Dryburgh, Margaret (1890–1945)

English missionary and prisoner of war. Name variations: Daisy. Born Feb 1890 in Sunderland, northern England; died April 23, 1945, in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in Belalau, Sumatra (then Dutch West Indies); dau. of William (Presbyterian minister) and Agnes Dryburgh; studied education and music at Newcastle College, a division of Durham University, BA, 1911; never married.

Presbyterian missionary in China and Singapore who acquired the status of a kind of saint among the women POWs in Sumatra and gained posthumous recognition for her role in creating a repertoire for the vocal orchestra of women; taught at Ryhope Grammar Girls' School, where she led the school choir; worked for Presbyterian Women's Missionary Association in Swatow, South China (1919–25); went to Singapore to work among the Teochow Chinese, whose language she spoke fluently; became the 1st principal of the Kuo Chuan Girls' School on Bishan Street, as well as organist in the Presbyterian Church in Orchard Road; was aboard the Mata Hari (Feb 1942) when it was seized by the Japanese in the Banka Strait off Sumatra; was a prisoner of war in a series of camps for women and children in southern Sumatra (1942–45); in the camps, quickly emerged as a religious and social leader whose regular church services as well as her verse, plays, songs and drawings of prison scenes served to inspire those around her; many of her creative works, including poems, drawings and a hymn, have been published in accounts of life in the prison camps.

See also Helen Colijn, Song of Survival: Women Interned (Millennium, 1996); and Women in World History.