The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
Jack Jennings
Probably the last Allied PoW of the Japanese to have endured the horrors of the ‘Death Railway’
JACK JENNINGS, who has died aged
104, spent three and a half years as a Japanese prisoner of war and worked as a slave labourer on the Siam-Burma “Death Railway”; he was thought to be the last survivor of the roughly 85,000 Allied soldiers who were captured when
Singapore fell to the Japanese.
In 2012 his story became familiar to millions because of a new advertisement for the National Lottery, showing how the Big Lottery Fund had helped to take him back to the Far East to visit the graves of dead comrades under its Heroes Return scheme.
Jack Jennings was born at Old Hill, Staffordshire, on March 10 1919, to Joseph Jennings, a bricklayer, and Ethel, née Dunn, a former foundry worker. A brother died five years before he was born, a sister died in infancy, and he grew up with two sisters. They lived in a house with his parents, grandparents, an aunt and cousin – nine people sharing three bedrooms.
The house was close to the railway line, and during the General Strike in 1926 the track was raided by children looking for coal which had been jolted off passing trains.
Jack was eight when his father died. Life became a struggle: the family could not afford school books, and during the holidays the children worked in the hop fields, where the farmer paid a few pence for each basket. His mother took in washing to help make ends meet.
Aged 14, Jack left school and took up an apprenticeship as a carpenter and joiner. He enrolled for evening classes doing cabinet work at Dudley Art College, winning a scholarship and prizes for his pieces.
In 1939, at the outbreak of the Second World War, he was called up and posted to the 1st Battalion The Cambridgeshire Regiment (1CR). After a spell in East Anglia on coastal defence duties, in October 1941 he embarked at Liverpool in the Orcades bound for Halifax, Nova Scotia.
There, he transferred to the West Point, an American liner which had been converted to a troop ship. A two-week stop-over in India was used for training in jungle warfare and they disembarked in Singapore at the end of January 1942.
When they arrived, docks and warehouses were being bombed. After a whirlwind advance through Malaya, three divisions of the Japanese 25th Army crossed the Johore Straits and 1CR took up a position at Seletar aerodrome before moving to
Adam Park, in the centre of the island.
Jennings and his comrades in the mortar platoon were taking ammunition to one of the companies when they were machinegunned by a Japanese spotter plane. They crawled into a concrete monsoon drain and this saved their lives.
They were ordered to move to another position, a Chinese burial ground. The Japanese had an exact fix on their location and they came under intense mortar bombardment. One bomb dropped on the other side of the grave in which Jennings was lying, fizzed for a few seconds but luckily failed to explode.
Japanese snipers were causing many casualties. They had tied themselves to the tops of trees, so even if they were hit they did not fall. Jennings had had no sleep and little food for several days. His battalion was boxed in on three sides.
On February 15, Singapore having fallen, Jennings and his comrades were ordered to lay down their arms and crammed into a tennis court with several hundred other soldiers. A machine gun was placed at each corner, pointing inwards. The prisoners spent the night there. The next morning, some hard biscuits and chocolate were thrown to them over the netting.
Later that day, they were formed into lines and marched off. As they passed a public building, they saw the heads of some Chinese on the spikes of a cast iron railing. There were Japanese flags everywhere.
Jennings and his comrades were transferred to Changi PoW camp on the east of the island. For the next 10 months they lived there on a diet of boiled rice. At night, sleep was difficult as they lay on bamboo slats, tormented by mosquitoes and listening to the croaking bullfrogs. In November, Jennings and his comrades were crammed into cattle trucks, so crowded that there was no room to sit down, and shipped to Thailand to work on the Death Railway in the searing heat of the jungle.
He worked in various camps – including Chungkai – as he travelled up the river.
Subsisting on a diet of rice, watery gruel and a teaspoon of sugar, Jennings suffered malnutrition, dysentery and malaria; he developed a leg ulcer that needed skin grafts, which were performed by British doctors with rudimentary instruments and no anaesthetic.
During an outbreak of cholera, he recalled, “they were carrying 15 bodies a day to be burnt. I had a friend who slept next to me and I woke up one morning and he was dead. He just gave up. Everybody had malaria and skin diseases.”
By the time he got to Rin Tin, Jennings was in serious pain and he was shipped back to Chungkai hospital camp, where he was diagnosed with renal colic. He said afterwards that this probably saved his life as he missed the worst period on the railway, when the Japanese introduced the “Speedo” phase to complete the work by October 1943.
Yet Jennings refused to give in to depression: “I never got down. You just got on with it. I never gave up hope. I made up my mind to forget about home.” To keep spirits up, he made a chess set: “There were offcuts from the boards they made the beds with. I managed to carve two pawns a day. We played a lot of games on it.”
In the last year of the war he was fit enough to work again and was sent north. The task of his group was to cut down huge trees and pile the wood alongside the railway to be used for fuelling the steam trains. He ended up in the far north of the country on the old state railway near Uttaradit. Leaflets were dropped, telling of the end of the war. It was a couple of weeks after VJ Day that Jennings embarked on his journey home.
He headed back to England via a stopover in Ceylon. This time the journey was much quicker, as they were able to sail through the Suez Canal. When he arrived home, the family gathered to greet him, and they all sat down for a meal.
“I’ve got your favourite pudding, Jack,” his mother announced.
“What’s that?”
“Rice pudding!” His mother could not understand why there was so much laughter.
Two months later, he finally got to marry his sweetheart, Lillian Millard. They moved in with her Aunt Lil, with whom they remained for the rest of her life. In 1956, their home at Old Hill was demolished and they moved to Wollaston; through the 1960s he was a foreman joiner at Swifts in Netherton. He was a great supporter of
West Bromwich Albion.
In the early 1990s, now retired, he started to write about his early life and an account of his time as a PoW, which was published in 2011 as Prisoner Without a Crime. From the mid-1990s he regularly attended Far East Prisoner of War reunions and would visit schools to talk about his experiences.
In 1995 he made the first of four pilgrimages to Singapore and Thailand. It was his third trip, in 2010, that was funded by the National Lottery, and two years later he featured in a Lottery television advert for a campaign called “Life Changing”, though according to his granddaughter, who accompanied him, the ad featured actors playing their parts for a sequence at the Chungkai cemetery.
In an interview for the Lottery, Jennings said that the Thailand he visited was “completely different’’ from the one he remembered: “So the old dreams just faded, you know... I was quite surprised and relieved. The place is really a nice tourist area now.’’ On his last trip, in 2015, he featured as part of an ITV News at Ten report on the 70th anniversary of the end of the war.
Reminiscing about his time as a PoW, he said: “Survival was my focus. I had no thoughts of dying. The prisoners who eventually got home were lucky, and I was determined to be one of the lucky ones. Some were tortured and affected badly. I wasn’t.”
Jennings made the best of the rest of his life. He loved music and gardening and was always willing to do odd jobs for people, be it repairing watches and clocks, or making wardrobes, cupboards or coffee tables.
He and Lillian enjoyed travelling abroad, and became close to Canadian family members after first visiting the country in 1977.
Lillian died in 2003, and in 2007 he moved to Torquay to be near his daughter, Hazel. Nine months ago he moved to a care home, where he entertained his fellow residents with his harmonica and remained mobile until recently.
Jack Jennings is survived by his two daughters, Hazel and Carol, who is a professor of Japanese.
Jack Jennings, born March 10 1919, died January 19 2024