Patrick Comerford
I was writing a few days ago (9 November 2024) about the Japanese Building in Kuching, the Japanese prisoner of war camp and cemetery at Batu Litang, and about the Japanese occupation of Sarawak from 1941 to 1945 during World War II.
One of the many horrific stories from that era is the story of the Long Nawang Massacre, which has been described as one of the worst brutalities of the Japanese occupation of Borneo.
One of the heroes in that event is Desmond Verdon Murphy (1894-1942), a senior police officer from Dublin with strong family roots in Limerick. The stories of his extraordinary career and his final days have been put together in recent years by his granddaughter Melissa Murphy. It is a story worth retelling on Remembrance Day
Although Sarawak was a British protectorate, it was a separate kingdom under the Brooke Rajahs. But Sarawak was unable to resist the Japanese invasion, and the capital Kuching fell undefended to the Japanese invaders on Christmas Eve, 24 December 1941.
On Christmas morning, 25 December, 1941, nine Japanese bombers attacked the inland town of Sibu, creating mayhem and panic among the residents. Soon, Japanese troops were marching off a large group of Europeans, many of them officers from the defeated Brooke administration.
The majority of the expatriates were interned, but a small group managed to escape Sibu hours before the Japanese advanced from Kuching. They included the British Resident, John Andrew McPherson, nine of his staff, his wife Clare who was eight months pregnant, Sally Bomphrey, her nine-month-old baby and five-year-old son, and two visitors.
They began the journey to Belaga on the upper Rajang on the night of 26 December 1941. From there, they planned to travel up the Balui River to the remote village of Long Nawang, a Dutch army post in the highlands, 300 miles inside Dutch-controlled Borneo, now known as Kalimantan.
Before leaving, McPherson radioed the British Governor of the Straits Settlements, Sir Shenton Thomas (1879-1962), who was based in Singapore. Thomas advised McPherson, ‘Do whatever you think best’, and contacted the Dutch government, asking them to expect and assist the group.
The perilous journey took 28 days, during which they crossed one river 36 times one morning, through ‘a raging mountain torrent sometimes knee deep, sometimes armpit deep and particularly powerful’.
Their ordeal ended on 22 January when they reached the military outpost they hoped would provide a safe hideaway. It was in a mountainous area in a pleasant, temperate climate, with sufficient provisions for a year. Some of the men considered returning to Sibu to be interned, but they changed their minds when they heard about the fall of Singapore on 15 February 1942.
Local Dutch forces surrendered in March 1942. One group then headed back to Kuching, but were never heard of again. Another small group of five men left Long Nawang: three of them met a Dutch army launch that took them downstream to a secluded Dutch army airfield, and from there they were flown to Bandung in Central Java; two eventually reached Perth, Australia, while the third man is believed to have joined a merchant vessel in Java. The other two were captured by Japanese marines and interned in Java.
The remaining group stayed at Long Nawang, where they were joined in April by a Dutch army group of 40 men. A number of missionaries from the US and a priest, Father Joseph Feldbrugge, also sought refuge there in August. On 19 August, news arrived of a Japanese raiding party hacking its way through the jungle and getting closer to Long Nawang.
The commander of the post dismissed the news, thinking the approaching group was actually a retreating Dutch unit, and took no further action. His decision was fatal. Soon after, 70 Japanese soldiers reached Long Nawang and took control of the post. By midday, the surviving men had been executed.
A month later, the women were dragged to a nearby location and bayoneted to death, including Mrs McPherson and her infant child. Investigators later heard the children were made to climb nearby trees, then allowed to drop from exhaustion onto upturned bayonets.
The Long Nawang massacre has been described as one of the worst brutalities of the Japanese occupation of Borneo. But, despite post-war investigations, the Japanese officers who were responsible for this atrocity were never identified, nor was there any war trial.
The story has been put together by Melissa Murphy, whose grandfather, Desmond Verdon Murphy (1894-1942), was among those killed. For more than 60 years, the circumstances of his death remained a mystery. The last anyone had heard of him was when he was on duty in Sarawak with the Brooke police. His tragic story became known to his family only after Melissa started to investigate the disappearance of her grandfather.
Desmond Verdon Murphy was born in Dublin in 1894. His father, Major John Murphy (1866-1933), was born in Catherine Street, Limerick, on 10 November 1866, and was baptised in Saint John’s Church, Limerick. is mother, Frances Amelia Spearman (1866-1948), was born at 8 Guildford Place, off North Strand Road, Dublin, on 30 December 1866. They were married in North Strand Church, Dublin, on 22 June 1893, when they were then living at 154 North Strand Road, and the witnesses at the wedding were James Lewis and Dorinda Jones.
Frances and John Murphy were the parents of one son, Desmond Murphy, and three daughters, Moya, Nina and Erris. Desmond was born at 75 Clonliffe Road, Dublin, on 2 May 1894, when he was resigistered as Desmond Vernon Murphy, and baptised in North Strand Church, Dublin, on 10 June 1894, when he was resigistered as Desmond Verdon Murphy. Frances Murphy’s sister Mary had married Julian Verdon in 1880, and so Verdon rather than Vernon appears to be his correct middle name.
At the time, John Murphy was a colour sergeant and staff clerk in the army at the Royal Military Hospital in Kilmainham. By 1899, the Murphy family was living in Clontarf. John was promoted from the ranks to an assistant commissary and honorary lieutenant in the Army Ordnance Department in 1906. His records from World War I have not survived, but he retired as a major in 1920 and died in Bath in 1933; Frances Murphy died in 1948.
Desmond Murphy was educated at Hutton Grammar School, Preston, and then studied electrical engineering. He joined the army at the outbreak of World War I in 1914, and was commissioned in December. He was sent to France with the Scottish Rifles in 1916, but was later sent home from due to sickness.
Family sources say that after World War I, Desmond Murphy joined the police in South Africa and then Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), although this has not been confirmed.
Murphy arrived in Sarawak in the mid-1920s, and joined the Brooke constabulary. He was promoted first to Superintendent of Police (1929), and then to Commissioner and Superintendent of Prisons (1933), before becoming Superintendent of Police at Sibu.
Local people recognised Murphy as a Tuan or respected person, and he married a local woman, Siti Sulastry binti Sulaiman, who was born in Java. They were the parents of three sons: two son died as infants, but the middle child, Michael Murphy, who was born in 1937, survived and was Melissa Murphy’s father.
When World War II broke out, Desmond and Siti were advised to blend in with the local people. But his family never hear again from Desmond, and he was officially listed as ‘missing in action’ after World War II. As an impoverished war widow, Siti raised her young son Michael in their humble stilted wooden home in Kampung Jawa, now Jalan P Ramlee, in Kuching, probably unaware that her mother-in-law, Frances Murphy, was still living until 1948.
Melissa Murphy had pieced together a few details of his final days. With the help of Roger Nixon, a London-based researcher, she located the death entry for Desmond Murphy in a Colonial Office register and found his other files.
The Colonial Office records showed Desmond Murphy was killed by the Japanese in September 1942 in Long Nawang. Sadly, the news came too late for his widow Siti, who died in 2001 without knowing what happened to her husband.
Their research also showed that all the casualties were originally buried at Long Nawang in two mass graves. They were reburied in 1950 on Tarakan Island in east Borneo in a cemetery called ‘Field of Honour’. That cemetery later fell into disuse and they were reinterred yet again in 1967 when they were moved to Kembang Kuning War Cemetery in Surabaya, Java.
Michael Murphy had long dreamt of visiting his father’s grave in Surabaya, but died in February 2012. Since then, his daughter Melissa has made extraordinary efforts to erect the Long Nawang Memorial at the Batu Litang Teachers’ Training College in Kuching. It was finally unveiled two years ago, on 21 July 2022.
