When war with Japan started, contact was lost, but in April 1942, after the fall of Singapore, she was found to be in Sumatra in a Japanese prisoner of war camp for women and children.

Soon she began arrangements of classical works for a 'Voice Orchestra', where types of humming sounds were used for each instrument. She taught the other inmates how to produce these sounds and concerts were put on to raise morale. From memory Margaret Dryburgh wrote down pages of music from baroque to contemporary with the help of Norah Chambers, a graduate of the Royal Academy of Music in London.

With only their memories to guide them they reproduced musical scores for over 30 orchestral and piano works by composers, which included Handel, Brahms, Chopin and Beethoven. Even the Japanese soldiers were amazed at the women's talent and used to listen at the door when they sang their services. The Saturday night gatherings grew so large and loud, that the guards peering in at the windows and climbing on to the dustbins, for a better view could not ignore them. They took to inviting themselves, sitting in the front row on cane chairs while the woman sat on the ground.

One of the pieces written by Margaret was the 'Captives Hymn', which was sung every Sunday at worship in the camp.
Its main feature was the absence of bitterness or hatred of their captors, despite the dreadful conditions they endured.

Together the two women rearranged the scores for choral singing, condensing a 15-minute movement of a symphony into a 5- minute choral work without losing its sense of balance and flow. Unless needed for vocal ease, the new scores remained faithful to the original keys.

The choice of syllabuses to be sung was left to Norah Chambers. To keep the programme a surprise for the other captives, she rehearsed the orchestra in a sooty shed behind the kitchen, without so much as a pitch pipe for an aid.

Constant hunger and disease took their toll and Margaret died on April 21st 1945 after reciting Psalm 23, a matter of months before the war ended. She was buried on 23rd April 1945 among the rubber trees of "Belau Camp on Sumatra. On March 2nd 1951 Margaret was reburied in the Dutch War Grave Cemetery in Java.
A year after the compositions were handed over to Stanford University, a women's chorus in California performed them in a series of concerts.

The story of the women and their music captured the audiences' imagination. It is thanks to a Dutch survivor, Helen Colijn, that their amazing spirit and Margaret's story lives on in her book which was later made into a film. The film -makers contacted Bill Fletcher, who played the organ in the Swalwell Chapel where her father was minister, to find out about her Tyneside background. The film,' Song of Survival', was shown in Britain on Channel Four.

In December 1997, a film, called 'Paradise Road', was released that showed the women's struggle to survive a horrific time in a Japanese Prisoner of War Camp in Sumatra during the Second World War, Margaret Dryburgh, was played by Pauline Collins.

Wards 9 and 10 at Dunston Hill Hospital were renamed 'The Margaret Dryburgh Ward' because of the hospital's connection with the Far Eastern Prisoners of War Association.