AustLit

Thomas Silcock was born in Chengdu, West China, the son of English missionaries. Silcock returned to England in 1919 to attend boarding school. He was educated at University College London and Oxford University, receiving a firm grounding in Classics but eventually specialising in economics. After several academic appointments, he became Professor of Economics at Raffles College, Singapore. During World War II, he was imprisoned with other university teachers at Changi and worked on the Burma-Thai railway. During his imprisonment, he wrote and discussed verse with his colleague Graham Hough, a literary critic. Most of the poems published in his only volume of poetry, Tradeways, were written during this time on scraps of paper and hidden in a tin with a false bottom. After the war, Silcock continued his academic career in Asia and the United Kingdom before taking up a Fellowship at the Australian National University. Tradeways was first published in Quadrant in 1967 and was then published in book form in 1971 with the addition of the 'Envoi' section.