A man for all seasons
Jack Gallichan was born in Palmerston North in 1908 and attended Palmerston North Boys’ High School.
He was a capable senior cricketer and played 19 games for Manawatū from 1926 to 1950. He had an enormous passion for cricket as well as many other sports.
During the 1920s and 1930s, Gallichan was the scorer and official statistician for the Manawatū Cricket Association, and was involved with cricket administration in Manawatū from 1937 until 1969, serving 10 years as chairman of the management committee, and two years as secretary. He was a life member of the United Cricket Club and the Manawatū Cricket Association.
For 30 years, Gallichan was the distribution agent for the Manawatū Evening Standard. When he retired in 1981, he estimated that 1000 boys and girls had worked for him delivering the newspaper.
I wonder how many of the paper boys and girls and fellow cricketers knew of his wartime experiences and his contributions as an author, diarist, editor and historian.
The focus of this article is how his experience during World War II made the local cricket correspondent into a writer with a national impact.
Private Jack Gallichan, a bachelor all his life, left New Zealand in September 1941, aged 33, with the Seventh Reinforcements. He was captured at El Alamein on July 15, 1942.
As a prisoner, there were moves from Benghazi to Camp Ara Fredda high up in the Apennines in Italy with 300 other New Zealanders.
The prisoners remained until September 1943, when Italy surrendered. On release, they tried to make their way to the advancing British lines.
Gallichan and six other New Zealanders with Red Cross parcels for food found shelter on a ledge above a 12th-century church. They then moved, packing their belongings on to a woodcutter’s donkey, and climbed over the Apennines and down the other side, only to find Germans everywhere.
Cold and weak, they retreated to their hideout, with Italian families risking their lives to provide food.
Eventually, on November 5, 1943, they were recaptured by a German patrol. From then on, Gallichan moved through a series of transition camps, ending up on July 4, 1944 in a coal-mining camp, Stalag E535 at Milowitz in Poland.
Here, 500 New Zealand POWs worked in dangerous, cold conditions alongside Polish miners and a few English, Spanish and Cypriot prisoners. Gallichan was at the camp until January 1945.
At Stalag E535, the Tiki Times, the camp newspaper, was born. In all, 25 issues were published. The paper was born of a desire to help break the monotony of camp life, but quickly flourished with the discovery of artistic and literary talent among the POWs.
Gallichan, the originator of the idea, was the editor. Pat Earle, of Lower Hutt, was the subeditor, and Max Wallace of Whanganui had the role of art editor.
Later on, John Phillips drew some amazing illustrations. Each issue had to be hand-printed using pen and ink, and its camp humour, often at the expense of the Germans, proved to be a great morale booster.
Gallichan said: “I was engaged 12 hours a day in the coal mines and then spent six hours writing up the Tiki Times. It came out every Wednesday, just the one copy, which was pinned up on the boards.”
The Tiki Times was written on 12 foolscap pages, and stuck up on a backboard with gold corners. A tiki and a mere painted in deep green and red were always on the first page.
Every man in the camp had a story to tell, and some were recorded in this unique publication. It included snippets of information from New Zealand, humorous and other incidents from camp life, verse, political discussions, and quality artwork. The Germans never found out about the newspaper – but in case they did, each sheet was branded with a fake censorship stamp.
The following extract provides a sense of Gallichan’s quirky sense of humour: “This will settle all arguments: Wellington's new cemetery is situated at Glenside, between Tawa Flat and
Johnsonville. Personally, we don’t want to know where it is.”
When the Russians advanced on Krakow, Gallichan was part of the famous 1100-kilometre forced march towards the Sudetenland and the Allies. He packed all the issues of the Tiki Times into a backpack that he carried for three months before giving them to a wounded POW, who took them to England.
Only 320 of the men survived out of the 577 who started the journey.
Often in hiding with SS soldiers nearby, they could only whisper. This played on their nerves, with Gallichan saying: “You felt you wanted to scream.”
Tragically, as they were crossing a bridge close to the Allied lines, the Americans began a bombing raid. A bomb landed 15 yards behind Gallichan and he was bowled head over heels, finishing up alongside a church. In all, 21 of his fellow prisoners lost their lives.
Finally, they reached the American lines and safety, and were flown back to England. Gallichan came home, bringing with him the Tiki Times and an 856-page diary covering his experiences as a POW.
On Saturday, August 6, 1945, on a special train of 500 former POWs, Gallichan finally arrived back In Palmerston North, along with a number of other men from the district.
On September 11, after three years of recess, he convened a meeting to reform the United Cricket Club. On September 19, the club started the new season with him as chairman.
For many POWs, readjusting to life in New Zealand was very challenging and different to the experiences of those servicemen and women who had remained in active service. Many felt that no-one could really understand what they had been through.
That was a reason for Gallichan in 1950 to reproduce his camp newspaper. A booklet, The Tiki Times: A Souvenir Booklet of the Camp Newspaper for Prisoners-of-war, was printed in Palmerston North by Keeling & Mundy Ltd, and distributed to the men who had been prisoners at E535.
In an interview, he noted that the republication was designed to “take casual readers into the life of a POW working camp, but it will never be able to take them into the hearts of prisoners-of-war, where only supreme optimism could crowd out the hopelessness and bitterness of a life full of hunger and scheming, of longing and hope, and of resignation to the overlordship of a brutish foe”.
The Tiki Times has become a focus of academic studies by historian Matthew Johnson in journals such as Veterans Studies on the role and impact of the publication on identity and remembrance amongst POWs.
Thinking about his unpublished diaries, titled Barbed Wired Days, and held in the Alexander Turnbull Library, Gallichan hoped readers would be interested in his experience and be convinced that captivity was “a most exacting existence in which human beings grade themselves either as men or as rats, is full of monotony and privation, and a longing to regain the shelter of home that seems so far away”.
Gallichan’s need to chronicle his shared experiences led him to other publishing ventures associated with the Wanderers cricket tours he used to organise in the 1950s over Christmas – but that is another story.