News

Monday, 23 October 2000

Tributes paid to war veteran Head Teacher

A SURVIVOR of World War Two Japanese prisoner of war camps who went on to become the first headmaster of St. Thomas à Becket College has died.

Albert Edwin (Ted) Smith, 86, of Barnsley Road, Wakefield, lived through a three-and-a-half-year imprisonment after he was captured by the Japanese while fighting with the Royal Tank Regiment in Singapore.

Locked up in the notorious Changi Gaol, he was reduced to eating snails and lost five stones in weightafter enduring a starvation diet of two biscuits and a tiny piece of cheese per day.

He was put to work on the Burma Railway and worked near the bridge at Tamerkan, immortalised in the Alec Guinness film 'The Bridge Over the River Kwai.'

Born in Stockton-on-Tees, County Durham, in 1914, Mr Smith worked at colleges in the Northeast before, and after, returning from the war.

He joined St Austin's College in Wakefield as headmaster in 1957, where he was the last head. And he was the first headmaster of the brand new St. Thomas à Becket High College when it opened in 1963.

Mr Smith retired in 1975 to devote more time to his wife Judith, two children and two grandchildren. He was an enthusiastic member of Wakefield Golf Club and a keen follower of the Yorkshire cricket team.

Wakefield Mayor Coun Norman Hazell said: "Ted was a lovely man who was never quite able to forget his time in captivity. He told me the Bridge Over the River Kwai story was pure fictionand he'd know."

And he said Mr Smith was a key figure in the success of St. Thomas à Becket. "He laid the foundations for the excellent college it has become. It was impossible to keep him out of the classrooms, and he enjoyed a reputation amongst ex-students as always being a calm and kind man."

This article was taken with permission from the Wakefield Express.