Remembering a forgotten survivor
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 18: In the Neighbourhood
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Rachel Buchanan
Download the complete article PDF
Rachel Buchanan's biography and other articles by this writer
Most war memorials are made from stone. This one is made from paper: ten original sketches drawn in ink, pen and coloured pencil and stuck in a velvety leather autograph album with cornflour-and-water glue, three Christmas cards, four letters and nine black-and-white photographs the size of football cards. This modest memorial honours an anonymous World War II Australian field ambulance man, Sergeant Henry (Lofty) Judge Cannon, and the life-saving care he gave to British artist Ronald Searle and many other near-dead prisoners of war at Kanchanaburi, a jungle camp at the Bangkok end of the Thai-Burma railway.
The Japanese Imperial Army decided to build the railway in 1942, the year Singapore fell. It needed to get food and weapons to soldiers fighting in Burma. Prisoners of war and Asian labourers cut the railway through mountains and jungles, starting in Ban Pong in Thailand and going up through Tamuang and countless settlements to Hellfire Pass and more before terminating 415 kilometres later at Thanbyuzayat. By October 1943, the impossible track had been built by 55,000 Allied prisoners of war and 135,000 Asian labourers, including men, women and children. It is estimated that a hundred thousand of these starving and cholera-ridden people died on the job. Forty years later Ronald Searle wrote in his war memoir, ‘If the men who died building it were laid end to end, they would roughly cover the 273 miles of track they built that year.'
Searle was one of these tortured labourers and the pictures he drew in the jungle slave camps and back in Singapore's Changi goal are a rare and valuable record of a particularly cruel episode in a cruel war. Three hundred of Searle's war drawings are held in London's Imperial War Museum and a selection published in his account of that time, To the Kwai – and Back: War Drawings 1939-1945 (Collins, 1986). His drawings also illustrate an early edition of Australian soldier Russell Braddon's classic POW memoir, The Naked Island (Werner Laurie, 1951).
Ten other Searle war drawings have never been published. Instead they were hidden for decades in a shoebox kept in the pantry of a family home in Coppin Street, East Malvern, in Melbourne's comfortable eastern suburbs. ‘I think Dad didn't know what to do with it,' Jill Parkes said of the album of drawings that Searle had given to the man she called Uncle Harry. ‘He put it away. It was too hard, too sad.'
LOFTY CANON RETURNED TO MELBOURNE in 1945 but didn't really survive the war. He spent most of the last twenty years of his life in Bundoora psychiatric hospital, in a ward for veterans with war-related mental illness. He died there in 1980, demented and alone. It was three days before his estranged wife Peg, Jill Parkes' aunt, was told of his passing.
Postwar, Lofty Cannon shrunk while Ronald Searle grew to become one of the most famous illustrators of the century. Between 1946 and the early 1978, Searle published fifty books. He is most famous for his subversive St Trinian's pictures about monstrous British private school girls, but these stockinged, hockey-stick-wielding horrors are just a small part of an extraordinary career that includes animation, sculpture, painting, magazine and newspaper illustration. His pictures have been on the cover of The New Yorker, Punch and Life magazines. In 1961, he covered the trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem for Life. Between 1958 and 1960, his work included reports on refugees for UNICEF and coverage of two American presidential campaigns, travelling first with Nixon, then Kennedy.
Searle's output has been so great that many people have a private exhibition space of his work in their heads. Mine is the spidery, gothic illustrations he did for a hard-cover edition of Dickens' A Christmas Carol. My parents owned the book and every December I would get it out and make myself cry.
Searle is still alive, aged eighty-seven and living in a village in the south of France. He is a private person but I was given his address and fax number. No email, no phone number. When I began this research, I wrote a letter asking for an interview. Then, panicked about my poor handwriting, I sent a typed fax. As the machine beeped transmission success, I noticed that the word ‘Searle' appeared on the screen. ‘Look, Searle!' I said, hardly believing it myself.
Ronald Searle is famous, Lofty Cannon is a nobody, yet without Lofty's care, the artist would not have survived the war. The drawings kept in the shoebox for so many years are now in the State Library of Victoria, along side the men's correspondence and background material compiled by Jill Parkes and her husband John. The library considers ‘The Lofty Cannon Collection' one of its archival treasures.