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Jim Roulston was a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps serving with the 18th Division Royal Engineers. Captured at the fall of Singapore in February 1942 Roulston spent the remainder of the war as a prisoner of war surviving the Burma-Siam railway, being torpedoed by a US submarine, and the labour camps in Japan.

Born in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, he was the second of eight children. He went to Foyle College in Londonderry before qualifying in medicine at Queen’s University in Belfast in 1938.

Roulston served as medical officer with the 18th Divisional Royal Engineers, arriving in Singapore shortly before its surrender. Following capture by the Japanese army Roulston was taken to Changi camp. In early November 1942 Roulston’s party was taken to Tarcao camp to work on the Burma-Siam railway. The march to Tarcao was undertaken in appalling conditions during the monsoon season. In a poem written in Japan at the end of the war Roulston wrote:

"We felt when we came to the end of that journey

That fate had delivered her hardest blow.

That we were mistaken, most sadly mistaken-

The coming years work on the railway did show."

Roulston spent the next 18 months moving through various camps on the railway; PungyshoII, Tamarkan Chungkai, and Tumuan. During this period Roulston worked on the bridge of the River Kwai (which actually crosses the Mae Khlaung River). The hell of this period is well documented by such as Robert Searle with whom Roulston shared a camp at one stage.

Roulston had one piece of good fortune during this period. Suffering badly from dysentery he was left behind to die when his party moved on from one particular camp. A Japanese guard returning to collect some equipment and noticing that Roulston was still breathing took him on his barge to the next camp.

In November 1942 Roulston was moved to the River Valley Camp and from there by ship to Japan. Roulston sailed on the Kachidoki Maru. This ship and the Rakuyo Maru in the same convoy displayed no markings that they were carrying prisoners and were both torpedoed by US submarines on 12 September 1942.

The Kachidoki went down in 20 minutes and about a third of the prisoners were trapped in the hold and went down with the ship. The survivors spent three days in the China seas suffering horribly from the effects of an oil slick before being rescued by a Japanese tanker.

On the tanker Roulston was recognised by Captain Rowley Richards, an Australian medical officer with whom Roulston was to work for the rest of the war. Richards in his book The Survival Factor stated: "Nothing that I had seen on the Burma railway, not even the death huts, had prepared me for the scene on the deck of the oil tanker . . . blackened travesties of humanity, a Goyaesque picture."

Roulston arrived in Japan on 20 September 1944 (on the only ship to survive from his second convoy), one of 650 survivors out of the 2300 prisoners who had left Singapore on the original convoy. After short spells in Moji and Tokyo Roulston arrived at the Sakata labour camp (coal, timber, and foundry work), where he was to serve as medical officer until the Japanese surrender. In 1944 Sakata suffered its coldest winter for 70 years and pneumonia took its toll of the prisoners alongside the more familiar tropical diseases, which they had endured since their capture.

Following the Japanese surrender Roulston wrote:

"They told us then that the war was done

The Allies had conquered Japan.

Three years and a half we had all endured

And each was a lucky man."

Jim Roulston, like many of his contemporaries, spoke little of his wartime experiences but never felt bitter, refusing to blame his captors, reasoning that it was a fault of the system rather than of the individual.

Roulston qualified, with a gold medal, as a doctor of medicine at Queen’s University in 1946 with the intention of using his experiences to study tropical diseases. However, family pressure intervened and Jim Roulston became a GP (or family doctor as he preferred) in Mirfield, West Yorkshire, whose inhabitants he cared for until his retirement in 1979.

Jim Roulston was a horticulturist of some local note and latterly described himself as a gardener with a smattering of medical knowledge. His other great interests were his Labradors and salmon fishing, which he practised mainly on the river Aan and Spey in Scotland.

Jim Roulston was a modest man who dedicated his life to caring for others, not least of all his beloved wife, Gwynne, who, together with a daughter, Davina, and a son, Chris, survives him. [Chris Roulston]