STORY OF A LOYAL MERCHANT SEAMAN: DEATH AT AUCKLAND

Greymouth Evening Star, 4 October 1949, Page 5

STORY OF A LOYAL MERCHANT SEAMAN: DEATH AT AUCKLAND

AUCKLAND, This Day (P.A.).— Sam Sum-Sue-Sum, the last of three prisoners-of-war companions who were repatriated together from Japan, to New Zealand, was buried in the mercantile marine section of the Waikumete cemetery today. His two former companions were a Scots lad and a Welsh boy. Sam was one of the few who escaped when the tanker Patella, from Singapore, was torpedoed in the Indian Ocean. He was taken to Japan as a prisoner to join the British soldiers and civilians there. He soon began in a self-effacing way to do things for them. His Oriental mind enabled him to give a warning when anything nasty was approaching arid tell I ?them how best to avoid it. ' Evacuated, to New. Zealand fn.J.945, lie entered the a tuberculosis patient. Sam was 1 everybody’s friend. He made the first cup of tea in the mornings and cherished a photograph of his wife and child in Singapore. Sam recognised only one nationality, maintaining to the last that he was “British Mercantile Marine.”