MAJOR-GENERAL Merton Beckwith-Smith DSO, MC, the subject of this superb biography by Michael Snape, Professor of Anglican Studies at Durham University, was the most senior British officer to die in captivity in the Second World War. He commanded the British 18th Division during the catastrophic fall of Singapore in February 1942.
Together with tens of thousands of other soldiers, he was held prisoner in the notorious POW complex at Changi, on Singapore Island’s north-east coast. In August 1942, Beckwith-Smith, along with the most senior officers imprisoned in Changi, was shipped by his Japanese captors to Formosa (now Taiwan), where, on 11 November, he died of diphtheria, heart failure — and starvation. The unspeakable horrors of the construction of the Burma Railway were still to come.
In due course, there were the formal tributes. But, after the end of the war, Beckwith-Smith was largely forgotten. “The memory and achievements of Merton Beckwith-Smith”, writes Snape, “have been buried under many layers of silence, distortion and amnesia.” Some historians of the Second World War even get his name wrong. Merton becomes “Mark”, Beckwith-Smith becomes “Beckworth-Smith”. And so on. But, for his soldiers who would have followed him to the ends of the earth, he was simply and always just “Becky”
Snape’s purpose, magnificently achieved in these pages, is to repair the injustice that we have done to this great soldier, conventional in so many ways and yet somehow something of a saint.
Snape’s earlier chapters cover Beckwith-Smith’s privileged background — his wealthy family, his schooling at Eton, his elevated social connections (including, to his later regret, with the playboy Prince of Wales, later King Edward VIII). These advantages smoothed his path into the Coldstream and Welsh Guards.
Central chapters recount Beckwith-Smith’s soldiering in the First World War, in which he was both wounded and decorated, and his flourishing family life during the interwar years — years nevertheless overshadowed by the prospect of the Armageddon that he clearly saw approaching.
Beckwith-Smith’s metal was demonstrated — if unremarked by historians — in his heroic part in the evacuation of Dunkirk. (He tells his men how to deal with Stuka dive-bombers. “Shoot them with a Bren gun from the shoulder. Take them like a high pheasant.”)
His darkest but finest hour was yet to come. On 10 November 1941, the 18th Division sailed for Singapore, though they did not yet know that that that this was to be their destination and their doom. Beckwith-Smith’s part in the débâcle of Singapore’s swift capitulation — after a voyage of 20,000 miles — was wholly creditable, but Snape’s unsparing telling of it makes for harrowing reading.
alamyMerton Beckwith-Smith, then Colonel of the Welsh Guards (left), with King Edward VIII (centre), and Lt. Col. W. F. O. Faviell, at the St David’s Day ceremony in London, 1936
So to Changi and the greatest test of Becky’s career. As Snape succinctly puts it, “there was still a moral victory to be won.” Beckwith-Smith launched a series of initiatives designed not only to restore a modicum of military discipline among his demoralised men — plenty of “square-bashing” — but aimed, too, at establishing in his “family”, as he always called them, a vigorous cultural and intellectual life. Boldest of these measures was his creation — astonishingly — of a divisional university.
Good biographers seek to understand their subjects and to identify what makes them who they are. Snape discerns a thread of steel running through Beckwith-Smith’s story, shaping his inner life, determining his decisions, and governing his dealings with friend and foe alike. This was his profound and unwavering Christian faith.
We must ask ourselves what manner of faith it was that sustained Beckwith-Smith and inspired such devotion among his men. The pattern of his costly discipleship was an ideal far out of fashion today — that which maintains a certain reticence and reserve. What alone matters is to seek the will of God and obey it. But your Christian faith is not something you go on about.
The Revd Dr John Pridmore is a former Rector of Hackney in east London.
Forgotten Warrior: The life and times of Major-General Merton Beckwith-Smith 1890-1942
Michael Snape
SPCK £29.99
(978-0-281-08691-7)
Church Times Bookshop £26.99