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John Collier Gransden
Post War
John and Marian Married in May 1946
At the RAF church of St Clement Dane’s in the Strand
My father returned to Singapore after the war to work for the Borneo Company, he became Managing Director of Borneo Motors and that is when I was born in Singapore.
Dinner at Tanglin Club in Singapore after the war
From Left to Right
Dorothy Wainwright, John Gransden
Jackie Wainwright and Marian Gransden
Jackie Wainwright was with Guthrie’s in Singapore and interned at Changi during the Japanese occupation. His wife, Dorothy, escaped back to England shortly before the Fall of Singapore in 1942 and worked at Bletchley Park where she supervised 200 decoders.
John and Marian with their baby daughter, Rosemary
Taken in 1948
At the Borneo Company house in Orange Grove Road, Singapore
The Christening of their Daughter, Rosemary
On 19th December 1948
The Christening of their Son, Roger, in 1950
As part of his job he travelled extensively across the Far East and regularly visited both Japan and Formosa over the next twenty plus years. I asked him once how he could visit Japan and regularly do business with the Japanese after the way he had been treated by them in the Japanese prison camps (at Palembang, Singapore and Formosa)and he replied that he and most people who had been living and working in the Far East at the time of the Japanese invasion, had lost their homes, their businesses, their possessions, the Japanese had killed a great number of their friends, the Japanese had in fact destroyed their whole way of life, but he was damned if he was going to let what the Japanese had done and what had happened during the war destroy the rest of his life as well. That steely determination and strong will together with a wonderful sense of humour, which had held him in good stead during his three and a half years of internment somehow also seemed to help him in his recovery from the tragic circumstances of that “bloody, bloody war”, as he called it, and enable him to move on and start again despite what he had suffered and been through as a prisoner of war of the Japanese.
New Year’s Eve Fancy Dress Ball at Tanglin Club Singapore
Taken in the mid 1950s
John Gransden, right, as an “Ugly Sister”
with evening bag, wig, ear rings….. and cigar!
He got on with his life but he never forgot what had happened either to him or to his many friends, who had suffered at the hands of the Japanese, those who had survived and those who had died in the defence of Singapore and Malaya and in the Japanese prison camps across S.E. Asia and I will always remember his last words to me when I visited him in hospital just before he died on 20th April, 1994, when he said, "Don't feel sorry or grieve for me. I have been a very fortunate man. I have had nearly 50 bonus years of a happy and successful life unlike so many of my friends and people I knew in Singapore and Malaya who lost their lives and died during the war in the Far East all those years ago....."
At the end of the 1950’s John joined Hawker Siddeley Brush International as director of their operations in the Far East.
Family Ski-ing Holiday in Seefeld, Austria – January 1959
“Apres Ski” – John Dancing with his Daughter, Rosemary 1959
My father never forgot what happened and he certainly never forgot the loss of so many good friends during that war with the Japanese, as indeed we who come after must never forget either. It is so important that we continue to keep alive the memory of the many men, women and children of different races who suffered so terribly at the hands of the Japanese military during World War 2, that we remember the millions of people, both military personnel and civilians, who lost their lives between 1941 and 1945 in the war against Japan, and it is especially important to remember the men, women and children who were captured, those who died during internment in Japanese prison camps across the Far East and those who survived three and a half years of hunger, disease, brutality, enslavement and separation from the rest of the world.
John in His Garden in Haslemere With Two of His Grandchildren
1984
My father spent his retirement and possibly some of his happiest years building a wonderful garden at his home in Haslemere, Surrey, a quiet and peaceful oasis with splendid views across Blackdown and the English countryside, a garden which he filled with many different flowering shrubs, plants and trees.French windows led out from the morning room on to a lawned terrace surrounded by a beautiful rose garden where during the summer months the wonderful scents from these exquisite flowers together with an exuberance of colour added to the simple pleasure of sitting outside on a warm, sunny day in England. At the top end of the garden was a small orchard of apple, plum and pear trees and a large plot set aside for the growing of vegetables and soft fruits and every summer there were a mass of strawberries, raspberries, loganberries, redcurrants, blackcurrants and gooseberries to be picked from inside the netting of an extensive fruit cage.
There was always a small bottle of Angostura Bitters kept in the tall, intricately carved, dark wood Chinese drinks' cabinet in the dining room in readiness for the pink gins, my father regularly served at pre-lunch or early evening drinks's parties, sometimes accompanied with deliciously hot and spicy curry puffs and tiffin often included not only different Malay curries but also the Cape Malay Bobotie, the rich, aromatic South African curry, the original recipe of Bobotie, brought by 17th Century Dutch traders to Cape Town from Indonesia, which my step-mother had learned to cook in Cape Town where she had spent the war years after escaping from Singapore with her five year old daughter just before the Fall. (My stepmother's first husband, Jack Harvey, a friend of my father's, was taken prisoner in Singapore and died in Changi at the hospital at Roberts Barracks in August 1942.)
John later took up upholstery going to classes to learn how to cover stools, chairs and small items of furniture in beautiful fabrics and most weekends during the season he and my stepmother packed the picnic hamper and accompanied by Cobber, their Australian terrier, they would drive to Cowdray Park to watch the polo often meeting up with old friends from Malaya and Singapore.
John died in 1994 at King Edward VII Hospital in Midhurst, West Sussex and his death was registered at Chichister.
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