Girls, interrupted: The story of sea captain's adopted daughters
In piecing together the story of two 'waifs' at the Happy Valley graveside of British sea captain and Yangtze River pioneer Samuel Cornell Plant, Polly Shih Brandmeyer and Stephen Davies have uncovered the roots of an unusual family tree
That was the dramatic ending to a feature that ran in Post Magazine on October 2, 2011, about British sea captain Samuel Cornell Plant, the first man to pilot a merchant steamer through the upper reaches of the Yangtze River. In 1921, Plant died of pneumonia at sea en route to England, via Hong Kong, and was buried, along with his wife, who succumbed to the same disease a few days later, in Happy Valley. Graveside at their funeral were two adopted Chinese daughters. The author of the piece, Peter Simpson, had dug up what he believed were their names – Isobel and Clara – but few other facts about the girls beyond knowing they were sent back to Yichang, in Hubei province, under the guardianship of an Emelia Moore, and that all three moved to Chengdu, Sichuan province, ahead of the Japanese advance of 1937-38.
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So what became of the two young girls who stood in the forefront at the funeral of Captain Cornell and Alice Plant, alongside the three male chief mourners from the Chinese Maritime Customs and Butterfield & Swire?
IN 2005, A FEW MILES FROM the Plant family home in Suffolk, eastern England, Hugh Coryn and his wife, Anne – whose grandfather was Captain Plant’s first cousin – set wheels in motion. They would bring two stories together and help unravel the mystery.
“Anne and I from the outset, after first learning of the girls, wanted to know what became of them,” Coryn remembers. “Clearly they were important to Alice and Cornell. I had read the consul’s letter, depicting them as waifs and purchased servants, which, at the time, I felt was disgraceful. The more we thought about it, the more we felt a wrong had been done. Then we realised that, just possibly, we might find them alive, although very old ladies.”
Unaware of the Coryns’ quest, in 2009, the three children and granddaughter (Polly Shih Brandmeyer – the co-author of this article) of the Isobel that Simpson had indentified as possibly being one of the Plants’ adoptees, arrived in Chengdu from different parts of the United States, to visit their 90-year-old Aunt Clara. Clara’s children and their families had settled nearby – and the first cousins were reunited for the first time since they had seen each other in Shanghai, in 1947.