Several of Churchill’s Abandoned Prisoners were part of the British Railway Mission in Siberia and Manchuria. Initially, this was led by Brigadier Archibald Jack, but he handed over to Brigadier William Beckett at the beginning of November 1919. Jack was awarded the CBE and CMG in 1919 and the CB in the Siberian Honours. In 1920, he became General Manager of the railways in Havana, Cuba. He was shot through the head by a striker, but survived this (he had already been torpedoed three times during the war) and was also a survivor of the 1927 Sevenoaks railway disaster. Beckett was awarded the CBE in the Siberian Honours despite abandoning his soldiers on the way back from Omsk. His penance was to remain behind when the British Mission closed in Vladivostok in May 1920. He continued to serve at Harbin in China as the British representative on the Inter Allied Technical Board of the Trans-Siberian Railway until 1923, for which he was awarded the distinguished Chinese Order of Chia Ho.
The leader of the prisoners-of-war, Major Leonard Vining, who had saved the lives of his men, was given neither public reward nor recognition and had his acting rank taken away from him by the War Office, while still a PoW. He published his diary and returned to his country of birth, to serve with the Indian State Railways. In the Second World War, he was eventually awarded an MBE (downgraded from a recommendation for an OBE) for his work in East Africa, where he cleared and reconstructed the port of Massawa and organised the railway and ropeway network in Eritrea.
Captain William Dempster, who had been awarded the Military Cross in 1918, returned to Canada where he became embroiled in a political scandal at the end of World War II. As a virulent anti-communist, he served in the Ontario Provincial Police Special Investigation Branch tasked to root out 5th Columnists. In this role, he compiled reports on the activities of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and opposition members of Canada’s Provincial Parliament. He was cross-examined over several days during the 1945 Royal Commission that exonerated the Drew government for knowingly spying on MPPs.
Warrant Officer Emerson MacMillan married Dallas Ireland (who had resigned as a American Red Cross nurse in Vladivostok) in London and returned to Philadelphia, where she gave birth to a son. Emerson then emigrated to Brazil with his family and developed the tram network in Sao Paolo, the financial centre of the country. During the Second World War, he kept an eye on German agents trying to persuade the Brazilian government to join the Axis and for his efforts, he was awarded an OBE in 1946.
Rupert Wieloch 