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    The Prisoner of War Diary of Stan Cornwell: North Africa, Italy & Germany 1941 - 1945
    The Prisoner of War Diary of Stan Cornwell: North Africa, Italy & Germany 1941 - 1945
    The Prisoner of War Diary of Stan Cornwell: North Africa, Italy & Germany 1941 - 1945
    Ebook134 pages1 hour

    The Prisoner of War Diary of Stan Cornwell: North Africa, Italy & Germany 1941 - 1945

    By David Cornwell

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    In September 1943, just at the moment when their Italian guards were deserting their posts and British Prisoners of War were about to be liberated by the advancing Allied troops, they were ordered by their own officers to stay in their camps. This order, from the M19 branch of the Ministry of Defence, contradicted Churchill’s express wishes that all POWs should be allowed to walk free. Fifty thousand Allied prisoners missed their chance as German troops recaptured the camps and transported the POWs to Germany and Poland where they would spend the rest of the war._x000D_
    This is the diary of one of those fifty thousand. Lance Corporal Stan Cornwell documents the daily preoccupations of a POW, played out against the backdrop of global conflict. The diary shows how comradeship enabled men to cope with hardships, frustrations, anxieties and insecurities, and how they and their families were able to hang on to their ordinary lives in extraordinary circumstances of loss, deprivation and chaos.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrown Dog Books
    Release dateSep 21, 2020
    ISBN9781839521737
    The Prisoner of War Diary of Stan Cornwell: North Africa, Italy & Germany 1941 - 1945

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      Book preview

      The Prisoner of War Diary of Stan Cornwell - David Cornwell

      2

      Stanley Cornwell – POW Diary

      When my father died in 2005, my brother and I had to deal with the inevitable process of discarding most of our past. There were three piles: keep, charity shop, and dump. I retained a little of the furniture: a mahogany-veneered, glass-fronted cabinet, a worn and battered 1944-stamped Lloyd Loom wicker chair; but we had little space and most of it joined the charity shop pile. At a stroke, as is usually the case with families who do not have heirloom furniture, our childhoods disappeared.

      Old tea services, cutlery, a little glassware, some books, maps, tools and family photographs were divided without argument and that was about it. We cut cards for who would take an antique compass and who a 1930 Kodak camera in a Bakelite case.

      When it came to paper documents, I was surprised to find my brother much less sentimental than me and he left almost all of it to my safe keeping. There was a folder of invoices for major items purchased since the 1940s. Many of these were on headed notepaper from the Co-operative Wholesale Society (Lanebottom Industrial Equitable Pioneers Society Limited, Rochdale). My father worked in the CWS Engineering Finance Section and we seemed to buy everything through the Co-op. There were some holiday receipts and brochures, old passports and driving licences, official documents relating to my mother and father’s own parents’ lives, marriages and deaths. But what really interested me, what provoked more than the obvious sense of nostalgia, was a roll of drawings and a black, plastic folder containing documents.

      The drawings had all been done by my father between 1933 and 1935 when he attended night classes in Technical Drawing at Wilbraham School in Fallowfield, Manchester. Most of them are compass and pencil drawings, interlocking shapes, the later ones increasingly complex, many of them delicately filled in with watercolour paints. I find some of them extraordinarily beautiful; they show an attention to detail and a patience in execution. They are repetitive in the same way that Islamic designs, Navajo rugs and Mexican tiles are. I find that extended viewing can produce complete changes in the focus of perception in the way that Rorschach blots will. My father could be short-tempered, easily frustrated by life, but here was evidence of a man who could be at ease with abstract structure, who could produce focus, calm, patience. Most of all it evidenced a man who enjoyed the recording of detail.

      The black plastic folder contained Army documents and memorabilia from my grandfather’s past. William Cornwell had been a regular soldier through the Boer War and First World War. There were postcards from South Africa and France. There were two marvellous handwritten programmes for variety concerts held by the Royal Engineers in South Africa. One identified Modder River as the location, the other Thursday 20th December, 1906 as the date. There were Army discharge papers and Ford Motor Company and Rolls-Royce employment papers, as well as a photographic negative of Will at the wheel of a Model T Ford in Trafford Park, Manchester.

      The folder also contained wartime documents relating to my father, some photographs and letters, and a diary which my father had recorded from 15th December 1941 to 13th April 1945, the period that he spent as a Prisoner of War in North Africa, Italy and Germany.

      My brother and I were aware of both the drawings and my father’s wartime diary, but I do not ever remember them being shown to us in detail or their context and content being discussed.

      It is the diary which became the focus of this book.

      * * * * *

      Stanley Corless Cornwell was born on 23rd May 1913, the first son of William and Alice Cornwell, a working-class couple from East Manchester. Briefly, the three of them lived with Will’s parents at 252 Palmerston Street, Beswick, but for most of his childhood Stan lived at his mother’s parents’ house at 685 Ashton New Road, Clayton. Stan’s two brothers Leslie and Eric were born in 1916 and 1920. The five of them slept in one room at the Clayton address until Stan was ten years old. He started at Seymour Road School, Clayton, aged six, a year late because, according to Stan, the School Inspectorate were understaffed during the First World War and ‘did not get around’ to their house. In 1923 the family moved to a council house at 4 Marbury Avenue, Fallowfield, in South Manchester. By then, Stan had survived a serious case of diphtheria and had been run over by a taxi. He was resilient.

      Stan left school at fourteen without qualifications, but, like so many of his generation whose intelligence was unrecognised and undervalued by a rigid class system and restricted by a lack of opportunity, he continued to educate himself, through night classes, correspondence courses and a general commitment to reading that lasted all his life. As a child and young adult he was keenly involved in the Boy Scout movement. It fostered his love of outdoors life, of camping, hiking and of developing ‘survival’ skills which would prove to be of great value during his wartime experiences. Amongst his effects was an old copy of Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys. Covered in protective brown paper, its edge was completely chamfered, worn down by its permanent insertion in Stan’s back pocket. It was always with him.

      In early adulthood, he made friends with others from a similar social background who used the local YMCA group and facilities to engage in hiking, climbing, cycling and athletics. The early YMCA was at the forefront of progressive social thinking which tried to address the negative effects of industrial poverty.

      In late 1940, Stan married my mother, Joan Petherick, who lived nearby in Darley Avenue, Whalley Range. Extraordinarily, Joan’s birthday, the 23rd May 1913, was exactly the same as Stan’s. Stan was four hours older than Joan. Within six months of their marriage, Joan and Stan would be separated by his posting overseas and they would spend the next four years apart. Stan was taken captive by German troops on 15th December, 1941 and remained a Prisoner of War until his release on 13th April, 1945.

      Joan Petherick and Stanley Cornwell, Manchester, 1938

      Joan and Stanley Cornwell’s wedding, St John’s Church, Whalley Range, Manchester, 1940

      Stan’s Enlistment Medical Certificate, 1940

      Summary of Stan’s movements from embarking from Britain till the day of his capture.

      Stan left Wentworth in Nottinghamshire on June 26th 1941, and travelled to Gourock on the River Clyde. He boarded the SS Oronsay on June 27th and set sail for North Africa at 3.30 p.m. on June 28th. Arrived Freetown, Sierra Leone, on July 14th and then Durban, South Africa, on July 29th. Left Durban for Aden on August 3rd arriving on August 21st. Departed Aden on August 24th, disembarking at Port Tewfik at the southern end of the Suez Canal on August 28th, and then moved onward to Ismailia. On September 17th, Stan was moved overland to Cairo and billeted at Base Depot, Almaza, ten miles from Cairo centre. On September 22nd, he left Almaza for Marsa Matruh on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast, 140 miles from the Libyan border. On September 26th he was moved from Marsa to Buq Buq, just short of the border with Libya. Here he remained at Battalion Headquarters until November 18th, the start of what he described as ‘the big push’. On December 13th, Stan’s unit was pushed to an exposed position to protect the Army’s southern flank. Three days later they were overrun by German tanks. Stan and 60 or 70 of his comrades were taken prisoner at 4.30 p.m. on December 15th. It was just under six months since he had left Britain. In terms of actual military combat, Stan’s war had lasted just three days.

      The Diary.

      The document is of lined paper, measuring approximately 6.5 inches by 4.5 inches. The paper has been fairly crudely cut from an exercise book which had been halved. The Diary had been kept inside the canvas-covered cardboard wallet which was issued with the standard Official Army Book 64 – Soldier’s Service and Pay Book.

      The Diary has a protective

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