Remembrance: Capt. Cecil Pickersgill

It’s the small memories that add up. As Britain commemorates its war dead on November 11, the anniversary of the end of World War I, the individual acts of remembrance add up.

Take Sybil Shaw. Today, she’s a 90-year-old widow living in Barnard Castle, the County Durham town where she has spent most of her life. And, as Remembrance Season rolls around, her thoughts swing irresistibly back to Capt. Cecil Pickersgill, the father who never returned from the Second World War.

These are fleeting moments from a pre-war childhood. “It was my fourth birthday. I’d been to see Snow White at the Scala Cinema with my mummy and granny.

“My father had bought me a puppy and he came to meet us with that little puppy, walking along the road here.”

Later: “His last leave. I’d been given a bicycle and he ran up and down Dene Road with me on that bike. He knew Mama would never have taught me to ride it, so he did it himself.

“I was so happy because as I got a little older, I used to go on bike rides with my friends.”

By the time young Sybil was taking those bike rides, Capt. Pickersgill was on the other side of the world in a Japanese PoW camp. She was six when he went to the Far East, eight when he died and 10 when the news reached his family back home.

Captured after the fall of Singapore, he was put to work on Burma’s notorious death railway. It was far from the life of an architect in an English country town.

Yet memories of Teesdale sustained Capt. Pickersgill even in the bleakest of circumstances.

As the death toll mounted among the PoWs, he appealed to the Japanese commandant to be allowed to build a lychgate into the cemetery. With approval granted, he drew up a design based on the lychgate he knew from the churchyard at Startforth, just across the river from home.

Today, that gate, transported piece by piece from the Far East, forms part of the Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire. That destiny might not have surprised Capt. Pickersgill’s comrades, who remembered an inspirational figure. Cecil set up a masonic lodge in the camp. He managed to get his hands on coloured inks and inscribed a copy of the Bible given by the Bishop of Singapore. He made a lasting impression.

“After the war, until there was no-one left, I met many of the chaps who were with him,” Sybil said. “They told me that my father got them to do things they never thought they could ever do.

“They had no nails to build that lychgate, so he got them bending barbed wire.”

One of those fellow prisoners was another Barnard Castle man, Reg Bainbridge. During the war, he was reported missing. Back home, his family was starved of news. Then came a card from the jungle, Capt. Pickersgill’s second and final message home. A brief text, and a briefer post-script: “Reg B here.” Sybil’s mother took it straight to the Bainbridge family.

By the time the card reached England, Capt. Pickersgill was dead of cerebral malaria. Reg Bainbridge returned home with a Bible and a story.

“At the end of the war, there was a Japanese officer at a table that held everything belonging to the PoWs. My father had taken his gold watch, his pen, a lighter, everything.

“Reg Bainbridge said to this Japanese officer that he would be seeing Capt. Pickersgill’s widow and would like to take his things. The officer said that belongings of dead PoWs had to go to Tokyo to be listed. Reg Bainbridge picked up my father’s Bible and said ‘I don’t think this will need to be listed in Tokyo’ and he brought it back.”

Today, there are only memories. The wartime generation is disappearing and their stories disappear with them.

“I am so very, very proud of my father, and until I go away I shall try to keep memories of him going,” she said.

The original interview with Sybil Shaw was in August 2025 for an article in the Teesdale Mercury marking the 80th anniversary of VJ Day. The images are part of the family archive unless otherwise stated.