John Hewlett Nunneley

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(22 November 1922 – 27 July 2013) was a British Army officer and businessman. A veteran of the Burma campaign, he later worked for reconciliation between Japanese and British. He was born in

Sydney Sydney ( ) is the capital city of the state of New South Wales, and the most populous city in both Australia and Oceania. Located on Australia's east coast, the metropolis surrounds Sydney Harbour and extends about towards the Blue Mountain ...

, Australia and educated at Lawrence Sheriff School, a

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, England. He concealed his age to enlist in the

Buffs (Royal East Kent Regiment) The Buffs (Royal East Kent Regiment), formerly the 3rd Regiment of Foot, was a line infantry regiment of the British Army traditionally raised in the English county of Kent and garrisoned at Canterbury. It had a history dating back to 1572 and ...

at 17 and was commissioned into the Somerset Light Infantry in September 1941. He was seconded to the King's African Rifles (KAR) and mostly served with a battalion recruited from the Tanganyika Territory. He was initially based in

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where his battalion guarded Italian prisoners after the East African Campaign. He moved to

Ceylon Sri Lanka (, ; si, ශ්‍රී ලංකා, Śrī Laṅkā, translit-std=ISO (); ta, இலங்கை, Ilaṅkai, translit-std=ISO ()), formerly known as Ceylon and officially the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, is an ...

in August 1943 while attached to 25th (East African) Brigade headquarters at Kurunegala. He rejoined 36 KAR when it was posted to Ceylon and accompanied it to India and Burma. In 1944 the battalion spearheaded the advance of the Fourteenth Army down the Kabaw Valley. While in Burma he recovered a Union Jack flag that had been captured by the Japanese at

Singapore Singapore (), officially the Republic of Singapore, is a sovereign island country and city-state in maritime Southeast Asia. It lies about one degree of latitude () north of the equator, off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, borde ...

in February 1942. Serving as an Intelligence Officer, he was wounded in the leg by a grenade on 17 October 1944. After the war, Nunneley worked for

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and as a director of the British Railways Board from 1962 to 1987. As chief publicity officer, he worked as

Dr Beeching Richard Beeching, Baron Beeching (21 April 1913 – 23 March 1985), commonly known as Dr Beeching, was a physicist and engineer who for a short but very notable time was chairman of British Railways. He became a household name in Britain in the ...

's assistant on writing "The Reshaping of British Railways" report (1963). In later life he was chairman of the Burma Campaign Fellowship Group and worked towards reconciliation between Burma veterans of Japan and the Allies. He wrote an account of his wartime experiences and of the death of a young Luo recruit Tomasi Kitinya (Thomas Liech) in ''Tales from the King’s African Rifles'' (2000). He had earlier edited ''Tales from the Burma Campaign 1942-45'' (1998) from accounts of Japanese soldiers. In 2001 he was appointed

for services to UK-Japanese relations."Queen's Birthday Honours"
BBC News 15 June 2001

References

External links

Obituary in ''The Times'', 25 September 2013
(paywall) {{DEFAULTSORT:Nunneley, John 1922 births 2013 deaths People educated at Lawrence Sheriff School King's African Rifles officers Somerset Light Infantry officers British Army personnel of World War II British Rail people Members of the Order of the British Empire People from Richmond, London Australian emigrants to the United Kingdom