It will be remembered that I have said that Major King, or Bill as he always was called, was the most powerful man in 2 Group and, as Chairman, he’d have been the greatest asset to us. He hated Nips like poison, yet he had an almost uncanny knack of getting things out of them, and he got for the camp things that nobody else in Thailand could have got. I’ve actually seen a Nip come into Bill’s Q.M. Office, where we were having a drop of Thai hooch with him, and Bill, so far from being embarrassed, persuaded the Nip to go back and fetch him another two bottles, escorting him to the door, pushing him on the shoulder, and sending him on his way with a very audible ‘F . . . off!’ Now Bill didn’t know that the committee had anyhow been going to ask him to become Chairman the next week, and at the present moment he felt that he had been ignored and slighted.

To cut a most amusing meeting short, the Chairman, who seemed to gravitate rather heavily towards his chair, and to speak a little indistinctly, said that he proposed a vote (from the Chair) of ‘No confidence’ in the existing committee. ‘Gentlemen,’ said he – somewhat irrelevantly and also inaccurately as it turned out, for at least a third of those present were Dutch – ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘remember you’re British!’ But no one seconded the motion. Bill’s putter-uppers didn’t feel like coming into the open and there was silence. The Chairman left the chair, Alec took it over, and a vote of confidence was passed almost unanimously in the existing body amid amusing cross-talk and laughter. But in spite of this, Bill became our Chairman the following Sunday. I think Leo was disappointed not to have got a smaller committee, but he contented himself by trying to control the ten of us.

The committee used to meet every Sunday morning at the back of the stage to discuss the events of the past and coming weeks. Bill, in the chair, always knew what was coming, and thoroughly enjoyed his guiding and refereeing. Alec was cold commonsense, and Eddie invariably had ‘just one more little point, Mr. Chairman’. Leo always had some objective or other, and we’d wait patiently for the clouds to disperse until he eventually came to his point, and then the argument would commence. ‘Lights’ Steve would be there, his massive under-jaw stuck out and his bespectacled face ready to pronounce a strong opinion on any and every subject. They were lively mornings, generally. The financial situation used to take up most of the time and, as secretary, I had to take down the minutes of each meeting.