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P.A. Crush

Re Claude William Kinder's lack of pension & what other chief engineers were paid.

JPG

Letter

Claude William Kinder

G.E. Morrison

PEKING, CHINA. June l0¬th, 1912. My dear Kinder, Your letter of the 14th May reached me in due course. Gladly would I do anything I could for you. Certainly you ought to have a pension, though I understand you voluntarily relinquished all idea of getting one, saying that you were perfectly satisfied with the treatment given you, but in the present impoverished state of China's finances, I doubt whether a suggestion to this effect would meet, with a favourable response. The Chinese quickly forget that men have done for them. You ought to have paid yourself better. It was the one great blemish on your famous career that you valued your own services and those of your subordinates too lightly. You left the service with an unblemished reputation, and it is absurd to think that you were “kicked out”  or your job. I thought Foley got £1,600 a year, together with a bonus which is usually the equivalent of a month's  salary. Ricketts gets £2,000, and considering the importance of the work. Although I do not think he does his work well - for all accounts agree that he is the most indolent engineer-in-chief who was ever given such an appoinyment, more indolent even than Collinson - this is not too much. Tuckey seemed to me to be underpaid at £2,500 a year – you get no thanks  for underpaying work. No man ever rendered more honest services to China than you did. When you left, you were so foolish as to write a letter, expressing your complete satisfaction at the way you had been treated.  It was I who took up the  cudgels for you and put in that leader in the paper , pointing out how scurvily you had been treated, contrasting the trifling sum given to you with the handsome gift made to Jadot.  By the way I spoke about this to the Yuchuan Pu. They gave me the explanation that Jadot received  his  present from the Belgians who were then powerful enough to pass it to him. Things are not getting on very well here.  The fight between the Provinces and the Central Government is being renewed, and it looks very much as if we were to have the same kind of trouble that took place In connection with the Chekiang Railways. With all good wishes to you, Very sincerely yours, (signature of  )   G.E . Morrison  (  ) P.S. I think you ought to answer, if you do not mind, the following extraordinary statemeny which appears in the “Dublin Review” for May, ( or April?) written by C.J.L. Gilson. -Nor were these suicides confined to the inhabitants of the northern provinces of Chili and Shantung, but men walked hundreds of miles in order to get themselves killed that their families might thereby profit.

1912.06.10

P.A.Crush & C.W.Kinder