This cotton loin cloth is part of a collection donated to the museum by Ralph Gaches that also includes a green cotton cap (NARB: 1990: 143) and a cribbage board made from a Dutch mess tin (NARB: 1990: 26). 

Ralph Gaches served in the RAF and was a prisoner of war of the Japanese from the fall of Singapore in February 1942 until the Japanese surrender in August 1945. He was transferred to a hospital in Singapore before returning home in November 1945. He spent his time as a POW at Bandoeng in Java, later lived in Burry Port and died in 1988. The cribbage board belonged to an Australian POW in the same camp and is made of wood and the metal from a Dutch mess tin. This prisoner is reported to have died of beriberi and dysentery on one of the Sumatran railroad camps.

 Australia had been a collection of British colonies between 1788 to 1901 when the six separate colonies federated to form the Commonwealth of Australia, becoming a self-governing nation within the British Empire. Singapore was one of the British Empire’s most important naval bases in the Far East. Britain had established a base there in the interwar years, following the termination of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance in 1923. The base formed a major part of the British interwar defence planning for this region of the Empire. Singapore had been established as a trading post in 1819, was part of the Straits Settlement between 1826 and 1942 along with Penang and Malacca and later becoming a Crown Colony between 1946 and 1959. Imperial cotton would have come from India or Egypt.