Dalesfolk: Jim Surr

From the archive, first published Friday 10th Feb 2006.

"IF music be the food of love, play on," quoth Shakespeare in Twelfth Night. Being far too modest to bandy words with the Bard, I agree entirely. But music can also be many other things, to many other people, and in many different sets of circumstance.

There was very little love on the scene when an Embsay pensioner discovered music. There was plenty of hatred, though, and pain and suffering and violent death. It was music that gave the then young Jim Surr another vital human emotion: hope.

With that hope came the will to survive, for as a prisoner of war of the notoriously brutal Japanese in World War Two, survival itself was no mean feat. Hundreds of Jim's friends and comrades died in the jungles of Java, some of them callously murdered even after the Japanese had surrendered.

Jim believes that it was the discovery of music in its most basic form that helped him live through those dark years. Without it, he wouldn't have been with us a few weeks ago to receive a special award to mark 60 years of service to amateur operatics.

"In those Japanese camps, you had to have something to concentrate your mind on other than the terrible conditions and the back-breaking work," he recalls now as we look out over his immaculately tended garden.

"Men who didn't have something to look forward too, some comfort however small, could just give up. They just willed themselves to die. Strangely, what gave me that little something to hold on to was a battered old cymbal I found in a former Dutch school which the Japanese had turned into a prison camp."

Jim, 85, originally from Ashton-under-Lyne in Greater Manchester, was a 20-year-old railway clerk when he was called up into the Royal Artillery. He and his unit sailed from Liverpool for the Far East on the very day the Japanese attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbour.

They didn't even know where they were going - "`Walls have ears,' they used to tell us" - but they had seen tropical gear being loaded aboard. It was only when they landed in South Africa, weeks later, that they learned about Pearl Harbour - their officers had kept the news secret even on the troopship.

They were, in fact, bound for Singapore but they never got there. By the time their ship arrived in those waters, the evacuation of Singapore had already begun - the biggest single defeat in the history of the British Empire - and any troops still free to fight were personally ordered by Winston Churchill to join up with Dutch colonial forces on the neighbouring island of Java.

This they did - but within a few weeks the Dutch had surrendered and they turned their guns on their British allies and forced them to surrender too as part the terms they had agreed with the Japanese.

It was the beginning of more than three years of abject horror for Jim Surr - apart from that cymbal he found in one of his first prisons.

"My dad had played in a concertina band so I had been exposed to popular music since I was a lad," he recalls of those days 80 years ago. "That cymbal gave me an idea so I built a drum out of an old bucket. There were a couple of other musicians in the camp - one of them an Aussie violinist - so we formed a little band.

"The Japs worked us hard but they had little entertainment too, so they allowed us to put on little shows and they came to listen. Soon, we were doing musical shows, like pantomimes and concert party stuff, and some of the fellas would dress up as girls.

"It all sounds very amateurish now but there was very little to laugh about in those days. It gave us something to concentrate on and it gave the other prisoners a bit of a giggle. I hope it helped them a bit because it certainly helped us. Not many of my comrades came home from Java."

Despite more than 20 attacks of dysentery and malaria, Jim was one of the lucky ones and docked back in Liverpool in October 1945, to a very subdued welcome.

"There were no bands playing for us lot. I think we were a bit on an embarrassment," he said.

Back in Ashton, the performing bug that had first bitten in the PoW camp continued to gnaw so he joined a local amateur dramatics group. But tragedy had not finished with Jim Surr. His wife died at the age of 39, leaving him with a young daughter. But once again, music and drama came to his rescue.

He was cast as the lead in a JB Priestley play, When We Are Married, and one of the minor female roles was taken by a lady he had never seen before, but rather fancied. They had not met because Ethel was more of a singer than an actress, being a leading soprano with a nearby amateur dramatic society. So Jim brushed up on his tenor scales and joined too.

They were married in 1961 and moved to Skipton soon afterwards when Jim, who had gone back to his jobs on the railways after the war, was made chief clerk for the local district.

Inevitably, they joined the Skipton Amateur Operatic Society and have been members ever since, as well singing in the choir at Embsay Methodist Church. Last month, Jim was awarded a silver bar and certificate for long service to the National Operatic and Dramatic Association.

The couple have five grandchildren and have just had their first great-grandchild so I suppose I could say the Bard was right: music turned out to be the food of love after all. But that wouldn't have been possible had it not first given Jim Surr the will to live.

Archive Home