The Colonel of Tamarkan – Philip Toosey and the Bridge on the River Kwai
By Julie Summers
Published by Simon & Schuster, 2005
Reviewed by Paul Dorsey

Three cheers for the colonel

The go-to guy at all the Death Railway PoW camps, Philip Toosey wasn’t nearly as keen on collaborating as Alec Guinness was in the famous film.

The Nation
Published in autumn 2005
Yet another remarkable addition to the Death Railway lore, and coming 60 years after the PoW camps’ liberation, “The Colonel of Tamarkan” is the story of the man portrayed – and yet not really portrayed at all – by Alec Guinness in the film “Bridge on the River Kwai”.
Even had there been no Oscar-winning movie, Philip Toosey clearly deserves a biographical tribute like this. He was one of the handful of men who truly stood out among the 70,000 Allied prisoners forced to toil on the Thailand-Burma railway.
Julie Summers is not only the grand-niece of Toosey, and thus uniquely able to document the family’s history and feelings, she has two wonderful story hooks on which to hang her eulogy.
One of these becomes a pair of bookends, opening the story with a poignant vignette pregnant with anticipation, and closing it with clenched-teeth resignation.
Tokyo businessman Teruo Saito is jammed into a musky phonebooth on a wet night with an interpreter and one of Toosey’s sons. Summers doesn’t say where they are, but the phonecall is long-distance to Toosey’s home in Cheshire, England, and the captain, now 70, must decline Saito’s request to meet him personally.
Saito – it’s mostly coincidence that the commander of the PoW camp in the film has the same name – had been a guard at the camp at Tha Maa Kham (Tamarkan, the prisoners called it), outside Kanchanaburi. Sized up by war-crimes investigators when World War II ended, Sgt Major Saito had been spared punishment when Toosey attested that he had been “fair in difficult circumstances”.
The Japanese regarded the Englishman as his saviour, and in fact said he “showed me what a human being should be. He changed the philosophy of my life.” The book ends with Saito’s 1984 visit to Toosey’s grave, eight years after the captain’s death, still regretting that they never met again in life.
The other enviable anchor for Summers’ biography is, of course, the 1957 David Lean film, which won the Oscar the following year and earned statuettes for the director, the star and the screenwriter, Pierre Boulle, the Frenchman who had moulded disparate shards of history into a lively anti-war fiction.
Boulle’s original novel came very close to complete mutilation in Hollywood before Lean managed to talk some sense into producer Sam Spiegel and get Boulle himself working on the script. As it was, great leaps were made in the interest of the box office, and the real blokes who built the bridge on the river Khwae Mae Khlong were justifiably furious.
Toosey was not – at first. The notion that anyone could possibly think Guinness’ Colonel Nicholson was a portrayal of him was, he insisted, “laughable”. Unfortunately, the movie was a blockbuster and most people who saw it decided it was utterly faithful to history. Toosey, his incensed former comrades warned him, was in danger of being forever falsified as a collaborator, if not a coward.
With great reluctance, and as usual thinking primarily of “his men”, Toosey wrote a letter to the Daily Telegraph lamenting that the film was too loose with the truth about the prisoners, the conditions in the camps and the attitude of the Thais. The letter released a deluge of like-minded criticism, and the message of the movie’s fiction was largely got across, but the captain retired from the field as quickly as he had reappeared, retreating into publicity shyness.
It must have been hard to be humble, though. Toosey had a good upbringing in Lancashire, quickly climbed the ranks at Barings Bank, seemed to always be the man put in charge wherever he went – including at all three PoW camps where he sweated out nearly four years (including one prison composed of only officers, many of whom outranked him) – and ending up with multiple corporate directorships and a knighthood, not to mention the leadership of Britain’s association of former PoWs, for whom he managed to get compensation from both London and Tokyo.
And it must have been hard for Julie Summers to avoid gushing about her grand-uncle, for he truly was grand, a man who consistently left behind him a wake of awestruck admirers. While she limits her editorialising admirably, readers get the sense that there might by a bad trait or two in the old man about which she’s keeping mum, though it’s hard to imagine what they could be.
“The Colonel of Tamarkan” is a book about the Death Railway with a host of distinctions that make it well worth buying. Even with such an amazing story to retell of the slave labour and suffering in Kanchanaburi, Nong Pladuk, Chungkai and a place to the east called simply here Ubon, it has the broader focus on the life of one man, following him on his business travels to South America and Africa, luxuriating in his family and, most engagingly, tracking his pre-war military career in the Territorial Army, which took him to Dunkirk and ultimately Singapore and his greater destiny.
Along the way are moving character portraits, primarily of the officers and NCOs with whom Toosey served, and some of their Japanese captors, but also of people like Boonpong Sirivejjabhandu (here identified only as Boon Pong), the ex-Kanchanaburi mayor turned merchant and Seri Thai captain who smuggled life-saving supplies to the prisoners of Tamarkan.
For his trouble Boon Pong was almost killed by the Thai police when the war ended, just because he was “Chinese”, though a George medal, the “civilian Victoria Cross”, helped mend the wounds, as did a medical scholarship named in honour of him and another legendary hero of the labour camps, the Australian Sir Edward “Weary” Dunlop. The documentary film “The Quiet Lions” is about both of them, and Boon Pong also figures prominently in “Beyond the Bamboo Screen”, a collection of anecdotes by Scottish PoWs.
Ironically, “The Colonel of Tamarkan” – alone among the many books about the Death Railway – will appeal to people who love David Lean’s movie. In making doubly sure the record is set straight, and offering a wonderful analysis of how the production evolved, Summers is so careful and compassionate that readers will look forward to seeing “Bridge on the River Kwai” again, knowing they’ll be watching it in a whole new light, right from the famous opening theme song – which is another Philip Toosey story in itself.