Singapore Diary

Taken prisoner in 1942 at the surrender of Singapore to the Japanese, Captain Horner kept a diary for the next three years of his experiences in the India Lines, the infamous Changi Gaol and on the Burma Railroad. Its discovery would mean certain death. This remarkable journal, with its lovely and amusing cartoons and drawings, is as life-affirming a document as you can find.

Despite illness and with death an everyday occurrence, Captain Ronald Horner took part in countless theatrical productions during his incarceration by the Japanese in World War II, designed to raise morale and bring some sense of normality, or illusion of normality, amidst the horrors of starvation, disease and brutality. The famous cartoonist Ronald Searle was a fellow PoW and some of the drawings here are by him. They both survived the ordeal; and so did Ronald Horner's diary, hidden in the false bottom of a suitcase.