Morris "Two-Gun" Cohen

Born Moszek Abram Miączyn to an Orthodox Jewish family in Radzanów, Congress Poland, in 1887, he was brought to London's East End in 1889 and later emigrated to Canada, serving in the Canadian Expeditionary Force during the First World War. From 1922 he belonged to the entourage of Sun Yat-sen, the founding father of modern China, acting as his aide-de-camp and bodyguard; the two revolvers he carried earned him the nickname “Two-Gun Cohen”, and he eventually held the rank of general in the Chinese Nationalist forces. Captured when Hong Kong fell in December 1941, he was held by the Japanese at Stanley Internment Camp and freed in a prisoner exchange in 1943. According to his biographer Daniel S. Levy, in 1947 he used a 1920 letter from Sun Yat-sen supporting Zionism to press Wu Tieh-cheng, head of the Chinese delegation, to abstain rather than vote against the UN partition plan (Resolution 181) — China did abstain; he died in Salford, England, in 1970 and was buried in Blackley Jewish Cemetery, Manchester, beneath a headstone inscribed in English, Hebrew and Chinese.