Jack Edwards was born in Cardiff, Wales on 24 May 1918, in the suburb of Canton, joining the Territorial Army just before the outbreak of the Second World War.

[1] Edwards was an army sergeant in the Royal Corps of Signals when Singapore fell to the Japanese in February 1942.

[1] Edwards was put into the Kinkaseki POW camp, a mountainous region near Jiufen, where he and 525[2] other inmates were forced to work the copper mine daily in tropical heat.

As men died, or were transferred to other camps because they were too weak and ill to continue working, replacement contingents were drafted in to make up the numbers.

[5] Edwards was moved to a remote jungle camp called Kukutsu in the Taihoku Heights about 12 miles (19 km) from Shinten (now Xindian District).

[1] There, he was actively involved in the Hong Kong Ex-Servicemen's Association as well as the Royal British Legion, becoming later on its chairman.

[14] A greater triumph came in 1996 when Edwards fought and won the granting of British citizenship to wives and widows of those veterans.

In 1990, he married Polly Tam So-lan, a former member of a Chinese People's Liberation Army dance troupe whom he met in 1974.