The lasting influence of the camps

Given the often brutal treatment of Allied POWs by the Japanese in World War II, it may be surprising that the camps could also be a place of cultural and intellectual enrichment and meaning.

John was a case in point, as was his friend Ian Watt, who read the complete works of Shakespeare whilst suffering from malaria (Watt, 1956: 525) and whose experiences in the camps deeply influenced his views on human nature and in turn his interpretation of literature as a leading scholar (Kermode, 2000: ix). Likewise, Railroad is the story of John’s formative years.

In particular, his contact with Dutch and Eurasian prisoners brought him into contact with the music and dance traditions of the nation that would soon become Indonesia. Theatrical entertainments were crucial to maintaining morale in the camps. John was very keen to attend the performances, though without his glasses he often struggled to see what was happening on stage. He took up the position of ‘prompt’ in the famous shows produced by ‘Leo Frick’ (Leo Britt) at Chungkai and was thereby introduced to the world of theatre. In time, he established an ‘Anglo-Dutch theatrical company’ and set about producing a ‘Balinese Ballet’ and an elaborate Javanese-style music and dance show, complete with tin-can gamelan orchestra. Its star, Tari, along with most of the cast, was sent upcountry to work on the final push to complete the railway before the show hit the stage. Tari is the word for ‘dance’ in Malay and Indonesian. This is likely to have been the half-Javanese performer Edouard Bertling, who was a dancer at the Central Javanese palace of the Sultan of Surakarta.

After the war John mused that he had been so enthralled with this theatrical work that, ‘if you’d told me that the war was over and I could go home, I’d have said: not now—let’s get this show on first— I’ll be ready to go home in a month or so’ (BBC Written Archives Centre T56/203/1, Treatment 1967/8: 26). John’s creative path had already been set; it was indeed the first step towards the discovery of Pavarotti.

Before the war, John had shown some literary and artistic leanings, but these only became fully apparent during his incarceration when he began to record his thoughts on scraps of paper. He went on to be a prolific memoirist and author of non-fiction, as well as a blockade-runner and revolutionary in Indonesia, a leading international theatrical agent and impresario, and film-maker, among other things. As a young man at Cheltenham College he had aspired to train as a doctor, but was placed in the military stream and in any case did not excel academically. His father, James Percy Chatterton Coast, could not or would not send him to university, much to John’s dismay. Instead he took up a clerk’s position at Rothschild Bank in London, (a job to which he was ill-suited and which he in turn despised in every way). He escaped this desk job when he joined the Coldstream Guards in 1939.