Cookhouse and surgical ward, Chungkai

A cookhouse and surgical ward in Chungkai prisoner of war camp hospital during the building of the Burma-Thailand Railway. Jack Chalker was serving in the Royal Artillery when he was captured at the fall of Singapore. In October 1942 he was in a party sent to Thailand to construct the Burma-Thailand Railway. Chalker secretly made drawings of the various camps and conditions endured by the prisoners. He drew and painted on whatever materials he could find or steal from the Japanese, hiding his work in sections of bamboo buried in the ground, the attap roofs of huts, or the artificial legs worn by amputees in the hospital camps. His work provides a candid and moving record of the prisoners' suffering. Re: date - While the drawing is titled with a date of 1943, many of Jack Chalker's sketches were reproduced in 1945 at the Australian Medical Headquarters in Bangkok. At the end of the war Chalker travelled to Bangkok at the request of Weary Dunlop. Chalker was required to reproduce three sets each of many of the sketches he had made while in captivity.