Winston Ide was the first and only Wallaby of Japanese descent, a man his teammates would have followed anywhere. While Winston Ide starved working in brutal conditions on the Thai-Burma Railway as a prisoner of the Japanese, Australia imprisoned his 79-year-old father as an enemy alien.
Dalkeith Street, Northbridge, is a quiet and leafy street in one of the wealthiest pockets of Sydney’s lower north shore. A century ago the grandest house on it belonged to a Japanese silk merchant.
He called it ‘Nikko’, after the mountain temple town north of Tokyo, and he built it with a grass tennis court and a cherry orchard.
When the local Anglicans had nowhere to worship he opened his home and held their church services in it until their church was built.
The owner of ‘Nikko’ was Hideichiro Ide, though everyone in Northbridge called him Henry. His youngest son was called Winston, though nobody called him that either.
From the time he was a toddler with a habit of puffing out his cheeks and blowing the air out sharply, Winston was nicknamed Blow. Blow Ide.
And for one remarkable winter in 1938, Blow Ide of Dalkeith Street was a Wallaby, the first and only Australian of Japanese descent to play Test rugby for his country.
* * *
Henry Ide left the town of Saga on the island of Kyushu in 1890. He was twenty-six years old, one of eight children, and set sail for Sydney to make his fortune.
He made it in silk, importing the fine Japanese cloth that Australian drapers and dressmakers couldn’t get enough of. He married an Australian woman, Clara Miles, and in 1902 he was naturalised, his papers witnessed by two wholesale grocers he did business with, Edward Hordern and John Barrow.
He was an inventor on the side, lodging a patent application with a Dr Tsunehiro Kubokawa for an improved apparatus for the external application of medicine, a document that still sits in the national archives.
The Ides were among more than three hundred Japanese-Australian families in Sydney between the wars and few did better.
The Ides produced seven children, four boys and three girls, raised on beach trips and bush picnics. They attended Fort Street Primary School, North Sydney Boys and Monte Sant’ Angelo.
Their third son, Charlie, became an engineer and worked on the design of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. A daughter, Tama, turned up in the social pages of The Sun. It was a thriving Sydney family in every sense.
The youngest Ide boy built his name a different way. Winston came through North Sydney Boys with a strong low tackle and no fear. From 1933 he played first grade for Northern Suburbs, helping Norths to the 1935 Sydney premiership.
His form and potential attracted the attention of representative selectors and he played for New South Wales five times across 1935 and 1936.
Then in 1937 the selectors dropped him, and Winston did what ambitious footballers have always done when a team stops picking them.
He moved to a team that would provide him with opportunity and in this case it was a move north of the border to Queensland.
* * *
At the Great Public Schools club in Brisbane he was a revelation.
Queensland picked him almost immediately, and the writers of the day settled on the same words every time they watched him.
Syd King, himself a fourteen-Test Wallaby centre of the 1920s who became a rugby writer for Sydney’s Daily Mirror, left the definitive portrait:
“Sturdily built, of medium height, he was not particularly fast, but had a nippiness and speed off the mark.”
“Most of all he had great courage, and his low, hard tackling and fearless going down on the ball in the face of charging forwards won him many admirers.”
The New Zealand All Blacks arrived in Queensland in the winter of 1938. Queensland lost to them 30 points to 9, but Ide’s defence held its shape and impressed the selectors.
When the second Test came around at the Exhibition Ground in Brisbane on 6 August, injuries and a late withdrawal opened the door.
Ide was named at outside centre, a position he rarely played, and became Wallaby number 317, as Rugby Australia’s honour roll records him to this day.
He was one of four debutants that afternoon, and one of the others was Cecil Ramalli, a teenager of mixed Punjabi and Aboriginal descent from Mungindi on the border of NSW and Queensland.
Neither Winston nor Cecil could have known they had just become the first Wallabies of Asian heritage. The milestone passed unnoticed that afternoon by a Brisbane crowd interested only in seeing New Zealand beaten.
Sadly, Winston and Cecil came up short in their debut which New Zealand won 20 to 14 in a fast, open game. Despite the loss the newspapers singled out the debutant centre Winston Ide whose attack and defence, after a nervous opening, had been outstanding.
A week later at the Sydney Cricket Ground, on a hard ground on a hot day in front of twenty thousand fans, Winston kept his spot for the third Test. The All Blacks won again but it didn’t harm his ongoing prospects.
The Australian selectors had seen enough, and when the squad was named for the 1939 tour of Great Britain, Winston ‘Blow’ Ide of Northbridge and Brisbane was in it.
* * *
The 1939 Wallabies are one of Australian sport’s great hard-luck stories.
Twenty-nine of them sailed out of Sydney on the Mooltan on 21 July, farewelled by former prime minister Billy Hughes, bound for a glorious ten-month tour and twenty-eight matches.
They trained every day on deck under their captain Vay Wilson, a 26-year-old Queensland mathematics master with a degree in mental and moral philosophy.
In the saloon at night Stan Bisset, a baritone good enough for the Melbourne conservatorium, sang while Andrew Barr played the squeezebox.
Ide, by every account, was in the middle of everything.
The tour profiles measured him at five foot eight and eleven stone seven, counted his 85 first-grade games for Norths, where he had played five-eighth outside Eric Gibbons, a clubmate now sailing beside him as one of the tour’s halfbacks.
He was introduced to readers as “Australian born of Japanese parents”. His mother Clara, Sydney born and bred, had disappeared from her own son’s story. Even at the peak of his fame, the papers could not see past his name.
They docked at Plymouth on the first of September after forty-two days at sea.
Britain declared war on Germany two days later and not one of the twenty-eight matches was ever played.
The disappointed Wallabies did their share, filling sandbags and stacking them around the Grand Hotel at Torquay.
They were rewarded with a chauffeured cider crawl through the West Country, were received by the King and Queen at Buckingham Palace, and sailed home, stopping only to play a scratch Gymkhana XV in Bombay.
The National Film and Sound Archive holds footage of them, young and fit and laughing, the abandoned tourists of 1939.
Within a year almost the entire squad was in uniform.
* * *
Ide enlisted in the Australian Army at Kelvin Grove in Brisbane on the first of July 1940.
He was posted to the 2/10th Field Regiment, Royal Australian Artillery, alongside a cluster of his Queensland teammates, and sent to Malaya.
Before he left, he announced his engagement to a young woman named Heather Reynolds. The wedding would wait until he came home.
In January 1942 his unit took part in the successful ambush of Japanese forces near Mersing, and in the desperate defence of Singapore his gunners fired more than two thousand rounds.
It wasn’t close to enough. On 15 February 1942 Singapore fell, and Bombardier Winston Ide, QX13648, became one of forty-five thousand Australian and British troops marched into captivity in the worst military disaster in Australian history.
Winston was placed in the Changi Prisoner of War Camp.
Ten days later, in the city he grew up in, in the country he’d been defending, the Australian Government arrested his father.
* * *
Henry Ide was seventy-nine when the military police came to ‘Nikko’ in Northbridge on 25 February 1942.
Henry was one of more than a thousand Japanese Australians rounded up in the months after Pearl Harbour. He had lived in Australia for fifty-two years, been a naturalised subject for forty and raised seven Australian children.
His son Harrie was serving with the AIF in the Middle East. His youngest daughter Tama had enlisted as a truck driver with the Australian Women’s Army Service. His son Taki had joined the Volunteer Defence Corps.
Two of his sons-in-law, one of them a veteran of Gallipoli and the Western Front, had signed up as well, one for the army and one for the air force. Clara knitted and sewed for the Northbridge Soldiers Comfort Fund.
And Winston, at that moment, was somewhere in the smoking ruins of Singapore, though his family did not know if he was alive.
None of this commitment to Australia mattered.
Henry had been born Japanese, and after Pearl Harbour that was the whole of the case against him. He was taken first to Liverpool and then six hundred kilometres west to the internment camp at Hay, out on the treeless Riverina plain.
As an old man he was separated from his family and entered a wired compound system that already held Italian prisoners and the Jewish refugees of the famous ship Dunera.
* * *
Henry Ide formally appealed the internment.
His hearing came at Hay itself, on Monday 18 May 1942 at 2.15 in the afternoon, before an Advisory Committee of three: W.H. Sharwood in the chair, J.W.K. Freeman and F.J. Quinlan alongside him, with Captain O.J. Gillard appearing for the Minister of State for the Army.
The National Archives still holds the Crown transcript. Across a dozen typed pages it records the Commonwealth of Australia formally weighing how Japanese one old man was.
It begins with the chairman’s first question. “You speak English, do not you?”
“Why should not I? I have been here 52 years,” Henry replied.
The formalities rolled on. “You are a Japanese by birth?”
“Yes, I was born in Japan.”
“Japan is at war with Australia, and you have been interned because of your Japanese race?” “Yes.”
Asked his religion, he told them he was Presbyterian.
Asked what he had to tell the tribunal, the old man answered, “Well, I have nothing.” What, after fifty-two years, was there left to prove?
So it fell to Captain Gillard to establish his Japaneseness, and the transcript preserves every strange turn of the attempt.
At one point the two of them debate whether Gillard would enjoy the food aboard a Japanese freighter. “I do not know; you might; you might not,” Henry offered.
“It all depends on the cook.”
Gillard pressed him on his invitations to the Japanese Consulate for the Emperor’s Birthday and the New Year, then on his standing among his own people.
“Would it be correct to say that you were a leading member of the Japanese community?”
“No, I am not such a leading member; I am only the old resident here.” Henry replied.
Gillard asked again, and Henry gave him the honest answer of an elder.
“Of course, I am the oldest; they all respect me.”
Then came the final question, tossed in like an afterthought at a man with one son in Palestine and another missing in Singapore.
“By the way, what country do you want to win the war, Australia or Japan?”
“Goodness knows; I do not know. How would I know?”
With Henry out of the room, Gillard summed up for the Crown.
“There is no doubt he regards himself as a Japanese, irrespective of his naturalisation,” he submitted.
That the Japanese community of Sydney received Henry as one of their own was used as evidence against him.
So, astonishingly, were his children in Australian Army uniform: “The fact that his son has answered the call is, I think, irrelevant, because it is not his act, when it is all said and done. It may be the proper spirit of his wife.”
Gillard conceded he was “a pleasant old gentleman”, but against that weighed his contact with the Japanese, their acceptance of him, and finally what he called “his obvious Japanese personality”.
The tribunal agreed. Its finding recorded that against Henry’s personal character there was “nothing but commendation to be offered”, and that his family “has displayed sentiments which are more Australian than Japanese”.
It ruled all the same that he could draw no “reflected glory or reflected righteousness” from his serving children, and that as a past president of the Nippon Jin Kai and a guest of the Consulate he had kept too intimate a connection with the country of his birth.
“We think that, in his outlook and surroundings, he is thoroughly Japanese. Should any secret agent or other emissary of Japan visit Sydney, we feel that his name would be one of the first on a list of people to be interviewed.”
In the acute circumstances of the war, they concluded, it was safer for him to stay behind the wire, and they refused him “very regretfully”, which may be the most Australian touch in the whole file.
At the foot of the final page, underlined in the Crown’s own copy, sit two words: LEAVE REFUSED.
* * *
Back in Northbridge the war came to the family in smaller ways.
Neighbours and strangers phoned in tipoffs about persons of Japanese appearance seen at the house visiting Clara or their children or transacting at the family’s business. The police would come around, interview the Ides again and file another report saying the family posed no risk.
Then they would come around again the next time somebody rang.
And the file did not stop at the father.
It later emerged that the authorities had been quietly investigating Blow himself for possible sympathies toward Japan, on no grounds beyond his blood.
While he wore his country’s uniform into captivity, his country was still asking whose side he was on.
Henry appealed a second time, and this time Northbridge itself stood up for him.
With the support of the community whose church services had once been held in his living room, he was released on New Year’s Day 1943 into house arrest at home, reporting to the security service monthly.
This arrangement would be in place until November 1946, more than a year after the war ended, by which time he was eighty-three.
He was home long enough to see his son Harrie pass through on his way to fight in New Guinea.
And he was home when the telegram arrived that told the family Blow was alive, and a prisoner of the Japanese.
What that telegram could not say was where his son Winston had been.
In May 1942 he had been shipped north with ‘A Force’ as slave labour on the Burma-Thailand railway, into the cuttings and embankments and cholera camps that killed prisoners by the thousand.
His family carried a particular dread through those years: that the Japanese would work out whose son he was and single him out as a traitor to their race.
It never happened.
Historian Kevin Blackburn, whose book ‘Sportsmen of Changi’ traces the fates of the athletes taken at Singapore, records that Ide was treated no differently from any other prisoner.
It is unknown to this day whether his captors ever learnt his ancestry.
He is believed to be one of only three Allied soldiers of Japanese descent taken prisoner by Japan in the entire war, alongside Japanese-Americans Frank Fujita and Richard Sakakida.
He survived two years of terrifying conditions building the Burma-Thai Railway, where the soldiers overworked, malnourished and riddled with disease.
When the line was completed, Winston was returned to Singapore with the other survivors.
* * *
In September 1944, Winston and his fellow POWs were herded aboard the Rakuyo Maru, one of the unmarked transport ships the prisoners called hellships.
The Rakuyo Maru was part of a convoy bound for Japan, where he was to be sent down the coal mines near Nagasaki.
On 12 September 1944, five days short of his thirtieth birthday, the convoy crossed the path of American submarines in the South China Sea.
The USS Sealion, with no way of knowing who the transports carried, put a torpedo into the Rakuyo Maru.
The ship took twelve hours to go down and the sinking itself hurt almost nobody.
The open sea was the killer.
The Japanese crew took the lifeboats, the prisoners had few lifejackets, and the water was sheeted with burning oil from the convoy’s tankers.
Over a thousand skeletal men who had survived Changi and building the railway went into that water clinging to rafts and hatch covers and each other.
Winston Ide could swim. He had grown up on the harbour.
One survivor set down what he saw:
“Those of us who escaped from the sinking Rakuyo Maru clambered onto rafts. I spotted Blow in the water and called for him to join us, as there was room for another.”
“Blow shouted back that some of the boys near him were pretty badly hurt and he would stick by them.”
The raft drifted on.
And the last words spoken by Winston ‘Blow’ Ide that came home to the family, the ones his mates repeated for the rest of their lives, were these.
When asked to join one of the rafts, Winston said:
“No, mate. I’m staying here to help my mates. In any case, I can swim to Australia if I have to.”
Winston was one of 1,167 Australian and British prisoners who perished after the Rakuyo Maru went down.
A handful were plucked from the sea in the days that followed, some by the Sealion itself, whose crew learnt only then what their torpedoes had created.
Winston Ide was never seen again.
It took nearly two months for the news to come home, carried back with the traumatised survivors the American submarines had lifted from the water.
On 8 November 1944, Sydney’s Sun ran five short paragraphs under the heading ‘Test Union Player Dead’.
The last paragraph held a detail that rocked the family further. Ide had been engaged, the paper noted, to Lieutenant Heather Reynolds who was:
“now reported missing, believed to be dead”.
By the time Australia learnt he was gone, it believed the woman he was to marry was gone too.
His teammates did not forget him.
In 1947 they created the Blow Ide Memorial Cup, awarded to the winner of the annual North Sydney and South Sydney trial match, and it was played for until the 1970s, when it quietly lapsed like a thousand other annual trophies.
Winston’s name was carved into the memorial at Labuan war cemetery, located on a small Malaysian Island off the coast of Borneo, taking his place among the 1,559 prisoners lost from the two hellships.
And what of his fiancee Heather Reynolds?
The report was wrong. She survived the war that took her man.
The proof sits in the In Memoriam columns of the Sydney Morning Herald of September 1947, three years to the day after the Rakuyo Maru went down, in among the ranks of small sad notices:
“In honoured memory of my beloved fiancee, Bombardier Winston Phillip James Ide (Blowie). Lost his life whilst P.O.W. on torpedoed Japanese transport. Sadly missed by his loving fiancee Heather Reynolds.”
Beneath it sat a second notice, unsigned, for the same man: “Sadly missed. Memories remain undimmed.”
Three years on, with the war over and the world moving forward, she was still his fiancee. She never became Mrs Ide and with no known descendants, there was nobody to carry his line forward.
After the war the Ide family were exempted from the deportations to Japan and they left Nikko and moved north to Gosford on the NSW Central Coast.
Henry Ide died broken-hearted three years later, and his descendants live on today in Sydney and Canberra, still rugby union fans.
In 2013, the Australian War Memorial told Blow’s story at its daily Last Post Ceremony, his name one of more than a hundred thousand on the Roll of Honour.
His story was given its few minutes in the fading Canberra light.
Although Winston ‘Blow’ Ide was largely forgotten in Australian rugby history, the country whose army worked him half to death remembers him well.
In Japan, Winston Ide is held up as a rugby role model.
His life inspired a 1993 novel by Tsutomu Kaniya, its title roughly translating as The Fatal Full-Time, and in 2010, a Japanese television producer turned it into a documentary.
Historian Kevin Blackburn put the cruellest truth of it plainly.
He wrote that Winston: “died without knowing that government officials of his country did not have the confidence in him and his family that his rugby union mates had.”
His friends wrote his epitaph, and it needs no improving.
It read: “Blow Ide died as he had always played, for his team.”
Patrick Skene is an author and writer who is happiest exploring sport history, culture and community. He can be found on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrick-skene/
Incredible story, thank you so much for sharing.