Christmas Island (Indian Ocean) - Historical stories, ruins, relics, and other interesting things
Captain Williams – Interview reveals extraordinary WW2 story
The story of the mutiny that took place on Christmas Island in the weeks before the Japanese invasion has been well documented. In the early hours of the 11th March 1942 Captain Williams and his NCO’s, Sergeant Giles, Lance Sergeant Cross and Gunners Thurgood and Tate were attacked without warning; shot and murdered whilst asleep in their beds by a group of Indian Punjabi soldiers, led by Havildar (Sergeant) Meher Ali. The victims were wrapped in mosquito nets and thrown off the nearby cliff into the sea.
Captain Williams and his men arrived on Christmas Island replacing Captain Kinloch sometime after November 1941. Kinloch had arrived in March 1941. Along with his men, his task had been to set up and calibrate a 6 inch Naval P3 gun, set up a fort site, dig trenches and train locals to defend the island against invasion. This was known as Operation X. The wooden “fort” was later dismantled and re-erected as POW huts next to the Incline in the area known as Settlement.
In July 2005, the BBC Radio 4 program “Home Truths” ran an interview titled “The Christmas Island Mutiny”. The interviewer was the poet Michael Rossen. He spoke with Brian Williams, the son of Captain Williams and his daughter Susan Anne.
Brian told an amazing story of he and his mother’s escape from the advancing Japanese, trying to get word to his father on Christmas Island, the sort of man his father was and more. His poignant story tells of a family separated by war, their survival and final tragedy leaving behind memories and a spiritual bond that would stretch back across the decades:
Brian Williams, early 1940s Photographer unknown. See end of page.
The Christmas Island Mutiny
Interviewer Brian Williams and his family were on the move. Brian came from an army family, his dad was stationed in Singapore and it had been decided that for the sake of his education, Brian would go to boarding school in Sumatra. Then the Second World War broke out and with the situation in the Far East worsening, Brian’s officer father found himself posted to Christmas Island in the Pacific [should be Indian Ocean]. There was a small garrison there and Captain Williams, with four white NCOs and a handful of Indian soldiers, had the job of defending it. But things turned sour with tragic consequences. The quest to discover exactly what happened to his father on the island has become a passion for Brian and also for his daughter, Susan-Anne. As a result of their research, they’ve also both found out more about Brian’s mother, Susan Anne’s grandmother, that is. It seems that with Singapore about to fall and her husband stationed on Christmas Island, she was advised to leave on a ship for Australia. Ten-year-old Brian, meanwhile, was still stuck in the boarding school back in Sumatra. The war had split the family three ways across the Pacific Ocean [should be Indian Ocean]. When Brian and Susan-Anne joined me from our Norwich studio earlier in the week, Brian started by telling me how he and his mother were eventually reunited.
Brian There came a time when all the children, me included, were supposedly to go to India. But I was taken off the bus because my mother was told that the ship she was going to go on, the Gorgon, was going to stop at Batavia, Java and I would be there to be met. But unfortunately, I flew to Java with a couple of the teachers at the school. But when we got to Batavia, we went around the docks to see if we could get any information about my mother, and it appeared that the Gorgon had not stopped at Batavia, but it carried on all the way to Australia, to Fremantle.
Interviewer So she had gone to Australia and you were in Java?
Brian In Java, yes.
Interviewer And then what was it like in Java?
Brian Well, luckily, one of the teachers was going to a family called Saffrey. Now, Robert Saffrey, their oldest son, he used to be at the school I was at, so they asked Mr Saffrey if I could go and live with them.
Interviewer And Susan-Anne, did your dad, did he tell you stories when you were young? Did he tell you stories about what it was like in Java at this time, when you were young?
Susan-Anne Well, not so much when I was young. I mean, I was aware of what actually happened to my granddad and, I mean, that was a family story that my dad talked about, but actually it’s in much more recent times over the last ten years when I’ve become very interested in my granddad’s story. And then talking with my dad had begun to realise the extraordinary tale of his kind of survival, if you like, and his escape, really, from the Japanese in Sumatra and Java and how lucky he was.
Interviewer So, Brian, how were you finally reunited with your mother? How did that happen?
Brian Well, Mr Saffrey obviously was looking for some means of us to evacuate Java and he came across this boat called the Zandaam and we left on the 1 March 1942 and we arrived in Fremantle on the 6 March. You know, it was only these last few years that I realised what my mother had done for me. Well, I mean, she must have gone through hell wondering where I was and how I was going to get to Australia. I mean, the shipping from Java was being sunk left, right and centre. In fact, looking on the internet the other day, it says, regarding the Zandaam, that this was the only ship to reach Fremantle safely. So, the 7 March, my mother came to pick me up from the harbour from the boat and we went to Perth and she said, I must let your father know. But when we went to the General Post Office to send the cable, they said they couldn’t get in touch with Christmas Island. And we found out later through our research that on the day that I arrived, the Japanese shelled the island and destroyed the wireless station. So my father never knew that I had met up successfully with my mother.
Interviewer So what happened to your grandfather, Susan-Anne? Brian’s dad.
Captain Leonard Williams Photographer unknown. See end of page.
Susan-Anne My granddad, was on the island and after Singapore fell, they had very little idea of what was going on in the outside world. They had some sort of understanding of the Japanese and the invasions in Malaya and Singapore. So they were stranded on this island and then on the 7 March, the Japanese gunship came up and bombarded the island. So a district officer raised a white flag after the Japanese had gone. My grandfather, he lowered the white flag and he put up the British flag. We think he did this because he was hoping that, you know, if there was some Allied shipping coming by for them to get off the island. But this caused quite a lot of unrest amongst the Indian soldiers or a group of them. And over the next few days, they were talking amongst themselves and they became convinced that by raising the Union Jack again, if the Japanese came back, their lives would be in danger. So on the night of, I think it was the 11 March, my granddad actually threw a party because to celebrate the number of years he’d been in the army and he had a few people, everybody left and he and the four NCOs went to bed.
Susan-Anne But in the night, these Indian soldiers mutinied, and they shot my granddad and the four NCOs and they disposed of their bodies by throwing them into the sea. And it was following the end of the war it came to light about this mutiny and there was a trial in Singapore and these soldiers were tried and a number of them were found guilty of mutiny. And they were actually the last soldiers in the British Army to have the death penalty passed on them, although it was eventually commuted. That’s sort of what happened to him. But my grandmother was never told officially, actually, about the circumstances of her husband’s death.
Interviewer Brian, come back to you on this. Brian, you and your mother, you didn’t know that this is what happened?
Brian Well, that’s perfectly correct, but we did find out unofficially, because a friend of my mother’s a Mrs Smith, her husband, worked at the Changi jail in Singapore and she sent my mother a load of paper clippings regarding the trial.
Interviewer But what were you told officially by the army?
Brian Well, if I remember rightly, he was missing in action and then obviously after the war, they said killed in action. I mean, we even got a luminated scroll from the King saying that your husband had been killed in action.
Interviewer So, to put it politely, the army or the Ministry of Defence fibbed to you, did they?
Brian I think so.
Interviewer And could you ever talk with your mother as you were growing up, or even when you became an adult, about your dad, or did it sort of go under?
Brian Yes, she used to tell me that my father need not necessarily had gone to Christmas Island because there was a single officer there who said that he would go in place of my father. But my father, he was a regular soldier and my mother always used to say to me “when we got married, he said, ‘I want you to understand something, that the army comes first'”, and that was it.
Interviewer And Susan-Anne, it must be extraordinary going through all this. I mean, it’s so complex and it’s got this tragic moment at the heart of it. What does it make you think?
Susan-Anne It makes me think all sorts of things, because I feel a kind of a … I’m not somebody who has any kind of religious belief whatsoever, but I feel a very strong link to my grandfather. He was an orphan and I feel somehow he died in an island away from all the people that knew him, on his own. And I feel that my research about him is about keeping that memory alive from him, something that is, in a way, owed to him. I feel a very, very strong bond to my grandfather and I’d love one day to actually be able to travel there myself. I feel it would be a tribute to him, to be able to stand on Christmas Island and just to acknowledge him.
Interviewer Would you like to do that, Brian? Would you like to both go?
Brian I would like to go, but I’m not in exactly good health, so I realise that that’s never going to happen.
Interviewer And you think investigating all this has brought you close together? You two?
Brian I think so, yes. I really, really do. Because we’ve always had … Susan and I have always been on friendly terms, but since we were doing this thing about my father and also my little journey through Sumatra and Java, we have so much to talk about.
Susan-Anne If you have something that you know there’s one person in the world that shares that deep interest. Any little thing that we find, we have to tell each other about it. Anything. We’re on the phone to each other because I live some distance from my dad on the phone telling each other, oh, this has happened. What do you think of this? And it’s our primary conversation, actually and it’s a really special thing and my grandfather’s story in itself is extraordinary. I’ve come to realise how extraordinary my father’s story is as well it’s just fascinating.
Interviewer Susan-Anne and Brian Williams. And I really hope that Susan-Anne gets to Christmas Island.
In a footnote to this story, and confirming part of it above, it appears that the mutiny was covered up by the War Office as they never revealed to the families of Captain Williams and his NCOs their true fate. In a 1987 newspaper article the following was written:
Graham Thurgood – A victim of the mutiny Photographer unknown. See end of page.
… It was a horrifying act of mutiny never acknowledged by the War Office.
The families of Captain Williams, 36, Sergeant Walter Giles, 24, Lance Sergeant Gilbert Cross, 32, gunner Graham Thurgood, 22, and Gunner John Tate, 27, were kept in ignorance.
… Pensioner Mrs Doris Thurgood, sister-in-law of gunner Graham Thurgood, thought he died at the hands of the Japanese.
She said at her home in Upper Norwood, South London “It stuns me to hear this. What a horrible way to die.”
“And why did the mutineers get off?”
For five of the mutineers were court martialled and sentenced to death in Singapore in March 1947.
But after a plea by the Indian government were reduced to life imprisonment. [Later they were returned to the newly formed Pakistan as free men.]
Mrs Thurgood still has the “notification of death” letter issued by the War office on March 20, 1946. It states simply that Gunner Thurgood “was killed in action on the eleventh day of March 1942 in the Far East.”
Mrs Thurgood added: “None of Graham’s family were told about the mutiny. We were never told anything about him being on Christmas Island.”
“For whatever reason, someone high up took the decision that the family should not know that Graham was murdered.”
“Cover-up over heroes killed in mutiny” Sunday Mirror – Sunday 22 November 1987.
Interview transcription with permission: Michael Rossen Brian Williams (deceased) Susan-Anne Williams (Efforts have been made to find Susan-Anne. If any of her family read this, please email christmasislandarchives@gmail.com
Graham Thurgood – A victim of the mutiny