“At the end of that first horrific
night, in the early hours of the
morning, we huddled together to cry
over lost virginity, to give each other
comfort and strength. How many
times was each one raped that night?
What could we do?’’
For the next three months the girls
were repeatedly raped. “Always and
every time ... I tried to fight them off,’’
Jan recalled. But it was no good. Once,
she shaved off her hair in an effort to
make herself look ugly, but instead of
putting her attackers off, it just
seemed to encourage them: “It turned
me into a curiosity object.’’ Even the
doctor who examined her regularly, to
whom she pleaded for help, raped her
before every examination, which was
carried out in front of any Japanese
soldier who cared to watch.
Then, after three months and
following a number of visits from
high-ranking military officials and
“much shouting”, the girls were told to
pack their bags. They were returned to
their families in the internment camps
with the warning that if they ever
revealed what had happened to them,they and their families would be killed.
“The silence began then and there, the
silence that was forced upon us,” Jan
recalled.
She told her secret to her mother,
who was devastated, and to a Catholic
priest. However, when she said that
she still wanted to become a nun
“there was a deadly silence.” Finally he
responded: “My dear child, under the
circumstances I think it is better that
you do not become a nun.” She was,
she recalled, “shattered” by his
response.
After the war ended she met Tom
Ruff, a British soldier who had fought
in the Burma campaign and was
serving in the British military
occupation of Indonesia. They married
in 1946 and, after living in Britain,
emigrated in 1960 to Australia, where,
settled in Adelaide, Jan became a
teacher in Catholic primary schools.
Before their marriage, Jan told her
husband what had happened to her
during the war and asked for his
patience. For decades afterwards she
continued to have nightmares and,
although her marriage was generally
happy, as she admitted in 1992, “I have
never been able to enjoy intercourse
as a consequence of what the Japanese
did to me.”
For years the couple tried to have
children, but Jan suffered a number of
miscarriages due to the internal
damage she had sustained at the hands
of the Japanese. However she
underwent surgery and afterwards
had two daughters.
For 50 years she carried an
“enormous burden of shame”, feeling
that she was “dirty, different, soiled”:
“I couldn’t help that it had happened,
but I was too ashamed. There was no
counselling; we were expected to live
as if nothing happened.”
In 1992, when she finally decided tospeak out, she told her daughters her
secret first before travelling to Tokyo
to attend a public hearing organised
by the Japanese Federation of Bar
Associations.
Though her story was less
harrowing than those of some of the
Korean women who gave evidence,
her controlled demeanour while
relating graphic details of her ordeal
contrasted with the more emotionally
charged presentations of others and
was thought to have made the greater
impact in Japan. Where others had
spoken of revenge and hatred for the
Japanese, she merely sought their
frank admission of the truth.
For the next two decades Jan Ruff
O’Herne travelled around the world
campaigning against rape in war and
to support all former “comfort
women” in their demands for a full
apology and compensation. In 2007
she travelled to Washington to testify
alongside two Korean women at a US
Congressional hearing.
In 1993 Yohei Kono, Japan’s Cabinet
secretary, made a statement of apology
that has been endorsed by all
subsequent Japanese governments.
“In many cases (the women) were
recruited against their will, through
coaxing, coercion, etc,” it said.
However, while many on the Japanese
Right do not deny the existence of
“comfort stations”, they continue to
insist that they were privately run
brothels staffed by willing prostitutes.
In 2007 there was fury when Japan’s
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (who in
1995 referred to comfort women as “a
made-up story”), claimed that the
women were not forced to have sex
with Japanese soldiers: “There is no
evidence to prove that there was
coercion, nothing to support it,” he
said.
When, in April 2014, Jan Ruff
O’Herne’s daughter Carol testified at a
hearing on a proposal to construct a
commemorative statue to the women
in Australia, Japan’s daily newspaper
Sankei Shimbun published an article
criticising the 91-year-old Jan “who
was reportedly a comfort woman on
the island of Java” for allowing family
members to be used in an “anti-Japan
campaign.”
Jan Ruff O’Herne refused to take
part in a $2.5 million Japanese
Government compensation
programme for Dutch “comfort
women” in 1998, which she criticised
as a half-hearted attempt at silencing
victims. When, in December 2015,
Shinzo Abe offered a weakly worded
apology to the comfort women, along
with millions of dollars of
compensation, it was limited to
victims in South Korea.
In 2001 Jan Ruff O’Herne was
awarded the Order of Orange-Nassau
by the Government of the
Netherlands. She was appointed an
Officer in the Order of Australia in
2002.
When Comfort Women: A New
Musical opened off-Broadway with an
all-Asian cast in 2015, one of the
characters was based on Jan Ruff
O’Herne.
Jan’s husband Tom died in 1995. Her
daughters survive her.Jan Ruff O’Herne, born January 18
1923, died August 19 2019Wartime prisoner of the Japanese who later told how she was forced to work as a ‘comfort woman’
Jan Ruff O’Herne
Jazz musician who brilliantly recreated the sound of Duke Ellington for the film The Cotton Club
Bob Wilber
F
REDA DOWIE, who has
died aged 91, was a
character actress who
specialised in long-
suffering, put-upon
characters, most notably as
the abused mother in
Distant Voices, Still Lives
(1988), Terence Davies’s
stunning debut feature film
which won the International
Critics’ Prize at Cannes.
Drawn from Davies’s
memories of his own
childhood in post-war
working class Liverpool, the
film focused on the real-life
experiences of his mother,
sisters and brother whose
lives are thwarted by their
father (a chilling
performance by Pete
Postlethwaite) an abusive,
violent man who is none the
less capable of humour and
gentleness.
As the careworn, battered
but ever-loving “Mum”,
Freda Dowie almost
wordlessly radiated stoicism
and goodness, and she was
nominated for a European
Film Award for her
performance.
“When I met Terry, I’d
been cast as a victim in a
series of TV roles. That was
a quality he was looking
for,” she recalled.
“Playing a non-fictitious
person gives you a great
responsibility. Some
incidents, like when Pete
Postlethwaite knocks me
about, Terry wasn’t present
at, so my craft came into
play. But most of the time he
was remembering. I took
every bit of direction as if it
were a memory of [his
mother].”
Born Freda May Dowie in
Carlisle on July 22 1928, she
attended Barrow Girls’
School before training as a
drama teacher at Central
School. From the mid-1950s,
she formed part of the
Tower Theatre Company,
which was based near to
where she lived in a two-up,
two-down in Islington.
She made her small
screen debut in The Eustace
Diamonds (1959), with David
McCallum, and played the
nursemaid in the 1966
Jonathan Miller BBC
adaptation of Alice in
Wonderland, in which she
splashed around in the Pool
of Tears with Alice (Anne-
Marie Mallik).
“It was a long scene” she
recalled. “Jonathan Miller
was on-hand with fluffy
towels and a good slug of
brandy. The longer the
scene the more I shivered,
so the more I drank and got
drunk.”
Twenty years later she
was brilliant as the Cook in
another BBC adaptation of
Alice, with Kate Dorning inthe title role. She also
appeared into television film
adaptations of Laurie Lee’s
Cider with Rosie, as drama
teacher Miss Crabby in the
1971 BBC film, then as
Granny Wallon in the 1998
ITV version.
She was Jack Watson’s
long-suffering wife in the
1975 ITV drama series The
Hanged Man (1975), Sally
Brass in The Old Curiosity
Shop (BBC, 1979) and the
peevish Mrs Green in
Oranges Are Not the Only
Fruit (BBC, 1990).
On the big screen she had
a small part in the espionage
thriller Subterfuge (1968),
and was the nervous nun
who confronts the American
ambassador Robert Thorn
(Gregory Peck), over his evil
son (Harvey Stephens) in
Richard Donner’s The Omen
(1976). Other film credits
include Michael
Winterbottom’s Butterfly
Kiss (1995), Jude (1996) and
Fragile (2005).
In 1970, divorced from
her first husband John
Goodrich, she married the
writer and director David
Thompson. She went on to
appear in his production of
Euripedes’s Electra, with
Derek Jacobi, and in his
production of Tartuffe, with
Leonard Rossiter – both at
the Greenwich Theatre.
In 1983 and 1984 she
played Emily Dickinson in
William Luce’s one-woman
play The Belle of Amherst at
the Theatre Royal, Bath.
On radio she was Elspeth
Cary in The Day of the
Triffids (1968) and the Pythia
in The Death of the Pythia or
What Really Might Have
Happened to Oedipus (1983).
She recorded a number of
audio books including
Wuthering Heights and
Dangerous Liaisons, and
continued to work in
television until about a
decade ago, bowing out
with roles in Midsomer
Murders and Heartbeat.
She and David Thompson
settled in Suffolk, where he
died in April this year.Freda Dowie, born July 22
1928, died August 10 2019Freda Dowie
Actress who played the mother
in Distant Voices, Still Lives
Chosen for her ‘victim’ qualitiesJ
AN RUFF O’HERNE, who has
died aged 96, was a 19-year
old Dutch girl living with her
family on a sugar plantation in
Java, then in the Dutch East
Indies, when the Japanese
invaded in 1942; two years later she
was taken from the labour camp in
which she had been interned, and
forced to work as a so-called “comfort
woman”, one among tens of thousands
of young women made to prostitute
themselves for Japanese soldiers.
For almost half a century, like most
victims, she suffered in silence. But in
1992, after seeing a television
interview with three elderly Korean
women who had decided to speak out,
she became the first European to recall
in public how she, too, had been raped
and degraded by the Japanese
occupiers.
“Japan wouldn’t listen to the Korean
women,” she recalled later. “But when
European women come forward and
say, ‘wait a minute, you didn’t only do
that to Asian women, you did that to
European women, to Dutch girls, too’,
I knew they would sit up and listen –
and this is what happened.”
Jeanne Alida “Jan” O’Herne was
born at Bandung, west Java, on
January 18 1923 into a devout Roman
Catholic family, and as she grew up
she wanted to become a nun. When
Java fell to the Japanese in March 1942,
Jan, her mother and two younger
sisters were interned as enemy
non-combatants in a work camp.
In February 1944 Japanese officers
entered the camp and ordered all
single girls aged 17 to 21 to line up for
inspection. “The officers paced up and
down, up and down the line,
inspecting each girl,” she recalled in a
memoir, Fifty Years of Silence (1994).
“Now they were standing directly in
front of me. One of them lifted my chin
with a stick to see my face. They stood
there grinning, looking at my legs, at
my face, at my body ... Oh, my God, I
prayed; don’t let them take me away.”
Despite the intercession of a nun in the
camp to the Japanese commander, 10
young women were taken away in an
army truck, including Jan.
Jan and six other girls were taken to
a Dutch colonial house in Semarang
converted into a brothel for army
officers. “We were all virgins. So
innocent,” she recalled. “We tried to
find out from each other what was
going to happen to us. To this day I
have never forgotten that fear.”
As Japanese officers arrived on their
first night, she led the frightened girls
in a recitation of Psalm 27: “The Lord is
my light and my salvation; whom
should I fear?”
Shortly afterwards one Japanese
officer, with a “big, fat, repulsive,
horrible face”, approached her and
unsheathed his sword: “He stood right
over me now, pointing the sword at
my body. I pleaded with him through
my gestures to allow me to say some
prayers before I died. With his sword
touching my flesh, I fell on my knees
to pray ... The Japanese officer was
getting impatient now. He threw me
on the bed and tore at my clothes,
ripping them off. I lay there naked on
the bed as he ran his sword slowly up
and down over my body ... I can find
no words to describe this most
inhumane and brutal rape.Jan Ruff O’Herne
aged 83, left, and
the South Korean
Yong Soo Lee, 78,
who had been
made a ‘comfort
woman’ or sex slave
of the Japanese
aged 14, embrace
after a news
conference in
Washington, 2007:
right, Jan O’Herne
in her teensB
OB WILBER, the clarinettist
and saxophonist, who has died
aged 91, was devoted to
preserving jazz styles of the
past, their techniques, forms and
spirit.
Wilber began in his early teens.
When he was about to leave school,
his father asked him whether he
proposed spending his life “blowing
his lungs out in smoky dives”. His
reply was: “Yeah, Dad! That’s what I
want to do!”
The dives were eventually replaced
by concert halls and recording studios,
but that is exactly what he did until
age and infirmity called a halt.
Robert Sage Wilber was born in
New York on March 15 1928. His
mother died when he was an infant.
He took up the clarinet at 13 and led
his own band, the Wildcats, while still
a teenager.
In 1946 he sought out the veteran
New Orleans musician Sidney Bechet,
then living in relative obscurity in
New York, and became his devoted
apprentice.
Wilber assimilated much of Bechet’s
passionate, full-toned style on both
clarinet and soprano saxophone, and
the echo of it remained in his own
playing thereafter. Bechet, who feared
that the old ways would die with him,
was delighted to have such an apt
pupil.
As it turned out, the late 1940s saw
not only the new jazz of Dizzy
Gillespie and Charlie Parker, but also a
surge of interest in older styles, with
Bob Wilber as a leading figure. He
made his first records then, some of
them with Sidney Bechet as guest star.
In 1948 Bechet was unable to take up
an invitation to play at the first jazz
festival in Nice, and sent Wilber in his
place.
In 1952, at the time of the Korean
War, Wilber was drafted into the US
Army. His two years’ service, spent in
a military band based near New York,
gave him time to consider what to donext. He was fully aware of the latest
developments in contemporary jazz
and considered creating an amalgam
of classic and modern idioms. On his
discharge in 1954 he set up a band
along these lines, called The Six. It
aroused much critical interest but left
the public unmoved.
Sidney Bechet died in 1959,
prompting Wilber to record an album
of his music. Much as he revered
Bechet’s memory, however, he
suspected that their close similarity in
style was hampering his own musical
development. He took up the alto
saxophone at around this time, partly
to signify a new start.
In his 1987 autobiography, Music
Was Not Enough, Wilber recalled
feeling misunderstood and neglected
during the 1960s. He certainly
recorded very little, but he was
playing regularly with some of the best
people. He was twice invited to join
Louis Armstrong’s band, the All Stars.
Many jazz musicians would havejumped at the chance, but, flattered
though he was, Wilber turned it down.
Armstrong’s gruelling worldwide
touring schedule was notorious, and
the contract was for at least a year.
A new band, modestly entitled The
World’s Greatest Jazz Band, was
launched in 1968 by jazz entrepreneur
Dick Gibson, with Wilber among its
first members. Co-led by the
trumpeter Yank Lawson and the
bassist Bob Haggart, well managed
and efficiently promoted, it enjoyed
remarkable success and continued for
10 years. It also arrived at the right
time. Vintage jazz was about to
experience another rise in popularity,
boosted this time by serious academic
interest.
With the New York Jazz Repertory
Company, Wilber toured the Soviet
Union in 1975 and shortly afterwards
became leader of the Smithsonian Jazz
Repertory Ensemble. He also founded
his own record label, Bodeswell
Records. In 1982 he was appointedDirector of Jazz Studies at Wilkes
University, Pennsylvania.
Between 1974 and 1979, he joined
with fellow soprano saxophonist Kenny
Davern to form the touring band
Soprano Summit. With their constantly
surprising choice of material and flow
of musical invention, this duo was
among the most popular jazz groups of
the decade, regardless of style.
In 1980, perhaps judging that
sufficient time had elapsed since his
misgivings about being viewed as a
Sidney Bechet clone, Wilber formed a
Bechet Legacy band. It played
concerts and festivals until 1984.
Perhaps the peak of Bob Wilber’s
career came with his recreation of the
sound of Duke Ellington’s early
orchestra for Francis Ford Coppola’s
1984 film, The Cotton Club. Ellington is
notoriously difficult to reproduce,
since so much depends upon the tones
of individual players. Wilber’s choice
of players was as meticulous as his
scoring and the result is superb. It won
him a Grammy award and brought
further commissions for film and
television work.
In later years he moved, with his
second wife, the singer Joanne “Pug”
Horton, to Britain, and the Cotswold
town of Chipping Campden. From
there they travelled as a trio, along
with pianist Dave McKenna. There
were also later versions of the Bechet
Legacy and Soprano Summit.
Although he claimed to have retired
on several occasions, Wilber
continued well into his eighties. In
2009 he presented a centenary
concert of Benny Goodman’s music
with Wynton Marsalis’s Lincoln Center
Jazz Orchestra, and appeared at the
Newport Jazz Festival in 2013.
Bob Wilber was married twice. He is
survived by his second wife, Pug
Horton, and a daughter from his first
marriage.Bob Wilber, born March 15 1928, died
August 4 2019Wilber with the
veteran New
Orleans musician
Sidney Bechet,
whose devoted
pupil he wasCHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGESWILLIAM GOTTLIEB/REDFERNSObituaries
CREDITThe Daily Telegraph Friday 23 August 2019 *** 29
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