Anthony Farrar-Hockley’s The Edge of the Sword

My mother was a member of the Companion Book Club in the 1950s (before I came along) and recently I came across a box of books from the Club she must have received around the mid-50s. It included a few interesting books that feature China, though she had no personal interest in the place and they were among the more usual fodder of long-forgotten romances and things like Lorna Doone. I feel, via the Companion Club, she was a voracious reader of what George Orwell termed “Good Bad Books” in an essay. I’m not sure how much she would have enjoyed Captain Anthony Farrar-Hockley’s The Edge of the Sword, but as an occasional Korea Hand I rather liked it. It’s the story of the Gloucestershire Regiments (the Glorious Gloucesters) in the Korean War, a well known story at the time. It follows their epic battle at the Imjin River and Farrar-Hockley’s capture by the Chinese and imprisonment by them for two and a half years.

Farrar-Hockley was kept in the Pyongyang Political Prison and subjected to psychological torture before escaping out through North Korea, a quite remarkable adventure. The book comes with two interesting maps (below), one of the Battle of the Imjin River and the other of the author’s escape route.