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Re: The Burma POW

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: September 03, 2003

"Sheriff leaves record of life as Burma PoW

FRANK URQUHART

furquhart@scotsman.com

STANLEY Gimson, QC, who survived the horrors of a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp to be appointed the first Sheriff Principal of Grampian, Highland and Islands, Scotland’s largest sheriffdom, has died in Edinburgh after a short illness, aged 88.

Mr Gimson was widely regarded as one of the most able legal figures of his generation. However, it is a series of 180 harrowing sketches, depicting the darkest period of his life, that will be his lasting legacy.

Born in Glasgow and educated at the city’s High School and university, Mr Gimson, a fluent Urdu speaker, served as a lieutenant with an Indian artillery regiment in the Far East and was captured by the Japanese after the fall of Singapore.

Along with thousands of other prisoners of war, he was taken into the jungles of Siam, to work on the Burma-Siam railway. But he lasted only a day on the railway and was sent to the Chungkai PoW camp, close to the River Kwai, suffering from severe dysentery.

Mr Gimson later said he had been one of the lucky ones. He said: "I was sent back to the camp because I was useless to them, I couldn’t work. But I was very lucky because about a month later they were falling behind schedule and decided not to evacuate people on health grounds any more; the men were worked until they died."

Suffering from dysentery, malaria and malnutrition, Mr Gimson struggled to stay alive. His weight fell to under five stone. Despite his failing health, he risked his life time and again to record what he witnessed at the camp in a series of secret sketches.

By the time he was released, Mr Gimson had spent exactly three and a half years in captivity.

Writing in a foreword to a book on the history of Scottish prisoners of the Japanese, he recalled: "It scarcely needs to be said that the attitude of the Japanese army of those days was based on utter contempt for servicemen who surrendered, an attitude expressed in brutality, callousness and almost universal lack of anything we would reckon as human feeling."

Following his return to Scotland after the war, Mr Gimson studied for the Bar and became an advocate in 1949. He took silk as a QC 12 years later.

Douglas Risk, another former Sheriff Principal of Grampian, Highland and Islands, yesterday led the tributes to his colleague.

"He will be sadly missed by all who knew him," Mr Risk said.

©2003 scotsman.com "