Secret diary of a POW in Japan
On the anniversary of VJ Day, Guy Kelly meets the sisters who discovered their father’s hidden war diaries
In September 1941, the night before her father, Cary Owtram, set sail to fight in the Second World War, Pat Davies did as she always did, making time to pen the day’s diary entry. To mark the occasion of Owtram’s embarkation, the family had left their cotton mill in Lancashire to spend a week together in Scotland. Pat, then 17, had time off from a secretarial job in London, while her siblings, Jean, 14, and 10-year-old Bob, were on holiday from their Warwickshire boarding school. Their father, a veteran of the First World War, a Territorial Army perennial and now two years on standby, was champing at the bit.
“Everyone rather remarkably cheerful, thought we might well have been somewhat depressed,” read Pat’s journal. “Sometimes wonder if I’m getting rather callous.”
When he left the children and their mother, Bunty, to join the 137th Field Regiment on SS Dominion Monarch in Liverpool, Owtram, then a senior major, and the rest of the regiment had no idea where they were going or when they might be back. The journey took him first to Sierra Leone, then Cape Town, up through the Indian Ocean to Sri Lanka, before moving east to the Malay Peninsula after the Japanese had entered the war. There they would remain.
Cary and Bunty wrote to one another every day. As they neared the Far East, however, Bunty’s letters began to be returned with a “missing” stamp. Cary, meanwhile, would be unable to reveal his location, so employed a quaint code: their local vicar in Lancashire had a daughter who lived in Singapore. With a mention of her name in a letter, Bunty knew where her husband was heading.
Pat, 94, recalls that optimism about her father’s voyage. What she, her siblings and mother didn’t know was that Owtram would not be returning for three years, until after Victory over Japan Day on August 15, 1945. “We all just thought the British army would defeat the Japanese and all would be well,” she says, at her home in Chiswick, west London.
Along with more than 80,000 other British, Indian and Australian troops, Owtram was seized by the Japanese after the fall of Singapore on Feb 15 1942, before being transported to Chungkai, one of the largest POW camps, to help build the infamous Burma railway. When he arrived at Chungkai, Owtram, by then promoted to colonel, was given the title of British Camp Commandant – the designated officer placed in charge, and the main point of contact between Japanese guards and their captives.
What happened to him there could, as in the case of so many, have remained a mystery. Yet, thanks to a diary he kept throughout his time as a POW, Cary’s every movement, thought and fear was recorded. And when he returned in 1945, the diary formed the backbone of a memoir, 1000 Days on the River Kwai. Nearly eight decades on, Pat and Jean have overseen its publication. Laced with wit and an almost superhuman calm, Owtram’s secret diary, written on scraps of paper he had found and then hidden from guards in bamboo poles, reveals a man who didn’t just cope with the horrors of life as a POW, but appeared to thrive on the responsibility of looking out for thousands of other men. In fact, many of his charges later paid tribute to their commandant’s mental fortitude.
In addition to forming relationships with the Japanese guards as best he could, he even arranged the construction of a rudimentary theatre for the men, where they would perform plays and use instruments that soldiers had in their personal supplies for makeshift concerts. “It was all about distraction,” Pat says. “He wanted to keep their minds off the fact of where they were and on to anything else. That and writing the diary, I suspect, saved his own life as well.” According to Owtram’s memoir, the POWS “started with very humble and amateurish entertainments” that eventually included some satires. “Naturally, we took particular pleasure in getting a laugh at [the Japanese’s] expense – and we did get a good many.”
At home, while Bob stayed at school and their mother stayed at the cotton mill, Pat joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service (Wrens) as a special duties linguist, while Jean went abroad with the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANYS). Neither was permitted to reveal much about their work to one another, and neither had much time for correspondence. “It was all excitement for us, so we quite honestly couldn’t think about our father,” says Jean, who is 91 and living back in Lancashire. “Typical teenagers, really. Too engrossed in our own experiences.”
‘We wished we’d asked him more, but families knew not to in those days’
After VJ Day, 72 years ago today, when the Empire of Japan surrendered, Owtram and fellow POWS were released. Their journey home took two months, and when he appeared in October 1945, the family gathered nervously. “We were tense but he was, amazingly, the same,” Jean recalls. “In fantastic spirits, if a little skinnier.” Besides an emotional sturdiness and a lifelong hatred of anything or anyone Japanese, there were few marks of woe. “We wish we’d asked him more, but families knew not to in those days,” says Pat, who went on to work as a journalist.
After the war, as Owtram rejoined the TA and returned to cotton spinning, he revealed his writings and worked them into a memoir which, at the time, publishers weren’t interested in. He died in 1993, aged 93, having received an OBE for his service, with that manuscript unread by anyone other than his close family. Now, his daughters have completed that mission.
“He wanted it published for his friends that didn’t come back. He would be astonished that we managed, but pleased. The epigraph from Ecclesiasticus says it all: ‘Their bodies are buried in peace, but their name liveth for evermore,’” Pat says. “We all celebrate victory in Europe, understandably, but really it was VJ Day that counted.”
1000 Days on the River Kwai: The Secret Diary of a British Camp Commandant, by Col Cary Owtram OBE, is published by Pen and Sword (£19.99). To order your copy for £16.99 plus p&p, call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk