Cliff Martin, sometime prisoner of war, and his granddaughter

A different commemoration of an individual in the Second World War

To publish a well-written book at the time of the 80th VE commemoration is a bold decision. In contrast to the BBC’s stance of briefly referring to some veterans’ former time fighting or surviving in war, the broadcaster virtually overlooked the fact that warfare continued for several years outside Europe, in places such as Malaya, Thailand and Shanghai, and Japanese soldiers barbarically destroyed and suppressed residents alongside British based soldiers. As current Hastings resident Geoff Martin states in his introduction to From Stepney to Hell…and back, ‘On a personal level I am appalled at the lack of public knowledge of what happened to men like my Dad’. Hilda Kean reports.

Initially Geoff discusses his father’s – Cliff Martin’s – background, the eighth child in one family, living in Stepney in the 1920s from which he was soon orphaned. Sacked from a labouring job during the great depression of the 1930s, when he was 17 he joined the East Surrey Regiment in Kingston: for the first time ever away from the East End.

In 1938 he first went overseas to Shanghai, subsequently promoted from corporal to the rank of lance-sergeant and even sergeant-major.  From early 1942 however, the regiment was retreating down the Malay Peninsula, and surrendered at the Fall of Singapore to the Japanese infantry who outnumbered the British and Indian soldiers there.

Then Cliff and other Commonwealth soldiers were sent to work on the ’Death Railway’, a new rail line of 250 miles linking Bangkok and Rangoon, running through jungles, rivers and ravines. This entailed hard physical work 18 hours a day, malnutrition, malaria, starvation, no medical drugs and routine beatings from Japanese guards. Still a young man, he managed to survive despite being ’starved, beaten and tortured’. Attacked for three and a half years, Cliff – though not many soldiers – managed to return to Britain in Autumn 1945.

The Hiraoka dam at Mitsushima that Cliff Martin worked on

Importantly, this work is not exclusively drawn from state official military history but the personal experience of Cliff Martin. Also, this story is not solely based on Geoff Martin’s own tales of his father. Rather Cliff himself personally conveyed some accounts of his own time in the war, through the old regiment’s archive, former colleagues, and reports to a war pensions tribunal, and Geoff has noted other individual soldiers’ memories, as well as some of his own tales of his father. Cliff did have memories of his past, even though the Japanese banned any soldier from writing even a diary or notes.

It was not until 1993, decades later, that he finally received a relevant war pension — with a slight increase by 2003. Medical assessments were first conducted on Cliff, then in his 70s, to ascertain the impact of the physically vicious imprisonment. Some conditions were identified as malaria,Dengue fever, ringworm, scabies, hearing loss, malnutrition and privation (including beri-beri). This was not just a past historical account: these were medical aspects still present in Cliff’s later life, arising from the ‘damage to his skull and his brain from the beating by Japanese guards’.

This book reveals not just one individual’s information but carefully shows an aspect of past history omitted from political and military history — and forgotten. Where were any public memorials of the war in the far east shown to viewers on recent BBC programmes? And were any survivors, or their families, interviewed? Where was a documentary of those years now shown on television? (Though no doubt in keeping with their overlooking of mass killing enacted elsewhere today…)

From Stepney to Hell … and back, by Geoff Martin, is available in paperback for £10 from Printed Matter, 185 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RG

This book is not in any way a usual ordinary family history derived from online Ancestry birth, marriage, death certificates and censuses. This is a fascinating account of an almost currently unknown history, the government’s failure to act but clearly recalled through the lives of ordinary men. Cliff did remember and didn’t totally reject expressing those negative times.

I picked up local writer Geoff Martin’s book in Printed Matter bookshop on a recent Saturday this May. As a historian I rarely read books quickly: within two days I finished this clearly readable and totally engaging work. I thoroughly recommend it whatever your age or knowledge of former histories.

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