In 1942, Picture Post commissioned Bert Hardy to photograph the lives of Chinese sailors in Liverpool. About 10,000 seamen, some of whom had been settled in Liverpool’s Chinatown for decades, worked on the Blue Funnel Line or in the kitchens and laundries of Royal Navy ships during the war. The men were paid less than half the wage of their British-born crewmates.
From February to April that year, the workers made headlines when they went on strike for equal pay. Hardy’s pictures, which were never published in the magazine, illustrated those months of protest, when the sailors – branded as troublemakers – gathered in Chinatown’s hostels and boarding houses to discuss their action. Several of those images, including this photo, are included in a retrospective of Hardy’s work at the Photographers’ Gallery in London.
The merchant ships and the navy, desperate for men, reached a settlement with the strikers that summer, but the act of rebellion was not forgotten. Though at the end of the war the Liverpool Post reported that the Chinese sailors were a “gallant body of men whose service to the allied cause is greatly appreciated”, the owner of the Blue Funnel Line slashed their wages. In 2002 it was revealed that perhaps 2,000 Chinese men who had settled legally, some of whom were married to local women and were raising families, were forcibly deported between 1945 and 1947 after a Home Office ruling that the men were “an undesirable element”. Some of them were picked up at night and bundled on to cargo ships bound for Saigon and Singapore. Homes in Liverpool were appropriated by the council and in some cases British wives lost citizenship. The ongoing campaign led by one of the daughters of those men, Yvonne Foley, has resulted in the full story being told; in 2006 a plaque was unveiled on Liverpool’s Pier Head as a memorial to the deported sailors.
• Bert Hardy: Photojournalism in War and Peace is at the Photographers’ Gallery, London W1, 23 February-2 June
