Forde Everard de Wend Cayley

On the outbreak of the Second World War he joined the Royal Army Medical Corps, being attached to the Suffolk Regiment, and served with British forces in France.

In September 1941 he married Eileen Lilian Dalton, daughter of a Principal Clerk at the Law Courts in central London.

He was captured by the Japanese when Singapore fell in 1942, and was held for a time in Changi Prison before being sent to a succession of camps on the River Kwai.

Medicines were in short supply, and Forde Cayley tapped local knowledge to use extracts from indigenous plants to treat other prisoners of war and Japanese soldiers.

Forde Cayley escaped injury because he had taken shelter in a monsoon trench, but bomb splinters were embedded in his copy of Gone with the Wind which he had been using as a pillow.