A. L. Fisher came to Hong Kong in 1932 as Assistant Engineer in the Telephone Company. He married Kathleen Parsons while on home leave in 1938 and in November of that year the couple settled in Hong Kong. Their daughter Angela was born on January 11, 1940.
In the period before the war the employees of the Hong Kong Telephone Company were incorporated into Army Signals and became the Fortress Signals Company. Fisher held the rank of sergeant.
He worked in various locations during the hostilities, at one point taking part in the 'siege' of Repulse Bay Hotel, volunteering alongside Benny Proulx to fetch machine gun ammunition from a deserted pillbox nearby.
After the surrender he was held in Shamshuipo POW Camp where he spent the rest of the war. He was chosen to be one of the leaders in the planned resistance if there was any Japanese attempt to stage a general massacre of the POWs.
He continued to work for the Telephone Company after the war before retiring to Shropshire in 1954. He eventually moved to Devon, from where he published a book of war-time reminiscences.
Source:
Les Fisher, I Will Remember, 1997, passim
Gomes Newsletter, 1 February, 1999.
Comments
Letter from Les Fisher dated 1998
In the course of sorting out my family papers I have found a photocopy of a letter dated August 1998 from Les Fisher to my cousin Diana Warren. Having left Hong Kong in 1938 at the age of twelve and lost her father in the war, Diana maintained a regular correspondence with Hong Kong ex-POWs all her life. Les Fisher mentions that his daughter Angela was delivered by Dr Black https://gwulo.com/node/10789 at the War Memorial Hospital on the Peak. Les's wife, Kathleen, was a ceramic artist who worked for Crown Devon before they were married. Her signed figurines were apparently worth a lot of money even in 1998.
From this letter, I learnt that The Towers, 20 Broadwood Road, which was originally the Warren family house, was rented and run as a boarding house by Eric and Dorothy Walch after they left their house in Hart Avenue, Kowloon. Les Fisher writes that Charles Needham, who, like him, worked for the Telephone Company went to live at The Towers while the Walches were there. The Jurors List for 1938 confirms this.
Diana Warren kept all the letters that she received from ex-POWs. When recently offered them, I refused, but gathered that the letters, if they are still in safe keeping with her granddaughter in Toronto, now need an appropriate home, if not to be thrown away.