David Lay FRICS
Lot 386
An East African Ida sword and sheath owned by Jack Chalker, the acclaimed British WWII artist who painted the atrocities he witnessed as a prisoner of war on the Burma Railway known as the 'Railway of Death'. A 57.5cm long, straight spined, crudely forged, double edged sword. The blade 2.3cm wide at its narrowest point close to the handle, flaring to 5.5cm at its widest point near the tip which is symmetrically rounded with a small point. The handle, 13.5cm long, is enclosed in rudimentarily hand stitched animal skin. The sheath also crudely constructed of red dyed animal skin stretched and stitched over wood with an integrated 5cm belt loop in the skin. At the tip of the sheath an East African bronze one cent coin (dated to 1949-52) has been formed into a protective wood filled finial. Jack Chalker, 1918-2014. Chalker had won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art but his studies interrupted by the outbreak of the WWII. He joined the Royal Field Artillery and was posted to Singapore in February 1942. Within a month he was captured by the Japanese. He was first sent to the Changi area for a few months, then a further four months at Havelock Road labour camp in Singapore Town before the journey up-country to Bampong in Thailand. From there groups were marched to various camp sites to begin the construction of the Burma Railway line. Chalker spent almost six months at Kanyu River working on the railway project. In March 1943 after succumbing to dysentery and dengue fever he was sent down-river to Chungkai where a large hospital camp was being established. In June 1944 he was moved south to the Nakhon Pathom Hospital camp where he remained until the Japanese capitulation in August 1945. Throughout his captivity, despite great personal risk to himself, Chalker sought to capture daily life in the camps in pen and ink. The making of any records was strictly forbidden and infringement of the rules resulted in savage punishment. Drawings were hidden in sections of bamboo buried in the ground, the roof of jungle huts or in an artificial leg worn by an amputee prisioner. Chalker kept an important record of the subhuman conditions endured by the allied POWs. He was a hospital artist for the renowned Australian surgeon Colonel Sir Ernest Edward "Weary" Dunlop and sketched the diseases, tropical ulcers and operations. After the war in 1945, Chalker joined the Australian Army HQ in Bangkok as a war artist; some of his work was used in evidence at the trials of Japanese officers and NCOs at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. On return to the UK he resumed his studies. In 1950, after teaching History of Art at Cheltenham Ladies' College he became principal of Falmouth College of Art and, in 1957, principal of West of England College of Art, where he remained until his retirement in the mid-1980s. Chalker did not talk about his war-time ordeal or look at his pictures for almost 40 years. In 2002, a bout of ill-health forced him to auction over 100 drawings and paintings. “I feel reluctant and in a way guilty about doing this, but it will help us out,” he said. They sold for almost £200,000 and were acquired by several private collectors and museums, among them Britain's National Army Museum. The highest-selling lot was a painting of the Australian surgeon Colonel Edward Dunlop performing an amputation, which sold for £24,600. He published two books of his POW drawings and has featured in a BBC documentary about the Burma Railway. Jack Chalker's son describes his father as never being without a useful knife of some sort and as also being an avid collector. Knifes and swords were one of his passions. He is not aware of where his father acquired the African Ida sword but it is his belief that he brought the Dha-Iwe back home with him when he returned from Burma after the end of the war.
