By Sears Eldredge

A welcomed addition to the week-day entertainment in Selarang were the Sunday evening musical concerts (including gramophone concerts or operas) performed in the Convalescent Depot area in an open-sided hut [marquee] which their Y.M.C.A. Representatives, George McNeilly and Ivor Hanger, had especially built for these purposes.

McNeilly later wrote,

At our Y.M.C.A. Hut and Gardens every Sunday evening, the A.I.F. Band and Orchestra gave promenade concerts. The Hut was flood lit, and hundreds of men promenaded in the gardens or lazed under the palm trees, and listened to “Rose Marie Selections” and “Poet and Peasant” Overture.^[i]

McNeilly was also encouraged to form a Choral Society. “Music,” he wrote, “was the means of keeping hundreds of men sane. It appealed to them in different ways, but it was a vital part in each man’s life, and added to the morale of the camp.”^[ii]

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[i] McNeilly, “Summary,” p. 3.

[ii] McNeilly, “Music in the Prisoner of War Camp Changi Singapore,” n. p.

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