After my mother received the initial printed card from Germany, on which new PoWs simply filled in their name, rank and service number, we started to get letters and letter cards from my father. All were, of course, censored both by the Germans and by the British before they arrived on our doormat. My father wrote all his letters from prison camp in pencil in a very neat upper-case script about 1.5mm high, and occasionally words or lines had been very thoroughly blocked out by a censor. A few months after he was captured we received a small bundle of his letters, accompanied by a note from the British censor saying that it was believed that my father was sending coded information, and asking if my mother could help. My godmother was staying with us at the time and the two of them puzzled over the letters for some time. She noticed that several of his letters mentioned that he was trying to change his writing and asked if we had noticed any change; eventually they found that if they sighted along each line of script an occasional letter was fractionally higher than the others and these larger letters formed the messages. I’m not aware that RAF officers at this period of the War had had any advice on simple codes to use in the event of capture, but I suspect that this was a personal initiative.
My father was in Oflag Xc, near Lübeck, then Oflag VIB at Warburg and Oflag XXIB at Schubin. From October 1942 until almost the end of the War he was in Stalag Luft III at Sagan, between Berlin and Wrocław, or Breslau as it then was known, before the post-War moving of the frontier put it out of Germany and into Poland. After a while some of his letters, all of which I still have, had references to the activities of “Mr. Delvet and his friends”; one told us that “50 of D.D’s students had failed their exams”. My parents were very keen on the countryside and wildlife and I was brought up on Beatrix Potter books among many others. My mother soon realised that these references were to a character in one of the Potter books, Diggory Delvet, who was a mole, and that my father was telling us of tunneling attempts, most of which were unsuccessful. In early 1943 he told us that “..some of Rainey’s old friends” had arrived, though segregated from the RAF compound and that a voluntary collection had been organised for them. “Rainey” was a friend of my parents who had communist leanings, and this told us that Soviet prisoners had arrived. He also wrote that it was true that they had snow on their boots; after the War we learned that those first Soviet prisoners had no shelter that winter and that the RAF prisoners had thrown food and clothing into their compound to try to keep them alive.
For a while after the unsuccessful Dieppe landing British PoWs were handcuffed, apparently in retaliation for the use of handcuffs on German prisoners by the Canadian troops bringing them back to the UK. They soon discovered that a simple modification to a sardine can key snapped them open.
One of his letters told us that he was doing five days solitary confinement in “the cooler” for being late on one of the morning parades at Oflag XX1B; so many had been late that it was not till he was in Stalag Luft 3 that he served his sentence, for there had been a long queue of ‘offenders’. He wrote that his mistake was to give his right name (“but don’t tell Buster11”); most of the others gave names like Crippen and M. Mouse and were never found when there became space for them to start their sentence.
My father organised art classes for prisoners and made a ‘samizdat’-type manual for students; he did posters for the many plays put on in the camp theatre, some of which the German staff attended, little suspecting the activities that took place under the stage. One of his letters mentioned that he’d been making papier maché masks for one of the plays and “for some of D.D’s activities”. Dummies were sometimes taken on the morning parades to hide the fact that there were fewer prisoners in camp than were counted the previous evening. Forging passes and documents and making fake German rubber stamps from shoe soles or sometimes as potato prints was another of his activities. He developed a technique of glazing the faked photos on passes by using repeated layers of saliva.
Throughout his time in prison camp he sketched and painted and he brought home numerous sketchbooks covering all sorts of camp activities. One wonders how he managed to take them with him on the winter forced march in early 1945, but they survived that; he also did a number of watercolour portraits of fellow PoWs, around A4 size and mounted, though this must have been done post-War. He made the mistake of lending some crayon and watercolour sketches of the camp to the makers of the film The Wooden Horse, based on the famous escape from Stalag Luft 3; none were ever returned. I leant some others to the authors of a book on another escape, Flak and Ferrets, to help their research, and unfortunately the thatched cottage where one of them lived burnt down before the book was finished and most of the remainder of the sketchbooks were lost. Luckily I had previously lent some to Charles Rollings, author of Wire and Worse, which deals with RAF PoWs till 1942, and he had photocopied some watercolours, which I have.