Discourse and Defiance Under Nazi Occupation: Guernsey, Channel Islands, 1940-1945 (33 page)

These considerations give additional weight to the claim that this was a strategic move rather than accurate confessions. Constable Fred Short later said that they were forced to use the excuse of hunger as motivation for the thefts in order to avoid the charge of sabotage.
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But what saved their lives destroyed their reputations. The German-controlled press in the Island had plenty of time between arrest and conviction to convince the public that crimes had occurred against the Island in general. The trial itself added further details that the policemen had stolen from the Island's stores “twenty pounds of meat at a time, ten pounds of dripping, wine, our butter, grain and other commodities,” as Winnie reported the news.
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And the effort to divide the policemen from the support of the public was quite effective. In an attempt to show that this was theft against the Guernsey people, and to turn the populace against the policemen, the Germans took a theft at the States Dairy back in 1939 and claimed that the police were responsible for this incident as well. This was duly noted by Jack Sauvary, who wrote, “It's an awful disgrace for the Island and this game has been going on since 1939, before the German Occupation.”
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The police were not in a position to deny any charges if they wished to be treated as common criminals rather than saboteurs, and they were also not in a position to control the official transcript (or even the hidden transcript) of their own story. Jack was scathing: “They have lost their jobs, pensions, some had 20 years service. What fools!”
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Rev. Ord wrote that the Island population felt “terribly let down,” and described the response from the common man thusly: “If they had pinched the stuff to share with the starving people it wouldn't have been so bad, since the Germans probably pinched a lot of the rations to begin with.”
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Winnie considered the general opinion to be that there was no harm in stealing from the Germans, but that “the police should be above suspicion.” Some of the concern was the fear that the Germans would use these thefts as an excuse for a crackdown, or to limit the civilians' already meager rations.
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The trial was, predictably, a show trial in the Royal Court, with the German-controlled
Press
milking it for all the propaganda value it could muster. Bill Warry pasted much of the account in his scrapbook. The men were brought from prison—where they were already serving a sentence imposed by the German Court—to be tried by the States. Constable William Burton was acquitted, as PC Pill had been at an earlier stage, but ten of the men were
given additional sentences, ranging from three months to sixteen months of hard labor. In an address that had all the earmarks of one constructed for the official transcript, the Bailiff dressed the men down severely when imposing sentence:

You have brought shame and humiliation to every single soul in the Island…I am filled with shame. It is revolting to think how you have abused your position. I cannot imagine what all the foreigners in the Island—brought up, as they are, to look upon the British policeman as an example to the world—think of you.
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Considering that Ambrose Sherwill was the policemen's attorney, and remembering the careful dumb show he performed when negotiating the surrender of Nicole and Symes, this performance of collective shame and apologia seems carefully designed to avoid general retaliation.

Low-level pilfering and financial sabotage are primary means of retaliation by which those in subordinated positions strike back at their rulers. It takes the form in business of beleaguered “temps” removing office supplies, “till-tapping” by convenience-store workers, or overpouring (slipping customers double shots instead of singles) by disaffected bartenders. Yet, pilfering must have compliance from peers, who usually are in a position to know what is taking place and choose to look the other way in a display of solidarity. Otherwise, the acts are viewed, in the hidden as well as the official transcript, as theft by an individual rather than acts of resistance by subordinates. Thus, it is important in “settling scores” with those in power that the form of resistance be “satisfying to peers and appropriately provoking to superiors.”
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This is an awkward position for the resister, who must seek approval by peers and trust that none among them will curry favor with the powerful by giving the game away.

Assuming that the later accounts by the police involved that this was resistant sabotage are true—which can never be firmly established
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—they may have been caught in a trap between the civilian population's desire to discipline profiteers, and the need to keep the theft and its rationale private, as protection against discovery. Later accounts described how some Islanders gathered to send off the policemen with upbeat remarks and gestures of support.
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Some further sympathy, simply on a human level, accrued when exactly one year later, one policeman, Percy Smith, died in solitary confinement on the Continent. Questions immediately grew over the likelihood of natural death in a thirty-nine-year-old. As Bert Williams put it, “He is said to have died of heart failure, but was it?” Bert and others believed that there was much of this story yet to be revealed.
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Overall, however, it is the official version of the entire saga of the Police Trial that has survived.

If “tales of misdeeds may be taken as more morally instructive than tales of virtue,”
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the Hill-Cottingham case definitely proves the point, perhaps more so than the Police Trial. The case was best described by Winnie Harvey, who knew the Hill-Cottinghams quite well and worked with Mrs. Hill-Cottingham at the Trinity Air Raid Precautions. Some sacks of flour turned up missing from the Vauvert Flour Store, so the police were set to watch and stop all lorries that carried sacks appearing suspicious. When one lorry stopped at a baker's, unloading all the sacks but one, and started to drive off, the driver was stopped and asked where he was going. He refused to answer until taken to the police station, whereupon he admitted that the sack held flour for the “Boss,” meaning the flour controller, Mr. Hill-Cottingham. As it turned out, the sack held fifty-six pounds of flour, what Hill-Cottingham called “sweepings” from the flour-store floor and intended for his chickens. He paid 5 shillings for the sack. Yet, when analyzed, the flour was reported as of better quality than the usual bread ration.
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While the case was still pending, little was talked about in the Island except the Hill-Cottingham affair, and there seemed to be some sense that his social standing and position would put him above the law.
HILL
-
COTTINGHAM
? was chalked up on some of the public buildings and the hoardings around St. Peter Port.
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Hill-Cottingham was tried and found guilty before the Royal Court, fined £200 in lieu of three months in prison, and relieved of his post.
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Bert Williams pasted the account of the trial and sentence in his diary, labeling it “A Law for the Rich.” On the next page, he pasted a press cutting describing two States Dairy workers who took pots of milk from the dairy and were given six month's hard labor. Over this account, Bert wrote, “And One for the Poor.”
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Even as a friend, Winnie could not raise her voice in Hill-Cottingham's defense, although she was personally sorry for his “fall.” And, Winnie wrote, “The word ‘sweepings’ is now a byeword in the island.”
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Ambrose Robin read public opinion as believing the sentence given to be “perfectly wicked” and a “grave miscarriage of justice.” From Robin's perspective, the common view was that Hill-Cottingham had a lapse in judgment as opposed to criminal intent.
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So, even though this case ended in the courts, it first played out in the so-called court of public opinion, as people weighed with each other privately their beliefs in his guilt or innocence. Such incidents provide gossip's “parables…third-hand lessons about what can happen if one commits a certain behavior,” which provide a primary teaching tool and method of normative control.
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JERRY-CHASERS

In considering those peers who were of particular concern to the resisters of the Occupation, the fraternizers and collaborators, I will start with the girls and women who formed attachments to various degrees with the German occupiers. These women have received far more consideration in recent accounts of the Occupation than their numbers would warrant, but the fascination with “forbidden love” is universal and understandable. Almost every fictional account of the Channel Island Occupation (book or film) weaves in a story of a brief encounter or an “eternal love” connection between an Island woman and a German soldier. In some of the storylines, a pregnancy results and the response of fellow Islanders to the offspring enters into the plot. Increasingly, as with the
Island at War
television series or the publishing sensation of
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
, the young woman in question is actually the heroine of the story.

The Guernsey Islanders anticipated the probability of some female fraternization with the influx of handsome young soldiers. It is for that reason, as well as worries over sexual assault, that so much concern was expressed for young women in general, as discussed earlier. Winifred Harvey, old enough to have seen much of the world, took a wry and biblical approach to the issue. She was reading about the old prophets and “the invasion and occupation of Palestine by the Babylonians” and enjoyed the parallels to the current Occupation. For example, there was “they shall eat their bread with carefulness.” But even better was the report that Jewish women were castigated for chasing after the Babylonian officers, “
all of them desirable young men!
”
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There were, of course, levels of this fraternization, and some women played the dangerous but lucrative game of coquetry that has long been part of the female arsenal. Stephen Ash, in his study of the occupied American South, listed among “feminine survival strategies” such skills
as “coquetry and flattery, feigned stupidity or innocence.”
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Setting aside “loose” women and good-time girls, who made a practice of plying men for gain, there would certainly be a temptation to some women left alone in the Island to play up to German officers without carrying the game too far, hoping that chivalry would ease the way through the Occupation.

In October of the first fall of Occupation, Rev. Ord mentioned “an unpleasant report” making the rounds that a “wretched woman has been holding cocktail parties to which German officers and local girls are invited. The sequel may be guessed.”
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Particularly appalling to Bert Williams and many others was the fact that some of these girls and women had “their menfolk in the British forces which makes matters worse.” They were consorting, therefore, with the very men dedicated to the deaths of their male relatives. “We in Guernsey know them all,” Bert claimed, “and I personally have played at some of these parties & so have seen what goes on.”
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Oddly, it was not only single women and those with absent husbands who seem to have been noticed in German company. Ken Lewis found it “annoying” to see girls and women “from age 15 upwards” in the company of Germans on the roads, “despite the fact that many of them still had their husbands living in Guernsey.” This would indeed be odd if the fraternization was of a sexual nature. Instead, this might indicate a couple, both of whom had an ongoing collaborative relationship with the Germans and were therefore to be seen in their company whether separately or together.
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For all of his understandable disgust at quislings and fraternizers, Ken is careful in his estimation of young women who were quite simply bored and wanted a good time. In other words, Ken seems to understand, as a young person himself, when “fraternization” was not a matter of patriotism and politics, but a matter of youth and a desire by some young women for parties and excitement while they were still young. This is what ultimately turned Ken from any interest in Vera at work and kept his mind on the distant star of Brenda Parker. Despite trying to see Vera as simply a lively girl who learned from her mistakes, in March 1944, Ken had to admit:

[Vera] is definitely what is called nowadays a “Jerry chaser” and she is always with them. She has on her own admission stated that she has been out with them and recently she became drunk in their company and had stated that despite this she would be ready to go again. I do not for one moment class her with some of the other girls who go with the Germans and sleep with them &c.
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While Ken's naiveté may be apparent in this entry, as a product of a good upbringing and a positive nature, he is right about many of the young women who “went with” the Germans. They were missing their youth stuck away in the Island, and simply wanted to go to parties and dance.

There seemed to be little need to bell this particular cat, because the “jerry-chasers” were rather heedless with their reputations. Not only were they seen about the streets flirting with the German soldiers or at dances with the same, the privileges granted by the occupiers marked them as fraternizers. At the time of the D-Day Invasion, Winifred Harvey went over to Newlands and found the house shuttered and the blinds down. With the Germans gone, Winnie had a lovely day in the gardens, feeling free for the first time in years. Later in the afternoon, she saw a pretty young woman hovering near the gate, and Winnie asked her if she was looking for someone. The girl wanted to get into the German office because some of the clerks were developing film for her. Of course, cameras had been called in at the start of the Occupation, so the only Islanders taking pictures, except in secret, and having the films
developed were those taking holiday-style snaps of their German friends. Winnie describes her response to the young woman: “‘I'm afraid you're too late,’ I told the pretty Miss Quisling, ‘the house is shut up and they are all in the cellar. I think that sort of thing is at an end.’”
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Because these girls and women were so apparent, they became part of the humor of the Island. Kitty Bachmann joked about local women “of low degree, who had taken too literally the Divine exhortation to love their enemies.”
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