15 February 2012 marks the day 70 years ago when 130,000 British, Australian, and Indian soldiers surrendered to the Japanese at the fall of Singapore. Some historians, even today, in order to easily explain away the rapid fall of Singapore, refer to all these men as troops of ‘a poor quality’.

In fact, the soldiers surrendering at Singapore had among them a considerable number of elite athletes at the peak of their physical fitness. In addition, there were many more active amateur sportsmen from the interwar years. This was a time when male identity was strongly defined by how well a man played his chosen sport. More elite and fit amateur sportsmen were captured at Singapore than in any other war zone. The surrender had little to do with the quality of the men doing the fighting.

Two days after the surrender, on 17 February 1942, 50,000 British and Australian prisoners of war made their way into Changi prisoner of war camp. With the Australians was the last Test wicketkeeper to play against England before the outbreak of the war, Ben Barnett. The British prisoners had with them nine English county cricket players, such as the later famous cricket commentator, E.W. Swanton, and Geoffrey Edrich of the equally famous English Test cricket Edrich family.

Among the inmates of Changi were elite football players from the major codes.

For rugby union, there was a Scottish and an Irish international. The Australian ranks contained three rugby players from the tour of England that was cancelled when it reached England on 2 September 1939, the day before war broke out. These included ‘Blow’ Ide whose father was a Japanese immigrant, and Cecil Ramalli, whose father was Indian and mother Aboriginal. There were three other Australian players captured at Singapore who would play for their country after the war.

Australian Rules Footballers, who had played at the highest level of their sport – the Victorian Football League – included the Brownlow medal legend of the 1930s, ‘Chicken’ Smallhorn, as well as ‘Peter’ Chitty and Lou Daily.

Going into captivity were three first-grade Australian rugby league players who had competed in the Sydney premiership. The best known was Jack Lennox, who took to the field for the leading clubs of St George and South Sydney.

For soccer, the British prisoners of war at Changi included two players from the English Football League’s first division. Albert Hall was a forward with Tottenham Hotspur before he joined up. Johnny Sherwood was a winger in the Reading team, which won the wartime premiership, the 1941 War Cup Final.

With numerous elite sportsmen in Changi, it is little wonder that high-quality games were often played within the camp. Swanton called the ‘Australia’ versus ‘England’ cricket matches, led by Barnett and Edrich as captains, as ‘Cricket De luxe’. The different codes of football were played so regularly and seriously that they were banned within a year because of the drain that injuries placed on medical supplies.

Even more extraordinarily, the elite sportsmen continued to play their chosen sports when they had time at the camps on the Burma-Thailand Railway, despite their bodies being badly weakened by being almost worked to death by the Japanese. Then, after the war, when they returned home, unbelievably, many simply signed up for the 1946 sports season and resumed their sports careers. 

Ever since he moved to Singapore from Australia in 1993, Kevin Blackburn has followed the veterans’ footsteps, walking through the battlefields and visiting their places of captivity. He teaches history at Nanyang Technological University and is the author of The Sportsmen of Changi, published by NewSouth.