'Beatings happened every day'

TOM Boardman volunteered to join the Royal Army Ordnance Corps in 1939 and was thrilled to be detailed to go to Singapore in 1941.

- BY EMMELINE SAUNDERS

He said it seemed like heaven on earth as food was still plentiful and there was no rationing.

Two months later, heaven turned to hell when British forces surrendered to the Japanese, and Tom and his friends became prisoners of war.

The young man from Lancashire was incarcerated in a concentration camp in Changi district. Then, after eight months, he and his fellow POWs embarked on a gruelling four-day journey in cattle trucks to Thailand, without sanitation and given just one meal a day.

Tom became one of the Allied prisoners forced to build the Death Railway, stretching 250 miles between Thailand and Burma.