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 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.
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