Sydney Ernest Scales (17 July 1916 – 7 March 2003) was a New Zealand cartoonist who, after being a prisoner of war in Java during World War II, worked for the Otago Daily Times for 30 years.
Biography
Born in Ashburton, New Zealand, Scales worked as a reporter at the Timaru Herald in the 1930s and published cartoons there and in other newspapers between 1934 and 1938. With war impending, he trained as a pilot and was commissioned in the Royal New Zealand Air Force as a flight lieutenant in 1940, and then seconded to the Royal Air Force. He served in World War II as a Catalina seaplane around Singapore and Malaya. On 25 December 1941, his plane was shot down into the Gulf of Siam, and the crew spent 9 hours in the water and 10 in a dinghy before being rescued. He died in Motueka on 7 March 2003.