Captive Memories: Far East POWS & Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine

Captive Memories is the title of a book which documents the long-term perspective of sixty-six former Far East Prisoners of War (FEPOW). Meg Parkes interviewed them all for the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine’s Far East prisoner of war oral history study, which began in 2007. Most Far East POW would not, or could not, speak about their captivity after the war, and when they returned home in the autumn of 1945 most were sick men, still affected physically and mentally by their ordeal. In the early postwar months a few of those living in the north of England began to make their way to the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM), to seek the expertise of doctors there. So began a unique six-decade-long medical and scientific collaboration.

Our speaker: Meg Parkes SRN, self-published her father’s secret Far East POW (FEPOW) diaries in 2002 and 2003. In 2007 she was invited to undertake an oral history study, interviewing FEPOW veterans for the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM), having worked with these patients for over 50 years, since late 1945. This work formed the basis of an MPhil study which was awarded in 2013. By then Meg had already embarked on what became a seven-year study into the unknown secret documentary artwork of British military Far East captives. In 2014 Meg was appointed Honorary Research Fellow and by 2018/19, in collaboration with the University of Liverpool’s Victoria Gallery & Museum, and largely funded by the Lottery Heritage Fund, Meg collaborated on the curation of a major exhibition, The Secret Art of Survival. It was due to run for 8 months from October 2019 but was curtailed by the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020.

Together with Emeritus Professor Geoff Gill, Meg has co-authored three books, published by Palatine Books and based on LSTM’s FEPOW research and medical history studies: Captive Memories(2015), Burma Railway Medicine (2017) and Captive Artists (2019), the latter in collaboration with co-author Jenny Wood, formerly senior art curator at the Imperial War Museum in London. To date, Meg has identified the work of 69 “unknown” and/or unpublished FEPOW war artists. This work continues.