Word: braddon
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Dimes for Tips. In Roy Thomson of Fleet Street, Thomson's first biography, Australian Writer Russell Braddon skillfully retraces the publisher's dedicated pursuit of the dollar. Thomson is not an easy man to write about, but Braddon has made the most of meager information. Myopic but energetic, Thomson went to work at 14 for a rope factory, where he soon exhibited a "passionate devotion to money." He took time off only to marry a red-haired girl named Edna. "One of the best selling jobs I ever done," he commented...
...Japs didn't finish him off after pistol-whipping him, trussing him up and dangling his feet over the edge of a death ditch. Author Braddon still doesn't know. Instead, his captors yoked him to eight fellow-Aussies, prodded the group with bayonets and jeers of "Georgey Six, number ten! Tojo, number one!" and marched them off to Pudu, a prison camp in Kuala Lumpur. On the way, the sons of the Rising Sun treated Braddon to some grisly samples of the new order. At one point, his guards collared a senile old Chinese...
...Tastes Like Rabbit. Under the sizzling tropic sun on the way to the prison camp at Pudu, the sense of common humanity melted away; a man saved himself. When a sniveling, fear-crazed sergeant begged to be carried, Gunner Braddon refused, then watched passively while a Jap guard pumped five bullets into the sergeant's stomach at a foot's range. At Pudu, each meal consisted of a handful of pasty rice sometimes crawling with weevils. Whenever he could get them, Author Braddon ate cats, dogs, snakes, grubs, fungus and leaves. He notes that "snake tastes like gritty...
Water for an I.O.U. Author Braddon lived to know new horrors which made those of Pudu fade away like old insect bites. He was marched to Thailand and assigned to the work gang building a Bangkok-to-Rangoon railroad. "Down there is much malaria-tomorrow you will be dead," said his guards mockingly. Countless Britishers and an estimated 130,000 Malay natives learned that the Japs were telling close to the brutal truth. Every crosstie under 400 miles of track was paid for with a human life, though, thanks to R.A.F. bombers, no train ever completed a trip. Author Braddon...
Gaunt and broken at war's end, Braddon nonetheless hiked 17 miles to see Lord Louis Mountbatten accept General Itagaki's sword in surrender. The old sense of common humanity came back strong; Author Braddon was certain that "the war had at least taught me to like my fellow men." But back in Sydney a little later, he was not so sure. One of the first letters he received was a demand for the ?112. He offered to hand over a check for every penny if the act of payment might be photographed by the press. "I thought...