AS THE world prepares to remember the end of the Second World War this Saturday, a Wokingham author is preparing to share the role her grandfather played in it.
Cecil Rivière was a British engineer who, for 40 years, worked for Western Telegraph and Cable & Wireless.
Based around the world, in 1942, Rivière was a first-hand witness to the fall of Singapore to the Japanese army.
Granddaughter Sue Dormer said that he then survived a dramatic escape on HMS Grasshopper, which was bombed and sank.
And he undertook a challenging journey to Sumatra, across the South China Sea, up the torrid Inderagiri River, through dense jungle, over mountains and into Padang, where he was captured by the Japanese and spent three-and-a-half years as a prisoner of war.
Weighing little more than seven stone on his release from captivity he was one of the lucky few to survive the horrors of a Japanese civilian internment camp.
She says that his determination to keep busy and his skills at mending and building things for others in the camp earnt him the nickname “Able and Tireless” by his fellow prisoners, and it is this nickname that forms the title of the biography she has written about him.
Last week, the world remembered when two nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 75 years ago.
As horrific as they were, and they killed many people, they also saved many thousands of lives by bringing the Second World War in the Far East to an end.
Ms Dormer said that her grandfather didn’t think he would have survived another six months of captivity.
He didn’t know about the bombs or the subsequent surrender of the Japanese until Wednesday, August 22, and didn’t get out of the camp until Saturday, September 1.
Mrs Dormer said that it took about a year to compile all the information into a book.
The marketing expert from Farley Hill first started researching last summer, and used December to visit the Cable & Wireless records office to find out more about her Granddad’s earlier life. And more clues came from a fellow prisoner-of-war.
“My Grandfather didn’t really talk about it, he tried to block it out,” she said. “He did write a report to describe some of the things that happened which gave some detail, and a fellow prisoner kept a detailed diary. He wrote about my Grandfather, giving me a lot of detailed information.
“It was fascinating and harrowing.”
Whatever Mr Rivière experienced, while he chose not to talk about it – like lots of veterans – it had a lasting effect on him.
“He would never say nice things about the Japanese people afterwards and he would boycott anything Japanese made.”
But the war experiences are just one part of his life, which included taking a morse code message that the Titanic was in trouble in 1912, and living in Singapore for three years.
“And he had a zest for life, a passion for building and mending clocks, and a lifelong love of golf.
“I just wanted to get his story out there,” Mrs Dormer said. “Once I started, I got completely stuck into it.
“I am completely in awe of him, he was a pioneer.”
Able & Tireless – Cecil Rivière: globetrotting cable engineer & survivor of WW2 Japanese internment” is available on Amazon and can also be ordered from Waterstones in Peach Street.
