Spring 2005 Volume 3 No. 1 Page 2
THIS ISSUE PAGES
Jimmy Rackham is centre back and George "Bunny" Austin is left front. Photo by kind permission of Bunny Austin
IT'S A SMALL WORLD
by Tony Rackham
Betty and I have not been TAS members for very long and so many of you probably don’t know us by name yet. Then in December Roy Fisher showed you his lovely pictures and mentioned that we are keen photographers too. Hearing our name made Bunny Austin prick his ears up and at the tea interval he asked me if I was related to ‘Jimmy Rackham’. My father was Edward James Rackham but was always known as Jim and it turned out that the two of them were in the Royal Corps of Signals together in the Burma Campaign. In fact in 1943 they spent some time together in the Assam jungle at Imphal, Bunny as a wireless operator and my Dad looking after the equipment. Bunny was one of four operators manning the radios and Jim spent a lot of his time half a mile away in the jungle looking after the transmitter.
Now my father was a Classics graduate and a junior school teacher who steered well clear of any DIY. It is true that after the War he could fix those old valve radios we had then but it is difficult to imagine him maintaining a vital communication link for the 14th Army. Anyway since then Bunny, who has a very good memory, has been telling us many of the things that Dad never said. I didn’t know that the airstrip was bombed repeatedly or that at one time the area was surrounded by the Japanese. Bunny has produced photographs of the men in ‘the Section’[see right] and of the Station’s football team. I have less trouble imagining Dad playing football as he later taught me to play.
Probably the most amazing things to appear so far have been the drawings my father sent me when I was 4 and 5. I pasted them into a scrapbook and have treasured them ever since. Two of them are drawings showing where the men were in the jungle and the rest are really fine pictures of the planes the British flew. My Dad did the scenic pictures but it was Bunny himself who drew the planes. I had always wondered who ‘G.A.’ was and Bunny had never thought he would see them again after 62 years.
