Upside Down

By Michael Taylor

When Peter Howell was 71 years old he was given the choice of whether to live or die. How and why he was put in that position is not the most astounding part. The disconcerting aspect is that he had to think long and hard about his choice.

Men climb mountains, sail solo around the world and trek through deserts but to really test a man's character put him in a hospital bed where he is unable to communicate or move and can only breathe because of a machine. And leave him there for 107 days with nothing but his thoughts. Once he gets through that present him with the devastating reality of the rest of his life.

Peter arrived in Australia as a wide-eyed 16 year old with lofty goals and ambitious dreams and he exceeded them all to become one of Western Australia's most successful and experienced transport opera-tors.

Then, in two seconds, his life was turned completely and permanently upside down.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Taylor
• Release date: Dec 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9780646870168

Michael Taylor

Michael Taylor is Professor Emeritus of Transport Planning at the University of South Australia. Author or editor of eight transportation books, Dr. Taylor is a leading pioneer in transportation network vulnerability analysis.

Book preview

UPSIDE

DOWN

The Life and Times of Peter John Charles Howell

Michael Taylor

Upside Down

The Life and Times of Peter John Charles Howell

ISBN: 978-0-646-87016-8

Copyright Peter Howell 2022

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, published, performed in public or communicated to the public in any form or by any means without prior written permission from the author.

All photographs property of Peter Howell

Michael Taylor

www.number41.com.au

CONTENTS

1

FATHER

2

MOTHER

3

CHILDHOOD

4

AUSTRALIA

5

DIESEL IN THE BLOOD

6

DOWN TO BUSINESS

7

BELL FREIGHTLINES

8

KEY TRANSPORT

9

NEXUS FREIGHT

10

TRAVELS

11

UPSIDE DOWN

1

FATHER

Captain Charles Alcock was only 33 years old when he made a decision in a steamy jungle far from home that could have resulted in the swift and brutal separation of his head from his body. He put his life at risk for the sake of the men under his care despite having a wife and child in England. It was a choice that required extraordinary courage and it matched one that his yet-to-be-born son would have to make about his own life 78 years later.

Charles Ernest Alcock was one of 10 children who were brought up in the industrial port of Ipswich, in Suffolk. The ancient town has a rich heritage of maritime trade, sail-making, ship building and a once-thriving wool industry. Its inhabitants are tough and resolute with their ancestors reaching back 1,400 years – beginning with the Romans and followed by Viking invasion and 50-year occupation in the 9th century.

One month after Charles’ 6th birthday his father, John Henry Alcock, was buried in an old orchard near the French village of Richebourg L’Avoué – the victim of a German soldier’s bullet. The year was 1915 and John Henry became one of nearly one million British service personnel who lost their lives amid the carnage of World War One (WWI). He shares the St. Vaast Post Military Cemetery with 800 other men – including Indians and Germans.

Charles’ mother never remarried. To get by she took in the neighbourhood washing which her children picked up dirty and delivered clean. The churchgoing family lived in a small two-up two-down cottage and continually struggled to make ends meet so as soon as each child was old enough they were sent to work. Charles’ job when young had been to follow the many horses around and shovel up their manure which could be sold as fertiliser. After finishing his schooling at the age of 14, he began working in an iron foundry making farm machinery and railway parts but his health suffered so more suitable employment was found in a men’s clothing shop. Charles was not looking for a career, though, as he had already decided on one. His income was to help support his family, and to afford studies towards life as a member of the Anglican clergy – much to the delight of his mother who had been hoping at least one of her children would follow a religious path.

Charles was accepted into St. John’s College, Highbury, for his divinity studies. He developed a powerful singing voice and also won the college’s elocution prize three years running. His commanding sermons in years to come would reflect the professional training he had received in that arena from accomplished actor, Claude Hulbert. Claude was a stage, radio and cinema star, although not quite as famous as his brother, Jack, who was voted the most popular British male film star at the box office in 1934.

On September 3, 1939, Great Britain’s Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, announced that the country was at war with Germany – in an all-encompassing conflict that would be known as World War Two (WWII). Six days later, Charles enlisted as a chaplain and was attached to the 6th Battalion, Royal Norfolk Regiment. He was married at the time but that did not interfere with his patriotic fervour and sense of duty.

Training and manoeuvres were carried out in the coastal village of Weybourne, in the town of Alderley Edge, south of Manchester, and also in the wilds of Scotland. Towards the end of 1941, however, Charles was transferred to the 4th Battalion at Ross-on-Wye, in Herefordshire, due to its chaplain becoming unwell. The commanding officer was Lieutenant-Colonel Alfred Ernest (A.E.) Knights.

Following the mass military evacuation at Dunkirk one year earlier, the 4th had been heavily involved in preparing England’s coastline for a possible invasion. Minefields were laid, dugouts and strong points were constructed and manned day and night, a tank ditch was dug, and roadblocks, consisting of herring barrels filled with sand, were placed around the perimeter of coastal towns Yarmouth and Gorleston-on-Sea. A gap was even blown in the nearby Britannia Pier to render it unusable as a landing point. The massive explosion blew out the windows of houses on Marine Parade, but the assembled crowd considered it splendid entertainment.

By the time Charles joined the battalion they were preparing for overseas deployment. HM King George VI inspected the battalion in late October and presented Lieutenant-Colonel Knights with his Territorial Decoration medal (TD) – awarded for 20 years of service in the Territorial Force (a part-time volunteer component of the British Army).

Charles was able to spend time with his wife and young son, Michael, at their home on Cauldwell Road before leaving for an unknown destination and for an unknown amount of time.

*

On October 29, 1941, Captain Alcock joined his men on board HMT Andes and proceeded, in convoy, in a zigzag course around the north of Ireland. The weather was good and there was little seasickness. One morning in November, halfway across the North Atlantic Ocean, the accompanying British destroyers were replaced by a battleship, an aircraft carrier, two cruisers and several destroyers of the United States Navy. At Halifax, in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, the soldiers transferred to the troop transport USS Wakefield (formerly the luxury ocean liner, SS Manhattan).

Trinidad was their next port of call, before arriving at the South African port of Cape Town. Here, the men were able to go ashore and enjoy the hospitality of the city. On December 29, after two months at sea, the 4th Battalion then disembarked on the west coast of India at the city of Bombay (now Mumbai) and travelled inland 155 miles (250 kilometres) to set up camp at Ahmednagar. Three weeks later, Charles and his men set sail once again – bound for the hell on earth that was unfolding in Singapore.

This city-state was of great importance to Britain’s defence strategy. But Japanese General Tomoyuki Yamashita was advancing towards it down the Malay Peninsula through mangroves and swamp alongside 25,000 ruthless and battle-hardened men with bayonets firmly attached to their bolt-action Type 99 rifles.

Ahead of them was Britain’s Lieutenant-General Arthur Percival who commanded more than 80,000 allied troops and had been ordered by Prime Minister Winston Churchill to fight to the last man. But poor communication, leadership failures and a lack of supplies and water were undermining his defence of the island. As well, that defence was focused on attacks from the sea.

Captain Alcock and the rest of the 4th landed at Keppel Harbour on January 29 through a barrage of attacking enemy aircraft. The battalion was given a sector to defend in the north-east of the island and the constant bombing and gunfire would temporarily rob Charles of his hearing. The following day, their troopship, the USS Wakefield, was struck by a Japanese bomb that killed five men who were all in the sick bay.

Food, water and ammunition were all running low for the allies, but resistance would continue for another, very long, 17 days. Nearly 5,000 men would be killed or wounded during the fall of Singapore and the savagery of the Japanese troops was on full display as they entered the grounds of the Alexandra Barracks Hospital. A British medical officer, Lieutenant Weston, held up a white flag and approached the invaders but was immediately killed with a bayonet. The troops then stormed through the hospital killing 50 soldiers, some in the midst of surgery, as well as slaughtering doctors and nurses. Civilians were murdered and soldiers decapitated or burned alive.

On February 15, Yamashita demanded an unconditional surrender from Percival and, in a desperate and ultimately futile attempt to prevent further loss of life, the general agreed. Eighty thousand British, Australian, Indian and Malayan soldiers put their hands up. Churchill called it the worst disaster in British military history. Captain Charles Alcock survived what must have been a sustained and terrifying period under attack, but it would turn out to be a cakewalk compared with what was to come.

He was marched to Changi Prison with 3,000 other captured soldiers to occupy a space designed for 600. Before long, both British and Australian troops were moved to the 470-acre (190-hectare) Sime Road Camp – former headquarters of the British Army and Royal Air Force. The prisoners of war (POWs) lived in huts they built themselves from wood and attap (thatch made from palm fronds). Eight months later, in October, 1942, a group of British POWs left Singapore for Thailand to finish building the Thai-Burma railway. Charles Alcock was one of them. Japan occupied Thailand at the time and needed a rail connection to supply their northern troops in occupied Burma.

Charles’ journey began with a long march through the jungle to cattle wagons which were too small to stand up in and allowed no room to lie down. There were no toilet stops so a man in need was held out the side door. Some men were lost during this procedure but the train did not stop. The trip lasted four days and the hungry and cramped men then had to march for another four days through the jungle. There was no rest. Any man who could not walk or be carried by his friends was left. Charles was not a big man and it seemed that the smaller men were more resistant to the conditions.

Eventually they arrived at a makeshift camp in Thailand which was 177 miles (285 kilometres) from the proposed end of the rail line in Thanbyuzayat, Burma. The Tha Sao area was a staging camp for forces moving north to work on the railway. It also became a hospital camp which operated under horrendous conditions. Even moderately sick POWs knew that if they went there, there was a good chance they would not walk out. In its 15 months of operation Tha Sao hospital would admit 15,000 men – crowded into attap huts and sharing a range of conditions and diseases. Tropical ulcers were the most common complaints. Sufferers had to be held down while orderlies scraped away the maggoty pus from their limbs using a silver spoon.

As chaplain, Charles was responsible for the spiritual welfare and support of all the men in the 4th Battalion, Royal Norfolks, as well as any others who required help. He held their hands as they were dying and was responsible for their funerals. Each man had an individual service which took place after the work day and Charles meticulously recorded the details of every man who died. At St. Luke’s cemetery there would be 613 graves, and a further 227 were at St. George’s.

There were three hospital camps at Tha Sao, two reached by river. Charles was allowed to visit those camps by boat with a guard and occasionally he could smuggle through an egg or a mango into the cookhouse for the sickest. Cholera was rife. At a camp in the Ton Chan area, where Charles also spent time, there were 97 deaths from this disease. The victims were either cremated on large bamboo fires or buried in communal graves to prevent further infection.

On the railway construction all men had to clear a quota of one cubic metre of rock per day using 14-pound sledge-hammers and four-foot chisel crossbars or other rudimentary hand tools. Dynamite was also used, and the subsequent rock clearing was back-breaking work on steep, slippery slopes. Cuttings had to be made through the uneven terrain, sometimes in monsoonal conditions. The longest was 1,500 feet (450 metres) long and 23 feet (7 metres) deep, and another was 250 feet (75 metres) long and 80 feet (25 metres) deep (known as Hellfire Pass due to the sight of emaciated prisoners labouring by burning torchlight). The Japanese wanted the railway finished as soon as possible and prisoners were made to work around the clock, with individual shifts lasting up to 18 hours. Sixty thousand allied POWs were forced to work on its 258 miles (415 kilometres) of track. Disease, malnutrition, punishment and torture were part of every day. Of the 30,000 British, one in five would die there in the twelve months of construction.

It was in this environment, while travelling between camps, that Charles decided to transport forbidden radio parts in his Holy Communion case. Once assembled, the radio was hidden among his ecclesiastical equipment in the middle of a pole carrying his and Donald Patteson’s possessions. It was an extremely risky move, but reported contact with friendly forces contributed enormously to the men’s morale. Discovery would have led to decapitation or a bullet. Such was Charles’ commitment to the soldiers in his care. Only the two men and Colonel Knights, the commander of the POW camp, knew of the radio’s location.

Charles kept three records of all the men he laid to rest. One was left in the ground at the foot of each cross, one he kept, and the third he buried where he hoped it would be safe. At war’s end, he visited as many parents as he could to tell them what he remembered of their sons. He would be appointed as a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE) for his tireless work in the service of his fellow men.

The railway line was completed in late 1943 and the Tha Muang district, west of Bangkok, became the site of a base camp for POWs. Colonel Knights commanded that camp from May, 1944.

During the last few months of the war, the Japanese were becoming nervous about the Siamese (Thai) resistance forces in relation to the release and arming of allied POWs. Any contact with them by the British brought with it a death penalty. Colonel Knights, however, was heading a covert organisation which obtained money from Siamese sources to buy food and medicines for his men. The organisation was eventually uncovered, and the Japanese secret police began investigating.

Knights was taken away and interrogated and many of his men did not expect to see him again. Under questioning he admitted that he had organised the supply of money, stating he alone was responsible (although in fact other officers had been involved). He then castigated the Japanese for their callous neglect of the POWs which had made his actions necessary, and added that he would do it again if given the opportunity. His stand came towards the end of three years of captivity and of brutality but his courage remained steadfast. He was released with the threat of death if he were to be caught again. Knights would be awarded a Distinguished Service Order (DSO), Military Medal (MM) and Military Cross (MC).

Colonel Knights and Captain Alcock both displayed levels of bravery through those years that were beyond anything expected. And they maintained that commitment to their men through disease, death and despair for three and a half years. Charles maintained his faith with the worst behaviours of the enemy on display every day, but he needed to remain a tower of strength because if the chaplain buckled, what hope was there for the rest of them?

In later years these two outstanding officers would play a major role in Peter Howell’s life – one as his father and one as his godfather – passing on fine character traits which Peter would draw on through many ups and downs.

On August 6, 1945, the United States detonated an atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later, Nagasaki bore the impact of another destructive blast. On August 15, Japanese forces surrendered, and the POWs began their long journey home.

Tomoyuki Yamashita, the Japanese general who took Singapore from the British and allied forces was charged with war crimes and executed in 1946.

Despite the immense human cost of its construction, most of the Thai-Burma railway was demolished after WWII. A portion of it remains intact in Thailand.

After more than four years away Charles returned to his home in Ipswich on a slow boat from the Far East to be greeted with devastating news. While he had been a prisoner of war his wife and her lodger had eaten poisonous toadstools, mistaking them for mushrooms. The lodger went to hospital and recovered but his wife did not – and had died. Their son, Michael, who was about to begin his schooling, had been farmed out to relatives.

After the emotional exhaustion and physical deprivations of his wartime experiences Charles was in no position to become a single father to a boy he hardly knew, and Michael remained where he was. Captain Alcock was given three months’ leave to recover both from the loss of his wife and the conditions he had been living under for three and a half years. In early 1946 he resumed military duties and was posted to Bury St. Edmunds, 23 miles (37 kilometres) from Ipswich. It would be there, in the Officers’ Mess, that his life would change forever.

In the meantime, he was kept busy fulfilling his promise to the hundreds of soldiers he had buried in Thailand. On his return to England, news had spread of his burial records and Charles received many letters – especially after a newspaper article was published: ‘Captain Alcock brought back a much-worn, but highly-treasured book containing the names of Dutchmen, Australian and Britishers who died during captivity, and were left behind lying in graves in three cemeteries out in the Thailand jungle – St. George’s cemetery, containing over 200 graves, St. Luke’s, containing over 500, and the cholera cemetery, containing 52 graves, many of them being of a communal character. The ‘Tarsao-Thailand Cemetery Register’, as the hand-printed inscription describes it, is a treasured possession after many vicissitudes and has been brought back to England in spite of all the Japs’ efforts to deprive the camp leaders of precious records.’

***

Lieutenant-Colonel Alfred Knights, left, and Captain Charles Alcock

2.

MOTHER

The English county of Norfolk is bordered on its north and east by the cold and stormy waters of the North Sea, but is best known as a beautiful rural area with rolling green countryside. Norfolk is a rich farming region, and also home to coastal sand dunes, salt marshes and the Broads – shallow lakes formed from medieval peat diggings when the sea was lower than it is today and which support sailing, fishing and bird-watching. Its natural attractions have always brought summer vacationers and Norfolk’s fortunate residents see little reason to ever leave. The Newdick clan have been reported as living in Norfolk from the late 16th century, although the earliest official recording is of Thomas Newdick marrying Alice Adams in 1604 at Mildenhall. The Newdicks were originally tenant farmers but rose to become landowners – growing wheat, sugar beets, oats, vegetables and barley for the distilling industry.

Brothers, Charles and John Newdick, would be the last farmers in the family, and it was through Charles that Peter’s grandparents met. Charles remained unwed for some time before marrying his mother’s nurse who was, reportedly, not a particularly nice woman. Despite that, after each good harvest