Ray
Parkin was born in Melbourne in 1910. He was an omnivorous reader and a
gifted artist. He largely educated himself and became a fine maritime
painter. He had spent 18 years in the Royal Australian Navy including
three years as a prisoner of war of the Japanese during World War 2.
After
the war, he became a waterfront tally clerk and wrote his wartime
experiences in a couple of books. These books include Out
of the Smoke, Into the Smother
and The Sword And The Blossom,
all published to critical acclaim by the Hogarth Press situated in London,
in the 1960s. Ray Parkin is the artist of "Two Malarias with a Cholera"
which now is the official logo adopted by the Changi Museum.
Ray
spent many years researching, writing & illustrating his remarkable,
award-winning work, H.M. Bark
Endeavour, published in 1997 by Melbourne University Press in 1997. He
won the NSW Premier’s non-fiction and Book of the Year (1999) awards
with this book from a record of 607 contenders.
Parkin has been living in Ivanhoe, Melbourne ever since he returned to Australia after the war.
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Stanley Warren is the artist behind the original Changi
Murals at Block 151 Roberts Barracks. He was a bombardier of
the 15th Field Regiment Royal Artillery during the war. He was
wounded during the fighting and was suffering from a severe renal disorder
and amoebic dysentery. He was then sent to the hospital to recover and had
eight kidney stones removed with no anesthetic.
Stanley was a religious man and was talented in art. Before the
war, he had designed advertising posters. Padres Chambers and Payne had
heard that Stanley had painted some small religious pictures in a chapel
in Bukit Timah, so they asked him if he would do some paintings for St.
Luke’s Chapel. Stanley agreed, and being of religious disposition,
sought inspiration for the proposed paintings in the Gospels.
The murals were painted in Roberts Barracks, Changi Camp, which was used as a hospital by the POWs at that time. The paintings, which consisted of 5 murals, had Christian themes. Paint was not readily available, but with the aid of the other prisoners, who unquestionably put themselves at great risk, colours and material to make the paint were acquired. Brown camouflage paint was found, as were a small amount of crimson paint and white oil paint. Billiard chalk was crushed and used to produce blue.
Despite still being very ill, Stanley set to work on the murals
in October 1942. His illness meant that he could only paint for a limited
period each day. To compensate as much as he could for the lack of coloured paint, Stanley resorted to using large brush strokes and big
areas of solid colour when painting. Altogether, Stanley managed to
produce five large murals on the walls of the Chapel.
On one wall he painted The
Nativity and St. Paul in Prison
where each mural was about three metres long. On the others are The
Last Supper, The Crucifixion and The
Resurrection.
All of them were subjects at the heart of Christian belief. These
murals uplifted the spirits of the POWs who can only imagine worshipping
or praying in the chapel. The Japanese subsequently covered the murals
with layers upon layers of distemper and one of them was partially
destroyed as the Japanese built a doorway through part of the wall for a
larger office.
After the war, Stanley returned to England believing that his murals had been destroyed by Allied bombing towards the end of the war. He quietly picked up the threads of his life, and became an art master at a school. The murals were rediscovered in 1958 and after a long search, Stanley was persuaded back to restore the murals. He eventually made 3 trips in December 1963, July 1982 and May 1988.
Of the original five murals, only one was not restored; the
partly restored mural of St. Paul in
Prison. Stanley’s original tracing of the drawing was missing and he
could not remember the detail of the missing bit. In 1985, Stanley’s
original drawing was discovered in the memorabilia of Wally Hammond who
had been a fellow Prisoner of War with Stanley. These original sketches
were subsequently donated to the National Archives of Singapore. From the
original, Stanley painted a small picture, which was placed below the
remaining piece of the mural in 1988. He was by then not fit enough to
restore the actual mural.
Stanley Warren, at age 75, died at his home in Dorset, England on
20 February 1992.
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Harold
Young was a rubber planter in Johor when the war broke out. The Japanese
interned him in Changi Gaol for the duration of the war. A Japanese guard,
who had a keen interest in drawing and art, supplied him with pencils and
paper. This helped him keep the sanity during the years of imprisonment at
Changi. The books containing his drawings were kindly donated to the
Changi Museum by his nieces Elise Porger, Jennifer Treleaven and Dorami
Keyt, who now reside in Australia.
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William Haxworth began his
career as
Superintendent of the Traffic Police and was later promoted to Chief
Investigator in the War Risk Insurance Department of Treasury in 1941. Haxworth together with the European civilians were all interned in the
Changi Gaol, when Singapore fell.
Haxworth
managed to produce over 400 paintings and sketches over the three years of
his life as a Civilian Internee despite the lack of paper and drawing
materials. His drawings depicted the high morale of civilians internees,
despite overcrowding, poor hygiene, inadequate food supply and other harsh
living conditions, all with a light touch of humour.
Haxworth,
although not an artist by profession, displayed great skills and was able
to capture the mood of his surroundings, with his paintbrush. He received
a number of awards in camp art shows especially for his portraits
When the Japanese surrendered, Haxworth was reinstated to his former post of Superintendent of Traffic Police. He retired in 1954. In 1986, his wife, donated the Haxworth collections of over 400 paintings & sketches to the National Archives of Singapore.
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Liu
Kang was trained at the Shanghai Arts School and in France Arts School. He
arrived in Malaya in 1938 and remained in Singapore during the Japanese
Occupation. After the war, Liu Kang captured in graphic detail the day to
day realities of life under the Japanese in the booklets, Chop Suey Vol. 1, 2 & 3.
His
sketches depict the inhuman treatment set out by the Japanese Army and the
suffering that the local population, POWs and civilian internees had to
endure throughout the entire occupation.
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