To honour those who served their country

“In this their finest hour”

94604

Captain

Temporary Major

Freddy Spencer Chapman

Seaforth Highlanders

4th Battalion

Chapman’s mother died shortly after he was born in 1907, and his father emigrated to Canada soon after, leaving Freddy and his older brother in the care of a village parson in England’s Lake District. The relationship with his father was formal and very distant. Freddy became an orphan when his father was killed in the Battle of the Somme in 1916. The lesson his father had bestowed on Freddy was to live his life for that day, as near to the edge as he could get.

At the age of 12 he we sent to Boarding School till at 14 he started at Sedbergh School which is in Moorland Country. He could walk miles without meeting another person, in his own solitude, he fell in love with nature.

Freddy considered the school lessons and organised games at Sedbergh a waste of time and to be avoided. The headmaster could see where Freddy was happiest and he was excused from cricket and other team sports, leaving him free to explore three afternoons a week. Freddy wrote:-

“That meant if I took lunch and supper with me, or did without. I was free from soon after 1 pm, when the morning’s work ended, until 7 pm when preparations began. As I could travel at an average speed of 6 mph over the fells, those six hours gave me a magnificent range of the country to explore.”

Although he gave more time to nature than his studies, he earned a scholarship to Cambridge. His friends at the university opened up a love for climbing, the spires of Cambridge’s buildings encouraged him to later look further a field to the Alps, where he learnt to sky and then on an organised expedition to Iceland. The experience from Iceland was noted and he was invited in 1930 to travel to Greenland with Gino Watkin’s expedition, where he explored by Kayak and dogsled, exploring as he did in the Yorkshire moors. This was his way of life, and returned in 1931 and 1934. He pushed himself as hard as he could and further, gaining the utmost respect of his companions, he also learnt to speak the language.

Freddy later wrote:-

“During the long winter journeys on the ice cap I was sometimes so exhausted that I fell asleep as I walked along, and once, owing to the rough sea making landing impossible, I spent 20 hours in my kayak. More than once I fell through a deep crevasse and only saved myself by catching hold of the handlebars of the sledge, and once, far from land, the sea ice broke beneath my dogs and sledge-runners, and only by driving on at full speed did I prevent the whole outfit from going through the ice.”

The threat of death was real when Gino died while out hunting in his Kayak in 1931. Freddy and his companions finished the survey and returned the following September.

In 1936, after a spell of teaching, he joined Marco Pallis’s climbing expedition to Sikkim in the Himalayas. He was then invited to join a diplomatic mission to Tibet as private secretary of its leader, Basil Gould.

Jomolhari - Photo by Martyn Smith

He explored Lhasa and learnt the language enough to negotiate permission to climb Jomolhari which was sacred to Tibetan Buddhists who believe it is the home of the protector goddess Jomo.

Freddy gained permission on his birthday May 10th 1937 and gathered a team, but with no money they borrowed essential equipment for the climb from the Himalayan Club.

Ready for the climb but after many mishaps Freddy and Pasang made the first ascent of this 24,035 foot mountain in 1937, taking just 10 days..

Further expeditions in Tibet nearly led to Freddy’s death when he fell 3,000 feet off an ice face, only his ice pick saved him by carving out foot holds on the sheer face of ice and climbing to safety.

After an expedition to Finland was aborted, he began teaching survival skills in Lochailort, Scotland.

As a very keen amateur botanist, in all his expeditions he collected seeds, pressed plants and noted nature as he saw it. Which he recorded in his book ‘Helvellyn To Himalaya’ published in 1941.

Service

War broke out in 1939 and Freddy joined the Seaforth Highlanders as a Lieutenant. His background in survival training was quickly recognised and he was sent to New Zealand to train Australian and New Zealand commandos in guerrilla warfare.

This led to him setting up a special school for ‘Stay Behind Parties’ in Singapore, which became the Special Training School 101 (STS 101). The advanced training designed under the Special Operations Executive was later a Far East detachment, commonly referred to as Force 136. It was unthinkable to the Military leaders that Singapore would fall, but the Japanese entered the war on 8th December 1941 by landing on the Thailand, Malay border and quickly gained a foothold.

Freddy responded by putting his ‘Stay Behind Parties’ into action but it was ridiculed by the British Colonial Governor as being defeatist. This changed after Malaya and Singapore surrendered to the Japanese.

British resistance fell to Freddy Spencer Chapman and his two fellow officers, Sartin and Harvey.

Freddy later called their response to surrender as the ‘mad fortnight’, the STS 101 blew up 15 railway bridges, derailing seven trains, and destroying 40 military vehicles. The Japanese command believed the it was the work of 200 highly trained commandos, and deployed 2,000 troops to hunt the three men down.

The havoc the STS 101 caused could not last as they were running out of ammunition plus men who fell to the Japanese, either killed in battle or beheaded after capture. The STS 101 retreated into the jungle but then malaria, typhus and blackwater fever hit them, limiting the numbers available to carry on the destruction.

On a 50 mile hike through the jungle in May 1942 a Malay policeman stopped Freddy, not knowing if he was friendly, Freddy tried to ride away, but on escaping he was wounded in his left leg. This caused Freddy on July 13th, to form an uncomfortable relationship with the Chinese communist resistance led by Chin Peng, he did not see any of the STS 101 over the coming year.

In this time he followed his interest in the fauna and bird life, the nature of the jungle was new to him so he kept notes on what he saw.

Christmas Day 1943 arrived and a meeting arranged with Colonel J.L.H. Davis of the Malayan police and Colonel R.N. Broome of the Malayan Civil Service. Both fluent in Chinese and members of Force 136. Together they became successful in receiving submarine sorties of wireless sets unfortunately too waterlogged to survive.

For the next 18 months of radio silence, Chapman joined a group of Chinese but they were less friendly than the other guerillas. They took his weapons and held him as a prisoner.

On the 10th May 1944 Freddy drugged the Chinese coffee and escaped only to be caught by the Japanese who seized his diary, but as it was written in Eskimo, it was of no use to them. Freddy managed to escape during that night but without his shoes. After six nights of walking and running in the jungle tropical ulcers formed on his bare feet but luckily friendly natives took him in and took care of his feet, but he had to leave smartly as Japanese troops arrived looking for him.

He found another friendly village who helped him and recovered after several months. In the meantime Davis and Broome had obtained communication via improved wireless sets. In April 1945, Freddy and Broome arranged to rendezvous with a submarine off the west coast of Emerald Bay, Pulau Pangkor Laut. After 15 days hiding in sampans avoiding Japanese patrols, on the night of 15th May 1945 a submarine, HMS Statesman shouted the code ‘Ahoy! How are your feet?’ to which Freddy answered ‘We are thirsty!’.

Freddy then swam out about 45 yards, was picked up and escaped to Ceylon.

He had lived more than three years behind enemy lines, often on the edge of starvation and almost constantly wracked with disease.

Timeline:-

1939/08/24 - Special Employment. Lieutenant - Temporary Captain 02/09/1940

1941/12/18 - Rank Lieutenant - Temporary Captain - Temporary Major

1942/03/18 - WO417/2, Casualty List No.774. Temporary Captain. Reported ‘Missing Malaya’.

1942/04/24 - WO417/003, Casualty List No. 806. Correction to entry on Casualty List No. 774. Rank should read Acting Major.

1943/11/15 - Casualty List No. 1291. Previously posted Missing 15/02/1942 now reported Not Missing (Casualty List 774 (Corrected by 806)). Acting Major.

Awards

Colonel J.L.H. Davis was awarded, Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire/Distinguished Service Medal, or CBE/DSO

Colonel R.N. Broome was awarded the Military Cross

Major F.S. Chapman, Seaforth Highlanders, was awarded Distinguished Service Order

Post War

After the war, Freddy was told Sartin and Harvey were both captured in 1942, Sartin survived as a PoW but Harvey after trying to escape, was executed.

Freddy settled down and married being blessed with three sons. He went back to teaching, as headmaster at schools in Germany and South Africa until Apartheid. Eventually they settled in Reading, England.

In 1971, life on the edge caught up with Freddy and depression hit him very hard.

He left a note for his wife in his study:-

“I don’t want you to have to nurse an invalid for the rest of my life”

He then shot himself.

Freddy was 64.