The Changi Cross and a small miracle
Last week I wrote about VJ Day and how much it had meant to relatives of the Far East prisoners-of-war, but I’ve been asked now to say more about the small brass altar cross which my father brought home in his belongings, and how it has touched so many lives since then.
In 1942 the cross was forged in the prison camp in Changi Singapore by a skilled engineer who made it out of the brass of a howitzer shell case to the specifications my father sketched in a pencilled diagram.
My father, Padre Eric Cordingly, kept it with him throughout the war and it graced the altars of four little prison chapels in the three and a half years he was in captivity before he brought it home with him and placed it on a shelf in his study.
Years after my father died, my mother was still caring for the cross and then she heard that there was now a small museum in Changi and she thought that’s where the cross ought to be. So my brother John and I took it out for her in 1992 and the prison Chaplain blessed it
and put it in pride of place on the altar of the reconstructed open air chapel. It is a working chapel and visitors leave hand-written notes and scarlet and yellow hibiscus flowers on the altar beside it.
That could have been the end of the story but, for one man, the cross was yet to perform a small miracle. Harry Stogden, the engineer who made the cross, tragically died of beri beri on the boat on the way home, and his son, Bernard has spent a lifetime missing him. But one day something caught his eye in a prisoner-of-war newsletter. “It was a story of the Cross of how it was made by a Staff Sergeant, and the only name they had was his Christian name ‘Harry’. The words were jumping off the page, I knew this man must be my father.” Bernard contacted the man who had written the article: “‘I knew Harry very well’ he said. ‘He was an extraordinary man. He was a very clever engineer. He made needles for sewing machines and he designed a self-locking joint to use in artificial limbs.'” Bernard was thrilled: “Believe me I couldn’t have felt more proud to listen to all the marvellous things my Dad had done.”
He quickly arranged to go out to Singapore and when he finally arrived at the museum he found himself overcome with emotion. “I absolutely broke down and the people that were there dispersed while I was in this situation. Then I said ‘I’m alright now’ and the lady I’d been in contact with said ‘This is your father’s cross. We’ve unscrewed it all ready for you’ and 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 I felt I was walking in his footsteps. Everywhere I went my father had been there. It was a very moving time.”
Changi Museum and Chapel are currently closed for major renovation. As an independent museum it was so successful that the Singapore National Heritage Board decided to take it over and I’m happy to say that I now have a huge file of legal papers assuring me that when the museum opens next year the cross will be displayed and cared for as one of their most precious artifacts.
The photos show: Eric Cordingly’s pencilled sketch of the proposed Changi Cross; Reverend Henry Khoo, Changi Prison Chaplain, accepting the gift of the cross from John Cordingly and Louise Reynolds in 1992; the cross displayed on the altar of the reconstructed open air chapel in Changi Museum Chapel; and Bernard Stogden holding the cross in the chapel in 1998.