Gallery
The Children's Parade on the deck of the SS Canton, 1939, Teddy center holding my hand; Amah carrying John; Mummy, wearing dark glasses, stands close to the ship's railing.
F.E.L. Dobbs, Ted, Daddy (1900–1941).
Alice, nicknamed Girlie, in the living room of her family’s Peking house, 1927. The black-and-gold lacquer cabinets came to America with Katie and remain in the family.
John, age 7, now in America, 1943.
Amah and her children, 1940.
My father in the 1930s, China.
With Lola Julius, our nanny in Shanghai, 1940.
First portrait of my father and us children, Shanghai, 1937.
John McGregor Gibb (1882–1939), my grandfather, front and center, surrounded by his English language class at Peking University in about 1910. Peking University, established in 1898, is considered the second-best university in China, and its sixty-eight-acre campus is considered the loveliest. In addition to teaching, John McGregor devoted himself to campus beautification— he supervised the construction of buildings and brought to the campus many large pieces of decorative marble, including a pair of columns bearing dragon reliefs, from the ruins of Empress Dowager Cixi’s Summer Palace. The palace had been demolished in 1860 by French and British troops during the Second Opium War (1856–1860). John McGregor thereby prevented the lovely carvings from being chipped up by scavengers and sold as garden rock.
In the back garden with Amah, Shanghai house, 1939.
My father and we children visit Jessfield Park, Shanghai, 1938–40.
Our last Christmas in Shanghai. Mummy and her brother, Tom (headmaster at the Shanghai American School), made the dollhouse (every room lit by a tiny flashlight bulb in the ceiling) and all its furnishings. Western-style toys were not available in China at the time.
Grandmother Katie, left, and guests take tea in the garden of her Shanghai house on Avenue Haig in the French Concession, 1939.
My grandmother, standing at the right end of the middle row with a group of Western ladies invited to tea by Empress Dowager Cixi (1835–1908), seated front row and center, and her court, Peking, 1903. Although she was one of many concubines, Cixi rose by cunning and manipulation to control the government of China, initially because she bore the emperor a son and she could read and write Chinese. During the forty-seven years she controlled the government, China rose from a medieval to modern country; she banned foot-binding (thus initiating women’s liberation), outlawed barbaric punishments, modernized the military, and reformed the education and legal systems.
Ranch in Rosario, Argentina, where my father was born. His dad went to Argentina to breed Irish ponies with Argentine ponies in hopes of developing superior horses for the sport of polo, 1904.
My father, Ted, seated in front of his father, Francis (Frank), and beside his older brother, C. Eric Stewart, at their ranch in Rosario, Argentina.
Alice Gibb Dobbs, just married, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1928.
Bamboo scaffolding erected around a marble column in preparation for moving it to the Peking University campus, about 1910. Note the men standing in the top scaffolding.
The two marble pillars that John McGregor had moved from the decimated Summer Palace in about 1910 still decorate the Peking University campus.
The approximately three hundred American internees in the Stanley Civilian Internment Camp in Stanley, Hong Kong, gather before repatriation, 1942. There were also about 2,500 British internees in this Japanese camp. The British citizens were not repatriated until the war ended in 1945.
Sarah Alice (age nine) and Mary Frances Fenn (age six) and me. I’m wearing my favorite borrowed dress, borrowed from Sarah Alice, Chengdu, 1942.
John hated this Buster Brown suit that he was put into for his new American passport photo. I watch for the “birdie,” as instructed by the photographer. Chengdu, November 1942.
Donkeys were brought to meet us when we arrived in Beidaihe by train each summer. Here, we children are on our way to the beach by donkey transport. No cars, not even a road, go to our hilltop summer house. Great-Grandmother Mary Candlin (Katie’s mom) has her own transportation—a sedan chair, which is stored above the porch rafters when not in use.
Alice Dobbs Metcalf, 1947.
Do you see the narrow strip of land under the bridge? In 1940s Chungking, before this bridge was built, the planes of the China National Aviation Corporation (CNAC) took off and landed on this island in the Yangtze River. The planes’ crews and passengers would then be rowed to the north or south riverbank in a sampan. This landing strip was never discovered by the Japanese. John and I arrived and left from here when we came to Chungking from Chengdu to meet Captain Hal Sweet. (Postcard from 1997.)
Waiting for the Red Cross truck to be put back on the road, somewhere in China, 1940. A man bends over the front fender.
Me, age nine, now in America, 1943.
Marlene Miller (second from right) and I share a birthday, so we shared a birthday party when we were twelve in 1946. This is the entire fifth grade that year at Haverford Friends School in Haverford, Pennsylvania, from left to right: Bridget Hamilton, Helga Pfund, Betty Jane Davis, me, Babs McCabe, Felicia Forsythe, twins Stephanie and Janet Hetzel, Marlene, and Laura Comfort. Mrs. Vickers (not pictured) was our teacher.
John, high school senior, Glassboro, New Jersey, 1955.
The house in Hankow, where we lived when John and I were born, 1933–37. One morning our family awakened to find hundreds of Chinese soldiers camped in the fields around it. Teddy watched the soldiers parading until our father told him to stay away from the windows.
The last picture taken of us together, Ted’s three children, 1998.