THE LARGEST PART of islanders’ reminiscences of the Occupation is devoted to the struggle and sheer grind of trying to keep healthy and cheerful. It is the memories of going to bed night after night with an empty stomach, and the long winter nights without light or heat, which are most vivid. This is the history which has been celebrated in personal memoirs, detailed in books and admiringly recreated in the island museums. Hardship, shortages, queues and drudgery were the islanders’ war. The struggle of daily survival while keeping a sense of humour has been elevated into something heroic on the islands, just as in Britain the struggle of ordinary men and women in the Blitz has become one of the most powerful myths of the twentieth century.
But the islanders’ struggle differed from that of relatives and friends across the Channel; their struggle was not only for their material well-being, but was also with their own consciences. Daily life in the Occupation was riddled with moral dilemmas which every islander, regardless of age or social status, had to confront. Every aspect of life – from jobs to shopping – was potentially loaded with the wounding accusation of collaboration.
It is difficult today to imagine the physical hardship and the moral anguish with which islanders lived. Even harder to understand is how bewildering the experience must have been to tightly-knit communities which had been stable, prosperous and law-abiding for generations. The Occupation was to strain, and in places shatter, the islanders’ whole understanding of themselves and the nature of their communities as decent, conscientious and fair.
It is not surprising that this is a theme on which islanders prefer not to dwell. A few words often mask a wealth of confusion and uncertainty; the last fifty years, with all the judgements they have brought on islanders’ heads, have only deepened the muddle of shame, humiliation and defiance, and drawn the repeated defence, ‘We had no choice.’
‘My husband worked for the Germans – that’s what they mean by collaboration, isn’t it? But you must remember, he was only nineteen.’
Jersey housewife Kathleen Whitley
Thousands of islanders worked for the Germans. Did they feel uneasy about their work? If so, how did they square their consciences?
Edwin de Ste Croix was seventeen at the start of the Occupation, and was an apprentice with the Jersey Electricity Company, much of whose work was for the Germans. He describes how he came to terms with the problem:
All the orders for work came from the Germans straight to the Electricity Company. In theory all German work had to take precedence over the civilian work. Certain work of a military nature, you could refuse to do under the Hague Convention. The rest was things like fixing lighting in barracks, hospitals and offices.
If you refused to do the military work, you didn’t always get away with it. You got an order from the Germans and the work wasn’t always specified and when you arrived, the German would say that the gun bunker down there needs an alarm. You could refuse to do it in some cases. I’d point out to the German officer in charge that I didn’t want to put alarms in gun bunkers to alert your fellows to shoot our fellows.
Sometimes they saw your point of view and they would say, ‘Fine, we’ll get a German electrician to complete it.’ Others would tell you to get on with it or they’d arrest you. You didn’t have much choice then.
Once you’d reached a point beyond which you were not personally prepared to go, you’d report it to the boss and the German would report it to his headquarters. My boss always supported me, but he was almost always overruled by the Germans.
You felt a bit uncomfortable and the only recourse was to drag the job out for as long as possible. I was frequently cuffed and beaten on the behind for speaking out of turn. I’d criticise Hitler or tell them that we’d win the war. You were as defiant as you could be. But what kind of resistance could you put up?
De Ste Croix recounts how in December 1944 fuel supplies were virtually exhausted, and the Germans ordered that electricity should be supplied only to the Germans, not the islanders. The Electricity Company staff refused to operate the grid under these instructions, and the Germans had to take over until the Liberation in May 1945. He proudly describes this as the only organised resistance of the Occupation.
Jersey carpenter Sandy Whitley volunteered to work for the Germans. He spoke openly about it, but his wife Kathleen was uneasy, and couldn’t help interjecting her remarks in her husband’s account:
SANDY: My brother was working for the Germans and he got me a job; he told me it was a cushy number. The Germans paid you £4.10 a week or even £5. Normal wages at that time were about £2 a week and I got German food rations.
KATHLEEN: Boys of that age – all they think about is food.
SANDY: If we hadn’t volunteered, we’d have been forced – I was a carpenter. I worked for the Germans for four and a half years right up until two months before Liberation. I did the carpentry for the shuttering [the boarding] for the concrete. I started building sea walls when the Germans were building their own bunkers. Then the German workers were withdrawn and we were put on to building military bunkers and tunnels. I worked on one tunnel for twelve months with some Dutch workers; there were Russians working on the other side. The Germans were quite fair – they’d give you a cigarette – and the work wasn’t hard. Everyone took it easy and pinched whatever they could; they’d come home with German bread and wood.
KATHLEEN: My husband worked for the Germans – that’s what they mean by collaboration, isn’t it? But you must remember, he was only nineteen.
SANDY: No one ever criticised me at the time for working for the Germans, but after the war, tourists would come and stay at the guest house we ran. They’d ask us about the Occupation and they’d ask me why I’d worked for the enemy.
KATHLEEN: A lot of the people working for the Germans did sabotage.
SANDY: I know now what we did was wrong. But you did try and do little things like putting the iron bars in the concrete anti-tank walls close to the edge, so they would rust through. You never thought that would cause problems today for the island [they are now used as sea walls] instead of the Germans.
On Alderney, George and Daphne Pope and their six children were the only British family on the island; Daphne took in washing for the Germans, and George worked as a pilot for the German navy, guiding them out to the Casquets lighthouse. Islanders have always accused them of collaboration, says Daphne, adding that they themselves were never bothered by ‘such nonsense’ for a moment. As she points out, with no alternative employment on Alderney, their only chance of keeping their large and growing family fed was to work for the Germans: ‘In exchange for bread I would do a German called Wilhelm’s washing. He was very generous, he would give me a packet of cigarettes in return for my doing some darning. He introduced me to a Czech who also brought me his washing and a bit of meat at the end of the week. I know the old joke, did I collaborate with him, or did he collaborate with me? – I don’t care. If you want to make me a collaborator out of that, you’re welcome.’
Guernseyman Ron Hurford was equally untroubled at the time. As a nineteen-year-old, he voluntarily went to work in the German bakeries; he had been a confectioner in a cake shop but he lost his job when the flour, yeast and sugar to make cakes ran out. He was working as a porter in a vegetable market in 1941 when the Germans offered him twice the wages and the chance of stealing some bread on the sly: ‘I took three to four loaves a week for my two brothers and my parents, and another two to three loaves for my girlfriend’s family. I don’t like people saying we were all collaborators. In my view I was working for my family and friends, I wasn’t working for the Jerries.’ Hurford was subsequently imprisoned for five and half months after refusing to reveal the name of a fellow Guernsey workman who had stolen some bread. The German supervisor struck him, and he hit back.
Jersey teenager Bernard Hassall was working in his father’s shop when he was rounded up by the Germans for forced labour:
This word ‘collaboration’ sticks in my craw. I was eighteen in 1943 and I was working in my father’s photographic shop. A staff car pulled up and a couple of Germans came in and told me to report to the Feldkommandantur. It was lies to say we volunteered.
First I had to work shovelling pebbles up and down the beach. I pretended I had heart trouble and a doctor managed to get me transferred to another job at the German repair workshop. I worked in the spare parts supply store. I knew German. I used to steal weapons.
You couldn’t resist, but you could make life unbearable for the Germans by pretending that you didn’t understand them and by playing stupid.
Some islanders, out of principle or envy of the high wages, were very critical of those who worked for the Germans. Joe Miere was a teenager on Jersey during the Occupation. Since the war his judgement has mellowed:
At first we looked down on those who volunteered to work for the Germans on the bunkers, but now, once you’ve had your own children and grandchildren, one looks at it differently. Some men refused to work for the Germans and some men worked for anybody. But in the end it didn’t matter what you did, you worked for the Germans one way or another. Even in my barber shop I was working for the Germans – although perhaps the haircuts I gave them [he had had no training] would count as sabotage. They didn’t half look a mess!
Miere was right: there were few islanders who were not working for the Germans either directly or indirectly by the end, and even fewer who could afford not to work for them. There is no doubt that pressing need was a justification for many, and eased their consciences. Others managed to feel a bit better by working slowly or shoddily, deliberately misunderstanding orders and generally trying to make life difficult for the Germans. Islanders tell numerous anecdotes of minor sabotage, although one suspects few were in fact as defiant towards their German masters as they have subsequently claimed to be.
The contrast with the thousands of Channel Island men – brothers, sons and fathers – who were serving in the British forces was painful. It was an uncomfortable position to be building the bunkers for guns which were to fire at British shipping. James Ryan, the Guernsey First World War veteran, took a very unsympathetic view, and in his private memoirs he bluntly castigated those working for the Germans:
They were attracted by high wages, easy work and the goods they managed to thieve. It matters nought to them that they were aiding the Enemy, prolonging the agony of their countrymen. Their sons were serving overseas and dying for the cause of the British.
Lorry drivers worked very hard – perhaps eighty-four to ninety-five hours a week, and got paid £6-18-9 compared to £2-8 before the war. What a contrast to the Guernsey boys who gallantly volunteered to face death and the unknown for the paltry pay of a soldier.
The local police forces were in a very difficult position; they were often the ones charged with carrying out unpopular German orders. Resentments still burn against certain policemen for having handed over islanders guilty of some misdemeanour to the Germans.
Guernseyman Eugene Le Lievre can proudly point to an appearance in the 1977 edition of the Guinness Book of Records, which features a photograph of him as a gawky young policeman pointing out directions to a German soldier during the Occupation. It was selected as a unique example of Anglo–German co-operation in the middle of the Second World War. Le Lievre was detailed to be a driver for the German Kommandant the night the Germans landed on Guernsey: ‘I had to salute the German officers. I used to duck down side streets to avoid them, but you’d be reported if you didn’t salute. You felt very uneasy because you were saluting the enemy which is not really the thing to do.’
William Brown was a policeman on Jersey: ‘Conditions were chaotic, especially in the early part of the Occupation. There was no precedent for guidance. We had received verbal instructions not to interfere with the German armed forces, regardless of what we saw them doing.’
Francis Le Cocq, another Guernsey policeman, remembers:
When the Feldgendarmerie [German police] went to investigate civilians, we always accompanied them unless it was something really bad. The Germans respected us as policemen, if we behaved as strictly and as circumspectly as they expected us to. If you stood up to the Germans as a policeman, they respected the law and that was the end of the matter. They were odd that way.
We weren’t directly under German control. People never accused me of collaborating with the Germans. I showed Germans where people lived. But I never came across hostility at the time – nor have I since – for having worked with the Germans.
A few of the Germans put themselves at risk to help islanders. Le Cocq was fortunate enough to work with an Austrian whom he describes as ‘a gentleman’:
He did his job as a policeman as little as possible. He spent his time here, he told me, buying King George III silver and sending it to addresses all over Europe. He said to me, ‘Whichever way the war goes, I’ll salvage some.’ I got to know him as a friend. When we had to go and investigate a wireless set, he’d open the door and ask, ‘You seen a wireless set?’ ‘No,’ I’d say and he’d reply, ‘No more have I.’ He did as little as possible against the civilians.
As food supplies became more scarce, the high German wages were much needed. Within months of the start of the Occupation, goods such as tea, sugar, coffee and chocolate were only available on the black market at exorbitant prices. Some islanders could dig deep into their savings to supplement their paltry rations, but the vast majority faced gruelling hardship for five long years. Families were deprived of things which for at least two generations they had taken for granted as the basics of life: heating, lighting, hot water, and bread and jam on the table for tea.
Rationing was introduced in July 1940 on staples such as meat, sugar, flour and butter. By summer 1941, the meat ration was down to four ounces a fortnight per person; cooking fat ran out early in 1944, and the salt ration fell to an ounce a week. Potato rationing began in December 1941 at ten pounds per person, and was halved in 1942, but by the end of 1944 there were none left. Bread was rationed at four pounds ten ounces per person in February 1941, and was cut by a pound for five months in 1943.
Bread was scarce, and as flour and yeast rations shrank, it became rough and brown. As for jam or tea, they were luxuries. There was no sugar to make jam. Precious reserves of tea were eked out teaspoon by teaspoon as a great delicacy; tea leaves were often dried and recycled. Substitutes such as dandelion coffee and blackberry-leaf tea were devised.
Food was one of the main topics of conversation; there was endless speculation and rumours about unexpected new supplies, or how some goods were suddenly available at a particular shop. While they lasted, potatoes were a staple, and every bit was cooked and eaten, including the peelings. Vegetables and fruit in season were invaluable. People braved the mined beaches to collect seafood such as mussels and crabs. Even limpets and ormers were gathered and minced, although, with the consistency of chewing gum, they were not a great success. Weeks could go by without any meat being available, although some families could resort to the black market for the odd chicken or bit of bacon. There were rations of milk for everyone, but before long it was always skimmed. The cheese and meat imported from France had often gone bad or had maggots by the time they arrived, after delays in shipping. Chocolate and sweets of any kind were a rare delicacy; children grew up not knowing what an orange or a banana was.
In an effort to vary the dull, limited diet of potatoes and swedes, islanders became extraordinarily resourceful and ingenious; they learned how to make a sweet syrup out of sugar beet as a substitute for sugar. They turned to the natural resources of the island such as carrageen moss (used as a setting agent in blancmanges), and used seawater for salt.
The only heating available by the end of the war was a small fire of twigs painstakingly collected from the roadsides, for a short period in the evening. Fuel was rationed, and the island authorities strictly controlled the felling of trees – wood was as precious as gold dust. Cooking stoves were useless without fuel, and the island governments organised communal kitchens to feed the people. Communal ovens were also set up; families would bring their food to be cooked and then carry it home. Hay boxes were used as slow cookers to save fuel; a dish would be heated up and then placed in a box full of hay for the night. By morning the dish would be cooked. As the Occupation wore on, the electricity worked for shorter periods every day, until it finally stopped altogether at Christmas 1944. Candles ran out, and smoky cooking oils in improvised tin cans, with bootlaces for wicks, were used as a substitute. The long winter evenings were particularly bleak, with virtually no light or heat.
The burden of finding food and trying to prepare palatable dishes fell to the women. Many tasks, such as making the syrup from sugar beet, or a coffee substitute out of parsnips or dandelions, or gleaning corn for flour, or hunting for kindling, were enormously time-consuming. On top of them came the task of scrubbing pots and pans, cleaning the house and washing clothes without the help of soaps or detergents. A grey bar of home-made Occupation soap is as heavy as a paperweight – it was mostly sand mixed with ash. If you were lucky you could make a better-quality soap of caustic soda and tallow. Toothpaste was made from soot mixed with chalk dust and peppermint essence.
The work of cooking, cleaning and mending for a family was never-ending. Guernsey housewife Daphne Prins remembers how it became instinctive to be constantly on the lookout for anything useful; she found herself still gathering twigs on the day of Liberation in May 1945 – until she remembered fuel supplies were at last on their way. Children were roped in to help with collecting fuel, fodder, seafood and gleaning. Guernsey boy Herbert Nichols, with five younger brothers and sisters, helped his mother by breeding rabbits, gathering fodder from the hedgerows, and catching seafood. The vegetable patch became the family’s most precious asset; everybody was set to work digging and hoeing and planting the cabbages, potatoes and onions on which survival depended.
Jersey boy Joe Miere recalls even resorting to catching birds: ‘We trapped seagulls on the top of houses but we couldn’t eat them. We would eat sparrows which we caught in the hedgerows – they gave a bit of flavour. We had no salt so we had to boil salt water down and down to make salt. We made flour and alcohol out of potatoes.’
Daphne Prins was a comfortable, middle-class housewife; her husband was the Dutch consul on Guernsey (a number of Dutch workers remained on the island throughout the war), and she only had one son, but she too was forced to scrounge for food, and had to turn her coffee grinder to new purposes: ‘I used to go into the fields to glean corn and grind it in a coffee grinder to make very heavy bread. We were always grateful for a few onions. We used carrageen moss for milk blancmanges with a bay leaf for flavouring. I missed things like marmalade, bread and butter.’
Guernseyman Ralph Durand published a history of the Occupation shortly after 1945. He drew up a week’s menu typical of a family in May, the worst time of the year for food, in about 1943. Breakfast every weekday was ‘grape-nuts’ made from mangelwurzel, moistened with milk; bramble-leaf tea and bread with a thin smear of a cocoa substitute mixed with sago, tapioca or ground macaroni. This spread could be flavoured with fruit later in the year. Lunch was boiled potatoes, green peas, swedes and cabbage with onion sauce followed by a pudding made of baked breadcrumbs and milk thickened with maize meal. Many weeks there was no meat, but if a family was lucky they might find a piece of fish. On Saturdays it was possible to cook lunch in the bakers’ ovens, and the potatoes were baked rather than boiled. ‘Tea’ was two slices of bread with butter and two with ‘cocoa’ washed down with bramble-leaf tea. Supper was vegetable soup followed by stewed potatoes and peas. A big effort would be made for something special at Sunday lunch, with spider-crab, potatoes and peas and perhaps the family’s last bottle of cider; there was no pudding. Sunday tea was a coffee substitute and a slice and a half of bread with jam.
The shortages did not affect everyone in the same way. Those who had access to land were in a much better position than those living in the towns. The size of one’s garden and the quality of its soil became critically important. The best-off were the farmers, who could falsify their yields and keep some of their harvest back for their own use. They hid calves and pigs and secretly fattened them after the Germans instituted strict controls over the slaughter of livestock. Few farmers’ families on either Jersey or Guernsey went hungry in the Occupation. But they did have to work, as Jersey farmer’s daughter Dorothy Blackwell recalled:
The shops were empty, you couldn’t buy anything. If you went into town, everyone was talking about food. People did barter – a bit of butter for a few potatoes and that kind of thing.
We did nothing but work on the farm. I’ve never worked so hard in my life. We mixed anthracite dust and tar to make fuel and we used to chop trees down. We made sugar beet syrup by boiling the beets. We made parsnip coffee which was very good and you could hardly tell the difference. You grated the parsnips, roasted them until they were black, and then made coffee. We couldn’t make it after the fuel ran out.
I bred rabbits; I started with two and reached two hundred. Finding the fodder for them was hard work; I used to search the hedgerows. We made a rabbit or a chicken last the whole week. We used to sell what we could spare to people who came from the town.
The Germans would send a tester around to judge how much milk there was; we were supposed to hand it all over, except for our rations, but we’d trick them so that there would be enough left for our friends and we’d charge them sixpence.
After the war, Dr Angelo Symons, President of the Board of Health on Guernsey, drew up a report for the British government on the island’s health. He said that the poor and the elderly, particularly in the towns, had suffered the worst. But almost everybody had suffered from deprivation:
The effects of physical deterioration and mental strain became progressively more marked as the Occupation progressed. The physical effects were due to sub-nutrition and cold from lack of fuel, whilst the mental effects were due to depression, boredom, isolation and monotony . . . In the case of the housewife, the mental strain was increased by the anxiety and difficulty of obtaining sufficient food, and the lack of satisfactory means of cooking.
Dr Symons found that the death rate had risen considerably, with peaks during the winter months which could be attributed to the cold. After November 1944, when rations had fallen to three ounces of butter per week and sugar supplies had come to an end, Dr Symons commented that ‘some cases of extreme emaciation have been admitted to the hospital from time to time and many of them died within a few days’.
Families who lived in the towns and whose main breadwinner was perhaps away serving in the British forces suffered very real hardship. Stella Perkins was the eldest child of a family of four; her father had gone to serve in the forces, leaving her mother and aunt with a bankrupt estate agency business to support them. Her mother, Augusta Metcalfe, showed remarkable prescience of what lay ahead when, in the midst of the confusion caused by the Germans’ arrival, she went out and bought rolls of satin and rayon:
She made cushion covers and nightdress covers which she decorated with oil paints. The estate agency downstairs was turned into a second-hand shop which my mother and my aunt ran and she sold these trinkets there. I used to make hats out of bits of material, and I made brooches out of beech nuts; I’d shave off the hair on the back, paint them with gold and coloured paints and put them on a pin. We also used to make calendars.
Out of all these activities we just about survived. By the end of the war we had nothing left in the house but the barest minimum of furniture; everything else had been sold. It was horrendous. There were one or two financial crises when Mother had to go to the British Legion for help to feed her children – it was once thrown back at her in a public meeting after the war, as if it had been a crime to ask for help.
We had no garden. My middle brother suffered in particular; I have a photo of him at the end of the war and his legs were like matchsticks. A medical examination years later revealed he’d had tuberculosis when he was about ten; he used to cough a lot but all we could give him was camphorated oil. Everybody did get terribly, terribly thin. I got very anaemic and I needed lots of iron after the Occupation. One was very weak and the slightest effort could make you come out in awful sweats.
A Guernsey schoolteacher wrote in her diary in August 1943: ‘For the first time since the fun began I saw myself in a dressmaker’s full-length mirror and the sight was depressing. Every rib, every vertebra, every single bone in my body was shining through my skin.’
The last year of the Occupation was the worst, hitting even the most prosperous islanders, who until then had been able to cushion themselves against some of the hardship by resorting to the black market. All supplies from France were cut off after the D-Day landings of June 1944 and the liberation of France. In November of that year the Guernsey Bailiff, Victor Carey, wrote a short note to his counterpart on Jersey, Alexander Coutanche: ‘The fact of starvation begins to stare us in the face and I can see no way out of it . . . the small rations and the want of heat is really awful.’ The islands were under siege, and a handful of people did die of malnutrition. Many more were so weak from lack of food that they succumbed to other diseases. People lost weight dramatically.
Finally, on 27 December 1944, the first ship bearing Red Cross food parcels from Britain arrived at Guernsey via Portugal. Guernsey policeman Francis Le Cocq says people were weeping to get the parcels. From then until the end of the war on the islands, five months later, the lives of the islanders depended on the arrival of the Red Cross ship, the Vega; once, the ship was delayed, and for six weeks the islands were without any flour to make bread. When at last the Vega arrived, in March 1945, there were great scenes of celebration. Seventeen-year-old Guernsey girl Dolly Joanknecht was working at the hospital at the time: ‘I was the smallest nurse there, so when we made a big loaf, I was made to walk through the wards with this loaf on a big tray over my head. The patients were clapping and singing because of the loaf on my tray. It was a terrible thing to be hungry.’
The islanders’ resourcefulness and ingenuity were applied to every area of life. Many cars had been requisitioned at the beginning of the Occupation, and fuel was in short supply, so islanders set their minds to inventing all manner of strange vehicles. There were no bicycle tyres, so hose-piping filled with sand was tied to the wheel frames, and old carts were brought back into service to provide a rudimentary form of public transport.
Clothes and shoes had to be mended, darned and patched because there were few new supplies coming in from France. Shops which had no more new stock to sell set up as second-hand shops to exchange goods, and the barter columns of the newspapers were invaluable. Resourceful dressmakers turned to the curtains and bedspreads to make dresses and shirts. Jersey girl Mary McCarthy remembers blankets being used to make coats and handkerchiefs being turned into bras. Shoes were made out of bits of leather, wood and rubber. Many children went barefoot through most of the summer.
There were terrible shortages of medicines and supplies in the hospitals. Surgery was restricted to emergency operations because of the shortage of anaesthetics. Diabetics presented one of the greatest problems after the insulin ran out; they lost a lot of weight because there were no carbohydrates in their diet, and they became vulnerable to liver and kidney infections and pneumonia. Thirty-two of them died on Jersey, twenty-six on Guernsey and one on Sark. The survival of Jersey boy Maurice Green was something of a miracle, and after the war he became the subject of medical research. For sixteen months he had no insulin; he discharged himself from hospital and devised his own treatment: ‘Every day I dug up the garden which made me burn up energy. I didn’t eat any carbohydrate or starch. I took a morning job for which I was paid in eggs and the odd piece of pork. I ate dandelions and roots and lost a lot of weight.’
The hospitals ran short of most medicines, and many islanders turned to grandmothers for old herbal remedies. One of the most common problems was constipation, because of the starchy diet, and contemporary diaries make frequent references to bowel movements. Sub-nutrition made people more vulnerable to infections such as ’flu and colds, and pharmacists were hard-pressed to devise alternative treatments. Fifteen-year-old Betty Thurban began working in Jersey Hospital as a nurse at the start of the Occupation: ‘All the malt and cod liver oil which was destined for the cattle was requisitioned and given to the children for vitamins A and D. The hospital pharmacist steamed fish livers for oil for a vitamin supplement. He also made tincture of foxglove as a remedy for heart conditions.’
Among the most common complaints the hospital had to deal with were skin conditions such as scabies and impetigo, caused by vitamin deficiencies. Children were particularly prone. The improvised treatment was rough and ready, remembers Betty Thurban: ‘The infections quickly became secondary between the fingers and toes. The cure was daily baths for five days followed by scrubbing from head to toe and then covering the body with ointment which contained sulphur and smelt terrible. The children used to scream and scream.’
Hardships and deprivation provoked a remarkable sense of camaraderie which broke through the islanders’ deeply-entrenched class consciousness. A measure of comfort – at times it was a matter of survival – depended on a revival of self-sufficient craft folklore, and exchange of this knowledge was vital. People swapped tips on cooking, cleaning, gardening and health remedies, and they exchanged surplus food and clothing. There was a clear quid pro quo; if you showed your neighbour generosity, he was more likely to show it to you. Islanders fondly recall this co-operation, and grow nostalgic describing the sense of communal solidarity and unity. Rollo Sherwill, the son of Ambrose, was only a boy on Guernsey, but he remembers: ‘If you wanted to know how to make anything, you only had to ask a neighbour. Everybody helped everybody. If people had food they shared it because there was always a pay-off – if I help you, you’ll help me. There was the most extraordinary spirit of co-operation which died of course after the war.’
This comradeship was only part of the truth. Co-existing alongside it were bitter communal divisions and resentments which were to strain the fabric of the island communities in ways no one had envisaged.
27 April 1943: It was a meatless weekend and on Sunday, the rector climbed into the pulpit and announced as his text, ‘I have meat that ye know not of.’
‘Black market’ thundered a voice in the congregation.
‘Occupational Observations by One Occupied’, unpublished diary of a Guernsey schoolteacher
Wherever goods are in short supply and prices are controlled, a black market develops – and so it did on the Channel Islands during the Occupation.
The islands’ black market had three main sources of supply; farmers kept some of their produce back to sell privately to friends and relatives, or to traders at above the official prices; traders set up supply lines on ships to and from France, and imported goods for the black market; and some of the goods intended for the German garrisons found their way onto the black market, either via islanders working for the Germans, or corrupt German quartermasters out to make a few Reichsmarks.
The quantity of food stolen from German supply ships at the island ports indicates a well-organised operation. In May 1943, the Feldkommandantur was investigating the theft of foodstuffs worth 10,549 Reichsmarks. They listed 300 kilos of flour, 838 kilos of wheat and 40 kilos of chocolate as having been stolen. The previous month 200 kilos of flour had been stolen, as well as 40 kilos of margarine, 101 kilos of chocolate, 780 pairs of silk stockings, 50 kilos of soap and 269 boxes of camembert.
There was no shortage of customers for black market goods. Hundreds of French, Belgian, Spanish and Dutch workers had been brought to the islands by the Germans to work on construction projects, and they looked to the black market to supplement their dull, small rations. Everything on the official market was reserved for islanders with their ration cards. Germans were keen customers on the black market, as were wealthy islanders.
The prices on the black market rose steadily during the Occupation, and after D-Day they became astronomical. A pound of tea, which would have cost 2s.8d in 1940, rose to £25 in 1944; a tin of fruit cost a shilling in 1940, and £1.10s. in 1944; a pound of butter cost 1s.6d in 1940, and £1.5s. in 1944. A bar of soap cost £6.14s.7d, a bottle of whisky £10, and a tin of Bird’s Custard £4.2s.6d in 1944. Average wages in that year were about £2 a week.
There are – obviously – few documents to indicate the scale of the black market, but it would be a fair assumption that the majority of islanders who could afford black market prices did at times resort to buying goods on it. There was much resentment towards the black market’s regular customers, and even more to its regular suppliers, who made considerable profits. Police records reveal a constant stream of fines and prosecutions for infractions against price regulations.
Some of the more sensational cases reached the newspapers. In 1943 the Guernsey Evening Press reported the case of seventy-year-old Pierre Mahy, of Figtree Farm, who was charged with having sold sugar without a licence and in excess of the fixed price, and for having sold beans and onions illegally. Denounced by the Bailiff for ‘underhand, underground’ black marketeering, Mahy was fined £105 (a farm worker’s annual wage at the time was £90). The Bailiff complained that many others like Mahy had no conscience, and were undermining efforts to keep food prices down. Mahy pleaded in his defence that the French and Spanish workers who bought the food were desperate, and he told the court: ‘These men are so insistent. To them the price is nothing. These men have plenty of money, but they can’t buy anything. They offer so much at times that you have to refuse the money – you have to. They know they are offering a great deal more than they should pay. I’ve done my best in other respects to get as much food for the civilian population as possible. I’ve done much more manual labour in the last two years than in the previous forty-five years.’
Jersey boy Bernard Hassall says: ‘Everybody was up to their necks in the black market. You couldn’t have survived without it. The market was mainly organised between the farms and the shops and there was a clique of about forty people on Jersey who ran it with someone at the top of it all. They also took in food which came from France. Butter was imported in 20-kilogram wooden cases from France. Brandy was imported and watered down, as well as sweets and dragées [sugar-coated almonds]. People didn’t worry about being informed on, because everyone was in it.’
Mary McCarthy claimed that prior to the Occupation, many of the farmers who were the main beneficiaries of the black market had been in a parlous financial position: ‘The Occupation and the black market was the saving of them. Many managed to pay off their mortgages and they moved up the ladder socially. There were some people who used their profits to buy up properties – they’re the kind who would have been strung up in France after the liberation. But what would we have done without the black marketeers? We’d have had no sugar if it hadn’t been stolen from the Germans.’
Some of the islanders’ resentment was directed at people who were making a lot of money out of the black market, some at people who had plenty while others were going hungry. Jersey policeman William Brown had a wife and three small children to support. Because of his job, he felt he could not buy food on the black market:
I let the children have anything extra that was going. I suffered terribly from hunger. I remember going to bed and the pains of hunger stopped me sleeping; I dropped from fifteen stone to ten stone. We put boiled, minced limpets on bread – the bread was made from oatmeal and potato.
We were invited at this time to the house of a shopkeeper for supper; we stocked up on boiled swedes before going round to their house because it was polite as guests not to eat too much. But they had nearly everything you could imagine – brandy, whisky, jelly; our stomachs just couldn’t cope. They were full of swedes anyway, but we couldn’t face that rich food.
Late in the Occupation, Jersey police raided the home of an islander and found a vast quantity of food hoarded there; the haul (lavishly reported in the newspaper) was displayed in a shop window in town, to the amazement of islanders. The pile of tinned food, wine, tea, and spirits made their mouths water at the distant memory of food they had almost forgotten about. The German Feldgendarmerie also conducted house-to-house searches, and on one occasion they found a man who had hoarded 363 tins of soup, vegetables and fish.
Jersey boy Maurice Green ran an errand to the home of a member of the Jersey government one evening during the bleakest days of war shortages: ‘I saw so much food, my eyes popped out. Some people on the islands never starved. They always got hold of milk and, unbelievably, sugar and real coffee. The rich had a different war. Those in government were rewarded for helping, or rather co-operating with, the Germans. They got hold of food and favours were given. The fact that they got rich really annoyed people, I think, more than the fact that they had been collaborators. The farmers did very well out of it.’
The black market covered all sorts of goods. People desperate for food sold family heirlooms such as furniture, silver and jewellery. Jerseyman Fred Woodall complained in his diary that one neighbour was buying radios and selling them to the Germans. ‘This occupation has made me lose more faith in humanity than anything else in my life,’ he wrote.
Woodall complained of a couple who frequently entertained Germans in their home. He noted down a conversation with the husband, who was a trader: ‘He was talking his usual rot. He is a typical Jerseyman, avaricious, grasping, narrow, self-centred. He said it wouldn’t make much difference whose rule we lived under. He said if the Germans won, he wouldn’t clear out; he would find some way of getting on with them. He is just a Jersey quisling, which is about the lowest of species.’
Making money – and there was a lot to be made – was often at the expense of islanders and to the advantage of the Germans. Many shopkeepers kept food under the counter to sell to Germans at higher prices than the islanders could afford. Dorothy Blackwell said: ‘A next-door neighbour used to sell all the best vegetables to the Germans, and sell the worst to the locals. The Germans could pay more and he got goods like tobacco in return.’
Within a few months of the start of the Occupation the Guernsey Controlling Committee was investigating the farmers Messrs Timmer Ltd, who had established themselves as the major supplier of vegetables to the occupying forces, after repeated allegations that they were charging high prices to the Germans. The Committee decided that the prices were justified because of the fact that the vegetables were washed and chopped, but resentment did not abate, and after the war the company had to go to great lengths to clear its name. Perhaps Timmers was envied because of its lucrative arrangements with the Germans; letters have survived from other farmers who wrote to the Germans offering to grow food for them.
During the siege conditions of 1944–45, the German soldiers became desperate for food as their rations shrank, and they were forced to buy on the black market at ludicrous prices. Both the German and the island authorities attempted to stamp out this illegal trade, and there was a steady flow of traders coming before the island courts. On 20 September 1944, a leader in the Guernsey Evening Press chastised the black marketeers who postured as patriots: ‘The profiteers considered it their duty to mulct the civilian public for as much as they can, but, in the long run, they have found the soldier represents a 2–300 per cent profit; the civilian a meagre 150 per cent . . . They sell to the soldier using one hand to grasp the money and reserving the other fist to shake at the retreating uniformed back.’
3 April 1942: Crime is growing enormously. Everyone pinches or does a bit of quiet black market; no one is honest, not even the clergy, one of whom remarked ingenuously, ‘It will be nice when the war is over, then we shall be able to lead Christian lives again.’
‘Occupational Observations by One Occupied’
The black market was one illustration of the way in which the islands’ traditional law-abiding values had been subverted by the Occupation. It turned the status quo upside down; those who might have been prosperous before the war found themselves bankrupt and hungry, while others perceived unprecedented opportunities for making money. It was a topsy-turvy world, in which everything was up for grabs. Some families which had been looked down on as ‘common’ were now among the best fed and best dressed. The unequal distribution of food and goods triggered envy and bitterness. It eroded the trust which islanders had shared for generations, and led to an exponential rise in petty crime. Jersey policeman William Brown commented sadly:
The morals of the local population fell considerably; the veneer of civilisation seemed to depart. I think it applied to nearly everyone. For the sake of obtaining food, they were prepared to break most of the regulations. These people were not criminals, but they broke small regulations and committed small offences. People would walk around in the blackout with a load of wood which they had ripped out of an unoccupied house. You wondered how far you should go to stop it.
There was one man, quite a decent fellow, who was in charge of a store which had some grain left in it. During the blackout one day, I saw the doors of the store open. There were two men inside – they were stealing grain. Both were sentenced and one man was imprisoned. He came out a broken man and died shortly after. He felt disgraced. He would never have behaved like that in normal circumstances. I felt sympathy for them.
The collapse of morals affected sections of the population which had previously been considered beyond reproach. One of the most extraordinary cases, on Guernsey in 1942, was covered in minute detail in the local papers. Over a period of several months, a number of thefts from shops had gone unsolved by the police, so the German Feldpolizei stepped in to investigate. Suspicion had fallen on the police themselves, as they were the only people who had complete freedom of movement after the curfew. At the time, discipline in the police force was at a low ebb. Men on night duty spent much of their time at a colleague’s flat, drinking and playing cards. The Germans finally caught two policemen breaking into an Organisation Todt store. Eighteen of the thirty-strong Guernsey police force were tried by a German military court for pilfering from German stores. They were also tried in the Guernsey courts on charges of having stolen foodstuffs including tomato preserve, French beans, butter and cooking oil from island shops. They had also stolen a large quantity of liquor: one police constable had forty bottles of spirits and wine, while another had eighty-six bottles of port and twenty-eight of spirits. Stephen Duquemin, the seventy-year-old landlord of the Victoria Hotel, was accused of buying stolen goods.
The policemen were given prison sentences of between four weeks and four years in France. The Bailiff, Victor Carey, said in his summing up, ‘I am filled with shame. It is revolting to think how you have abused your position. I cannot imagine what all the foreigners in the island . . . think of you.’ The police corruption case was extremely embarrassing for the Guernsey government, and weakened its hand with the German authorities. It also lowered morale in the population; it was widely believed that the convicted men were not the only ones abusing positions of power to enrich themselves.
Most of the islanders considered stealing from the Germans legitimate, and if the policemen had restricted themselves to that, they might have won sympathy, but they had also stolen from civilians. After the war several of the police appealed against their dismissal from the force; they argued that they had been motivated by patriotism, and inspired by the BBC broadcasts of ‘Colonel Britton’ (Douglas Ritchie), who issued stirring appeals to occupied Europe to resist the Germans. They claimed that they had intended to hand out the much-needed food to hungry islanders, and that the thefts were ‘part of a campaign of opposition to the Germans which included, inter alia, cutting telephone wires, painting anti-German slogans and otherwise attempting to hamper and obstruct the enemy’. One of those found guilty in 1942 says the thefts were sabotage, and all he ever got from them was thirty pounds of oats.
Police claims that their theft of wine and spirits was in fact ‘sabotage’ look thin, but the dividing line was not always clear. Many people felt that pilfering goods from the Germans was in some way ‘patriotic’. The case of the Guernsey police shows how lawlessness could not be kept within bounds; stealing from the Germans spilled into stealing from islanders. Furthermore, if people in positions of authority were stealing, why shouldn’t everyone else? Allegations were levelled at States officials. An entry in Baron von Aufsess’s diary in 1944 notes: ‘I fear that many [Jersey] States officials do not, in their position, set the example they should. Current rumour credits them, with the exception of Duret Aubin [the Attorney General], of generally dabbling in the black market and taking advantage of their privileged position.’
Some islanders persuaded themselves that stealing from houses abandoned by those who had been evacuated to England was legitimate; they argued that if they didn’t take the goods, they would fall into the hands of the Germans. Alderney, with hundreds of abandoned homes, was particularly tempting. French refugees fleeing the Cotentin peninsula in 1940 were alleged to be the first to ransack abandoned shops before they continued their journey to Brittany. Then the Guernseymen sent in 1940 to collect the harvest and the cattle on the island took a share. Ten Guernseymen were tried in 1941 for pilfering on Alderney, including Charles Hutcheson, who had been appointed by the Guernsey government as the Civil Commandant of the island.
Many of the eighteen British residents living on Alderney felt that goods and foodstuffs remaining on the island were theirs for the taking. One man, James Rutter, took it upon himself to clear the homes of his former neighbours. By the time the Germans caught up with him and put him on trial, the list of his stolen goods ran like the contents of a department store: ninety-six curtains, seventy-five pillowcases, fifty blankets, five wirelesses, twenty-five carpets and more than a hundred pieces of silver. More useful for surviving the Occupation were the sixty-two kilograms of flour, hundred kilograms of sugar and eighty-two jars of jam he had stolen. Rutter claimed he had bought everything legitimately, but the German police report pointed out that there was hardly room to move in his tiny flat for the piles of goods heaped in baskets and crates, while the carpets were ‘stored in such quantities that they are laid one on top of the other in two or three layers’. Daphne Pope commented on the case:
Mr Rutter was a very stupid and greedy man, and he didn’t do what we advised, which was to take what you need, not what you fancy, and then it will look right. Then, when the Germans came into your house and looked round, they wouldn’t notice.
One farmer, who was a neighbour of ours, could get from one farm to another and he could grab anything out of these houses without being seen. As he said, ‘What fits on one farm, fits on the next.’ If you went along these lines, you were sensible, but this Mr Rutter took everything. He could get from his garden to the next without setting foot on the road, so he wasn’t seen, or perhaps the Germans shut their eyes.
When the police discovered him, he had enough food to feed my family and yet he used to come to us for food. The farmer said he would have liked to shoot him because he had made trouble for us all. Life got very tricky and the Germans came to search us but we managed by simply taking things that looked right.
Stealing was easier on Alderney, where there were no civil authorities or police, but thefts from abandoned houses were also common on the other islands. Store cupboards and wine cellars in evacuated houses were quickly emptied. The island authorities stepped in and gathered all the furniture from the deserted homes into warehouses to preserve it for its owners’ return after the war – German requisitioning orders were often met out of these stores. But not even wooden banisters, skirting boards and doors were safe from the depredations of hungry, cold islanders; they were ripped out and burnt for fuel.
Children learnt to steal, and if they took things from the Germans, they were unlikely to be punished by their parents. Rollo Sherwill recalls: ‘We stole potatoes from German stores. Children learnt very quickly how to make skeleton keys and we could open any door, or any padlock. That kind of information got around very quickly. I never used that skill after the war. The Germans were a legitimate target, but it was absolutely taboo to steal from a neighbour.’
Sherwill remembers that when the children who had been evacuated to Britain during the war returned, those who had stayed on the islands were, in comparison, ‘a bit wild’: ‘We gave people in authority hell. We did anything to buck authority because during the war we had learnt it was legitimate to do that, because authority had been the Germans.’
The taboo of not stealing from neighbours did not always hold. It was hard for those with hungry stomachs to live beside a farmer whose family had more than enough, and who was supplying the Germans at a huge profit. Farmers found it difficult to guard their farms and livestock. Herbert Nichols was a well-brought-up Guernsey boy, but the needs of his five brothers and sisters and harassed mother were such that scruples were laid aside: ‘I’d go to the milk depot to steal the cream; I dropped through a skylight and once we nearly got caught by a joint patrol of Guernsey and German police. We also used to milk the cows in the summer at night when they were sleeping outside. I’d crawl along in the grass because it was after curfew; I used to go fairly regularly with some friends. My mother didn’t say anything, but she was scared. Sometimes I’d bring home a chicken I’d stolen. Once we stole 5–6 hundredweight of potatoes from the greenhouse.’
Islanders complained bitterly of how bicycles they had left for a minute disappeared, of how clothing vanished from the line and apples from the trees before they were ripe. Some of the culprits were foreign labourers, and in the last year of the war German soldiers, desperate for food, turned into armed burglars for precious potatoes and carrots. It was a far cry from the pre-war days, when islanders never had to worry about locking their doors.
One of the hardest memories of the Occupation for islanders to come to terms with was the fact that many of their neighbours turned informers. It was a deep shock to realise that people could betray their own kind. This transgressed every notion of decency and good neighbourliness which the islanders had believed were respected – if not always followed – on their islands. The trust between neighbours broke down, and islanders quickly learnt to be careful of who they spoke to and what they said to them. No one was sure who could be trusted. A Guernsey schoolteacher wrote in her diary:
4 August 1942: I blush for my fellow islanders, they are giving one another away right and left about black market dealings. How they find each other out is remarkable but the way they do betray their friends is hateful (worthy of the Hun himself!)
Informing was a way of getting back at a neighbour who had refused to lend some sugar or flour, or at a shopkeeper who was charging high prices. It was also a way of settling old scores. Informers were paid handsomely on occasions, with rewards of several pounds for betraying someone with an illegal wireless. Island post office workers claimed that they managed to stop hundreds of letters addressed to the Feldkommandantur from islanders informing on neighbours for having illegal radios or secret supplies of food. Albert Lamy, the head of Guernsey police, said the police ignored the informers’ letters they received, as they realised that they were often unreliable, and inspired by malice. Even the Germans sometimes found these betrayals beneath their dignity, although they did rely on paid informers, and granted them favours in return.
Some of the letters have survived:
‘Why is Jack Cornu, 4 Boyne Terrace, Great Union Road, allowed to have received one ton of anthracite coal when other people have none at all. Also call and see his stock of food in bedroom cupboards and billiard room and see what you make of it,’ wrote a Jersey informer in 1944.
‘Please search Brampton Villa, Great Union Road for at least two wirelesses hidden under floorboards, loft and cellars. It is a lodging house,’ wrote another.
In 1943 ‘a stranger’ wrote to ask the Germans to search Frank Powers, ‘who sells black market cognac, sugar, butter at terrible prices. The cognac is German property and he dilutes it. One more point, he is believed to have a wireless set hidden in one of the house walls. Anyhow I hope you will do something. Best of luck.’
Some of the women who slept with Germans were accused of being informers. One of the most infamous was a woman on Jersey called Mme Baudains who was nicknamed ‘Mimi the spy’. Joe Miere said, ‘She would listen to you on the streets and in the cafés and she would phone the Germans and they would be around immediately.’ Bernard Hassall was equally wary of her: ‘She used to wear black with a fox fur around her neck with a silver end to the tail. You’d see her going around town but you didn’t dare look at her. We kept well out of her way – she was lethal.’
Hassall says that both he and his brother Peter were informed on by women. He ended up in Jersey prison, while Peter was sent to the Continent, after an escape attempt to England failed: ‘The woman who put me inside is living in London. A friend of mine got friendly with her, and tried to impress her by telling her that I had some weapons hidden in my bedroom. I should never have told him. She was also friendly with the Geheime Feldpolizei [the secret military police] down at Havre des Pas. There were more women than men who informed; they did it in return for favours such as stockings, food. Informing is as low as you can go; it’s shocking.’
Some of the women Mary McCarthy knew to be dating the Germans became informers. When Mary called one girl a ‘dirty jerrybag’ the girl retorted, ‘Shut up, and if you don’t, there are ways of making you shut up.’
Sometimes informing had tragic consequences. In one case two women, a mother and daughter, alleged that a young Guernsey boy, John Ingrouille, had a gun, and was planning armed resistance against the Germans. No gun was ever found, but John’s denials, backed by his parents, were ignored at his trial on Jersey, and he was sentenced to five years for treason and espionage. John was a much-loved only child, and his father’s diary vividly records his anguish:
2 January 1941: Two German officers of the Military police came and searched my house . . . taking with them a knife which they said my boy had stolen. However, they came on several occasions and carried on their work of searching my house and turning everything upside down . . . But the climax came when one day these same officers brought with them a woman . . . That same woman told one under-officer that my boy had two hundred men ready to revolt in the island of Guernsey . . . I can clearly state that it was a lie.
John Ingrouille was sent to prison in Caen, Normandy, and he wrote regular, affectionate letters to his parents. In one he wrote, ‘I’m keeping my spirit up as much as I can. It will be everybody’s birthday when I come back home, and I hope it will be soon.’
It was not. With an uncharacteristic scrupulousness for legal niceties, the German authorities decided a retrial was necessary in Germany. The two informers were taken to Germany to give evidence, and again John was found guilty. Victor Carey, the Bailiff, attempted to intervene with the German authorities, pointing out that the boy was considered by his employers to be below average intelligence and that ‘his parents are simple and industrious peasants and he is their only child’.
On 6 August 1942, John’s father received a letter from the Berlin Army Justice Inspector saying that his son’s sentence had been revoked. But he was not released until the following year. It was too late; he had contracted tuberculosis, and died in Brussels on his way home.
A female informer is alleged to have revealed to the Germans that two British agents had secretly landed on Guernsey in September 1940. The agents subsequently handed themselves in, and the informer’s act led to the arrest of fifteen people, who were imprisoned in France.
There was one other category of collaborators, a tiny handful who went further than informing, and actually volunteered to work for the Germans in Germany. At least one was working alongside William Joyce – better known as Lord Haw-Haw – in broadcasting German propaganda to Britain. Judging by their surnames, most were originally Irish and could not therefore technically be accused of treason, but a few were British. In May 1942, the Jersey Bailiff Alexander Coutanche wrote to the Feldkommandantur with the names of five men working in Germany who wished their wages to be paid into their island bank accounts. A letter in the Guernsey archives enquirës whether wages owing to those working in Germany could be deposited with the Westminster Bank in Paris; it mentions no names.
One of the men who worked in Germany, James Lingshaw, was originally among those deported in 1942 and 1943, when 2200 islanders were sent to German internment camps. Ambrose Sherwill met him at Laufen internment camp, and after the war he drew up a statement for the investigating British authorities on his recollections of the man:
He had a room to himself which he had been given a key for and he had a pass which enabled him to leave the camp . . . there was considerable resentment against Lingshaw for these privileges.
On 16 August 1943, Lingshaw told me that he was going to Berlin to coach fifteen girls in English and I gathered these girls were connected to the German radio propaganda service. I explained to Lingshaw that such work was incompatible with his duty as a British subject . . . and that I should be compelled to regard him as a renegade Englishman and that he should consider the matter carefully . . . There was something lacking in his mental make-up. [He was] almost obsequious and what I said was passing over his head. He sought to shake hands. I refused but he was still most polite. His attitude was rather that of a schoolboy about to embark on a pleasant vacation.
Lingshaw was put on trial after the war, and was imprisoned for five years. In court it was pointed out that he was riot being tried for any crimes he might have committed while in the Channel Islands.
In 1946 James Gilbert, who had briefly lived on Jersey and was perhaps the ‘Gibson’ mentioned in Bailiff Coutanche’s letter to the Feldkommandantur in 1942, was tried in the Old Bailey, London, and sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment for working at a German radio station and ‘aiding’ the enemy. After the trial his sister unsuccessfully appealed to King George VI, stating that her brother had had no choice but to help the Germans, after he was beaten and threatened with death in a concentration camp. She said that James was a pacifist, who had arrived on Jersey in 1940 in search of work; he was ‘extremely gullible’, and was ‘tricked, trapped, tortured and now, worst of all, branded as a traitor’.
It was almost impossible to abide by every German and island regulation and still make a living and have enough food on the table. Thousands of islanders broke the curfew, did a bit of trading on the black market, had a banned radio, stole food from the Germans or chopped some wood down illegally. No one had a spotless record, and everyone lived in fear of the heavy boot-tread, the knock on the door and the house search. The islanders were completely powerless in the face of the German authorities, who were accountable to no one, and thousands of civilians found themselves up before the courts in the course of the Occupation.
Most black market or theft charges were dealt with in the local courts, but the more serious cases were tried in German courts. The lucky ones got a fine or a sentence in an island prison. All the islands’ gaols were full by the middle of the Occupation, and many of those convicted had long waits before they could serve their sentences. Dozens of others had to be sent to prisons in France, where the conditions were bearable and sometimes the food was more plentiful than on the islands, but it was lonely to be in a foreign country, with no one speaking one’s own language. Most French people found the islanders’ Norman French virtually incomprehensible.
Seventeen-year-old Dolly Joanknecht had never been abroad when she was sent to prison in France in 1943. The only other time she had left Guernsey was to go to Southend for a holiday. She was accused of handling stolen goods at her uncle’s shop where she had been working. The German police came one day to take her name, and two months later she received a form telling her to go to the German headquarters.
A German said to me, ‘You are a German undesirable. You have received stolen food from the German forces. You are going to prison for four months.’ Bang, he stamped my form. I didn’t know what he was talking about. Later, I learnt my uncle had been a black marketeer and was also sent to prison.
I was very proud that I was going to prison; I thought it made me something of a resistance heroine. I expected to go to the Guernsey prison, but some time later I got a letter saying I was going to prison on the Continent. A car came to collect me; I wasn’t scared, I was excited. I was handed over to a German gendarme who looked after me very well.
When we arrived in St Malo he took me for breakfast and then we walked all over the town, sightseeing – our train wasn’t until the evening. We had a lovely dinner in a café and the gendarme got drunk on beer and I had to help him out of the café and I sat him on a seat on the wall around St Malo to sober up. I could have run away but I didn’t know where to go so I just sat there and waited for him.
Dolly served her sentence in Lille women’s prison, where she was nicknamed ‘La Petite Tommy’. She learnt some French and made some good friends. She received French Red Cross parcels with delicious food, and she managed to survive a number of scrapes and adventures, including falling seriously ill. On the boat back to Guernsey she met Willi, her future husband, as we have seen.
Imprisonment could be highly arbitrary. Stella Perkins’s mother and aunt were arrested around the time of the D-Day landings simply because they were of Russian birth. Fourteen-year-old Stella was left to look after her three younger brothers for several weeks.
In such a situation there was no island official to turn to for help. Only in the very gravest cases did the island governments intervene to plead an islander’s case with the German authorities.
John Leale, President of Guernsey’s Controlling Committee, pleaded unsuccessfully for the release of John Ingrouille. Early in 1945, Jersey Bailiff Alexander Coutanche intervened in the tragic case of ‘Alice’, an eighteen-year-old girl who had fallen in love with a German soldier. With the end of the war in sight the soldier had decided to desert. Alice hid him, but he was found, and they were both sentenced to death. Coutanche appealed to the German authorities: ‘I have seen the father of this young woman and he had told me that for some four or five months a great friendship had arisen between his daughter and the German soldier . . . Alice was, it would appear, passionately in love. A young woman in love does not always weigh the consequences of her acts, when they are dictated by what she believes, however wrongly, to be for the welfare of her lover . . . I appeal for mercy.’
To everyone’s relief, Alice’s sentence was transmuted to ten years’ imprisonment. Joe Miere was in the next cell to her, and from his window he glimpsed her German boyfriend wave goodbye to her on his way to the place of execution, where he was shot.
Coutanche also successfully pleaded for a stay of execution on two middle-aged ladies, Suzanne Malherbe and Lucille Schwab, sentenced to death for resistance activities. He cleverly couched the plea in terms designed to appeal to the Germans: ‘The sentence is causing anxiety and distress amongst the population, not because of any particular acquaintance with, or sympathy for the condemned persons, but because of a feeling of repugnance against the carrying out of a sentence of death on women . . . in view of the great difficulties which are facing the civil population in the future and of my desire to avoid anything calculated to arouse passion . . . I appeal for mercy.’
Senior members of the government usually managed to get off more lightly. When Ed Le Quesne, the head of the Jersey Department of Labour and a member of the island’s Superior Council, was sentenced to prison for having an illegal radio, he served only two weeks of his sentence before being released. Von Aufsess wrote in his diary that he was furious with his colleagues for ever allowing the case to come to court.
A prison sentence in France was not too great a hardship, but the terrible fear was that one could get ensnared in the system and end up in a concentration camp, where unknown horrors were being perpetrated. Between twenty and thirty islanders were sent to concentration camps, and about half of them died there. Some of their offences were relatively trivial: Canon Cohu of St Saviour’s, Jersey, died in Spergau, to which he was sent after an anonymous informer reported that he had a radio. Stanley Green, the Jersey cinema projectionist, survived a terrible ordeal in Buchenwald, also for possessing a radio. Informers caused the arrests of Louisa Gould, her brother Harold Le Druillenec and her sister Ivy Forster. Louisa died in Ravensbruck. Her brother and sister survived, but Harold suffered appallingly in Belsen.
The islanders learned to live with constant fear. At any time they could be reminded of their vulnerability, their isolation from the rest of the world and from their traditional protector, Britain, and the overwhelming strength of the Germans. William Brown, the Jersey policeman, remembered: ‘At night, you sometimes heard five hundred of them on a route march at one or two o’clock in the morning, and they’d be singing victory songs. You’d be the only local person out, and they’d come up the town, roaring at the top of their voices every time, as if they wanted to waken everyone up to German supremacy.’
It is not surprising that many islanders who lived through the Occupation wanted to forget about it as quickly as possible after 1945. It had been morally confusing, and had made people bitter and cynical; it was hard work, and dreary; it was frightening; it was boring and monotonous. As the medical report to the British government immediately after the war commented, depression was one of the biggest health problems on the islands. Cut off from the outside world, the islanders had little to talk about. Rumours and gossip festered on the smallest scraps of information, fuelling unjustified and justified resentments alike: ‘Some high official is being accused of shady dealings. It is all quite exciting and relieves the monotony of our dreary existence, for we are all feeling bored,’ wrote one diarist.
Amateur dramatics and entertainments were a great morale booster to some; religion or reading to others. Because keeping cheerful was so difficult, it became a much admired quality. Those who kept their sense of humour – as many did, judging by the ribald Occupation jokes – were nothing short of heroic, as they eased the burden of woes for everyone.