Ernest Edward FINCH

Ernest Finch's name on Column 18 of the Singapore Memorial in Kranji War Cemetery, fourteen miles north of the city of Singapore. Image courtesy of Andrew and Brenda Wee.

Ernest Finch was born on 23 July 1902 in St Ebbe’s. He was the fourth of the twelve children of William Finch, a bricklayer, and his wife Annie (née Hale). William was from the city-centre parish of St Mary Magdalen in Oxford. Annie came originally from Croydon in Surrey, but her family had moved to St Thomas’s in Oxford by the time she was nine. She and William were married in the winter of 1897 and initially lived in a house on the High Street; their first child Violet was born there the following summer.

By the time Ernest was born in 1902 the family was living at 13 Luther Street in St Ebbe’s; over the following years they moved to Bookbinder's Yard off St Thomas’s High Street (recorded there in 1906); and to 37 St Aldates (1911).

In 1919, when he was seventeen, Ernest joined the Ox & Bucks Light Infantry. He served as a Private for a year and seven months. By the time of the 1921 census he was back living with his family, now at 14 English Row off St Aldates. He and his older brother William (aged 22) were both unemployed labourers; their father William senior was working as a bricklayer for Messrs Vale, builders of Stourport, at a site on South Parks Road. Ernest’s mother Annie died in May 1926 at the age of 52.

In the 1939 register, taken on 29 September, four weeks after the outbreak of the Second World War, Ernest (now aged 37) was recorded as being one of over 150 people staying at the London Road Hospital in Headington. (The hospital was also known as The Laurels; the building had previously been the Headington Workhouse, which closed in 1930.) His occupation was ‘general labourer’. Meanwhile his widowed father William (aged 66, but still a bricklayer) was living at 24 Weirs Lane in Cold Harbour with Ernest's two youngest sisters Ruth and Gladys.

On 5 October 1939 Ernest joined the 89th Battery of the 35th Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment, Royal Artillery. He was a Gunner, service number 1486474. His army records describe him as being 5ft 3½in tall with a chest circumference of 33½in, weighing just under 8 stone, and having a dark complexion, brown eyes and brown hair. His religion was Church of England.

The 89th Battery of the 35th Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment was a Territorial unit formed at Oxford specifically for the defence of RAF airfields. Its initial work was to defend Oxfordshire, and later other southern counties, against air attack. Ernest appears to have been based in Oxford; in March 1940 he was admitted to the 26 British General Hospital (a wartime hospital which was based for a time in Oxford) before being transferred to the Westbury Convalescent Depot in Wiltshire. He was discharged in early April 1940.

On 8 November 1941 Ernest's regiment set sail from Greenock in Scotland. Their intended destination was the Middle East, but they were diverted to Singapore, reaching there in January 1942. On 27 January Ernest was admitted to the Alexandra Hospital in Queenstown, Singapore, though we don't know whether he was ill or had sustained an injury. This hospital had been established in 1938 as a British military hospital, and it was the main military hospital of British Far East Command during the war. 

Between 8 and 15 February 1942 there was intense fighting between British and Japanese forces, resulting in Japan capturing Singapore (said to have been the largest British surrender in history). About 80,000 British, Indian, Australian and local troops became prisoners of war (PoW). On 14 February the Alexandra Hospital was the scene of a massacre by Japanese soldiers of wounded service personnel and medical staff. It is not known whether Ernest was one of the few survivors of the massacre, or whether he had been discharged from the hospital before it occurred. In any case, he was captured on 15 February and became a PoW.

On 18 October, Ernest was among six hundred men of the Royal Artillery who were taken from the PoW camp in Singapore to Rabaul, Papua New Guinea. At the end of November, 517 of those men (including Ernest) sailed from Rabaul to Ballalae, one of the Solomon Islands, leaving behind 82 of their colleagues, most of whom were considered too sick to make the journey. Only 18 of those 82 survived to the end of the war. The prisoners taken to Ballalae were forced to construct an airstrip for the Japanese that is still in use today. None of these 517 men survived. Approximately a hundred died from overwork, exhaustion and tropical diseases, and about three hundred were killed by an allied air raid on the island. After completing the runway, the remaining prisoners – including Ernest Finch – were executed and their bodies thrown into mass graves (which were discovered by Australian investigators in 1945). Another of our 24 Men of Grandpont and Cold Harbour, Edward Boswell, was also one of the victims. The official date given for what became known as the Ballalae Massacre is 5 March 1943, but it is generally accepted that it probably occurred in late June. Ernest was aged forty when he died.

Ernest, Edward, and the other victims are commemorated on the Singapore Memorial in the Kranji War Cemetery, which bears the names of over 24,000 casualties of the Commonwealth land, sea and air forces who have no known grave. Another of our 24 Men of Grandpont and Cold Harbour, Alan Martin, is also listed on the memorial. Ernest is also remembered on the war memorial of St Luke's Church in Cold Harbour, South Oxford.

Ernest's father William died in November 1943. Ernest's brother William junior, who lived at 35 Canning Crescent in Cold Harbour, therefore became his next of kin. He was not officially informed of Ernest's death until June 1946, three years after it happened. Ernest left an estate worth £130 13s 10d (about £5,000 in today's money).

Research by Emma Hill and Mark Hathaway, with thanks to Matthew Grayson.

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