By Sears Eldredge
At the start, POWs could only attend shows in their own areas and with their own Unit. But that meant long waits between opportunities to see a show as all Units in the area had to have a chance to see the show. To get more entertainment to more men more speedily, the Japanese gave concert party troupes permission to tour outside their areas for matinee performances, and POWs with legitimate reasons, permission to travel to other areas to see a show.
The next day the Aussie concert party toured to the Southern Area and performed in the Pavilion Theatre.
Even when touring by Divisional concert parties became permissible, the hunger for entertainment among the thousands of POW in Changi was still not satiated. And there were other would-be entertainers not in the Divisional concert parties who also wanted a chance to put on a show. So Regimental and Battalion Concert Parties were encouraged. Late in the month, a new Entertainment Unit and a new indoor theatre appeared in the Divisional Signals sector of the 18th Division. They called their renovated dining hall, The Theatre Royal, and their first show was appropriately titled, Signal Lights.
The end of the month came and the Senior Officer Japan Party still did not leave Changi as expected. Their date for departure was postponed once again.
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
RFHG 