Torture, magic and the hero who inspired BGT winner
ALTHOUGH he had been conjuring professionally since the age of seven, the 24-year-old magician was especially nervous that afternoon – even though his audience consisted of just one man.
But then it was no ordinary man, and this was to be no ordinary performance.
British PoW Fergus Anckorn was facing Japanese lieutenant yoshio Osata, commandant of the Chungkai camp near the notorious Burma Railway during the Second World War – who had earned himself a terrifying reputation among the Allied prisoners-of-war.
Despite his nerves, Anckorn successfully made a coin disappear – and miraculously discovered it in a tin of fish on the lieutenant’s table.
‘I got to eat the fish,’ he later recounted. And thanks to his magic tricks, for the rest of the war he was able to secure vital extra food for his fellow PoWs toiling in the intense 120-degree heat.
Until Saturday night, few people had heard of the ‘conjuror on the River Kwai’. But then a finalist on Britain’s Got Talent, 25-year-old magician Richard Jones, told how he had been inspired by the extraordinary story of this heroic man.
Jones, himself a serving soldier, presented the 97-year- old on stage with heart- stopping flourish before winning the competition.
‘I salute you Fergus,’ cried judge Simon Cowell, ‘and thank you for everything you have done.’
Despite what was clearly a heavily stagemanaged stunt, no one could be more worthy of public acclaim than Fergus Anckorn. For his very British blend of courage, determination, inventiveness and, above all, modesty could not be more different from the celebrity obsessed Britain that Cowell’s vacuous talent shows epitomise.
He was born in 1918 into a well-off family near Sevenoaks in Kent, and enjoyed an idyllic childhood. ‘Nothing nasty ever happened,’ he wrote with bitter irony in his autobiography, ‘ and there was no such thing as nasty men – not to my knowledge anyway.’ The young Fergus’s greatest passion was magic tricks, and he spent hours practising sleight of hand.
However the advent of war, as it did for millions of others, was to change his life. He joined the 118th Field Regiment Royal Artillery and the first two years of war were largely spent entertaining the troops with his magic. But on 22 October 1941, he was shipped out to the Far East. Just before he left, he got engaged to his sweetheart, Lucille, a nurse who had cared for him after an acute bout of pharyngitis (throat inflammation).
Almost as soon as he arrived in Singapore, Anckorn was to witness the horrors of war. One morning, while working near the docks, he and his party were attacked by Japanese dive bombers.
Anckorn survived after jumping into the sea unaware that if a bomb hit the water, the blast wave would have killed him.
He emerged to find five of his comrades had been killed. ‘ It shocked me so much that I went about the dockside not really knowing what I was doing,’ he recalled.
Anckorn was to endure many more raids, some of which killed men standing right next to him.
SHORTLY before the fall of Singapore, he was ordered to drive a lorry along with, of all things, a large can of beetroot and an unexploded and primed shell. He drove straight into an air raid, and saw a bomb land ten feet away.
The shell exploded in his lorry, and so did the beetroot – the red mush all over him caused his comrades to believe the worst. In the Alexandra Military hospital, Anckorn’s wounds were found to be severe. His left leg was riddled with shrapnel, and it was only when the surgeon discovered that Anckorn was a conjuror that he decided not to amputate his right hand. Even the hospital wasn’t safe, for it was there that the Japanese were to carry out one of the most horrific atrocities of the war. The troops entered the wards and bayoneted the wounded in their beds.
Anckorn could hear the thudding sounds of bayonets entering men’s bodies. ‘There were no cries, no screams, nothing,’ he recalled.
‘Just thud...thud...thud. I didn’t feel fear and I don’t think the man next to me did either.’
Anckorn pulled his pillow over his face and waited for the inevitable. But in what seemed to be another miracle, Anckorn was spared.
He could only think the pillow over his face, and the quantity of blood on his sheets, must have made the Japanese suppose he was already dead.
Later, when other Japanese discovered he was alive, Anckorn was taken captive, and his arm was operated on in a barbarously rudi- mentary fashion. Found to be gangrenous, the wound was ‘disinfected’ by maggots, which gorged themselves on his rotten flesh, and then had to be removed from under the skin without anaesthetic. The treatment worked and Anckorn’s hand was saved.
In early 1942, he worked on the Burma Railway where he suffered from malnutrition and savage beatings like so many other PoWs.
One afternoon, he was ordered to climb 100 feet up a bamboo viaduct to apply boiling creosote to the struts. Suffering from vertigo, he managed to reach the top, only to find himself frozen with fear. An enraged guard climbed up after him, and threw the hot creosote over Anckorn’s head.
‘Fortunately, I had a banana leaf hat on my head,’ he recalled, ‘which protected my face, but I was aware of my shoulders and chest suddenly roasting.’ Badly burned, Anckorn passed out, and he ended up at Chungkai camp, which was a hospital of sorts, although many regarded it more as a cemetery. However, for Anckorn, it proved to be a life- saver, as it was there that he started to practise his magic again, which was noticed by Osata, the brutal commandant.
As well as killing his pet dog for fun, Osata had once made six prisoners line up in front of six guards outside his hut, then ordered his men to beat them to within an inch of their lives.
‘An invitation to do magic for this man was not good news,’ recalled Anckorn. But what made things worse was that his right hand and wrist were almost crippled. Would he be able to perform his old tricks?
Anckorn was passed a small coin by Osata. He successfully made it disappear – and miraculously discovered it elsewhere.
‘He had a tin of fish on his table,’ the magician later recounted, ‘and I reached across, opened the can, and produced the coin from it.’
A delighted Osata let the conjuror depart – along with the precious tin of food. ‘I got to eat the fish,’ said Anckorn, ‘ because they wouldn’t touch anything we had touched – we were verminous.’ As he left, the magician suddenly realised – ‘If I do magic with food, I’m going to end up eating it.’
After his first performance, Anckorn grew more brazen in his requests for food to be used as props for his tricks. On one occa- sion he used a trick which required a single egg.
Cheekily, Anckorn insisted he needed no fewer than 50 eggs to make sure the trick worked. To his astonishment, his request was accepted.
He and fellow PoWs were able to tuck into a 49-egg omelette, while he saved the 50th egg for the performance.
After the show, Osata summoned Anckorn into his hut, and demanded to know why he needed so many eggs. Anckorn – aware he could be immediately executed - managed to convince Osata he needed the other 49 eggs for practice. Unable to prove otherwise, the commandant spared his life.
At the end of the war, he weighed just six stone and was not allowed to return to Britain until he ‘fattened up’. Back home, he found it hard to adjust to civilian life but, finally, on 26 January 1946, he married his sweetheart Lucille.
Ever since then, he has lived a quiet life, combining his magic with his duties as a Special Police officer. Despite the horrors he suffered, he is not a man for self-pity and even considers himself lucky: ‘I’ve been blown up, I’ve been shot, I’ve survived a massacre – and I also got away with that egg trick.’
Perhaps that explains why he is so contemptuous of today’s compensation culture.
‘It makes me laugh to see people getting thousands of pounds for something they’d witnessed,’ he said in an interview. ‘you had to put up with it and deal with it.’
Captivity, Slavery and Survival as a Far East POW: The Conjurer on the Kwai by Peter Fyans is published by Pen & Sword.