Graham Heywood's diary paints rich picture of life in a Hong Kong POW camp
The wartime diary of Observatory employee Graham Heywood, one of the first two men to be captured during the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong, shines a light on life inside the Sham Shui Po POW camp, writes Annemarie Evans.
"It won't be long now" was a common greeting between inmates in the Sham Shui Po prisoner of war camp after the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong in December 1941.
For three years and eight months, "enemy nationals" (mostly British, Canadian, American and Dutch) who had survived the 17-day Battle of Hong Kong languished in the territory's internment camps, hundreds of others having been shipped to Japan, to work as slave labourers.
Benjamin Davies Evans, then-director of the Hong Kong Royal Observatory, was sent to Stanley Internment Camp for civilians; two of his scientific officers, Leonard Starbuck and Graham Heywood, would end up in Sham Shui Po. They were, in fact, the first men to be captured in Hong Kong.
"Not only were Heywood and Starbuck the first known people to be captured by the Japanese after they crossed the border in 1941, it is possible that they were the first Allied POWs captured on land in the entire Pacific war," says Hong Kong war historian Tony Banham, author of We Shall Suffer There: Hong Kong Defenders Imprisoned, 1942-45.
While people in Hong Kong knew the Japanese military were advancing south, many didn't realise how fast.
On December 8, Heywood and Starbuck were instructed by Evans to dismantle the magnetic (weather observation) station at Au Tau, in Yuen Long, and to retrieve the instruments and equipment.