C.R. Boxer

Charles Ralph Boxer FBA (8 March 1904 at Sandown, Isle of Wight – 27 April 2000 at St. Albans, Hertfordshire) was a historian of Dutch and Portuguese maritime and colonial history. In Hong Kong he was the chief spy of the British army intelligence in the tumultuous years leading up to World War II, but it is his lead role in one of the most flamboyantly public love stories of the 1940s, his romance with Emily Hahn, author and one of The New Yorker's most prolific contributors, that accounts for most of this fame.

Charles Ralph Boxer was born on the Isle of Wight in 1904. On his father's side, he was a descendant of an illustrious British family that had served in command positions in every British war since the French Revolution. Boxer's father Colonel Hugh Edward Richard Boxer served in the Lincolnshire Regiment and had been killed at the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915. While his fathers family may have been of Huguenot origin, the family of his mother, Jane Patterson, hailed from Scotland. Her forebears became successful pastoralists in 19th century Tasmania and in Australia.

Charles Boxer was educated at Wellington College and the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, Boxer was gazetted a second lieutenant in the Lincolnshire Regiment in 1923 and served in that regiment for twenty-four years until 1947. He served in Northern Ireland, then, following language and intelligence training, Charles Boxer was seconded to the Imperial Japanese Army in 1930 for three years as part of an exchange of Japanese and English officers. He was assigned to the 38th Infantry Regiment based at Nara, Nara Prefecture, Japan. At the same time, he was assigned to the non-commissioned officers school at Toyohashi. His housekeeper concubine was a northerner from Hakodate on the island of Hokkaido. In 1933, he qualified as an official interpreter in the Japanese language. It was in Japan that he expanded his interest in Portuguese imperial history, concentrating his attention on the first disastrous experiment of European incursion into Japan and its catastrophic ending when Tokugawa closed off the country to outside influence in the 1640s. The Japanese crucified hundreds of Christian missionaries and converts and for good measure executed a delegation of anxious envoys sent out from the Portuguese enclave of Macau to make it entirely clear to the European outsiders that they meant what they said. This was the subject of Boxer's book The Christian Century of Japan. Boxer also took up the traditional Japanese sport of kendo, becoming one of only four British nationals recorded to have done this up until that time. Joining the regimental team he became proficient in the art to the level of being awarded the rank of nidan. He would later use his skill as a method of subterfuge in his profession as a spy when he was sent to Hong Kong in 1936. On visits to the occupied territories he would often have a kendo bout, eat, drink scotch and then pump the various Japanese officers and officials that he was socialising with for information in the true nature of a secret service agent.

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