1840–1950, ed. Jean Chesneaux (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 1972), 148. 36 Tsai, Hong Kong in Chinese History, 251. 37 Ching F. Yong, Chinese Leadership and Power in Colonial Singapore (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1992), xix. 31

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One of the most visible symbols of Chinese domestic workers’ support for the Republic was the removal of their queues (long braid of hair) in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution. Chinese men had been forced to wear the queue from the beginning of the Manchu Qing dynasty as a symbol of loyalty and subservience. Its removal symbolized a rejection of Manchu traditions, especially Confucian notions of superior-inferior, obedience and conformity.38 In Singapore and Hong Kong, British colonists had embraced the wearing of the queue by Chinese servants and the submission to colonial authority that it embodied. They viewed its removal with some trepidation, expressing concern that demands for political freedoms would soon follow.39 In both Hong Kong and Singapore, Chinese domestic workers employed in private homes and hotels engaged in small-scale strikes which to colonial observers seemed to confirm their new revolutionary spirit. In May 1912, the commercial washermen of Hong Kong went on strike for higher wages.40 In Singapore in 1912 the entire Hainanese domestic staff employed at the Grand Hotel de l’Europe went on strike to protest the arrest of six staff members for assaulting the hotel manager. The manager was forced to bail out the servants.41 Employers’ claims regarding the alleged ‘tyrannical insolence’ of servants ‘puffed up on revolutionary ideas’ from China culminated in a renewed and concerted campaign for servant registration in Singapore from 1911 to 1913.42 The campaign was watched closely in Hong Kong and reported in the South China Morning Post, suggesting such concerns preoccupied that colony too.43 While employers in Singapore believed that their Chinese servants were illustrating a new level of defiance in the wake of the Chinese Revolution, this may not necessarily have been the case. As John Butcher argued in relation to Malaya, the British ‘tended to see anything short of total submissiveness as a sign of rebellion’.44 Indeed, Chinese domestic workers had always advocated for fair wages and conditions. The British reaction to the Singapore mutiny of 1915 illustrates the degree of paranoia about Chinese servants. A regiment of

Tsai, Hong Kong in Chinese History, 243; C. M. Turnbull, A History of Singapore, 1819–1975 (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1977), 112. 39 ‘Hong Kong’s Year’, South China Morning Post, 1 January 1912; Turnbull, A History of Singapore, 112. 40 ‘Washermen on Strike: Dispute over Ten Cents a Day’, Hong Kong Daily Telegraph, 20 May 1912. 41 Peleggi, ‘Colonial Hotels’, 21. 42 ‘Registration of Servants. To the Editor’, Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 25 July 1911; ‘Servants’ Register. The Poll of Employers in Singapore – First Results and a Reminder’, Straits Times, 30 July 1912; ‘Registration of Servants: An Enthusiastic Supporter’, Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 8 January 1913. 43 ‘Contracts with Chinese’, ‘Chinese Boys’, South China Morning Post, 8 August 1912. 44 Butcher, The British in Malaya, 116. 38



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Indian sepoys revolted, killing forty-four people including thirty-five Europeans. Despite their fears this would spark an ‘uprising of all natives’, British residents returned home to find their servants going about their duties as usual.45 As Governor Young put it in 1915: ‘I have not heard of a single case of pilfering, and it shows in what high esteem the boys held their masters and mistresses.’46 Young assumed that anti-colonialism would be revealed in the petty crime of ‘pilfering’. Theft tended to be an individual act of retribution, but as workers became organized they were encouraged to act on a larger scale. For some this meant using the law to seek justice or reform, or failing that seeking to help overthrow the colonial government. This might explain why in Singapore instances of theft by servants actually dropped in 1912.47 The Chinese Revolution also played a part in inspiring Vietnamese nationalism. Following the revolution, Phan Boi Chau’s vision shifted from his initial aim of reinstating Vietnamese imperial rule to the goal of establishing a Vietnamese republic along the lines of the Chinese Republic.48 French unease about the control of their colonies increased during the First World War in response to further evidence of nationalist manoeuvring against the colonial state.49 A number of Vietnamese and Chinese workers went to work in France during the war and they returned to Indochina with a new understanding of the fragility of French authority. It was in response to increasing unrest that the French colonial government created the Sûreté Indochinese (Indochinese Political Police), a secret police force designed to root out political subversion within the colony and track the activities of Phan and other revolutionaries outside the colony.50 In the context of increased government repression, Phan and his fellow scholarly revolutionaries came to rely on an underground network of soldiers, robbers, pirates, prostitutes and domestic workers in order to communicate and organize.51 Phan praised servants in particular for their role in the movement. In his memoir, for example, he described how a Vietnamese cook working in Hong Kong recruited his friends to the nationalist cause. The cook’s actions convinced him that ‘the incarnation of fidelity and zeal today is to be found in our cooks!’52 Writing in 1914 from prison, he reflected on the role of a houseboy

Ibid., 123–4. 46 Song, One Hundred Years, 482–3. 47 ‘Police and Crime’, Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 26 August 1912. 48 Goscha, Networks of the Vietnamese Revolution, 34–5. 49 Ibid., 43–4. 50 Ibid., 42. 51 Ibid., 36, 38. 52 Ibid., 37. 45

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called Ly Tue, who while working on a French steamship aided Phan’s escape from Vietnam in 1905. He described Ly as ‘a brave man, a strategist and one who understood deeply the meaning of justice’.53 Clearly not all domestic workers in colonial homes were anti-colonial activists in waiting. We can assume that some thought little of politics, while others worked to sustain the colonial order. In Indochina, the Sûreté Indochinese recruited ‘boys’ and cooks along with other labourers to monitor Phan’s revolutionary movement.54 In other colonies too there was evidence of domestic workers being targeted as collaborators. In Hong Kong, during the 1913 tram boycott protesting the colonial government’s ban on the use of the new Chinese currency, a Chinese servant who rode a tram to run an errand for his British employer was attacked for doing so.55 In other colonies, such as the Netherlands East Indies, the perceived loyalty of Javanese male servants to their Dutch employers made them the target of violence and sometimes murder by nationalist forces.56 In northern Vietnam, further evidence of formal labour organization among domestic workers came at the conclusion of the First World War. Writing in 1918 in the newspaper Courrier D‘Haiphong, one French man complained that domestic servants in Vietnam had unionized and were now imposing work conditions and boycotting houses that did not please them. Servants who had been part of the 48,995 strong workforce from Tonkin and Annam which had served in non-combatant roles in France during the First World War, were thought to have returned with new ideas of wage equality.57 By the 1920s, organized and collective domestic worker activism stepped up pace in Vietnam, Singapore and Hong Kong. The working-class base of Chinese and Vietnamese nationalism ensured that many viewed the struggle against foreign oppression as a struggle against labour exploitation.58 By the 1920s, radical branches of Chinese and Vietnamese nationalism began to emerge and intersect with the ideas of communism. The focus was not just on achieving or sustaining national independence but liberating workers from exploitation and

Phan Boi Chau ‘Prison Notes’, 1914 in Marr, Reflections from Captivity. 54 Goscha, Networks of the Vietnamese Revolution, 43. 55 Tsai, Hong Kong in Chinese History, 263. 56 Stoler and Strassler, ‘Memory-Work in Java’, 179. 57 Courrier D‘Haiphong, 11 December 1918, 2; Tyler Stovall, ‘Colour-Blind France? Colonial Workers during the First World War’, Race and Class 35, no. 2 (1993): 37. 58 Steve A. Smith, Like Cattle and Horses: Nationalism and Labor in Shanghai, 1895–1927 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 5; Goscha, Networks of the Vietnamese Revolution, 37. 53



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imperialism in all its forms. In all three colonies during this period, domestic servants became members of formal trade unions and became involved in communist inspired labour activism.

Trade unions and labour activism in the 1920s During the 1920s the Chinese labouring classes were increasingly attracted to more radical forms of protest.59 The city of Canton (Guangzhou) in Guangdong province became known as the centre of Chinese communism.60 The proximity of Canton to Hong Kong and the constant flow of labourers and trade between the ports facilitated the influence of communist ideas on the labouring classes of Hong Kong.61 Labour activism was also fostered by the significant growth of trade unionism during the 1920s, including unions for domestic workers. Over a hundred trade unions were formed in Hong Kong in 1920 alone.62 The colonial government sought to curb the power of the unions by introducing the Societies Ordinance of 1920 banning a number of unions, including the Hotel Boys and Cooks Guild.63 In addition to joining unions, domestic workers were actively involved in labour strikes in Hong Kong. During the Hong Kong Seamen’s Strike of 1922 the Chinese Seaman’s Union demanded a 30–40 per cent wage increase and asked that recruitment be organized through the union rather than by the compradors.64 Service staff on the ships, including Chinese cooks, stewards and waiters, went on strike alongside other maritime workers.65 Governor Stubbs banned the Chinese Seaman’s Union under the Societies Ordinance (1920) and arrested its leaders. In retaliation the union called for a general strike, asking all workers to abandon their posts and leave Hong Kong for Canton. Many Chinese working in private homes and hotels went on strike in sympathy

59 Ching F. Yong and R. B. McKenna, The Kuomintang Movement in British Malaya 1912–1949 (Singapore:  Singapore University Press, 1990), 83–8; Lau Kit-ching Chan, ‘Business and Radicalism: Hong Kong Chinese Merchants and the Chinese Communist Movement’, in Colonial Hong Kong: Interaction and Reintegration, ed. Pui-tak Lee (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005), 175–6. 60 John M. Carroll, A Concise History of Hong Kong (Hong Kong:  Hong Kong University Press, 2007), 89. 61 Ibid., 97, 100. 62 David Levin and Stephen Chiu, ‘Trade Union Growth Waves in Hong Kong’, Labour History 75 (1998): 42–3. 63 Carroll, A Concise History of Hong Kong, 97. 64 Ibid. 65 Chan, The Making of Hong Kong, 166.

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leaving ‘most houses without any servants whatsoever’.66 The striking workers included the entire staff of Government House.67 The strike developed into a broad campaign against labour exploitation and the colonial government of Hong Kong. As the general strike escalated, Governor Stubbs attempted to prevent workers from leaving by stopping the train service to Canton. The strike turned violent after the colonial police shot dead five workers and wounded eight others attempting to leave Hong Kong on foot through Sha Tin in the New Territories.68 While the judicial enquiry into the Sha Tin massacre found ‘justifiable homicide’, the event consolidated Chinese public support with more than 100,000 workers joining the strike in sympathy, bringing the colony to a standstill for fifty days.69 Some 10,200 domestic workers employed in European households and hotels in Hong Kong went on strike during this period, accounting for roughly 9 per cent of the striking workers. Striking domestic workers employed in Chinese homes were not counted.70 The Hong Kong strike concluded in the workers’ favour. The maritime workers were successful in gaining a wage increase close to what they had demanded, the ban of the Seaman’s Union was lifted, the arrested leaders were released and compensation was paid to the families of the victims of the shootings.71 British residents of Hong Kong viewed this outcome as a ‘surrender’ that only increased Chinese assertiveness and paved the way for further labour agitation.72 Labour activism emerged once again in Hong Kong with the General Strike and Boycott of 1925–6. This strike was in response to the infamous shooting of nine Chinese protestors by colonial troops in Shanghai on 13 May 1925 and the massacre six weeks later of a further fifty protestors in the city. In response, communist and union leaders in Canton called for a general strike throughout Southern China.73 The strike began in Shanghai where workers of all industries downed their tools, including Chinese servants.74 The strike soon spread to ‘The Strike Situation: News from Canton. Boys, Cooks and Amahs Leave Work’, Hongkong Telegraph, 2 March 1922; Hong Kong Government Reports Online (1842–1941), Hong Kong University (hereafter HKGRO), ‘Report of the Captain Superintendent of Police (E. D. C. Wolfe) for the Year 1922’, K12, http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkgro/index.jsp. 67 Carroll, A Concise History of Hong Kong, 98. 68 Ibid. 69 HKGRO, ‘Report of the Captain Superintendent of Police (E. D. C. Wolfe) for the Year 1922’, K12; Chan, The Making of Hong Kong, 181. 70 Chan, The Making of Hong Kong, 181. 71 Carroll, A Concise History of Hong Kong, 99. 72 Putnam Weale, The Port of Fragrance (New York: Dood, Mead, 1930), 77. 73 Carroll, A Concise History of Hong Kong, 100. 74 ‘Shanghai Strike Grows:  Chinese Servants Now Out:  British Homes Mostly Affected’, Hong Kong Telegraph, 6 June 1925. 66



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Hong Kong where workers were encouraged to take refuge in Canton. By July 1925, 250,000 had done so.75 Mirroring the development of the strike in Shanghai, the domestic workers employed in private homes and represented by the Houseboys’ Union were among the first to join the strike in Hong Kong and they did so in large numbers.76 Hotel employees followed suit with some 500 staff walking out of Hong Kong hotels on 19 June. A couple of days later all the Peak Hotel staff left their positions while 600–700 domestic workers employed in private homes on the Peak joined the strike.77 Domestic workers in Hong Kong hospitals and at Hong Kong University also went on strike.78 The strike paralysed Hong Kong and a boycott of British goods that accompanied it might have resulted in the colony’s economic collapse had London not provided a loan.79 The strike and boycott finally ended in October 1926 following the call from Canton for workers to return to their positions. Relations between Canton and the colonial government in Hong Kong remained tense. From 1927, however, the Chinese government and the K.M.T. branches in Hong Kong and Singapore enacted a purge of the communists, dramatically changing the politics of labour activism for Chinese workers.80 The participation of Chinese male domestic workers in strikes and boycotts in Hong Kong was not necessarily a sign that they were committed to the cause. While some employers maintained that their houseboys were enthusiastic ‘agitators’ of ‘Bolshevism’, the government tended towards the view that many were intimidated into taking part in the strike, as did British authorities in Fiji during the 1920 strike of Indian workers, noted in ­Chapter 6.81 Certainly some domestic workers did return to work as soon as they were able, while others continued working throughout the strike period.82 On the other hand, at least two domestic workers were convicted of intimidating others to strike.83 A sense of their commitment was also illustrated by the destruction of property. It was Carroll, A Concise History of Hong Kong, 100. 76 ‘The Chinese Ferment: Strike Commences in Hong Kong’, South China Morning Post, 20 June 1925. 77 ‘The Chinese Crisis: Strike Declared in Hong Kong’, South China Morning Post, 22 June 1925; ‘Spread of the Strike: The “Boys” Leaving Their Posts’, South China Morning Post, 26 June 1925. 78 ‘Schools and Hospitals: Further Absentees’, South China Morning Post, 23 June 1925. 79 Carroll, A Concise History of Hong Kong, 100. 80 Ibid., 103. 81 HKGRO, ‘Report of the Secretary for Chinese Affairs (E. R. Halifax) for the Year 1922’, C13; HKGRO, ‘Minutes of the Hong Kong Legislative Council Meeting of 9 July 1925’, 45–7. 82 ‘The Local Situtation:  All Quiet Yesterday’, South China Morning Post, 29 June 1925; ‘The Intimidators’, South China Morning Post, 3 July 1925; ‘Intimidation Case: Dock Watchman Charged’, Hongkong Telegraph, 14 July 1925; ‘More Confidence: “Boys” No Longer Require Protection’, China Mail, 28 July 1925; ‘The Strike: Little Change in the Situation’, South China Morning Post, 6 July 1925. 83 HKGRO, ‘Report of the Police Magistrates’ Courts for the Year 1925’, H13. 75

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claimed that the staff at the Peak Hotel, for example, kicked holes in the boiler before going on strike, leaving the guests with no hot water.84 Domestic workers were also convicted for possessing ‘seditious’ literature promoting strike action in 1925.85 The British residents in Singapore found the 1922 Seamen’s Strike ‘deeply humiliating’ and a blow to ‘British pride and prestige’, predicting that further ‘labour trouble’ would follow particularly from the domestic worker unions.86 Concern about anarchist and communist influence in Singapore emerged in 1922 when Bolshevik material sent from Canton to the ‘bar boy’ at the Grosvenor Hotel was intercepted by the Straits Settlements police.87 In 1924 the colonial government banned the Singapore branch of the K.M.T.  under the Societies Ordinance in an effort to stem Chinese labour activism.88 British authorities responded to the General Strike in Hong Kong in 1925 with measures of their own to rein in nationalist, labour and communist agitation in Singapore.89 The left wing of Singapore’s K.M.T. was subject to a raid in August 1925 in which the Special Branch of police (responsible for curtailing political subversion in the colony) arrested Wong Siang Chek, a K.M.T. officer from Canton. Documentation from the raid indicated that Hainanese staff employed at the Europe Hotel made up a significant proportion of the K.M.T. left wing support base.90 While the authorities in Singapore concentrated their efforts on curtailing the K.M.T., Chinese workers turned to more radical labour organizations, particularly the Nanyang (South Seas) General Labour Union, established in 1926.91 This union, a branch of the Canton-based China General Labour Union, sought to unite the workers of Singapore around an anti-British, anti-colonial and communist platform. It was a precursor to the Malayan Communist Party with branches in Singapore, Malaya, Sarawak, Siam and the Netherlands East Indies.92 Despite the fact that they were a minority group in Singapore, Hainanese ‘Strike Items’, South China Morning Post, 23 June 1925. 85 ‘Seditious Pamphlets: Four Men Sentenced’, Hongkong Telegraph, 23 June 1925. 86 ‘The Hongkong Strike: Public Resentment at the Settlement’, Straits Times, 18 March 1922; ‘After the Strike: The Domestic Servants and the Hotel Boys’, Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 25 March 1922. 87 Martin Andrew, ‘Suppressing Communism in Singapore’, Harvard Asia Quarterly 13, no.  2 (2011): 22–3. 88 Yong, Chinese Leadership, xix. 89 ‘Hong Kong Strike: Determination of British Residents: Advice to the Home Government’, Straits Times, 28 July 1925; ‘Creeping Back: The Houseboy’s Return’, Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 29 July 1925; ‘Much Like Ourselves’, Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 31 July 1925. 90 Andrew, ‘Suppressing Communism in Singapore’, 23. 91 Yong and McKenna, The Kuomintang Movement, 83–8. 92 Yong, The Origins of Malayan Communism, 68–70. 84



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servants dominated the union.93 Servants were also enthusiastic participants in the Hainanese Night Schools which were established in Singapore in the mid1920s to provide basic literacy skills to workers and to promote a communist agenda.94 With the 1927 purge of communist elements in the K.M.T. in China, a number of communist activists fled to Singapore for safety.95 Their influence further radicalized the Chinese labouring classes in Singapore laying the groundwork for social revolt. An important catalyst for social unrest in Singapore came with the Chinese community’s annual commemoration of Sun Yat-sen’s death on 12 March 1927. The event began peacefully enough with a ceremony at Kreta Ayer. The crowd, which included a large proportion of Hainanese servants, formed a procession. When the group crossed paths with a trolley-bus outside of the Kreta Ayer police station, a British official instructed the driver to force his way through the procession.96 A riot broke out and police shot into the crowd killing six people. In response to the incident, a trolley-bus boycott was initiated. The police attributed blame for the unrest to the Nanyang General Labour Union and the Hainanese Night Schools, conducting a series of raids on the organizations during 1927. Those arrested included a Chinese houseboy called Fong who was employed by Alec Dixon, a police detective working in Singapore. A houseboy employed by another policeman in the same police barracks was also arrested in the raids. Fong, who Dixon had considered to be an ‘excellent servant’, was revealed as a leader of the Singapore Chinese Communist Party. Other arrested domestic servants included its secretary and treasurer.97 Servant involvement in nationalist and labour agitation continued with the shoemakers’ strike of March 1928 which was initially concerned with economic issues but became a broader anti-British movement. The strike turned violent when homemade bombs were thrown into shoe shops in the commercial district of the city. Like the boycott, the strike was attributed to Hainanese members of the Chinese Communist Party.98 The Special Branch of police conducted four separate raids on servants’ quarters within three private homes, arresting six Hainanese male servants for possession of seditious literature inciting riots and

Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, 53. 94 Alec Dixon, Singapore Patrol (London: George G. Harrap, 1935), 34; ‘Singapore’s Secret Societies: Old and New Style of Samseng. C.I.D. Head on Police Problems’, Straits Times, 17 November 1928. 95 Andrew, ‘Suppressing Communism in Singapore’, 22–3. 96 Ibid., 24. 97 Dixon, Singapore Patrol, 44, 132–7. 98 ‘Annual Report of the Straits Settlements for the Year 1928’, 293; ‘The Shoemakers’ Strike. Bombs Thrown. Seditious Literature Seizure’, Straits Times, 7 March 1928. 93

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the overthrow of British colonialism. The houseboys and cooks arrested were also charged with the possession of ammunition and explosive materials.99 In Singapore, as in Hong Kong, the government maintained that foreign agitators from Russia and China intimidated domestic workers into the strikes and boycotts.100 At the same time, however, employers and colonial authorities in Singapore were more likely than their counterparts in Hong Kong to suggest that a significant proportion of Hainanese servants were ‘red hot revolutionaries!’, as Alec Dixon put it.101 A number of letters and editorials published in the Singapore newspapers in the late 1920s and early 1930s, referred to the political activities of so called ‘domestic “reds” ’, labelling them ‘dangerous’ ‘fanatics’ and calling for servant registration to curtail the spread of anti-British Bolshevik activism.102 As communist agitators from China began to influence nationalist activism and labour agitation in Hong Kong and Singapore, so Vietnamese nationalism was increasingly radicalized under the influence of the Communist leader, Ho Chi Minh. Ho drew on existing anti-colonial and nationalist networks developed by Phan Boi Chau, particularly among the Vietnamese community in Thailand. Ho had been living in France since 1911 where he developed connections with the French communist movement.103 He had returned to southern China via Moscow in the early 1920s and in 1925 formed the Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth League in Canton, a precursor to the Indochinese Communist Party. Ho recruited educated elites into the league alongside Vietnamese soldiers, sailors and servants working for the French in southern China.104 He relied on workers’ networks to smuggle revolutionaries into Vietnam where they could prepare for revolution.105 Within Indochina, the Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth League competed with the Vietnamese Nationalist Party to secure popular anti-colonial support. The Vietnamese Nationalist Party was established by Nguyen Thai Hoc in 1927. In contrast to the Revolutionary Youth League’s tactics of indoctrination and 99 ‘Red Propaganda: Serious Allegations of Sedition’, Straits Times, 2 March 1928; ‘Police Raid: Alleged Seditious Literature’, Straits Times, 22 March 1928; ‘Painting Singapore Red:  Another Hylam Committed’, Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 23 March 1928; ‘Domestic “Reds”: Hylam Servants in Court’, Straits Times, 1 May 1928; Kah Choon Ban, Absent History: The Untold Story of Special Branch Operations in Singapore 1915–1942 (Singapore: Raffles, 2001), 111–12. 100 ‘Communist Activity in Malaya’, Straits Times, 16 March 1929. 101 Dixon, Singapore Patrol, 34. 102 ‘Registration’, Straits Times, 7 April 1920; ‘Servants and Surats’, Straits Times, 30 April 1927; ‘Like Master, Like Man: A Dissertation on Servants. One Kuala Lumpur View’, Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 14 July 1927; ‘Occasional Notes’, Straits Times, 24 March 1928; ‘Singapore’s Secret Societies: Old and New Style of Samseng. C.I.D. Head on Police Problems’; ‘Why Employ Hylams?’ Straits Times, 29 September 1928. 103 Goscha, Networks of the Vietnamese Revolution, 49. 104 Ibid., 65. 105 Peter Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille:  A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 202.



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organization, the Nationalist party concentrated its efforts on violent acts of political resistance including assassinations and mutinies.106 The Sûreté swiftly targeted its members and by July 1930, most of the Party leadership had been executed and 600 members were in prison.107 Throughout the early 1920s, the activism of Chinese servants in Hong Kong and Singapore, and Vietnamese servants within and outside of Indochina, were separate movements with common interests. Before 1928 political activism tended to be organized along ethnic lines. We presume it was this factor that prevented the Vietnamese servants employed in Hong Kong’s Astor Hotel from joining the strikes of 1922 or 1925.108 In Singapore, the demonstrations and strikes of the late 1920s were squarely identified as Chinese agitations and at least one Malay servant assisted in the arrest of Chinese communists.109 Little is known about the role of ethnic Chinese in the communist movement within Vietnam. The vilification of the Chinese within the Vietnamese nationalist movement makes remote the possibility of a Vietnamese–Chinese alliance between the labouring classes in Vietnam.110 By the 1930s the ethnic segregation which characterized servant activism in Singapore, Hong Kong and Vietnam seems to have broken down to some degree. In this period we see evidence of the emergence of pan-Asian solidarities in servant labour activism. These solidarities emerged in the context of organized state repression of communist activities within and between the respective colonies.

‘Domestic reds’ in the 1930s By the late 1920s the colonial administrators of Hong Kong, Singapore and Indochina were cracking down on internal political dissent. The suppression Ibid., 203. 107 Ibid., 203–4, 1. 108 ‘Strike Crisis: More Hotel Boys Out’, China Mail, 1 March 1922; ‘The Chinese Crisis: Strike Declared in Hong Kong’, South China Morning Post, 22 June 1925. 109 In February 1928, a Malay driver chased and captured Cheong Yok Kai following his assassination attempt on Dr C.  C. Wu, a member of the Chinese Nationalist Party who was visiting Singapore:  ‘Annual Report of the Straits Settlements for the Year 1928’; ‘The Hill Street Shooting: Life Sentence. Accused Speech at Assizes. “Light for Labouring Classes” ’, Straits Times, 14 March 1928. 110 Christopher E. Goscha, ‘Widening the Colonial Encounter:  Asian Connections inside French Indochina during the Interwar Period’, Modern Asian Studies 43, no. 5 (2009): 1200–201; Goscha, Networks of the Vietnamese Revolution, 85. There was also an alleged communist ring run out of the kitchen of Lang Bian Palace Hotel in Dalat in the 1930s. See Eric T. Jennings, Imperial Heights: Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 146. 106

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of communism in Hong Kong and Singapore was assisted by Chiang Kai-shek’s purging of communist members of the K.M.T. in 1927, both in China and across Southeast Asia. Many communists residing in Canton fled to Hong Kong and Singapore for safety. The colonial governments responded by seeking out and deporting suspected communists to Canton where they were then executed.111 Government surveillance, raids, harassment, imprisonment, banishment and immigration restriction took a significant toll on the communist movement in both Hong Kong and Singapore.112 In Singapore, the colonial authorities targeted Hainanese domestic servants in particular.113 In Indochina the so-called Soviet Period of 1930–1 was marked by hundreds of violent uprisings in the urban centres and rural areas with domestic workers playing a significant part in the unrest.114 A special newspaper (Boi bep, ‘Kitchen Boy’) was established for the cooks and waiters and kitchen boys of Haiphong.115 Issues were distributed free and workers were encouraged to write articles for publication.116 The French colonial government brought in Foreign Legionnaires and declared martial law. Some 1,300 people were killed in the efforts to suppress the rebellion.117 In addition, the leaders of the communist movement in Indochina were killed, incarcerated or forced into exile.118 Communist activities were very much circumvented during the early 1930s, yet this period also marked the emergence of formal communist parties in Southeast Asia. Ho Chi Minh, who had fled Canton to the relative safety of Hong Kong following the purge of 1927, was crucial to these developments. By the end of 1929, the Far Eastern Bureau of the Third International, known as the Comintern, had supplanted the influence of the Chinese Communist Party in Southeast Asia.119 In 1930 Ho became the Chief of the Comintern’s Far Eastern Bureau and was tasked with the job of uniting communist forces across Southeast

Carroll, A Concise History of Hong Kong, 103. 112 Chan, ‘Business and Radicalism’, 181–2; Chan, ‘Labour vs. Crown’, 140. 113 ‘Annual Report of the Straits Settlements for the Year 1929’, in Annual Reports of the Straits Settlements 1855–1941 – Volume 9: 1927–1931, ed. Robert L. Jarman (London: Archives Editions, 1998), 406; ‘“Southsea Youths” Hylams to Spend Two Months in Gaol’, Straits Times, 28 November 1929; ‘Annual Report for the Straits Settlements for the Year 1930’, in Annual Reports of the Straits Settlements 1855–1941 – Volume 9: 1927–1931, 43; ‘Alleged Hylam “Reds” Caught’, Straits Times, 7 October 1930; ‘Noted Communists Arrested’, Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 16 March 1931; ‘Aliens Registration:  Strong Opposition from Chinese Members’, Straits Times, 20 October 1932. 114 Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille, 204. 115 Woodside, Community and Revolution, 179. 116 Ibid., 180. 117 Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille, 204. 118 Ibid., 206. 119 Andrew, ‘Suppressing Communism in Singapore’, 25. 111



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Asia.120 He pursued this by facilitating and presiding over the formation of the Malayan Communist Party in Johore in 1930. As well as incorporating British Malaya, the Malayan Communist Party was established to support communist agitators within Siam, the Netherlands East Indies and British North Borneo until such time as they could form their own organizations.121 From his base in Hong Kong, Ho also united communist forces within Indochina by forming the Indochinese Communist Party in 1930.122 The establishment of the Malayan Communist Party and the Indochinese Communist Party brought Chinese and Vietnamese activists and servants together. In both cases, domestic servants formed a component of the party membership. Rather than separate movements, Chinese communists in Malaya and Vietnamese communists in Indochina were increasingly connected by a regional communist network. The Nassim Road Raid of 1930 in Singapore, described at the start of this chapter, attests to the involvement of servants within these groups.123 Despite the budding connections between the Indochinese Communist Party and the Malayan Communist Party and their similar support base, the Comintern’s vision of an organized alliance was not to be. On 1 June 1931, a document with Ho Chi Minh’s address in Hong Kong was found during a raid on the office of French communist Serge Le Franc in Winchester Street, Singapore. Ho was arrested by Hong Kong police five days later and spent the next two years in gaol.124 From the late 1930s there was a revival of communist-influenced servant activism in Singapore and Vietnam. In Singapore in 1940, 2,000 Chinese laundry men went on strike. The organizers called for workers to ‘struggle for a revolution’ to be achieved through ‘the strength and utility of the masses’.125 The election of a Popular Front government in France in 1936 led to the release of thousands of political prisoners in Indochina and the legalization of specific communist activities.126 Basic worker rights were also enshrined in law in 1936, but this did not go far enough for some Vietnamese workers. On the morning of 29 January ‘Communist Party in Malaya Begins to Crumble’, Straits Times, 5 March 1939. 121 Goscha, Networks of the Vietnamese Revolution, 82. 122 Ibid., 77, 81. 123 ‘South Seas “Reds” in Malaya’; ‘Broken Up Communist Meeting:  Nassim Road Raid. Two Years Sentence for “Red” Officials’, Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 9 June 1930; Yong, The Origins of Malayan Communism, 146. 124 ‘Suspected Communist Agitators Charged in Court:  Alleged “Red” Activities, Frenchman Charged in Singapore’, Straits Times, 19 June 1931; R. H. Onraet, ‘Malayan Communism and Le Franc: Singapore Police Background’, Straits Times, 18 January 1946. 125 ‘2,000 Laundrymen Still on Strike’, Straits Times, 30 April 1940. 126 Charles Keith, Catholic Vietnam:  A Church from Empire to Nation (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 2012), 205. 120

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1937, Binh Son, a cook at the Hotel Metropole in Hanoi, addressed some 200 cooks. He roundly denounced European employers as ‘no good’ and stated that in these difficult times they must join together to protect their common interests. He requested his audience join him at the newspaper office of Le Travail (The Worker). Included on his list of demands were a 25–50 per cent salary increase; an eight hour day with extra pay for overtime; twenty-four hours of rest every week and five consecutive days of holiday per year; medical care paid by the employer; and the right to form a union.127 Binh Son told the assembled crowd: ‘This day, we assemble here, not to strike, not to make trivial demands or to ask for exaggerated rights, but to ask you to apply the workers’ law which the Governor General promulgated for all of Indochina on the 1 November 1936.’128 At least six cooks met at Le Travail office with a written list of demands. Among the requests was a maximum six-month contract, so as to provide more work for the unemployed, and that retirement be granted to domestic workers after thirty years’ service. They intended to present these demands to Minister Justin Godart, a French Senator who was visiting Indochina to inspect labour conditions. The ideological divide between Godart and the colonial government was only thinly veiled during his visit. In southern Vietnam, the police, who had been attempting to repress the newly formed Indochinese Congress (a communist people’s reform organization), were instructed to pause their activities, only to resume the crackdown after Godart’s departure.129 In February 1937 a new Domestic Workers’ Union (Syndicat des Gens de Maison) was established in Hanoi. The police reported that about a dozen men had met near the village of Papier, at the home of a servant who worked for a European in Hanoi. Among them were the same men who had promoted the event of 29 January, including three cooks working for a doctor, a pharmacist, and the Mayor. They aimed to establish a union for cooks, boys, gardeners, dressmakers, nurses and maids for children, and rickshaw drivers (cooliespousse).130 As this meeting illustrates, domestic worker activism continued well into the 1930s. Archives nationales d’outre-mer, Aix-en-Provence, France (hereafter ANOM), ‘Grève des domestiques (Hanoï)’, Official Telegram, Hanoi, 30 January 1937, Auguste Tholance, Résident Supérieur au Tonkin, Indochine, Résident Supérieur au Tonkin, Nouveau Fonds, 2960. 128 ANOM, ‘Grève á l‘Hôtel Métropole (Hanoï)’, Indochine, Résident Supérieur au Tonkin, Nouveau Fonds, 2960. 129 Sud Chonchirdsin, ‘The Indochinese Congress (May 1936–March 1937): False Hope of Vietnamese Nationalists’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 30, no. 2 (1999): 345. 130 ANOM, Arnoux, Le Controleur Général de la Sûreté, Chef des Services de Police au Tonkin, Confidential Note, Hanoi, 2 March 1937 to the Résident Supérieur and the Director of Political Affairs, 28 February 1937, Hanoi, Résident Supérieur au Tonkin, Nouveau Fonds, 2960. 127



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Conclusion Contrary to the silent and submissive stereotype of the ‘houseboy’, men employed in domestic service in Hong Kong, Singapore and Indochina were often ardent political and labour activists. The idea that the private nature of domestic service left these workers isolated and without access to the kinds of organization available to other industrial workers is hard to sustain. We have seen that wages, working hours, and recruitment processes were all areas of concern in the four decades between 1900 and 1940. Added to these workplace issues were broader political motivations for protest. The nature of domestic work itself may have pushed workers in this direction, or perhaps, already converted to the cause, they sought out domestic service employment to gain a more intimate understanding of their colonial masters. Whether they were anti-colonial nationalists or communists, we have evidence that some domestic servants risked their employment, their freedom and even their lives as part of the growing movements to oust Europeans from power. These workers sought to challenge colonial injustice by taking matters into their own hands. This exploration of servant activism has also shown that many movements in support of labour rights and anti-colonialism were shared across the colonies. Far from being isolated, domestic workers were often key players in facilitating trans-colonial activism.

Conclusion

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, a shared culture of male domestic service developed across colonial Asia and the Pacific, characterized by the employment of Asian and indigenous men in homes, hotels and steamships. Representations of male domestic workers, encapsulated in the patronizing title ‘houseboy’, expressed the desire for white colonial mastery. The asymmetries of power in colonial master–servant relations emerged from a complex and layered history, with roots in the hierarchies of European feudalism, Indian and Chinese caste and class systems, and in the racialized framing of the slave and indentured labour (‘coolie’) trades. By the early twentieth century, even as the expanding European and American empires reached their height, there was an insistent subaltern response from male domestic workers. Far from being the submissive ciphers of colonial imaginings, these workers were active in creating a subversive counter-culture. ‘Houseboys’ unsettled colonial power in the intimate spaces of homes and hotels, and some took their protests to the broader stage of trans-colonial politics. New imperial histories insist upon delineating empire’s cultural imprint on the British and European metropoles. We have extended this intervention by examining the ways in which ideas, practices and aspirations of domestic servitude developed in India and China came to influence imperial engagements in other settings. A key way in which the concept of trans-colonial circulation has informed this study is embedded in our attention to the transplantable model of the ideal Asian servant and his engagement with indigenous domestic labour. The adaptations and collaborations shaping colonial cultures of domestic service were multifaceted, responding to the specificities of the local, and the wider regional networks within which these sites were embedded. Historians have long understood the colonial home as a contact zone; we have sought to highlight the historical resonances, multi-ethnic composition and geographic breadth of that contact.

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Demands for domestic labour were prominent and persistent throughout colonial Asia and the Pacific. Newly arrived colonists in particular were dependent on indigenous domestic workers to access local knowledge about the climate, foods, and customs. In some cases, notably in the Philippines, that knowledge already reflected centuries of interaction between Malay, Chinese, Spanish, and British peoples. At many sites, elite households turned to resident immigrant workers, usually Chinese or Indian men. The pattern of domestic service was somewhat different in French Indochina and in the Netherlands East Indies where female servants were employed in greater numbers, and indigenous people predominated in service. In these locales male servants were typically Vietnamese or Javanese, although significant numbers of migrant Chinese male servants were also employed in homes and hotels.1 In the gendered, orientalist discourse common to most colonies in this region, Asian men were constructed as the ideal servants, whose perceived dignity, efficiency and loyalty were essential to achieve an atmosphere of perfect comfort for the colonizers. Such racialized constructs in turn shaped attitudes towards those indigenous men who were employed in colonial homes. In larger households in Darwin in Australia, Suva in Fiji, and Manila in the Philippines, indigenous men entered service alongside Chinese or Indian men. They typically assumed the lowestpaid positions, and were frequently relegated to outdoor work. In smaller or less wealthy households, indigenous men sometimes gained a greater level of intimacy with their employers. European and American colonists routinely assessed these workers against the benchmark of the imagined oriental ideal; they were usually found wanting. Undoubtedly, these domestic workers found their employers wanting in many respects too, and felt the need to make certain adjustments. We have seen that both indigenous and migrant men had ambivalent relationships with colonial masters, and many asserted their independence and made clear that their priorities lay outside the colonial home. This resulted in broken patterns of service, which employers were forced to accommodate. Some colonists resorted to physical and emotional abuse in an attempt to reinforce their position of

It should be noted that the preference for male indigenous workers was not universal across the Asia Pacific region. In German New Guinea and French New Hebrides, indigenous women rather than men predominated in service (although men were not unknown):  Anne Dickson-Waiko, ‘Colonial Enclaves and Domestic Spaces in British New Guinea’, in Britishness Abroad: Transnational Movements and Imperial Cultures, ed. Kate Darian-Smith, Patricia Grimshaw and Stuart Macintyre (Carlton:  Melbourne University Press, 2007), 219; Margaret Rodman, Daniela Kraemer, Lissant Bolton and Jean Tarisesei, eds, House-Girls Remember:  Domestic Workers in Vanuatu (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007). 1

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authority, but it was in an employer’s interest to maintain workable relations, for it was often through the networks of domestic workers that they were able to secure future servants. In our study we have been attentive to the recent emphases on connections and entanglements in comparative colonial scholarship. Through the examination of photographs of domestic workers across several disparate sites we have seen the extent to which a shared culture of domestic service existed. The repeated tropes and posings in photographs reveal the mobility of ideas and practices across colonies and between empires. Even for those who had never travelled to the colonial world, a postcard or a photograph included within a letter could afford them a glimpse of life in the colonies. The practice of disseminating photographs undoubtedly was a call for those at home and abroad to admire and envy these stylized and sanitized representations of colonial domesticity. Throughout the book we have also emphasized the ways in which physical mobility and exchange between colonies was encouraged, including through steamship travel, the rise of hotels in key ports of call, and through the increased mobility of politically active workers. By the 1920s we can speak of the shared rhythms of the Asia Pacific region, a coherent space in its own right in which ideas as well as people and goods were highly mobile. The steamships that plied the Indian and Pacific oceans were an especially important means by which colonial cultures interacted. And here we find replicated on board the culture of the home, with stewards of various ethnicities assuming the role of the houseboy. If some passengers and stewards were yet to experience the colonial world, these long voyages provided a form of training or initiation, with shipping companies carefully orchestrating the performance and spectacle of exacting service. The rise of grand hotels took the orientalist fantasy to new heights. These bastions of colonial luxury encouraged interactions between European travellers from different colonies and Asian employees, and were key sites for the development of a trans-colonial culture of domestic service. Given the high degree of organization among seafarers, stewards were closely aligned to the global currents of labour activism. But we have also seen how workers in colonial hotels and homes, including in Fiji, Hong King, Singapore and Indochina, were active agents in shaping their working conditions through private and organized protest and even trans-colonial activism. Political solidarities between domestic workers, whether anti-colonial nationalists or communists, reveal the extent to which some men risked their employment, their freedom and even their lives to join the growing movements to oust Europeans from power.

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Further research, particularly on non-Anglophone Pacific colonies, is needed before we can develop a comprehensive picture of domestic service cultures across the region. There is a great deal that we do not yet understand, and this book marks just the earliest collaborative venture into this diverse and complex history. What we do see is that the numbers of men employed in domestic service throughout Asia and the Pacific began to decline from the 1920s. By the mid-twentieth century, there was a marked feminization of such work. As we proposed earlier, this trend may have reflected the decline of colonial power, and the concomitant anxieties in asserting authority over non-European men.2 From the standpoint of the workers themselves, we must recognize that falling wages eroded the masculine prestige that had formerly attached to such work, and that, particularly after the Second World War, employment opportunities for men expanded into other sectors.3 In some locations, the decline in male domestic service was more gradual. In Papua New Guinea, a colony of Australia until 1975, indigenous men continued to dominate domestic service until the 1960s. This persistence mirrored the pattern found in Africa and India in the twentieth century,4 but was rather more unusual in the Asia Pacific region. Significantly, too, the ‘de-masculinization’ of domestic service does not hold true beyond the home. British shipping lines continued to favour a racially compartmentalized crew with the revival of passenger routes after the Second World War, and today, in the expanding cruise tourism industry, men continue to outnumber women in service roles on board. Men from South and Southeast Asia (as well as Latin America and Eastern Europe) predominate in the lowest-paid positions, work the longest hours and have little prospect of

For more on the decline of Chinese male servitude in Southeast Asia, see Claire Lowrie, Masters and Servants: Cultures of Empire in the Tropics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 103–31. 3 This was the situation in Tanganyika, following its independence from Britain in 1961. See Robyn Pariser, ‘Masculinity and Organized Resistance in Domestic Service in Colonial Dar es Salaam, 1919–1961’, International Labor and Working-Class History 88 (2015): 109–10. 4 As late as 1968 in Zambia, for every woman in paid domestic service there were twenty-one men; see Karen Hansen, ‘Household Work as a Man’s Job:  Sex and Gender in Domestic Service in Zambia’, Anthropology Today 2, no. 3 (1986): 18. The figures cited here are 36,491 men as opposed to 1,758 women. Men continued to predominate until the 1990s not only in Zambia but also in Tanzania. In India, even accounting for the increase in the proportion of female servants in the early twentieth century, men made up more than half of the domestic workforce until the 1980s: Raka Ray, ‘Masculinity, Femininity, and Servitude: Domestic Workers in Calcutta in the Late Twentieth Century’, Feminist Studies 26, no. 3 (2000): 693–4. As Indian women came to dominate in domestic service positions, men were increasingly stigmatized as ‘failed patriarchs’: Seemin Qayum and Raka Ray, ‘Male Servants and the Failure of Patriarchy in Kolkata (Calcutta)’, Men and Masculinities 13, no. 1 (2010): 113, 117. Yet many employers still opined that ‘male servants are better’ (Ray, ‘Masculinity, Femininity and Servitude’, 694), and younger men entering domestic service, many of whom had migrated to urban areas in search of work, typically regarded such employment as merely 2

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career advancement, relegated to a ‘permanent status of relative servility’.5 They frequently describe the work as ‘exhausting’ and ‘demeaning’ being obliged to ‘entertain passengers and provide emotional service’ so as to gain tips to supplement inadequate wages.6 In Europe, a ‘re-masculinization’ of domestic labour has been observed, with male immigrants from Africa and India taking up service roles.7 This resurrects, Christine Chin and others observe, ‘an uneasy spectre’ of colonial inequalities.8 In this regard, understanding the ‘houseboy’ in the Asia Pacific region as a trans-colonial cultural construct with a complex history is of direct relevance today. International Labour Organization estimates from 2013 suggest that there are between 52 and 100 million global domestic workers, and of this number, an estimated 17 per cent, or up to 17 million workers, are men.9 As the number of male domestic workers reaches new global heights, it becomes all the more important to investigate the causes and consequences of retaining and even reviving colonial cultures of domestic service, with their attendant gendered and racialized employment patterns.

a ‘first halt’ in their working biographies: Radhika Chopra, ‘Invisible Men: Masculinity, Sexuality and Male Domestic Labor’, Men and Masculinities 9, no. 2 (2006): 157. Christine Chin, Cruising in the Global Economy: Profits, Pleasure and Work at Sea (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 143. 6 Pamela Nilan, Luh Putu Artini and Steven Threadgold, ‘Contemporary Balinese Cruise Ship Workers, Passengers and Employer:  Colonial Patterns of Domestic Service’, in Colonization and Domestic Service:  Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Victoria K. Haskins and Claire Lowrie (New York: Routledge, 2015), 323. See also Mark Oliver Salariosa Llangco, ‘Filipino Seafarers On-board Cruise Ships: Shared Viewpoints on Working Lives’ (PhD diss., Cardiff University, 2017). 7 Raffaella Sarti, ‘Fighting for Masculinity: Male Domestic Workers, Gender, and Migration in Italy from the Late Nineteenth Century to the Present’, Men and Masculinities 13, no. 1 (2010): 16; Maria Rita Bartolomei, ‘Migrant Male Domestic Workers in Comparative Perspective: Four Case Studies from Italy, India, Ivory Coast, and Congo’, Men and Masculinities 13, no. 1 (2010): 88–9. 8 Chin, Cruising in the Global Economy, 114. 9 Jennifer N. Fish, Domestic Workers of the World Unite! A Global Movement for Dignity and Human Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2017), 3. 5

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Archival material and photographs The unpublished archival material and photographs for this book were drawn from the collections of the following repositories:

Australia Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney National Archives of Australia, Canberra, Brisbane and Darwin National Library of Australia, Canberra Northern Territory Archives Service, Darwin Northern Territory Library, Darwin Pacific Manuscripts Bureau, Australian National University, Canberra State Archives and Records Authority of New South Wales, Kingswood State Library of South Australia, Adelaide

Canada British Columbia Archives, Victoria Chilliwack Museum and Archives, Chilliwack New Westminster Archives, New Westminster

Fiji National Archives of Fiji, Suva

France Archives nationales d’outre-mer, Aix-en-Provence Fondation Custodia, Paris

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The Netherlands Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, University of Leiden

New Zealand Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington Archives New Zealand, Wellington Hocken Collections, University of Otago, Dunedin University of Auckland Library Special Collections, Auckland Wellington City Archives, Wellington

Philippines LawPhil Project, Arrellano Law Foundation, www.lawphil.net

Singapore National Archives of Singapore National Museum of Singapore

United Kingdom British Library, London Caird Library, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich Peninsular & Oriental Steam Heritage Collection, www.poheritage.com Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford Public Records Office, Kew

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Hong Kong Oral History Archive, University of Hong Kong.

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Index Abbott, Charles L. A., Administrator of the Northern Territory (1937–46) 58, 59, 125 Aboriginal male domestic workers under Aboriginals Ordinance 1911, Northern Territory 53 agency 74–6 and child-minding 114–15 compared to Chinese workers 47–8, 51, 54, 62 as ‘loyal’ servants 49, 67 married couples 125 mobility of 58, 70–1, 72–5 preference for male workers 55–7 as punkah-wallahs 65 ‘savagery’ discourse 61 segregated spaces 64, 72 sexuality in relation to white women 68–9 see also wages Africa, domestic service in 18, 108, 113, 119 African American workers 96, 146 African slaves in England 27–8 anti-colonialism and domestic workers 20, 46, 195–6, 206, 217, 221 in Singapore 204–5, 210 in Vietnam 202, 212 American (U.S.) impressions of British tropical colonialism 191 American (U.S.) influences in the Philippines adapting to local custom 80, 83 anxieties relating to domestic workers 86–7, 93, 95–6 conflict with employees 95–6, 97–8, 100 (see also violence) food 91, 92, 94–6 household intimacy (and distance) 77, 82, 86, 88–9, 93

‘liberalism’ 23, 77–80, 83, 88–90, 93, 97–8, 100 luxury 77, 80, 85–6, 94 preference for Chinese workers 77, 83–6, 95 social prestige 80–2, 95 wages 90–2, 99 working conditions 81–2, 92, 98–9 Arabic influences 26 Austin, Jean (nee Gilruth), daughter of John Gilruth (see Gilruth) 114–16, 129 Australia 144 Goulburn Island 65, 70, 75 Melbourne 137 northern Australia 134 steamship lines 149 stewards from 146 Tiwi Islands 67, 70, 76 see also Burns Philp and Company see also Darwin Binh Son (cook in Hanoi) 216 British Columbia 14, 105–8, 114, 121, 126–9, 133, 135 British influences in the Philippines 79, 88, 100 British North Borneo (Sabah) 95, 215 Burns Philp and Company (shipping) 144, 147, 152, 155, 165 butlers 4, 37, 38, 40, 65, 85, 176, 187, 189 Calcutta (Kolkata) culture of domestic service 10, 37–8, 42 recruitment of domestic workers 6, 24, 28, 169, 176–8, 182, 192 California 14, 84, 146, 149, 151, 153 n.60, 157, 165–6 Canada. See British Columbia Canadian Pacific Railway Company (CPR) 146, 159

254

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Cantonese 11–12, 14, 134 (see also China, Canton) Census data 11–14, 51–2, 61, 83–4, 88, 107, 175 chauffeurs. See drivers Cheng T’ing-seng (domestic worker) 195 Cheon, Hong Pak (also known as Hong Bok Cheon) (domestic worker) 112, 133, 135 child care 42, 108–17 children as domestic workers 28, 29, 51, 91–2 of employers 105, 108–12 China Canton (Guangzhou) 35–6, 39–41, 44–5 Macau 29, 34–6, 40 Shanghai 152, 208–9 see also Hong Kong Chinese domestic workers Australia 51, 54, 56, 65, 114, 116 n.48, 126–8, 134–5 Canada 14, 108–10, 128, 133–5 employed by Europeans in Canton 35–6, 40–1, 44–5 England 29 Fiji 65, 191 the Philippines 77, 83–6, 117–18 in photographs 109–11, 120–1, 123–6, 132, 200–1 the United States 14 see also Cantonese; communism; cooks; eunuchs; Hainanese; Hong Kong; stewards; strikes; wages Chiang Kai-shek, Chinese nationalist leader 214 Chinese Exclusion Act (1903) (Philippines) 86, 90 Chinese Exclusion Act (1923) (Canada) (also known as the Chinese Immigration Act) 14 Chinese Revolution (1911–12) 34, 203–5 chinoiserie 29–30 clothing care of employer’s 69, 164 uniforms as cultural display 45, 131, 157, 159, 160, 164, 167, 190, 199 uniforms as wages 92 western dress 133, 137, 160

clubs 9, 170–2, 174–5, 190, 192 Colonial Sugar Refinery Company (CSR) 177, 178 colonialism exploitation 106, 113–14 settler 1, 9, 17, 106, 113, 123, 127, 139, 144, 150, 156 Comintern (Third International) 214–15 (see also Ho Chi Minh and communism) communism in China 207, 208, 212, 214 and domestic workers 87, 187, 195, 197, 210–11, 216–17, 221 in Hong Kong 207, 209, 212, 214 Pan-Asian 206–7, 214–15 in Singapore 195, 209, 210, 211–16 in Vietnam 212, 214–16 compradore 39, 40, 199 (see also dubash) contract labour. See indentured labour Cook, Cecil, Chief Protector of Aboriginals (Northern Territory) 57, 62, 69, 72 cooks Fiji 52, 54, 60, 62–5, 175–6, 183, 186–7, 189 Hong Kong 207 India 37 Indochina 200–3, 205–6, 214, 216 Netherlands East Indies 36 Northern Territory, Australia 51, 65, 112, 133 the Philippines 77, 80–2, 84–5, 87–8, 90, 93–6, 99, 119 photographs 15, 81, 130–1, 201 and protest 88, 209–12, 214, 216 Singapore 195 on steamships 142, 147, 149, 151, 155–6 Dalfsen, H. W. 13 Darwin census 51 Chinese domestic workers 51, 54, 56, 65, 114, 116, 126–7, 134 compared with Suva 47–9 comparing Chinese and Aboriginal domestic workers 62, 76, 128–9 curfew 72 establishment of town 49–50

Index Wing, Bernadette (employer) 63, 65, 67, 69 see also Aboriginal male domestic workers; clothing; female domestic workers; masculinity and domestic workers; wages Dauncey, Campbell, Mrs, (British employer in the Philippines) 83, 88, 90, 92–5, 99, 100 De Tham, Vietnamese rebel leader 202 della Valle, Pietro 31 Dewey, George, Admiral US Navy, during Philippines Spanish-American War 84–5 dhobie/dobie (laundry worker) 114, 127 drivers 4, 54, 100, 189, 216 dubash (broker) 39 Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or VOC) 32 Elwood, Anne 25, 38, 45 English East India Company 31 eunuchs 18, 34 female domestic workers 12 Aboriginal women 56–8, 64 Dutch women 32 Fijian women 55, 58–61 Filipina women 83 Javanese women 12, 220 New Guinea women 13, 60 Vanuatu women 220 n.1 Vietnamese women 12, 40 n.77 feminization of domestic service 4, 12, 18, 60–1 Filipino male domestic workers 11–12, 77 and American attitudes towards 84, 88–9 as coachmen 82 compared with Chinese workers 78, 86, 90, 128 and hygiene 96 insurrectos (revolutionaries) 86–8 and numerous servants 80 and paternalistic traditions 83 in photographs 81–2, 130–3 pre-colonial traditions 79 Spanish terms for domestic workers 83 stewards 147, 154

255

and theft 93 see also Dauncey, Campbell, Mrs; violence; wages Fiji colonial policies in 49–51, 52, 58–61, 71, 72 indigenous women 55, 58–61 Levuka 69 plantation indenture 50–1, 52 social status of Indians in 73, 188, 191–2, 193 see also female domestic workers; Fijian (indigenous) male domestic workers; Grand Pacific Hotel, Suva; Indian domestic workers; Masters & Servants Ordinance; Suva Fijian (indigenous) male domestic workers agency 73–4 employer assessments of skill 62, 67 numbers of 52 recruitment 53, 71 ‘savagery’ discourse 62–3 sexuality in relation to white women 68–9 see also Fiji; Masters & Servants Ordinance; wages First World War 182, 205, 206 Forbes, William Cameron, GovernorGeneral of the Philippines (1909–13) 79–80, 90 French influences 27 gardeners 4, 7, 37, 64, 65, 75, 77, 82, 114, 216 German domestic service culture 13, 60, 122, 143, 220 Gilruth, John, Administrator of the Northern Territory (1911–18) 114, 127 Gilruth, Margaret, daughter of John Gilruth (see also Austin, Jean) 115–16 Gordon, Arthur, Governor of Fiji (1875–80) 50–1 Gordon Cumming, Constance, niece of Arthur Gordon 62 G. R. Lambert and Co (photography) 120, 200

256

Index

Grand Pacific Hotel, Suva American impressions of 191 comparison to steamship 182, 186, 187 construction of 171–4 decline of 191–2 labour recruitment 73–4, 175–80, 182, 186 in Second World War 189 see also orientalism; wages Grimshaw, Beatrice (writing on Fiji) 74, 179 Gunn, Jeanie (writing on Northern Territory) 112, 133, 135 Hainanese as activists 197, 204, 210, 211–12 as cooks 195 as houseboys 132 kongsi 199 Night Schools (in Singapore) 211 sexuality 121 as stewards 147–8 Harrison, Francis Burton, GovernorGeneral of the Philippines (1913–21) 79 Hastings, Warren, Governor-General of Bengal 29 Hawai‘i 14 Hindu influences 26, 30 Ho Chi Minh 212, 214–15 Hong Kong census employment data 107 Chinese nationalism 203–5 colonial impressions of domestic workers 44, 100, 112, 198, 204 compradores 40, 199 early colonialism 36, 147 ethnicity of domestic workers 10–12, 34, 45 husband and wife domestic workers 125 kongsi 199 photographs 126, 201 recruitment hub 6, 85, 146, 148, 150, 152, 199 see also communism; strikes hotel staff 2, 9, 18, 21, 23–4, 65 (Darwin), 73, 129, 141, 143, 148 see also Grand Pacific Hotel, Suva

‘houseboy’ 7, 14, 23, 25, 83 origins of term 25 How, Ah (domestic worker) 114, 116, 127 Immigration Restriction Act (Australia) 137 (see also White Australia Policy) indentured labour 177–9 India Bangalitola (Bangali Tola) 169 Bengal 16, 21, 26, 29, 33, 37, 44 Bombay (Mumbai) 38, 43, 45 Goa 30, 142, 148 ‘Indian Mutiny’ 43, 44 Pondicherry (Pondichéry) 39 see also Calcutta (Kolkata); Mughal empire Indian domestic workers England 28–9 Fiji 51, 54, 60, 64, 177–9 India 25–6, 30–1, 37–40, 41–4 see also cooks; Grand Pacific Hotel, Suva; India; slaves; stewards Indochina (French). See Vietnam Indochinese Communist Party 212, 215 Indonesia 198 Bali 33, 139 Bandung 13 Jakarta (Batavia) 32–3, 107, 123 intercolonial connections 6 Jacky (domestic worker Darwin) 66, 123 Japan Tokyo 155 Yokohama 149 see also steamship lines Japanese 11, 14, 23, 51, 77, 79 see also stewards Jardine Matheson & Co. 35 Java 33, 39, 107, 111, 119, 144, 187 Javanese 12, 25, 30, 220 in Australia 187 and clothing 110, 133 compared with other ethnicities 34, 36 and intimacy 121, 123 men as domestic workers 105 n.9, 197–8, 206 mistresses 118 nobility 33

Index stewards 143 see also female domestic workers Jones White (Merchant Marine) Act of 1928 (United States) 156 khansamah 39 King, Ah (domestic worker) 86 kongsi (Chinese dialect-based community societies) 199 Kundook, Sam (domestic worker) 58, 125 Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party or K.M.T.) 156, 203, 210, 211, 214 La Follette Act (Seamen’s Act) of 1915 (United States) 151 Lago, Henry (domestic worker) 67, 125 Lall, Moti (domestic worker) 169, 170 Lamilami, Lazarus (domestic worker) 75 Lim Ming Joon (domestic worker and photographer) 132 Ling, Ah (steward) 85, 151–2 Longfellow, Dwight Webster (American employer in Capiz) 98 Malay workers 10, 23, 62, 65 Malayan Communist Party 195, 210, 215 Malaysia 35, 109, 215 male workers, preference for 4, 22, 28, 30, 47, 55, 57–60, 220 n.1 Manila (Luzon island) army households 81–2, 95 Chinese domestic workers in 85, 90, 94, 100 domestic worker numbers 12, 84, 85–6 Filipino domestic workers 88, 130 Spanish colonial era customs 22, 79, 83 uprising (1914) 87–8 Manilal Maganlal Doctor 184–5 marriage and bachelorhood 14, 26, 56–7, 72 masculinity and domestic workers feminization of male domestic workers 16, 18 infantilized men 14, 15–16, 18 manliness 18–19 patriarchy 112, 125 sexuality 16–17, 23, 68–70, 105, 117, 121, 123, 135–6

257

Masson, Elsie (Australian governess and author) 54, 55, 70, 114–16 Masters & Servants Ordinance 1890, Fiji 52–3, 71 Maw, Ah (domestic worker) 85 medieval domestic service 27, 30, 80 military employers 31, 37, 80, 87, 96, 143, 189, 199, 202 mistresses (female employers) and Aboriginal domestic workers 55, 66, 70 intimacy with male servants 16, 42–3, 117–19, 121 and male servant patriarchy 38, 112 and men for child care 113–14 perceptions of male servants as a sexual threat 67–8, 157 white women and the colonial project 113–16 Mitchell, Charles, Governor of Fiji 52 Moses, Bernard, President of the Civil Commission to the Philippines (1900–02) 80 Moses, Edith, wife of Bernard Moses 80, 89, 92, 94, 96, 100 Mughal empire 31 mui tsai 11–12, 104 see also female domestic workers Murray, Hubert, Lieutenant-Governor of Papua 68 Muslim influences 30 Myanmar (Burma) 195 Nabobs 29, 30 Nationalism Chinese 197, 203, 206, 210, 212, 217 and domestic workers 24, 87, 197, 205–6, 211, 221 Indonesian 206 Vietnamese 197, 205, 206, 212–13, 217 Netherlands East Indies (see Indonesia) New Hebrides (see Vanuatu) newspapers, as sources 21 New Zealand 17, 19 see also Union Steam Ship Company of New Zealand

258

Index

opium smoking 75, 165, 197, 199 Opium wars 35–6, 40, 44 orientalism 26, 28, 159, 162, 164, 167, 180, 220

Roosevelt, Eleanor Butler, wife of Theodore Roosevelt 81, 86 Roosevelt, Theodore Jr, Governor-General of the Philippines (1932–33) 81, 86

Pacific Cable Board 157 paintings 104, 110 Pan American World Airways 149, 188 Papua New Guinea 67, 57 Persian influences 26 Phan Boi Chau (Vietnamese anti-colonial leader) 202, 205–6, 212 Philippines Baguio (summer retreat, Luzon island) 77 n.2, 90 Capiz (now Roxas City, Capiz province, Panay island) 80, 92, 96, 98 Nueva Cáceres (now City of Naga, Camarines Sur, Bikol region, Luzon island) 87, 98 see also Filipino male domestic workers; Manila pidgin English 36, 144, 151 Pong, Ah (steward) 137–8, 141, 149 Portuguese in India 30 in Macau 34–5 postcards 103, 109, 120, 123 prestige gained by employing domestic workers 1, 27, 66, 114 punkah wallah 41–2, 65–6, 87

Second World War 17, 61, 189, 222 ‘servant problem’ as colonial discourse 9, 20, 198 seventeenth–century domestic service 7, 27 sex ratio of domestic workers 4, 12, 83 sexuality and homosexuality 119–21 and perceived sexual danger 16, 68–70, 119 and the preference for male servants 56, 119 see also masculinity Shepherd, Billy (domestic worker, Darwin) 114–15 Sico, Aniceto (domestic worker) 130–3 Singapore 195–200, 203–6 Kreta Ayer Incident, Singapore (1927) 211 Singapore Mutiny (1915) 204–5 see under anti-communism; communism; strikes see also Hainanese sirdah 39, 41 slaves in domestic service 219 British North Borneo 95 China 34 England 28–9 India 28, 30–1, 33 Java 32–4 Macau 35 The Philippines 79, 91, 97–8 Solomon Islanders in Fiji 51, 64–5, 177 Soviet Period, Vietnam (1930–31) 214 Spanish influence domestic service culture 22, 78–80, 85, 87 n.50, 89, 90, 92, 97 food 94–5 language 40, 83, 89 Spencer, Sir Walter Baldwin (1860–1929) anthropologist 56 Sri Lanka (Ceylon) 171, 174, 176 steamship lines 139 archives 20–1, 141

racial hierarchy and workers in colonial homes and hotels 7, 16, 22, 23, 48, 64, 76, 95, 128, 181, 219, 220 on steamships 138, 146–7, 150, 152, 154–5, 222 racial segregation 7, 9, 16, 56, 110, 121, 153 racial superiority (belief in) 5, 45, 123, 124, 143, 187 Raffles, Sir Stamford (1781–1826) 33–4 recruitment of domestic workers from Asia 6, 10, 50–1 from Australia and Pacific Islands 14, 17, 22, 24, 47, 52–3, 57, 60, 74 Rodwell, Cecil, Governor of Fiji 68

Index

259

Australasian Steam Navigation Company (ASNCo) 150 China-Australia Mail Steamship Line 147 Dollar Line 146, 156, 164 Eastern and Australian Steamship Company (E&A, est. 1873) 144–5, 147, 155, 157 Nippon Yusen Kaisha (N.Y.K.) 149, 155 Ocean Steam Ship Company (aka Blue Funnel Line, est. 1866) 144 Oceanic Steamship Company of San Francisco 151 Orient Steam Navigation Company 141 Pacific Mail Steamship Company (est. 1848) 144, 146, 150, 153, 157, 159 Peninsula and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (P&O) 142, 148, 154, 156, 160, 162, 163, 188 Toyo Kisen Kabushiki Kaisha (T.K.K.) 149–50 Vestalia 137 see also Burns Philp; Union Steam Ship Company of New Zealand (USSCo.) stewards Chinese 85, 137, 144, 146, 148, 151–3, 155–9, 164–5 ethnicity 143, 147 Filipinos 154–5, 159 Indian 142, 150, 160, 162–3, 165–6 Japanese 149, 155, 160, 162, 163 white workers 142, 144, 146, 152 strikes in Fiji 185 in Hong Kong 154–5, 199, 204, 207–10, 212–13 in Indochina 216 of seamen 150–5 in Singapore 199, 204, 210–12, 215 Stubbs, Reginald Edward, Governor of Hong Kong (1919–25) 207, 208 Sun Yat Sen 203, 211 Suva 47, 49, 52, 64, 71–2, 73, 172–3

Thailand (Siam) 195, 203, 210, 215 trade unions household domestic workers 196, 199–200, 206–11, 216 International Seamen’s Union of America 151 Marine Cooks and Stewards Association of the West Coast (U.S.) 153, 154 Nanyang General Labour Union 210, 211 stewards 141, 149–50, 153–5, 157 see also strikes trans-colonial historiography 2–6, 20, 171 transmitting cultures 22, 23, 140, 152 tropical climate 57, 94, 99, 113, 181, 186, 191

Taft, Helen, wife of William Taft 80, 83, 94 Taft, William, Governor General of the Philippines (1901–03) 80, 82, 83–6, 90, 94, 151–2

wages in Darwin 53, 54–5 in Fiji 52–3, 54, 60, 71, 176, 178–9, 189

Union Steam Ship Company of New Zealand (USSCo.) 151 see also Grand Pacific Hotel, Suva valet 34, 37, 39, 80, 82, 164 Vanuatu (New Hebrides) 13, 51, 64, 220 Vietnam 10 Haiphong 202, 214 Hanoi 202–3, 216 Saigon 40 n.77, 199 see under communism see also Vietnamese domestic workers Vietnamese domestic workers 10–12, 40 n.77, 108, 143, 220 as activists 87, 195–8, 200–3, 205–6, 212–13, 215 Vietnamese Nationalist Party 212, 213 Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth League 212 violence by domestic workers 24, 43, 87, 119, 128–9 by employers (in the Philippines) 17, 78, 97–9

260 at the Grand Pacific Hotel (Suva) 176, 189 in the Philippines 90–1, 96 on steamships 137, 155 waiters 9, 54, 84, 141, 146, 174, 176, 180, 183, 185, 189, 191, 203, 207, 214 White Australia Policy 51, 57, 134, 152, 179 White Mughals 31–2 White Women’s Protection Ordinance (1925), Papua 17, 67–8 Whiteness 17, 114, 170, 185–6

Index women. See female domestic workers; mistresses Wong Juat Pho (aka Lee Kwan Jun) (domestic worker) 195 Worcester, Dean, Secretary of the Interior, Philippine Islands, zoologist 86, 97, 99, 133 worker voices 20–1, 49, 137, 197 Yang Lu-ts’ai (domestic worker) 195 Young, Arthur, Governor of the Straits Settlements (1911–19) 205