‘I lived on the toss of a coin’

AT the age of 103, Dr Bill Frankland is believed to have been the oldest former prisoner of war taking part in yesterday’s parade.

He spent three-and-half years in Japanese captivity – but revealed his life had been saved by the toss of a coin.

The grandfather of ten told The Mail on Sunday that on his initial arrival in Singapore as a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps, he and a colleague were asked to choose whether they were to go to the main military hospital or a smaller district one.

They both wanted the district posting – so flipped a coin to decide.

‘I correctly called heads and got to choose,’ Dr Frankland said of the fateful moment in 1941. His colleague was subsequently sent to the main hospital – but was slaughtered along with many patients and staff when the Japanese invaded the country at the start of 1942.

Dr Frankland was evacuated from his own hospital when they came under bombardment on February 11 that year.

Just four days later, the British surrendered – and Dr Frankland was sent to work in a POW camp in Changi. Thousands of prisoners were held and many were worked to death.

‘We were all more or less living skeletons,’ he said. ‘I had to forbid men from being weighed because I thought it would be bad for their morale.’

After a year, he was moved to a camp on an island just off Singapore. ‘If men misbehaved they were slapped,’ he said. ‘I was once knocked out.’

He heard about Japan’s surrender from a POW who listened to the news on a hidden wireless.

And after years of imprisonment, in November 1945 he finally found himself on a boat back to Britain.

He returned to Pimlico, London, where he was able to rejoin his wife Pauline. They went on to have four children and spent 41 years together before her death in 1982.

He went back to work at St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, and became a leading expert in allergies and hayfever.