An Australian prisoner of the Japanese during the Second World War, Russell Wright built and ingeniously concealed radio receivers to bring authentic news of the war to his fellow captives. This practice became at once more difficult yet ever more crucial to the morale of those with whom he slaved on the notorious Burma-Siam railway. A doctor, also a prisoner, told Wright, “You can do more to save lives than I can”.
Born in Melbourne in 1920, Russell Francis Wright was the son of Colonel Charles and Jessie Wright. He was educated at Scotch College, Melbourne, where he constructed his own technically advanced radio receiver before beginning studies for an electrical engineering degree with the intention of following his father into the Army.
Shortly after the outbreak of war in the Far East in December 1941, he was commissioned into the Australian Army Ordnance Corps and posted to Singapore with reinforcements for the 8th Australian Division, taking with him 25 men trained in radio-location (radar). Their arrival on January 10, 1942, proved too late for an effective radar organisation to be put together and a month later they were ordered to leave by ship bound for Sumatra.
When intercepted by a Japanese naval vessel, the captain surrendered rather than risk huge loss of life if sunk. Wright and other prisoners were held for five months in a camp in Palembang in southern Sumatra, where he constructed his first radio receiver concealed in an army water bottle.
In July 1942 he and other prisoners were moved to Changi jail on Singapore’s eastern tip, where he helped to set up the radio-receiving organisation. No chances were taken over security; only a strictly limited circle of Australian and British operators knew where the sets were hidden or from where the daily news bulletins emanated. “Our mutual trust was absolute,” he said later. The organisation provided not only an accurate news service, as the proliferation of rumours was unhelpful to the maintenance of morale, but also manufactured radio equipment for working parties of prisoners dispatched to Borneo, Burma and Thailand and to other prison camps in Singapore.
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In Changi Wright designed receivers to be concealed in everyday objects unlikely to arouse suspicion: a broom head, the legs of a table and a harmonium. None of the prisoners beyond his immediate circle was aware of his activities. At night, listening through a rubber tube connected to an earpiece on a radio, he would take down the key points of the Allied news broadcasts on strips of paper using the edge to guide his hand in the dark.
When 7,000 prisoners were ordered to leave Singapore to supplement the workforce on the Burma-Siam railway, required to support the Japanese forces in Burma and which was behind construction schedule, Wright volunteered to join them so they could continue to receive authentic news via his clandestine radio. Wright marched 160 miles with a radio built into a piano accordion strapped to his back.
Awkward to carry and heavy, as the accordion contained not only the radio but also items required for construction of a transmitter, he was mocked by fellow prisoners not in the know for carrying so seemingly frivolous a burden. Undeterred, he completed the march to the camp at Shimo-Songkurai near the Burmese border with his load secure.
Conditions in the camp were already appalling when the new workforce arrived and a collapse of morale threatened. Facing the onset of cholera with acute shortages of food and medical supplies, this was where the camp’s medical officer, Major Bruce Hunt, gave Wright the go-ahead to begin radio reception as a matter of urgency.
In conditions of great risk to himself, Wright operated the radio receiver to provide news to be filtered through the camp with an immediately demonstrable good effect on morale and hopes of survival. Nevertheless, of the force of 7,000 that set out from Singapore in April 1943, more than 3,000 had died by the end of that year. Wright, however, was able to give his fellow prisoners news of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Japanese surrender before their captors knew of any of them.
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Although graded as 60 per cent disabled on discharge from the Army, he made a good recovery and read for an electrical engineering degree. On graduation in 1953, he came to the UK to work in the guided weapons and aircraft industry, notably with de Havilland on the Comet programme.
He then moved into the nuclear industry, joining Atomic Power Constructions in 1960, to become the chief commissioning engineer for that company which was building one of the first nuclear power stations in North Wales. He led the team of engineers and physicists through the execution of the lengthy complex procedures involved in taking the reactors and power plant to full power.
He was then appointed to commission Dungeness B, one of the more powerful nuclear stations employing advanced gas-cooled reactors. As part of the restructuring of the industry, he undertook phases of the commissioning of the nuclear stations at Hartlepool and Heysham.
Upon arrival in the UK in 1953 he had joined the Territorial Army airborne forces and was warned for possible deployment to Suez in 1956 but was not called on. His passion for engineering extended to his private life. He restored and flew two vintage wood and fabric light aircraft.
For his services as a prisoner of war, he was appointed MBE in 1947. He is survived by his wife, Irma Mary Sanders, of Adelaide, whom he married in 1956, and two sons.
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Russell Wright, MBE, prisoner of war of the Japanese and engineer for the British nuclear industry, was born on September 28, 1920. He died on April 22, 2012, aged 91