Fellow Exiles

In addition to a working contingent of seven or eight hundred labourers from the Gilbert group, the British Phosphate Commissioners used to employ about fifty Chinese artisans and eight hundred coolies in their mining operations on Ocean Island. The artisans were a quiet, hardworking class who thought as proudly of their social status as of their various crafts, and held themselves aloof from the coolies except to give them advice or moral support on occasion. The coolies were a varied, colourful, turbulent crowd signed on in Hong Kong, and for that reason treated locally as British subjects, but in fact largely drawn from the slums of Canton.

The great majority of the coolies, like the mechanics, were tremendous workers. Though they were on the average small and pathetically frail-looking, they had the mighty hearts of their race, and their output of mined phosphate per man-day was astonishingly higher than that of the husky Gilbertese. But their number was not without its natural quota of cheerful leadswingers, and the weekly magistrate's court—over which the resident commissioner presided—usually dealt with well over a thousand cases of absenteeism a year.

The contract of indenture explained in Hong Kong to every recruit before signature contained a penal clause which rendered him subject to fine or, at his own option, imprisonment for being absent from his work without leave. The law allowed the court reasonable latitude for the variation of penalties according to cases; but, if my memory serves me right, the formula that Reggie McClure generally used for first offenders was a fine of a twentieth of a month's basic pay or, alternatively, two days' imprisonment for every day of absence. page 33The same conditions applied to the Gilbertese labourers, but there was very little absenteeism among these.

A good deal of fuss was to be raised some years later about the retention of penal clauses in contracts of employment. But I never could see the force of the objection in relation to the facts at Ocean Island. In signing on to work for a wage there, the recruit, whether Gilbertese or Chinese, committed his employer to the expenses of housing, feeding and doctoring him free of charge as long as he was away from home, also of repatriating him on termination of the agreement. He knew in advance that none of these forms of payment could be withheld from him for any reason whatever, once he was on Ocean Island. His wilful refusal to work after arrival thus amounted to a fraud, against which the contract very rightly tried to protect the wretched employer with a penal clause.

In those days, the majority of habitual absentees among the Chinese welcomed a few days in prison as an alternative to allowing a fine, however small, to be deducted from their month's pay-packet. The exercise of this option gave them a happy sense of scoring all round: nobody got their money, the government had to keep them boarded and lodged, the employer lost their work for the term of the sentence.

But there was one pair of gifted professionals who had things more constructively organized. The speciality of these two was never to check in for work on Saturdays. Week after week they came up on the same charge to the small thatched courthouse under the palms, bowed pleasantly to Reggie on the bench, pleaded guilty, bowed again when sentenced, and, producing a handsome black cash-box, obviously their common property, paid on the nail for their sins. They were good enough to explain to the interpreter one day, in Reggie's private office, why a little thing like a fine meant nothing to them. They had discovered that there was money in cooked food. Their Saturdays were spent, not in unproductive idleness but in preparing delicious cakes and baked meats for sale, over the weekend, to their fellow workers. According to the interpreter, page 34who was all on their side, the loss of their day's industry to the employer was repaid a thousand times over by the happiness and strength that coolies and mechanics alike derived from their superb cooking. It looked to Reggie and me as if he might have been right when, the next Saturday night, we walked through the brightly lit hurly-burly of the Chinese location and saw the milling, eager, laughing crowd that surged around their stall, hard by the recreation hall where the mah jong and fantan schools held session. And, as Reggie said, it became a pleasure to extract the maximum fines from them after that, seeing how stuffed with £ I notes that cash-box had looked, open between them on the counter. I couldn't help feeling, though, that the B.P.C. manager had some right on his side when he got us to cancel their contracts and shipped them, still cheerfully smiling, back to Hong Kong.