Captive Memories: The Enduring Legacy of the FEPOW Project

This powerful episode of LSTM In Conversation explores the long-running Far East Prisoners of War (FEPOW) Project, a unique research and remembrance initiative chronicling the health, trauma, and lived experiences of former FEPOW during and after WWII. Alumni, Emeritus Professor Geoff Gill and Meg Parkes share highlights from decades of groundbreaking work in tropical medicine, and psychological care, alongside emotional oral histories, revealing how Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine has shaped care, research, and memory for over 70 years.

Cover image: "Working Men" Thailand 1943, by Gunner Jack Chalker, ©️T.Mercer

Transcript

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James, Hello and welcome to the LSTM in conversation podcast series where we bring you the stories from across the world of global health research and impact. I'm James McMahon, the Alumni and Supporter Engagement Manager here at Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. Today's episode is a very special one. We're exploring the enduring legacy of the free power project, a decades long research initiative into the health and lived experiences of former Far East prisoners of war from World War Two. It's a story that sits at the intersection of medical history, psychological trauma, resilience and remembrance, and it's a story that LSTM has helped to tell for over 70 years. Today, I'm joined by three remarkable guests. LSTM alumnus, Professor Geoff Gill, a physician and emeritus professor and honorary research fellow at Liverpool School Tropical Medicine. He has led decades of research into medical and psychological legacy of captivity among former Far East prisoners of war, otherwise known as free powers, and is one of the driving forces behind LSTMs long standing partnership with fee power veterans Also joining Geoff is alumni Meg Parkes. Meg is a medical historian and fee power oral history specialist. Meg has played a key role in recording and preserving the personal testimonies of former prisoners of war, shedding light on their resilience and long term impact of captivity. She also co directs the FEPOW History Research Center. Between them, they have co authored multiple books on the fee pound history. Let's begin by setting the context for our listeners. Geoff, you've been involved in the FEPOW project for many years. What has made this such a long standing and significant area of research for LSTM, I think there's, there's multiple reasons, but I think perhaps one of the things that has kept it going is that the sort of emphasis of what we've been doing with the surviving forest POWs has has subtly altered over the years, so the school first saw its returning POWs before 1945 was out. Late 1945 none of them had been debriefed, none of them had been medically tested, and some of them were starting to get resurgences of malaria, dysentery, and the school saw a number of these men and continued to and that was really the school's involvement for for many years, perhaps up into the 50s, early 60s. We don't have records of that time. It's estimated that up to 1968 about 2000 men were seen. And there were people like Brian McGrath, Herbert Gillis, the professor of Tropical Medicine, who kept that going. So it was a, it was a kind of a clinical system, really, for 20 years or more. Then a chance event occurred Queen Mary's Hospital Roehampton, which was a major military hospital just outside London, and they had seen a lot of Far East POWs, mostly from the south of England. They stopped being a military hospital, became an NHS hospital, so their involvement with POWs greatly reduced. And all of a sudden, the school and its tropical clinical unit became the main referral center nationally, so that the work increased. A guy called Dion Bell came along, Senior Lecturer, later reader, who had a huge interest in their health. I became involved in the late 70s and intermittently for about 10 years before becoming a permanent member of staff. And Dion and I decided this, this, there was medical issues here which were not really understood or known to the medical the medical press, the medical field. So we started a series of research projects. So we then moved from a kind of a clinical to a kind of research phase, and that went on into into the 1990s by that time, the number of POWs being seen as declining. Many of them were passing on. And I think we saw our last pow clinically in 1999 but anxious to keep this story going because, you know, we had been incredibly moved and impressed by the stories and the medicine and the research which, which we done. The whole thing moved to medical history, outreach, telling the story, if you like. And that's the phase which continues, continues now, and we've written books. Meg became involved, and we've been very active, and she will tell you more about the work that she's done. So we're into a kind of a history outreach, telling the story, having conferences and so on phase and that. Continues. So it's moved in phases, if you like James and Meg, you've worked closely with farmer female veterans and their families over the years. What drew you to this work initially, and what has kept you engaged with it on such a personal level? Well, family history drew me to it. My father survived captivity in Java in Japan, returning home in late 1945 he was intermittently ill, but he wasn't as badly off as so many were. He was able to pick up the threads of his life, went back to university, trained to be a doctor, having done engineering pre war, married my mum, who he'd been engaged to after the fall of France, and I grew up with my sisters just knowing that dad had been a prisoner of war in Japan. That's all we you take on as children. You take on these sorts of statements. We have no idea what this means. It wasn't till my later teens that I started to ask questions, I suppose, and he wasn't, he wasn't given to talking about the subject, but he, luckily for me, he did at times, and he revealed that he had written a diary, which I knew. Only knew that there was a homemade TypeScript on our bookshelves, and had never been allowed to touch it as kids. But there were diary notebooks, and I saw those before I was 20. I saw those, and it was reading that account of somebody so close to me and wondering, how on earth you get through the sort of privations that he described. And he described his diary writing was not very emotional. It was more factual, almost journalistic, in its style, easy for me to absorb, but i There were so many questions. So from my early 20s, I was transcribing his diaries so that my sisters and I could have copies in the future. Got to know the diaries, and thought I'd got forever to do this, and inevitably, time catches up with you. And I lost my parents in the late 90s, both of close together, and he left me his diaries because of the work I'd been doing on them, and it that became a huge responsibility, having this, these artifacts that that were part of history, as far as I was concerned. And fast forward to 2007 2006 I met Jeff because I published the diaries. There'd been an exhibition in Wirral. Jeff had come along. I'd met him, and I I was then being made redundant from a job, so I contacted anybody I knew to see whether or not they had used for medical secretary, stroke, Nurse stroke, somebody who knew knew something about this history, not really fully understanding what the School of Tropical Medicine had been involved in. And it was Jeff who enlightened me, and then offered me the chance to do an oral history study. This? Was real serendipity. We talked about this on a train back from London for a meeting, and I was conscious that there really, you know, the number of POWs still alive was rapidly declining. I'd looked at the archives. The Imperial War Museum has a sound archive. There were some stories there, but they weren't terribly good quality. They were mostly officers rather than men. And I had this idea that we really should record stories from a wide area of imprisonment and a wide area of ranks, you know, not just officers. And I had some funding for that and but didn't have time to do it. And along comes Meg parks, and fantastic. And you mentioned that early on, I from a personal family history point of view, I had got in touch with the Imperial War Museum in London because they hold, at that point, a growing archive of these accounts. And as Jeff says, across the range of services ranks. This was the work of a particularly enlightened curator there, Roderick sederby, who made it his business to open up the national collection of private papers to people who had experience of Far East captivity. For instance, they held many private papers from all sorts of war contexts. But this was something he was very keen to do, and so from the outset of our oral history study here in Liverpool, we collaborated with the Imperial War Museum, and they hold at least half of the digitized recordings that I made. We're working on getting the other half in their collection actually online. Half of them, at the moment you can access online. And that was very important, because that helped when I came to Geoff offered me the chance to do an MPhil based on the oral history taking. I was doing, and I grabbed the opportunity. And then I got to know more about archives such as the Imperial War Museum, the Wellcome Library and others, but particularly IWM, because it is there's such breadth of interest there. And the men I ultimately got to interview. Jeff had got enough money for a part time contract for a year. He then offered me the chance to do the M Phil that changed. It meant had to go searching for money to keep me on as a research assistant. But he managed it, and I had the the opportunity then to devote a great deal of time, and I did interviewed 67 veterans and 10 wives and widows, and it was very important to me knowing how my father had later in life, these things had come home to roost psychologically he'd got on with his life early on and post war, and he was a very busy family doctor for his working life, but once he retired, the dynamic changed, and it's so important looking back that it wasn't just old age, it was the lack of structure to his daily life that gave too much time to think and that altered things within the family. That was something we lived through. It was very hard for my mother in her later life, and I came to understand better as I interviewed more and more wives or widows of these men. And interestingly, when a wife would ask if she could sit in on the interview, I would always say, well, that's up to Joe, Bill Fred, whoever he was, and he didn't mind. And they sat completely mute. These women, they didn't say a word, they didn't interrupt, they listened. And at the end, all of them, each in different ways, said I knew I'd hear things I've never heard before. And then one or two of them took it the opportunity to put him right about certain things he'd said about, oh, it hadn't been so bad. And the early post war years, you know, we settled down, and the family came along. Typical thing you didn't mention the nightmares, you didn't mention said wife, and then we could explore these things as far as they were able or willing. But it was a very interesting dynamic, and it was so important to the women, so very important. So what this has done, as far as the study is concerned, is given it another, another aspect of this history. It's a history that needs to be shared because it is still, relatively speaking, little known in this country. And that's something we'll come on to in a second. Is, you know how keeping the memories alive and why it's so important. But before we go on to that, I just Jeff, could you talk us through some of the key tropical and long term medical challenges faced by fee powers and how those experiences went on to influence the overall field of Tropical Medicine? Yeah, certainly, the men came back, as I mentioned, with little or no medical psychological screening, debriefing, went back home, tried to get on with their lives. And then in the first perhaps 10 years or so, a number of them, from quite early on after started having attacks of fever or attacks of diarrhea. Now, malaria was very common in most areas of Far East imprisonment, and so many of these were recurrences of malaria. The diarrhea were sometimes recurrences of dysentery. There's a type of dysentery called amoebic dysentery, which can be quite long lasting and can relapse and so So these, these were seen in the first few years that sort of declined as the years went by, although we still saw the odd case here at the Liverpool tropical school 30 years later, approximately. So those were two big problems, particularly early on. There's a worm called strongyloidiasis disturka raylis, real mouthful, very advanced round worm, microscopic round worm, which lives in the soil, particularly prevalent in Southeast Asia, particularly Burma, Thailand, where the railway was built, burrows into the feet and goes around the tissues to the lungs the bowel, and cycles round. And because of a process known as auto infection, can actually cycle round indefinitely. And this causes, sometimes bowel disturbance, but often a rash, as these larvae migrate around the tissues. 15% of men in our research have this returning POWs, and of those that were on the thaiboma railway, 20% had it. So, really, very, very common, and we saw a lot of that, and we wrote a lot in the medical press about. About just how long standing that that was. We also saw people with neuropathies with damage to the nerves in their legs, sometimes their arms or sometimes their eyes, and this was due to malnutrition, due to vitamin deficiencies, due to the poor diet that they had. And again, most people sort of general thinking in tropical medicine was that if that happened, once you treated it with vitamins, returned to a normal diet, that should resolve. But no, it wasn't. There was five or 10% of the men that we saw were it was really permanent, reduced vision, tingling, pain in their feet and so on. So I think drawing all that together, and we published, you know, a number of articles in the medical press on these, these conditions, but during it all together, I think what it taught us in tropical medicine was the surprising longevity of exposure to tropical disease that you know here was, if you like, a kind of natural experiment. 1000s and 1000s of white, European Caucasians put into an area of intense tropical disease, exposure, poor nutrition, over work. And this is what can happen. It's not just a short term effect. It's not just survival. It's actually a long term effects. And then there is, of course, the psychological effects, which we can say a lot more about. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Correct me if I'm wrong, but was it Brian McGrath who said, listen to the men? Yes, indeed. So the director of the school in 1944 he was appointed Professor McGrath. He received a letter from the women of Blackpool in September 1945, and it besieged him to fight, to inform them in some way as to how to look after their men. Folk. The men were coming back through the Mediterranean. They knew they were only a few days out from home. They knew those who knew they had a survivor coming home. They were frantically trying to work out how they were going to look after their men. The Blackpool women represented one of those small territorial units of called the Blackpool regiment, inverted commas, drawn from the whole of the filed area. And so these this whole territorial unit was captured to a man out in Singapore, and the survivors of that were coming back from captivity and and McGrath put on his hat and coat and went to Blackpool and talked to them, and it was reported in the local press the following day, and in the archives. Here we have his his archives, which are fascinating, and his press folder. And in that is the cutting from that talk in which he tells them many things, it's reported him telling them about diet and perhaps eat more frequently, not to overload their digestion and other practical ways in which that they might find useful and then counter to all the military medical thinking of The day. And in fact, I would probably think even civilian medical thinking of the day, certainly for men, was let them talk it out. He says these words, let them talk it out, ask questions, let them get get it out of their systems. And that, as I say, went against all the military medical sinking of the day, the men were being told on the ships bringing them home, don't talk. Don't talk about it. Don't give interviews to the press, because people will come to your door. They'll want to know if you know their son, their husband, or whoever, and you'll be plagued with questions you can't answer, and it'll be very hard for you. Don't do it. And the families at home were being given the advice, don't don't ask. Just go forward back into family life. Move on. Let them get their health back back to work. These were the messages they were getting. And McGrath just went, flew in the face of all of that, and said, Let them talk it out. And that if we fast forward a few decades to the work that Jeff and his colleagues have been involved in that broadened their reach in terms of the trauma these men had been through, what they were telling them in clinic meant that they got other help. And I think over to you, Jeff, yeah, explain that. It's going back to Brian McGrath. He I met him in his retirement a few times. Remarkable Man, really nice guy, absolute POLYMATH. He was a published poet, amongst many other things, but also by complete a complete stroke of luck, he'd done most of his clinical tropical work in Southeast Asia, which is relatively unusual in those days, and to some extent these days, mostly it's Africa that attracts tropical physicians. So the result of that was that he very much knew the problems that these men were coming back with, at least from a medical point of view, because he knew the area clinically, tropically he'd spent years and. Years there in some remote, remote areas. So it was a real stroke of luck that it was him that had the chair in tropical medicine, that he was invited. And I suspect one of the reasons he accepted that invitation, because he was a busy man, was because of his Southeast Asian experience. But he, you know, invited, you know, he opened the doors of the tropical school in these pre NHS days to POWs, who were ill, and later that was compounded by a liaison he made, again by chance, with Philip Tusi, who was a commander at tamagont camp on the Thai Burma railway. He was from Merseyside. He was a banker, and he met the great after the war. By chance, they formed a liaison, formed a friendship. Tusi actually eventually became president of the of the of the school. But again, Tusi had a group of he was organizing a kind of mini support group for Northwestern for his POWs, and so he sort of increased the referrals. You know, he would ring Brian McGrath to look up, got this poor chap who's having fevers or something. And Brian would say, yep, send him along. No problem. So it all sort of snowballed. And from the psychological aspects of the problems these men were facing, you had a doctor who worked closely with you indeed, yeah. So I was very young, recently qualified doctor when I first came to the school and worked at the tropical beds at Sefton General Hospital, which is now an Asda supermarket on smithdown Road, and worked there, and my boss was Dion Bell, and Dion had been incredibly impressed by the psychological trauma that was being carried by these men. We we estimated 35% of them had significant psychological problems. Now bear in mind, this was the 70s. PTSD was not an accepted diagnosis until the early 80s, and we used to call this the FEPOW psychiatric syndrome. Really, it had all the hallmarks of what was later called PTSD, flashbacks, nightmares, depression, anxiety, withdrawal and so on. And down Bell found a helpful, keen, enthusiastic, young, senior registrar, that's the just below consultant grade in those days in psychiatry at Sefton hospital called Kamal Khan. And again, a huge stroke of luck, and Kamal was asked by Dion to see selected cases. After a while, Kamal came to Dion and said, Can you let me see all of them. He was so impressed by the severity of their psychiatric symptomatology and the frequency of it. Let me see all of them. He later became a consultant psychiatrist at Arrow Park hospital on the Wirral in place bridge hospital. He did a remarkable part time PhD comparing psychiatric morbidity in the Far East. POWs with Burma star veterans. These were men from the Burma campaign. In other words, they in the same theater of war, but they hadn't been imprisoned. Showed remarkable psychiatric morbidity, as one might expect in the POWs very detailed study, and he started a FEPOW clinic on a Friday afternoon. Back. Was it on Friday? I think it was a Friday afternoon. He just off his own back, just started this, as well as all his other NHS work. And again, you, you spoke to men who'd been through that system, and you enormous support. One of them, one of the chaps I interviewed, had been a merchant seaman who joined the ship in Liverpool, the Empress of Asia, which took troops out to the Far East in late 1941 and arrived in Singapore in early February 4210 days before the fall of Singapore. And it was bombed in Singapore harbor, and the ship went down, but thankfully, no losses. They were close enough in for everybody to be rescued. And this young chap, who was 17 at the time, had been working as a butcher's assistant in the bowels of this ship to feed these men, was scooped up and taken into captivity as a merchant seaman, not a Royal Navy. He was classed as a civilian and went into Changi jail. Spent three and a half years in captivity. He came home, age of 21 shattered, psychologically shattered, and he told me I'd known him for some years before I'd started the oral history. So he was one of the first ones that I wanted to interview. And he told me about how he'd come along to one of the clinics run at the School of Tropical Medicine only. Well he was well retired, so well into his 60s, because up until that point, he would accept no help from any doctor for his psychological. Problems because he was terrified of being put into what was then described as a lunatic asylum. Winnick hospital was his nearest and this terrified him. So when he came along to doctors here at LSTM, they referred him to Dr Khan, and in his interview, I'll just read you a brief extract. It was on the radio that anyone had been a prisoner of war should make an appointment to go to the School of Tropical Medicine for a strongyloides test Merle, his wife, insisted that I go. I saw a doctor, Dr Wyatt, and he told me that good news was I didn't have strongloides, but you do have two problems. One is your hearing, and that was because he had been repeatedly bashed about the ears. This was one of the techniques of the guards to punch the ears. He was a very tall man. He was a very tall youth, and notably Korean and Japanese were very small. So this was one way they got to get their own back on these these prisoners. He said, the other one is, you have a mental problem, and I'd like you to go and see my colleague, Dr Khan. And here, Harry says, so we went to Ara Park hospital. We met dr Khan, and he was a wonderful man. It was his job to talk to people like me, and he talked to me for over an hour. He was wonderful. And he said, you're like 80% of all Far East prisoners of war that I've seen. The only problem is, I'm 20 years too late. And Harry said, but I was able to tell him things I couldn't tell Merle. So I went on a regular appointment. There were lots of FEPOWs there that went, and I knew some of them. And each time I went, it was wonderful. it was remarkable and and I had the great privilege of also as part of the study, interviewing Dr Khan as well. He spoke very movingly of his work with FEPOW patients. We've talked a lot there about the the PTSD and the trauma informed care and the medical research? Could you, could you let us know what's, what's the impact that's still being felt today in the because of all this work that you've done? I think there, there are probably two aspects to this. One is that we now recognize the extreme longevity, or potential longevity, of tropically acquired infections and vitamin deficiency syndromes that these can carry on for a long, long time. This strongyloidiasis, these one in particular, this worm, untreated, can last essentially forever. We are aware of a case in Bristol, 65 years after repatriation of that patient and that that case was fatal. You know, again, we have become aware of distant literature which demonstrated that on some occasions, the strongyloidiasis worm could hyper infect that if the body's immune system was suppressed, perhaps steroid drugs or something like that, the worm could massively multiply and be very likely to cause death, and this is what happened in the Bristol case. So we've learned that sort of thing. The other thing I think it's impacted on is military medicine. The School, for many years, has worked quite closely with the Royal Army Medical Corps. Our clinical department is something that we've learned. And the interaction with military medicine and war war medicine as well been the contribution, I would say. Could you tell us a bit about Wendy Bailey and her research? Yeah, Wendy was a something of a forotten hero in the story. Wendy, for many, many years, ran, led the diagnostic laboratory here at the at the school, Now the problem is that they sometimes don't come out for a while, and they sometimes don't come out in very big numbers. Standard that we use would be three separate stool samples, but we know that sometimes that didn't work, and sometimes you might need six. We had a famous case where we were so convinced that this patient had all the hallmarks of a strongyloidiasis infection, but all the stools were being negative, which the 12th stool sample that we finally, finally found the little larvae. Now this is obviously very inefficient, and so the search was on for a blood test, a test which which could demonstrate the immune response to the worm infection. And this is what Wendy led as well. As well as running the diagnostic lab being an enormous part of the whole service for for POWs, she developed one of the first strongyloidiasis tests, an ELISA test, that means enzyme linked immunosorbent assay, a very clever immunological test to demonstrate antibodies to the worm. And that not only helped enormously, but it also kick started, very wide research and similar, similar tests evolved and were in the literature for many years from all over the world now. And so she really started the blood test, which would circumvent the difficulties of parasitological, parasitological diagnosis by stool. So when you had a huge, huge impact on the whole pow story, so much of this project is about preserving memory and honoring lived experience. So Meg, you've recorded and archived the testimonies of many, few hours. What role do these personal accounts play in both historical understanding and medical research? I would say that what we've been able to do is give voice to 69 veterans of their individual experiences. For many of them, it was the first time they'd officially put anything on the record, and that mattered hugely to them in later life that they'd been able to do that. So it adds to the collective accounts that are there at places like the Imperial War Museum. One of the things, I think that one of the lasting things, has been this support to the families the descendants of these men, given that the trauma that they went through. Almost all of them had some degree of of trauma that they experienced, and that we know how trauma can go on through family groups can affect people different generations. And I think the fact that the school has seen the need to share this information that we have gathered, and the collective work of Jeff and his colleagues over decades, people, long before he came to the school, the work that they've done to give them access to support those people in Trying to understand better has been a huge benefit, and one that I know these people are very, very grateful for. So to me, what that says is that it exemplifies this very special establishment and the unique way in which the people in the School of Tropical Medicine. Medicine have done from the earliest days and continue to this day, to reach out and to try to help people in need. Obviously, a great deal of the work is done in other parts of the world in terms of physical need, but here we have an example of that same influence coming to bear with the families of these men, and along the way, at these conferences, the one that we will be hosting at the end of this week, we bring together academic interest, we bring curators of museums, students and speakers from around the world, as well as delegates, are coming here to Liverpool to learn, and I think that's of huge value. What do you hope the next generation of researchers, clinicians or historians, will take from all of this? I think what we've seen over the years is the story is clearly of interest to the families of POWs and many but not all of those that come to our conferences and who are our research associates? Are members of families of POWs. They, some years ago, were the sons and daughters, but now they're the grandsons and granddaughters. So I think the interest is passing through generations, so I'm confident that certainly family members will continue to be interested in the experience. I think it is now, hopefully, at least in part, due to our own work, is more out in the open and more available. It's more acceptable to be talked about. It's not just a story of defeat that we don't want to know about. And I think it's recognized that there are, there are very much things to be learned, both historically and medically. I mean, one of the angles that Meg and I have researched is the remarkable ingenuity that doctors, scientists and artisans in prison camps used to create medical equipment and medical instruments and so on. And that sort of story is quite unique, and is at least now in the historical literature, and also allied to that the artwork of captivity, artwork, as with diaries, was strictly forbidden by their captors. You weren't meant to have any form of recording of materials of any sort. And you know, in the Far East, there weren't visiting journalists or Red Cross that were in one or two of the propaganda camps, but not across a vast geographical area of hundreds and hundreds of these POW camps. The only way that we can have a visual understanding is thanks to the work and the courage of men who committed to paper what they could see, gifted artists, trained artists, gifted amateurs, cartoonists, you name it, but they tell us something very, very important we get to see through their artwork what they saw. And the school helped us to put on a first ever exhibition drawn from private sources, pulling together over 100 artifacts, artwork and created items, sculpture, not sculptures, carvings, things like this that men did, and it was here, held here at the Victoria Gallery and Museum in then the pandemic struck. So we didn't get the long eight months run that we were promised, unfortunately, but in four, just over four months, 12 and a half thousand people came from all over to see this exhibition. And it's that sort of thing that brings this history into close focus for people to be able to see. And it's one of the ways now in the outreach work we do with schools and colleges is to show these images to the young generation, to show them what people recorded in times of absolute dire need these things. It's hard to quantify the effect, but this sort of initiative has helped us to spread the word and publishing our respective academic studies in a readable form for the general reader. That too, I think has, I hope, has had some lasting effect. You mentioned the Art Gallery and the support the school gave to that, I think it will be good to widen that to the support over the decades that the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine has given to this experience and to this project. Schools of tropical medicine are mostly interested in research and treatment of malaria, TB, HIV, women's health, children's health, neglected tropical diseases. So this is a little unusual as a project which came on. Away, but as it grew and grew and grew as I think, being appreciated as a very important part of the school's activity, and the school has been enormously supportive to ourselves and others in this work, and we'd like to thank them. And obviously that is coming to nearly 80 years. Isn't that a good project? So actually, what's the future or the thinker project. Now, it won't go away, James, it won't go away. I'm sure it will stay. We are having another conference next week, which we have every two years. I'm absolutely sure they will continue. We had inquiries, you know, two or three times a year from usually grandchildren. Now, who know that their grandparents were in this prison camp or the other, but they have no records. And can we help? Sometimes we can, not always, but sometimes we can. We now have an archivist at the school, and we're in conversation with moving the records that we got, which are quite considerable, into a proper catalog space that you can hopefully be available to become, you know, to anybody. So, yep, these are the things still going. This is what we're working on for the future. If people want to find out more, the you've got a number of books as well. Is that correct? Yes. So the first book came out in 2015 was captive memories, which based on the oral histories. So each man and woman gets a voice in that, and it maps out this study that I undertook into medical ingenuity, but for the first time, it tells the story of FEPOW's, Far East prisoners of war and the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. It was so very important that we got that story told in in this first book. And then So Meg led that book, and I led two years later, Burma railway medicine. That was my particular interest in the medical history, but again, a medically based book, but not directed at a medical audience. It can be read by lay public. So that dealt with medicine, disease, survival on the Thai Burma railway, quite a lot about the innovative medicine, creation of medical instruments, medical equipment and so on, from very basic materials, and Meg also contributed oral history experiences from there and then two years later, I think the third book, three years later, we to coincide with the exhibition, we brought a book called captive artists, in which we collaborated with a recently retired senior art curator at the Imperial War Museum who knew their FEPOW Art holdings had worked with them for 37 years, and it was a great privilege to work with Jenny Wood on that book. She brought a perspective neither Geoff nor I could have. I mean, your book was based on your PhD study, that exhaustive. So all three books give the reader different perspectives on this history and on how here at the School of Tropical Medicine, we have been able, thanks to the support we've had, to delve deeper and understand better, and that's what the families need, the families of these men. And I think it's fair to say that the effect that from some of the research that Jess described it has informed military medical thinking to this day on certain aspects of problems that arise in war torn countries, so it's a much broader benefit, I think, than perhaps many people realize. Thank you very much. Thank you for speaking to us today. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. James, yeah.