As Eric stated on the website The Forgiveness Project, ‘I…had intense hatred for the Japanese, and was always looking for ways and means to do them down. The meeting helped Eric to exchange his feelings of vengeance for a wish for reconciliation. Takashi carried a heavy weight of guilt and had disavowed the brutality of his compatriots’ treatment of their prisoners. Takashi was looking for reconciliation with allied prisoners.Īt the end of the 1980s, Eric and Takashi met. A turning point for Eric came when a fellow ex-POW sent Eric a newspaper cutting featuring Takashi Nagase – the translator who had taunted him throughout his beatings and whose voice had never left Eric’s mind since the war. They divorced in 1982.Įric married his second wife, Patti, the following year.

This led to great tension and difficulties in their relationship. Throughout this period in his life, Eric found it almost impossible to communicate the daily haunting memories of his trauma with his wife and family. They spent time in Africa as part of Eric’s job in the Colonial Office before returning to Scotland where he was a lecturer at Strathclyde University. The couple had met through the Charlotte Baptist Chapel in Edinburgh before Eric was sent overseas, and there were strong religious and social expectations that they would marry should he return from the war. The wedding entry described Eric’s occupation as a Clerical Officer, Post Office Telephones (Lt, Royal Signals). On 20 November 1945, aged 26 years old, he married Agnes Scott Dickson, a sorting clerk and telegraphist who also worked in the GPO. Eric survived this physically, but he was left with haunting and traumatic memories which he couldn’t escape from on his return to Scotland. National Records of Scotland, Soldiers’ and Airmen’s Wills, SC/512.Īn image of the will and transcript can be seen on the Scottish Archives for Schools’ resource ‘Leaving it all Behind’.Īs in the camp in Haito, existence for the men building the Burma Railway comprised sickness, starvation and maltreatment. During his time as a POW, Eric and a group of fellow prisoners were found hiding a radio receiver made from scrap parts they were tortured, beaten and interrogated for this act. His remains were scattered over Hong Kong in 1946. Food was scarce and disease spread easily, including malaria, which killed James. Men often died of sun-stroke or were beaten if the daily work targets were not met. Prisoners in the Haito Camp worked in cane fields and in the nearby sugar factory. The will was written on his behalf, as he was too ill to write it himself, and bears the official stamps and finger prints of the Japanese and British officers who witnessed it. James left his estate and monies to his wife Mary Kennedy Bain. Private James Bain, the Gordon Highlanders, was a Scottish soldier who died in a Japanese POW camp in Haito, Taiwan, in April 1943. Eric was one of the 30,000 British POWs set to work on the line which became known as the ‘Death Railway’ 27% of Allied POWs died or were killed in Japanese custody compared to a 4% death rate in German camps (source: Encyclopaedia Britannica). The Japanese forced approximately 200,000 Asian conscripts and over 60,000 Allied Prisoners of War (POWs) to construct the Burma Railway.

He was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant in December 1940 and was one of thousands of soldiers who surrendered to the Japanese in Singapore in February 1942. In 1939 Eric joined the Royal Corps of Signals, before the war broke out. Eric also worked there before the war, and very briefly after returning to Scotland and being demobilised. His father worked in the General Post Office (GPO), opposite General Register House – the building where one of the ScotlandsPeople search rooms is based today. National Records of Scotland, Statutory Register of Births, 1919, 685/7 no. Eric Sutherland Lomax was born on at 11 Bedford Terrace, Portobello, the son of John Lomax, Civil Service clerk, and his wife Elizabeth Sutherland.

The railway man