INTRODUCTION
FEPOW 75
Roger Townsend, Hon. Director
On 7 October 1945 the SS Corfu docked in Southampton, the first of many ships to bring almost 40,000 former Far East Prisoners of War back to the UK, after years of privation and suffering in South East Asia during World War 2.
75 years on, this website seeks to pay tribute to the courage and fortitude of those survivors and of course, to honour the memory of all those who never returned home and still remain somewhere in South East Asia.
We must not forget them.
REUNION DINNER
Hubert Burton reads
No schoolboy, relishing his country’s glory,
Shall read our victory there. It has no name,
No statesman cheered the news,
or full-page story
Roused in the public bars a toast to fame.
No classic ode commends, or sculpted face
Peers from a monument to those who fell.
Even our movements tactically disgrace
the paper-battles soldiers love so well,
And friends avoid, with genuine regret,
Mentioning days they’d like us to forget.
Dearer for us to know – as dear to those
Defeated, sore afflicted companies
Who share no common glory – that from these
Grievous dishonours only honour grows.
Lt John Durnford RA
Image credit: Stan Durnford, published in A Form of Consolation Poems 1942-1945 (1984)
FEPOW75
Histories
The POW camps
Pvt. Basil Elvin Ferron RAMC Slaughterhouse and pigsty, Ubon POW Camp. Thailand 1945
Over 190,000 British and Commonwealth troops were taken prisoner by the Imperial Japanese during the Second World War. For many of those who were held captive in the Far East life was brutally harsh. Many were forced to carry out slave labour under the harshest of conditions, with barely enough food to survive. Most were malnourished and often starving, while many suffered from diseases, such as cholera, dysentery and malaria. Obtaining enough food to survive became their primary concern, with rations shared out equally between them helping to maintain morale inside the camps.
Conditions inside the POW camps varied, but for the prisoners on the Thailand Burma ‘Death Railway’, the suffering was terrible. Between 1942 and 1945 over 60,000 British, Commonwealth and Dutch prisoners were forced to work on the railway, enduring the most brutal and harsh conditions imaginable, including long hours of intense heavy labour with minimal food and water, which led to over 16,000 of them perishing.
Prisoners were often moved at short notice, often being forced to walk hundreds of miles, from camp to camp. Others travelled by boat or train, with some being taken to Japan, where they were forced to work in mines.
Hellships: The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru
US Navy Supply Officer, Lt. Willard Carroll Johnson USS Canopus. Sketch of sinking of the Lisbon Maru, 2 October 1942, made while at Kobe POW camp, Japan.
On 1st of October 1942, The Lisbon Maru was torpedoed and sunk off the coast of China near Shanghai while carrying prisoners and troops to Japan. Over 800 British prisoners lost their lives.
Further information on the Lisbon Maru & other hellships In Memory Of...The Poetry of John Durnford
John Durnford
Stanley John Harper Durnford was born on 9 March 1920 in Edinburgh. Educated at Sherborne School from 1934 – 38, he won the English Verse Prize in 1936/37 and 1938; when he also won the Barnes Elocution Prize and the Longmuir English Prize. He edited the School magazine.
He went up to Trinity Hall, Cambridge in 1938 to read History and a promising career beckoned; possibly in education, or the Church. However he was only there a year when War was declared and in September 1939 he quickly joined the Royal Artillery and was posted to Malaya. Leaving Glasgow in March 1941 he made friends on board ship with officers of the Lanarkshire Yeomanry and transferred to that regiment, attached to the Artillery. He arrived in Bombay and after training with the Ghurkas sailed again across the Andaman Sea to Port Swettenham in North Malaya, landing there in August. He fought all the way down the peninsula from Kedah on the Siamese frontier in December 1941 to the last days of the battle for Singapore, culminating in the fall of that island on 15 February 1942, when out of 130,000 Commonwealth casualties he was one of 38,496 British troops captured by the Japanese. In October he was sent with 21,000 other FEPOW to Siam/Thailand to work on the River Kwai ‘Death’ Railway, in country that contained panther, pythons, rattlesnakes and iguana, where even the Thai villagers were afraid to go. 12,399 FEPOW died there, alongside over 90,000 Asiatic labourers.
John Durnford was in Khanburi camps for over three years helping to build that railway, spending a gruelling 12 hour working day where each man was designated a cubic metre of earth or stone to excavate by hand. Unlike in Europe, officers below the rank of Captain were also expected to do manual work and as a Lieutenant John endured hardships such as starvation, personal assaults and the epidemic diseases of dysentery, malaria and cholera with minimal medical assistance. He wrote his verse at night and with no electricity he had to write by the light of a lamp made of an old tin filled with coconut oil.
It took some days after VJ Day for news to reach Khanburi and Durnford was finally liberated on 2 September 1945. Thanks to the efforts of Earl Mountbatten he was one of 1,134 FEPOW repatriated from Rangoon to Southampton on the P & O liner ‘Corfu’: arriving on 8 October: the first of 22 ships carrying FEPOW to dock here. No families or girlfriends were allowed to meet them, but they were greeted on board the ship by General Sir Ronald Adam: the Adjutant General and by Lord Nathan, the Acting War Minister, who gave each FEPOW a written message of welcome from King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. John Durnford has written poems describing his return to Southampton, which feature here.
On disembarkation John and his fellow FEPOW were kept for two days under canvas on Southampton Common before he was given a rail warrant to return to his parents’ home in Bath, having not seen each other for over four years. Other FEPOW were not so lucky: returning home to find that their wives had re-married and girlfriends had not waited. All had to acclimatise to relationships that they had not had for four years.
The following year John Durnford married Pauline Hansford and their son, Peter, was born in 1947.
*****
In common with many thousands of his fellow FEPOW survivors the Peace was not kind to John Durnford. Although he took a regular commission as a Captain and pilot in the Army Air Corps, the memories of his time as a FEPOW were always fresh and he suffered from bouts of severe depression and alcoholism. Following a breakdown when flying in North Africa in 1952, he was retired from the Army on an 80% invalid pension, rising eventually to 100%.
Still with a deep faith he initially started to train for the priesthood, but then took a number of humdrum jobs: being unable to settle at any of them, taking a heavy toll on his personal and family life. Eventually he retired to Box in Wiltshire, where he died on 11 August 1995.
His marital life was also unstable, fathering three other children by separate mothers: Sara; Caroline & Tom and the siblings rarely communicated.
He wrote his story Branch Line to Burma which was published by MacDonald in 1958, but unable to find a publisher for his poetry he did self-publish Immortal Diamond in 1975 and A form of Consolation: Poems from 1942-1945 in 1984.
*****
John Durnford’s poem Dedication, written for a reunion of the 18th (East Anglian) Division at the House of Commons on 7 October 1956, forms the cornerstone for FEPOW 75.
Hubert Burton reads Reunion Dinner
Southampton
Repatriation
Repatriation
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Further Reading
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