After the Café Royal dinner, the prisoners-of-war who returned to London with Brian Horrocks dispersed around the world. Captain “Bim” Neville travelled home to Australia before moving to China with his family. This well-travelled officer had married “Alia” in Petrograd in 1914 and they had a daughter, Alice (6 years old) and son, Ronald (3 years old), when they settled in Shanghai.
During the Second World War, the Neville family was interned in Yangchow (or Yangtzepoo) Civil Assembly Centre Number 3 where Alice had to wear the armband in the photograph below. They left China in 1945, just as Eric Hayes was appointed Head of the British Military Mission, but it is not known whether the two former inmates of the Andronovsky prison had a reunion in Shanghai.
My next post will be about the Hampshire sergeant who married a Russian girl in Omsk before Trotsky captured the White capital.
With Grateful Thanks To The Australian War Memorial
Rupert Wieloch 