Obituary: Chris Buckingham. Changi Camp internee

[JR8]

I'm not inviting comments. Just pasting this so any interested others might reflect on times past. These sort of obits used to be pretty routine in the British broadsheets, but if you'll excuse the pun I think it fair to say they are dying out fast these days.


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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituar ... ngham.html

Chris Buckingham, who died on January 19 aged 89, was a doctor who featured as a young man in The Naked Island (1952), Russell Braddon’s graphic account of life in the Changi prisoner of war camp during the Second World War.

The fall of the British bastion of Singapore to Japanese forces on February 15 1942 marked a low point in British military history. More than 35,000 British troops and 15,000 Australians were herded into a former British military barracks at Changi, where many would spend the rest of the war. Buckingham, serving with the Royal Norfolk Regiment, was among them.

His immediate neighbours in Changi included Russell Braddon, an Australian PoW. In his book, Braddon described Buckingham as a man who “knew a bit about electricity and a bit about the stage and a bit about other things, but nothing very much about anything”