Chaplain Alexander Dean was born in Bendigo, Australia to parents Alexander and Annie Dean.
Alexander was inducted into Scots’ Church, Shepparton, Victoria, on July 12 1939. He volunteered as a Chaplain in the Australian Imperial Force in 1941. According to the Shepparton Advertiser, Alexander was a “popular and successful chaplain in several [military] camps.”
The Rev. Dean went with the AIF to Singapore to defend it from the marauding Imperial Japanese Army. When the city fell in February 1942, Alexander was one of more than 130,000 Commonwealth service personnel taken prisoner by the Japanese.
Alexander was one of the poor souls sent to labour on the notorious Burma-Siam Railway, aka Death Railway. One of the most notorious events and projects of the Second World War, tens of thousands of captured POWs and local slave labourers toiled in awful conditions with rudimentary tools to build the railway.
It’s estimated between 12-16,000 people died building the Burma-Siam Railway. Sadly, Reverend Dean was among them. The exact circumstances of his death are unknown, but Alexander arrived to work on the Railway in April 1943. He was dead from illness a scant four months later, aged 39.
He was survived by his wife Elsie Lorance Dean.
He was sent to work on the railway in April 1943 and died of illness four months later, aged 39. He is buried at Kanchanaburi War Cemetery.
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