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- Biographies and personal histories, History - WW2, Book reviews, Biographies
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- Publication
- December 2023 edition of the Naval Historical Review (all rights reserved)
Shanghai Demimondaine: From Sex Worker to Society Matron. This biography by Nick Hordern was published earlier this year by Earnshaw Books of Hong Kong. Paperback 262 pages available from Amazon and Kindle at about $34 and $10 respectively*.
This could be the story of a fallen woman and her return to respectability, a topic which has fascinated many a writer over the ages, but it is much more than that. It begins on the banks of the Darling River in far west New South Wales in 1890 when Laura Treweek was born on a large sheep station owned by a prominent establishment family. Aged 19 and unmarried Laura fell pregnant, but the father’s name is never revealed. A daughter Laurinna, known as Lorraine, was born on 22 January 1910 and the baby fostered.
With beauty and charm Laura next fell pregnant to the millionaire property owner who established her in Melbourne as his mistress, where they had three children Peter, John and Margaret. In addition, Laura reclaimed Lorraine, and now had four children to bring up with only a nominal father. To give an air of respectability, an imaginary husband, solicitor Chester Murray, is invented who conveniently dies overseas after serving in the First World War.
Haunted by fears that this unofficial family might be discovered in Melbourne where the father is well known, they move to Sydney, again in comfortable circumstances with the children at exclusive private schools. The Great Depression caused generous allowances to be reduced and the two boys leave school, working on their father’s property. Margaret was allowed to finish school and Lorraine was obliged to find work.
Lorraine is engaged by a newspaper where as an attractive 18 year-old she is sent to find gossip amongst the social set. Here she meets the 43 year-old aristocratic Japanese Consul General, Tokugawa Iemasa, and befriends his daughter, a couple of years younger than herself. When the Consul is transferred to Canada and later back to Japan Lorraine, who is by now Tokugawa’s mistress, remains part of the household.
The affair scandalises Japanese society and Tokugawa is forced to give her up. Lorraine embarks upon a ship to return home, and in September 1933 when the ship calls at Shanghai Lorraine makes a stopover lasting six years. Here she becomes part of the European social set who live in luxurious International Settlements in the heart of the city, immune from Chinese jurisdiction.
*Note: The image of Lorraine Murray on the front cover is from a 1936 sketch made in Shanghai by her then lover Edmund Toeg, an accomplished amateur artist.
Living off the generosity of friends, Lorraine needs a job and is introduced to a high-class brothel, set in a substantial mansion. Shanghai at this time was the pleasure capital of the world attracting all types of shady characters with the likes of Marlene Dietrich and Wallis Simpson (later Duchess of Windsor) frequenting its night life. Lorraine comes to the notice of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) which was interested in her Japanese contacts.
Jewish merchants who had been driven from Spain resettled in Baghdad before relocating to Shanghai where they flourished in the tea, silk and opium trades. Conducting this band was the fabulously wealthy Sassoon family who had bought their way into British society, and to which their cousins the Toeg family sought admittance. Victor Sassoon and Edmund Toeg were English educated and graduated from Cambridge and Oxford. Like the Duke of Windsor, both men suffered from sexual inadequacies and needed experienced women to comfort them, with Lorraine becoming a favourite of both Sir Victor and Edmund.
Lorraine was befriended by, and lived with, American Emily Hahn who was married to a Chinese with connections to the Chinese Nationalist Party. Batting for both sides, Emily introduced Lorraine to the communist American journalist Agnes Smedley. Interestingly when Emily divorced her Chinese husband she married Charles Boxer, a British Military Intelligence Officer.
Shanghai was home to many foreign correspondents who were keeping abreast with the political situation of civil war and the Japanese intervention, including the Australian Harold Timperley working for the Manchester Guardian, and an American cameraman Norman Alley. Timperley was one of the first journalists to expose the scale of the ‘Rape of Nanjing’. Alley was on hand during the ‘Panay Incident’ in December 1937 when Japanese aircraft bombed and sank the Yangtze River gunboat USS Panay which was assisting in the evacuation of American and foreign nationals from Nanjing. Norman Alley filmed the attack which was shown to President Roosevelt and then in movie houses across the United States. This ‘Incident’ influenced American public opinion against Japan, culminating in an embargo on oil exports to Japan and acting as a trigger to Pearl Harbor.
With the Japanese noose becoming tighter Lorraine departed Shanghai and returned to Sydney in September 1939, just weeks before the outbreak of the Second World War. She set herself up in a flat at Kings Cross, becoming a paid informant for the Commonwealth Investigation Branch (CIB). She claims she was blackmailed into this, otherwise the authorities would reveal her shady past. Here she not unnaturally meets Australian Navy intelligence officers. Her handler notes ‘this young lady is bright, vivacious, intelligent and not of a particularly high moral standard’. He also says she has a working knowledge of Italian, German, Japanese and Chinese and might have added French, given her private school education. Lorraine was put to work making contact with suspected Axis sympathisers, however she did not seem particularly suited to spying on fellow Australians, or quite possibly the suspects were innocent.
By Lorraine’s standards life in Sydney was too quiet and she eventually found employment with American forces then based in Brisbane. But she hankered for her Shanghai pals, many of whom had moved to Britain and the United States. Post-war Lorraine made her way to Britain and rekindled her relationship with Edmund Toeg. In November 1948 the now 38-year-old Lorraine married Edmund, fourteen years her senior, at London’s Caxton Hall. At last she had reached the status which she had so long craved and was able to take her place in society.
In 1973 Edmund died aged 78 after which Lorraine returned to Australia and, reconciled with her siblings, lived close to her brothers who had properties in the Riverina. In failing health, she spent her final years in a nursing home in Wagga Wagga where she died on 7 January 2000 just short of her 90th birthday.
This is a well-researched and consuming story told with great skill of an extraordinary Australian femme fatale who was at the very centre of pre-war and wartime intrigue and espionage.
Reviewed by Arcturus