Sixty years since Britain surrendered Singapore to the Japanese, more than 100 Far Eastern prisoners of war and civilian internees attended a reunion at the Imperial War Museum. Reporter JOHN HIGGINSON talked to two Beckenham men, who were taken prisoner, about their experiences in the camps and the hardships faced by those forced to build the Death Railway and the bridge over the River Kwai ...

ONE was a dentist, the other a statistician. But war brought them together as prisoners of war in Singapore.

These two men, of Beckenham, still have vivid memories of their time in the Far East.

Here are their stories ...

Eric Martin, 84, of Stanley Avenue, Beckenham, served in the Royal Army Dental Corps. He was in one of the first parties sent to Singapore in May, 1942.

"There were 600 hundred of us in my party. We were captured and that was it.

"I was one of the more fortunate ones because I was a dentist I had a profession which was useful.

"I was working as a dentist back at the base camp in Bampong and I had more food than those working the railway on the front line.

"I was lucky not to have to work the Hellfire Pass."

"The Japanese gave us no tools or anaesthetic to do our jobs.

"Dentists and doctors had to try to work with whatever tools they could find.

"That was the main reason so many of the men died.

"If you got ill or injured there was very little which could be done for you.

"However, there was a professional thief in our party who managed to steal some cocaine hydrochloride from the Japanese for me, which works well as a pain killer.

"He took a big risk getting hold of that and would have been severely punished if he had got caught. It lasted nearly the entire time I was there. I would make fillings out of chalk and some tapioca flour."

From 1949 to 1981, Mr Martin worked at a dental practice in Central Hill, Upper Norwood.

Trained as a statistician, Dennis Bluett, 83, of Manor Way, Beckenham, became an officer when the Second World War broke out.

"I was in the 18th division. We spent three months at sea, so when we got to Singapore, we were already weak.

"We had no air defence and the Japanese were blanket bombing the town of Changi. We had to surrendered, to protect the civilians.

"Because we surrendered, the Japanese treated us as third class citizens.

"They believe soldiers should die before they surrender.

"When we were taken prisoner, we were left with nothing more than the clothes on our backs, our haversacks and water bottles.

"In the heat of South East Asia your water bottle is the most important thing you can ever have, without it you'd die of thirst.

"I was in charge of looking after my troop, who mostly cleaned and cooked for the other workers. Mostly, we just had rice, but we sometimes had a vegetable stew, or coconut milk to flavour it."

"In the evenings, the workers would come back from a long day building the railway, to our old leaking British army tents.

"They would huddle around in those damp tents and sing as if they didn't have a care in the world.

"As an officer, I always had great admiration for them for that.

"The Japanese treated us all badly. The Red Cross would send us clothes and they would take them for themselves, and if we stepped out of line they would beat us. But they treated the Indians and Malays worst of all, because they had conquered their countries.

"They were treated like fourth class citizens.

"One camp near us held 3,000 Indians, cholera broke out in their camp. The conditions they were made to live in were so bad only 750 of them survived that one outbreak."

After the war, Mr Bluett became an investment banker in the City.

He retired in 1985.