page_title: Anthony Chenevix-Trench
section_title: Military service
hierarchical_section_title: Anthony Chenevix-Trench / Military service
caption_attribution_description: English: Arthur Percival marches under a flag of truce in order to sue for surrender of the British forces to the Japanese on 15 February 1942.
context_page_description: Anthony Chenevix-Trench was a British schoolteacher and classics scholar. He was born in British India, educated at Shrewsbury School and Christ Church, Oxford, and served in the Second World War as an artillery officer with British Indian units in Malaya. Captured by the Japanese in Singapore, he was forced to work on the Burma Railway.
  He taught classics at Shrewsbury, where he became a housemaster, and taught for another year at Christ Church. He was headmaster of Bradfield College, where he raised academic standards and instituted a substantial programme of new building works. Appointed headmaster of Eton College in 1963, he broadened the curriculum immensely and introduced a greater focus on achieving strong examination results, but was asked to leave in 1969 after disagreements with housemasters and an unpopular attitude to caning, which became the subject of a press controversy after his death.
  Following a one-year break during which he taught for one term at the prep school Swanbourne House, he was appointed headmaster of Fettes College, where he succeeded in greatly increasing enrolment and in reforming the harsh traditional atmosphere of the school.
context_section_description: Chenevix-Trench started his military career as an officer cadet at Aldershot, taking the technical and organisational teaching seriously but the remainder less so: "In these pre-Dunkirk days, work finished at five o'clock and everyone went home for the weekend." On 1 March 1940, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant. When volunteers were requested to be replacement officers for artillery units in India, he stepped forward, remembering his happy childhood days there. In Bombay, he joined the 22nd Mountain (Indian Artillery) Regiment, and took charge of an artillery battery. His linguistic skills were immensely valuable in overcoming poor communications within the unit (he mastered the basics of Urdu to make it possible for the officers to communicate with their men), though the culturally diverse nature of the unit, half Muslim and half Sikh but with British officers and signallers, continued to cause problems.
  The regiment, made up of four batteries, was stationed in Singapore, the most important British naval base in the Far East. Each battery was made up of 180 men with four British officers; Chenevix-Trench's battery was the 24th (Hazara) Mountain Battery, which had recently been re-equipped with 6-inch howitzers. By the time Japan attacked Malaya in early December 1941, Chenevix-Trench had been promoted to battery captain, and the battery was hundreds of miles further north in Jitra near the Malayan border with Siam, supporting the 11th Indian Division in defence of the Alor Star airfield. They were soon forced to withdraw in the face of the Japanese offensive, and then became part of the general retreat southwards through Malaya as the British forces risked being outflanked by Japanese amphibious landings. Massive Japanese air superiority put an end to the British naval counter-strike by sinking the battleship HMS Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser HMS Repulse, which had been sent to attack the Japanese transport ships.
  The battery commander, Edward Sawyer, described Chenevix-Trench as having been "a tower of strength" in the rearguard action. By 26 December, the unit was fighting at Kampar, halfway back to Singapore. Chenevix-Trench was further praised for his battery's role in defeating the first Japanese amphibious landings at Kuala Selangor, but the retreat continued, and by the end of January 1942 the regiment was back in Singapore, supporting the 28th Indian Infantry Brigade in its defence of a sector of the island's shore west of the causeway linking it to the mainland. The 85,000 British and Commonwealth troops in Singapore surrendered on 15 February. One of the Sikh artillerymen in Chenevix-Trench's unit was not much impressed by the physical appearance of the Japanese, asking, "Sahib, how came we to be beaten by those bastards?"
  Chenevix-Trench was a prisoner of war (POW) for three and a half years, first at Changi Prison and then working on the Burma Railway, where he lost an eye and suffered kidney failure. The twenty-four British officers and signallers were separated from their Indian troops – whom the Japanese had hopes of subverting to their cause – and initially lived in fairly tolerable conditions. Chenevix-Trench learned more about India's ethnic and political divisions, read Homer's Odyssey in Greek and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and compiled, bound and decorated an anthology of English poetry. Conditions changed in April 1943 when the POWs were used as slave labour on the railway. The track had to be forced through impenetrable jungle, in appalling conditions and with malaria, dysentery and beriberi constant: Chenevix-Trench suffered all three. Medical supplies were non-existent, rations at starvation level, and the sick forced to work until they died. Chenevix-Trench saved many lives through inspired pseudo-medical advice and hygiene discipline. He saw one of his fellow soldiers impaled against a tree with bayonets for attempting to escape, amidst many other horrors. When a cholera epidemic struck, the British did not have enough fuel to build funeral pyres for the victims, so were
caption: The British surrender at Singapore was the largest surrender of British-led forces in history.
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