Anzac service broadcast to highlight sacrifice of POWs
Prisoners of War will be remembered in an Anzac Day Dawn Service broadcast, with the Ode to be recited by the son of an Adelaide hero who was posthumously awarded the George Cross.
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David Matthews barely got to know his heroic father, who was executed by the Japanese in World War II, but he will proudly wear his posthumous medals to recite the Ode for a special broadcast of this year’s Anzac Day Dawn Service.
The theme of the service will be Prisoners of War, one of whom Stepney-born Captain Lionel Matthews became after the Fall of Singapore in 1942.
David, now 81, was just two years old when his father went off to war and only has “four or five vague memories” of the man he would later learn was a hero.
Captain Matthews was initially interned at Changi, then sent to the Sandakan POW camp in Borneo where he secretly set up a complex intelligence-gathering network which helped save many lives.
When the network was betrayed to the Japanese, Captain Matthews and other members of the organisation were beaten, tortured and starved during interrogation, then sent to Kuching where he was executed by firing squad in 1944 – refusing to be blindfolded.
As a nine-year-old boy, David accepted his father’s Military Cross and, the following year, was presented with his George Cross by the Governor-General on the same day that his uncle, Colonel Geoffrey Matthews, received the Distinguished Service Order.
It wasn’t until he researched and published a book about his father in 2008, titled The Duke after his nickname, that Mr Matthews finally learned the extent of his courageous actions.
“It was then that it fully came to me what a phenomenal achievement he had performed. All boys believe their dads are heroic, but I really understood then just what he had gone through.”
Mr Matthews donated his father’s original medals to the Australian War Memorial in Canberra in 2015 but he has kept a set of replicas.
While Saturday’s Dawn Service will still be held at the War Memorial on North Terrace, this year only a small number of invited participants can attend due to the coronavirus ban on public gatherings.
However, the Adelaide service will be broadcast on ABC Radio 891 from 5.55am and ABC TV from 6am on Saturday.
It will be the first time Mr Matthews has recited the Ode at a Dawn Service, although he has read it many times in his 12 years on the Blackwood RSL committee and at the funerals of ex-servicemen during five years as its vice-president.
Mr Matthews also volunteered for National Service in 1957 and was called up for three years, then returned after a seven-year break for another two years’ service.
“It was just part of me,” he said. “My grandfather had been in the old militia – he was a sergeant in the 10th Battalion – my father had been in and my uncles had been in. It was just part of the family thing.”
Mr Matthews believes that military service helps build a strength of character.
“It gives you a sense of self-belief, of independence, confidence in many ways. You are handling things you would never handle normally.”
English was David Matthews’ best subject at school and in 1956 he wrote to The Advertiser’s managing director Sir Lloyd Dumas to apply for a job.
He spent the next 48 years working for The Advertiser as a journalist and sub-editor until his retirement in 2003.