Captain Peter Norman WITNEY (11843)
Royal Army Medical Corps

Date of birth: 31st March 1913
Date of death: 25th December 1941

Killed in action aged 28
Buried at Stanley Cemetery in Hong Kong Plot 2 Row A Collective Grave 1
He was born at Whitstable on the 31st of March 1913, the youngest son of Dr Ernest William Witney MD JP, doctor, and Lottie May (nee Lamprey) of White Croft, Marine Parade, Whitstable, Kent.

He was educated at the Junior King's School from September 1921 to July 1922, Yardley Court Preparatory School from September 1922 to 1926 and at Tonbridge School where he was in Hill Side House from 1926. He gained his School Certificate in 1929. He went on to study medicine at St John's College, Cambridge from the 9th of October 1931 where his tutor was Mr M.P. Charlesworth and he gained a BA in 1934.

He then went to Thomas' Hospital, King's College London where he gained MRCS and LRCP in 1937. He held posts as a clinical assistant in the Pathology and Children's Department at St Thomas' Hospital and as House Physician at Torbay Hospital before settling in General Practice with his brother in the family practice at White Croft, Marine Parade

Following the outbreak of war he received an emergency commission in the Royal Army Medical Corps on 23rd of November 1939 as a Lieutenant and was posted to Hong Kong. He was promoted to Captain and was serving in Hong Kong when the Japanese invaded the colony on the 8th of December 1941.

By the 24th of December 1941 the fighting had reached St Stephen's College, which was being used as a relief hospital for the many wounded from the fighting and where Peter Witney was second in command. In the hospital were sixty five patients, two nursing sisters Miss A.F. Gordon and Sister Elizabeth Appleton Fidoe, as well as six VADs, five Chinese nurses from St John's Ambulance, and a number of orderlies. That evening machine guns were placed in the grounds of the college as the allied troops fell back in front of the Japanese onslaught. Most of the staff, including Peter Witney, spent Christmas Eve night in the main hall of the building.

At 5.30am on Christmas Day morning around 150 to 200 Japanese troops broke into the hospital. Peter Witney and Lieutenant Colonel George Duncan Ralph Black OBE, along with Corporal Noble and Private Mooney RAMC went out to meet the Japanese who had begun shooting and bayoneting the patients in their beds. Black and Witney were stripped of their equipment and taken behind a nearby building. The Japanese then swept through the hospital where they murdered the wounded in their beds. Later another group arrived and raped the nurses, killing anyone who got in their way.

On the morning of the 26th of December, following the surrender of the Hong Kong garrison, the Japanese gathered together those staff and patients who were still alive and could walk and set them the task of clearing and cleaning up the area. During a search of nearby buildings the body of George Black was found in the staff lavatory and that of Peter Witney was found in the staff sitting room. Both men had been searched, and bayoneted or cut with swords. The Japanese ordered their bodies to be burned and around a hundred other bodies were gathered from the area around the hospital and disposed of in this way.

He is commemorated on the war memorial at King's College, London and on the memorials at Tonbridge School, Yardley Court Preparatory School and at St John's College, Cambridge.

Back