Christopher Spencer Chapman, the son of World War II hero Colonel Frederick Spencer Chapman, talks to R. Gowri about his father’s capacity to overcome challenges throughout childhood and adult life.
AS I stepped out from the grove of bamboo and tropical hardwoods where the hotel jeep had dropped me, I had to suppress a gasp. On my right, startlingly blue waters, as brilliant as a blue emerald, washed up against the powder-fine sands of Emerald Bay.
The lustrous bay on the private island of Pangkor Laut is one of the most romantic places in the world to honeymoon in, famed for its picture-postcard beauty. Couples cocooned in the five-star comforts of Pangkor Laut Resort, a YTL luxury resort, linger over private dinners on the beach and take romantic cruises aboard an old-world Chinese junk.
To me, it seemed an unlikely place for a wartime adventure but 71 years ago to this date (May 13), one of the most daring World War 2 rescue missions in Asia took place on this island, from this very bay.
Pangkor Laut was an uninhabited island at the time of the Japanese invasion of Malaya, which began on Dec 8, 1941.
On May 12, 1945, two British commandos, in disguise as Chinese labourers, successfully made their way to the small island on foot and sampan. Colonel Freddy (Frederick) Spencer Chapman and Major Richard Broome had left their Gurun camp hideout in the jungles of Perak on April 27, travelling some 97 kilometres, aided by Chinese guerillas.
Chapman was part of the small stay-behind parties of the British Armed Forces that had been ordered to “organise and lead reconnaissance and operational parties behind the enemy lines” when the Japanese invaders landed. He had been in charge of 101 S.T.S., the Special Training School in Singapore established by the British in 1941 that trained fighters in guerilla warfare, intelligence gathering and sabotage work. Broome was from Force 136, an arm of the Special Operations Executive of World War II.
Contact had finally been made with their headquarters in Ceylon and it was essential that the men return with pertinent information on the state Malaya was in then.
On May 13, 1945, Japanese planes had been crisscrossing all day over Pulau Pangkor Laut, on their way to their coast-watching station at the nearby larger island of Pangkor. Despite the obvious dangers, both men were greatly looking forward to the rescue; after all Chapman had been listed as missing, presumed dead. His publisher had already compiled several written works by him on his mountaineering expeditions and published them in his absence, thinking it impossible that he would return from Malaya. He was mistaken.
“Next day, May 13, was the great day. Broome and I had a bet of a dinner at the Galle Face Hotel, Colombo, as to which of us would see the submarine first. A new moon was shining over the Straits (of Malacca) as it grew dark, but it soon set, and as the stars were hazy the visibility was poor and now we could only just make out the arms of the bay.”
The commando steadfastly kept journals of his 3½ years living in the jungles of Malaya. Although some of his journals were found and taken by the Japanese, his survival story is detailed in his book, The Jungle Is Neutral (Marshall Cavendish, 1977 edn).
Chapman and his fellow officer spotted the submarine around 9.15pm but soon learnt that it did not have a boat that could come ashore for the men. Thus they had to swim out to it. So, despite their weakened condition after years in the jungle, they gathered their notebooks, slung on their backpacks and swam 46 metres out in the waters of Emerald Bay to the HMS Statesman.
A FAMILY LEGACY
As I made my way across the sands to Pangkor Laut Resort’s Chapman’s Bar, named after the war hero, I wondered about his life after his heroic adventures in Malaya. Waiting for me at the tables set out on the bar’s verandah were Christopher Spencer Chapman, Freddy’s third and youngest son, and his companion Sue.
The couple stood up to greet me with warm smiles as I approached. They were elated to be at the very beach that Christopher’s father had stood on just before his rescue. During his years in Malaya, Chapman had inflicted on the enemy so much damage that the Japanese were left with the impression that a large unit of men were wreaking havoc with their transportation lines and convoys, when in reality, it was mostly just Chapman or him and a handful of British officers and resistance fighters, particularly the Malayan Peoples’ Anti-Japanese Army.
I tell Christopher that his father’s adventures in the Malayan jungle play out like one of those action movies where at every climactic scene, you expect to bid farewell to the protagonist. It just seems impossible that things could end differently, yet the hero pulls through time and time again, through sheer ingenuity and amazing physical resilience.
Chapman battled bouts of malaria (one time he was in a coma for 17 days), pneumonia, tick-typhus, bullet wounds, dysentery and hostile locals. He was captured by a large Japanese patrol once, struck up a convivial conversation with the enemy leader, and, during the night, escaped the camp despite the guards.
He was kept prisoner by local bandits another time, but also escaped, making his way through thorny bamboo groves and steep, densely forested hills. There were days without any sort of shelter from pouring rain and cold, and days with little food, or only water to survive on. Yet he only once, it seems, thought he wouldn’t make it out alive.
What shaped his amazing tenacity, I asked his son.
“The motto he adopted was from Shakespeare. ‘Nothing is good or bad, thinking makes it so ...’, meaning that you can put up with anything with the right mental attitude. Certainly that was instilled into me.”
Christopher also tells me that his father’s “slightly unusual childhood” may have shaped him into being a fiercely independent individual, a survivor.
Chapman’s mother died when he was around a month old. He had very little contact with his father, who emigrated to Canada soon after to find work. “He signed his letters to his dad as ‘FS Chapman’. His brother and him were left with a guardian. Then his father returned but only to go off again and fight in the first world war.” Chapman was 8 or 9 years old when his father died in the Battle of the Somme.
Chapman was then sent off to boarding school. “My father grew interested in wildlife and went off on long walks in the forest. He didn’t like organised games. He chose solitary interests ... I think he was lonely because of his background.”
LOVE OF NATURE
The teenage Chapman won a scholarship to Cambridge. His great love of the outdoors led him to make several important climbing and botanical expeditions to the Himalayas, the Arctic and Greenland. His early films of the expeditions can be viewed at the Pitt Rivers Museum’s (Oxford) website. He also published several books and papers on his explorations.
His love of nature and keen powers of observation never waned even through his hard years in the Malayan jungle training the resistance fighters and evading capture.
He writes in The Jungle Is Neutral: “As darkness closed in, the jungle chorus, which had been hushed during the day, came to life.... every imaginable species of grasshopper, cicada, and tree-frog tuned its individual contribution — musical, unmusical, rhythmic, or strident — to the cacophonous medley.” He noted the various bird species in Malayan jungles even as he trained the men in irregular jungle warfare.
Christopher says: “He would be invited to give lectures on his experiences after the war. He had just turned 38 when the sub picked him up from Emerald Bay and sailed to Ceylon.”
Chapman met his life partner while in Ceylon. Christopher smiles as he says: “This WAAF (Women’s Auxiliary Air Force) officer appointed herself as secretary of the Freddy Protection Society, to protect him from all the other women. My father was already quite well-known and popular at the base for his adventures, you see. Well, she got her man. Faith Townson, my mother, married Freddy in Delhi (January 1946) in India.
“After the Hiroshima surrender, my father was parachuted back into Malaya to help organise and take control of the surrender in the East Coast.” Chapman’s relations with the guerillas had been good, so he was asked to help the British support group in Malaya to liaise with some “refractory guerrillas”.
When the war was over, Chapman went back to his teaching job as headmaster, which took him and his young family to Africa and Germany. Christopher says: “My early memories are of when he worked in South Africa in a school. In Africa, we frequently travelled to see wildlife. To me, he was every bit a normal father. He was interested in the arts, music, wildlife, and was a keen photographer.”
Christopher, who lives in Devon, England, is also an outdoors man. “I joined the navy, and visited the Antarctic. The sea has always appealed to me. After that I became a yachts skipper and visited Greenland.”
During one of his trips, he met a young man whose father had been on the submarine that rescued Chapman. “His father later told me that he vividly remembers the evening of May 13, 1945 when this wet, very scrawny Englishman with yellow stained skin climbed out of the water into the submarine ... “
REMEMBERING HIS SPIRIT
Chapman’s wartime diaries are also in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, presented as a gift by Faith. Christopher has not read them, and they have not been published.
Throughout his published books and papers, Chapman’s empathy for his fellow humans of all races and his keen interest in all cultures is evident.
Was he deeply religious? “My father was brought up by first one vicar, and then another, so he went to a lot of church services; he came to find it boring,” admits Christopher. “But he believed in living according to the precepts of the Christian religion because he found it to be a good moral code. He was spiritual rather than religious.
“He also believed in discipline but had a loose way of applying it. He allowed us three boys to wander about. Once I pinched one of his cigars and went off to smoke it with a friend. My father got to know and said, ‘Anytime you want a cigar, don’t pinch one, just ask me’. Needless to say, I never took one again,” shares Christopher, with a hearty laugh.
The following day, May 14, Christopher flagged off The Chapman’s Challenge, a biathlon crafted by Pangkor Laut Resort. His two children, Stephen, 30, and Hazel, 28, participated. Chapman’s grandchildren displayed some of the stamina of their grandfather’s by coming in fourth and fifth among the 130 attendees. Stephen is a platoon commander in the British Forces Parachute Regiment and Hazel, an art director.
The Chapman’s Challenge involved a 6.2km run through the island’s roads and rainforest trails, followed by a 1km swim, finishing at Chapman’s Bar. The race, said Ross Sanders, the resort’s general manager, is a tribute to the willpower and endurance of Freddy Chapman, who was awarded the Distinguished Service Order and Bar, and the Lawrence of Arabia Memorial Medal, among others, after the war.
Your father would have loved this event, I remarked to Christopher after the race. He nodded.
“Yes. He was a fine runner at school. And he was interested in all sorts of people. He would be delighted to see so many countries taking part.”