Mateship

If you think of Anzacs, you think of mateship and I don’t know of a finer example of mateship than this man, Richie Murray, a boxer before the War from Botany, New South Wales.

Captured by the Japanese, Richie would be sent, along with 1800 of his fellow Diggers and 700 Poms, to Borneo, to Sandakan, where the entire camp, over the next 3+ years, were worked literally into the ground, humiliated, starved, beaten, brutalised, even cannibalised.

Richie, a married man with a family back home, and his best mate Keith Botterill who at 19 was ten years or so Richie’s junior, helped each other through as much as they could.

By May 1945, Richie and Keith were at Ranau, force-marched 160 miles or so across the island from Sandakan, and clinging somehow still to life.

It was clear the Japanese were losing.

Fearing (correctly) that their captors would not allow the POWs to be recovered to tell the hideous tale, Richie and Keith hatched one last Hail-Mary plan, to try to escape into the jungle and hang on until the Allies landed.

They would need something – anything – to fuel them though, so they scrounged a little of the Japanese rice they’d been forced to carry through the jungle for them.

When their captors discovered this, Richie and Keith, along with several other mates were lined up and told they would all die here and now unless the culprit owned up.

It was 20th May 1945.

And 30-year-old Richie Murray stepped forward and took full responsibility.

He knew exactly what they would do to him.

He, along with Keith, had survived more than we can ever know and here he was, deliberately giving up his chance of going home, now so tantalisingly close, for his mates.

Richie was duly marched away, beaten and bayonetted to death.

Keith Botterill did eventually escape into the jungle.

He was one of six men, all Aussies, to survive the War out of the 1787 Anzacs and 641 British men (two of them my cousins) who were murdered, sometimes quickly, mostly agonisingly slowly, on Borneo.

We Will Remember Them all, especially Richie Murray, especially on Anzac Day.