Improvised billy can with lid: Sister Nancy Law, Church Missionary Society, Fukushima Internment Camp, Japan

Small improvised billy can with lid, and a carrying handle with a wooden grip attached to the upper edges of the can. A further handle is attached to the side of the can, as well as a small one to the lid itself. Made from a tin which originally contained an American product, Wilson & Co's B-V meat extract, the body of the billy and the lid are constructed from single can. The upper rim of the billy and rim of the lid have been hand rolled. The three handles have been hand folded from tin cut from a separate can. The handle on the lid is attached with metal tabs folded through slots cut in the lid; the large side handle on the body of the billy is folded under the lower edge and slotted under the hand made fold of the upper rim; the carrying handle is attached to metal tabs slotted under the upper rim.

Billy can improvised from commercial cans, used by Sister Nancy 'Annie' Law in the Fukushima Internment Camp in Japan.

Nancy Law was born in England on 13 January 1888; she was the niece of the Reverend T Law of Victoria who together with his wife, the former Miss L M Heywood, undertook missionary work in the Diocese of Lucknow in the north of India. During the First World War Nancy Law served with the Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service. After the war, she continued with her nursing when she joined the Church Missionary Society (CMS) as a nurse, working at the Ranaghat Hospital, located in the district of Nadia, West Bengal in India.

In 1941, Law took over a year’s furlough from nursing and rather than travelling to England (which was considered too dangerous during wartime) she travelled to Australia, embarking from Colombo (Sri Lanka) TSS Awatea, arriving in Melbourne on 24 January 1941. She stayed at Canterbury (in Melbourne) with the Setford family, who had a relative (Stella Setford), also nursing at the Ranaghat CMS Hospital.

Nancy left Melbourne in May 1942, travelling to Fremantle to board the P & O ship, SS Nankin, bound for Bombay via Colombo with a complement of 162 passengers . All was well until they reached a position about 1500 kilometres due west of Geraldton on 10 May, when they were spotted by a plane from the German raider Thor which machine gunned them, killing two Indian crewmen and wounding at least two passengers. When the raider was within 13,000 yards, at about 3:00 pm, she opened fire with 5.9 inch guns and straddled the ship, eventually scoring a hit on the bow.

The Master of the Nankin, Captain Stratford, decided to abandon ship and ordered the chief engineer to scuttle the ship, but a German boarding party managed to repair the damage done to the ship’s pipes and engines. The Nankin was taken into tow, and the passengers and crew were transferred to the Thor. On 15 May the passengers and crew were transferred to the Regensberg and the Nankin was emptied of stores. Selected passengers from the Nankin were allowed to return to her briefly to collect personal belongings and Sister Law took the opportunity to retrieve three boxes of medical supplies which she had been taking to India. The captured personnel were transferred to the fuelling ship Dresden and sailed for Yokohama in Japan. When they reached Yokohama, the prisoners were transferred to the Ramses, a prison depot ship mounted with guns. There were already prisoners aboard this ship from recent captures; most had been reasonably treated by the Germans.

On 10 July 1942, despite being prisoners of the Germans, the passengers and crew of the Nankin were informed that they were to be handed over to the Japanese. Sister Law was allowed to carry her three hospital supply boxes packed by the CMS Melbourne, which contained simple items such as aspirin, bi-carbonate of soda, bandages and syringes, but which would prove vital in the ensuing years. She was among twenty four women and eleven children in the group from the Nankin, and a total of 98 men and 42 women were transported to Fukushima from the Ramses where they were imprisoned in a converted French-Canadian convent, the women and men permanently separated. The camp was under the jurisdiction of the Japanese police, consisting of a Camp Commandant, two police sergeants and 14 to 16 police guards. This was reduced to five guards during 1944.

Treatment of the prsioners was severe, with punishments and bashings meted out by the guards. A favoured punishment was to make the internees stand in a hall for hours with all the doors open – especially onerous during winter, when the ground was covered in snow. Nancy Law recalled that there was no privacy with the Japanese following the women everywhere and spied on them in the bathroom. She was especially targeted by the guards because of her CMS hospital supplies, the guards pestering her to have drugs administered to them.

Clothing was scant, with pillow cases used as shorts and stocking unpicked and unravelled to provide cotton thread to make repairs.

With no cutlery or crockery available, the male internees made improvised plates and billy cans out of old tins and cutlery from bamboo. Although the men were strictly separated from the women, Sister Law was allowed to treat the men in the camp’s hospital, and it is suspected that this contact allowed her to obtain the billy can. She may have been the conduit through which the women of the camp were supplied with the improvised metalwork.

Food was always at a premium, the diet consisting mainly of bread and vegetable stews, with dandelions and chickweed from the garden supplementing the poor food. In March 1944 the camp received its first supply of Red Cross parcels but it wasn’t until the final weeks of the war, when American planes dropped food supplies that the diet improved markedly. Nancy Law and another nurse provided care for any who needed it – the internees were without a doctor during their entire stay.

When the war ended, Sister Law travelled to Australia aboard the British aircraft carrier, HMS Ruler and returned to stay with the Setford family in Melbourne where she recuperated for nearly 15 months. She learned that most of her friends thought she had drowned after leaving Australia in 1942, and that Nurse Stella Setford, her close friend at Ranaghat CMS Hospital had died in India on 18 April 1945 of an inoperable tumor.

Nancy Law returned to Ranaghat CMS Hospital in 1946. In November 1947 during the unrest that was the result of the partition of Indian Partition after independence, Law and two other CMS members were murdered at the hospital when an orderly 'went beserk' and shot them just after they had finished their dinner. She died of her wounds three days later, on 4 November 1947.

This billy can is one of three items Nancy Law kept from her incarceration in Japan. As related, the men of the camp made improvised plates and cups from old food tins and this billy can is an example of their work. The tin handles are expertly slotted into the tin bodywork. As meat extract was exclusively found in US Red Cross parcels the billy must have been made after March 1944.