Hunger Parties
How a Canadian woman raised the morale of fellow civilian prisoners in a Japanese Second World War internment camp.
How a Canadian woman raised the morale of fellow civilian prisoners in a Japanese Second World War internment camp.
It’s the early 1940s in wartorn Singapore. We join a group of women dressed to the nines in fashionable tea dresses, hair done up in victory rolls. They’ve just sat down to lunch at an immaculately laid table. At the centre is a bouquet of daisies with sprigs of fern and a basket of bread with a crisp brown crust. Conversation flows and glasses tinkle.
Except, there are no glasses. Nor crockery, nor cutlery. The bread and the bouquet of flowers do not exist either. They are all figments of the women’s imaginations. Shabbily dressed and stick-thin, some have sores on their skin and swollen feet — clear signs of malnutrition. Yet, here they are, on the verge of starvation, discussing the ultimate recipe for treacle sponge pudding.
From 1942 to 1945, these women were imprisoned by the Japanese in Singapore’s notorious Changi internment camp. Their perverse tea parties were a survival tactic dreamt up by Canadian prisoner Ethel Rogers Mulvany. According to Mulvany’s memoirs, the exercise in make-believe served the practical purpose of stimulating the saliva glands, helping to stave off relief from hunger pains, a condition that was known to precede death. “We would think and we would swallow saliva,” she later wrote, her memories of Changi still fresh long after her return to Canada.
Originally from Ontario’s Manitoulin Island, Mulvany followed her British doctor husband to Singapore in 1940. Energetic and strong-willed, she was volunteering as an aid worker with the Australian Red Cross when the island was invaded by the Japanese on December 8, 1941.
It was under the Canadian woman’s guidance that fellow prisoners — the majority were British, but there were also inmates from Australia, New Zealand, the United States, the Netherlands, and other countries — debated the ingredients needed for their imaginary dishes. They faithfully transcribed nearly eight hundred recipes for cakes, pies, roasts, soups, and fish dishes into two large prison ledgers. Upon her return to Canada in 1946, Mulvany had twenty thousand copies of the book printed, raising $18,000 to help former prisoners of war who were hospitalized in Britain.
Today, a rare original copy of the Prisoner of War Cookbook resides at the Canadian War Museum, its cover ragged around the edges, its typewritten pages yellowed with time.
Rescued from oblivion by the work of Ottawa historian Suzanne Evans, the cookbook was republished by the Manitoulin Historical Society in 2013.
The cookbook, however, is not the only thing for which Mulvany is remembered. While at Changi, she also initiated other projects that kept up the spirits of her fellow prisoners and ensured that their suffering would not be forgotten. n the day Singapore fell to the Japanese — February 15, 1942 — Ethel Mulvany, according to her memoirs, was speeding the wounded to hospital by amulance, “accelerators right to the floorboards” in the “hideous slam bang horror of battle.” Later in the day, she surrendered her vehicle and joined hundreds of other civilian captives as they marched to Changi jail. The Japanese capture of Singapore had caught the British army unawares. From Mulvany’s bluntly worded memoirs, which rail against “the pettiness, the jealousies … the absolute cowardice” of military top brass, we can imagine her fury at the British army as she entered the prison camp.
Changi, a district in eastern Singapore, had a notorious prison that held civilians during the Second World War. Originally built by the British colonial authorities to hold 600 people, the complex was crowded with about 1,000 women, 330 children and 1,100 men. Conditions were even worse at a nearby barracks in Changi called Selarang. Built for 800, Selarang held as many as 17,000 thousand Allied prisoners of war.
Most of the women prisoners were wives or daughters of diplomats and came from lives of ease and privilege. Many were mothers accompanied by young children, whom they somehow had to care for. They were crammed into bug-infested cells, with little more than “bubu,” a tasteless mixture of rice and water, for sustenance, and their new living conditons were quite a shock. As fellow prisoner Sheila Bruhn (née Allan), author of Diary of a Girl in Changi, wrote, prisoners had to learn to “bow wow wow” under threat of “a clout on the head, a bayonet … thrust in front of you or even a kick on the backside that could send you sprawling onto your face.”
Stepping up to the mark, Mulvany appointed herself Red Cross representative, a title never recognised by the Japanese, which nonetheless ended up winning her some freedoms — albeit temporarily — such as driving a battle-scarred army truck out of the camp to sell the women’s jewellery and buy extra food to supplement their meagre diet. While out on these trips, she would buy items such as “weevily dog biscuits” to keep the women’s hunger pangs at bay.
In a written interview from New South Wales, Australia, Bruhn remembered that Mulvany also bought rolls of fabric so that the women could make clothing for themselves and their children.
Mulvany’s leadership role did not go down well with everyone. As prisoners adapted to life in the camp, establishing a pecking order that reflected colonial society, the audacious Canadian may have been seen as acting above her station. Bruhn remembered that Mulvany was seen as a “bossy” and “overbearing” charac-
ter, but that “perhaps the women were jealous because she had the opportunity to go outside the prison and ... [they] felt the Japanese officials were favouring her.” Nonetheless, the controversial Mulvany rose above the interpersonal tensions to embark on an ingenious venture. During the first nine months of internment, female prisoners were forbidden from communicating with their menfolk in the adjoining prison. In some cases, they did not know if their loved ones were even alive. It was Mulvany who hit upon a novel means of communication after seeing a project carried out by a group of Girl Guides in the camp.
The girls had secretly been meeting once a week in a corner of the exercise yard, where they clandestinely sewed a patchwork quilt as a surprise birthday present for their guide leader. One of the Girl Guides was Olga Henderson (née Morris), who was ten years old at the time. “It was being naughty, but we were enjoying it,” she said in an interview with the BBC in 2015. “The Japanese didn’t like anything unusual.”
Mulvany saw the potential to advance the quilt-making project by including secret messages. As Bernice Archer, a British historian, recounts in her book A Patchwork of Internment, each woman was given a square of rice sack and instructed by Mulvany to put “something of themselves” on it. Three quilts were made. The first, dedicated to the Japanese Red Cross, with images of the Rising Sun and Mount Fuji, was designed to flatter their captors and to pave the way for second and third quilts, dedicated to the British and Australian Red Cross, respectively. Subtle, coded messages were sewn onto the squares. All were sent to a craft fair organized by the civilian men in their section of the camp in September 1942.
For the men imprisoned next door, the initialled patchwork squares, with their very personal images — flowers, cells, a clock with wings, and even a mother rabbit with a baby rabbit wearing a blue ribbon collar to indicate that a son had been born in prison — were the first signs that wives, sweethearts, sisters, mothers, and children were still alive. “The information was used to say ‘all well,’” said Henderson, who returned to England after the war.
The quilts were “alive with sentiments of love and encouragement,” said Bruhn, who embroidered a map of Australia on her square. Brought up in Malaya, the Eurasian teenager had been keen to let her Australian father know that she intended to go back to his homeland someday, in accordance with his wishes. Heartbreakingly, as recorded in her diary, he died three months before liberation.
“If it had not been for Ethel, there would not have been the Changi quilts,” said Bruhn, who lives in Australia and has been giving talks on the story behind the quilts since 1995. Today, the Japanese and Australian quilts are exhibited at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. The British quilt is at the British Red Cross headquarters in London, England, and the original Girl Guide quilt that inspired the project now resides at the Imperial War Museum, also in London. y early 1943, Changi jail was severely overcrowded, with an influx of new prisoners swelling numbers. Yet, crammed three to a tiny cell, with the impacts of by-now-severe hunger, disease, and general squalor making themselves felt, the women were making the best of it, organizing classes, activities and concerts, all recorded in Pow Wow, the camp newspaper.
Mulvany’s memoirs do not mention any participation in the morale-boosting events organized in camp. Indeed, Bruhn remembers her as being aloof. Mulvany was “inclined to keep herself away from people.… She did not join in any activities. She said she had more important duties to attend to,” Bruhn said. Indeed, by 1943, Mulvany would have been hard at work on her next project — a “silence hut,” where the women would each have a turn at resting in cubicles containing mattresses made with stuffed canvas bags.
Here, Mulvany’s Manitoulin Island survival skills came in handy. The 4.5-square-metre hut was built with bamboo poles and boughs, the roof covered with frond-like leaves from the coconut trees. The male prisoners assisted with the building of the hut, sticking the poles into holes dug just over a metre deep — below the frost line, just like at home in Canada.
As Bruhn recorded in her diary entry for the opening ceremony
on February 13, 1943, the hut was a sanity-saver, a means of escaping the strains of camp life.
That year, life in Changi took a darker turn. In October 1943, the Kempeitai — the Japanese military police — descended upon the camp. The dreaded force arrested two women and fifty-five men under suspicion of running a spy ring — an episode known as the Double Tenth. In her diary, Bruhn writes of boots clanging on iron stairs, flashing torches, and inspections in the showers, all against a backdrop of “howling wind and dark clouds hiding the moon.” One man was executed and fifteen died under interrogation and torture. At the prison, rations were cut, and activities such as games, concerts, plays, and school lessons were forbidden for months.
By February 1944, food rations were cut to half. Bruhn speaks of “filling up with water” — or edema — a symptom of the dreaded beriberi disease, which afflicted many of the women. In May 1944, the civilians were moved to another prison camp in the Changi district in order to make way for more incoming Allied POWs. In one shocking entry in July 1944, Bruhn writes of being so hungry in the new camp on Syme Road that she swallowed a baby mouse. Her description of finding the mice — “so tiny and pink and helpless” — helps to bring home the extent of the women’s hunger. “Without thinking, I scooped up one and popped it in my mouth, and before I realized what I had done, I swallowed it,” she wrote.
The urgency of the situation bred Mulvany’s improbable cookbook project. By this time, her shopping trips outside the camp had been forbidden, and, as prisoners later found out, Red Cross parcels to the women were held back by the Japanese. In these desperate circumstances, Mulvany recalled a memory of her father telling her that, if ever she wanted something, “to just have it in mind and you’ve got it.” It was this distant childhood memory evoking the power of imagination that gave rise to the Changi tea parties.
“We were hungry so I suggested that we make a jail cookbook,” wrote Mulvany in her memoirs. “A cookbook! Can you imagine writing a cookbook in jail, when every mention of food seemed to make us hungrier?”
Mulvany’s memoirs provide some vivid insights into the daily role-playing. She remembers an Australian, Euphemia Redfearn, setting the table with words as she called up imaginary cups, saucers, plates, knives, forks, salt, and the crowning item — a bouquet of flowers for the centre. “I would have wayside daisies,” said Redfearn. “With sprigs of fern.… And bread! Bread with a brown crisp crust. I would cut it myself, right there at the table.” As Mulvany describes it, after the tea parties the women would sleep “with a feeling of having had a meal.”
Mulvany’s irrepressible energy and determination made her one of the standout characters of the camp. But her bold attitude seems to have masked a fragile mental state. Fellow prisoner Freddy Bloom, an American journalist, wrote in her diary, “Ethel was larger than life, very beautiful with more energy than any human body could bear.” But she also had a “past history of nervous disorder,” Bloom pointed out. Later in the diary entries, Bloom loses patience, blasting the latter’s “haywire” management of the Red Cross.
ulvany’s apparently manic energy appears to have been a double-edged sword. While it enabled her to lead her fellow prisoners in constructive action, it may also have made her subsequent decline all the more dramatic. One nurse interviewed by Bernice Archer recalled that Mulvany was separated from the others towards the end, “because she was difficult to share with. She sang hymns all the time and was physically unwell with leg ulcers.” Bruhn remembers that, towards the end of her gruelling captivity, Mulvany suffered “bouts of screaming fits,” testimony backed up by Bloom’s diary.
After liberation in September 1945, Mulvany was reunited with her husband, and both went to India to recuperate. Their marriage, however, did not survive.
Mulvany returned to Canada in 1946, lying low in Toronto at her aunt’s home while she recovered. In her memoirs, she recounts how the trauma of starvation remained with her, leading her to pocket pieces of food whenever she left the dinner table, and to store them in her room. As her niece, Marion King, recalled in an interview: “She hid. She didn’t want anyone to see her until she was well.”
Mulvany published The Prisoner of War Cookbook in 1947. In 1953, she started the Treasure Van Corporation, which sold crafts made by people in developing countries, and raised funds for students at home and abroad. She died on Manitoulin Island in 1992.
In the aftermath of war, the experiences of the approximately eighty thousand women and children imprisoned by the Japanese in camps in the Far East was, as Bernice Archer points out, “erased from the public memory” — perhaps, as she suggests, this was because the capture and imprisonment of women and children was seen as “politically and socially embarrassing.”
Through the quilt project — and, to a lesser extent the cookbook — Mulvany left behind a lasting legacy. She helped to ensure that the suffering and endurance of the women and children at Changi will not be forgotten.
Learn more at CanadasHistory.ca/Mulvany