Alistair Urquhart describes himself as ‘a lucky man as well as an angry man’.
Alistair Urquhart describes himself as ‘a lucky man as well as an angry man’. No one who reads his remarkable autobiography will doubt either the phenomenal extent of his good fortune or the extraordinary justification for his anger. Yet his story will be remembered for qualities that are universal rather than personal.
At the age of 20, with a job as a warehouseman in Aberdeen, he was called up in 1939 for service in the Gordon Highlanders, and sent to Singapore. When the city suddenly and shockingly fell to the Japanese in December 1941, he was captured, but he survived almost three years as a slaveworker on the railway in Thailand and in the docks in Malaya, before being shipped to Japan in the hold of a cargo vessel for labour in the coal mines.
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