Reconciliation by Julie Summers

At the moment I and about six million fans of the ITV drama series, Home Fires, are locked in a battle-royal with the network. After just two seasons the show has been axed in order for ITV 'to be able to refresh their drama portfolio'. There has been an outpouring of grief, anger, consternation and disbelief on social media. Fans have been bombing ITV with pots of jam and a petition had reached 23,000 signatures after just one week. To no avail, I suspect. No chance of reconciliation and I suspect ITV will just brush it off as an annoyance.

Bridge on the River Kwai (C) Rod Beattie

That got me thinking about reconciliation and I promised last month I was going to tell a story of the most remarkable show of reconciliation I have ever come across. In August 1945 prisoners of the Japanese were released after three and a half years in captivity. The had been used as slaves by their captors, most famously on the Thailand Burma Railway, but also in mines, on roads and in quarries. Of the 60,000 men who were forced to work on the notorious Death Railway, over 12,000 never returned. It is said that the cost was a life for every sleeper laid along its 415 kilometer length. In addition to the Allied soldiers who died, a shocking 83,000 Malay, Burmese and Tamils also perished, mostly of disease as a result of starvation and squalid conditions. In other parts of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere the death toll was even higher. In all, 130,000 prisoners of war and the same number of civilians were held captive. The story of their plight is well documented in books, films, broadcasts and newspapers. Some of their tales are truly harrowing. Less often does one read about reconciliation between the former prisoners and the Japanese. However, today I was reminded of one man who, despite suffering appallingly, forgave his captors.

Captain Bill Drower c. 1940

I first met Bill Drower, or Captain William M. Drower to give him his full name, when I was researching the biography of my grandfather, Philip Toosey, which appeared in 2005 as The Colonel of Tamarkan: Philip Toosey and the Bridge on the River Kwai. I had been out in Thailand with my mother to see the bridge over the river Kwai, the camps where Toosey had been senior British officer and to talk to some of the prisoners who had been in captivity with him. When I got home there was an envelope on my desk with spidery writing. I opened it and read the first sentence which began: ‘My dear Miss Summers, My name is William Mortimer Drower and your grandfather was kind to me when I got into a spot of bother in the camp gaol…’ Bill was by then 87 and had served in the diplomatic service in Washington for many years.


I knew the story of Bill Drower’s imprisonment, of course I did. Anyone who has read about the railway knows that he fell out with one the guards in the officers’ camp in May 1945, only to be hauled up in front of the psychotic camp commander, Noguchi, and condemned to spend the rest of his life in a hole in the ground. For 77 days he lay in solitary confinement, quietly losing his mind, being fed on just one rice ball a day. Once he woke to find a rat gnawing at his foot. On 16 August 1945 the camp at Kanchanburi was liberated and Bill Drower was dragged out of his prison, more dead than alive. He was suffering from Blackwater fever and was delirious. Some ‘spot of bother’. Amazingly he recovered and the next time my grandfather saw him was in London six months later, when Bill was physically restored to his spectacular 6’3” frame.

This drawing was made from a photograph taken of Bill the day after he was released from his prison

Fifty years later Bill was invited to go on a reconciliation mission to Japan. He agreed on one condition: that he would be allowed to give a speech in Japanese. He had worked at the Japanese Embassy in London in the 1930s and spoke the formal, honorific form of the language. As a translator on the railway he was expected to speak informal Japanese, the language accorded to the lowest in society. His wish was granted and he gave a speech, in honorific Japanese, in Tokyo. It went down extremely well and he received a standing ovation. As a sign of respect and gratitude to this great and humble man, the Japanese hosts offered Bill a trip on the Bullet Train, which he accepted with enthusiasm. He was chatting to the guide and translator about the train and learned from them that the bullet train had been designed by one of their most famous railway engineers.

The guide continued:


‘This engineer designed a railway in Thailand in the Second World War.’


‘I know,’ replied Bill, ‘I helped him to build it.’

Bill at my book launch 2005

Bill Drower was one of the most impressive men I have had the privilege to meet in the whole of my life. I think of him often and with great affection. Shortly before he died I visited him with my youngest son who was 10. Bill's health was deteriorating and I knew he had not long to live. He offered to play chess with Sandy, who was at that stage a junior school team player and very able. Bill told him to set up the game on an old board and as he did so, Bill explained that this board had been dropped into the officers' camp at the end of the war by the RAF so the men had something to entertain them while they waited to be sent home. The officers had given Bill the board as a gift. As they started to play I could see that Bill was way ahead of Sandy and very soon the boy found himself at check mate. A fortnight later I heard that the great man had died. When I told Sandy he said: 'but now I'll never have the chance to beat Bill at chess.' When I related this story to Bill's daughter she wrote back: 'I am amazed. My father had not played chess since 1945.' What an astonishing, impressive and wonderful man he was.

The Colonel of Tamarkan was published in 2005 

Every Picture Tells a Story

Every picture tells a story is an old cliché but it is true. When it comes to illustrating non-fiction, well-used and thoughtfully captioned images can enhance understanding of a story. However all too often books contain pictures that are either poor quality reproductions or badly explained: pictures have to earn their place in books and that the author then has a duty to ensure that they are appropriately captioned.

One of the most extraordinary photographs is of The Endurance. On the face of it this picture is of Shackleton’s ship sinking into the ice of the Weddell Sea in November 1915.

What is significant about the photograph, taken by Frank Hurley was that Shackleton carried it with him in his pocket when he sailed from Elephant Island to South Georgia to raise the rescue mission for the men left behind. Now here’s the critical thing as far as I am concerned: Frank Hurley took a photograph of a sinking ship. Fine. He developed the glass plate (approximately 12" x 8”). Where? On the ice. In a tent. Then he made a little print for Shackleton. Not a big one. Shackleton could not have fitted a big one into his pocket. Where? Also in a tent on the ice. Moving ice at that. In fact we know that Hurley kept a selection of the photographs he had taken on the voyage, prior to The Endurance sinking, because it is recorded that he and Shackleton had to make the terrible decision to jettison the majority of the glass slides as they were so heavy. Shackleton succeeded in making his extraordinary journey in a lifeboat, the James Caird, from Elephant Island to South Georgia, some 800 miles across some of the heaviest seas in the world. He carried this photograph with him in order to prove who he was and what had happened to his ship. It is only slightly more remarkable that the actual photograph still exists.

When my editor was looking for a photograph for the front cover of my book about evacuees she chanced up a famous image of three little children sitting on suitcases with luggage labels round their necks. The picture says everything about the mass evacuation of unaccompanied school children from Britain’s cities to the countryside in the Second World War. Except that this picture is not quite what it seems. It was taken not in 1939 but in 1941 when the children were about to leave from King’s Cross Station for Northampton. They had in fact been evacuated with their parents to Chislehurst Caves in Kent at the beginning of the war but returned to Greenwich before Christmas 1939. It was only when their father got a job as a driver in the RAF that their mother decided the children needed to be evacuated. Barbara, the oldest of the children, seated in the middle, had no recollection of the photograph being taken. Her memories of that day are of being left by their mother and ending up in a beautifully clean house smelling of lavender polish. She and her sister, Rosie, spent eighteen very happy months with Mr and Mrs Rice. 

Their brother John was sent to another family for the duration. They returned to Greenwich after the war and Barbara’s strongest recollection from that period was her determination to be as clean and tidy as her foster parents. Fast-forward sixty years and imagine Barbara’s surprise when her daughter phoned to tell her that the photograph had appeared in the Daily Mirror in 2005. The Royal Mail used it on a stamp for their Britain at War series and the memory of wartime evacuation returned to the forefront of Barbara’s mind. When I interviewed her in 2009 she said: ‘Although I was happy in Northamptonshire and well looked after I never quite lost that nagging sensation of sadness that I would so very much rather have been with my mum, despite all the difficulties of life at home.’

Brigadier Sir Philip Toosey DSO, CBE, 1974. His role as senior
British officer at the Bridge camp in Thailand was immortalised
by Alec Guinness in The Bridge on the River Kwai

A third image (below) is one of my all-time favourites and it helped me better to understand a family story that I wrote about in The Colonel of Tamarkan. Sergeant Major Saito was a Japanese guard in the prison camp on the Thailand-Burma railway where my grandfather and 3,500 men built the bridge over the River Kwai. My grandfather, Lieutenant Colonel (later Brigadier) Philip Toosey, was in charge of the camp and had difficult dealings with the Japanese and Korean guards. On one occasion two officers and six other ranks escaped from the camp into the jungle. This caused a terrible scene and Saito, second-in-command at the camp knew that the deeply-feared Kempei Tai (the equivalent of the Gestapo) would be called in to investigate. Toosey realised the implications of this so took responsibility for the men’s escape. He told Saito he and he alone had known of their intentions to run away (they were later all caught by the Japanese and executed). Saito beat him severely and ordered him to stand to attention for 24 hours in the full heat of the sun, badly knocked about. It was a public punishment intended to humiliate him in front of his own men but it was also for the benefit of the Kempi Tai who would not feel the need to investigate further, thus sparing the camp a much worse fate. Through this and various other contretemps, Saito and Toosey developed a mutual respect and understanding. At the end of the war Toosey was called to screen camp commanders for war crimes. It was here that he came face to face with Saito for the last time. To the guard’s intense surprise Toosey shook him by the hand and told him he was free to go. In his opinion, Saito had treated the POWs firmly but fairly. Thirty years later Saito wrote to him: ‘I especially remember in 1945 when the war ended and when our situations were completely reversed. I was gravely shocked and delighted when you came to shake me by the hand as only the day before you were prisoner. You exchanged friendly words with me and I discovered what a great man you were. You are the type of man who is a real bridge over the battlefield.’

Saito at Toosey's grave 12 August 1984, on what would have been my grandfather's 80th birthday

Saito had wanted to visit Toosey in Britain but the old man was too sick. In 1984 he finally managed to get to Landican cemetery on the Wirral where he visited Toosey’s grave on what would have been his 80^th birthday. This is the photograph taken that day by Toosey’s son, Patrick. Saito wrote to him the next day: ‘I feel very fine because I finish my own strong duty. One thing I regret, I could not visit Mr Philip Toosey when he was alive. He showed me what a human being should be. He changed the philosophy of my life.’