Bailey Collection

Fay Bailey was an American employee of the Manila branch of the New York National City Bank living in the capital of the Philippines when war broke out. During the occupation, he and his family, including his young daughter Caroline, were interned in Santo Tomás Internment Camp. During his imprisonment, Fay Bailey was Treasurer of the Philippine Red Cross as well as Chief of the Finance and Supplies Committee, a sub-branch of the Internee Executive Committee which governed the camp. 

Caroline Bailey Pratt, who was a young child at Santo Tomás, would later publish her father's wartime diary entitled, Only a Matter of Days: The World War II Prison Camp Diary of Fay Cook Bailey. She also donated many items she made and kept as a child inside Santo Tomás.

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Photo of Fay C. Bailey (second from left) when Santo Tomás Internment Camp was liberated in February 1945. Weight loss due to lack of food and malnutrition was especially prevalent among adult male internees.










20230918_120424 (2)Drawing of Caroline Bailey, c. 1943.

Caroline was a young child when her family entered the internment camp.









20230918_120409 (2)This coin purse and wallet were made by Caroline Bailey as Christmas gifts for her parents, c. 1942. Fabric, thread, and money would all become hard to find inside the camps by 1944, though internees would continue to try to create homemade gifts with whatever materials they could find, including scrap fabric and wood.









20230918_120414 (2)This set of stuffed animals was made by Laura Evelyn Arctander, a widowed internee who shared a room with the Bailey family, c 1942. Towards the start of internment, sleeping quarters for internees were segregated by gender, even among families, and many people would be forced to share one room-spaces in buildings never meant to house so many people in one place. Some camps were established in places that were never meant to house people overnight; Santo Tomás, a former university, was a day school that didn't have dorms and internees slept crowded into classrooms and offices.





20230918_120418This once-stuffed toy frog was purchased by Caroline Bailey in 1941 at a British War Relief Association Fair as a Christmas gift for Arthur MacArthur, son of General MacArthur. Originally filled with navy beans, the family emptied the frog and ate the beans when food began to run out in December 1944. By the time of liberation, internees were on a diet of only 700-1000 calories a day due to a lack of food supplies.





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Bracelet, c. 1945

This bracelet was made from a piece of wreckage from a Japanese plane by a sailor on the SS John Lykes, a ship that was used to repatriate former internees to the US. It was given to Caroline Bailey as a gift by one of the sailors as her family sailed on the ship on their return trip to America.



20230919_104155US Navy Sailor’s Hat, c. 1942

This hat formerly belonged to a sailor on the USS Warren. It was gifted to Wendy Bailey by a sailor as they were repatriated to the US by ship in 1945. It bears different signatures along with cities and states.