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Articles
Ron Adley
"MEDIC
BROTHER WHO EMULATED HIS FATHER" by Phil Reilly
Ronald Adley was just 21 when he succumbed
to cholera in August 1943, thousands of miles from his family in
Dover. He was in Singapore serving as a medical orderly with the
RAF when it was overrun by the Japanese, and spent his final
months doing backbreaking manual labour on the infamous Burma
Railway.
His little sister Rose was just 12 when she
last saw her brother in 1941. Sitting in the immaculately tidy
front room of the small flat she shares with husband Ernie in
Harold Street, Dover, Rose, now 80, remembered her mother
telling her of her brother's death before they had received a
telegram. Rose recalled, "One morning she came to speak to me
and she told me "Ron's dead". She said he came to her in her
sleep and said, "I'm all right now mum, you don't have to worry
any more. The telegram arrived later the same day. She was very
upset at first, obviously, but she actually became calmer
afterwards. She had been so worried because there was so much
uncertainty."
The family - mum Minnie, dad Charles, and
siblings Bill, Doris, Fred, Bob, and Rose - had no contact with
Ron after he left for Singapore in 1941. It was his first
posting overseas. He had returned to the family home in Primrose
Road only briefly after finishing his training and married Dover
girl Phyllis in a hurried wedding at Buckland church. Rose was a
bridesmaid.
Rose, who has three children, seven
grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren, remembered Ron as a
friendly and caring older brother who spoilt his little sister.
"All my brothers spoilt me," Rose remembered with a smile.
Ron was quite quiet, but he was charming
and very friendly, and everybody liked him. "He knew that I used
to like dancing and singing, and he used to take me up Bunker's
Hill where they used to have dances."
Ron's middle name was Charles, after his
father, and Rose remembered the admiration her brother had for
her dad. "He always wanted to be like my father, who was a
medical orderly in the First World War. He used to sit down and
tell us these fascinating stories about it - this was when they
used horse-drawn ambulances."
Ron went to Barton Road school as a child,
and attended Sunday school at the apostolic chapel in Primrose
Road. He joined the airforce as a cadet as a teenager, for which
he played the bugle. When he joined the RAF in 1941, still in
his teens, he was sent out to patch up troops in the Far East.
He was taken prisoner when Singapore fell to the Japanese in
February 1942.
As prisoner of war, Ron was put to work
building the Burma Railway, as well as continuing to nurse his
fallen comrades. He died of cholera on Sunday August 1, 1943,
and was buried in the Chungkai war cemetery in Thailand.
Rose, the last surviving sibling in the
family, has never been to Thailand to visit the grave. She does
have a photograph of it, which was given to her by former Mayor
of Dover, Mike Farrell, after he returned from a visit to the
Far East.
Rose added, "It was really lovely, he was
in Thailand at the cemetery and he saw the grave. He wasn't
looking for it, he didn't know who Ron was but he saw that he
was from Dover so he took the picture. When he got back he sent
it to the Dover Express and offered to give it to any relative
that got in touch. That's how I got it, and I am very grateful."
This article first appeared in the Dover
Express, p28, 8th June 2006
reproduced with permission
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