According to Bernice Archer, A Patchwork of Internment, (2004)there were 6 doctors in Changi Women’s Prison Camp. Among them Dr. Cecily Williams, the Commandant when Dorothy was Deputy; Dr. Margaret Hopkins, the first Commandant; and Margaret Smallwood, Dorothy’s cell-mate. One other women doctor was Robbie Worth, who was married, actually, to a planter,like Dorothy. The poem at the beginning of my Play,Looking for Mrs. Peel, is about her.

This is a bizarre embarrassment of riches,percentage-wise, but if you consider that women doctors of that era probably had trouble setting up practice in England; also that during the siege, their services would have been called up, so they would not have been evactuated like most of the other European women, then it makes some sense.

In Archer’s book, my grandmother, without getting named, gets slurred once again by an internee.

According to Archer, although the women doctors became natural leaders at Changi, they were as quickly voted out after being voted in. This is supposedly because they were seen as playing favourites (Cecily certainly liked Freddy Bloom)being on power trips and also because, in such a chaotic, claustraphobic,uncertain environment, they couldn’t perform the miracles the internees wanted. So they were voted out –"even if for the worse", writes Mary Thomas, as quoted by Archer. Hmm. Cecily was voted out and my grandmother voted in in June 1943.