I would like to thank the Red Cross for the
information that they provided me with,
also my cousin
Barbara Watson, who lives in South Wootton. I also sourced
information from a book titled ‘St. Valery and its
aftermath’ by Stewart Mitchell.
The year is 1972 and I am 14 years old. It is a Sunday
morning and I am in Heacham church
yard. I can hear hymn singing coming from the church. I am
there putting some flowers on my
Father's grave, who had died suddenly of a heart attack aged
52, one year earlier. While I am
at his grave I feel that I am being watched and I turn to
see an elderly man looking at me over a low wall. As
I start to walk away he calls me
over and asks me who I am. I tell him that I am the son of
Nelson Owen, whose ashes are
buried here. A big smile comes over his face and his eyes
swell up as he shakes my hand. He
tells me his name is Fred Bartle (who for many years ran a
florist and green grocers shop on
Heacham high St.). This shop I remember well as it was
just around the corner from where my Aunt Margery and
Uncle Wally lived in Malt house
Crescent. He goes on to tell me that before the war my
father had worked for him
delivering his produce around the village on a horse and
cart, and it was while he was
doing this that he had met my mother, Freda, who was on
holiday, staying in a holiday
beach house between Hunstanton and Heacham. He also tells me
that one night Fred, my father,
and a few of their friends had caught the bus to Lynn and
went on a pub crawl. This led to
them missing the last bus home and they decided to walk
back to Heacham. Fred having some kind of disablement
couldn't manage the walk, and so
they all took it in turns holding a limb each and carried
him all the way home between
them!!! I can well imagine that
only a short time later my father would have dearly wished
that he was back there carrying Fred, rather than
fighting with the '7th
Royal Norfolk
Regiment', as he was one of the men left behind at
Dunkirk. The ‘7th
Royal Norfolks’
had been assigned to the ‘51st
Highland
Division’, and realising that there were no
more boats they were instructed to head along the
coast to St.Valery, where they
would be picked up. Fighting a rear guard to keep the
Germans at bay the Norfolks had
taken a heavy loss with only 20 to 30 men
surviving, many being run over by
German tanks. However, the morning they were going to
be picked up a thick fog had come
down making their escape impossible, and on the 12th
of June 1940 he
was captured by the Germans at
St.Valery, and along with approximately 10,000 men
from various regiments they had been forced to
surrender, some men falling down the cliffs
to their deaths trying to escape.
The Germans were not prepared for this, having
to deal with so many prisoners, so they rounded them
up in a large field. The next day
they were ordered to line up in rows of 5 and told to march
covering approximately 20 miles a
day, they marched through France, Belgium and Holland, with
very little food, often no food at
all. They had to march all day and sleep in the open no
matter what the weather threw at
them, and also the Germans kicked and punched them if
they slowed down. After a few days they looked like
tramps and many were taken ill.
Eventually after a while in a transit camp my father was
sent to ‘Stalag XXA’ in Torun,
Poland. This was an old Prussian fort where conditions were
dreadful, with dank corridors,
water continuously dripping from the ceilings, and in the
winter it was bitterly cold. Food
consisted of a ladle of potato soup and a loaf of black
bread which was shared between 6
men a day. Their clothes were soon full of lice, and
many had dysentery. Their cell was a vault like room
with straw on the floor and a tiny
window providing the only light. Despite many attempts to
escape (resulting in time spent in
solitary confinement), he spent the remainder of the war in
‘Stalag XXA’.
My Grandparents who lived in ‘Pulls
Cottage’, Malthouse Cresent, were well known
in Heacham. My Grandfather William Owen was a local
fisherman, during the summer
giving boat rides to holiday makers. He was also a very good
customer to the ‘Bushell and
Strike’ Public House. My Grandmother had been a school
teacher in Claxton, Norfolk, and
was by all accounts quite a refined lady. They had 7
children: Sam, Eve, William,
Stanley, Frank, Margery and Nelson. They were naturally very
worried about their youngest son Nelson.(See
attachment a quote from Patience Strong which she sent to
him). About this same time in
1972, I was talking to a lady who ran a shop at north beach
Heacham, her name was Peggy Williamson, and I
remember her husband's name was
Les, and he was a bus driver with Eastern Counties. She told
me that she had been my father's
girlfriend when they were at
Heacham school, and she along with many
people from the village had met the train which
brought my Father home at the end of
the war. She went on to say that a few of the men
lifted him up onto their shoulders
and carried him home to his parent’s house in Malthouse
Crescent. My cousin Barbara Watson
remembers as a child seeing Nelson return home, and
remembers him looking
very gaunt and thin, and as you would expect not a
well man. A few weeks later my
parents were married at St. Marys in
Heacham, with many local
people turning up to watch them leave the church. This was
followed by a small reception at
the W.I. hall, across the road from the church.
After the war Fred had asked my Father to go back to
work for him, but he decided to
work on the railway at Hunstanton. He later went to work at
the Golf club with his brother
Sam, who later became the landlord of the ‘West Norfolk
Hotel’, Heacham. After this he
worked at the ‘Golden Lion Hotel’ in Hunstanton, and finally
(until his death) he was steward
at the Conservative Club in Hunstanton. I can still vividly
recall the day my Father died and sitting with my
mother in the front room of our
house in Church St. Hunstanton, and hearing Doctor Fielding
say that the time he had spent as
a prisoner of war could well have contributed to his early
death.
Although I was only 13 years old when my
father died, I was aware of how popular
and well liked he had been. His funeral took place at
St. Mary´s, Old Hunstanton, and
was one of the largest the village had seen for many years.
His death was also mentioned on
the local radio Hereward news. I
have read that the majority of men caught at St Valery found
it difficult to talk about what
happened to them, and although I was only 13 when he died I
can’t remember him ever mentioning
anything except when I was small, telling me how they used
their socks as mittens to stop their fingers getting
frost bite. I remember my father as
being a gentle man, certainly not a natural fighter,
but like so many he was prepared
to fight and risk his life for his country.
S.G. Owen.
