Stanley Gimson was a remarkable, talented, kindly and gentle Scot. He came from Glasgow and was educated at Glasgow High School and Glasgow University where he studied law. In 1938 he joined the Territorial Army. He was called up at the outbreak of war in 1939 and in 1941 he was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the 2nd Heavy Anti Aircraft Regiment, Indian Artillery, then stationed in Singapore.

When Singapore fell, Stanley was captured by the Japanese and he was amongst those who were sent north into Thailand to work on the infamous Burma-Siam Railway. Here thousands of Allied prisoners suffered beatings, overwork and lack of food and medical supplies in the most terrible of conditions. Stanley Gimson contracted dysentery and malaria and, weighing around five stones and unfit to work, he was sent to the camp at Changi.

It was while he was in Changi that, despite his very poor state of health and the threat of torture and death if discovered, he began to gather together and add to a series of sketches that he had made of prison life under the Japanese. Paper was virtually impossible to come by and fellow prisoners risked their lives to provide Stanley with drawing materials. The finished sketches were rolled up, put into a bottle and buried in the camp cemetery.

When these sketches were retrieved at the end of the war they provided an almost unique record of camp life. Beautifully crafted, the very simplicity of these drawings has come to symbolise the appalling conditions of cruelty under which Allied prisoners laboured for three and a half years.

Stanley Gimson was a fortunate survivor. He recuperated in hospital in India and then returned to Scotland to further his future in the law. He had a distinguished career both as an Advocate and a Sheriff Principal. He devoted much of his time in later life to the welfare of Far Eastern Prisoners of War and he was and active, caring and compassionate Chairman of the Scottish Far Eastern Prisoners of War Association. He was amongst a group of Scottish FEPOWs who spoke movingly of his experiences at a Scots at War Witness Seminar in 1997.

Sheriff Stanley Gimson died on 30th August 2003. He left behind a very special and bravely made record of a tragic and cruel imprisonment which many did not survive.