'Give me the peace the world knows nothing of.' If ever there was a fitting epitaph for Jack Edwards, this was it. The tribute was offered by fellow Welshman and life president of the Hong Kong Male Voice Choir, Berwyn Evans.
Few deserve peace like Jack Edwards, MBE, OBE. He died last Sunday after a long battle against deteriorating health. He was 88.
Edwards dedicated more than 60 years of his life to fighting for justice for the thousands who died at the hands of the Japanese in the second world war. He was based in Hong Kong for more than 40 of those years.
There was little to suggest that the boy born in south Wales in the Cardiff suburb of Canton on May 24, 1918, would make the pursuit of justice for others his life's work. He went to the local school where he excelled at singing. He lived there until he joined the Territorial Army from Cardiff just before the second world war broke out.
He was serving with the Royal Signals, attached to the Royal Artillery in northern Malaya, when war broke out in the east. They retreated through the jungle down the length of the Malay peninsula to Singapore, where they were taken in February 1942. Edwards never forgot the 'living horror' of that retreat. 'Our people were dying along the way. It was malaria, dysentery, heat, lack of water ... it was horrible.'
After a few weeks in Singapore's Changi Prison, Edwards was shipped to Formosa (Taiwan), where he spent the rest of the war as slave labour in the Kinkaseki copper mines. 'We stood up to the groin in water contaminated with sulfur and worked in 130 degrees Fahrenheit heat,' he would recall more than 40 years later. 'The nightmare started early every day with the almost 1,000 steps we had to climb to reach the mine's entrance. It was not enough to get the ore out; we had to wheel the bloody stuff in big wooden carts to the collection point. It was backbreaking work, on starvation rations. Inside the mines, we often had to kneel to work. The damage those sharp pebbles did to my knees still hurts today. Oh, the Japanese were bastards, they really were.'