Ernest Edward FINCH

The Singapore Memorial in Kranji War Cemetery, 14 miles north of the city of Singapore. Image from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

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, but over the following years they moved to Bookbinders Yard off St Thomas’s High Street (recorded there in 1906); to 37 St Aldates (1911); and to 14 English Row off St Aldates (1921). In the 1921 census William was recorded as working as a bricklayer for Messrs Vale, builders of Stourport, at a site on South Parks Road. Ernest (now aged 19) and his older brother William (22) were both unemployed labourers.

Ernest’s mother Annie died in May 1926 at the age of 52. She was buried in the churchyard of St Aldates.

In the 1939 register, taken on 29 September, three and a half 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 his two youngest daughters Ruth and Gladys.

Ernest joined the 89th Battery of the 35th Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment, Royal Artillery, a Territorial unit formed at Oxford specifically for the defence of RAF airfields. Ernest was a Gunner, service number 1486474. The initial work of the regiment was to defend Oxfordshire, and later other southern counties, against air attack. In November 1941 however, the 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.

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), including Ernest Finch. He was captured on 15 February, in a large group. On 18 October, he was among the 600 men of the Royal Artillery who were taken from the PoW camp in Singapore to Rabaul in 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. Those 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 100 died from overwork, exhaustion and tropical diseases, and about 300 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. Another of our ‘24 Men of Grandpont’, 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 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 and air forces who have no known grave. Another of our ‘24 Men of Grandpont’, Alan Martin, is also listed on the memorial.

Back to the 24 Men of Grandpont 1939-45 biographies page