Japanese prisoner of war

Born: September 8, 1919;

Died: October 7, 2016

ALISTAIR Urquhart, who has died aged 97, was an Aberdeen-born businessman who spent three-and-a-half terrifying years as a prisoner of the Japanese following the fall of Singapore and whose memoir The Forgotten Highlander became an overnight success when it was published in his 92nd year.

The book, recounting Urquhart’s incredible survival story, struck a chord with journalists like Max Hastings and the BBC’s Alan Little and their interest helped propel it to become a Sunday Times No 1 Bestseller.

A punishing round of television, radio and newspaper interviews, public speaking engagements, literary festivals and book signings followed – all of which Alistair Urquhart took in his stride, while keeping up his ballroom dancing activities. He passionately believed that Japan had never atoned for the holocaust that the Japanese Imperial Army perpetrated upon China and South East Asia. As a proud and active member of the Far East Prisoner of War Association, he was angry too at what he saw as the shameful neglect by Britain of the former prisoners who were regarded as something of an embarrassment by successive Governments seeking to trade with Japan.

Like so many veterans, he never spoke about his experiences for many long years. He did not want to upset himself or his family. But he could never escape the nightmares of his experiences and after the death of his wife Mary he began to speak to school pupils whom, he joked, were always horrified to learn that he had not had a shower for three-and-a-half years.

In 2007 a paragraph in a local newspaper reported that Mr Urquhart was to speak to a Dundee primary school about his life as a prisoner of the Japanese. A member of my own family had died on the infamous Death Railway as a prisoner of the Japanese and I asked Kurt Bayer, a young journalist colleague, to go along and interview the former Gordon Highlander.

He returned with an amazing tale of survival and endurance. Mr Urquhart had survived not only a death march into the jungle to build the railway and the Bridge on the River Kwai, but also starvation, constant beatings, torture and a bout of cholera, the disease which killed tens of thousands of slave labourers in the horrendous camps dotted along the route of the railway into Burma.

Incredibly, he had survived further slavery in the Singapore docks before being consigned to the hold of the Kachidoki Maru, one of a fleet of rusting ‘Hell Ships’ in which 20,000 allied prisoners died in horrific conditions. Men went mad from hunger and thirst and killed each other but Mr Urquhart's sufferings in the iron tomb were nothing as compared to the ordeal that awaited him when the ship was sunk by an American submarine, the USS Pampanito, which is now a museum in San Francisco and which Mr Urquhart visited in his lengthy retirement.

Mr Urquhart found himself floating alone in the searing heat of the South China Sea for five days until he was rescued on the brink of death – by a Japanese fishing boat.

During his time on the Death Railway, he had befriended the camp doctor, a Scot called Dr Mathieson and, now the doctor nursed him through a second hell ship journey to Japan to slave in a coal mine. Unfit to work in the mine, he worked with Dr Mathieson, for whom he had enormous respect, as an orderly and tended to the vegetable gardens of the Japanese army.

It was while working in the gardens on August 9, 1945 that Mr Urquhart had his final brush with death during the Second World War. He sighted a lone plane high in the sky and minutes later was knocked over by a strange warm wind – unknown to the young Aberdonian he had felt the hot breath of Fat Man, the code name for the nuclear bomb which the Americans had detonated over Nagasaki a few miles away.

Eventually, with the help of literary agent Mark Stanton, we were able to secure a book deal with a respected publisher and Mr Urquhart again demonstrated the determination and shrewdness that helped him to survive by ceaselessly and successfully campaigning to have the book title changed and to improving the terms of the advance. It was a pleasure and a privilege to work with him on the book.

The book was launched at the Gordon Highlanders museum in Aberdeen in what was the first of dozens of sell-out events. There were several emotional and poignant moments during these events – when elderly ladies would approach Mr Urquhart with faded photographs of their loved ones asking if he had known them on the railway.

But none was more poignant than the event in Glasgow where two ladies patiently waited at the end of an enormous book-signing queue before introducing themselves as the widow and daughter of Dr Mathieson.

Despite all of his suffering, injuries and illness, Mr Urquhart had never received a war pension. That was remedied when Prince Charles read The Forgotten Highlander. Both he and Camilla were deeply moved by the story and he personally contacted the Ministry of Defence on Mr Urquhart's behalf.

Mr Urquhart was a compelling speaker and held audiences spellbound. He spoke without notes and at one memorable packed meeting in Alyth, when interrupted by a questioner, he answered the question at length before returning to exactly where he had left off – impressive for a man of 93.

He recognised that the appeal of his story was one of an ordinary man who found himself in extraordinary circumstances. Yet he was extraordinary too. Highly intelligent, athletic as a young man and tenacious in spirit, he believed others could benefit from reading his story. And they did. The old soldier received dozens of letters from readers who found the book inspirational and hundreds more echoed those sentiments in online feedback.

Mr Urquhart wanted The Forgotten Highlander to be his legacy and succeeded. To those who knew him or who read the book, he will never be forgotten.

He died in Dundee, where he made his home after the war, and is survived by his son Philip and daughter Joyce and his grandchildren.

GRAHAM OGILVY