BOOK
REVIEW The
nudists and the ex-diplomat's
daughter Midnight in
Peking by Paul French
Reviewed by Michael Rank
Just
before dawn on a cold January night in 1937, a
young Englishwoman was found dead, her body
horribly mutilated, in the lawless Badlands of
nightclubs and brothels close to the center of
Beijing.
The murder of 19-year-old Pamela
Werner, the daughter of a retired diplomat, caused
a sensation among Beijing's small foreign
community who were already fearful of the Japanese
army that was bearing down on the Chinese capital,
but the case was never solved and was soon got
forgotten, overtaken by far greater events.
This gripping book revives the story,
telling how Pamela seems to
have been the victim of
a group of expat males who indulged in nudism and
wild parties, and how this was covered up by the
British Legation, anxious to protect their own.
But her father was determined to uncover
the truth, and carried out his own investigation,
making detailed notes that lay forgotten in a
dusty file in the National Archives in Kew,
southwest London, until author Paul French
discovered them as he was close to finishing his
research for this book.
Pamela was Edward
Theodore Chalmers Werner's only child, whom he and
his wife had adopted as a baby from a Portuguese
orphanage in Beijing in 1917. Pamela's adoptive
mother died when she was only five, and this seems
to have led to what nowadays would be called
"challenging behavior", as she was thrown out of
several Beijing schools.
She was
eventually sent to board at the prestigious
Tientsin Grammar School, but was home for the
Christmas holidays when she met her miserable
death coming home from a party to which she had
been lured by her killers.
The British
authorities in Beijing and the local police force
made little progress in tracking down the killer
or killers, and indeed seem to have been more
anxious to prevent a scandal, while Detective
Chief Inspector Dick Dennis, who was sent from the
British Concession in Tianjin to investigate,
found himself frustrated at every turn.
He
requested the right to conduct house-to-house
searches, but the Administrative Commission of the
Diplomatic Quarter, backed by the British Legation
and the British consul, refused.
Pamela's
internal organs were missing when her body was
found, and many assumed that she had been the
victim of a Chinese cult that believed that such
body parts had medicinal or magical powers, but
her father, an authority on Chinese religion and
superstition, never believed this and was
convinced blame lay in the foreign community.
E T C Werner - he seems to have been
Chalmers to his few friends - was an unsociable
man lacking in social graces and with quite a few
enemies. There were even suggestions that he was
responsible for the death of his young wife.
He had been forced to retire from the
consular service at the age of 49 after a series
of rows, culminating in an incident in Fuzhou when
he and his wife had stormed the Foochow Club,
beating a customs official with whom they had
quarreled. This was all too much for his Foreign
Office masters and he was pensioned off in 1918.
But Werner chose to retire in China and
lived quietly in Beijing with Pamela in a
traditional Chinese house on Armor Factory Alley.
The notoriously gossipy London Times
correspondent George Morrison - Morrison of Peking
- called Werner "this poisonous Consul", while
Werner himself did nothing to court popularity.
"The socially popular man is intellectually poor!"
he once wrote, and the fact that he was an
unabashed atheist as well as a teetotaler must
have added to his general unpopularity.
Werner may have been a difficult
character, but he loved his daughter and continued
his hunt for her killer or killers long after the
authorities had given up.
He was convinced
she was murdered by a group of men who included
Wentworth Prentice, an American who had been
Pamela's dentist, and George Gorman, a British
pro-Japanese newspaper editor, who were members of
a nudist colony based in a temple in the Western
Hills and held parties with naked White Russian
dancing girls.
Gorman had made a pass at
Pamela at a picnic, which she seems to have
laughed off, but her father concluded that he and
his friends resented her rejection of their
advances, and this is what led to her murder.
The book also examines the role of
Tientsin Grammar School headmaster Sydney Yeates,
who apparently also made a pass at Pamela and who
was fired soon after her murder. It was widely
believed at the time that Yeates was involved in
her death, but he had a firm alibi, and while his
conduct may have been unbecoming, he was no
murderer.
In March 1943 the Japanese
rounded up all remaining Allied nationals in
Beijing and held them in the infamous Weihsien
internment camp in Shantung. These included
Werner, as well as the leader of Pamela's
suspected killers, Wentworth Prentice, and one
survivor recalls Werner pointing at Prentice and
calling out, "You killed her, I know you killed
Pamela. You did it."
Midnight in
Peking is written in a racy style that
occasionally veers close to parody ("Pinfold was
easy with the whole nudist thing, and how hard was
it to secure some wages while eyeing up naked
women?"), and I wish the author had said more
about how he first got interested in this tragic
story and told us more about Werner's 150 pages of
notes into the case.
The book has some fascinating
illustrations, including photographs of Pamela and
her father, as well as of the house on Armor
Factory Alley where the Werners lived.
Surprisingly, given the destruction of old Beijing
over the past six decades, the house still stands,
and the book has an informative website that
includes a walking tour of the city which takes in
Armor Factory Alley and the Fox Tower
(Dongbianmen) under which Pamela's body was found.
Werner returned to England in 1951 for the
first time since he had challenged his dismissal
from the diplomatic service shortly before World
War I, and died three years later aged 89.
French accepts Werner's conclusion that
Prentice and company were responsible for Pamela's
murder, and it is hard to find any other
explanation for the killing, although 75 years
later almost all the evidence has vanished and we
will never know for certain who killed Pamela
Werner.
Pamela was buried in the British
cemetery in Beijing, but that was paved over long
ago, and her body now lies deep under the city's
Second Ring Road. But she will not be forgotten
thanks to this fascinating book, and the author is
to be congratulated on telling the story of Pamela
Werner's short life and tragic death so vividly
and expertly.
Michael Rank
graduated in Chinese from Downing College,
Cambridge in 1972. He was a British Council
student in China from 1974 to 1976 and a Reuters
correspondent in Beijing 1980-1984. He is now a
journalist and Chinese-English translator living
in London.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
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Pamela was Edward
Theodore Chalmers Werner's only child, whom he and
his wife had adopted as a baby from a Portuguese
orphanage in Beijing in 1917. Pamela's adoptive
mother died when she was only five, and this seems
to have led to what nowadays would be called
"challenging behavior", as she was thrown out of
several Beijing schools. 
