The Lone Flag: Macau's WWII British consul

When Hong Kong fell in 1941, the Portuguese colony of Macau was left as a neutral enclave surrounded by Japanese-held territory. Nonetheless, John Pownall Reeves, the British consul there, remained and continued his work, which was to include the provision of relief to 9,000 British subjects who had become refugees from occupied Hong Kong. Reeves' posting in Macau came to an end in 1946, and he was then assigned to a job in Rome, where he wrote a memoir of his war years. In 1949, Reeves sought permission to publish his writing but Britain's Foreign Office refused to grant it. Now, finally, Reeves' wartime memoir has been released to the public, in the book The Lone Flag.

Here we present the chapter titled "The Situation", wherein Reeves describes the situation in Macau ahead of an influx of refugees that would swell the enclave's population from 130,000 to more than 450,000.

The situation was now not a little interesting. My flag, floating next door to the Japanese Consul's, was the only Allied flag, apart from Chinese, for some distance, west to Yunnan and Chungking over 700 miles, north to Vladivostok 1,800, east into the Pacific some 4,000(?) miles, southeast to Port Moresby over 3,000 and south to Australia 2,700. It was to remain the only one constantly floating until the end of the war when it was described by the press as "The Lone Flag". It is possible that no other British flag has ever been so alone from the point of view of distance to the next.

Some play was made later in the press as regards my proximity to the Japanese Consulate. There simply was no other house available at the moment, in 1941, when I had to find an office and residence. I have already referred to the crowded conditions in Macao but where there were a few empty houses, these were mostly pre-empted by rich Chinese of Hongkong who, astutely seeing trouble coming, had prepared for themselves a bolt-hole in Macao; indeed I secured the Consulate only just ahead of one of these gentlemen, who in the end remained in Hongkong throughout the war to his own enrichment. My Japanese colleague before hostilities broke out, was evidently well imbued with the typical espionage complex of his race. Hearing that I liked Japanese food he asked me to dinner while offering his regrets that there were no geisha in Macao. "But", he said, "you will have seen that pretty Chinese girls come to my house". The dinner never occurred owing to the events of 8th December but it is obvious that he thought I was following his plan of noting all visitors to the Consulate.

Mr Fukui, my Japanese colleague, was a fine man. The Governor [Gabriel Teixeira] once remarked of him that he ought to be promoted to another nationality. Even after hostilities had started he did all he could to assist, from a humane point of view, activities which could not hurt his country. He was known to have put all his weight into the return of my wife from Hongkong [Rhoda Reeves had been trapped in Hong Kong when the Japanese attacked, and lived for a time with other refugees in St Stephen's College, on Lyttelton Road]; he was known to have facilitated the dispatch of food parcels to prisoners in Hongkong and he was known to have personally brought letters from prisoners to their families in Macao. He was killed by an assassin hired by the Japanese Gendarmerie.