Phyllis Thom was caught up in the Japanese invasion of Malaya in December 1941, while working as a young Colonial Nursing Service sister in the General Hospital at Alor Star in Kedah.

Evacuated first to Singapore, she worked in a hospital receiving air-raid victims until taken aboard the cargo ship Mata Hari sailing for Australia. The ship was bombed by the Japanese aircraft but, unlike the Vyner Brooke, also overladen with women and children, was not sunk, Instead it was taken as a prize-of-war by the Japanese Navy. The passengers were dumped on a jetty on the Sumatra coast without food or water for 24 hours before being marched to their first prison camp.

The atrocious treatment of prisoners of war and captured or interned civilians — many of them women and children — by the Japanese Imperial Army during the Second World War brought worldwide condemnation. Yet just 40 years earlier, although Japan had not signed the Geneva Convention stipulating humane treatment of civilians and prisoners, Western nations had been impressed by Japan’s record during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. All 79,367 Russian soldiers and sailors captured were well treated, returned safely and paid for work performed. The rise of Japanese militarism, with discipline based on physical violence in the armed forces and Kempeiti secret police, appears responsible for the change.

Together with thousands of other women and children, Phyllis Briggs, as she was then, was held prisoner for 3½ years, enduring endless hunger, pointless cruelty, hardship and indignity in prison camps barely fit for animals. On the first day on the jetty she took off the bits of jewellery she had with her and her watch and, knotting them in a headscarf, concealed them under her hair. They were to prove invaluable later as a source of trade for food and medicines.

Her first camp was improvised from the Chinese labour lines for the Muntok tin mines in Sumatra, with 40 women allocated to space intended for 20 coolies. They slept on a communal sloping cement slab; the lavatories were an open drain. After three months, most of the women and children were moved away, but Briggs and five other nurses remained to care for the 500 servicemen and male civilians in the other wing of the labour lines.

Later the nurses were moved to a group of former Dutch bungalows in what became the Women’s Internment Camp, Palembang, down the centre of which ran the ironically prettily named Irenelaan. This was to be their prison for 20 months.

It was here that Briggs became seriously ill, passing blood to an extent that she had be given an injection of morphia from the precious small supply received from the nearby hospital run by the Roman Catholic Charitas order. She lay unconscious in the garage serving as an isolation ward. Then a friend, Alice Rossie, massaged her until full circulation returned, undoubtedly saving her life. With dysentery and malaria rife in the overcrowded and crude sanitary conditions, she and the other nurses devoted themselves to a daily round of the male prisoners to bring cases to the few hard-pressed doctors.

In September 1943 the women and children were given 24 hours’ notice that they were to be moved. Rumour fostered the hope that they were to be shipped to Java where food was allegedly more plentiful, but they were marched only a mile or so to a former men’s camp that had been evacuated. After the comparative privacy of the bungalows they faced a desolate, rat-infested place. In April 1944 the already wretchedly inadequate food rations were reduced, and the women ordered to start growing vegetables inside the prison compound.

That August Pelambang was bombed by Allied aircraft, lifting the spirits of the prisoners significantly, and the next week a batch of 50-word letter cards from relatives in the outside world were handed out — they had been held back by the guards for several weeks. In October the prisoners were moved back to Banka Island, landing on the same jetty on which on they had been put ashore from the Mata Hari almost three years earlier. Fearing return to the labour lines, they were relieved to find a new, custom-built camp with proper kitchens.

Finally, in April 1945, the prisoners were moved to a former rubber estate in southwestern Sumatra. It was there that on August 26, 1945 — 12 days after Japan had surrendered — the camp commandant announced: “The war is ended. There is peace and we will all soon be leaving Sumatra. Now we will be friends.” Weighing a mere six stone, Briggs was flown on a stretcher to family members in New Zealand to begin her recovery and re-assimilation into society.

Phyllis Mary Erskin Briggs was born in Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex, to British parents who met while working in the Caucasus. Her childhood was spent in Paris where her father was chaplain of Christ Church in Neuilly-sur-Seine and of the British hospital in Paris. Orphaned in her early teens and brought up by an aunt and uncle in northern England, Briggs took up nursing in Manchester and subsequently at King’s College London. Her passion for travel took her to Malaya.

Her captivity featured in the television series Tenko (the answer required from prisoners at daily roll call), in the book, Women Beyond the Wire by Lavinia Warner and John Sandilands, published in 1982, and in the film Paradise Road.

She returned to nursing in Malaya in June 1946 and in 1947 was married to Robbie Clifton Thom, who became head of the Malayan Police Special Branch and, subsequently, a security officer in British Guyana, before independence. When her husband died in 1967 she settled in Bournemouth where she was a volunteer for Barnardo’s. She is survived by two daughters.

Phyllis Thom, nursing sister and prisoner of the Japanese, 1942-45, was born on June 14, 1908. She died on September 16, 2008, aged 100