‘What our Sons went through’: The Connective Memories of Far Eastern Captivity in the Charles Thrale Exhibition, 1946–1964

Charles Thrale, a British national, was a prisoner of war (POW) of the Japanese between 1942 and 1945. During his captivity he painted hundreds of pictures recording a narrative of POW life. In 1946, post-repatriation, Thrale created an exhibition from this journal of pictures and toured Britain with it for the next eighteen years. Accompanying the surviving paintings are thirteen books, each containing comments left by the visitors to the exhibition. These books, preserved in the Imperial War Museum, have received scant attention until now. Yet the books offer rare insight into how representations of Far Eastern captivity during the Second World War were received and remembered in Britain in the immediate post-war period. Drawing on Marianne Hirsch's notion of postmemory—that is, how traumatic histories are passed on to, and remembered by, the second generation—I explore how the transgenerational transmission of the story of Far Eastern captivity occurred in the immediate aftermath of the war. Furthermore, I show that early postmemory of Far Eastern captivity was informed by the connections that Thrale's audiences made between the representations of the POW camps and those of other wartime atrocities.