Alistair Drummond

Captain Alistair Drummond led a company of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in the defence of Malaya. His battalion conducted a famous fighting retreat down the Malay peninsula, one of the last units to cross the causeway to Singapore. After the fall of Singapore, he spent three and a half years as a prisoner of war, working on the Burma-Siam railway. Despite appalling conditions, he organised resistance among officers and protected his men from the worst Japanese abuses. He died of cholera in Changi prison in 1944, just months before liberation. His diary, smuggled out by a surviving comrade, is now in the Imperial War Museum.