No Better Friend, page 35
But there was one unavoidable part of the agreement. All animals, with no exceptions, that landed onto the shores of Great Britain had to undergo six months of quarantine to prevent rabies from spreading on the island. Even General Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme commander of the European theater, had to board his beloved Telek, a Scottish terrier, for six months upon arriving in England to prepare for the invasion of France.
So when the ship anchored in Liverpool on October 29, 1945, what should have been an incredible moment of triumph for Frank was instead bittersweet to the point of tragic. He walked down the gangway, Judy of Sussex ranging ahead of him on a leash, her feet touching English soil for the first time in her nine years of life. Waiting to meet them was an official of the Ministry of Agriculture.
Frank hesitated. He had had a couple of days to get used to the idea of life without Judy, but that didn’t make it any easier now that the time had come to say farewell. How to explain this abandonment, after the years in the jungle, surviving the torpedoing of the Van Waerwijck, the reunion in Singapore, and all the days they spent together? There was no way to do it, and Frank didn’t trust himself not to collapse into tears, so he gave Judy a quick tousle of the ears and told her to go on without him. He handed the leash to the government official.
“She stopped at the gangway,” Frank remembered, “seemingly because she did not understand my command. Her questioning gaze and waggling tail suggested she expected me to summon her back. But as always on my command, she walked meekly toward the docks and jumped in the truck of the quarantine service.”
Judy was a prisoner once more. And this time, she would have to burden it alone.
But life at the Hackbridge Quarantine Kennels in Surrey, about a twenty-minute train trip from London (passengers alighting at the Hackbridge Station were guided to the nearby kennels by the sounds of barking), was more pleasant than life in the various prison camps or even aboard the multiple ships she had called home. Upon arrival, she was thoroughly checked for disease and groomed in a way she hadn’t been since at least the outset of the Pacific War, and perhaps ever. Frank visited often, and the seventy-member staff at the kennels, once briefed on Judy’s story, went out of their way to comfort her.
Built after World War I to handle the influx of rescued and adopted dogs returning from the continent, Hackbridge could handle six hundred animals at capacity, but there were far fewer when Judy was there. No two dogs could come in contact with each other, in order to protect the quarantine. They couldn’t even exercise together, so the complex needed plenty of room for every dog to have its own space. Set among the lush meadows and hedges of the Surrey countryside, the kennel offered a wealth of opportunity for Judy to explore. The rationing of food during the war had not extended to dog biscuits at Hackbridge, and now there were plenty of other morsels to go around, including fresh vegetables when appropriate. For Judy, it must have seemed an unimaginable luxury to have endless supplies of food delivered right to her every day. According to a photo essay published in the Illustrated London News in 1938, a “sun ray treatment” was used twice a day on the dogs (and presumably cats) to acclimatize them to the cold English winters, although why a cold sprinkler, instead of a sun ray, wasn’t the apparatus of choice wasn’t explained.
According to an essay in Tail-Wagger magazine, Judy would have been let out in her individual large paddock to run while her kennel was cleaned just after eight a.m., the exercise period lasting half an hour. At eleven a.m. she would have been fed her main meal of the day, “a sight for canine eyes,” according to the essay, dog food either dry or “covered with delicious meat gravy.” The afternoon brought more runs, along with a nap and whatever visitors turned up to give Judy’s ears a scruffing. Then a smaller snack of biscuits, one last trip outside, and lights-out at seven p.m. In all, a dog’s life, indeed.
But it wasn’t easy. Even though life in the jungle had been difficult to the extreme, it at least came with a great deal of freedom. Here, despite the spoils and the long runs, that freedom—the independence she had shown since first tunneling out of the Shanghai kennel as a pup—was gone. Frequent visits from Frank, as well as legions of other returned Sumatra POWs, old navy friends, and just plain curious dog lovers, helped Judy pass the days, but the confinement must have felt strange.
Despite the highly unusual circumstances of Judy’s quarantine, it didn’t come for free—Frank was expected to pay for the cost of the boarding, which was about twelve pounds, or nearly fifty U.S. dollars (over six hundred dollars today). His RAF and POW back pay didn’t go very far, so to help him out, the Tail-Waggers’ Club put a notice in the December 1945 issue of the organization’s magazine that they were “opening a small fund to defray the cost of Judy’s stay in quarantine. Should there be any surplus it will be paid to Judy’s owner as a help toward her future maintenance.”
Plenty of readers answered the call for help. The next issue of the club’s “Official Organ” detailed the contributions: eighteen pounds, eighteen shillings, and eight pence (a bygone method of denominations worth over one thousand U.S. dollars today), coming from sixty-one sources. More money poured in during the following months, including two Canadian dollars from an expat living in British Columbia. The total reached over thirty-five pounds in the end, far more than required.
It was a long six months for master and pet, but Judy was freed into Frank’s care on April 29, 1946. Frank arrived looking dapper in his Royal Air Force uniform. Judy was sleek and well-groomed, having had a special long bubble bath that morning in anticipation of the big reunion. Their meeting was as joyous as imaginable. “She was all legs and tongue,” Frank remembered. Painful as it had been, the separation certainly did Judy some good; the time spent eating, resting, and playing in the fields was restorative.
There was a ceremony upon Judy’s release, well attended by press photographers. The chairman of the British Kennel Club, Arthur Croxton Smith, presented Judy with a “For Valour” Medal of the Club and handed Frank a check for twenty-two pounds, one shilling, and four pence, or roughly ninety U.S. dollars in 1946 terms (over eleven hundred dollars today). This was the promised surplus from the fund-raising efforts of the Tail-Waggers’ Club. The magazine noted that “Mr. Williams requests to us to convey his thanks to all the people concerned who have contributed so generously toward Judy’s Quarantine expenses.” A representative of Spratt’s Patent Limited, a dog-food maker, also slipped a new collar on the pointer’s neck, to go with her existing one that still sported her POW number 81-A, this one inscribed, “Presented to Judy, ex-Jap-P.O.W., by Spratt’s.”
While Judy was in Hackbridge, Frank had been busy. Shortly after handing Judy over, he boarded a train from Liverpool bound for the RAF base at Cosford, in Shropshire, about ninety minutes south in the Midlands. Cosford was the site of Personnel Reception Centre (PRC) #106, a reentry point for European POWs that was rather suddenly made to serve a similar function for the Far East POWs when the actual number of airmen coming home to the United Kingdom was fully realized.
While every detail of the war against the Germans was absorbed and memorized by the English populace, the suffering in the Pacific was far more a case of “out of sight, out of mind.” The enormity of the terror faced by the POWs at the hands of the Japanese was only just being comprehended.
“The functional purpose of the unit is to receive, kit, medically examine and attend to the documentation of ex prisoner of war personnel,” read the PRC mandate as written by the War Ministry. “After this procedure the ex prisoners of war proceed on 42 days leave, after which they return for a full medical board at the PRC.”
The logs kept at Cosford report that two trainloads of former prisoners arrived on the twenty-ninth, a group of 340 at 1:50 and another of 341 at 3:10. Frank was interviewed, “kitted” out with fresh RAF uniform gear, given back pay, including combat and special service pay, and looked over by the doctors. Frank’s condition was now improved enough after convalescence at sea to allow him to pass through the basic testing and debriefing and be turned out, free to go back to Portsmouth and his family for six weeks of leave, beginning as October turned to November.
Frank returned to his hometown, which was a far different place from the bustling port of his youth. The city had been thoroughly wrecked by Nazi bombs, most of the damage done during three major raids from August 1940 to March 1941. Frank’s family home at 38 Holland Road had been bracketed by explosions during the Fire Blitz of January 10 and 11, 1941, although it appears the house miraculously suffered little damage. But that was the rare tale of good fortune. Approximately 930 people were killed by the bombings, with 1,216 more wounded. This was relatively light compared to other places across the country, but the physical part of the city was demolished. “Our principal shopping centres have been almost obliterated,” wrote the Portsmouth Evening News in 1941. “There is not a part of the city which does not show hideous scars, in some places completely devastated areas.” Thirty churches were leveled, as were eight schools and four cinemas. The George Hotel, where Nelson had stayed before sailing into history, was now rubble, as was the city’s tallest building, the Centraal Hotel.
Far worse from Frank’s perspective was some awful news. On June 6, 1944, while he had been at Gloegoer, shortly before smuggling Judy aboard the doomed Van Waerwijck, his older brother, David, a private in the Hampshire Regiment, had been killed during the D-day invasion of Europe. It wasn’t until eighteen months had passed that Frank heard about the untimely death of another male family member in his life. He related none of the anguish publicly, but it must have been a savage blow that undercut the joy of his and Judy’s homecoming.
At some point, Frank would have been handed a letter from King George welcoming him home. The date September 1945, a month Frank spent in Asia, indicates the boilerplate nature of the note, sent on Buckingham Palace stationery, but the sentiment expressed by the monarch is clearly genuine.
The Queen and I bid you a very warm welcome home.
Through all the great trials and sufferings which you have undergone at the hands of the Japanese, you and your comrades have been constantly in our thoughts. We know from the accounts we have already received how heavy these sufferings have been. We also know that these have been endured by you with the highest courage.
We mourn with you the deaths of so many of your gallant comrades.
With all our hearts, we hope that your return from captivity will bring you and your families a full measure of happiness, which you may long enjoy together.
Frank’s leave in Portsmouth ended in mid-December, when he had to return to the air base at Cosford for a full medical evaluation. There is no record of any further treatment ordered for him, so Frank apparently met the standards set by the staff for a return to duty. That wasn’t the case for many of his fellow ex-POWs. A situation report from Cosford points out the difficulty many had in leaving the Japanese camps behind. “Medical board action in respect of Far East POWs proved much more lengthy and complicated than was the case with prisoners ex-Europe, owing to the effect of malaria, dysentery, eye trouble and worms, and to the complete disregard which had been displayed by the Japanese in respect of all medical condition.”
Fred Freeman experienced the doggedness of the malaria bug he contracted in the Sumatran jungle. He had returned to his prewar home in Brighton, but the attacks continued, to the point where he couldn’t hold a job, and had to apply for a medical pension as a result. “The headaches persist,” he wrote in his application. “In fact I had one all last night and this morning. Several times my employers have counted a day of illness as a day off to avoid losing cash.”
Given the approaching Christmas holiday, Frank wasn’t eager to spend any more time at Cosford than mandatory. The doctors too felt the pressure to get as many men cleared as possible so as to allow them to spend their first holiday at home after so many spent as captives. “To be home for Xmas,” wrote one base doctor, “must have meant so much to these unfortunate people who had suffered so much in the cause of freedom.” A handful of men (eighty-four, according to PRC records) didn’t complete their exams in time and had to come back in January. Frank most likely was not one of them.
Once 1946 dawned, Frank was off to a new post—a POW rehabilitation (or “refresher,” in RAF parlance) center called Sunninghill Park, located outside London, near Ascot. For three weeks the men sent here were given updates on developments in the service, taught how to reorient themselves into civilian life after their years in the jungle, introduced to important people in business and government who gave them pep talks, and taken to companies of all manner in order to give them a glimpse at how ordinary society—one that wasn’t at war or dehumanizing them—worked. “Much time should be available for recreation and sports and games and gardening, music, amateur dramatics, farming, etc. etc,” added an official Air Ministry report on the centers. There were visits by local symphonies, films shown in the station cinema, a “liberal supply of bicycles for officers and airmen,” and plenty of “citrus fruit available,” as many returned POWs were lacking in vitamin C. There were also courses in the history of the just-completed war, which Frank and so many others had missed while deep in the Sumatran jungle.
Rouse Voisey was there too. Frank struck him as a gentle sort, “a nice, quiet chap, quite average, really.” For Rouse, the rehab center did the trick. He found a job in the local government near Norwich, where he grew up, and spent thirty-two years as a civil servant.
Frank’s exact thinking on returning home is something of a cipher—he didn’t give any interviews from this time, or provide any glimpses into what must have been a bewildering reintroduction into his native land. Rouse gives one reason why. “The government [in this case the War Ministry] told us not to talk about our experiences,” he says some sixty-eight years after the fact. “We had just had to get on with it. No one wanted to make a fuss over us.” When pressed on why the government would suppress, rather than celebrate, the incredible suffering and endurance these POWs showed in the name of king and country, Rouse can only laugh. “Who knows why politicians do anything?”
John Williams, who was on Pompong Island with Frank, wrote a brief memoir after the war, which also shines a small light on why the POWs were silent. Years later he revisited his work and found it wanting, which he explained in a note affixed to the front of the memoir. “At the time, it did not seem appropriate to write in more graphic prose about some of the horrors and barbarities which we had witnessed or experienced, especially having regard to the much worse happenings that had occurred at Belsen and other Nazi concentration camps.”
The British military anticipated this to some degree. “Among the symptoms to be expected,” read a report prepared for the Cosford medics, included “a sense of strangeness, shyness and reticence, a dislike of crowds, lack of concentration, mind changing, and a strong resentment against petty restrictions.” Frank displayed all of these in some form or another.
His upper lip was as stiff as the drinks served at the Portsmouth waterfront pubs. He had also been beaten to a pulp by the guards after the Tick episode, put flat on his back by humiliating diseases such as dysentery and beriberi, and driven to contemplate ending his own life and that of his beloved dog. It was hardly an experience Frank wished to revisit.
One thing Rouse Voisey was sure of—Frank loved Judy. He remembers that Frank talked of little save his best friend. “He was peddling pictures of Judy to us at the rehabilitation center,” he recalls. “They had information about her service and her adventures on the back. Somehow, Frank had gotten Judy’s paw prints on there too. I bought a couple for a pound or two each, quite a small amount. The money was for charity. Frank was raising funds to give to the Dickin people [the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals, or PDSA].”
Upon leaving the rehab facility, Frank was assigned a new RAF base, for despite all he had been through, he was still an airman on active duty (another reason why he was discouraged from talking about his days as a POW). He was assigned to the Number 4 Mobile Radar Unit at the RAF base in West Kirby, near Liverpool. After a word to the base commander, Judy was officially assigned there too, in absentia. Like many returned POWs in the RAF, Frank was often invited for meals or tea to the homes of local residents near the base.
But Frank and Judy didn’t spend much time at West Kirby. They had more important destinations, primarily London, where Judy’s wartime exploits would at last be fully recognized.
During the six months of quarantine, the story of Judy’s incredible journey and penchant for survival had made her a national heroine. The papers were filled with tales of her amazing adventures in the jungles of Sumatra and on the waters of the South China Sea and the Yangtze, as well as of her incredible defiance of the Japanese. The press called her “Gunboat Judy” and the “Precious Pointer.” On May 3, 1946, there was a ceremony honoring her service in west London’s Cadogan Square, an elite neighborhood akin to New York’s Park Avenue. It was staged by the PDSA, for whom Frank was already raising money, as mentioned by Rouse Voisey. The PDSA was (and remains) a veterinary charity founded in 1917 by animal-welfare pioneer Maria Dickin, catering to the animals of the poor and suffering.
In 1943, with animals contributing to the war effort across all branches of the service, Maria Dickin established the Dickin Medal, the animal version of the Victoria Cross, the highest honor in the realm. Prior to Judy, thirty-five animals had won the award, including eleven dogs and myriad messenger pigeons, including Winkie, White Vision, and Tyke (aka George), all cited for “delivering a message under exceptionally difficult conditions and so contributing to the rescue of an Air Crew.”
