The prisoner of war nurse

When we think of prisoners of war we think of the terrible pictures of those liberated from the camps of World War II.
But there were other types of camps and other types of prisoners.
Lilian Gladys Tompkins was born on March 10, 1893, in Halcombe in northern Manawatu to Lilian Jane Crabb and her storekeeper father Arthur Henry Tompkins.
After a private education she began training as a nurse, completing her training at the New Plymouth Hospital in 1927.
Gladys worked in several places in Australia before returning to New Zealand to do her maternity training in Wellington before training as a Plunket nurse in Dunedin.
In 1939, Gladys intended to go to India to nurse but during a holiday in the Malay Peninsula with her mother she took a position working for three months in a children’s ward of a hospital in Johor.
For a while she worked in the Batu Pahat district.
But during the Japanese invasion of the Peninsula she was sent to Johor to the general hospital before being evacuated to Singapore which was considered safe.
It fell to the Japanese and Gladys was detained in the Katong Internment camp then marched 8.5 miles to Changi in 1942.
Changi was known for its brutal treatment of prisoners, many of whom died of malnutrition, disease and mistreatment.
Gladys helped run an improvised hospital for the prisoners.
She had been able to take two suitcases of possessions which included her watercolour paints.
Among the sparse food supplies Gladys was able to grow papaya which helped supplement her diet.
Two years later she was moved to the Sime Road Internment Camp where the conditions were better but the diet was worse. She lost a great deal of weight by the end of her time there in 1945.
She and the prisoners were sent to Madras then on to Bangalore to recover before she returned to her family in Hamilton.
Gladys returned to nursing at Johor Hospital. It included visiting nearby villages to hand out medicine and food to the starving villagers.
She then went to Taiping before retiring in 1950 and went back to Hamilton.
She recounted her experiences to a niece and published a book Three Wasted Years. Her watercolours were reproduced in colour.
The diary she had carefully kept during her internment and her paintings were donated to the Alexander Turnbull library.
Gladys had never married and she died on March 18, 1984, in Hamilton and was cremated at the Hamilton Cemetery.​