About

Jack Spittle was born in Ascot England in 1914.  His parents moved to nearby Slough when he was in his early teens. By then he had developed an avid interest in natural history, exploring the hedgerows and woodlands of the Thames river valley between Marlow and Henley.  At fifteen he "discovered" a heronry near Henley beginning a seventy-year study of the herons and  their environment. 

After leaving school he found his "dream job" as a lab assistant at the Imperial Institute of Entomology at Farnham Royal, working in the parasite lab and doing illustrations for the Institute's publications.  

In 1941, he was sent to Singapore with the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC), arriving a week before the Japanese invasion of Malaya.  As a POW he worked as an orderly in the dysentery ward at Roberts hospital at Changi before being transferred first to Selarang and finally to the hospital camp at Kranji.  An avid ornithologist, he made extensive observations of the birds he saw in captivity, assisted by a small group of fellow POW.  After the war he published articles on Singapore birds in the Bulletin of the Raffles Museum and The Malaya Nature Journal.  

His postwar career was spent in freshwater pollution prevention, allowing him to live his passion by working to preserve the environment and mucking about in streams with his insect net.  His monograph on the herons of Oaken Grove was completed in the 1990s.  He died in 2004.

I grew up in England, moving to the United States when I was in my late-twenties. Since my retirement, I have been working on a memoir based on my father's POW notebooks. 

My initial goal was to write about his captivity but he was a notetaker, not a diarist, and I have often had to read between the lines.  In Singapore Birdsong,  our stories - the elusiveness of his and the obsessiveness of mine - blend together.  But there is much I could not squeeze into it, and more that I would like to explore.  Hence this site.