The book naturally has much to say on the Shanghai of the period. The British dominated the International Settlement, though it was never a colony. The police, as elsewhere in the British Empire, felt themselves to be a good deal less than “pukka.” Drinking while on duty was common, and this may have been the reason for Tinkler’s demotion and subsequent resignation in 1930. Corruption (“graft”) was common too, though Bickers thinks it unlikely Tinkler fell into that trap as he never accumulated any savings, having only ?48 (US$89) in the bank just before he died.
Even so, he managed a trip, sailing First Class, to Taiwan and Japan in 1921, visiting Taipei, Tainan and Alishan, calling in on Japanese police stations en route and being well-received.
This is in many ways a rather melancholy book, as well as being a meticulous one. Its subtitle “An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai” sets the tone. Empire, in Bickers’s view, was a seductive illusion, drawing men who had few other options into the soft life it offered, then quietly bleeding them and leaving them in effect unable to go home. Injustice permitted this state of affairs, he says, but the expatriates rarely thought in this way, maintaining instead societies that reminded them of home, though usually a home that was out-of-date by a generation, or even two.
On the other hand, Bickers’s is also a vision that offers several poetic possibilities, and it’s certainly preferable to earnest statistical analyses and tables of trade figures. That his interest verges on the imaginative is confirmed by his discussion of many novels dealing with the British Empire, including books by Paul Scott, Anthony Burgess and J.G.Ballard.
Maurice Tinkler’s dramatic end put him onto the front pages of British newspapers. Enoch Powell, later to become a prominent UK politician, even wrote a poem on him at the age of 27, seeing him as a loyal servant of empire abandoned to his fate by his country. And it was probably this last-minute celebrity that brought his file onto Bickers’ library desk in the first place. Historians feed off death, he remarks, but mulling over this evocative book, with its faded photographs and interviews with surviving relatives, you feel that it tells truths about the allure as well as the pitfalls of displacement. Its title, incidentally, probably refers back to Graham Greene’s early novel England Made Me, confirming that Bickers is a keen reader of fiction, and disposed to a similarly evocative treatment of history.
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