After Second World War Service with the Royal Artillery, which he left as a lieutenant-colonel in 1948, Len Harrop joined the Imperial War Graves Commission the following year, having previously travelled widely in the Far East for the Army, working to find final resting places for the casualties of the campaigns in the region. This work led to his becoming the supervisor of the commission’s work in Japan, and he became responsible for the British Commonwealth War Cemetery at Yokohama. There, the remains of most of the Commonwealth servicemen who died in action or perished as prisoners of war in Japan, or with the occupying forces after the war, as well as some from the United States and the Netherlands, are buried or inurned.
The Yokohama cemetery, which had been first proposed for the city’s Hodogaya ward at the end of the war, was established there by the Australian Army Graves Service and handed over to what was then the Imperial War Graves Commission in 1948. On the site of a former juvenile recreation ground set up to mark the ascension to the throne of the Emperor Hirohito in 1926, it contains the last remains of 1,675 identified casualties from the UK, Australian, Canadian, New Zealand and Indian forces, besides a number of others who are unidentified. Many of these had been brought by ship to Japan as slave labourers in terrible conditions, battened down below decks, from camps in Japanese occupied territory in South East Asia; others had been killed or captured in action off or over the Japanese homeland.
Beautifully situated in peaceful woodlands at the head of a valley, the Yokohama cemetery is surrounded by wonderful gardens, the establishment and tending of which owe much to Harrop’s stewardship over the years. For this and for his other, varied services to the British community in Japan he was appointed MBE in 1978.
Leonard Schofield Harrop was born in 1915 at Rochdale, Lancashire, where his father kept a chemist’s shop. His father died when he was 11, and he was educated at the Royal Masonic School at Bushey in Hertfordshire. After leaving school he worked as a commercial salesman, travelling around the North of England selling pharmaceutical products. But in 1938, foreseeing war, he enlisted in the Army, in which he served in the ranks in an anti-aircraft brigade before being commissioned in March 1941.
He subsequently served with AA batteries in Orkney, Shetland and Kent, and in January 1944 was posted to 40 Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment attached to the 51st (Highland) Division in preparation for the Normandy landings. After D-Day he took the rear party of 40LAA over to Normandy.
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After the end of the war in Europe he was sent to GHQ Far East Land Forces in Singapore where, with the Army Graves Service, he helped to oversee the grim task of identifying and burying the remains of Commonwealth soldiers who had fallen throughout the SE Asia theatre. After being demobilised as a lieutenant-colonel, in April 1949 he joined the Anzac section of the Imperial War Graves Commission as a district commissioner in Australia, subsequently working in New Guinea. In 1952 he was posted to Japan. Settling there, he became the Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s local supervisor, responsible for the maintenance and development of the cemetery at Hodogaya. The work of identifying and tracing the dead was to occupy him for much of the rest of his life.
The development of the gardens, in which he was greatly assisted by his Japanese head gardener, made him into something of an expert on Japanese horticulture. He revelled in the year’s parade of flowering plants, which begins each January with the white and pink blossoms of the Japanese flowering apricot, which perfume the air on a calm evening with their delicate fragrance. He also selected the hardy Manila or Korean grass, Zoysia matrella, with its preference for open exposure to the sea, as the turf for the site.
Shortly after arriving in Japan, Harrop had bought a plot of land by the sea on the Pacific shore of the peninsular Chiba prefecture, which encloses Tokyo Bay. There he built himself a beach house, a gradual process of many years, accomplished largely with his own hands. He also kept a flat in Tokyo where he worked as a copywriter at the Nikkatsu advertising agency, producing work for such clients as Nippon Steel and Mitsubishi, for whom he is credited with suggesting the name of Colt for one of their models. He was also a “fixer” for a number of British firms trying to get into Japanese markets, and conversely for Japanese companies wanting to do business with the UK.
Although he officially retired from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission in September 1986, he kept in regular contact, returning periodically to Hodogaya to escort VIP visitors. He was involved in a good deal of charity work and in projects aimed at Anglo-Japanese reconciliation, particularly involving some of those who had suffered cruel treatment in PoW camps and their former guards.
In his late eighties he began to find that climbing on to the roof of his beach house to effect repairs was getting beyond him, and in 2003 he returned to England, settling at first into a house at Ely, close to relations, and later moving into a nursing home in Cambridge. He did not marry.
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Len Harrop, MBE, former supervisor, British Commonwealth War Cemetery in Yokohama, Japan, was born on September 28, 1915. He died on February 7, 2011, aged 95