MOUNT LAWLEY senior high school will induct ex-prisoner of war Arthur Leggett OAM into their “Lawley Legends” society.

The Lawley Legend status is usually reserved for school alumni who’ve “excelled in their field or made a significant contribution to society since they left school” but also acknowledges people who’s supported the school over a lengthy period.

Mr Leggett was a signaller who was captured in Crete in early 1941.

• Arthur Leggett OAM and school chaplain Andrew Paul.

He spent nearly four years  working in coal mines in northern Poland, before being forced on a death march in the winter of 1944/1945 across the Czechoslovakian Alps to Bavaria in starvation conditions.

He wasn’t a MLSHS student himself (born 1918, it wasn’t around when he was a youngen, having been founded in 1955) but he’s long had a connection with the school, educating students and contributing to their Anzac Day assembly for more than 10 years and the annual service at the ex-POW memorial at Kings Park for more than 20 years.

A poet and author, he’s being inducted as a Lawley Legend Friday May 5 “for his character, good humour, his sacrifice as a prisoner of war and his dedication to keeping alive the memory of his fallen comrades with generations of MLSHS students.”

by DAVID BELL