A Perth audience this week took the opportunity to hear a second world war soldier’s incredible story of survival against all the odds as a prisoner of war of the Japanese.
Alistair Urquhart’s autobiography The Forgotten Highlander has proved hugely successful around the world and he visited the AK Bell Library to share with others what he went through.
As a soldier in the Gordon Highlanders he was captured by the Japanese in Singapore and survived working on the notorious bridge on the River Kwai.
On September 4, 1944, he was among 900 British POWs marched up the gangway of the 10,000-tonne cargo ship Kachidoki Maru.
Onboard one of the rusted hulks that came to be known as “hellships”, he and his colleagues endured appalling conditions, searing heat, sickness and death at the hands of both the Japanese and comrades driven mad by what they faced.
Mr Urquhart has admitted he feared no one would emerge alive. While nearly everyone else on board died during the attacks and thousands of those who survived the Death Railway perished, Mr Urquhart was eventually rescued by a whaling ship, only to be taken to Japan where he was forced to work in a mine near Nagasaki.
In a fittingly dramatic end to an incredible tale, some two months later he watched the war come to an end as a nuclear bomb dropped just 10 miles away.
He returned home to Scotland and Broughty Ferry and kept his astonishing tale to himself for many years, only to finally tell all in his 90th year.
There will be a second opportunity to hear his incredible tale in the Ogilvy Rooms in Alyth on March 16 at 7.30pm. Tickets for this event also cost £5 and should be purchased in advance from Alyth and Blairgowrie libraries.