‘What our Sons went through’: The Connective Memories of Far Eastern Captivity in the Charles Thrale Exhibition, 1946–1964

Abstract

Charles Thrale, a British national, was a prisoner of war (POW) of the Japanese between 1942 and 1945. During his captivity he painted hundreds of pictures recording a narrative of POW life. In 1946, post-repatriation, Thrale created an exhibition from this journal of pictures and toured Britain with it for the next eighteen years. Accompanying the surviving paintings are thirteen books, each containing comments left by the visitors to the exhibition. These books, preserved in the Imperial War Museum, have received scant attention until now. Yet the books offer rare insight into how representations of Far Eastern captivity during the Second World War were received and remembered in Britain in the immediate post-war period. Drawing on Marianne Hirsch's notion of postmemory—that is, how traumatic histories are passed on to, and remembered by, the second generation—I explore how the transgenerational transmission of the story of Far Eastern captivity occurred in the immediate aftermath of the war. Furthermore, I show that early postmemory of Far Eastern captivity was informed by the connections that Thrale's audiences made between the representations of the POW camps and those of other wartime atrocities.

Keywords:

• prisoners of war
• Second World War
• postmemory
• multidirectional memory
• FEPOW

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Jay Prosser for his thoughtful reading and discussion, Clare Makepeace and the guest editors for their comments and advice. My thanks are also due to the trustees of the Imperial War Museum (IWM), and particularly Jenny Wood and Sarah Henning at the IWM for access to the Thrale pictures and comments books; Michael Nellis for his permission to reproduce the image of the ‘warning leaflet’ from his father's book; and the late Roderick Suddaby, former Keeper of Documents at the IWM, for sharing his enthusiasm for the Charles Thrale collection. All efforts have been made to contact the copyright holders for the material used in this article, but the author and IWM would appreciate any information to trace the family of Charles Thrale.

Notes on contributor

Lizzie Oliver is an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award (CDA) student at the University of Leeds and the Imperial War Museum. Her thesis is focused on the life writing of men who were forced to labour on the Sumatra Railway as POWs of the Japanese during the Second World War. She is particularly interested in the legacies of ‘silenced’ or ‘forgotten’ histories, the relationships between autobiographical and historical narratives, and the postmemory of second- and third-generation family members. Email: [email protected].

Notes

1 I have examined twelve of the thirteen Thrale visitor books; the thirteenth requires conservation and therefore has not been handled. Three additional volumes contain cuttings of newspaper reviews of the exhibition up until the mid-1950s.

2 Two versions of the catalogue have been used for this article, representing the early and later years of the exhibition—the first edition from 1947, and the thirteenth, which was produced in 1961.

3 The IWM library holds just over 170 memoirs and first-hand accounts published between 1945 and 1950, compared to the 302 published between 1918 and 1922 (Haggith, 2011: 241). This does not include unpublished narratives held in IWM archives.

4 A further £10,000 payment was made available by the British Government to former Far Eastern POWs or their widows from 2000.

5 See Clare Makepeace (this issue) for discussion on the way in which some European POWs appeared to devalue their experience after hearing the stories of captivity in the Far East.