Dr Terry Smyth

Biography

I was born and bred in Essex, but now live in Suffolk. My professional life divides into three parts: a career in the health service, followed by further and higher education. After early retirement in 2003, I spent eight years as a freelance education consultant working with local, regional and national clients. During WWII, my father was a POW in Java and Japan. Many years after his death in 1995, I discovered he had spent 3 years incarcerated in a POW camp called Hiroshima 6B, approximately 115 kilometres from Hiroshima, slaving as a coal miner, where he felt the rumble of the atomic bomb. Assisted by Japanese friends, I travelled to Japan in 2010 and 2014 to visit the site of my father’s camp, and to foster reconciliation. For more information see: https://www.facebook.com/TwoweeksinJapan A series of serendipitous events inspired me to undertake a full time PhD at the University of Essex (2013-2017), where I was fortunate to discover, in Professor Michael Roper and Dr. Mark Frost, two supervisors closely attuned to my own interests. In 2020, I accepted a book contract with Bloomsbury Academic. The book draws on my PhD research and examines the lifetime legacy of having a father who had been a prisoner of the Japanese in the Second World War. The title is 'Captive Fathers, Captive Children' and was published in November 2022, and the paperback version in July 2023. Since December 2017, I have been a Community Fellow in the History Department from which base I continue to pursue my scholarly work, and to extend local and wider networks for the benefit of the department and university as a whole. I have taken a particular interest in the consequences of the closure of two local hospitals - Severalls Hospital and Essex County Hospital - including prompting and then contributing to events to mark the closures. I have disseminated the results of my research on the children of Far East Prisoners of War to local community groups, for example Colchester Recalled, as well as to international audiences (the Netherlands, Japan and UK). Currently, I am working on unique oral history and memoir material that connects a local family with late colonial life in the tea estates of Sri Lanka. This, I believe, could be expanded into new contexts and geographies, so as to uncover fresh local/global histories.

Qualifications

• PhD Sociology University of Essex, (2017)

• MA Educational Management and Administration University of East Anglia, (1986)

• BA (Psychology, Sociology and Education) Open University, (1982)

Appointments

University of Essex

• Honorary Senior Lecturer, School of Health and Human Sciences, University of Essex (1/1/2011 - 1/1/2013)

• Community Fellow, History, University of Essex (1/12/2017 - 1/2/2025)

Other academic

• Visiting Fellow, Institute of Health and Social Care, Anglia Ruskin University (2005 - 2006)

• Project Leader for Interprofessional Learning, Institute of Health and Social Care, Anglia Ruskin University (2004 - 2005)

• Head of Faculty, Faculty of Music Arts and Health, Colchester Institute (1985 - 2003)

• Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Royal Historical Society (5/6/2023 - present)