The house was built as a Japanese thought a Western house should be and is a curious mixture of East and West. The rooms are large, high ceilinged and airy and Tom and Jim Glover would have lived there comfortably, even in the hottest days of summer cooled by the breeze skimming the water of the harbour below. They could have entertained their friends there with some style. This was a decided improvement on the early clapboard, Wild West style of building in Oura which was house, warehouse and office combined – a style the highly skilled Japanese carpenters had copied from outdated pictures of Western architecture.
There are photographs, some captioned as early as ‘Nagasaki 1863’, showing the now familiar honeycomb shape of Glover House shortly after it was built. In one of these Tom and Jim are posing on the steps of the porch in a group containing their partner Edward Harrison with some others. The distinctive ‘rising sun’ windows are visible above the door behind them. Significantly these early photographs also show some of the Westerners carrying rifles. In those days the brothers were still ‘Tom’ and ‘Jim’ – only later would Glover acquire the more stately ‘Thomas’ or ‘TB’.
A croquet green had been laid on the level above the house and the level below overlooked the masts and sails of the many ships lying at anchor. In another of the photographs two Western women are pictured on the croquet green with their partners and it is most likely that Glover House was a favourite gathering place for Nagasaki’s foreign residents.
Much of the social life at this time would have gone on at the homes of the residents. Western women were still at a premium but there was apparently no shortage of local girls. In a Japanese directory of foreign residents in Yokohama, dated 1861–2, thirty of the seventy-nine registered households had a resident musume (literally daughter or girl, at the time the word was taken to mean a mistress). The register lists no musume resident at the homes of married men whose wives were with them in Japan, or at the homes of clergymen, doctors and certain others. In houses shared by two bachelors there were two resident musume. It is safe to presume the same arrangements were in force in Nagasaki.
The four partners in Glover & Co. had plenty to keep them occupied – letters for dispatch by mail steamer to keep Jardine, Matheson happy, bargaining with the tea and silk dealers in an effort to keep up with changing prices, running the tea refiring plant which now employed hundreds – as well as run-of-the-mill problems of thieving by native labourers, crooked Customs officials and belligerent ships’ captains. On top of this, Glover in early 1863 was continuing to keep close and clandestine contact with agents of the Satsuma clan.
Shogun-induced problems with foreign exchange the previous year had eventually been referred to London. Francis Groom was in Britain on Glover & Co. business at this time and gave his version of affairs in Japan to British Treasury officials – perhaps contradicting the views of the British Minister in Edo, Rutherford Alcock.
But currency problems were not the only problems Glover had to face in the early part of that year. He was in trouble with his own Consul for apparently taking the law into his own hands.
Okoobo Bungonokami, Nagasaki’s governor, wrote his letter of complaint to Morrison, the Consul, on 21 February 1863. In it he accuses Glover of ‘having seized a number of coolies’ whom he suspected of stealing silk he was shipping and of binding them with cords ‘besides painting the faces of seven of them with tar’ before handing them over to the Japanese police. The Consul in reply said that it was not Glover but Edward Harrison who had been involved and that he was at present absent from Nagasaki but would be punished on return. The governor would not accept this, insisting that Glover was also involved and that both Britons should be punished for breaking the Treaty rules. He went on to say that the ‘coolies have since been examined’ and that only one had stolen the silk while another had attempted to do so – both of these had been punished according to Japanese law and the remainder set free.
According to the Consular records, Glover and Harrison were ‘severely reprimanded’ by the Consul and Harrison fined ten dollars.
But as the cherry blossom season approached and the cool of Nagasaki’s early spring was replaced with the warmer air of April, much more serious events were occupying the Consul’s mind.
CHAPTER SEVEN
ESCAPE OF THE ‘CHOSHU FIVE’
The late spring and summer of 1863 in Nagasaki was long and hot. For the British community in particular it was also a very dangerous time and Glover’s letters to Jardine, Matheson during the period chart the drama.
The background was the impending British retaliation against the Satsuma clan for the murder of Charles Richardson the previous September. Early in the year the British had demanded £100,000 from the shogunate in reparation. As well as this the Satsuma clan were ordered by the British to execute the samurai involved and to hand over £25,000 as their own reparation for the crime. Rear-Admiral Kuper of the Royal Navy’s China squadron was standing by with nine ships to discipline the hotheaded Japanese clan if they failed to comply. They were well aware that the shogun could not control the Satsuma clan, particularly in its distant stronghold of Kagoshima.
The anti-foreign faction urged the shogun not to give way to the British. A decree was finally issued by the shogun in Edo. The Japanese language is notoriously imprecise and the decree was read by moderates as a start to new negotiations with the West over the Treaty port arrangements. But to some fanatics in the Choshu clan it was read as approval for attacking and finally ridding Japan of all ‘barbarians’. This they quickly prepared themselves to do.
On 6 April 1863, Edwin St John Neale, the acting British Minister during Alcock’s absence on home leave, presented the shogun with an ultimatum. The Japanese had twenty days to respond to the British demands or face the consequences.
Tension mounted in Nagasaki, much closer to Satsuma country than Edo or Yokohama, where a squadron of the Royal Navy were standing by to protect the British residents there if need be. Morrison’s report from Nagasaki to the British Legation in Edo on 14 April sets the tone. He reported that he had pleaded for calm with the residents, but went on to point out the proximity of Nagasaki to Satsuma should hostilities break out. He continued:
The Prince [of Satsuma] has had agents in this port making earnest enquiry as to the measures which will be anticipated on the part of the British government, and some of his high officers are in constant association with foreigners, especially with Mr Glover of Glover & Co.
This gentleman has informed me that the Commander-in-Chief of Prince Satsuma’s forces has himself been in Nagasaki to gain information; and that another high agent wished him to be the medium of offering any sum of money that might be desired.
When Glover had pressed the Satsuma men regarding punishment for the murderer he was told that it ‘was out of the question’. He was now the only Briton with direct access to the Satsuma.
He kept Jardine, Matheson well informed, writing, for example, on 29 April:
. . . the community has been told to hold themselves in readiness to leave . . . considerable bodies of Japanese troops are . . . moving down into the forts at the entrance to the Bay.
On 6 May:
. . . we hear from native sources that Satzuma is most indignant at the British demands and declines altogether to listen to them. In such case we fear there is no alternative but hostilities.
Jardine, Matheson had replied asking him to ‘use his best endeavours’ for the protection of their property in Nagasaki. Glover wrote again on 16 May:
War now appears inevitable and the communities are leaving the port with their valuables. The Governor states that a distinction will be made between the different nationalities but the Americans, Dutch and other foreigners do not put much faith in this . . . Full particulars are forwarded for publication in the North China Herald & Recorder.
Morrison’s dispatches to Edo were on the same lines as those of Glover to Shanghai and almost certainly he was the Consul’s