Humanity Remained

It was a story that Ray picked up on from Lens' biography. There were limited options with this one [For capturing likeness] so looking at photos and hoping for the best. It took 4 months to make. The handing of the guitar to a young Thai lad was a gesture that Len made as he was released and about to leave the country to return home. In the guitar, there was a little bit of money that Len had managed to save and hide.

Bev Lonsdale

Gibson became a chorister at Holy Trinity Church (now Sunderland Minster), where he developed his natural talent for music. He left school in 1935, the year before the Jarrow March, at the onset of the Depression. Determined, he went to work for a builder's firm. His ambition remained to train as a teacher, and as soon as he could he enrolled at Bede Teachers' Training College. He studied for 4 hours a week for the London matriculation, paid for the lessons himself, sang in the church choir and studied at night. At the cinema in early 1939 he saw the propaganda film The Gun, with its scene of a lone British artilleryman making a last stand.

He was inspired to enlist because of a shortage of volunteer signallers for the defenders. Shortly afterward he joined a new Territorial Army artillery regiment that was being formed locally. On the outbreak of war in September, Gibson was incorporated into the 125th. The following years included intensive bombardment training in the deserts of North Africa, exercises in India and jungle survival techniques in Ceylon.

He applied for pilot training and passed initial tests, but a letter from the Air Ministry stated that he had failed to meet the required standard of vision for a navigator. Having taken Singapore, the Japanese started the forced march of the men en route to India. They were eventually moved by lorry and cattle truck to Thailand. It was here Gibson's true ordeal began: as a PoW and Burmese-Malay slave labourer building the infamous Siam-Burma railway.

Gibson, who had survived against all odds, suffered with diseases like malaria, dysentery and tropical ulcers. He underwent an appendicectomy with minimal painkillers, was forced to work barefoot in unbearable heat, often beaten by their captors, sometimes with pick handles. That the Japanese had not signed the Geneva Convention made little difference to the regime, which had no interest in humanitarian support.

Gibson helped form a prisoners' choir, which he later described in his book A Wearside Lad in World War II: A Gibson Memoir as his lifeline, especially the singing. Eventually he came home, in September 1945, and resumed his teaching career.

The Times

My great grandfather was in Burma, it's great to have such a statue in our town. I didn't plan the image but did plan the trip to see it as it was important to me to see as soon as possible given the family connection (fortunately my great grandfather wasn't captured out there!)

Nick Mansfield