Obituary - Andy Coogan, athlete and Japanese POW

Died: March 20, 2017

ANDY Coogan, who has died aged 99, was an inspirational athletics coach and talented runner whose dreams of Olympic glory were shattered by the ill-treatment he received as a prisoner of the Japanese army following his capture in the fall of Singapore in 1941.

The son of Irish immigrants, Mr Coogan was brought up in extreme poverty in the Gorbals. But he retained a positive outlook on life which helped him survive his appalling ordeal as a slave labourer of the Japanese.

As a boy, he was rescued from possible delinquency by a kindly policeman who recognised his potential as a runner. The policeman introduced the child to the daunting, better-off world of the Maryhill Harriers and a lifelong passion for running was sparked.

In 1940, before a crowd of 60,000, Mr Coogan came second in the Ibrox Mile behind Sydney Wooderson, then the fastest man in the world. This newspaper published a photograph of Andy in the lead. It became a treasured possession which he kept hidden during his captivity. In a dread moment it was discovered by a Japanese guard who, luckily, was also a runner and recognised Wooderson. It allowed the young Scot to form a rare bond with one of his captors.

A gregarious character, Mr Coogan inherited his mother’s talent for singing and his father’s story-telling skills. In 2012 he employed those skills to write a best-selling memoir, Tomorrow You Die. Given his great love of life, he was not happy with the publisher’s gloomy title but it reflected his ordeal of having twice been ordered to dig his own grave and also enduring a mock execution by a Samurai sword-wielding Japanese officer who threatened to behead him.

The book’s vivid recollections of growing up in the Gorbals in the inter-war period are a valuable addition to Glasgow’s social history and includes a compelling account of being chased down the Malayan peninsula during the fighting retreat, then shambolic flight of the British army.

Mr Coogan had been conscripted into the Lanarkshire Yeomanry which had been transformed into an artillery unit. The men had no weapons and at one point were reduced to fighting charging Japanese with trenching spades, sticks and stones. But he could find humour in most situations and recalled how he and a comrade had stumbled upon a Japanese patrol. As they ran for their lives the young Olympic hopeful was astonished to be overtaken by the rotund figure of fellow Glaswegian Willie ‘Tubby’ Daly. “It just shows what fear can do,” he wryly observed.

But the laughing was soon to stop. The Lanarkshire men were divided into two groups. One was sent north to the infamous ‘Death Railway’ while Mr Coogan’s group endured a terrible voyage on a "hell ship" followed by a march to the remote Kinkaseki copper mine on Taiwan. Enduring the utmost brutality at the hands of their guards the starving men slaved in medieval conditions. Daily, men barely able to stand and weeping, begged the medical officers not to be sent down the mine. But Japanese guards regularly raided the sick hut and beat the patients, chaining together men suffering from dysentery to enhance their misery.

Mr Coogan was buried alive in a roof collapse and when he later went blind due to vitamin deficiency was forced to continue working in the pit.

A further journey by sea to Japan almost claimed his life when he and fellow Scot Charlie Farmer were lashed to a mast in a freezing storm clad only in loincloths. Later, as the pair huddled under an old lice-ridden kilt to try and get warm, Mr Coogan awoke to find his comrade dead.

When, in 1945, the prisoners were put to work digging a tunnel, Mr Coogan asked a Korean guard what it was for and was told chillingly, “It’s a tomb.” The Japanese high command had issued orders that all allied prisoners were to be massacred in the event of an American invasion. Salvation came when the prisoners emerged from the mine to see a strange dust-laden sky 30 miles south over the city of Nagasaki. What they thought was a volcanic eruption was the aftermath of the atomic destruction of the city.

On his return to Scotland Mr Coogan returned to running to rebuild his health and confidence. After settling in Carnoustie, where he worked as a painter and decorator, he single-handedly established the Tayside Amateur Athletics Club and coached hundreds of youngsters over the years.

He was revered in the Angus town and interviewing him in Carnoustie Golf Club, I was struck by the fact that he seemed to know everybody and had coached three generations of some families.

Mr Coogan continued running into his eighties and coaching into his nineties. He caddied at Carnoustie in his retirement and on one occasion caddied for the visiting Japanese ambassador. When the diplomat enquired where he had learned Japanese, Mr Coogan diplomatically replied, much to the relief of accompanying R&A officials, “I was on my holidays.”

His contribution to Scottish sport was recognised when he lit the flame at the 2014 Commonwealth games in Glasgow.

One of the youngsters he inspired to take up a sporting life was his great-nephew Sir Chris Hoy who paid a fitting tribute: “He was an amazing man and we were so lucky to have him in our lives.”

Mr Coogan was predeceased by his wife Myra and is survived by his children Andrew, Christine and Jean and grandchildren Ewan, Lachlan, Jenny, Sarah, Eleanor, Christopher and Alistair.

GRAHAM OGILVY