Hungerford Arcade is delighted to have heard from our great friend Stuart Miller-Osborne. Read all about his latest find below.
Hello again
One of the things that I miss about Hungerford is not being able to pop into the Arcade whenever I feel like doing so.
As some of you know, I am closer to France (around 25 miles) than Hungerford (at a guess 100/200 miles) and because of this I do not have the opportunity to pursue one of my favourite pastimes of browse and find which is short for browsing without any specific aim in mind. In a way it is like beachcombing. You never know what you might find apart from pebbles, dead fish and even more pebbles. If I listed all the things I have come across in the Arcade (and frequently purchased) then it would be like Prime Minister’s Question Time – boring and never ending!
Down here in East Kent one can find interesting things but these are sadly few and far between. Charity shops seem to think that if anything is over 50 years old then it is massively valuable, which is not always the case. There are antique shops in the area, which range from the very expensive to ones that are much more reasonable. This makes it all the more challenging, but just as much fun, as occasionally you find something really interesting, which was the case the other day.
I had not trotted into town thinking about earthquakes even though this part of England is on a plate that I believe originates in Belgium. But by the time I had trotted back, these awful natural disasters were very much on my mind.
The reason for this was that I had found an incredibly interesting booklet called “The Great Earthquake” which detailed the catastrophic earthquake that struck the Izu Peninsula Yokohama, and shortly after Tokyo, at noon on 1st September 1923.
I had obviously heard of this earthquake and that thousands of people were sadly killed but I was totally unaware of the smaller details which this booklet detailed in the extreme. It had been printed as a record of the reports in the Japan Chronicle (the date of the booklet was unclear but, at a guess, I would have thought it was produced soon afterwards).
When natural disasters happen many miles distant from our shore, there is sadly a tendency to dismiss them (even in this age of 24/7 coverage) and I wonder how this awful earthquake was viewed in 1923. There were really only the newspapers in 1923 which would have carried the reports of the disaster but not much more. And because of this the detail in this publication is quite stunning, as short and long reports have been lifted from the pages of the Japan Chronicle and reproduced.
On the first page alone it notes that the Imperial Palace in Yokohama was on fire. (history tells us that the whole of Yokohama and three quarters of Tokyo were destroyed by fire). Refugees were reported to be sheltering in parks and that communication with London and other major cities was more or less non existent. Other pages reveal the fate of diplomatic staff and the state of the Tokyo embassies (it was reported that the American embassy was burnt down but the Ambassador and his wife were safe). This said, a member of staff in Yokohama, Miss Doris Babbitt, was killed and there were many others reported missing or dead. Princes are reported dead as well as nameless others by the thousand. This makes grim reading.
On a more positive note, ships carrying refugees are identified with the names, where possible, of who was on board (an interesting note is that most of the names were European in origin)
The booklet also contains a number of photographs which detail the destruction caused by the earthquake and the confusion afterwards.
Another interesting item is a newspaper cutting that was attached to my booklet dating from the 23rd March 1932, which notes the retirement of a certain Captain Samuel Robinson, who provided great relief in Yokohama at the time of the 1923 earthquake. It is reported that Captain Robinson and his ship The Empress of Australia rescued a great number of survivors from the burning harbour at Yokohama and was further involved in the relief effort in the days following the disaster. What makes this even more haunting is that less than ten years later, the free world was at war with Japan and thirteen years later the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In a way it a window into Japan in the 1920s, which for most of us living nearly a century later is something of a mystery unless you are a student of the subject.
I have not looked but I would imagine that somewhere on the internet there is a copy of this small publication. It will probably be a year and a day before I find an item as interesting as this (unless I make it back to Hungerford and the Arcade). And to think I nearly missed it, as it was partially hidden in a pile of of pretty ancient knitting magazines and under a very tatty copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull (which I also purchased for my daughter to read).
That is the beauty of browse and find as you do not know what you will find next.
Happy Hunting
Stuart
