University of Barbed Wire: How British prisoners studied for degrees and trained to be doctors in World War II captivity

Ever since World War II ended, the words ‘prisoner of war’ have been synonymous with escape.



But despite the bravery and ingenuity of the men who tunnelled or climbed their way past the barbed wire, carrying artfully forged documents and wearing civilian suits made out of blankets, the majority of prisoners were simply more concerned with day-to-day survival.

Now, a new book written by Midge Gillies, whose father Donald was a POW of the German Reich, pays tribute to their quiet brand of bravery and to the determination that kept these prisoners going year after year — not knowing when, or even if, they would ever be free.

Entertaining the troops: Prisoners getting ready for a show at Stalag Luft III, Bavaria

An estimated 170,000 to 200,000 British, Commonwealth and Empire men were taken prisoner in Europe, with 90,000 Allied prisoners held in around 1,000 camps run by the Japanese.

Most were in the prime of life when they were captured. Some had abandoned promising careers — as actors, musicians, professional footballers, doctors and lawyers — to join up.

They applied their skills and enthusiasms to the forbidding task of maintaining morale in captivity, setting up universities, performing makeshift theatrical pieces as actors and musicians, devising life-saving medical gadgets from scavenged bits of rubber, learning new languages, sitting exams, writing poetry and, above all, making lasting friendships that crossed class divides and nationalities.

Although many of them — particularly those who suffered brutality and deprivation at the hands of the Japanese — never recovered physically or mentally from their imprisonment, for others it opened up new horizons.

Terry Frost, a working-class boy from Coventry, had always loved art at school, but his family considered painting something ‘for the ladies’. So he abandoned it and worked in factories until the war intervened.

Punishing: Two emaciated British prisoners after their release from a Japanese prison camp

Soon after signing up, he was captured in Crete by the Germans and sent to Stalag 383 in Bavaria, where he met a middle-class art student called Adrian Heath.

With Heath’s encouragement, he began painting portraits of other prisoners — men whom he would never have encountered as equals in the class-bound civilian life of pre-war Britain — and was introduced to other art forms, such as poetry, classical music (several men had gramophones and records) and plays. For Frost, Stalag 383 was ‘a university’. He dreaded boredom, which reduced morale ‘quicker than anything. It seems that everything’s a waste of time’.

POWs had to make do with very basic materials: Frost painted his portraits on the back of hessian pillowcases and was, at first, restricted to just three colours: Prussian blue, yellow and white. The Red Cross occasionally included paints in the parcels distributed regularly to the prisoners in Europe, and a German guard gave him tubes of oil in return for a portrait of himself by Frost. His brushes were made of horsehair attached to a piece of cocoa tin.

POWs in the Far East had to work with even more limited materials because Red Cross parcels weren’t distributed there.

Free at last: Cheering British sailors reach the shore after being released from Sahara prison camp at the end of the Second World War

Ronald Searle, who had been an art student and cartoonist before war broke out, used his art to document conditions at Changi prison in Singapore, then in the labour camps of the Death Railway that the Japanese built from Thailand to Burma using POWs.

Unlike the prisoners in Europe who could openly display their paintings, men such as Searle and his friend Jack Chalker, another artist, had to hide their work from their captors because it served as a testimony to their atrocities.

Searle concealed his work under the beds of men dying of cholera because he knew this was one place from which the guards kept away; Chalker hid some of his inside the artificial limb of a fellow POW.

On one occasion a guard caught him with his paintings, done on forbidden paper. Almost all were ripped to shreds and he was beaten mercilessly.

Undeterred, Chalker continued to paint, his work capturing the quiet dignity of emaciated POWs supporting each other among the squalor of their surroundings.

In one camp he worked as a medical orderly, assisting the surgeon with amputations and other operations, and then drawing what he had seen.

His art was not limited to horrors, however. His captivity introduced him to the intricate beauty of nature: he said that appreciating it meant he did not ‘sink to hating everything’. So he painted the delicate blossom, scarlet hibiscus and exquisite orchids around him in the jungle.

In fact, the exotic abundance of nature was one of the few advantages enjoyed by the Far East POWs. Monkeys, peacocks lizards and numerous species of colourful birds surrounded those in jungle camps.

Nowell Peach, a doctor from Bristol, was one of many who found birdwatching the ideal form of escapism.

He had ambitions to become a surgeon, but had not yet trained when he joined up, and found himself learning on the job in Indonesian camps.

He used his spare time to memorise all 1,381 pages of the surgeon’s ‘bible’, Gray’s Anatomy, and carried out operations on makeshift operating tables using parachute silk for stitches.

When he was not operating, he delighted in watching and drawing some of the 400 species of birds found on the islands, detailing sightings of green-coated tailorbirds, scarlet-headed flowerpeckers and black-winged kites.

Even apparently impractical skills could become a lifeline. Fergus Anckorn, who had practised as a magician in his native Kent, recalled his time in the Thai jungle working on the railway.

‘Every hour, we got ten minutes to boil some river water and drink it. I would start doing tricks and the guards loved it. Sometimes it would go to 45 minutes before they realised, during which time friends of mine . . . would be pinching potatoes from the Jap stores.’

Even in Borneo, where the Japanese had banned pens, pencils, ink and paper, a prisoner named Frank Bell — who had a first-class degree in French and Spanish from Cambridge University — set up a study programme, with every camp inmate sharing whatever knowledge they possessed. Classes were held in everything from advertising and pig farming to history, German and chess.

When the Japanese banned the classes, Frank continued to teach in secret, using scraps of paper and ink made from charcoal powder. ‘Even now,’ he wrote after the war, ‘though I can walk past a cake shop without my mouth watering, I cannot pass a stationer’s without longing.’

If anyone spotted a Japanese guard approaching, they would shout the coded warning ‘Nip in the air’ which evolved to ‘cold’, despite the 100-degree heat.

Frank even held exams, awarding degrees from the ‘University of Kuching’.

Back in Europe, Anthony Barber, an RAF pilot, studied — through the International Red Cross — for a law degree while a POW and gained a First. He attributed his success to having ‘no women, no drinks and no distractions of any kind’.

Not all POW pastimes centred on self-improvement. Gambling was endemic in camps in Europe. ‘Jockeys’ raced round on human horses, and mini-courses were built for mice, earwigs, beetles and frogs. Some racked up debts that had to be repaid after the war. According to family tradition, Jock Hamilton-Baillie, an inveterate escaper who ended up in Colditz, ‘won’ his future wife, the sister of a fellow POW, in a game of cards.

Sport was encouraged by the camp authorities in Europe, and the Red Cross sent out cases of kit and equipment: bats, balls and clothing.

At Stalag Luft III in Poland (later famous as the scene of ‘the Great Escape’), POWs built a golf course and played using clubs with heads made from melted-down lead water jugs or silver cigarette foil, attached to a shaft made from a tree branch.

During his five years in POW camps, Terence Prittie — a passionate cricketer — made six escape attempts. Each failed, but cricket kept him going. ‘With a cricket bat in his hands, the prisoner of war is rather nearer home than at any other moment of his existence,’ he wrote later.

For other prisoners, theatre and music provided the ultimate mental escape.

Hours were spent making costumes, wigs and props, building stages and spotlights (made from recycled Red Cross tins) and rehearsing. At its peak, Stalag VIIIB in Lamsdorf, Poland, held 10,000 British POWs (plus around 9,000 in satellite work camps), which made it the biggest British POW camp.

The future film star Denholm Elliott took to the stage there and ‘found a talent emerging that I hadn’t really felt when I was at RADA [Royal Academy of Dramatic Art]’. His slim hands and features made him a convincing girl: he played Viola in Twelfth Night and Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion, and had a keen following among the guards. His first wife, the actress Virginia McKenna, later attributed his forays into homosexuality to his time in the camp.

Clive Dunn — also slight, young and later most famous for playing Corporal Jones in Dad’s Army — performed with the theatre group at Stalag XVIIIA (at Wolfsberg in Southern Austria), wearing a wig made from a horse’s tail and a dress of dyed Army pullovers stuffed with sock ‘breasts’.

In the Far East, where materials were more scarce, huge resourcefulness was required. Major Denis Houghton made a flute, at a camp workshop in Singapore, from 175 separate pieces of scrap, including parts from fire extinguishers, naval guns, bicycle spokes and a packet of sewing needles. Another man made a double bass from a soapbox strung with telegraph wire.

Light-hearted plays, such as romantic comedies, were popular. Again, female impersonators were in high demand: wigs were made from stolen hemp sacking sewn onto caps, then dyed using soot or wood ash.

In one camp, a P. G. Wodehouse play required two women to appear in their underwear. Although the men had been stripped of almost all possessions, an appeal went out. Two pairs of silk cami-knickers mysteriously appeared and were afterwards returned to their owners, no questions asked.

One Far East POW described how these performances revived starving and sick men.

The audience was transported ‘from its surrounding squalor, filth and drearily monotonous diet of rice and watery stew, into a totally different — and yet more real — world of beauty and sanity. Even those who had come only for their weekly ration of bawdy jokes went back to their huts almost in a trance’.

Books were passed round and round camps. Jack Chalker noticed that when times were toughest, men sought comfort in such childhood favourites as Alice In Wonderland, Wind In The Willows and Winnie The Pooh.

At camps in Europe, some men retreated to a make-believe world of their childhood, herding imaginary sheep, riding non-existent bikes or playing invisible marbles. Airmen ran with their arms outstretched, swooping and diving and imitating the sound of an aeroplane engine.

Sometimes such flights of fancy tipped over into mental illness or ‘barbed-wire-itis’ as it was sometimes known. There were some suicides and cases of clinical depression.

But it is remarkable how many men survived with their spirits unbroken — although they often suffered nightmares and trauma in later life.

Many POWs took the skills they had learned or polished during captivity, into their civilian lives and showed remarkable lack of bitterness about all they had suffered, preferring to dwell instead on what they had gained.

Nowell Peach became a surgeon, and Jack Chalker combined his medical knowledge with his artistry to become a surgical illustrator.

Ronald Searle became a leading graphic artist, and his St Trinian cartoons have been transformed into Hollywood films.

Terry Frost defied his family to go to art school and became a successful abstract artist.

Fergus Anckorn returned to conjuring and still performs tricks in his 90s. Frank Bell set up his own language school and an educational trust.

Others simply brought with them to civilian life the attitude that had enabled them to survive in captivity. In the case of the author Midge Gillies’ father, Donald, it was incurable optimism and ‘a genius for living in the moment’.

Such men had achieved the ultimate victory over their captors: their minds remained free.

