Jimmy Mowatt

Jimmy Mowatt, who has died aged 92, only expected to be in the Gordon Highlanders for six months. He was a young entrepreneur with a business to run – a gents' hairdresser's shop he opened at the age of 16. But just three months after enlisting, in June 1939, Britain declared war on Germany and over the next six years the course of his life was to alter in the most unimaginably brutal way.

Captured by the Japanese after the fall of Singapore, he lived through one of the most hellish regimes of the Second World War, the construction of the Thailand to Burma railway, he almost drowned when American aircraft sank the ship transferring him to Japan and endured more gruelling, forced labour in an underground lead mine.

That he survived at all is testimony to his strength of character – he always told himself: "I'm going home." That he appeared to harbour no bitterness is perhaps even more remarkable.

The son of farm grieve Arthur Mowatt, he was born in West Mathers, St Cyrus, near Montrose, the second youngest of six children. He was educated at Johnshaven School where his perfect attendance over 10 years earned the 15-year-old a gold watch, chain and propelling pencil from an admiring headmaster in Aberdeen who read about his achievement.

After leaving school he started work apprenticed as a hairdresser to his uncle, David Airth, in Inverbervie and was not yet 17 when he opened his first shop in Laurencekirk. It was a job he loved and, as a man who enjoyed company and had an entertaining line in patter, it was a trade to which he was ideally suited. By the time he was called up, initially for six months, it was the summer of 1939 and he was 20.

However, the outbreak of the Second World War meant he was not released from duty. After basic training in Aberdeen he began active service. In 1940 he headed to Singapore aboard the MV Batory from Liverpool. Among his fellow passengers were several hundred children being evacuated to Australia, over whom the soldiers had to stand guard each night.

Singapore was considered a good posting at the time, prior to the invasion of Malaya by the Japanese. Part of B Company, he regularly did guard duty at Pengerang and built various anti-tank defences. But after the Japanese launched bombing raids in December 1941, he was sent to Johore on the Malay mainland, to counter the Japanese advance.

A good shot, he was made a sniper and, fighting a rearguard action back to Singapore, he was in the last squad to leave Malaya. "I don't remember anyone piping us across the causeway," he later said, "as this would have given away our position as the Japanese were right behind us."

After the surrender of Singapore he was marched to Changi and sent to Thailand to begin work in No 2 Group on the notorious Thailand to Burma railway, toiling the whole length of the route which is thought to have cost the lives of 120,000 labourers.

In an interview for the Gordon Highlanders Museum in 2010, Mr Mowatt told of building the wooden bridge over the River Kwai – the temporary structure before the erection of the steel and concrete bridge and immortalised in the David Lean film Bridge On The River Kwai.

He was in numerous camps along the almost impenetrable terrain from which the railway was hewn, including those at Chungkai, Wampo and Takanun.

At Wampo he had to carve a ledge for the line along the edge of a cliff above the river.

"We had to clear a cubic metre of rock every day," he recalled, "and we drilled the holes using a hand drill and a sledge hammer, giving the drill half a turn after each hammer blow."

Undoubtedly one of the most amazing engineering achievements of the war, it came at a terrible price: diseases including cholera were rife; food was a meagre daily ration of rice; vicious beatings for any perceived wrongdoing were commonplace.

"If they struck, you stayed down or the guards would have hit you again and again. I wasn't too bad as I was easy going and if you worked hard they seemed to leave you alone."

Only allowed to wash in the river once a month, wounds were easily infected and although he suffered terribly with leg ulcers he avoided the fate of many of his comrades who had limbs amputated.

In 1944 he was taken from Thailand and put on a ship to Japan which was bombed and torpedoed in the Philippines by the Americans.

The vessel, believed to be the Hofuku Maru, sank in five minutes with the loss of more than 1000 prisoners.

Mr Mowatt was in the water for a long time, sharing a piece of wreckage with another man who gave up and drowned before rescue came via another Japanese ship.

He then spent a short time deep in snow in a PoW camp in Formosa (now Taiwan) before being moved to Japan, again in freezing conditions and with almost no clothes.

There, within sight of Mount Fuji and under frequent American air raids, he worked in a lead mine until the day a Japanese officer announced: "The war is over and I hope you get back to your loved ones."

After recuperating in Australia he came home on the P&O ship the Strathdene and was demobbed in Edinburgh in November 1945.

Mr Mowatt, who often had to cut his Japanese jailers' hair, resumed his barber's business in Laurencekirk and in 1951 married his wife Jean in Fettercairn.

A great storyteller with a keen sense of humour, he loved to laugh and joke, often having his clients in stitches. But he always insisted: "I'm lucky to be here."

A widower, he is survived by his children Fraser and Jane and grandchildren Stuart, Graeme, Alix and James.