‘Despair, illness, no hope’ – former Manchester POW recalls camp | Manchester News

Gunner Maurice Naylor was a soldier in the 18th Infantry deployed to Singapore when Japan invaded in 1942 during World War Two – and was taken by the Japananese as a prisoner of war.

Mr Naylor later remembered his time in one of the country’s notorious camps as one of “despair, illness, no hope, no idea of when this world was going to end, apparently forgotten by our friends”.

The weary prisoner was put to work on the infamous Thai-Burma railway – known as the “death railway” – and, when he eventually returned home to Manchester at 24, weighed just 5.5st, 7lbs (35kg).

Mr Naylor died in 2020 aged 99 and excerpts from a 2013 interview with him have now been released on the 80th anniversary of VJ Day as part of a podcast The Second Map

At 21, Mr Naylor had set sail for North Africa but was diverted to Singapore to reinforce troops preparing to clash with the Japanese.

After engaging in combat, he became one of about 130,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers to be taken prisoner, and was held in a camp in Thailand.

Every day was the same – woken before dawn, given rice, and then sent out to work in forced labour camps, including the feared Thai-Burma railway project, which saw many prisoners – stricken by exhaustion and starvation – die during their efforts.

The story of the railway was later dramatized in the 1957 wartime epic, The Bridge on the River Kwai.

The conditions were terrible, and he soon became malnourished.

“I had chronic diarrhoea most of the time I was a prisoner,” he recalled.

“But I wasn’t considered bad enough normally to stop me going out on a working party.”

He declined to talk about the horrors of his experiences until after he was aged in his 60s, when a trip back to south-east Asia prompted him to tell his story.

Mr Naylor’s daughter Liz Rowbotham said: “He stood in the graveyard in Kanchanaburi, which is the nearest town to the bridge, and saw all these rows and rows of graves, and thought that he owed it to those men to tell the story of what had happened.”

Mr Naylor gave his interview to Monica Whitlock in 2013, and it is now part of The History Podcast: The Second Map, a Radio 4 and World Service podcast available now on Sounds.