DM1ST(^30) DAILY MIRROR SATURDAY 17.08.2019
along the Death Railway. Like many of
his compatriots who eventually came
home, he refused to talk in any detail
about those times, no matter how
much I tried to persuade him.
There was a compact of secrecy
among the survivors, and when it was
broken most dramatically by the film
The Bridge on the River Kwai, my dad
felt outraged and betrayed.
When he received an invitation to
the film’s premiere, he turned it down.
The reason for this silence, I have
always suspected, is that he and thou-
naire my dad had to complete after he
was freed that on November 3, 1942,
that he was among the first to travel
north from Singapore by train,
crammed into locked metal goods
wagons for three days and nights with
no rest stops, no latrines and little food.
The heat and smell was appalling
and those who died were thrown out of
the wagons by the guards. When they
arrived at what they had been led to
believe would be a Red Cross camp, it
was in fact Won Rum, the first of three
work camps Dad would be posted to
through inhospitable jungle terrain to
carry supplies from Thailand to Japa-
nese troops in Burma, and every inch
of it was built by forced labour.
As many as 100,000 local South East
Asian workers, known as coolies, died
laying rails and sleepers and building
several hundred bridges – as did nearly
13,000 Allied prisoners of war.
With no medication, sparse food,
little rest and tropical diseases scything
through the weakened workforce, the
railway lived up to its awful nickname.
I know from the War Office question-
disable vehicles and destroy
whatever ordnance they could to
prevent the Japanese from making use
of them. With bombs exploding all
around, he drove lorries into the
harbour, had a few beers and then
waited for the inevitable.
What followed was three-and-a-half
years of hell, the first eight months of it
spent in Singapore’s Changi Jail, the last
21 months or so in PoW camps in Thai-
land, and the 13 months in between
slaving on the infamous Death Railway.
The line ran for nearly 260 miles
I often wonder how D
PoW on the Death Rai
he came home and h
JOHN CRAVEN REMEM
HE has been a familiar face on our
televisions for more than half a
century, presenting Swap Shop,
Newsround and Countryfile.
Now, in his autobiography, Headlines
and Hedgerows, John Craven, 79, tells
the story of his life, on and off screen.
In this exclusive extract, he tells how
his father survived a horrific three
years as a Japanese prisoner of war:
A
beaming five-year-old rides on
the shoulders of a stranger, a
hero returning from fighting
tigers in distant lands.
For weeks, the boy has longed for this
moment – because the man is the
father he could not remember, who left
home for life in the jungles when the
boy was just a few months old.
When the man had stepped from the
train on to the steam-shrouded plat-
form at Leeds station, he had picked up
the boy, embraced him long and hard
and placed him on his shoulders.
But how can this little boy under-
stand the reality of the situation; that
his hero, emaciated and worn out by
illness and ill-treatment, barely has the
strength to lift him the short distance
to the taxi that will carry them home.
What his father has fought, and
miraculously survived, is the monstrous
inhumanity of an enemy who has held
him captive for three-and-a-half years.
That stranger was my dad, Private
Willie Craven, coming back to his
native Yorkshire in 1945, with no thanks
at all to the Imperial Japanese Army.
In the taxi home our little family – my
For most of
the time my
mother had
no idea if he
was dead
or alive
JOHN CRAVEN ON HIS
FATHER’S DAYS AS A POW
John on Countryfile and,
left, on TV’s Newsround
mother Marie (pronounced Marry),
Dad and I – were together again, for
the first time in four years.
For most of that time my mother
had lived in hope, with me as a
reminder of their love, because she
had no idea if he was alive or dead.
Dad had a conventional working-
class upbringing in Leeds until the
Second World War broke out.
Two years earlier he had
married his childhood sweet-
heart and been promoted to
manager of the Ideal Divi-
dend grocery store on
Kirkstall Road.
I was born on the
busiest day of the Battle
of Britain and two
months later Dad
enlisted with the Royal
Army Ordnance Corps as a
motor mechanic.
A few months after, he was
posted to Malaya. It was from Singa-
pore he sent me a telegram on my
first birthday. The message said
simply, “Loving Birthday Greetings. I
wish we were together on this special
occasion. Fondest love and kisses.
Daddy Craven.”
When Singapore fell six months
later, my dad was one of 80,000
British, Australian and Indian troops
taken prisoner by the Japanese.
While most of his unit tried to
escape to Java, he and a few others
were ordered to stay behind, told to
TV FAME
THE SATURDAY BIG REA
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