By Sears Eldredge

The Senior Officers finally embarked by ship on 16 August accompanied by a group of O.R.s (including Jack McNaughton and Arthur Butler from “The Mumming Bees”) as administrative staff, cooks, and batmen. Tom Wade fantasized about the female impersonator, Arthur Butler’s, reaction to the undignified medical inspection carried out on all those departing to ensure that no one with dysentery was included in the draft: “Privates, sergeant majors, brigadiers and generals, even the governor of the Straits Settlements had to drop their shorts in the open square, bow to Japanese medical regulations with the rest of us and receive the sleek glass rod. (What did Gloria d’Earie, the female impersonator, say when he received the glass rod? Ah Ecstacy! [sic])”^[i]

A month after their arrival in Taiwan (their first stop), McNaughton and Butler, along with a group of Officers and O.R.s, were sent on to Keijo [Seoul] POW Camp in Chosen [Korea]. By Christmas, they would begin to produce a series of shows enlisting additional performers from among the other POWs. [See forthcoming blog on POW entertainment activities in Korea.]

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[i] Wade, 53.

Note that all the documents in this series of blogs reside in Sears A. Eldredge Archive in the De Witt Wallace Library at Macalester College, 1600 Grand Avenue, St. Paul, Minnesota, 55105

Sear’s book, Captive Audiences/Captive Performers: Music and Theatre as Strategies for Survival on the Thailand-Burma Railway 1942-1945, was published by Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota in 2014, as an open-access e-book and is available here: http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/thdabooks/22