Canadian Passages

Quotes are transcribed as written without correction for current spelling, standards or sensibilities. 

Canada Brock’s Arrival on the China Station

In 1925, after spending the formative years of his naval career in the Mediterranean, twenty-three-year-old Sub-Lieutenant Patrick Willet Brock applied for a transfer to the Royal Navy’s China Station. The traditional “treaty-port” system was collapsing under the weight of surging Chinese nationalism, and Great Britain had responded by intensifying its “Gunboat Diplomacy.” This policy involved the strategic use of naval force—both implicit and explicit—to safeguard British trade, citizens, and vast commercial holdings during the early, volatile years of the Chinese Civil War.

Brock received his orders while at home on leave in Canada and departed from Vancouver aboard the Canadian Pacific Steamship Empress of Australia, arriving in Shanghai in early 1926. Though he had expected to serve on the river gunboat HMS Moorhen, his orders were changed at the last minute. He was instead assigned to the cruiser HMS Vindictive.

For the 23-year-old Sub-Lieutenant Brock, the spring of 1926 was a time of acclimatization and observation. He witnessed the simmering tensions resulting from the previous year’s “May Thirtieth Movement,” which was a series of anti-imperialist strikes and boycotts—and prepared for the more direct naval actions that would come later.

The “Bolshevik” Cruiser: Life Aboard the Vindictive

HMS Vindictive was a ship with a complex identity. Originally designed during the First World War as a heavy cruiser, she was converted into an aircraft carrier while still under construction, only to be rebuilt back into a conventional cruiser between 1923 and 1925. By 1926, she was a fully armed cruiser with a complement of over seven hundred men, including thirty-seven officers.

The Vindictive arrived in China from England trailing a cloud of scandal. In December 1925, sensationalist headlines in England and Canada claimed mutiny on board. Newspapers reported that the socialist anthem “The Red Flag” had been sung by ship personnel and labelled the Vindictive a “Bolshevik ship.” In an essay called, “Notes on Vindictive,” Brock wrote the following about the incident.

“In the winter of 1925 to 26, I was on leave in Canada after having had a very good commission in a smart cruiser flagship in the Mediterranean. I noted casually one day a headline in the local rag: “Bolshy Ship of the British Navy!” Underneath was a photograph of HMS Vindictive and a confused and rambling statement that there had been a communistic outbreak in the ship and had now acquired a reputation of being “red.” …The reported Bolshevism was as greatly exaggerated as the reports of Mark Twain’s death.”

Brock wrote that the fallout of the incident led to a change in captain. However, the timing of leadership change may not line up with actual events. George Francis Hyde had been in command of Vindictive during some of 1925, but by the time Brock joined the ship, it was captained by Ronald Howard, a veteran who had commanded the vessel once before in the early 1920s.

Familiar Faces

Despite being thousands of miles from home, Brock found familiar company on the Vindictive. Among the officers on board was Francis Robert Woodcock “Jack” Nixon. Born in Duncan, B.C. in 1904, Nixon attended the Royal Naval College in Esquimalt at the same time as Brock.

Although two years younger than Brock, the two had joined HMS Orion together in 1920. According to a story on the website, For Posterity’s Sake, Nixon had been given permission to start his career early to support his widowed mother.

The Vindictive also carried the Honourable Walter Seymour Carson, son of the famous Irish unionist Lord Carson, who had served on HMS Orion with Brock and Nixon.

Bock and Nixon were not only friends, but Brock was the best man at Nixon’s wedding held in Victoria, BC in 1928. Tragically, while Brock’s career would see him retire as a Rear Admiral and live into his 80s, Jack Nixon would meet a different fate. Nixon was killed in 1941 when the troopship S.S. Nerissa was sunk by a German U-boat off the coast of Ireland.

The Seasonal Migration: From Shanghai to Wei-hai-wei

In the spring of 1926, the Vindictive was anchored in the Huangpu River, the naval hub of Shanghai. However, as the sweltering summer approached, the Royal Navy followed a strict seasonal migration to avoid the “oppressive heat and disease” (such as malaria and cholera) prevalent in Shanghai and Hong Kong.

In a letter to his brother, Brock described the ship’s problematic departure from the “Fairy Flats”—the historical English name for the treacherous Tongsha sandbars at the mouth of the Yangtze.

“To turn in the narrow and crowded Whangpoo River, we had to go up at slack water to a bend in the river, let go an anchor, and swing with the assistance of the first of the flood. All would have been well if the river were emptier, but the flood swept us down on a steamer at anchor and she had to veer clear. Then proceeding downstream, a steamer shoved off from the jetty without considering us, and the tide bore us over to her side and we scraped along her. All our boats were out, and might have been crushed to matchwood, but they escaped with a few scratches. We got down to Woo-sung where the Whangpoo joins the Yangtze about 1300 hours, and then had to anchor and wait for the next flood tide before we could pass the Fairy Flats at the mouth of the river. Considering that the Yangtze brings down something like one million tons of mud per day, the wonder is that the entrance is not more silted up than it is. You can see the yellow colour of the river water eighty or a hundred miles out to sea.”

Their destination was Wei-hai-wei, a British-leased “health resort” and naval outpost 457 nautical miles north of Shanghai. Wei-hai-wei, and specifically Liugong Island (Liu-kung Tao) at the mouth of the bay, served as the official Royal Navy summer training ground. For the crew of the Vindictive, this was a period of conducting drills and gunnery practice in a cooler climate to ensure the ship was fighting-ready before deploying to dangerous, pirate-infested hotspots.

Muscle and Workhorses of the Station

While heavy cruisers like the Vindictive provided the muscle for major diplomatic shows of force, the daily “piracy patrols” fell to smaller vessels like HMS Moorhen, HMS Woodlark and HMS Bluebell, all mentioned in Brock’s letters. Late in 1926, Bluebell would gain fame for rescuing the hijacked British steamer Sunning from pirates—a story that made headlines across the Empire.