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[This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Margaret Jones from Three Counties Action at the Bedford Museum Project in Riseley on behalf of Alison Keating and has been added to the site with her permission. Mrs.Keating fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.]
This is a story about my father as remembered by me and from information gained later.

My father worked in the Malayan Civil Service in the Chinese Protectorate section. We lived in Singapore, but my father travelled up country as well and we had lived in other places in Malaya. We had been on home leave in 1939 but by mid 1940 there were anxieties about Japanese intentions and my mother and we 3 children were shipped to Australia. My father was then treated as a single man and was sent up county — it had not been possible before because there were no proper facilities for families. He worked in some of the towns in the N. E. of Malaya and was probably near the spot where the Japanese landed. We know this from my uncle who worked in the Mines Department and met my father in Singapore after the retreat from Malaya.

After the retreat, my father worked his way back to Singapore but as he had no job there, he joined the Straits Settlement Volunteer Force FEPO which was a sort of Dad’s Army, as a captain and he was armed. They defended the Island until February 1942 when the Japanese bombed it then swarmed in and there was a call to surrender. After the surrender the men broke up all their arms so the Japanese could not have them. My father was now regarded as a military man and he would have known what they did to the military. He did not escape but was captured and put in Changi Jail for some months.
There was already a railway line from Singapore to Bangkok in Siam but the Japanese wanted to extend it from there to Burma and China. They put all the military prisoners, who were mostly young, into cattle trucks and shipped them to Bangkok where my father was put in prison in Kanchenaburi. He was made to labour on the new railway line which included the infamous Bridge on the River Kwai. They lived on little but a small amount of rice a day and were abused and ill-treated. The railway was finished in 1943 by which time the men were wrecks.

We did have some communication from him. He was allowed to send pre-printed cards with gaps for a choice of substitute words so we knew that he had been captured and was alive. But the cards took 8/9 months to arrive in Australia. He apparently died in 1944 in a different camp but a card from him still reached us in 1945. We were told that he died of a heart attack following pneumonia but they all had many other diseases and he would probably have had an inherited blood condition called Iron Overload. When the Japanese surrendered in August 1945 all internees were rescued and returned to the UK before sorting out who they were. So in September 1945 we set off from Australia for UK and the cable telling us of his death only caught up with the ship in Durban.

This story is linked to A WARTIME REFUGEE IN AUSTRALIA

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