Maxwell Hall

Lt. Col. John Maxwell Hall on the left of the picture, at the War Crimes Trial of Japanese officers, December 1945, Labuan.

Not to be confused with John Hall Maxwell.

John Maxwell Hall, known most commonly as Maxwell Hall, was a British colonial administrator, judge and author who lived in and wrote about North Borneo (now Sabah).

Early life and career

Hall was born at Kempshot, near Montego Bay, Jamaica, on 7 October 1884, the son of Maxwell Hall and Agnes Gertrude Tullis.

Hall was appointed West Coast Resident, North Borneo, in 1931.[1] Before World War II and the Japanese invasion of Borneo, Maxwell Hall was a senior judge. Immediately after the war he was the Chief Advocate at some of the war crimes trials held at Labuan (holding the rank of Lieutenant Colonel) and was attached to BBCAU, the British Borneo Civil Affairs Unit which was responsible for the running of North Borneo and other territories after the handover from Australian military control.[2]

A description by K. G. Tregonning

In his 1960 book North Borneo, K. G. Tregonning described Maxwell Hall as

J. Maxwell Hall, a retired senior officer of the Chartered Company ... one of the very few elderly Englishmen living in the Colony ... the grand old man of the territory.
He lives in a two-storied wooden house, sparsely furnished, as befits his Spartan physique, the owner of some fifty acres of land. On this he has built a half dozen homes, which he rents, with five acres or so of land, to Chinese market gardeners ... He lives as a South-East Asian squire, in solitary contentment: but instead of becoming, after fifty years' service in North Borneo, the grand old man of reminiscences ... this grizzled old live-wire lives vigorously for the present and the future. He is perhaps one of the most wide-awake and pertinent observers of the North Borneo of today whom it was my privilege to meet.
He has written well of the past, in several hard-to-secure books published locally, for he has an historian's bent, and he has contributed numerous articles ... He is writing yet another tale, the history of Labuan. But all this is relaxation; for he is no ivory tower writer, and it is the problems and the possibilities of the present that interest his wide-ranging curiosity and evoke his keenest comments.[3]

Several of Maxwell Hall's books have been reprinted, most recently Labuan Story: Memoirs of a Small Island near the Coast of North Borneo in 2008.

Selected works by Maxwell Hall

References

  1. ↑ Ingram, Kenneth (2000). Manuscript Sources for the History of the West Indies. University of the West Indies Press. p. 194. Retrieved 2008-12-09.
  2. ↑ http://cas.awm.gov.au/photograph/122770. The photograph caption (which may be incorrect) describes him as 'Former Chief Justice' of North Borneo; this post was held by C. F. C. Macaskie from 1934-1945 (Macaskie's Who's Who entry). If the caption is correct, the dates of Hall's tenure as Chief Justice are uncertain.
  3. ↑ North Borneo K. G. Tregonning, 1960, 72-3

Bibliography

External links

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