Sex
Male
Status
Deceased
He appeared on the This is your life TV show:
http://www.bigredbook.info/thomas_cosmojones.html
His wife, Elizabeth Menna Owen JONES, was also in camp, though they divorced after the war.
Dates & details from this thread on the Stanley Camp Discussion list:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stanley_camp/message/2860
Regards, David
PS He was born & brought up in New Quay, Cardiganshire, around 60 miles away from my home town in Pembrokeshire. New Quay is a pretty spot to visit if you get a chance.
Comments
Cosmo Jones
Brian found this mention of Cosmo Jones, saying that he was in Japan at the time the Japanese surrendered. It isn't clear why or when he moved from Stanley to Japan:
Among the crowd of prisoners herded into ((Stanley Camp)) that day were my great-aunt Menna Jones and her husband Captain Cosmo Jones, who had been working for the Chinese Maritime Customs when Hong Kong fell. They had hardly any luggage, no food, no means of contacting the outside world and no idea of what lay in store for them. Menna was just 26 years old.
Of the 3,500 internees housed in Stanley Camp, only 121 died during the period of their internment from January 1942 to August 1945. Compared with the death toll in other Japanese PoW camps in the Far East, this was an unusually low figure. It seems from historical accounts that the presence of women and children in Stanley contributed to a sense of normality that must have been lacking in the single-sex encampments deep in the jungles of the Far East.
[...]
A famous photograph of one of the internees shows a severely underweight woman with her hair done in a Victory Roll, holding a bowl of rice and cup of stew to the camera – not her own portion, but rations for five people. She is smiling because it is August 1945 – the prisoners have just been liberated and will soon be sent home.
It took a long time for the good news to reach some of the more remote PoW camps. Cosmo, who had by this time been transferred to a camp somewhere in Japan, only discovered that the Japanese had finally been defeated when a stone was thrown over the barbed wire, landing directly at his feet. He picked it up and unwrapped the piece of paper that had been tied round it with string. Inside ran a handwritten message: ‘War is over.’
Both Cosmo and Menna came home safely to New Quay, but they never lived together again and soon divorced. It’s impossible to know what damage was done to their relationship by their drawn-out incarceration and subsequent enforced separation, or whether they were never meant for each other in the first place. In any case, they both entered into happy, fulfilling second marriages.
From: http://www.walesonline.co.uk/whats-on/arts-culture-news/authors-notes-francesca-rhydderch-7132251