prisoners of war.
The Shinano Maru had been converted to act as an auxiliary cruiser, or large merchant ship scout, and played a crucial role in the famous Battle of Tsushima in May 1905. Captain Narukawa of the Imperial Japanese Navy was put aboard as naval liaison officer, and, together with fifteen other similarly converted merchant vessels, she was assigned to a numbered square within the Tsushima Straits between Korea and Japan, with orders to report any sighting of the Russian Baltic fleet to Admiral Togo on his flagship, the Mikasa. It was the Shinano Maru that subsequently made history by its signal on 27 May, at 4.45 am: ‘Enemy is in Square 203’. The Shinano Maru was capable of speed, and possessed a powerful wireless apparatus. Afterwards, Captain Salter and Frank Britton both received the Asahi Medal for their part in the Russo-Japanese War.
After the end of the war, Frank made seven voyages to the Ogasawara Islands, known then as the Bonin (uninhabited) Islands. In a letter to his uncle in Sydenham, Frank wrote that the Bonin Islanders – descendants of early Western whalers:
… will be very sorry when we are taken out of the ship as we are the only fresh Western faces they see, and we always do our best to cheer them up. One trip we brought down a gramophone and another time a magic lantern. They are a very good-hearted lot of people. One old man seventy years of age remembers Commodore Perry calling at the islands some fifty years ago.
Once, on the outward voyage, Frank’s ship dropped off a Japanese census-taker on a small island, and when they went back to collect him, the island was nowhere to be found. There was only a huge mass of floating pumice surrounding a few rocky outcrops. The island which the unfortunate census-taker visited may possibly have been one of the ‘ short-lived islands’ comprising the tip of the undersea volcano called Myojin-sho, also known as Bayonnaise Rocks, and designated ‘Izu Islands No. 81’ in a 1925 survey. It erupted again in 1952. And another island appeared in 2013, and is getting bigger and bigger! Maybe it is the census one back again! Kyodo News now reports that it has joined the island in the Ogasawara chain called Nishinoshima, and that as a result the boundary line of Japan’s EEZ (exclusive economic zone) is likely to expand a little.
Frank Britton finally decided to give up seafaring and remain in Japan. Engineers were in great demand. The NYK had been the only source of supply and Frank was the last non-Japanese engineer to be engaged by them, and only a few chiefs were still left in their employ and no juniors.
After leaving NYK, Frank first accepted a position as manager of the Yokohama Engine and Iron Works in the centre of Yokohama beside one of the creeks, set up by an Irishman named Edward Kildoyle. But, in 1906, Britton resigned to become manager of the Zemma Works built in 1900 in the village of Zen-ma in the town of Isogo, on Tokyo Bay on the outskirts of Yokohama.
The shareholders planned to reclaim land and enlarge the operation. In view of the coming 1911 Revision of the Tariff Treaty that would put prohibitive duties on foreign goods, they began negotiations with Babcock and Wilcox, the world’s foremost maker of ship’s boilers, to make boilers there instead of importing them. The upshot was that in 1910 Babcock took over the Zemma Works, and Frank eventually became Managing Director, Far East, of what was then the biggest foreign business in Japan. Due to Frank’s foresight, in 1930 they merged with Mitsui Bussan to become Toyo Babcock, leading to the post-war Babcock Hitachi that it is today.
In his younger days, Frank Britton took long walking trips, became fluent in the spoken language, and came to have a great faith and belief in Japan, for whose people and culture he developed a deep and sympathetic understanding.
Frank was very conscientious and worked tirelessly, all the rest of his life, for Babcock, England and Japan. His 300 workers adored him. He knew the names of each one personally and they came to him with their problems and looked upon him as a father. He never uttered a word of anger to his men. The secret of his remarkable forbearance is revealed in a letter to his uncle in 1909 when Babcock & Wilcox were first considering taking over the Zemma Works. He wrote:
If B&W bring out their own men it is doubtful if they can get on with or even stand the ways of the Japanese. I am irritated sometimes to such a point that I feel like giving them a good English thrashing, and to ensure keeping my temper I always keep cigars on me, and when I feel I cannot control myself any longer I light a cigar and reflect that if one lives in a foreign country one must put up with foreign ways. A cigar is the finest thing in the world to soothe the nerves, and I am quite sure cigars have saved my life many times over, for, without them, I should have struck some of the workmen with the result that the whole works would have been on to me like one man – not an uncommon occurrence in Japan.
When the First World War broke out in August 1914, Frank was one of the first at the British Consulate wanting to enlist, but he was ordered to stay and make munitions for the war, in which Japan was Britain’s ally. He ran the works day and night, contenting himself with ‘getting at the Boches indirectly if not with cold steel’. He did not forget the need for good public relations, and even designed and organized a march by his workers dressed like bombs! I forget what occasion the march was for.
Skilled at designing, he was also an inventor. He registered many patents, including a portable mudguard to be hung beside motor car wheels to prevent them drenching kimono-clad pedestrians on rainy days! It was very popular. And when gramophones were introduced, he did much for the local industry, devising useful improvements.
CHAPTER 4
How Marrying
Changes My Father’s Life
WHEN ALICE HILLER dropped in for tea that day in 1920, Frank was still a bachelor. In one of his letters to his uncle he writes:
I control these Works with its 300 employees, and keep the company’s books as evening amusement, so you can see that I have no time to burn on social repartee.
Frank did finally manage to obtain an accountant, a delightful Scot called Tom Chisholm, to take some of the burden off his hands. He had also told his uncle that the girls on The Bluff seemed to have little time for engineers. But my mother used to marvel why he had not married beautiful Elizabeth Keith the artist, who was the sister of the wife of his friend journalist John Robertson Scott. Famous for her wood-block prints of Japan and Korea, Elizabeth remained a good family friend of ours.
Frank lived across the road from the Zemma Works and in the interim between marrying Alice in Shanghai and bringing her back with him to Japan, Frank had the house enlarged and beautifully improved. He resisted moving up to The Bluff where all the foreigners lived. Feeling privileged to be in Japan, he refused to live in that completely Western enclave where in those days no one socialized with the Japanese or learned to speak their language. I believe many people thought we were rather peculiar.
While enlarging his house, Frank heard that the Shinano Maru was being decommissioned, and so he bought the nostalgic teak of its decks and used the wood, cut into small fish-scale-shaped pieces, imbricated and dyed a beautiful rose colour with the traditional Japanese persimmon juice wood preservative, to cover the sides of the house, He also used the Shinano Maru deck teak for our mantelpieces, not only in Yokohama, but later here in Hayama, where our original east side veranda, facing down the beach, was also made of that nostalgic teak.
The Brittons’ first child, a son, was alas, stillborn – which my mother was convinced must have been the result of the visit by the accountant’s wife who had a frightful cold, which brought on Mother’s chronic all-night coughing. That is why I have always felt strongly about the necessity of people with colds staying home, no matter how important their reason for travel might be.
When
