Making Oundle's War

This article is based on the talk I gave for the Oundle Festival of Literature on Remembrance Sunday 2008 about 'Oundle's War', a book that I wrote about the town's history during the Second World War.

It’s not a newly published book by an up and coming young writer, and perhaps has only a limited appeal for the friends of one small market town in Northamptonshire. But what better way could there have been for the 2008 Oundle Literature Festival to raise funds for wounded ex-servicemen and their families on Remembrance Sunday than to ask the author to talk about the background to Oundle’s War and the reprint which has just been launched? 

All profits are again being donated to the Royal British Legion, as they were when the book originally appeared in 1995.







Picture: The front cover photo shows tanks in Oundle Market Place during a wartime recruiting drive.

Of course I was the editor rather than the author of this book, which was subtitled Memories of a Northamptonshire Town 1939-1945. I chose to let others’ voices record the mixture of events – tragic and heroic, bizarre and even amusing – which for them made up the Second World War. 

Nor was I a professional editor, or even a specialist historian of the period. As I told former Blue Peter presenter Peter Purvis during an interview for BBC Radio Northampton, I’m not one of those people who knows the price of butter in 1943.

That 50th anniversary of the end of the war, when I decided to write a book to raise funds for the Royal British Legion is almost a distant memory for me now, as indeed is Oundle, now that I have retired to the other end of the country in Budleigh Salterton on the East Devon coast.


And yet there was one day earlier in the summer when, sunbathing on Budleigh’s famous pebble beach, I was struck by the sight of about 30 young men jogging along the Marine Parade towards the steeply rising coast path. On a weekday? Why weren’t they at work? Was it a football team in training? Suddenly – perhaps it was the haircuts – I realised that I was watching a group of Royal Marines from their base at Lympstone, on the Exe estuary. 

They would have been on a 30-mile training run which would eventually, no doubt, lead many of them to Afghanistan. Some would quite possibly never see their families again, or if they survived would be unrecognisable to their loved ones and would require constant care. I suddenly thought of the tragic losses among the young people of whom I’d written in Oundle’s War, and of course of the recent death of former Oundle School pupil Captain David Hicks.














Picture: Remembrance Sunday 1994 at Oundle War Memorial.

And so, almost 15 years after the original publication, I’m pleased to be supporting once again the Royal British Legion. Thanks are due to Mike Murphy at Oundle School Bookshop for suggesting the idea of a reprint, and for handling the business side of things. 

It would also be right to acknowledge my debt to the original 1995 team of 20 pupils – ten from Oundle School and ten from Prince William School – who set to work under my guidance with tape-recorders and notebooks to interview veterans for the project.

The publication of Oundle’s War was a community-based venture, and would not have succeeded without the collaboration of many people with local links: Brenda Durndell and Melvyn Chapman were vital for the typesetting and pre-press work, as were David Marsden and Simon Dolby in the design field. Old Oundelian Andrew Clay facilitated the printing, while Chris Piper at the Old Oundelian Club helped with marketing the book to former pupils. 

And finally I was grateful to my wife and family who read through the text so many times before it went to the printer.

With so many international problems now shared and solved in a positive spirit by the great powers, the grim and bloody squabble of World War Two seems even further away. But it’s no surprise that the 1939-45 conflict continues to inspire and to shock. No other event in History has inspired more films, for example: productions such as The Dam Busters, Reach for the Sky or The Bridge on the River Kwai which I saw as a child, but also more recent and more costly blockbusters which have moved later generations – Saving Private Ryan, The English Patient, Atonement… The list goes and will go on and on.

Pretty extraordinary and dramatic things happened of course. Even in Oundle.

In 1940, Churchill had announced that Britain was about to be invaded. Home Guards everywhere stood ready. At Oundle, the sixth formers of Grafton House remembered being given rifles and live rounds of ammunition and sent up to the playing fields to await the Nazi paratroopers. And to calm their nerves, the Housemaster gave each boy a cigarette. Everybody was ready to defend the kingdom.

Everybody? Well, not quite. In one village not too far from Oundle, one of the residents whom I interviewed for Oundle’s War remembered only too well Churchill’s terrifying announcement. 

Ready for the ultimate sacrifice this person raided the family gunroom and went from house to house prepared to distribute shotguns, hunting rifles and handguns to the villagers, imagining that they would be desperate to repel the Nazi paratroopers. 

The reality came as a shock. Not one English household was willing to take up the offer, frightened as the community was of being caught with weapons by the invaders and of being shot as resistance fighters. There was one exception, but that was a German Jewish refugee family which had settled in the village.

That story was omitted from the book at my interviewee’s insistence. This person loved the village and did not want the media to descend on it in 1995 and label its wartime residents as cowards.

Another story which did appear was much stranger. In 1944, just prior to the D-Day landings, Glapthorn Road resident Vic Thorington remembered being posted to Doncaster racecourse where his task was to bleed horses. Why, I wondered? Mr Thorington had certainly been given no indication by his superiors as to how those thousands of bottles of horse blood would be used.

I suggested to a professor of veterinary medicine at Cambridge that the sight of the full bottles could have been to boost the morale of soldiers prior to D-Day, reassuring them that adequate medical supplies had been provided by the Allies for the invasion. He retorted that this would have been morally outrageous; horse blood is in any case incompatible with human blood. And in retrospect, it might well be argued, the sight of all those blood supplies might have weakened morale.

I never did discover the answer, and decided to leave the puzzle to be solved perhaps by future young Oundle historians.

Another story which was not included in order to protect a family concerned a young British officer whose Oundle widow told me of the nightmares which would trouble him for many years after the war. 

When the Allies did invade in June 1944, some of the most savage resistance which they encountered was from members of the Hitler Youth. One group had been captured by the officer and his patrol who had locked them up in a wooden shed while awaiting reinforcements. It was obvious from the sounds of rioting that the young but fanatical Germans were about to break out. Some of them would certainly have concealed weapons and they outnumbered their captors. 

The British officer’s only horrifying solution was to allow his prisoners out one by one and to have his patrol execute them in cold blood. Had the affair come to light he would certainly have been prosecuted as a war criminal.



















Picture: Clark Gable with local girls Delma Northen and Mavis Pollard. The latter, on Gable's right, was to become a GI bride.

In a lighter vein, the late Dame Miriam Rothschild told me the story of how she had acted as a chaperone for Clark Gable, stationed at Polebrook Airfield with the USAAF’s 351st Bomb Group as a B17 air-gunner. The Hollywood star, celebrated for his recent performance in Gone with the Wind, had been invited to a party at the local hospital and explained that he needed to be protected from the nurses who were apparently desperate to seize a piece of his underwear.

Some of these more controversial stories were not included in Oundle’s War; I did not set out to write a troublesome work which might have caused embarrassment. 

The book had its origins in an eight-page supplement published in a 1992 edition of the Oundle Chronicle as a tribute to the USAAF; local newspapers everywhere were marking the 50th anniversary of the arrival of the Americans in Britain. 

With the 50th anniversary of the end of World War Two approaching in 1995, it was clear that the making of a book to involve Oundle pupils would be a wonderful educational opportunity, to provide, in the words of the town’s Royal British Legion former Treasurer Peter Francis “a lasting reminder to all, of what some ordinary people did during those six momentous years.”
















Picture: Oundle War Memorial drawn by local artist Diana Leigh 

That thought, in connection with an earlier war, had perhaps been at the back of my mind for the 25 years following the move that my family and I made in the 1980s to our own house in Oundle, a Victorian property on the corner of Herne Road. 

For there, etched faintly on the panelling we discovered the name of the decorator, H.B. Hancock, and the date, 1912. It was many months later while passing the war memorial, that I saw with a sudden chill and sadness the name of the poor man who had lost his life in the first year of the Great War.

























Picture: Robin Miller with his pre-war diary 

There are plenty of stories in Oundle’s War about ordinary people who found themselves caught up in dramatic situations during World War Two, as well as previously published exploits of well-known wartime heroes, many of them educated at Oundle. 

The book’s chapter-based structure allowed approaches from a variety of angles. Research for the first chapter, ‘Beginnings’, was a real eye-opener: the visit of a Hitler Youth group to Oundle in the 1930s, arguments for and against appeasement in the School debating society in the face of Hitler’s advances, the intensity with which poems contributed to the school magazine The Laxtonian treated the subject of war, the air-raid shelters built by pupils… such discoveries brought the period to life. 

They included the extract from former Oundle School Head of Music Robin Miller’s 1935 diary entry, recording how he sat a few tables away from Hitler in a Munich café.

Research for the book led to the honouring of an Oundle-educated former Chief Scientist of GCHQ by the Master of the Grocers’ Company, when a plaque was unveiled in Laxton Cloisters in 1995 recording the vital pre-war work on radar defences carried out by former pupil Gerald Touch.

‘Oundle at War’, the second chapter, owed a tremendous debt to the O-level History coursework carried out by former Laxton School pupil Patrick Duerden; his research into evacuees, rationing, wartime fund-raising, the Women’s Land Army and the Home Guard was invaluable. 

Among the many amusing stories in this chapter was the reported arrest by US military police of the School’s Headmaster Dr Kenneth Fisher, who had been foolish enough to go bird-watching with binoculars near Polebrook Airfield; unfortunately he had set out without his identity card. 

But the section ends poignantly with the sight of ‘Bud’ Fisher in the Chapel and the news of Old Oundelians recently killed in action, as remembered by former pupil Paul Massey: “I remember him blubbing as he read out the names to the whole school. I didn’t understand why he was blubbing – I only 13 at the time.”



















Picture: Captain Norman Jewell, MBE, DSC, on a visit to Oundle in 1995.

The third chapter, ‘Active Service’, is the longest: it combines a chronological history of World War Two with a record of the heroic deeds and the tragic loss of life among both young servicemen from Oundle town, and among some of the 2,480 ex-Oundle School pupils who had enlisted. 

Incidents such as the deaths of two brothers, Gordon and Michael Potts, killed on the same day in different parts of France, struck me as particularly sad. Other episodes in which Old Oundelians played an important role could be said to have contributed positively to the course of the war and the Allied victory; 392 former pupils were decorated and 372 were mentioned in despatches. 

It was an honour to meet Norman Jewell, captain of HMS Seraph, the submarine which played such an important part in the wartime counter-intelligence operation immortalised in the book and the film The Man Who Never Was. 

Yet another of Oundle’s war heroes, Robert Aitken, gave me a detailed and fascinating account of his 1943 journey across the North Sea in the successful X-craft midget submarine operation to disable the Tirpitz, Germany’s most feared battleship at the time. 

Equally absorbing, but grim in its depiction of the conflict was Geoffrey Bond’s account of the fighting in France following the D-Day landings; I changed nothing in this text from a former Oundle School pupil, better known as the television scriptwriter Christopher Bond whose shows would ironically include successful comedies like To the Manor Born and Keeping Up Appearances.











Picture: The USAAF memorial at Polebrook Airfield.

‘Friends and Allies’, the fourth chapter, included an extended version of the tribute to the American servicemen which had appeared in the 1992 Oundle Chronicle. 

From Polebrook Airfield alone, 405 airmen had lost their lives during World War Two. As Miriam Rothschild told me, “I don’t think we realised how much we owed the Americans. They were incredibly brave, incredibly tough, incredibly dedicated, and I don’t know what would have happened here if we hadn’t had the American air force stationed at Polebrook and the various other places from where they operated. We must always be deeply grateful.” 

Many were the stories, enthralling and touching, horrific and sometimes amusing, which I was told by Oundle’s wartime residents. A page in the book reproduces the entry made by the 15-year-old schoolgirl Lorna Sloan, recording the “whale of a party” that she had with Clark Gable until 2.30 am on 24 August 1943. “I had Clarky! He is really very nice but by no means good!” she wrote.












Eight-year-old Jodie Richardson, a pupil at Polebrook School, thanks Roger Johnson for his gift of a new bike.

Also included in this chapter was the full account given by the ex-USAAF veteran Major Roger Johnson, who returned to the Polebrook area in 1992 to repay a half-century-old debt. His present of 94 new bicycles to local children was the result of his having borrowed a bike one night in order to get back to the airbase in time for an early morning bombing raid. For 48 years he had anguished over the fact that he had not been able to return the bike to its owner.

Picture: Emil Skiba outside his West Street shop.

The Americans were not Britain's only allies; chapter four also recorded some of the stories told by Oundle’s Polish residents. One of the most remarkable was that of Emil Skiba, the town’s respected clockmaker, whose 1,500-mile flight on foot to escape the Russians led him via the Middle East – where he learnt his clockmaking skills – to Italy where he took part in the battle of Monte Cassino in Italy.

The penultimate chapter focuses on the servicemen with Oundle links who became prisoners of war. For Old Oundelians like Robert Aitken the School’s “pre-war moderately spartan style” helped to make life as a PoW tolerable. Others were involved in classic escape stories which have been made into books and films. The role played by the School Workshops in the making of Stalag Luft III’s vaulting horse, for example, immortalised in the book The Wooden Horse, is not generally known by Oundle people.

Picture: Former prisoner-of-war Ralph Leigh.

Yet other veterans in Oundle’s War found that their captivity challenged a stereotyped view of the enemy. Among local residents I found Ralph Leigh, whose experiences as a captive in North Africa and Germany could be described as life-changing. A chance meeting with a chivalrous Mussolini prompted his thought, “Who’s been filling us with all these stories about the people we’re supposed to be fighting?” 

Later, as a prisoner in his camp outside Dresden, the revulsion and anger at the sight of the horrific firestorm which destroyed the city in February 1945, would make him, as he put it, “a complete pacifist.”

 In the Far East, feelings for the enemy were less ambiguous: Old Oundelian James Bradley’s account of the savage treatment of Allied prisoners forced to work by the Japanese on the Thailand-Burma railway provided many instances of man’s inhumanity to man. 

And yet Oundle resident Aubrey Clark, who was lucky enough to be a prisoner on the Japanese mainland, quoted numerous instances of his captors’ fair treatment of Allied servicemen, and even of their kindness.

Picture: Charlie Schoenrock outside Oundle School's Great Hall

As for enemy PoWs in Britain, this chapter of Oundle’s War included the story of Charlie Schoenrock, captured in August 1944 as Allied troops pushed into France. Morale was low, and resistance was not an option, he explained. “We were all just walking in a field like lost sheep.” 

Happily settled in the Oundle area and working for the School he became, in his own words, “a naturalised Englishman” as well as a friendly face for generations of pupils, especially at the Workshops.

‘The End’, the final chapter, included mention not only of the memorials and celebrations which marked the conclusion of World War Two but also veterans’ reflections on the conflict and the lessons which they believed they had learnt. For if, at the very least, as one reviewer has put it, the book has “ensured that many of the voices of that era will survive for posterity” Oundle’s War will have amply served its purpose.

The reprinted version of Oundle’s War, is available by phoning Oundle School Bookshop on 01832 277192 or by emailing books@oundle.co.uk