David Mundell

Last weekend I met my constituent Margaret Barbour, of Rosefield farm near Annan, to hear about the experience of her father, Sergeant Major Jock Wylie, and to look through the letters, paperwork and photographs that she has kept. A riding instructor in the Lanarkshire Yeomanry Territorials, Jock was deployed in 1940 to the far east. By 1942, after the fall of Singapore, he was taken prisoner by the Japanese. Thus began three years and eight months of unimaginable suffering. Jock was not a “guest” of the Imperial Nippon Army, as their propaganda called it, but their slave. Jock spent time in Changi prison in Singapore before being sent to the notorious Kinkaseki jungle camp on Formosa—now known as Taiwan. Hundreds of Jock’s fellow prisoners died on that journey. There, along with hundreds of others, he was forced to work in copper mines in horrific conditions, often up to 18 hours a day. Starved, beaten and stripped of dignity, men were tied to stakes under a burning sun, given salted rice or left in bamboo sweat boxes without water. Every day they were forced to take a walk past prisoners who had been beheaded for alleged misdemeanours and had their heads placed on poles, with their full military headgear still worn as the flesh around it decayed. Jock and his colleagues were reduced to skin and bone. He was over 12 stone when captured, and barely 6 stone when released. The first person to see him at the local railway station on his return burst into tears at the sight of him.