Many letters asked Hope to contact Private Ward and Gunner Simpson for news of their relatives imprisoned in the Far East. They gave personal details: name, rank, number, regiment, etc. Some sent photographs which were, at the time, rare and Precious. With this information individuals can be traced. Of 850 named men, 550 were eventually liberated but 230 died, many of them months or years before the letters were written. A few had been killed in the last desperate days before the Fall of Singapore but the information had still not reached their next of kin.
Here are the stories of some of them:
Margaret Tonge and her husband Signaller Albert Edward Tonge
Margaret Tonge, Manchester, wrote an anguished letter on 12th December 1944:
“So, Mrs Robinson, I turn to you. My husband A.E. Tonge, Royal Corps of Signals was taken with the Fall of Singapore & is in Camp No. 4, Thailand . . . Why should we at home not be told the true facts? All this hush-hush makes one wonder what has become of our dear ones.”
Albert had been killed just four days before she wrote this letter by an American bombing attack on his transport train. Thirty other men died in the attack. Margaret never got over her husband’s death. She never re-married and devoted her life to charities for disabled ex-servicemen.
Clara Hobbs and her son Sapper Norman Bastiani
Clara also wrote on 12th December 1944:
“I should be most grateful if I could have a copy of your private report re Jap Prisoner’s [sic]. My son Norman was taken at Malaya. We have two returned captives in Luton, a meeting organised by the ‘Red Cross’ a hundred were disappointed at the Government’s refusal to allow it. I feel there must be a few bright parts. I quite realise the sordid side, but any little cheerful parts make us feel so grateful & here I wish to thank you so very very much for your kind interest & for the trouble you must have taken.”
Clara believed that the Government had prevented local rescued soldiers from speaking to her Red Cross group in Luton. Norman survived the war, later marrying and raising a family. When he died in 2017, the family found the letters between Clara and Hope and lent them to Erewash Museum for the “Letters of Hope” exhibition.
Hannah Harper and her son Gunner Donald Harper
Hannah wrote to Hope from County Durham on 30th December 1944 having seen a photo of Hope and her daughter Penny in the Daily Mail.
“I have only received three typewritten cards in that time [three years], the first in that plane that crashed.”
Hannah was referring to a plane, carrying the first batch of 30,000 postcards from POWs in Singapore, which crashed whilst coming in to land in Eire (the Republic of Ireland.) Ten passengers and crew were killed and most of the letters were burned in the fire that followed. However, several hundred letters survived the crash and were scattered across the slopes of Mount Brandon where they were collected by local people and re-posted to their destination.
In 2014, a reunion took place between the nephew of William Mort, a POW whose postcard was found on the mountainside and forwarded and a local woman whose father and she found it.
Broadcast RTE August 24th, 2014
Donald was aboard the “hellship” Kachidoki Maru when it was sunk on 12th September 1944 but he was rescued by the Japanese and survived the war. Hannah died in 1966 and he died in 2009.
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