Philip Toosey

Philip Toosey

Brigadier Sir Philip John Denton Toosey, CBE, DSO, TD, JP, LLD (Liverpool University) (12 August 1904 – 22 December 1975) was (as a Lieutenant-Colonel) the senior Allied officer in the Japanese prisoner-of-war camp at Tha Maa Kham (known as Tamarkan) in Thailand during World War II. The men at this camp built the Bridge on the River Kwai which was described in a book by Pierre Boulle and later in an Oscar-winning film in which Alec Guinness played the senior British officer. Both the book and film outraged former prisoners because Toosey did not collaborate with the enemy, unlike the fictional Colonel Nicholson.