SIME ROAD CAMP

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 89, Issue 215, 11 September 1945, Page 5

SIME ROAD CAMP

N.Z. INTERNEES WERE HELD THERE Singapore, Sept. 8. New Zealand and Australian men and women residents of Malaya comprised a substantial proportion of Europeans in Sime Road internment, camp, says the Associated Press special correspondent in Malaya. The camp is a collection of crumbling huts in the picturesque surroundings of the former R.A.F. barracks r»rd the Singapore Golf Club. Doctor B. M. Johns, of the Malayan Medical Services, a surgeon who was ill-treat-ed in the Gestapo gaol is New Zealand’s representative and chief medical officer of the camp. Sime Road is not another Belsen or Buchenwald, but certain periods of imprisonment were hard and bitter. At the outset the civilians were mustered and marched seven miles in the hot sun to the Changi prison, where they were herded in small cells. Five thousand civilians were herded into a space meant for 700. Women and men were segregated. Husbands and wives were permitted, at the most, a one-hour meeting a week. The prisoners found an ingenious way of conversing, whispering down the interconnecting drains and hiding notes in foods. When the internees were sent to Sime Road the conditions greatly improved by comparison, but food was an obsession with the inmates. It was almost their sole conversation. The daily breakfast was of rice and gruel, tea without milk or sugar, at lunch boiled rice and vegetables; at supper rice, flour bread, some baked twice a week and some form of vegetable dish, with dried fish. The huts were open-fronted and lull of ingenious improvised cooking utensils. With the furniture in the open, carefully hoarded clothes were flying from rafters and sticks. Furniture standing in ths sun in the women's quarters looked like a row of stalls in a market. The bright side of the camp was the relatively low sickness rate among the women and children, partly due to open air exercise and partly to the superb care by the doctor and nurses, including Sisters Gladys Tomkins, Hamilton, New Zealand, and Mary Uniacke of Stratford, who nursed and washed clothes, scrubbed, ironed anti cooked and kept up the women’s spirits.