Two-Gun Cohen
There are a hundred tales of cockneys setting forth to make their mark on the world – as soldiers and explorers, as the adventurers who travelled to build the New World of the Americas and Australia.
But few stories are stranger than that of an East End boy who started life going from police station to reformatory, but ended it as a general in the Chinese army, and one of the most influential figures in that vast country in the years leading up to Mao’s revolution.
Morris Cohen was born in 1887, the son of Polish Jewish immigrants to the East End. His birthright was a life of devout religious piety and crushing poverty.
Cohen soon gave up on his studies, spending his time on the streets of Whitechapel, watching the card sharps and the conmen working their pitches. In 1900 he was arr-ested for the first time, for picking pockets.
He was sent to reform school and then, as was the custom in those days, shipped off to the Colonies – western Canada in Cohen’s case.
Shipping a 13-year-old boy halfway round the world with no prospect of ever seeing his family again seems a brutal remedy, but Cohen seemed to take to the rugged life of the Canadian wilds. He spent years wandering between Manitoba and British Columbia, building up a reputation as a hustler, a rabble-rouser and general troublemaker, with a taste for gambling and women.
Returning to the prairies after service in the Great
War, Cohen went back to his card-sharping and con tricks at the carnies and fairs that travelled around western Canada.
He became a regular customer at a Chinese gambling house in Saskatoon, where one evening he happened upon an armed robbery in progress. Cohen came to the aid of the Chinese owner – an extraordinary deed in a racist age when the Chinese were considered fair targets.
Bodyguard
Cohen now became lauded as a hero by the Chinese community and found himself becoming interested in the volatile world of Chinese politics. The conflicting forces of Nationalism and Communism were soon to vye for leadership of that country, as its ancient imperial system teetered toward collapse.
In 1922, Cohen set off for China itself, signing up as a bodyguard for legendary political leader Sun Yat-sen. He became fascinated by Sun’s ambitious plans to unify and develop China into a modern nation state. The stocky tough guy became a familiar figure at the leader’s side, earning the soubriquet ‘Two-Gun’ as he always strode around with two enormous pistols at his hips.
Cohen was an aggressive and ambitious man, and his habit of talking up his own achievements saw him slowly rising to become an influential figure in Nationalist China. He became a friend and confidant to key figures in the revolution, and a general in the Chinese Army.
The sharp-dealing Cohen was also building up a fortune as a property tycoon and arms dealer. Extraordinarily, he prospered in Asia while never learning a word of Chinese, but his career was abruptly halted with the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong. He was interned, and spent years in brutal prison camps.
Gambling
Back at liberty, Cohen trod a blurred line. The Nationalists and Communists were bitter enemies, China splitting into the tiny Nationalist-ruled Taiwan while Mao’s Comm-unists took control of the huge new People’s Republic. Cohen professed loyalty, at various times, to both sides.
Ageing, and with his savings exhausted by his love of gambling and women, Cohen increasingly blurred fact and fiction, talking up his exploits to ever-greater heights.
Picking back through his extraordinary story, it’s often hard to separate his deeds from his dreams. What is certain is that Morris ‘Two-Gun’ Cohen – huckster and conman, soldier and diplomat – did more than most Westerners to promote understanding of the Chinese in an age when his contemporaries saw no further than the opium den stereotype.
Two-Gun Cohen –
A Biography by Daniel S Levy. ISBN 0312156812.