Roy Cornford - Guards on the Burma-Thailand Railway

Transcript

Roy Cornford:
You got friendly with a couple. There was one guard, his name was Georison and everyone called him Georgie. He says "If it's good enough for the king of England to be called King George," he says, "You can call me Georgie." So everyone called him Georgie. Yes, he was one nice pleasant one who could help you where he could. But there was another one they called The Bull, he couldn't walk past you without hitting you or kicking you.

And he was on the ship when we got torpedoed and soon as we got torpedoed, there was prisoners running around, singing out "Let's find The Bull, let's find The Bull." So what happened to him, whether he survived and got picked up by the Japanese ship that picked the survivors up, I don't know. Well there would be 300 or 400 of us in the camp and there would only be about 40 or 50 guards. And of a night time, there would be about eight guards on guard duty but all they'd do is sit in their camp with no fences around the camp or anything like that.

You could have escaped but you couldn't go anywhere, you're in the jungle and you had no food. And there were six men dead from another camp escaped and they got caught about six days later. And they were brought back and they were all shot.