Geoffrey Burton RIP

Kyt · Oct 6, 2008

Obituary: Geoffrey Burton | From the Guardian | The Guardian

For a man of words, my uncle left much unsaid. Geoffrey Norman Burton, who has died aged 89, went up to St John's College, Oxford, before the war and was one of two British students to go to Harvard in 1948 on a Rotary fellowship - an award given to further "international understanding, good will and peace".

Between those stints in academia, he was a Japanese PoW. Captured in the fall of Singapore, he worked on the "death railway" linking Siam to Burma and helped establish a camp library. He wrote about those experiences on his way home in a book entitled In the Shadow. What he wanted to do, he said, was teach, and he became a politics and history master at Clifton college, Bristol, where he lived with his wife and young children. Widowed in 1963, he brought up Rosemary and Christopher first alone and then with his second wife, Mary, to whom he was devoted.

After he retired, Geoff and Mary settled in North Wootton, Somerset, where he wrote a monthly poem for the parish magazine (the most recent of which appeared shortly before his death). Then, almost a decade ago, he took part in a millennial oral history project - now posted online - in which he relived details of his war. For three years, we learned, he had laboured his way from Changi to Nong Pladuk, where he read Shakespeare by the light of a coconut-oil lamp and circulated books held together with thread from old kitbags and glue made from rice. Once, he was beaten "for as long as I don't care to remember".

An educator to the end, Uncle Geoff left a clear understanding of what we should learn from his experience. People used to ask him: "What do you feel about the Japanese; you must hate them after all these horrors." No, he would reply, it's time for the hating to stop.
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In The Shadow Memoirs Of A Prisoner Of War In Japanese Hands From The Fall Of Singapore In February, 1942 To August 1945 by Geoffrey N. Burton

Antipodean Andy · Oct 6, 2008

I know that name for some reason. He lived a life of service. RIP.

Has anyone read the book?

Can anyone find his online oral history? I had a quick look but just came up with references in the various obits.

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Geoffrey Burton RIP

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