Right Hand Page

Letter discussing journalist and filmic accounts of POW Changi camps.

Thanks for honoured comradeship of Changi

I do not intend to humour with gruesome details of the brutality – [unknown] to which we are subjected no doubt all of you know of [unknown] from T.V. and radio from books and films and from serials in the [unknown] press. But to me [unknown] [unknown] [unknown] of these reports to my knowledge was exaggerated. Indeed fact the majority were played down and if any of you saw that [unknown] [unknown] film The The Bridge and the River Kwai I would say that the POW camps depicted in the film were camps in which most POWs would have been pleased to exist. In fact the only example of journalistic [unknown] I have come across is in the current serial in the People written by Mrs Freddy Bloom the wife of one of the RAMC Majors and who was the subject of a recent TV “This is Your Life” programme when she stated that at the Alexandra Hospital in Singapore all the staff and patients were murdered. This was not so because only about ¾ of the staff and less than half of the patients lost their lives on that fateful Saturday in 1942. I know because I was there and there I will begin my story.