The Female Midshipman

The twenty-year-old worked at the latch until it broke. She pushed the window open and squeezed through, dropping to the ground and giving herself a “sair clyte” in the process. She was either desperate or foolish for she was approaching the end of a six-month sentence for theft – not her first offences – her jail term on this occasion being for stealing from drapers’ shops in Aberdeen.  The temptation when left alone for a few minutes by the jail’s washerwoman proved too inviting and so out the window of Aberdeen’s east prison at Lodge Walk she clambered and once collecting herself after her fall off she ran in a bid for freedom. And so she succeeded. For a time at least. When next she turned up in Aberdeen, she was a he.

She was Isabella Knowles; the day 4 February 1869. Isabella’s flight from justice took her south to Stonehaven initially and from there she made her way into England to Newcastle. Somewhere during her travels she had her long hair cut short and took to wearing breeches, probably stolen. Perhaps a stint in Edinburgh’s Theatre Royal inspired her transformation from Isabella to a sailor called John Brown rigged out in typical seaman’s gear of light tweed trousers, light grey vest and blue silk necktie, sailor’s jacket with anchor studded buttons and a peaked cap and so midshipman Brown was created. Just like that. Gender switch so to speak.  Could she/he pass muster was the question? Away from her home territory the answer was yes but she grew homesick for Newhills just outside Aberdeen and was drawn back north.

In the granite city the midshipman boldly smiled at every police constable she encountered without being recognised and so continued westwards from the town, perhaps to the family home. It was her bad luck and his good luck that one day in April a local shoemaker suffering badly from depression went to a quarry at Hilton intending to drown himself when he noticed a bundle of good quality clothing lying abandoned. Distracted from his purpose and being an honest man, he went off to the police station at Buxburn (Bucksburn) to report the finding. Because the items were of high value a search of the area was undertaken by the police who found more bundles hidden in whin (gorse) bushes. The items had obviously been stolen and so the police set up an overnight watch in case the thief showed up. Around 8 o’clock in the evening they saw a figure approaching – a 

Philip Richard Morris, Two young midshipmen in sight of home

“dashing young midshipman with fine blue suit, and shining yellow buttons, with cap set jauntily on his head, with seaman-like carelessness, and carrying under his arm a bundle”

(Aberdeen Journal, 14 April, 1869)

The man retrieved one of the bales hidden in a bush and was walking away with it when the two watching constables sprang into action and caught hold of the thief. Searching the tall, good-looking stranger they found him in possession of several household articles including pairs of curtains, which later were identified as having been stolen from the lobby of Aberdeen’s Lemon Tree Hotel. A further search of the quarry area turned up nearly 200 articles of stolen property including a riding habit. The estimated value of the goods was about £30, in today’s terms around £5,000. A large proportion of the items belonged to the wife of the owner of the Stoneywood Paper Mill, Mrs Pirie, and had been packed into a trunk left overnight in a room at the mill. The trunk itself was missing, having been emptied and thrown into the nearby river Don.

At the police station the suspected thief identified himself as a seaman from Stonehaven called John Brown but the sergeant’s wife had only to take one look at the person under arrest to declare ‘him’ a her, at which point the prisoner owned up to her deception. It was then the bobbies realised they had unwittingly nabbed the escaped thief, Isabella Knowles, and returned her to Aberdeen to complete her previous sentence and await trial on a fresh set of charges for prison-breaking and theft when the circuit court convened in the city. The press revelled in being able to report on what they dubbed the cross-dressing miscreant, the ‘female midshipman’.

At her trial before Sheriff Comrie Thomson in July 1869 Knowles maintained her innocence over the theft of a chest or trunk and a large quantity of women’s and baby clothing and household linen from a room at Stoneywood Paper Works. Having been previously employed at the paper mill and so familiar with its layout did not help her case and she was found guilty and sentenced to 15 months in prison.

Donside mill before Isabella’s time there

Hardly was that jail term behind her when Knowles was hauled again before the courts when in April 1871 she was accused of stealing a carpetbag filled with clothing from Aberdeen’s steamboat wharf. She deposited the bag in the left luggage office at the nearby railway station but her reputation as a sneak thief was such that Aberdeen’s police had been on the lookout for her and when she returned to the station to retrieve the bag they lifted her. But not for long. Knowles made a run for it pursued by a constable. As he drew close she tripped him up by throwing herself in front of him and made off again but where John Brown might have succeeded in his breeches, Isabella’s skirt caught on a paling (fence). She pulled it free but the delay allowed the police constable to finally catch his quarry. Knowles snatched a knife out of her pocket and threatened him with it but he overpowered her. Back at police headquarters at Lodge Walk it was confirmed he had apprehended the ‘“notorious” female midshipman’. Isabella is listed among prisoners in Aberdeen’s east prison census that year.

When the case came to court Knowles’ long record of prior misdemeanours was read out including her imprisonment for stealing from Borland’s Temperance Hotel in Greenock and the Prince of Wales in Port Glasgow when she was convicted under the name, Jane Robertson (one of a number of her aliases). Her solicitor argued that none of the thefts was deliberate but the mere playfulness of moving articles from one place to another. The jury and sheriff were not persuaded and she was sentenced to 20 months.

On her release, Knowles resumed a criminal career that took her across Scotland and into England. Whatever motivated her – poverty or a mental condition – Knowles was simply not very good at thieving and quickly arrested once more, this time on a charge of stealing poultry and a pair of trousers from a house at Woodside close to the home of her long-suffering and respectable parents. Isabella Knowles, the female midshipman, lived a life of uncertainty and obvious privation. Perhaps something that happened early in her life drove her to follow her bizarre and largely unsuccessful criminal calling. Who’s to say? Her family in Newhills were apparently unremarkable, hard-working folk. Isabella’s father was a master cartwright, her mother didn’t appear to work when the children were growing up. A brother followed his father into the joinery/cartwright trade. A younger son, Alexander, worked in the Woodside mill where Isabella was once employed – she was a mill worker at thirteen and possibly younger. It is likely her younger sisters would have followed them into the mill as it was a major employer in their area. It’s awful to think of these children having to labour long hours in a noisy and dangerous factory where accidents were common occurrences. Isabella is believed to have been badly hurt in an accident. I haven’t found evidence of this but a girl around the same age as Isabella was horribly killed at the Stoneywood mill at the time Isabella was there. The seventeen-year-old’s skirt caught on a revolving machine and despite a young man’s desperate attempt to keep hold of the poor girl the power of the engine dragged her in and she died, crushed between enormous rollers. Whether Isabella witnessed the incident or not she would have known about it. Being around the same age they may have been friends. This is pure speculation, of course.

Nethergate, Dundee where Isabella died

We know that Isabella Knowles was a plucky young woman who survived on her wits when her wits didn’t let her down. Her 1871 sentence in April that year was about the time her father died of Phthisis or tuberculosis aged just 55 years. It’s likely this horrible wasting and contagious disease was passed to his wife during his short illness and she died of the same in 1874 also at the age of 55. Earlier that year their daughter Isabella was once more up in court charged with a series of thefts.  Found guilty she was sentenced to seven years penal servitude.

Isabella’s death certificate and correction certificate

Isabella Knowles would have been released from prison in 1881. With her parents dead there was little to keep her at Newhills and when I next found her, she too had died – still single now a millworker in Dundee she was a jute repairer which sounds like fairly unpleasant work. On 28 February 1899 Isabella was found dead at 74 Nethergate, at 8 am, it was assumed of heart disease at 51. The sometimes comical but tragic life of the ‘romantic prison breaker’, ‘notorious girl’, ‘female midshipman’ had come to a close.

The Corrosive Banality of Misogyny: International Women’s Day

As International Women’s Day rolls around again we shouldn’t kid ourselves that women in the 21^st century are anything but still marginalised and victimised – differently from in the past for many but experiencing the sort of misogyny that’s impacted women’s lives for millennia. Oh sure, legislation has been passed over the past one hundred years to eliminate inequalities between the sexes but look at where we are now – in some parts of the world men still dictate what women can and cannot wear, where they can go, who they can speak with. Women are killed for disobeying men who regard them as property. And not very valuable property at that. Sex has always created divisions and power struggles but currently in western countries it’s sex that’s under attack with some questioning the definition of what constitutes a woman to the extent that men can claim to be women, occupy roles that are designated as women’s and redefine what feminism is – it’s not what women say it is, according to them.

In 1908 International Women’s Day was inaugurated as a protest against sexism and misogyny. However despicable were men’s working conditions, and they were, women’s were often worse. Women and girls faced every kind of unfair treatment purely because of their sex from employment rights to the franchise. The once collective suffrage movement, the Chartists, dropped women from the demand of voting rights because the men thought they had a better chance of success without them. They were still fighting for votes for men over 21 almost 100 years later and by then women had realised if they wanted something they had to do it for themselves.

Hundreds of thousands of women took to the streets worldwide to mark International Women’s Day in 1908. By then a whole slew of women’s organisations demonstrated women’s fury and impatience at their treatment in every facet of their lives purely on grounds of sex. Poor and working-class women and girls fared worst of all and women were drawn to socialist and communist organisations to accelerate positive changes. However when the International Women’s Congress opened that September in Geneva it was under the presidency of Lord and Lady Aberdeen, Scottish aristocrats, but aristocrats with a strong sense of social justice – or at least she had. Lady Aberdeen was an outspoken campaigner for women. She setup the Onward and Upward Association to improve the material, mental and moral position of women, ensuring her own servants at the family seat Haddo House in Aberdeenshire were provided with a range of classes to attend from language to crafts. The main preoccupation at the time for the UK’s middle-class women was their lack of voting rights to influence opinion in parliament. This was also important for working class women whose existence was blighted by unfairness, prejudice and deprivation.  

In those countries where women’s lives are constrained and limited by men flogging religion, law or tradition to justify murdering women for their disobedience nothing short of uprising and revolution will do. In the west the harm to women is more subtle and insidious with the attempt to erode sex as a definition of woman based in science and logic and replace it with gender that is being redefined as a fluctuating fancy. If an erstwhile man can merely state he is a woman to be legally accepted as one what is there to stop penis bearers replacing women in everything women want to do? Other than childbearing – the point where the penis bearer discovers he’s not woman enough and must exploit a woman to provide a child for him. It is extraordinary that women in governments, in health institutions and all manner of organisations go along with this. But there have always been women willing to sell out their sisters.  

Penis-bearers now want their inclusion in Women’s Day. Did I write want? A loud, aggressive testosterone, hectoring, insistent demand that comes of the male trait of not taking no for answer.  Male entitlement that we used to equate with differential pay grades and the like has moved onto stripping away from women any sense of womanhood beyond the most ridiculous parodies of what it is to be a girl or woman – parodies steeped in sex stereotyping. The entitled male often adopts a cartoon-like name, has a penchant for photographing himself in a women’s lavatory and employs a lexicon of abusive, sexist language against women who question his new identity. Heavy duty misogyny. There’s the notorious case of Adam Graham, a double rapist, who decided he was Isla not Adam after being charged. Initially he was sent to a women’s prison and only placed in the male estate after a huge public outcry. The idea that the correct place for a rapist to be is in a woman’s prison beggars belief. As for that risible statement made by the deputy First Minister of Scotland, Shona Robison, that there a is

“. . . no evidence that predatory and abusive men have ever had to pretend to be anything else to carry out abusive and predatory behaviour”

Not only is there proof but the instances of it are increasing. And that can only be bad for women. In 2023 Pink News ran a story about a women, a ‘cis’ woman because women cannot be women nowadays without a prefix we are assured by men, murdered because her killer took her to be trans. The implication being this was an attack on a trans person not the tragedy that a woman lost her life at the hands of a brutal man. That’s misogyny.

Women victims of crime have long been subject to contemptuous comment. Press and police behaviour over the murder of a young woman called Emma Caldwell is nothing short of abhorrent misogyny. Emma’s life was reduced to being a prostitute. Such foul prejudices have not moved on one iota from the days of Jack the Ripper in the 19^th century and his 20^th century equivalent the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe. At Sutcliffe’s trial the Attorney-General said

“Some were prostitutes, but perhaps the saddest part of the case is that some were not. The last six attacks were on totally respectable women”.  

For years we have witnessed a never-ending stream of male officers employed at the Met known to be sex pests at the very least. The organisation has shown itself to be incapable of tackling hatred of women. Among its ranks the humiliation and belittling of women has been treated as funny, a game. Wayne Couzens was known to his Met colleagues as a guy who targeted women but got away with his bestiality for so long because his behaviour was regarded as normal among his colleagues. The force was stunned at the public reaction to their officer’s abduction, rape and murder of Sarah Everard. It promises, again, to learn lessons.

Misogyny is as old as the hills. Those ancient Greeks liked their monsters to be female so they could be tamed and kept in line by men. The ancients had a thing about women. Aristotle dismissed them as irrational and intellectually weak on a par with children or slaves – and slaves were reviled.  Dismissing women as weak in the head as well as body hasn’t quite been eradicated as a source of misogyny. The philosopher Socrates was an outlier in that he didn’t reckon there was much to separate the sexes except in physical strength. Far too many current sports organisations disagree with old Socrates for now they bow to needy men’s demands to access women’s places in sport. Well, to do otherwise would hurt a male participant’s feelings and we know through experience that female feelings carry less weight – or no weight.

There’s never been a time, surely, when women have not been as capable as men when given the opportunity. – philosophers, rulers, blacksmiths, authors, painters, goods carriers, composers – but still folk are surprised to discover there ever were women capable of any of the above. Expectations of women’s abilities have always been low, achievements often dismissed as second rate and unworthy of comment. It’s a talent women have – of being invisible.

Highlighting the plight of women has differed since 1908. In 1927 in Hankow in China factory women hobbled the streets in bound feet to mark International Women’s Day, accompanied by hundreds of young girl factory workers who toiled 12 hour days for miniscule wages. In the west in the 1960s the Day’s issue focused on sexuality, reproductive rights (the pill and abortion), domestic roles as well as the ongoing battle of sex discrimination in the workplace. Thirty years after the 1970 Equal Pay Act came into force in the UK that useful invention to justify lower pay for women, ‘women’s work’, was given by the Labour Party run Glasgow council as the reason its lowest paid women employees earned less than their male counterparts. The council fought them for over a decade and spent over £2 million to deny women justice but in the end lost that disgraceful misogynist argument. The Equal Pay Act was brought in because male-dominated trades unions colluded with employers to keep women’s pay lower than men’s. Even those earnings were not deemed a woman’s own until 1990 in the UK. Until then a married woman’s pay was considered part of her husband’s income. If a wife paid too much tax her rebate was paid to her husband not her.

From highlighting pay discrimination to lack of enfranchisement to sex rights to gender fluidity International Women’s Day emerges with different emphasis over the hundred plus years of its existence. One thing that never changes is the loathing and disrespect that characterises the experience of so many women. The United Nations Commission on the Status of Women bows down to the male echo chamber by enabling men who identify as women to speak for women. Make no mistake women are well and truly under the cosh of misogyny now so deeply institutionalised. Wherever you look men are pictured representing women. These people irrespective of how they identify have no idea what it is to be a girl or woman. None at all. Slipping into a dress is not the same as living as a woman. They live as men imagining what life is for a woman. In 1996 the International Olympic Committee altered its charter to promote equality in sport through enabling women to advance at all levels. In 2024 it turned the clock back by opening the door to any male athlete claiming to be a woman to complete alongside women and to take up places meant for women in female competitions. The antithesis of equality. Undermining women negatively impacts on their lives and is one facet of misogyny.

International Women’s Day has witnessed the best of times and the worst of times. It began as an outlet for women to give voice to their mistreatment in a hostile world and offer hope to each other through collective action. The trope of gender equality that has sneaked into conversations surrounding women’s lives detracts from what should be positive action by women for women.  Sex is now a four-letter word and gender rules – that shape shifter with a penis. Men are welcome to act collectively alongside women but not speak for women. Women are quite capable of speaking for themselves. Men’s views of what’s good and what isn’t for women is not acceptable when it is a man insisting women wear a veil or a man insisting he is a woman and so can represent women, often aggressively. Every woman and girl I know has grown up experiencing sexism and misogyny to varying degrees. Girls and women learn to deal with it. It’s the kind of experience no man identifying as a woman has or can ever have.  Psychology Today, 12 February, 2014 published an article How Men Bully Women: Bad Tempers and Tantrums. On aggressive men

 “these men are more focused on their own feelings and image of self-importance and power than they are focused on how anyone in a relationship with them feels.” 

When the president of West Yorkshire Federation of the National Association of Schoolmasters argued in 1952 against equal pay for men and women teachers his misogyny slipped effortlessly out of his gob –

“ …the women on the staffs (of some schools) did their work successfully because there were men on the staffs whose presence maintained an over-all discipline necessary to successful teaching…”

Given that sort of pervading nonsense it is hardly surprising that three years later when a mere woman had the audacity to imagine she was capable of reading the news on television she lasted less than a year before the forces of reaction had her sacked. This was Barbara Mandell on ITV in 1955. In 1960 the radical experiment was repeated by the BBC with Nan Winton but she fared no better and was dropped because viewers asked how they were meant to take news seriously when being told it by a woman, after all a BBC spokesman explained –

“It was felt that a woman could not remain impartial when talking about disasters and tragedies”

It wasn’t until 1974 that women were judged to be capable of reading off an idiot board without bursting into tears and distracting viewers with their clothing and hairstyles with the appearance of Angela Rippon on the BBC.

This year while women celebrate (or don’t) International Women’s Day there will be men who use it as a vehicle for their obsessive bullying of women. Women must stand strong and not be defined by men. Those women who took to the streets to mark the first International Women’s Day in 1908 were not submissive, were not deferential towards men with their rapacious appetite for controlling women’s lives. The marchers in 1908 were confident of what they and women like them needed, deserved – empowered through equal access to work, equal pay, education, suffrage, property rights and respect. While women’s lives have been transformed in so many ways over the past century misogyny has never gone away. It probably never will. Stay strong sisters. Remember those women who over time have struggled to be heard, struggled to be taken seriously, struggled against the tide of misogyny. It’s ever-present in our day-to-day lives – the corrosive banality of misogyny that creeps into everything. Resist. Resist. Misogynists are never your allies.

You may kill me, but you can never frighten me

“You may kill me, but you can never frighten me.”

The last words of George Grant as he faced a firing squad of twenty Mongols (and perhaps one Russian). George Grant died along with the four Chinese men he refused to abandon to the lineup of executioners.

Peking as it was known in 1913. Now Beijing.

That summer of 1913 George Grant left Peking at the behest of the Chinese government to track down problems with the telegraph system in Mongolia. Effective far-reaching communications had become essential to the expansion of global capital and to enable empires maintain links with their outlying colonies and territories and the telegraph provided an ear to what was happening in these areas often distant from the seat of power. From the 1840s telegraphic networks brought the world closer together. Several European states developed their own systems including Russia, erecting telegraph lines across its vast region from west to east with an intention to connect to Japan and China via underwater cables. But it was a Danish business, The Great Northern China and Japan Extension Telegraph Company that undertook this work, from 1870.

In 1870 George Grant was not even a glint in his parents’ eyes for he was born at the village of Skelmorlie in North Ayrshire in Scotland in 1876 to Jane and John Grant, a railway carrier (no mention of his mother’s occupation.) The boy joined the 11^th Glasgow Company of the Boys Brigade – a Christian club for boys started in and popular in Scotland (which preceded and influenced the creation of the Boy Scouts.) Following his death the Brigade struck a medal, the George Grant Medal for any activity chosen by Brigaders, and presented annually. I have no idea if it still exists.

Between then and the early years of the twentieth century (possibly towards the end of the nineteenth) Grant sailed to China where he worked as a telegraphist. For a time he was employed  by the Eastern Extension Australia and China Telegraph Company (GB) before transferring to the Danish Great Northern Telegraph Company.

China was at the time brutally resisting Mongolian independence. The situation between Mongolia and China was extremely dangerous with atrocities being perpetrated on both sides. In June 1913 the superintendent of telegraph in Peking, Henningsen, a Dane, his fellow countryman, Langeback, and Grant from Scotland along with Chinese colleagues, described as three merchants and a servant, set out at the behest of the Chinese government to ascertain damage to telegraph lines, poles and stations inside Mongolia because of concerns from telegraph staffers of damage and missing supplies.

The major threats to the lines came at two points – in the vicinity of the Gobi Desert in northern China and southern Mongolia – at Pang Kian Station. There Grant remained with three Chinese men and their servant while Langback and his assistants went on to inspect the situation at Tuerin. Henningsen then returned to Peking. Grant reported the loss of a caravan of supplies, stolen by Mongolian raiders, and he was given permission to obtain replacement goods from Kalgan. On 17^th June he left in search of these items. Five days later Reuter’s Kalgan correspondent telegraphed that a foreigner, three Chinese merchants and a servant had been captured a couple of days earlier by Mongols some 80 miles from Pang Kian.

Eastern Telegraph Company Network 1901

 Immediately a search party was organised by George Grant’s close friend, Jacob Henningsen, who was accompanied by inevitably nameless Chinese and a fellow Dane, Dr Wolff and an English journalist called Giles. They set off from Peking on 3 July, on ponies instead of camels since the Mongols might be more acquisitive of their camels, enquiring of everyone they encountered the whereabouts of the missing Grant. One night a group of eight Mongols rode into their camp. The Europeans seized their rifles and questioned them to ascertain if they were friends or enemies. Believing them to be friendly enough Henningsen agreed to return with them to their camp in his desperate effort to trace Grant. It was decided Wolff and Giles should continue with their journey. A description of George Grant was shared with the Mongolians and he was told that   

“Such a man is at the camp of the Great Chief. He has joined us, and will not leave.”

A full day’s ride into the hills took Henningsen close to the Chief’s camp by early evening. It was surrounded by other camps with several hundred men protecting the area. At one camp Henningsen was interrogated as it was suspected he was a Chinese government spy. He was ordered to send for Wolff and Giles and in his message he warned them to be careful as the situation was precarious. They too were closely questioned when they arrived at the camp and confirmed to the Mongols the man they were looking for was about thirty-six years old, short and sturdy, bald-headed with a full red beard.  They were told that such a man lived in another camp.

Henningsen, Wolff, Giles and their party were escorted by Mongol warriors to the camp of their Great Chief who was about 45 years old and quite friendly. He told the Europeans he had received a telegram instructing Grant’s release but explained to Henningsen the foreigner in question volunteered to stay in the camp, as a commander of 50 men. Henningsen was at liberty to ask if he wanted to leave but must not try to persuade him. When the foreigner was brought before Henningsen he discovered a man of vaguely similar appearance to Grant but not a Scotsman at all. This European was a Russian who told the Dane he’d come across Grant who had been very kind to him and allowed him to stay with him at Pang Kian. 

Mongolia 1913 from Wikicommons

The Russian was barefoot when the Europeans found him and when asked if he had boots he showed them several pairs along with his clothes and a saddle. Henningsen recognised the saddle as the one he had given Grant when they set off from Peking. The Russian claimed the saddle and other items belonging to Grant had been taken by Mongols. Looking around Henningsen also recognised the cart George Grant used for the journey. Inside were many of his things including his pipe and tobacco pouch. A furious Henningsen shouted at the Russian and Mongols and threatened to report them to their Great Chief but he was warned if he did his own party’s lives would be at risk – that Grant was dead and he and his party should “go away in peace” or risk being killed. They were told that if Grant had done so his life would have been spared. Some claimed it had been the Russian who had shot Grant but the Europeans did not believe them for the Russian appeared kindly – a peasant who travelled widely across the Far East. (It transpired that a Russian government attempt to secure the release of George Grant came too late to save him.)

Grant was an enthusiastic photographer and his camera had been confiscated by his captors who offered to let him go without it – and his Chinese colleagues. Grant refused to agree and argued for the lives of the Chinese men he had travelled with. When this was denied he stood in front of the firing squad, a group of around twenty men, and laughed at them – at the number of them it took to tie him up – at their cowardice as he put it. The last words spoken by George Grant the small Scotsman with a bushy red beard to his killers were “You may kill me, but you can never frighten me.”

As for the Russian he told Henningsen he had been captured by some Chinese troops, stripped, shot in three places and left for dead. He was saved by chance when a party of Mongols found him and nursed him back to health at which point he decided he would stay with them and

“kill every Chinese that comes my way – I shall rid the earth of a few Chinese before I die.”

So was the Russian behind the killing of Grant and the Chinese men George Grant tried to protect? We don’t know. Grant was said to be popular with those who knew him – popularity that aroused distrust among Mongols in the area.

Reports of George Grant’s death found their way into Britain’s newspapers. In its inimitable way Aberdeen Press and Journal contrived to describe the red-bearded Scot as an Englishman (I suppose Ayrshire is quite far south from Aberdeen.)

The Grant family’s MP in North Ayrshire, Captain Duncan Campbell* asked a question in the UK parliament regarding compensation and in a written answer was told by the foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, that the matter of compensation had been referred to the British Charge d’Affairs at Peking.  In China its government said it recognised Grant’s loyalty to their people and arranged a ‘handsome’ payment to his mother back in Scotland.

Telegraph, the first electrical telecommunications system, provided a messaging service for nearly two hundred years, from the 1840s. Their essential nature to global as well as local connections made them a target for attack not only by Mongolians who regarded the Chinese network across their territory as an incursion on their independence but by various individuals and groups including Russian revolutionaries who as part of their struggle against Tsarism in 1906 cut the lines connecting Peking with Irkutsk in Siberia that fed into European Russia. This line was operated by the company Grant worked for when he died, the Danish Great Northern Telegraph Company that, incidentally, had telegraph stations at Aberdeen and Newcastle. The nature of the great telegraph network criss-crossing often remote areas sometimes the subject of national rivalries created dangerous working environments for employees such as George Grant. Their bravery in undertaking this work is unquestionable.

*Captain Campbell was injured at the Battle of Ypres in the First World War a year after George Grant’s death and his question in the Commons. His injuries included the loss of an arm and following his return to military service he was further wounded by a mine and as a consequence died in 1916.

https://atlantic-cable.com/Books/GNT/index.htm

John Munro’s War: Part 7 – 1946

In May John’s name again appears in the farm diary being paid the same rate as Roy, now on 76 shillings per week. He was finally released from military service in July. He was described on his army testimonial as a reliable type, a good driver who carried out his duties in a hard working manner. The tank commander who went on to spend 3 years in enemy labour camps never drove again, except the farm’s tractors. The enthusiastic, rebellious teenager who enlisted without his parents knowledge in May 1939 returned home a thoughtful, fairly reserved man. Always affable and sociable when required he never pursued much of a social life outside the family, unlike his young brother, Roy. Never dated. Never married. He was a voracious reader and his extended knowledge and intelligence meant he was always engaging to talk with. Quick to laugh and anger in equal measure he could be insensitive at times but was considerate and kindly for all that. While his mind remained sharp his body was crippled by arthritis and he suffered greatly but a friendly vet was on hand to prescribe painkillers for John as well as for the animals on the farm.

There was symmetry to John Munro’s war. He enlisted as an 18-year-old on 9 May 1939 and was freed from his prison camp around 9 May 1945. In May 2011 with his health deteriorating John one day decided he’d endured enough, went upstairs, climbed into bed, turned his face to the wall, refused food and drink and waited for death which came on the 12 May, at the age of ninety.  

John Munro’s War: Part 6 – 1945

Agricultural difficulties intensified at home and regular crop rotations were stopped mainly because of government demands on farmers to overwork the land so it had no time to revive fertility because the soil’s minerals were so depleted from constant cropping. The work on the family farm was shared between John’s father and seven full-time men and three women: the grieve (gaffer), foreman ploughman, second ploughman, shepherd, cattleman, second cattleman, tractor driver*, dairymaid, poultry woman* and part-time clerkess*. Those marked * lived in the farmhouse with the family and other labourers were accommodated in farm cottages, receiving the usual perks in addition to wages of 4 pints of milk daily, a half-ton of potatoes, 6 bolls of meal and 3 ton of coal plus firewood every six months. Women always received less pay than the men except when John’s sisters were employed during busy times such as tattie planting when they were paid at the same rate as their brother, Roy (before Roy’s earnings rose to 71 shilling per week). POW labour on the family farm cost £12. 14s. in February and again in March but there is no record how many were employed or how much each man earned. The POWs employed on John’s family’s farm probably were living a mile or two away at Brahan. Local children used to play with wooden toys made by POWs such as dancing figures made out of wood and string.

Throughout the war the retention of skilled farm labour continued to cause major problems. Farming can’t be done by just anyone but requires high levels of familiarity with land or animals, changing seasons and crop developments and that is why agricultural labourers were the last to be called up. In 1945 only four horses were part of the farm’s workforce.

By the end of 1945 one million former old grassy areas of Scotland had been ploughed for additional cultivation. Between 1941 and 1944 the production of top-quality beef improved. So, too, did yields of barley, wheat and potatoes and milk.

The winter of 1944/45 was severe across mainland Europe. Conditions within the camps was deteriorating for POWs and German camp guards. Hunger and starvation affected almost everyone and Red Cross parcels became an even greater target for the malnourished and sick trying to survive freezing conditions in the long winter.

Between the 13th and 15th February 1945 Dresden was one of several large German cities targeted by allied bombers. It’s relative proximity to John’s camp probably meant he saw some of the results of it being blitzed with incendiary devices that lit up the sky and were visible for almost 100 miles around. It must have appeared to many allied prisoners that the tide was turning for the German government. And indeed it was. A second wave of bombing followed about three hours after the first to confuse and hinder rescue personnel on the ground trying to put out fires. A group of 254 Lancaster bombers with 500 tons of high explosives and 375 tons of fire bombs devastated the city, blowing off roofs and blowing out doors and windows exposing building interiors to the flow of air that drove fires across the city. Ruptured water mains meant there was nothing available to fight the flames of the thousands of fires that blazed for hours. In the resultant firestorm much of the city was destroyed and the dead which numbered between 25,000 and 30,000, including POWs and fleeing refugees.

Allied POWs, including those from nearby camps, were put to work clearing up and retrieving bodies from the ruins for mass burial. The American writer, Kurt Vonnegut, a POW there are the time, recalled that there were

“too many corpses to bury. So instead the Nazis sent in troops with flamethrowers. All these civilians’ remains were burned to ashes.”

“We saw terrible things: cremated adults shrunk to the size of small children, pieces of arms and legs, dead people, whole families burnt to death, burning people ran to and fro, burnt coaches filled with civilian refugees, dead rescuers and soldiers, many were calling and looking for their children and families, and fire everywhere, everywhere fire, and all the time the hot wind of the firestorm threw people back into the burning houses they were trying to escape from.”

“I cannot forget these terrible details. I can never forget them.”

(Lothar Metzger, survivor)

While industrial targets were said to be the targets, the intention behind the bombing of Dresden was to create confusion for the German government by forcing tens of thousands of people to try to escape from the region so choking up the east’s communication and travel infrastructure. Other raid followed in March and April – action that suited the ally from the east, the Soviet Union, whose troops were advancing towards Berlin and welcomed disruption in eastern Germany that wrecked any plans the German government might have had of concentrating its authority in this part of the country.

The destruction of Dresden in February destroyed so many of the region’s transport links that any supplies including food became extremely scarce. Stalag POWs were drafted into the city to help clear it of bodies, many victims were elderly or mothers and their children along with POWs and refugees who were unlucky enough to be caught up in the bombing.

With the breakdown in infrastructure towards the end of the war there were greater food shortages than ever with an increase in food parcel thefts but on 12 April 1945 John wrote –

“Dear Mam, Hope you are all well at home. I am all right at present as a supply of Red Cross parcels came through although the cigarettes were short owning to looting. I had a letter from you dated 12th Nov now this week and I am looking forward to more letters and cig or personal parcels if I am lucky enough. I am your loving son, John.”

Two days later, on 14 April, POWs, often weak from hunger and sick, were marched in cold and wet weather south towards the Sudetenland to avoid falling into hands of the Red Army but they came under constant attack from the Soviet air forces on their enforced march. The German armed forces in the west surrendered unconditionally on 7^th May. On 8 May German guards abandoned their posts leaving POWs to walk away, heading towards American lines.

Back home John’s father unaware of his son’s liberation was concerned with that season’s crop of Golden Wonder potatoes and oats. An experienced farm valuator he travelled to Leckmelm on the 7^th to carry out a valuation there. It was rogation day and a bank holiday in Scotland. An additional horse had been purchased for the farm bringing the number back up to five and perhaps this was a consequence of continuing labour shortages and recently introduced shorter hours for farm labourers that made organising the work more tricky although POW labour was still available. The weather that summer was good and as a result the oat crop was heavy but barley less good. Potatoes, too, were disappointing because of late ground frosts that stalled growth. The cattle herd was doing fairly well but lacking in protein because of ongoing scarcity of animal feed. Sheep faired better with good lambing numbers.

John Munro’s War: Part 5 – 1944

Food supplies were continuing to cause concern at home. Much of the farm’s potato crop was destroyed by blight. Cattle feed was so scarce the beasts spent more time on grass in an attempt to fatten them up for market. Labour costs were increasing because of the difficulty finding skilled farm workers. John senior was always very involved in local farming business and was attending meetings of the Agricultural Executive Committee (A.E.C.) a country-wide organisation setup following the declaration of war and chaired by lairds and prominent men with working farmers such as John’s father providing the actual expertise of day-to-day farming. The committees had sweeping powers to go onto land to ascertain the best way to cultivate it to prioritise food production. While each locality had its own group the government through the Scottish Department kept tight overall control. Through local A.E.Cs labourers were assigned to farms, including casual workers, the Women’s Land Army and POWs (many Italian and German) in desperate attempts to fill the gap in experienced agricultural men. Previously unworked land or at least land that had not been cultivated for many years was put under the plough and planted where possible or used as pasture for stock.

Allied POWs were worked hard as substitutes for German workers drafted into the military. That statement should be qualified for being interned in a camp did not automatically mean you undertook work. Conditions and prisoners’ rights within camps including work provision, education, food, religious observances and leisure were covered by the 1929 Geneva Convention which relied on the 1899 Second Hague Convention that specified that prisoners of war could only be employed on work which would not be “humiliating to their military rank” – in effect officers were exempt from physical labour unless they chose otherwise. NCOs were only required to do supervisory work. While NCOs and officers had it cushy other ranks endured long hours of work, some of it hard such as breaking stones for roads, road making, salt or coal mining while frequently suffering from malnutrition. Weak from starvation POWs would glean what they could when outside the camps searching anything edible such as dandelions. That said John found ordinary Germans generous – sharing what little they had with POWs. He may have been employed on a farm given his background but I have no evidence of this.

For men like John (and they didn’t have it as hard as Soviet prisoners) they might have one day in twenty-one off from work but conditions varied across POW working camps. And who you were, as we’ve seen. Officers and NCOs were very fortunate to enjoy opportunities to study and pursue hobbies in arts and crafts, setup clubs and put on entertainments since they were less exhausted than men and women enduring long, long shifts working.

The dire food situation lent importance to the provision of Red Cross parcels each POW was sent from the international organisation. Every week of the war around 97,000 Red Cross parcels were sent out from the UK. Each parcel contained about 17 items and while contents were fairly standardised because they came from different nations and supplied various nationalities within the international mix of camps they provided opportunities for trading items e.g. dried fruit; coffee; chocolate; cigarettes; tinned meat; fish. John would never eat salmon after the war and I wonder if this was because of a surfeit of tinned salmon while in confinement. British food parcels contained variations on a theme – tea, cocoa, chocolate, tinned meat; steak and kidney pudding, meat hash, sausages, Irish stew, bacon, pork luncheon meat, chopped ham. There was usually processed cheese, condensed milk, dried eggs, sardines or herrings, margarine, sugar, vegetables, biscuits, a bar of soap and 50 cigarettes or tobacco. Scots like John would have received rolled oats for porridge. Inevitably Red Cross parcels attracted thieving and towards the end of the war this greatly increased causing malnutrition among prisoners forced to try to exist and work long shifts on very inadequate rations. German food was limited – something like sausage, soup, some sort of fresh meat occasionally and meals made from dried peasemeal. The loss of their parcels also dealt a blow to the morale of POWs who not only depended on them for sustenance but as a diversion from the awful reality of their predicament. POWs also were provided with medical parcels containing cotton wool, safety pins, soap, aspirin, ointment, various medicines and vitamins and toilet paper. Only Soviet POWs had no access to Red Cross parcels because the Soviet government refused to work with the Red Cross. Unfortunate Soviet prisoners had to rely only on tiny German rations and helps explain why so many of them perished while in camps.

The Red Cross and St John War Organization issued monthly newspapers for next of kin of POWs. Because of paper shortages these were not on public sale. The Prisoner of War newspapers were no different from the rest of the press and adhered to government propaganda to create an optimistic impression of life in camps and the publication’s cheeriness irritated some POWs who thought it promoted a false impression of life in camps. The May issue in 1944 reported the need for families to retrain from sending lots of letters to their family member because the British camp leaders in each of the German camps struggled to cope with the sheer amount of mail sent out from the UK that had to undergo censorship and finding the correct recipient with several people sharing the same or similar names, and called for just one letter per week per POW.

At the end of April John sent a postcard home alerting his family to the increasingly dire situation of lack of food and his father immediately contacted the Red Cross expressing his concern at what was taking place in the camp. He forwarded John’s postcard to them. A reply from the Scottish Branch of the Red Cross was sent on 4th May 1944.

“Dear Sir

Re: Tpr. John MUNRO, P.O.W. ******, Stalag IV.A.ARB.Kdo.No 1162

Your letter of 29 April enclosing letter card received from your son, addressed to the Next-of-Kin Parcels Depot, has been passed to this Department for attention.

We are well aware of the conditions which exist at the camp in which your son is Prisoner, but such conditions apply to a large part of that particular area in which the camp is situated. The matter has, however, been brought to the notice of the Directorate of Prisoners of War, who are taking the necessary action to ensure that in the near future, you will hear from your son that things have, in fact, improved.”

John never mentioned them in his letters but in January of 1944 enough musical instruments for a 9-piece orchestra were diverted to Stalag IV-A from Italian camps – 3 violins, a cornet, 2 saxophones, a viola, a clarinet and a set of drums.

John Munro’s War: Part 4 – 1943

On 12^th April a defunct railway carriage arrived by rail, probably at Strathpeffer station, or perhaps Dingwall or Muir of Ord, bought from a farmer at Castletown in Caithness and presumably intended as an additional henhouse. On the same day John’s father paid out £33 for 10 tons of seed oats. With government pressure on farmers to extend land use and increase crop yields the Marginal Production Scheme was established in the spring of 1943 with grants provided to encourage farmers purchase fertilisers to try to increase fertility in previously designated poor marginal land.

The next letter I have finds John in work camp Stalag IV A, near Dresden in southern Germany. Stalag means soldier and stalags (stammlager or base camp for enlisted personnel) were camps for non-commissioned allied troops. Camps for commissioned officers were called oflags. There were two Stalag IV-As – the original one at Elderhorst but from February 1941 the camp at Hohnstein Castle began taking in increasing numbers of prisoners and became Stalag IV-A.  The 1941 number of prisoners under Stalag IV-A was 22,000, later rising to 32,000. Many Soviet prisoners were confined here. They and Polish prisoners were provided with the smallest food rations and allocated the most difficult work assignments.

Some officer POWs were held here for a time but nearby oflag, Colditz Castle, became famous for the daring escapes from there. All camps had their own stories of daring escapes. John had a low opinion of POWs in Colditz because their confinement was cosy compared with the desperate conditions of men in the stalags. As well as stalags and oflags there were several other types of internment camp designations: intelligence, civilians, maritime, air force etc.. Each German military district was identified by a Roman numeral. IV was the Dresden military district covering many camps. By 1942 the district had about 700 work camps – a flexible number that altered according to labour requirements for different industries.

Every kind of industry and occupation in the region employed POWs – coal mining (lignite or brown coal), transport, chemical production, shoe manufacture, horticulture, cement works, timber yards, textiles, hospitals – psychiatric, medical, surgical, convalescent. Hohnsetein POW camp was an administrative centre for a huge network of external camps with its main task the distribution of POW and forced labour to workplaces.  Hohnsetin castle was the area’s command headquarters.

John writes to his mother, in pencil on a plain letter postcard on 21st November, 1943 –

“Dear Mam, Here is another post card to let you know I am all right. We are getting our Red Cross parcels now. I have not had any letters yet but I should get one for Christmas. I hope everybody at home is well. The weather in this country is similar to home so I should not feel the cold much when I come home. Well, I must close now. I am, your loving son, John.”

POW mail was often stamped several times over, going through various checks. There’s a Stalag IV B stamp on this lettercard and I think because John passed through IV B as a transfer prisoner around the time of Italy’s collapse. Military district IV referred to Dresden. John was also held in Poland for a time but I know nothing about the circumstances.

On 17 December 1943, John’s mother was sent a letter from the Scottish Branch of the British Red Cross. John was then in Stalag IV B.

“We are sorry we are unable to change the camp address of the parcel, as it had already been despatched. We do not think you will have any anxiety regarding its safe arrival, as we feel sure it will be forwarded on to him at his new address. We have noted the new address on our records and trust you are having good news from your son.”

Stalag IV-A

In recent years it has emerged that when Italy was on the brink of collapse that British officers stepped in as de facto guards to prevent POWs escaping and attempting to rejoin their army units that were spread here, there and everywhere. An order was issued from within a secretive branch of Britain’s Ministry of Defence and transmitted as a religious broadcast on a BBC programmed called The Radio Padre that all British POWs should remain in Italian camps and wait for the arrival of UK forces. Perhaps in London they didn’t realise Germans could understand English but whatever an order went out for some 50,000 allied POWs to be transferred to Poland and Germany. POW deaths were high during the transfers and subsequent years in Nazi labour camps. The original order subsequently disappeared from the War Office archives at Kew. The 1940s equivalent of deleted Whatsapp messages.

John Munro’s War: Part 3 – 1942

War in the Western Desert was not going well for Britain with Rommel’s tank corps making steady headway.  At the end of May a fresh German offensive broke through the British defensive line forcing the British back to Egypt.

Back on the farm 69 acres were put under oats, 30 with barley, 10 with potatoes (Kerr’s Pinks and Redskin), 24 with turnips, 61 acres were sown as meadows and 120 left under grass and so on. John’s sister, Margaret, was again helping occasionally such as at tattie lifting in October, alongside school children on their tattie holidays. Tattie picking holidays were established in Scotland in the 1930s to provide extra labour to gather-in potato crops in autumn and came into their own during the war when labour was in short supply and picking up tatties didn’t take skill, only energy. During wartime shortages of experienced farm workers created a few headaches because the production of food was essential not only for the domestic market but to provide for military personnel overseas. Men’s wages were increased in January of 1942 from 48 shilling per week to 60 shillings. Women were always paid less irrespective of their skills. With so many men on military service women were recruited as the Women’s Land Army, their deployment falling under the Secretary of State for Scotland. 

On January 3 John’s thoughts were very much on the Scottish Hogmanay and his aunt and uncle from Inverness who visited at the beginning of each new year. Then a little over a week later John’s mother, Bella, is sent a letter written in a beautiful hand from Seaforth Avenue, Durban, Natal, South Africa.

“Dear Mrs Munro,

This is just a short letter to say that we had the pleasure of entertaining your son, John, during his short visit here. We took him and his two chums one from Dundee and one from Glasgow to see some of the sights near the town including the wild monkeys. Then we brought them home for supper and they spent the evening with us. The boys enjoyed their stay here and it was a nice break after their long voyage. They also tasted some of our fruits which they had never even heard of before. They all looked very fit and well and very brown. This is the first Scottish boys we have had and we enjoyed their company as we come from Perthshire.

We think it a great privilege to be able to do something for the boys as we are too old for military work so we do what we can in the hope that this letter will be some comfort to you.

Trusting that this will find you and your husband fit and well and that you will soon have your son home again. We are yours sincerely, Mr and Mrs J. Shephard.”

On the 30^th of January 1942 John wrote home from his training base to reassure the family he was alright and getting settled in camp. He makes a guarded reference to his visit to Durban but not by name, to avoid the censor’s blue pencil –

“Did you get any letters from a town we touched on our way out. There was a couple there who took us around who said they would write home. They came from Scotland. This place is not very hot just now. It is just like summer at home but it is very cold at night. It is pretty dusty too and every step you take raises a cloud of it. Today was pay day and we got 100 piastres or ackers as they are called. It is equal to £1 but it does not stay as long as anything worth about 1d at home costs about an acker here. We get our washing washed and ironed for 3 ackers by the dobeys or something that sounds like that. There is a Church of Scotland canteen down the road called Scots corner. The funny thing about this money is that you have a pile of notes and it may not be worth 10/-. You get notes for 5 ackers worth about 1/-. When we were on the train coming here a swarm of hawkers came on and started selling a lot of trash bangles wallets etc. As there was no money among us they started to change them for old pens and odds and ends. I never changed anything as there was nothing worth buying. I would look very nice I daresay with a string of beads round my neck and a few bits of stuff round my wrists. Some of the rest of them changed stuff. They will be throwing it away yet likely enough. We get good enough grub and beds here but we have a few partners in the beds with us. The place is full of them. I hope everything is all right at home.”

1d is 1 penny and /- is the sign for shilling. He goes on to mention the family at home and complains at the time, sometimes months, it takes for mail to arrive. Finally there is a reference to the troops’ allocation of 50 cigarettes and extra 4d a day colonial allowance.

Between censorship, distance and sheer volume of military mail letters took on average three months to be delivered but telegrams were sometimes a possibility, albeit an expensive one. On 2nd February 1942 John sent a Via Imperial telegram to his mother.

“ALL WELL AND SAFE PLEASE DONT WORRY KEEP SMILING.”

This was followed up five days later by a brief pencil-written letter informing the family of his new address – B. Squadron, 3 R.T.R., M.E.F. (Middle East Forces). He expresses relief having at last joined a battalion for he was fed up of the –

“…spit and polish at the Fort but in a battalion they have a bit more sense…It seems funny to be in the middle of winter and the sun shining every day. It is a bit cold at nights though.”

While this letter was written in February, he realised his mother would not receive it until the summer.

On 14 February John sent home an airgraph, a type of telegram that photographed letters in miniature and sent them on by airmail. He was again frustrated at not receiving mail and it’s clear he was thinking a great deal about the family at home in Scotland. He drew the letter to a close as the last post was being sounded asking his teenage brother Roy if he has been busy keeping down the rabbit population on the farm. Rabbits were often shot but they were also trapped with snares.

“This is not the sort of country to be in to be setting traps in here. You would need to watch them 24 hours per day. They would pinch the colour from your shirt and swear down your throat it was white. There is a lot of dud coins too. If you give them a five acker piece or upwards they will ring it on a stone and as like as not refuse it. After a few days you do the same yourself or if not you will have a pocketful of useless stuff on you. I got rid of all my duds so just now I am all right (I hope). They pester you all over the place in town trying to brush your boots or sell you something. You get a real good   feed here though. Plenty of eggs. 4 eggs and chips tea and bread and salad and what not for about a bob (or five and six ackers). Well Roy that’s lights out so I will close . . . I saw a right good acrobatic turn the other night. It would beat anything Bertram Mills circus ever had. Well Roy, cheerio, I am your loving brother, John.”

On 10^th March 1942 he wrote to say he had received a letter from his Mam, his mind is on what was happening with the routine seasonal work on the farm such as spring sowing and describes a little of his impressions of agriculture in the middle east –

“You should see them pumping water out here for the fields, you should get Roy busy with a pump if you get a dry year … I was pretty lucky I came here according to the newspapers as the other places do not seem so healthy the last few months.”

In addition to his usual interest in what the family are up to he mentions a picture card he’d sent home, possibly of Durban, and makes a reference to a sea journey, likely from South Africa to North Africa with his tank regiment.

“I was not seasick although the most of them was in a bad state for a few days.”

He regrets never receiving local newspapers sent to him by his mother and urges her to forward the Ross-shire Journal, closing by asking if anyone else at home has been called up.

“I think I had better close as I am going down to get my tea. I am your loving son, John.”

On 24 March John again complains that so few letters sent to him from home are getting through to him. You can be sure his close-knit family were writing and problems with the mail system were at fault. His mood is low and he has little to say aside from a mention of dust storms in the area. However, days later, on the 29 March his mood has lifted. Those longed-for letters and a telegram from home have finally arrived. Three of those letters had been posted from Scotland in December of the previous year and another, from his sister Margaret, sent on 1 January 1942. On receiving them John immediately wrote back. Life in the unit was monotonous he indicates and it appears he is lonely; complaining of not seeing anyone he knows or even any fellow Scots despite Scots being in the vicinity. He refers to the weather, already hot, is growing hotter and how hot it was on the boat (north from South Africa) and his sunburn.

“It was so hot that a lot of us got our hair all cut off. We looked like a bunch of convicts but it is a fair size again. What I am wondering now is whether I will part it or just let it grow. I think I will have it without a parting as I have got my combe broken and I did not have the chance to get another. I was wondering if I could manage to make one out of a petrol tin but I gave it up. Still I’ll get one soon I hope.”

Looking good was still a priority despite the privations of life in the Western Desert.

Those local newspapers he longed for eventually arrived, or rather clippings from them – the Bulletin I’m not familiar with and the North Star I think was The North Star and Farmers’ Chronicle. He writes about how much he’s missing news of home and is longing to read about what’s happening there, again requesting his family send him copies of the Ross-Shire Journal even though they’ll be six or eight months out of date by the time he eventually gets to read them.   

3^rd April 1942. In a letter to his mother John’s mood is again flat and he has little to say. He’s in north Africa and suffering in the heat. There’s a mention of getting his RAC beret (which he wore all his days while working on farming after the war) and going off to the pictures “in a whilie” within the camp as they aren’t allowed out.

“We handed in our kitbags today to go away and we will get paid today. I have the new address but it is only after embarkation. You had better hang on for a day or two before you write. Well that’s all, I am your loving son, John.”

If only we had his mother’s letters to him. Sadly, none have survived.

Back at home newspapers were full of the war in the desert and the struggle against Rommel’s forces.  Young John was a tank commander in the thick of the action that involved hundreds of jousting tanks and continual whizzing and cracking of exploding shells that left spirals of white smoke hurtling skyward and explosions of flames as tanks were hit and caught fire. Visibility was cloaked with clouds of desert sand and thick acrid oil vapour from blazing tanks.  The clamour was deafening.

29 April 1942. John receives an airmail letter from home that took only a fortnight to arrive. Surface mail was still taking around three months. He writes back –

“Things seem to be wakening up a bit at home according to the odd scraps of news we get now and again.”

He’s referring to Luftwaffe and RAF bombing raids of Britain and the Continent.

“I heard they had a pretty strong raid on France too not so long ago. I hope they make a right strong one by the time this letter gets to you and stay there. We ought to be pretty well equipped all over after nearly three years of preparation. The air force seems to be by the look of it and the army is not much good without air support. The Russians are still doing fairly well I think. Well they can afford to lose plenty of men. They have plenty to draw on. At present I am along with a lot of Englishmen. Some of them are all right but some are not. The best lot I came across were the ones I trained with who came from infantry regiments. The RAC ones have a lot of well to do ones – civil servants and so on and I don’t fancy them. There is one with me now who talks lah-de-dah like a toff. He thinks and always likes to tell everybody who have no other option but to listen that Churchill has never done anything worthwhile since he became prime minister. He calls himself a communist but hasn’t the brain to be anything other than a windbag. He has had a pretty easy time by the look of it. A good walloping would do him the world of good. Of course they aren’t all like that but there are quite a lot of them I dislike and despise. One of the blokes from the Seaforths (there are only three of us here now) is fed up with them too. He is on a lorry with other two. The Gerry used to say the English man was decadent. A lot of them are. In another twenty years or so by the look of the better class it may be the best of the whole lot are the ordinary working man.”

He’s again frustrated by the army censoring so much of what he wants to write but understands it’s concern that letters will fall into Gerry’s hands, revealing military positions. He asks about home and mentions that he recently wrote to his Granny (like most of the letters this one has not survived). Again the hot African weather is mentioned necessitating them changing into shorts instead of the battledress they had been in on landing in the cool season.

“I don’t think they have the right idea of the east at home. It’s a lot different from what is talked about it – waving palms and all the rest – there are some but the most of the waving palms belong to the nippers shouting ‘“Baksheesh George. Give it”’ they are always trying to cadge something off you, money or cigarettes. They are awful bargainers too. I bought a wallet with stamped leather designs from one of the kids. He wanted 15 ackers for it about three bob. I offered two. He muttered something in Arabic and came down to 10. I offered three and he came down to eight at last I got it for four and a cigarette. The whole deal took about half an hour and I still think I was robbed.”

The 8^th Army had nearly 850 tanks in the region, nearly 200 planes and 100,000 men protected by the Gazala Line – a huge minefield that extended for 43 miles inland from the coast. John’s 3^rd battalion were involved in the near non-stop action.  Assumptions were made by the British command about German tactics. They got it wrong. Rommel launched an attack on 26 May 1942 (John’s sister Margaret’s 26^th birthday). Both sides struggled with inadequate supplies for their troops but Germany’s tanks and air defences proved superior to those of the British and Rommel’s Panzer division pressed forward finally penetrating British positions and securing supply lines to consolidate German’s grip on the region. A British counter attack was launched on the 1^st and 2^nd of June amidst severe desert sand storms but the British action was repulsed by the Germans resulting in the destruction of many tanks, their crews killed, injured or captured as POWs. On 5th June Operation Aberdeen went badly wrong with vast losses of British troops and equipment and thousands of men captured.

The war in the desert was reported back in Britain but perhaps not in a way that was recognisable to the men involved. The 4 June edition of Aberdeen Evening Express was upbeat about the progress of the Allies campaign –

“…we have been able to cut off the head of Rommel’s forward positions… at last light on June 2 our armoured forces drove the enemy out of Tamar… The enemy are known to have lost at least fourteen tanks in this engagement.”

No mention of Allied tank losses which were huge. And on 11 June 1942 the same newspaper had this to say –

“…there are many more around who, though not yet shouting, are supremely confident of the final result.”

On 16th June optimistic propaganda exploded into bombastic hyperbole with embedded war correspondents describing British convoy commanders

“…sitting up aloft on their trucks like sunburned gods – their sun compasses pointing a black sliver of shadow towards the Boche”

 Aberdeen Press and Journal 16 June.

Towards the end of the month the British press was still painting a positive picture of the desert campaign –

“It is these battle groups which are enabling strong British forces to operate with deadly effect well behind the Axis lines.”

With the surrender of tens of thousands of British-led troops to the Axis powers, Churchill later wrote 

“Defeat is one thing. Disgrace is another.”

Back on the farm it was a bumper summer for barley and oats but unfortunately much of the crops had to be left in the ground because of a scarcity of sacks and transport.

On 14 July 1942 a generic statement was issued to John’s father at the farm from the Cavalry and Royal Armoured Corps. It was misaddressed but he eventually received it.

“I regret to inform you that a report has been received from the War Office to the effect that (No.) ******* (Rank) TPR

(Name) Munro J.

(Regiment) 3^rd Btn. Royal Tank Regiment was posted as “missing” on the 2^nd June 1942 in the Middle East.

The report that he is missing does not necessarily mean that he has been killed, as he may be a prisoner of war or temporarily separated from his regiment.

Official reports that men are prisoners of war take some time to reach this country, and if he has been captured by the enemy it is probable that unofficial news will reach you first. In that case I am to ask you to forward any postcard or letter received at once to this Office, and it will be returned to you as soon as possible.”

John’s disappearance was one of many reported in the press during July 1942 –

“Mr John Munro, farmer, Kinnahaird, Strathpeffer has been officially informed that his son Pte. John Munro R.T.C, is missing.”

The news would have been a devastating blow to the family, one shared by so many in Scotland and countries everywhere. John’s mother must have been beside herself with grief and worry but then one morning she announced to the family “John is safe” for she had dreamt in the night of a baby in a cradle furiously rocking back and fore before slowly steadying and coming to a stop which she interpreted as her son John as the baby in the endangered cradle that stilled with the child safe. She wasn’t to know then but John was the sole survivor of a tank destroyed in battle.

On 2^nd August 1942 a plain postcard was written by John.

“Dear Mam,

I hope you have not had long to wait to learn I was (a) prisoner. You do not need to worry about me. When you reply write c/o Italian Red Cross, Rome. Well I will close now. I am your loving son, John. “

John and his fellow captives from North Africa were transferred to Sicily’s Camp PG 98 Prigione di Guerra (Prison of War) under a prisoner agreement between the two fascist governments of Germany and Italy. Prisoners were stripped, deloused, their heads shaved then allocated a tent with about fifty others. The camp in a mountainous area was cold, wet and windy and difficult to escape from. Food consisted of tiny rations of bread, cheese, pasta or rice at best -a handful of berries at worst. There were high levels of sickness, diarrhoea, dysentery and vomiting due to the filthy conditions and near starvation rations. I don’t know if John tried to escape while in Italy. He did break out of camps on several occasions, possibly in Germany where in the earlier stages of the war failed escapees were questioned and returned to camp and perhaps put in solitary confinement for a few days (towards the end of the war they were often shot dead), but in Italy a recaptured POW might be tethered to a flagpole and left for days without food. For many of the very sick Italy was the end of their journey. Surviving POWs such as John were further transferred into Germany. There camps were well protected with trip wires around the perimeter and backed by double barbed wire fences topped with coiled barbed wire, perimeter towers with armed guards and regular foot patrols of camp guards.

There were short rations, too, for farm stock back in Scotland because so little winter feeding was available. Less fertile land was ploughed as an attempt to grow more food instead of relying on foreign imports that tied up vessels and cost mariners’ lives.

John Munro’s War: Part 2 – 1941

By February 1941 Germany’s Afrika Korps commander, Major General Rommel, had landed a force at the Libyan capital of Tripoli in support of the Italians who were struggling to contain the British. Rommel’s tank companies proved a formidable enemy and within a matter of weeks British forces had retreated to the Egyptian border. 

Far from the heat of war in the Western Desert Scotland was suffering severe winter weather during which many of the farm’s lambs died of exposure to the extreme conditions. Grass sickness stopped the breeding of horses on the farm and the numbers of their working horse fell with some of the tasks previously undertaken by horses transferred to a paraffin-fuelled tractor.

John’s uncle, Duncan MacRae, awarded the Military Medal for bravery in the First World War, and grieve (foreman) on the farm during the Second lived with his family in one of the farm cottages close to the steading. In addition to firewood and farm produced food such as oats and potatoes, eggs etc he was paid £11. 10s a month in 1941. The farm employed five other men – for example cattleman Frank McLeod who received £105 a year and others whose wages ranged between 48 shillings and 54 shillings per week. John’s young brother, Roy, was paid between £7 and £13 per month, dependent on hours. John’s sister, Margaret, when not away working as a nanny earned the occasional £7 or £8 at busy times.

John’s father’s farm diaries rarely include any references to family events but on 3^rd December 1941 he noted –

“John sailed. Cable sent from Glasgow – 2^nd Feb about 9 weeks at sea.”

John had been transferred from the Seaforths to the newly formed Royal Armoured Corps, a tank corps that replaced the old horse cavalry regiments. In April 1939 the Royal Tank Corps had been  renamed the Royal Tank Regiment, part of the RAC.  John was recruited into the Reconnaissance Corps which was setup in January 1941, to carry out reconnaissance – scouting ahead of infantry divisions before they advanced – and disbanded in 1946. Recruits into this corps were selected through an intelligence test before being trained as drivers, wireless operators, mechanics and assault infantrymen. Many failed the test and were sent back to their own units. During World War 2 the Reconnaissance Corps served in the Middle East, East Africa, North Africa and the Far East.

During 1941 B battalion 3 RTR were in Greece fighting Italians but I have no evidence John was stationed there although some family members believe he was in Crete where fighting had spread from mainland Greece. Both were terrible bloody encounters and defeats for the Allies despite Britain’s determination to hold Crete which was regarded as essential to British interests as a vital refuelling base in the eastern Mediterranean since 1940. (The first reference John makes to being with the RTR is the following February).

The 3^rd December 1941 is the date on the first of John’s letters I have.

Dear Mam,

We are safely aboard at last. I’m afraid the paper you was sending on is a bit late now. Well it will be sent on later I suppose. We had a sing-song last night and we had a fairly early reveille this morning. Has Roy got busy pushing the pram yet. He can hitch it behind the motor bike he was to get. They will all be settled down for the winter now at home at the neeps. This letter may take some time on arriving as it will be censored and perhaps kept back for a while. Well I am afraid I cannot say much more.

I am your loving son John.

I don’t associate John with sing-songs as the John who returned from war was quite reserved but at twenty and surrounded by comrades he comes across as carefree and with a keen sense of humour. Roy was his young brother and the pram reference is to their sister Chris’ recent baby. Neeps are swedes and it’s clear John is thinking about the life he left at home on the farm.  

Just over two weeks later John writes home again, he’s contemplating the turn into the new year of 1942 but otherwise has little to say partly because of the army’s strict censorship rules, though he does hint at where he currently is –

“I can’t say where I am but it’s hot enough anyway. I have hardly anything on but I am sweating like a pig. We may not be here long and I think it may be a lot hotter yet.”

John Munro’s War: Part 1 1939-1940

This is a partial record of one man’s war divided into seven parts.

Part 1

Thursday 10 May 1945. A postcard written in pencil.

“Rested here overnight when making our way back to the American lines from near Dresden.”

Here being Lederan in Gasten Chemnitz in eastern Germany. The picture postcard was written by 24-year-old John Munro and it appears he was accompanied by several others: Tom and John Whitehead, Chris Simmons, Norrie Thompson, Bill McKay. C. Simmons, Tom S Whitehead who have added their signatures to the reverse of the card – all survivors of the Nazi work camp, Stalag IV-A. On the defeat of Germany that May the camp guards simply abandoned their posts and left the gates open as they hurried away. 

Eastern Germany around Chemnitz was a centre of war-time industries producing military hardware so became a focus of allied bombing aimed at disrupting production and destroying German lines of communication in the east of the country. Some forty miles away was the famously beautiful and culturally important city of Dresden which had escaped direct attack while bombs targeted the region’s manufacturing sector but on the night of 13^th/14^th February Operation Thunderclap changed that when Dresden became the prime target for one of the most controversial Allies’ decisions of the war. The Soviet army approaching from the east and their allies, the British and Americans, were keen to create confusion to prevent German concentration of power in the region and possible resurgence of strength. Punishing the German people was also somewhere in the mix and a curiosity over the effectiveness of firestorm in conflict. As well as Dresden’s own citizens thousands of refugees were also passing through the city (fleeing from approaching Soviet troops), and prisoners of war (POWs) – one of them the American writer, Kurt Vonnegut, later wrote about the terrible scenes he witnessed in his novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. He was one of a number of POWs put to work recovering the tens of thousands of bodies of people who had been burned to death or suffocated in the firestorm that engulfed Dresden when Allied aircraft dropped tons of incendiary bombs on its civilian population. The following night Chemnitz was the target.

Prisoners at Stalag IV-A camp would have been well aware of the increasing assaults on the cities of eastern Germany from the flames that leapt into the sky and, presumably, been given hope that the end of the war was close. At the same time allied bombardments created interruptions to food supplies and Red Cross parcels were stolen more than was usual. Camp guards as well as prisoners were near starving and by early May with the Red Army progressing across country guards abandoned their posts and left the camp gates open. By 8^th May 1945 Chemnitz was occupied by Soviet troops.

C. Simmons and Tom S. Whitehead jotted down their names on a scrap of map of the Freiberg region that John Munro took home with him. Did they use maps to find their way across country after liberation? Possibly.

*

John Munro came from Ross and Cromarty in Scotland where his parents were farmers just north of Inverness. As a farmer John would have been exempted from military service at the beginning of the war but he was barely 18 and headstrong so he enlisted as a private in the Seaforth Highlanders at Strathpeffer without telling his parents four months before conscription was introduced in 1939.

1939

There must have been a lot of talk about war around the Munro kitchen table that May. While to some the country north of Inverness might suggest an idyll of out-of-the-way peace it was far from it – nearby Strathpeffer, Jamestown, Achterneed, the Heights, Blairninich became centres of military activity throughout the war and were restricted areas which meant travel passes were required for everyone, locals included. Private homes as well as hotels and public buildings were commandeered by the military – officers setting themselves up in the smartest of houses – other ranks were accommodated as available and the overflow put up in camps of wooden huts and tents. Land was allocated for military training – rifle and shelling ranges. People came in from across the UK and the world: Newfoundlander and Honduran foresters brought to Scotland to boost the country’s forestry workers (lumberjacks and lumberjills), to provide essential timber supplies for building, aircraft, shipping, mining, telegraph poles and so on. Immediately west of the Munro’s farm practice trenches were dug out on either side of the Black Water, the river that ran through their land. To assist the professionals, locals either too old or in reserve occupations, were able to provide back-up and feel they were contributing to the defence of the country through participation in the Home Guard. John’s father signed up with them and was issued with a pair of boots of different sizes. I expect another volunteer had a similar pair.

On the eve of a war that would transform so much of British life resonances of the past endured. Horses were important means of working muscle. On John’s family’s farm there were 5 working horses plus 2 young ones and a foal that summer of ’39, along with a Shetland pony that was taken as a mascot by one of the military units, likely the Lovat Scouts or Seaforth Highlanders. Horse numbers were decreasing with the advent of the tractor. Just a year or two earlier no fewer than 11 horses were being worked on the family farm. The horses all had names and some of the cattle (mainly Highland and Galloway) on this mixed farm – big cow, broken horned cow, teen, Bonnie, Captain Smith’s, old red cow, old blue cow, roan dairy cow, little red cow. Flocks of sheep were predominantly Cheviots and Leicesters. There were also 140 hens, 30 ducks and 25 turkeys – for people used to eat turkey eggs back then. And crops that included oats, barley, swedes and potatoes.

At just 18, John was surely regarded by his father as a permanent member of the farm’s workforce which he hadn’t expected to lose. As a farmhand John was paid the average wage for a male farm servant of £4 per week (housing and perks were provided on top of basic pay) and £3 for women. That May he received £15 for three weeks work before he left for military service. John’s father, always very involved in local affairs, assisted in assessing damage to Strathpeffer’s Kinettas grass parks and Kinnellan Avenue by Lovat Scouts – broken verges, fences, abandoned water troughs for their horses and general rubbish from their camp.

1940

North Africa became a main theatre of war between Allied and Axis powers over that essential trade route, the Suez Canal. At the outbreak of war the canal was controlled by the British who depended upon it for oil supplies from the Persian Gulf and it became a target for the Axis powers of Germany and Italy. In June 1940 Italy declared war on Britian and France and in September Italian troops invaded Egypt from Libya which had been colonised by Italy in 1911. 

John had swapped working as a farmer for working as a soldier. He earned a soldier’s pay now and paid income tax the same as he would have at home. He would be liable for income tax throughout his time at war, as a prisoner of war. Had he been wealthy or an officer he could have claimed tax relief on investments held outside the UK curiously enough.