Welcome to the website page exploring the history of Lurgashall Parish
The Archive room at the Village Hall is next open to visitors on Wed 26th NOVEMBER and Wed 10th DECEMBER, 2.30 – 4.30pm.
Contact: archive@lurgashallvillagehall.org
James (‘Jim’) Bradley (1911 – 2003)
“The picture that gave me the will to survive”
Some of you may know Roger and Gay Bradley who used to live at Beards Cottage (now Aldworth Farm) on Jobson’s Lane and now live in Haslemere. Roger’s parents, Jim and Lindsay, lived in Balls Cross, running the fruit orchards there. Jim couldn’t be trapped in an office after what he had endured in life; he needed fresh air and freedom.
Jim’s story of suffering, endurance and ultimate survival in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps during World War II is testament to all those who fought and survived a brutal war in the name of peace.
A Cambridge engineering graduate, Jim was a lieutenant in the Sappers when he arrived in Singapore in 1942. After 30 days of action the island fell to the Japanese, and Jim, along with hundreds of other Allied troops, was marched off to the infamous Changi jail.
After 14 months, and already weakened, ill and emaciated, Jim was sent with 7,000 British and Australian POWs to work on the construction of the Burma/ Thailand railway – now known as the Death Railway.
Songkurai, a place just eight miles south of the Burma/Thailand border, contained three POW camps. The Japanese showed no mercy to their captives. Jim recalled, “We had to work 15 hours a day in the pouring rain, up to our waists in water to build a bridge.” Cholera was killing 20 or more people a day, and Jim, being one of few cholera-carrying officers, was made to cut wood for the funeral pyres of the dead every day.
Incredibly, Jim and nine other men planned an escape from the camp, heading perilously through jungle towards the coast. After a nightmare journey lasting more than eight weeks, the five who survived were seized by Burmese hunters and handed back to the Japanese. The escapees were locked in a 6ft-by-6ft bamboo cage and put on display at POW camps all along the railway as a warning.
Weighing less than six stone and desperately ill, Jim was taken to the place he described as “the worst of all” – Outram Road Jail in Singapore. After eight weeks of torture, he was taken back to Changi where he remained for the rest of the war until his release in August 1945.
Through all this, Jim had miraculously kept safe the photograph of his young son Roger, his first wife Lindsay and her mother – “the picture that gave me the will to survive”.
Back in England, Jim had his fruit farm, and he rented the orchards at Parkhurst in Lurgashall for many years and then bought the land and Orchard Cottage at Parkhurst for Pip and Margy Holden. Pip managed the Parkhurst orchards. Roger and Gay lived at Beards Cottage just up the road.
It took 35 years for Jim’s nightmares to subside, finally exorcised when he wrote about his war experiences in a memoir.
In 1995, the 50th anniversary of VJ Day, Jim agreed to meet and shake the hand of the Japanese camp commander who terrorised POWs at Songkurai. He wanted the Japanese to acknowledge the atrocities and, if they could do so, to apologise. Jim said, “I never want anyone else to go through what I had, and the way to stop it is to have peace.”
Jim died in 2003, aged 91.