Discourse and Defiance Under Nazi Occupation: Guernsey, Channel Islands, 1940-1945 (49 page)

Some verbal defiance was sung rather than spoken, as we saw with Rex Priaulx's spontaneous operatic take on Mussolini's resignation. Most acts were not as overt as that of a Mrs. Garland, who was sentenced to two years and three months in prison for composing a song considered “deprecatory to the Reich.”
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Islanders had an attachment to patriotic songs, and once the wireless sets were confiscated, they sorely missed the Sunday playing of the National Anthem on the BBC broadcast. Thus, there were little private means of patriotic display, as during the first calling in of wireless sets in 1940. Each Sunday night at 10
P
.
M
., when Big Ben struck in England, Guernsey being one hour ahead, Winifred Harvey would play “God Save the King” on the piano, while the elderly Mrs. Clayton stood. At first, Winnie admitted, her playing was “very piano and timid,” but soon she was ringing it out “as bold as brass.”
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What were small private acts took on an aspect of unifying patriotism when they were performed at some of the dances and social evenings allowed in the Island. Bert Williams's band played often at these gatherings, and he served as a witness to music as a resistant act. For example, there was a New Year's Eve social evening at the town asylum, with Bert's band playing from 8:00 to 12:15. And Bert casually records, “We sang the ‘King’ at the end of the evening.” Because Hitler was speaking at 12:15, the electricity was still on, and many Germans were likely about, staying up to hear Hitler's address.
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It may have been the sense of the change in the war that encouraged such defiance, because there was plenty of shared history that singing patriotic songs could bring down strict punishment.

On September 30, 1943, a dance party was held at Stroobant's Café as a farewell gesture to Roy Machon, a young man being deported to Laufen in Germany for resistant acts. All was going quite well until the small band swung into “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag.” The dancers took this to be a defiant rendition of “We're Going to Hang Up the Washing on the Siegfried Line,” and they entered into the spirit of the moment, singing with gusto. Here, different versions of the event enter in. Bert Williams described the German police intervening to stop the dance and check everyone's identity cards. Ken Lewis, hearing the story by way of Vera Lloyd, who was present at the dance with her sister Jane, claimed that no one thought much of the song until they prepared to leave. At that point, they found the doors barred by sailors, and the Feldgendarmerie appeared to demand identity cards from all present. Eight people were without their cards, Jane Lloyd being one of them, and they were kept in prison overnight. The others had their cards confiscated and had to report to the Field Police at Hauteville to get their cards back. For a while, dancing in general was forbidden and Stroobant's Café was barred from holding further entertainment. This incident became instructive of the slippery boundary between the acceptable and the punishable. More to the point, it reveals the contagious nature of verbal defiance, and the stake the Germans maintained in its control.
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MESSAGES IN DISGUISE

It became clear to Islanders from the onset of the Occupation that their group politics would have to come in “disguise and anonymity.”
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And, because of the heavy censorship of Red Cross messages, that disguise extended to written contacts off the Island. As Kitty Bachmann put it, “We live in an age of ‘cloaking and dissembling’ as the Book of Common Prayer would
have it,” and she was quite proud of Peter's ability to share local news in carefully worded messages to friends in the outside world.
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Many families had simple code words, presumably established before the initial evacuation or the mass deportations to Biberach, that they could drop into messages as a blanket indication that all was well. Although such phrases were frustratingly short on detail, they served the general purpose quite handily.
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Sometimes the more specific messages that were sent could slide past the German censors simply because they were based in British terminology. Local knowledge was the basis for Kitty's message to the family that they had been evicted from the family home: “Left La Guelle. Crampen ordered us, take Basil & Dudley with us. Knew you'd appreciate the effort.” By using her father's favorite term for the Germans (“Crampen”) rather than “Jerry,” which was recognizable and resented in German eyes, and combining it with the names of their home furnishers, Kitty believed that this message that they protected the family household goods would if “properly deciphered…speak volumes.”
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There was a certain enjoyment in concocting the Red Cross messages, because it called to mind family jargon, with its attendant good memories, and it allowed an exercising of imagination. Dorothy Higgs and her family exchanged messages discussing whether the “onions” were decent—not as an agricultural reference, but using the name for Hitler and the Nazis coined by Dorothy and Phyll during a 1936 visit to Germany.
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One notable pattern in these codes to escape the censor was the use of supposedly proper names. Thus, Rev. Ord and Grae sent home to England a Red Cross message after the confiscation of the wireless sets: “You'll be sorry Uncle Bebecey passed away quite unexpectedly this week. His cheerful company sorely missed.”
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These were sometimes a bit of a stretch, and Dorothy Higgs wondered if her news that “W. Machin, Friggie, and Vac” were still working for her was understandable to her family or perhaps too transparent to escape the censor.
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Jack Sauvary got a kick out of various similar messages: “My Cossar gone, Nothing from Lydell or Belfrage lately. We miss Pye, not apple”—all of these names of newscasters or makes of wireless sets.
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Although many of the proper names appearing in Red Cross messages might have been obvious to the German censors, such as the ubiquitous “Winnie” to refer to Churchill, these messages might go through easily because they could also refer to the numerous Winifreds in the Island. It seems that simplicity worked well for these coded messages, but so did more complicated efforts. Thus, Dorothy Higgs wrote to her mother, “Little Mary sends love to Anna Gram. Dr. Santiro's prescription was inadequate but she's thriving on home produce.” Later, she learned that the reference to anagram helped the family sort out that the imaginary Dr. Santiro meant rations. The family sent the message around, so Dorothy received several return messages addressed to “Anna.”
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It did not take long for families at a distance to adopt caution in their wording, probably sensing the need from the cryptic messages they were receiving from Guernsey. These messages, too, were based on a blend of past history shared with the recipient and some facility with language. Ken Lewis's Auntie Ede received a message from Roy after fourteen months of silence that read, “Received news of all. Doing what I wanted—happy and well—glad you are too. Don't worry—I'm not. Love Roy.” They took “doing what I wanted” to mean that Roy had joined the RAF, an ambition that he apparently shared with many family members. It might also be speculated that his admonition for them not to worry and his bluff “I'm not” contained a hint that he would soon be seeing combat.
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Some were exceedingly clever at getting around the censor with a message that would be readable to Islanders and invisible to the Germans. The names and addresses of people who
were to come to the Red Cross bureau to claim the messages awaiting them were published regularly in the local papers. So, one ingenious person sent a message to the following address:

Jean Tendras
Vos Araines
Par Tchieu

As was usual, this “address” of the recipient subsequently appeared in the local press. But in Guernsey patois, this address roughly translated to “we hear your news over here.”
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Red Cross messages were occasionally published in their entirety in the
Press
or
Star.
It was probably at the urging of the Guernseymen on the staff that a message from Frank Le Poidevin, the headmaster at Torteval, was published in the
Star.
It spoke of the progress of evacuated children at school, so it would be of general interest and what could be the harm? The message read, in part, “Children progressing very well, especially Tommy. Jack showing good initiative, should improve rapidly from now on.” Of course, the reference to Tommy as the army and Jack as the navy made this a clever way to deliver general war news around the censor.
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A similar message from the headmaster was published two months later: “All children very fit. Tommy, Joe and Sam's boys working hard. Doing very good work. Should graduate with honours, near future. Delighting parents.”
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Ken Lewis was often amazed at the messages that managed to make it past the censor. He was shown a message by Mr. Hollard at the office that read, “All well. Be of good cheer your day of deliverance is near…-” The three dots and the dash that closed out the message provided a common form of the “V” sign.
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Other messages that slid past the censor were so coded as to be worthless to the recipient. Ken was rather miffed at a message his Mum had received that “contained all foolish statements…and gave no news whatsoever.” Instead, the message was filled with oblique questions, such as “Have you got patches on your feet?” and “Have you any pretty biscuits in your tin?” Whether these were intended to be read as codes, or simply references to shared events from the past, they were thoroughly lost on the Lewis family.
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If there was a master of the coded message, it had to be Rev. Ord. It was not simply his intellect but his intimate knowledge of the Bible that made his coding so fascinating to read. Ord includes full transcripts of some of his coded letters to Biberach and seemed to enjoy the creative game of devising means of discussing the war when only limited to news of the family. Some of the more entertaining of these offerings contained a detailed description of the passing of Uncle Ron (Rommel's army in North Africa) and gave hymns with specific verses, as they were “long hymns,” and Bible verses that were delivered at the funeral. Naturally, all of these verses and hymns contained specific messages and exhortations, at least when read between the lines.
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Not surprisingly, Ord found the Bible to be a fertile hunting ground for sources of coding. Early in the summer of 1942, he tucked into a Red Cross message a reference to “Last two verses, Acts, Moffatt's version,” which reads, “For two full years he remained in his private lodging welcoming any who came to visit him. He preached the Reign of God and taught about the Lord Jesus Christ, quite openly and unmolested.” There could have been few better descriptors of his position or more effective means to convey the news that he was still in his home and able to perform his duties as minister. Ord marveled that “Some of these passages seem designed for the conveyance of messages,
IF ONLY
they are not censored!”
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In August 1942, the Germans cracked down on all the “cryptic messages” that were being sent,
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and the use of biblical texts.
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As a minister, Rev. Ord could get away with the use of Bible verses to send external messages longer than could the average Islander. Yet, it was in messages aimed at the support and encouragement of his own congregation where Ord was the cleverest and boldest. Some references tucked within his sermons were directly tied to war news. On September 14, 1942, a woman stopped Ord in the Arcade with “Shepherd's Hotel—you naughty man!” The night before, Ord was preaching on Isaiah and the attempt by Sennacherib to take Egypt (war references in the Bible being one way to broach the topic of the current war) and had dropped into his description of Napoleon's retreat from Egypt in 1799 a mention that it was so sudden, “he never got to stay at Shepherd's Hotel.” The BBC had been reporting that Rommel expected to take Cairo and make Shepherd's Hotel his headquarters. Ord could tell that the congregation “took up the significance directly.”
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It is also little wonder why Ambrose Robin, describing some “startling remarks” made by Ord in one sermon, could only write in admiration, “He's got pluck.”
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And it is Ord whose coded message through the Red Cross early in the Occupation beautifully captured the developing communal identity that would sustain the Islanders through the years to come. He replied to a message by asking, “Do you know closing sextet Tennyson's Ulysses?” He believed that Tennyson's words would convey much that they were not allowed to detail in a message:

Though much is taken, much abides; and tho'

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, AND NOT TO YIELD.
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