As the rescued POWs arrived home in Britain in November 1944, they were whisked away by the War Office to undergo medical tests and interrogation about their experiences over the previous two and a half years. The stories that they told were shocking and terrifying to hear. After their debriefing, the men were finally allowed to make their way home for a period of leave before they re-joined their regiments.
Hope obtained the addresses of three of the returned men and she visited the first of them, Private George Ward on 17th November 1944 at his home in Jacksdale, ten miles north of Ilkeston.
By coincidence, this was the day that the Secretary for War, Sir James Grigg, made a speech in Parliament describing conditions in the camps. With strong language, he told of starvation rations, toiling for long hours under the blazing sun, beatings, murders, malaria, dysentery, and the “appalling death rate.”
After visiting Gunner Sidney Simpson in Hinckley, Leicestershire a week later Hope became determined to produce her pamphlet which, she felt, offered a more balanced and comforting picture for the anxious relatives. Although she was a little anxious that Ward and Simpson had shielded her from the worst of the facts, she was reassured that their stories matched. She tested the water by reading her notes to a packed meeting of the Ilkeston Prisoners of War Relatives’ Association at the Ilkeston Miner’s Welfare. Her presentation was warmly received giving her the confidence to contact the Sunday Express. Her letter was published on 26th November 1944, under the heading “A Jap Prison Camp: Better News.”
The letter was literally an “overnight sensation.” The following day, letters began to pour into her home in Wharnecliffe Road, Ilkeston , thanking her and asking for more information. With the help of family and friends, she diligently set to work to answer every letter and to include a duplicated copy of the pamphlet. In that first week, 430 letters arrived and in the second week, 176.
In the third week, the Daily Mail picked up the story and, on 11th December 1944, ran an article titled “She Defies War Office Secrecy.” This raised the numbers even higher and, in the week following this article, she received a further 700 letters.
Letters continued to come in throughout the Christmas period (several being written on Christmas Day) but reduced to a trickle for the rest of the war, the last arriving a week after the surrender of Japan.
A total of 2,215 letters have survived to become part of the Hope Robinson POW Letters Collection but Hope’s diaries and personal letters hint that there may have been over 5,000. The fate of the missing letters is unknown.
<= BACK The Escape and the Pamphlet
FORWARD The Letters and the Writers =>