Identification card/work permit photo taken in Shanghai of Agnes ('Peggie') Orchin in 1942. Born ...

Identification card/work permit photo taken in Shanghai of Agnes ('Peggie') Orchin in 1942. Born England in 1897, Peggie met and married Alfred Cecil 'Copper' Orchin, who had served with the Leicestershire Regiment and the Royal Flying Corps during the First World War, in 1918. In the early 1920s he accepted a job offer from a friend whose father ran a firm in Dairen in China, and Peggie and their new son Douglas accompanied him to China, establishing a home in this port town. Douglas died aged two; two other children - Pamela (born 1921) and James Michael (born 1927) - were born in China. The family moved to Tsingtao later in the 1920s; their children were mainly educated at the Catholic Inland Missionary School at Chefoo. They were all placed under house arrest by the Japanese in December 1941, and allowed to repatriate to England from Shanghai in August 1942, but missed their boat. As a result they became internees, housed at the Columbia Country Club until April 1943, and at the Lunghwa Civil Assembly Area (an internment camp) until the end of the war. Pamela died of malnutrition on 16 December 1944. Peggie was actively involved in organising committees which were vital to the orderly operation of the camps and at the end of the war, removed a large collection of papers from the abandoned Camp Commondants office, which turned out to be the nominal roll of all the internees at Lunghwa. After the end of the war the family returned to England; Alfred Cecil died on 22 April 1959, having never really recovered from the ordeal; Peggie died in 1995, aged 98, and Michael married and emigrated with his family to Australia in 1971.