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Auction: 25002 - Orders, Decorations and Medals
Lot: 40

Seven: Colour-Sergeant T. Moorehead, Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders, who was taken a Prisoner of War at the Fall Singapore in February 1942

India General Service 1908-35, 1 clasp, North West Frontier 1935 (2979656 Pte. T. Moorehead, A. & S.H.); India General Service 1936-39, 1 clasp, North West Frontier 1936-37 (2979656 Pte. T. Moorehead, A. & S.H.); 1939-45 Star; Pacific Star; Defence and War Medals 1939-45; General Service 1918-62, 2 clasps, Palestine 1945-48, Malaya (2979656 C./Sjt. T. Moorehead, A. & S.H.), second clasp loose on riband, contact wear and edge bruising, nearly very fine or better (7)

Thomas (Theodore) Moorehead was born on 5 April 1911 and enlisted in the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders in December 1934. As a member of the 2nd Battalion, he subsequently witnessed active service on the North-West Frontier in the mid-to-late 1930s, but by the time of his capture in Singapore on 14 February 1942, he was serving on secondment to the Indian Army Ordnance Corps.

Among those incarcerated in the bleak surroundings of Changi, he was subsequently embarked for Japan in the Kyokku Maru in April 1943, where he was held in Omi camp up until his liberation in September 1945. The camp was based near the factory and quarries of the Denki Electro-Chemical Industry Company, where Moorehead and his fellow internees were put to work, sometimes with fatal consequences.

In a post-war report, Lieutenant Stephen Abbott of the East Surreys, stated:

'The officer in charge of the camp - Lieutenant Yosimura - was a young and irresponsible fool … the punishment for even the smallest offences was to a Western mind, brutal and uncivilised … the effect on the men both physically and mentally of continuous slapping and beatings eventually showed in low morale, poor health and, in many cases, a broken spirit and death.'

In his P.O.W. debrief, Moorehead paid tribute to the courage of a Lieutenant Burroughs and Lance-Corporal Davies, who smuggled a wireless set from Singapore to Omi, where they operated it from about May 1943, 'at great risk of being detected by the Japanese.' Great risk indeed and likely a story related in Stephen Abbott's And All My War is Done, which was published in 1993.

Unusually perhaps for a pre-war entrant and ex-Japanese P.O.W., Moorehead elected to stay in the Army after the war and witnessed further active service with the Argylls in Palestine and Malaya, latterly as a Colour-Sergeant. He died in Crewe, Cheshire in July 1982.

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Estimate
£400 to £600

Starting price
£320