This year is the 70th anniversary of the end of WW11 and to mark it I’ve published the true story of a small brass wartime cross, made by prisoners of war of the Japanese in 1942. The cross stood on the altar of their makeshift chapels during their three and a half years of captivity, both in Changi in Singapore and then in Thailand when they were sent to work as slave labour on the Death Railway.
My father, who was an army chaplain, brought the cross home with him at the end of the war and kept it in his study for many years until after his death. Then my mother decided to send it out to the new museum in Singapore where it is now displayed on the altar of their reconstructed chapel. My brother and I took it out to the museum in 1992 and since then it seems to have had a life of its own.
In the book I have included the memories of POWs who recalled what the cross meant to them and in particular Tim Hemmings, now in his nineties, who engraved the regimental badges of my father’s wartime ‘parish’ on to the cross. Tim used an old umbrella stem as an engraving tool and when I visited him in Bexhill last summer he said he had never forgotten about the cross and was astonished to hear about its travels.
There had always been a mystery about which POW actually constructed the cross out of a brass Howitzer shell case to my father’s pencilled design. But in 1997 I received a phone call from Bernard Stogden, in Pontypridd, who was very excited to tell me that he’d just discovered that his father, Harry, was the man who made it. It is not surprising because Harry was a skilled engineer and in the prison camp he repaired vehicles and made joints for artificial limbs as well as undertaking the unusual task of creating an altar cross from scraps of metal. Harry became a keen member of the church and took confirmation lessons under my father’s instruction. The tragedy is that Harry, who was then sent to work in the Japanese mines, survived the war but died from beriberi on the boat on the way home. Seven year old Bernard and his young sisters, whose mother had already died, became orphans. In 1997 Bernard travelled out to Singapore to see the wartime cross for the first time and to hold it in his hands. “I took it out of the case and I held it. It was a wonderful day. I felt that my father had held it and he’d made it and that was a lot to me and I felt I was walking in his footsteps. It was a very moving time”.
Bernard and I realised that our fathers must have been good friends in the prison camp and we’ve dedicated the book to Harry and, in Bernard’s words: “all the other poor souls who perished”.
I hope it is a small but fitting tribute to all the men who, 70 years ago, did not return home.
The Changi Cross A Symbol of Hope in the Shadow of War by Louise Cordingly is published by Art Angels Ltd on March 1st ISBN 978 0 9926954 15