'Moving portrait of hero dad who risked life radioing secrets from Japanese POW camp'

Making a stealthy escape under cover of darkness from Singapore in a 12ft dinghy, General John Nicholson traversed perilous seas for five days - using his single paddle to row across the strait of Malacca.

It was 1942 and, finally reaching Sumatra in Western Indonesia, he was captured by the Japanese and taken as a prisoner of war.

Now - nearly four decades after his father’s death in 1988 - a portrait of him as a malnourished POW, weighing half his normal body weight, is being featured in an exhibition at Westonbirt, the National Arboretum in Gloucestershire.

“My father’s story is extraordinary,” his son Michael Nicholson, 75, tells the Mirror. “The conditions he endured as a prisoner of war during World War II were terrible.

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“Although he wasn’t wounded, the war didn’t leave him untouched. He’d been undernourished and had all sorts of ghastly diseases like Malaria. Before the war he was healthy and sporty and typically he would have been about 12 stone. But he went down to six and a half stone and all his muscle was wasted away. He was on a death ship for about two weeks where they were expecting to be torpedoed at any minute. I can’t imagine how awful that would have been.”

Michael’s dad - an engineer - risked his life to hide a disassembled radio inside the camp, which he used to relay important news like the start of the Battle of Midway. He also helped other prisoners escape. “Every day he must have been worried that the Japanese guards were going to search the camp properly and find the radio,” Michael explains. “It was a mad thing to do to take a radio with him. Every time he wanted to use it he had to assemble the different pieces - If they’d have found it they would have shot him.

“Then imagine getting within spitting distance of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), which is what he managed to achieve, only to be picked up by a Japanese tanker and brought all the way back,” Michael says. “That must have been so disappointing. He was then put into the Changi POW camp where tens of thousands of other prisoners were incarcerated.”

It was in Changi that he encountered vicar Frank Stallard, who painted his portrait - one of 90 discovered by his grandsons Charlie Inglefield and Ben Stallard. They then tracked down relatives of the soldiers featured using the family history site Ancestry.co.uk and reunited them with the portraits.

John was liberated by the Russians three weeks before the end of the war and returned to the UK, marrying Michael’s mum Phyllis 18 months later and enjoying a happy and fulfilled life. “My mother would cheerfully tell us about hiding under the piano in her flat in London when the bombs started falling, but my father didn’t really discuss his experiences,” Michael says. “And I didn't know anything about the portraits until last year.

“At the exhibition, I met lots of other relatives who have been tracked down through Ancestry. It was terribly moving - just as the people in the prison camp must have been a pretty eclectic bunch - so were we as we looked at our fathers or grandfathers. I remember thinking my dad was better looking in real life but this portrait was completed at a difficult time in his life which somehow made me feel that it was important. Seeing it for the first time was incredibly moving and extraordinary.”

The portraits are currently on exhibition at The Royal Arboretum and online at Ancestry.co.uk . For further information go to https://www.thenma.org.uk/what%27s-on/exhibitions/portraits