Extracts from a local newspaper

TICKHILL WEDDING SEQUEL TO JAP PRISON CAMP FRIENDSHIP

For three and a half years Tickhill born Mrs Freda Gee anxiously waited at her Sunderland Street home for news of her husband, Pte. Kenneth Gee, then in a prisoner of war camp. No news came until September last year when British liberating forces released the thousands of their comrades who had been held by the Japs. Then she received a letter.

It was from one of her husband’s fellow prisoners, a member of the same regiment, the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. The letter told her that her husband had died, two years before, while slave – working on the notorious Bangkok – Siam railway.

The writer suggested that he might visit Mrs Gee and convey further information of her husband to her, and also to return some of his personal belongings.

Mrs Gee agreed, and one month later, in October of last year, she and L/Cpl. Ralph Macdougall, Inverness-shire- born regular soldier, met.

He told her of his friendship with Private Gee, a friendship that had been started by a meeting in 1940, on the boat taking troops over to Singapore, and grew through the sharing of mutual discomforts of prison camp life. They talked and exchanged photographs and other family memoranda. Then they were drafted to slave labour on the Bangkok-Siam railway.

Some time later in August 1943, Private Gee became ill, and while the others moved on, he had to be left behind. He died a few days after Lance Corporal MacDougall was allowed to go and collect Private Gee’s few belongings.

And now, seven months after taking her to his home in Scotland for the first Christmas he had celebrated there for nine years, and nine months after they first met, Lance-Corporal MacDougall and Mrs Gee were married at Tickhill on Saturday.

Among the wedding guests were four ex-prisoners of war, one-time fellow prisoners of the bridegroom, including the best man, Mr William Braidswood, also a Scot.