Searle's War

 Today is Ronald Searle's birthday. He was born in 1920, and died at a grand old age in 2011 (an event marked on this blog). It was amazing, going on miraculous, that he even made it through his twenties: serving with the Royal Engineers in Singapore in 1942, he was taken prisoner by the Japanese and spent the next three years in the notorious Changi jail, at various camps, and working in the Kwai jungle on the even more notorious Burma railway, the well named 'Death Railway'. He contracted beriberi, dysentery and malaria, among other afflictions, was frequently beaten, and, like all the prisoners of the Japanese, kept on starvation rations. And through it all he drew, on whatever scraps of paper he could come by, recording what was going on around him, even though he knew he would have faced almost certain death if his drawings were discovered. A fellow prisoner described Searle at work: 'If you can imagine something that weighs six stone or so, is on the point of death and has no qualities of the human condition that aren't revolting, calmly lying there with a pencil and a scrap of paper, drawing, you have some idea of the difference of temperament that this man had from the ordinary human being.' 
  Searle hid his drawings, often under the mattresses of fellow prisoners dying of cholera, hoping that the Japanese guards would be too fearful of infection to go near those beds. Astonishingly, some 400 of his drawings survived the war – and so did Searle, who went on to have a glittering career as an illustrator. Most of his PoW drawings are now in the permanent collection of the Imperial War Museum, a valuable record of the brutality visited on their prisoners by the Japanese. They are remarkable not only for their skill but for their calm, dispassionate documentation of the often horrific scenes he recorded; there is none of the expressionistic anguish you might expect. More about this remarkable body of work, about Searle's war, and about the illustrated memoir he subsequently wrote, To the Kwai and Back, can be found here.