70 years later, sketches of life inside Japanese PoW camps discovered

They were drawn by soldier John Mennie of Aberdeen, who trained as an artist before joining the army. He was sent to Singapore in 1941, which fell to the Japanese in February 1942. He died 1982 aged 70.

He traded packets of cigarettes for Chinese watercolours and used scraps of paper, including rifle practice target paper, to work on.

He later gave the drawings to fellow PoW Eric Jennings, who kept them in a shoe box and never told anybody about it.

The box was only opened upon his recent death, containing 30 pencil portraits of PoWs and 6 larger colour drawings.

Many of these kinds of drawings were used after the war for war crime trials, as evidence.

A sketch of the infamous "Selerang Square Squeeze' in Changi, Singapore in September 1942, when 16,000 PoWs were kettled in the cramped square for 5 days in stifling heat to make them sign documents stating they would not try to escape. Many men died from disease and dysentery during the incident and four more were callously executed by their sadistic captors.



A sketch of an operation being carried out in open air by a British surgeon.



A sketch of a group of PoWs in their underpants singing Christmas carols to keep their spirits up.