Empire Made Me

By Robert Bickers

Book Overview

'This is a biography of a nobody that offers a window into an otherwise closed world. It is a life which manages to touch us all...' Empire Made Me

Shanghai in the wake of the First World War was one of the world's most dynamic brutal and exciting cities - an incredible panorama of nightclubs opium-dens gambling and murder. Threatened from within by communist workers and from without by Chinese warlords and Japanese troops and governed by an ever more desperate British-dominated administration Shanghai was both mesmerising and terrible.Into this maelstrom stepped a tough and resourceful ex-veteran Englishman to join the police. It is his story told in part through his rediscovered photo-albums and letters that Robert Bickers has uncovered in this remarkable moving book.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0141011955
• ISBN13: 9780141011950
• Release Date: August 2004
• Publisher: Penguin UK
• Length: 360 Pages
• Weight: 0.72 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.8" x 0.9" x 5.1"

Customer Reviews

Excellent history of pre-world war two Shanghai

This is the story of Richard Maurice Tinkler an ordinary Englishman who after fighting for his country in World war one found that his country has no job for him. He saw an ad of a policeman in Shanghai- Applicant must be unmarried, with good teeth, about 20 to 25 years of age. Salary is Taels 85 per month equivalent to 13 pounds per month. He was given free passage to Shanghai. Sailed from Glasgow and arrived in 1919 via Port Said, Penang, Singapore and Hong Kong. ( See p 31-33 Bickers ) Coming from poverty-stricken England Tinkler was taken in by the prosperity he saw in Shanghai. Thus Tinkler became a man made by the British Empire and ended up An Englishman adrift in Shanghai. Bickers has written a good history of Shanghai pre-World war two. He has used the life of a nondescript Englishman to illustrate well the social and political pre-war Shanghai.

Ode to the Imperial Everyman

This is brilliant theatre of the absurd. It captures the pathos of the imperial everyman Maurice Tinkler toiling away for a small pay at the distant edge of empire - and his decline which mirrors and echoes the decline of the British Empire in the far east in the 1930's - faced by the surge of Asian nationalisms. Maurice Tinkler is falling apart, emotionaly, mentaly, spiritualy and physicaly - and so is the Brittish Empire which he loves and to which he has devoted his life. He died an imperial martyr - it was the only way he wished to go.