Discourse and Defiance Under Nazi Occupation: Guernsey, Channel Islands, 1940-1945 (56 page)

The danger inherent in owning and listening to illegal wireless may be gauged by the hesitancy to acknowledge owning a set even in private diaries. Ownership may be read between the lines of Gertie Corbin's brief entry, “People are in prison, because they have radios, I tremble.”
¹⁹⁸
Many of the diarists wrote in code. Winifred Harvey would be invited by her dressmaker for “fittings” if an important speech or news was expected.
¹⁹⁹
Dorothy Higgs described how they were busy “counting the beans.”
²⁰⁰
These were the same types of codes used in everyday life to invite friends and family for a listening session. Kitty Bachmann would phone a friend whose husband was serving with the British forces and say, “We have a nice bowl of ‘fruit’ if you'd care to collect it” (or, to fit the season, “cake”) to invite her over to hear the news.
²⁰¹

It is telling of the sense of changed fortunes that the diarists became more overt in acknowledging their wireless sets after D-day, and particularly during the spring of 1945 as the war headed toward its conclusion. Before Christmas 1944, when electricity appeared to be ending,
Winnie received a crystal set through a friend of a friend, describing it as “the joy of our lives.” In the mornings, when the cleaning woman was about, the crystal set was hidden away under slats in a rabbit hutch at the lower part of the garden. It was restored to the house in time for the one o'clock news, then put back in the hutch until Winnie took it up to her bedroom in the evening. Winnie was thrilled with the little device fitted inside an electric light switch and easily hidden in the palm of a hand. It was, in her eyes, the “neatest little thing” and a source of “enormous pleasure,” although she had to keep one ear cocked for a knock at the front door.” There were times when houses in the general area were being searched for wireless sets, and Winnie would tuck away her little set in the bottom of the pram that she regularly used going back and forth to Newlands. She would leave the pram there, with the wireless hidden “under the Germans' noses.”
²⁰²

Most of the Islanders who listened to secret wireless shared Winnie's concerns over being detected and arrested. But they worried as much about harming their source of information. There grew up an etiquette about news sharing that was designed to protect friendly sources from those who might inadvertently give the game away. The milkman was very upbeat one May morning in 1943, telling Rev. Ord, “The war is over in Africa! Mr. Churchill is in Washington and the BBC says our hopes are soaring.” The reverend thanked him profusely for the news, which was anything but “new” to Ord, but “it would never do to reveal other sources of information.”
²⁰³
This same little charade went on whenever Ord ran into Mr. Lihou, the postmaster. The two men would spend some time discussing the latest news without ever revealing their sources. “He clearly believes I have kept my set,” Ord wrote, “and I am sure he still has his, but we are elaborately innocent in our references to sources of information. There are laughs even in Occupations!”
²⁰⁴

This was not some idle paranoia, but a reasonable caution. A tradesman named Arrowsmith, a dyer on Victoria Road, was arrested for possessing a wireless set and listening to the news from London. His case became an object lesson for Guernsey, although there were several versions of what actually happened. The most detailed report had Arrowsmith in a bar that was frequented by Wolff, a plainclothes member of the Feldgendarmerie, tasked with hanging about the bar listening in on conversations. In one version of the story, Arrowsmith was very much in his cups and bragging about the British news; in another version, it was not Arrowsmith who was in the bar, but someone quoting what he had been told by Arrowsmith about the news.
²⁰⁵

Both renderings of this incident pointed to very real fears on the part of the Guernsey population and made caution a necessary element of interpersonal discourse. One day, Kitty Bachmann was talking to her friend Stan, who happened to mention that Winston Churchill would broadcast that night. Stan continued in exasperation, “It will be on the Overseas Service and we can't get that station on our set!!” Kitty looked up with an innocent expression, a little smile, and raised eyebrows: “Can't you, Stan?” Stan caught himself and then came out loudly with, “Hell! You could have been—just anyone!” It was funny between friends, but Kitty admitted that she still did not reveal her own hidden set to Stan. It was just too easy to let the wrong information leak out accidentally.
²⁰⁶

Rev. Ord found out just how easy it was to be caught out as a source of British news. He was part of a small crowd waiting for the road to clear after General Müller passed on a troop inspection. Old Dr. Foote, a nonagenarian veterinary surgeon, came up to Ord to ask why the road was blocked. Ord was trying to explain, talking loudly because Dr. Foote was extremely deaf, when Dr. Foote bellowed out, “Well, what's the latest news you have to tell me?” This
brought forth a knowing laugh from the little crowd, but with the armed sentry standing by, it was an uncomfortable situation for Ord, who found it “quite hard to put the old man off.”
²⁰⁷

Ken Lewis was remarkably sensitive to the problem of inadvertently revealing that a friend or family member had a secret wireless set.
²⁰⁸
Ken was over at his Uncle Wils and Auntie Ede's house and saw a wireless mains set in the dining room. He simply pretended not to see it.
²⁰⁹
This delicacy seems an overabundance of caution, but the possession of an illegal wireless was generally treated as very private business. It was, therefore, an act of trust when, in 1944, Ken invited Ralph over to listen to his crystal set. Ralph had not heard the news headlines since the wireless sets were called in during 1942, so he was obviously excited to have the opportunity. This was a gift that Ken could extend to his best friend, but it was also a sign that he could trust in Ralph's discretion.
²¹⁰

The underlying reason for this caution became apparent as arrests followed arrests and the prison was filled with those caught for wireless offenses. It quickly reached the point where offenders had to wait until there was an “opening” before they could serve their time. These arrests were facilitated by a true scandal in the eyes of the Islanders and the one real break in the solidarity of the Guernsey populace. It quickly became apparent that the German police were not catching so many people by chance or through general sweeps, because they often knew precisely where wireless sets were hidden in the houses that they searched.
²¹¹
The Germans were more than happy to show some of those arrested the anonymous letters by which they had been betrayed.

The Islanders already knew that there were some collaborators in Guernsey, most of them known and treated with contempt. But these anonymous letters were something entirely different. They could have been sent by anyone—neighbor, relative, supposed friend—and often they related such specific information that they seemed likely to have come from someone close to the person arrested. Islanders recoiled in horror at this chink in the wall of solidarity. “What demons some people are to round on their own countrymen,” wrote Bill Warry.
²¹²
Bert Williams shared this assessment and only hoped that the names of the people who had “‘sold’ their own countrymen to the enemy” would be uncovered, so that they could be dealt with after the war.
²¹³
Even mild-mannered Ken Lewis described how these letters were viewed as “treachery by the local population and would not be forgotten after the war.”
²¹⁴
Little could be done about this form of betrayal, although H. C. Chapell, the head postmaster, was adept at steaming open letters when they were addressed to the Feldkommandant at Grange Lodge. Somehow, many letters revealing the location of a secret wireless disappeared at that point in their journey.
²¹⁵

Even now, these anonymous letters seem inexplicable, based on all we know about the Islanders and their response to the Occupation. At the time, Rev. Ord tried hard to account for them, at one point categorizing them as a “token of the degeneration of morals in a hitherto very upright community.”
²¹⁶
This was not a satisfying explanation, because the general morality of the Islanders had held up quite well under the intense strain of Occupation. He returned to contemplating these anonymous letters later when describing the overall dangers of owning a wireless and passing news items along to others:

Worse still, a local Quisling—for to our shame there are some among us—moved by some grudge or spite or jealous envy, may write the anonymous letter which will prove your undoing.

“They took my set. Why should you keep yours?” The Occupation makes many appeals to the baser instincts of the meaner sort.
²¹⁷

Ord was most likely correct in his assessment that some anonymous letters were a means of settling old scores, an opportunity for payback to a disliked relative, or an effective weapon in the war between feuding neighbors. The very anonymity of the letters meant that the sender would be unlikely to receive any reward from the Germans, thus bolstering the probability that personal motives were involved.

The damage to personal relations and the trust between neighbors was obvious. As the result of an anonymous letter, the Feldgendarmerie searched Mrs. Terrell's house,
²¹⁸
one of Ken's neighbors, for a wireless set. She had actually never owned a wireless in her life, so it was not that she was in any danger of arrest. However, the sense of betrayal was very upsetting, and the nearness to Ken's house sparked a flurry of securing his diary, news notebooks, wireless, and camera from detection. The German police actually apologized to Mrs. Terrell and asked if she had any enemies, perhaps hoping for names that would allow them further searches. She suspected that it might have been two specific women, one of them a woman for whom she used to work, but she did not reveal their names. Yet this suspicion, never to be proven or disproven, would surely have changed her relationship with both women.
²¹⁹
The anonymous letters produced a worm of doubt in more than one interpersonal relationship, likely never to be resolved.

Stories of the near detection of wireless sets and tricks used to retain them became a narrative resource in the transcript of Guernsey resistance. Some accounts were simple reports of good hiding places, such as that used by the Blampieds, who kept their wireless in a bucket on the roof of an outhouse.
²²⁰
Most of these stories are more detailed and lauded cleverness and quick thinking, providing heroes of a domestic type pulled from tales of average Islanders. Such narratives absolutely pepper the contemporaneous accounts and seem to fall into some common categories. Many are of the purloined-letter variety, where a set is in a readily apparent place that is not then searched by the Germans. When the Germans searched one home, prompted by anonymous letters, the maid showed police to the lounge where the lady of the house was seated on a little stool close to the fire. She excused herself for not rising, because she was not feeling well, but invited them to “Search the house by all means.” The maid showed them around; they searched thoroughly and returned to apologize for disturbing her, leaving Madame comfortably seated on the stool containing the wireless inside it.
²²¹

A similar story involved a man hurriedly putting his all-mains set on the settee as Germans approached the house and tossing his wife's coat haphazardly on top of it. The Germans never searched beneath, leaving Ord to theorize that “The best ‘blind’ is perfect openness.”
²²²
This first type of narrative reveals the importance of “the ruse” as a theme in many Occupation stories and anecdotes. The goal of the ruse is to outsmart rather than overpower those in control, to provide “an exhibition of intelligence, wit, and taking a bit of power.” Although the activities described in the stories are improvisational, once they enter the realm of repeated tellings, they have the opportunity to replicate themselves by inspiring others to similar acts.
²²³

Individual Islanders' ability to bluff and bull their way through trouble was a characteristic highly prized in a second type of wireless narrative. Typical was the tale of Miquet Kinnersley, who happened to be cooking a rabbit, caught in the rough area of her property, as a treat for guests when the Germans arrived looking for her wireless set. The reported exchange went, “You are under arrest, Madame!” “Oh, that's all right! But I can't possibly come now as I've got guests coming any minute and I'm in the midst of cooking. Won't you come in?” Keeping up a tone of “gay raillery” and unperturbed courtesy, she denied having either wireless or the typewriter needed to produce BBC newssheets, as she excused herself often to check on
her cooking. Soon, her charm seemed to distract the police enough that they took themselves away without a search, complimenting her on the delightful smells issuing from the kitchen. “And, do you know,” Miquet later reported, “I verily believe they would gladly have stayed to dinner if there had been any chance of my inviting them!”
²²⁴
Such stories made the feared German police into bumbling incompetents, all too human and easily gulled by feminine wiles.