'I witnessed dad's terrible nightmares from war'

Rosemary Southgate met her father for the first time when she was four years old.

"He walked into our house and I didn't know who he was, so I hid under the kitchen table," she said.

Soldier Jack Price, from Ketley in what is now Telford, was a prisoner of war in Singapore during World War Two and witnessed atrocities at the hands of the Japanese.

Rosemary recently shared her father's story with Telford MP Shaun Davies, who laid a wooden cross in his memory in the grounds of the Palace of Westminster ahead of Armistice Day.

"When he first came home from war he had terrible nightmares," said Ms Southgate.

"It was horrible to see as a child - he would be shouting and his arms flailing. It was difficult for my mum."

Mr Price, like many men of his generation, never spoke of the horrors he witnessed during the war.

He was captured by the Japanese during the Battle of Singapore in 1942 and held captive in the notorious Changi Prison until the war ended in 1945.

The acting regimental sergeant major was sent to work on the Burma-Thailand Railway, in which 12,000 Allied personnel perished during its construction.

Ms Southgate's niece, Sarah Dukes, said the war had affected her grandfather in many ways.

"When we were little he would hold our hands and sometime his hand would twitch because of shell shock, or what we'd now called post-traumatic stress disorder," said Sarah.

"He wouldn't have anything made in Japan in the house because he was scarred by how they had treated him."

Jack, who had served in the King's Troop Royal Horse Artillery during the war, returned to his job at a foundry in Ketley.

He died from bowel cancer in 1985, aged 74.

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