This early affair of Glover is worth looking into even with the scanty facts which have survived. For the period he appears to have conducted this affair with unusual sensitivity and respect. In later years another liaison of his would follow much more closely the Madam Butterfly theme.
Glover was only one of many Westerners who took a Japanese wife at this time. George Smith, the Anglican Bishop of Hong Kong, on a ten-week visit to Japan in 1860, was outraged at the number of foreign bachelors with native wives. He thought it tantamount to government approval that Customs officials could be involved in such scandalous matters. The Bishop failed to mention that no Western women were available.
The Bishop wrote a book on what he had observed on his Japanese visit. He reckoned that it was ‘sad indeed the temptations to which young Englishmen are exposed who take up their residence in Nagasaki . . . after 9 p.m. nearly half the population [of Nagasaki] are inebriated’.
Nagasaki’s newspaper, a four-page sheet which began publication in the summer of the following year, 1861, called the Bishop’s remarks a ‘libel’. In its review of the Bishop’s book the writer thought that ‘the mother, the sisters and friends of young bachelors would be led by these [the Bishop’s] expressions to believe that these were as the cities of old, peculiar for their vice, and, horrors, we deny it.’
It is not known what Tom’s mother, sister or friends in the Bridge of Don would have thought of these remarks if they had read them. Aberdeen was a world away.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE PHANTOM AND THE FANATICS
In an otherwise mundane business report to Shanghai from MacKenzie and Glover in January 1861, a very significant change in Japanese trade was noted. At the end of an account of a cotton-marine product barter, MacKenzie mentions that the Japanese Satsuma clan had bought the British steamer England. This fast, screw-driven ship of 1500 tons had been purchased in defiance of the shogun’s ban on such imports. Ostensibly it had been bought for carrying the clan’s products from the remote Satsuma capital of Kagoshima in the far south of Japan to the markets of the heavily populated north of the country. The England was not new but it was modern – at the time most transatlantic crossings were still being made by smaller paddle-steamers – and it was important because an example had been set for other potentially rebellious clans. There were some in the Satsuma clan who were not at all happy with the shogun’s impotence to prevent the foreign presence on the sacred soil of Japan. Others felt that much could be learned from the Westerners and wanted to encourage and promote trade with them – but they, too, resented the shogun. The divisions in the Satsuma clan were beginning to appear in the other powerful clans of south-west Japan. The general situation was one of confusion with the hotheaded anti-foreign fanatics the most dangerous faction of all.
Ships such as the England would be vital in the event of civil war breaking out among the rival factions in Japan. In a country with virtually no system of roads, transport of troops by sea would be crucial in a conflict. There was the chance, too, that guns could be mounted on the ship at a later date. Another major point to be taken from the purchase of the England by Satsuma was that the shogun’s monopoly of steamships then in Japan was over, another sign of the underlying weakness of the bakufu.
Glover shrewdly noted the price paid by Satsuma for the England — $128,000 – which included $8000 worth of bribes, presumably for the Nagasaki-based government or Customs officials not noticing that the shogun’s ban was being broken. This was potentially very big business indeed – equivalent to multi-million pound deals in the late twentieth century – and would have raised the hopes of the traders who were then ready to quit what they saw as a shogun-restricted, declining Nagasaki. Glover had strong shipping connections – his father a Coastguard commander, two brothers shipbrokers, a third now a ship’s captain. His interest was most certainly aroused.
Glover’s partnership with MacKenzie broke up in the early part of 1861. By May of that year the older Scot had decided to return to China after his stint of almost two years in Japan. MacKenzie was well regarded in Nagasaki. The announcement of his going had the British Consul, George Morrison, writing:
It is with much regret that I learn the hour of departure has arrived whereby I lose the valuable aid of your experienced Council and, in common with the rest of the community, an esteemed friend.
MacKenzie’s reasons for leaving are not clear – he may well have thought his prospects better in Hankow, where he had been operating before his move to Nagasaki. In any case his going gave Glover an opportunity the twenty-two-year-old quickly snatched. Before MacKenzie had even left Nagasaki, in May 1861, Glover officially declared himself as a general commission agent. He was now an independent merchant trading under the name of Thomas Blake Glover and was the sole agent in Nagasaki for Jardine, Matheson.
MacKenzie left for China on 18 June 1861, leaving $2300 of Jardine, Matheson’s money with Tom. Part of his last communication to the company, written on the day of his departure, reads:
. . . after great delay and much trouble I obtained a large and beautifully situated hill lot held upon very easy terms as to annual rent which Mr Glover will cause to be planted and will hereafter build a bungalow upon it at a cost of $800.
The day after MacKenzie’s departure, Glover was writing to Jardine, Matheson’s Shanghai office complaining of the depressed state of the market but optimistically reporting that the building of the company’s own premises was ‘all but completed’. These premises were a warehouse on the best Oura allotment of all: No. 2 on the waterfront. Glover had supervised the building and even lived for a while in the house above the warehouse. He was taking good care of his prestigious agency for Jardine, Matheson. The ‘bungalow’ on the ‘beautifully situated hill lot’ referred to by MacKenzie is the now-famous Glover House which was completed in 1863.
Glover had entered the tea business. By June 1861 he had already sent samples to the company in Shanghai which showed interest and offered to put up cash for more.
In the early summer of 1861 prospects were looking good for young Glover. Established as Jardine, Matheson’s agent, he was elected to Nagasaki’s first Chamber of Commerce as one of its three British representatives – the others being William Alt and Robert Arnold. At twenty-seven, Arnold was the oldest of the three and he and Alt were the best-known British merchants in the port. Not yet twenty-three and still requiring to prove himself in business, Glover’s election was most probably a reflection of his position as agent of the mighty Jardine, Matheson. Politically, things were quiet and there was money to be made in tea and silk if he could get things going properly and the shogun did not interfere too much. The foreign community in Nagasaki was settling well and becoming more organised.
According to the Consul, Morrison, there were around twenty-five British residents in the port in early 1861, ‘a very well-ordered community . . . giving no occasion for complaint on the part of the Japanese’.
By June that year a British Club had been founded and its members were looking for more land for a recreation ground. The site of the club, Lot 31, was at the extreme rear of the Oura concession and backed on to the native part of the town. The establishment of a Club was another sign to the Japanese hotheads that the foreigners were here to stay.
Tom Glover was not the only Aberdeen man busy in Nagasaki that summer of 1861. James Mitchell, formerly of the city’s Alexander Hall & Co. shipyard, had also established himself in the port. Mitchell was an associate of Glover, a master shipbuilder, and had arrived in Nagasaki at about the same time. He had founded a small shipyard at Lot 1 on the waterfront of the Sagarimatsu concession on the other side of the Oura river from Glover’s office. He called his establishment
