Beddow, T H
Thomas H Beddow
I would like to add my uncle’s name, Thomas Handel Beddow (1915 -1992), to the list of POWs. I would hate for his name to be forgotten.
I am setting out what my mother told me. Handel didn’t talk much about his experiences -they were probably way too painful and he did not to pass hate onto successive generations. I remember him as kind man and a good uncle who was always rather quiet. He was a keen sportsman before the war and was a talented football player. He followed all the sports on the tv (rugby, football and cricket were his passions). He deserved the grace to do so in his armchair after all what he had been through.
My mother told me that he had been part of The Long March and that he told her stories of the conditions. There was no regular food supplies and they had to survive by digging up potatoes, turnips and swedes from the frozen earth with their bare hands. He was one of the lucky ones to have survived and was rescued by the advancing American Army. Nevertheless he was in a dreadful physical condition probably weighing approx. 6 stones or so.
My mother told me that he was in such a bad way that he was taken into an American hospital unit ?Munich, which specialised in turning round starved victims of the POW and concentration camps. Is much known about this?
Whilst at Lamsdorf he was on a work detachment working down a coal? mine. This makes sense as he came from a coal mining family and lived in the South Wales Coalfield. It also was mentioned that there were Jewish prisoners working alongside them. Would this have been the case and were they Jewish Prisoners of War or from the concentration camps? I am just trying to work in my mind what really happened there as there seem to be so many myths out there.
Suggest an improvment to this record