Morris Cohen (adventurer)

Morris Abraham "Two-Gun" Cohen (1887–1970) was a British and Canadian adventurer of Jewish origin who became aide-de-camp to Sun Yat-sen and a major-general in the Chinese National Revolutionary Army.

According to a 1954 biography written by Charles Drage with Cohen's assistance, Morris Cohen was born in London in 1889 to a family that had just arrived from Poland. However Cohen was actually born in 1887 into a poor Jewish family in Radzanów, Poland, about 45 miles northwest of Warsaw. Soon after his birth the Cohens escaped the pogroms of Eastern Europe and emigrated to the St George in the East parish in London's East End.

Cohen loved the theaters, the streets, the markets, the foods and the boxing arenas of the British capital more than he did the Jews' Free School, and in April 1900 he was arrested as "a person suspected of attempting to pick pockets". A magistrate sent him to the Hayes Industrial School, an institution set up by the likes of Lord Rothschild to care for and train wayward Jewish lads. He was released in 1905 and Cohen's parents shipped the young Morris off to western Canada with the hope that the fresh air and open plains of the New World would reform his ways.

Cohen initially worked on a farm near Whitewood, Saskatchewan. He tilled the land, tended the livestock and learned to shoot a gun and play cards. He did that for a year, and then started wandering through the Western provinces, making a living as a carnival talker, gambler, grifter and successful real estate broker. Some of his activities landed him in jail.

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