Today is the 80th Anniversary of VJ Day. I’m sure that many others here had relatives who fought in the Far East during the war, my relation was no one special.
While a prisoner in Taiwan, there was an army chaplain who drew portraits of some of the men (and also the Japanese guards, who gave him paper and pencils in return).
There is currently an exhibition of some of these portraits at the National Memorial Arboretum (just north of Birmingham) and I believe that others are held by the Imperial War Museum at Duxford.
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My relative was born in 1916, one of seven children. By the time of the 1921 Census his father worked as a Yard Inspector for the Great Western Railway at Gloucester railway station. (His father had actually started working for GWR as a “Lad Porter” at the age of 13 and worked his way up).
The home is recorded as having five rooms (that includes the kitchen but not a bathroom if there was one). So there were nine people living in four rooms plus a kitchen.
There is then a newspaper article of him taking part in a Sunday School Union “Gloucester Scripture Examination” (Gloucester Citizen, 3 April 1929, Page 4 Col 3):-
“For the Gloucester Sunday School Union scholars scripture examination the subject was “Jesus at His Work” … Scholars numbering 142 and nine teachers from 12 schools competed; 23 candidates passed with honours certificate, 66 first class and 46 second class”
However, he didn’t do particularly well and only got a second class pass.
His father died when he was 18 and, by the time of the 1939 Register, he was working as a Railway Porter for the LMS Railway at Gloucester station. His mother also worked there as a Waiting Room Attendant. Two of his sisters still lived at home; one worked as a Cook in a cafe and the other as a Shop Assistant.
He then enlisted in the army in Gloucester on 15th March 1940 and joined, for some reason, the Royal Norfolk Regiment. He then spent the next 18 months on coastal defence duties near Great Yarmouth and elsewhere.
Then in October 1941 they sailed from Liverpool on a very roundabout route to go to Singapore. First of all they sailed in entirely the opposite direction towards Halifax in Canada. Then in Canada they transferred to a US navy ship and then sailed to Trinidad and South Africa before arriving in India on the 29th December 1941. They stayed in India for three weeks before sailing for Singapore.
They arrived in Singapore on 29th January 1942 and were pitched right in to the fighting from the moment they arrived until the British surrender just over two weeks later on 15th February.
He was taken to Changi Jail. He stayed there for nine months until they were moved to southern Taiwan (called Formosa back in those days) and he then spent over two years at Haito (or Heito) POW camp near the present day city of Pingtung in Taiwan.
Others were sent to Thailand and Burma to work on the “Death Railway” (the real “Bridge on the River Kwai”).
Rather than building a railway, my relative and those with him were forced to pick rocks and stones up from a vast area of an old dried river-bottom near the camp so that the land could be made ready to plant sugar cane.
Altogether 132 men died here, the highest in-camp death rate of all the Taiwan POW camps. Ironically, the single event that caused the largest loss of life at one time was when the US Air Force bombed the camp on 7 Feb 1945 which killed 28 POWs and injured a further 80. Fortunately, it happened during the day so most POWs were out in the fields or working in the local sugar factory - otherwise the death toll would have been much higher.
Shortly after the bombing, most of the prisoners were transferred to other camps and my relative was moved to Taihoku camp on 15 Feb 1945 which was near to the capital city of Taipei.
His mother received word in 1943 that he was still alive and a prisoner and she died a few months later.
After the war, he returned to Gloucester and married in 1951
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But while he was in Taiwan there was also an army chaplain there by the name of Fred Stallard. Fred had previously been a vicar in Northampton but became an army chaplain soon after the war started and, like my relative, was captured in Singapore.
Fred created drawings of the Japanese guards, who in return gave him pencils and paper. He also produced sketches of many of his fellow prisoners using these materials.
Below is the sketch he did of my relative and also some other sketches that he did.
After the war, Fred became a cathedral Canon and also the vicar of a nearby church. As well as this, he also taught RE in the local girls grammar school. Fred died in 2003
There’s no real point to this, except maybe to highlight that a lot of Far East prisoners of war get overlooked when people remember this time.
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And just to go totally off topic, I know the girls grammar school that he taught at (it's since been closed). In that city there was only one girls grammar but two boys grammar schools. So it was much more difficult for girls to get a grammar education – there were twice as many places for boys as there were for girls.
Today that would be a classic case of indirect discrimination, but back in the 1970s that was totally acceptable.