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John Collier Gransden
Summery by Rosemary
Hopefully with so many of us doing this and more and more being shared, written, documented and recorded on the war in the Far East, there will come a time when VJ Day, marking the end of the war with Japan, will and should become as important a day in this country as VE Day, marking the end of the war with Germany, and FEPOW Day 15th August will one day become an officially recognised National Day of Commemoration, worthy of the courage and the sacrifice, which was made by many thousands of people, both those who fought and died fighting the Japanese and those who were later interned and lost their lives in the truly infamous Japanese prisoner of war camps across South East Asia
I've been very lucky to have found a lot of detail from books, manuscripts, private records of former British Malayan families and from the sharing of information with others on a similar quest and had invaluable help from people like Jonathon Moffat at the Malayan Volunteers Group of which I am a member, Michael Pether, who has done an enormous amount of work researching those who left on those last evacuation ships and whose family used to live opposite us in Singapore in the 1950s, Michael Hurst at the FEPOW Association of Taiwan FEPOW websites and the American USS Block Island Association who sent me a lot of interesting stuff including the testimonies of the officers and men of the US Navy who were serving on the American aircraft carriers, Block Island CVE-106, the USS Santee and DEs who rescued and evacuated 1,100 of the POWs on Formosa on 6th September 1945 - including my father. Quite recently out of the blue the son in law of another Formosan POW sent me the name of the American troopship, the USS Admiral Rodman, which evacuated my father from Manila to San Francisco on 17th September 1945 together with the list of military personnel recovered from enemy custody, two of whom had been in the camps in Formosa with my father. I can never resist finding out more about the people whose names crop up on these various lists and records and whom one recognises along the way which all adds to the interest and fascination of doing this.
I've also become a very fast typist too! I knew that awful secretarial course my father told me would be so useful would come in handy one day.....!!
Ronnie:- I was looking for a title and asked Rosemary for one of her dad’s sayings, her reply has to be included in Rosemary’s summary, it brought a smile to my face:-
Rosemary:- Ref the heading - my father had a number of hilarious expressions (He had a wonderful sense of humour but some of them totally unrepeatable!) ..... and I only discovered where these expressions came from during the research I have done on his life......many were from his time as a boy scout in his youth and later as a POW Rover Scout in Formosa but also some of their origins were straight from the vocabulary of the British Raj.
As a Rover Scout one of his good turns at Shirakawa was helping out in the hospital huts , emptying the "bedpans" of those too sick to be moved, lifting and carrying weak and undernourished men to the fly-infested latrines, feeding and washing sick, skeletally thin comrades and generally cleaning up the huts, always with a ready smile and cheery quips like, "Watch out, Matron's on the warpath! God dammit that dame puts out incendiary bombs by spitting on them!" or he would pretend to be a Girl Guide leader, saying in an over "refained" high falsetto voice, "Girl Guaides, crowch down, Scowts arownd!"
There were also a number of rude little rhymes he would recite, often accompanied by a lot of face pulling and raspberries, which as children always had us in fits of laughter and especially when my mother would tick him off for setting us a bad example and give him one of her despairing looks having heard his "funny stories and risque rhymes" so many times before! These continued to delight us and amuse him however many times he repeated them!
It has been said that during those three and a half years of imprisonment during the Japanese occupation cheerfulness, humour and good natured banter amongst groups of friends played an important part in keeping the POWs sane and men relied on their comrades to encourage and help pull them out of the doldrums, those particularly low points which each man experienced at different times when his mate, his buddy, his pal or his chum would be there for him. As a child I often used to sit on the steps of the verandah of our house in Victoria Park in Singapore and listen to the grown-ups, my parents and their friends, many who had been prisoners of the Japanese, talk about the war over their pink gins and machan ketchil. They had all suffered horribly during the Japanese occupation but I never heard one word of self-pity and like my father, if they spoke at all about their different experiences, they used humour to camouflage the worst of those memories.
My father would often grin and say with a mischevious chuckle, "Of course we had marvellous parties in the camps. Do you know, we even had balloons, dear!" but the expression I remember most of all was if you hiccoughed or burped, he would always say "Come in, Babu, leave the camel outside"....
I have since found out that this was an expression which originated in India, and was used by the "Box Wallah" (the derogatory Indian term for a salesman or business man, my father often jokingly describing himself as "Box Wallah" and the word "Babu" (pronounced "Bar-Boo") was the name for an Indian clerk employed in British firms in the days of the old East India merchant traders who came to Singapore at the time of Raffles....
He had two nicknames for me - Raspberry Gooseberry and Coconut Kapala (Kapala being the Malay word for "head" so Coconut Head because he said that when I was born, my head was the shape of a coconut!) but he had funny names for everything - creepy-crawlies were insects, raspberry jam was anything to do with blood or cuts, a grog blossom was a pimple, hors d'oeuvres at lunch were horses' doofers, ballyhoo was any sort of hullaballoo or rumpus and a dooberry was just about anything at all. If someone was mad, he said they were "doolally", a word which again originated in India after a sanatorium in Deolali, a small town in western India where the British sent those who went insane, usually due to the heat or from drinking too much, before they were shipped back to England to mental asylums. These poor souls were diagnosed with having caught "doolally fever" and therefore in the slang, used by British Army soldiers posted to these outposts of Empire, were said to have gone "doolally" or "doolally tat". The original term used was that a person had the "doolally tap", taken from the Sanskrit word, "tapa" meaning "heat" and the Australian equivalent became "Calm down, don't do your lolly"!
That kind of humour would probably not meet with today's modern political correctness though!
Ronnie:- I am not sorry for including this section Rosemary, it shows John’s character. Thank you so much - it has been such a pleasure writing the pages. I feel I now know your dad - God Bless Him
John is remembered in the Roll of Honour
http://www.roll-of-honour.org.uk/g/html/gransden-john-collier_.htm
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