Jan Maclure’s Escape to Chungking

Below is the cover and a colour illustration from the author Jan Maclure’s Escape to Chungking, published by the Oxford University Press in 1942. This is an interesting book as little is known about the author yet it was widely read at the time of publication and was what would now be called a Young Adult “YA” book – this copy was given to my aunt (then a teenager) shortly after the war. The book deals with the fall (then very recent) of Singapore and Malaya to the Japanese – the book is dedicated to “Friends who have not yet got out”. A 14 year old boy carries secrets across war torn Asia from Japan to Chungking (China’s war time capital) and the detail is rather good. The book has a variety of black and white illustrations (by Jack Matthews) and one colour print at the start (shown below).

Maclure herself remains a mystery with no other published books credited to that name and “Jan” may be a pseudonym so we can’t even be sure of the author’s gender. OUP, rather sloppily, have apparently destroyed their records from that period!

And that’s all I know….(though Owen Dudley Edwards’s British Children’s Fiction in the Second World War has more details)