It’s 8am on the morning of Wednesday 9 May, 1945 and Bill de Carteret is walking along St Peter Port’s seafront – striding ahead of the crowd despite his dodgy knee – on his way to watch the Union flag regain pride of place on the flagpole outside the States Office for the first time in nearly five years.
Behind him are a couple of dozen Tommies with bayonets fixed, a truck carrying American war correspondents Jimmy Gemmell and Frank King, who are filming the procession, and a little girl called Margaret who has yet to comprehend freedom.
Ahead of him, the flag whips in the wind, flashing across the camera held by Technical Sergeant George Holt, who captures the moment for posterity and for syndication to the nationals.
Bill has a flag just like that at home, hidden in a biscuit tin in a recess of the chimney breast – a symbol of freedom obtained at great risk, right under the noses of a contingent of armed Germans. But then, the last five years have been beset with risk, as he has been using his position as a crane driver to record meticulously the comings and goings of vessels and freight into and out of his enemy-occupied harbour.
What is Bill thinking as he marches along in his flat cap, round glasses and striped scarf? Perhaps about the random switch that kept him alive during an RAF raid, killing his friend instead of him. Perhaps about his wife and daughter to whom he can now write, expecting a reply in days rather than months. Or perhaps he’s just thinking about the Red Cross parcels at St George’s Hall that he’s due to load onto a lorry later in the day, to take to all the shops. Only 12 days ago, he wrote in his pocket 1945 week-to-view diary, ‘No meat this week. Strength still failing.’
A few hours after we launched our Freedom 80 series with the story of having found ‘the girl in the picture’ – thereby completing a search launched by another publication 20 years earlier – we were contacted by Lynn Hanley, who told us: ‘My grandpa is the man in the flat cap and glasses’. It further transpired that Bill had kept a diary during the Occupation and that more than one extraordinary tale had been passed down to the family via his widow after his death.
‘He never said a word about the war, to me,’ says Lynn’s dad Geoff de Carteret – Bill’s son – as he fetches out the little diaries.
Bill’s was a solitary war in many ways. His wife Doris and four-year-old daughter Shirley evacuated on the Fratton, a coal boat, in June, 1940, while he stayed.
He began training as a crane driver in 1941 and qualified the same year, working at St Peter Port harbour. As well as loading and unloading on the piers, he also drove delivery trucks to depots and from there to the shops throughout the Occupation.
‘Didn’t he work!’ says Geoff. ‘He was doing anything and everything, taking flour to Senner’s, to Bordeaux Bakery, to Vauvert School for the Germans. All sorts. Night duty, guard duty, he was a workaholic, basically. And yet he never seemed to have enough rations. The odd bit of meat now and again, that was all.’
In his position as a worker at the heart of Channel Island supply operations, Bill was able to see exactly what was making the occupying forces tick. He kept a list at the back of his diary of all the ships calling in at the harbour, and in his daily entries he detailed the tonnages of the shipments coming in. It’s hard to imagine that he would have dared to carry his pocket diary around with him, as he must surely have feared severe punishment if discovered. But the impression from the diaries is that he wrote in them each and every night, lending the information a considerable degree of veracity.
Some secret diaries can be a sort of comfort – a receptacle for pouring your heart out – but Bill’s tiny pocket books had space only for the briefest of daily records and his style was perfunctory. Most entries are about 30-50 words long, describe what he did during the morning, afternoon and evening and summarise the weather. But this brevity means that when he does share any anxiety or emotional response, it hits all the harder. Take this, his full entry for one day in 1944, as an example.
‘Got up 8.45. Went up to no2 [Norman Terrace]. In afternoon, stayed home, in evening remained at home. Went to bed at 8.15. Weather fine dry day, cold. The worst Christmas I have ever had.’
Another entry for 17 January, 1942 records the event which so nearly put a premature end to Bill’s life and would have prevented Geoff – born in 1946 – from ever coming into this world.
‘Was driving crane at White Rock when 3 British planes bombed 2 ships in harbour. George Tucker, next crane to mine, was killed. Narrow escape for me, many casualties.’
This was no ordinary raid. While there had been several opportunistic raids on the Channel Islands – mainly by Allied bombers returning from targets on the continent – this was a planned Allied attack against German naval operations at St Peter Port.
At 9.17am, three Beaufort aircraft of 86 Squadron Coastal Command took off from St Eval on the north coast of Cornwall and flew in formation to Guernsey. According to the subsequent report by the civil harbourmaster Capt Franklin, they were flying so low as they approached the harbour from the north-west, that they had to rise to clear the sea wall. They dropped four 500lb bombs and a dozen 250lb bombs, using delayed fuses due to the low altitude of the attack.
Two of the biggest ships the Germans had been using for bringing in supplies for their fortification programme were docked at the time. One was sunk and the other badly damaged. Along with Bill’s friend George, eight Germans and about 20 French and Dutch workers were killed at the harbour and another 50 Germans were killed or wounded by machine-gun fire elsewhere on the island.
‘My mum found out what happened,’ says Geoff, ‘I never knew. They were unloading a German boat in the harbour. If you look at where the Condor berths now, the cranes were opposite and Dad’s was crane number one – the one to the north, closest to the sea wall. His friend George Tucker’s was the other one. On this day, for some reason best known to themselves, they had decided to change cranes. So I’m lucky to be here, talking to you today.’
At the end of a week in November 1943, in which Bill describes his work at St George’s Hall and his visits to play euchre and darts at the Jamaica Inn and the Salerie respectively, he records in the ‘memo’ section at the bottom of the right-hand page – ‘19 British sailors were washed ashore around the islands from 13th to 15th from cruiser Charybdis. Total in bank £173. No meat this week.’
It’s a very brief mention but Bill’s involvement in this tragedy ended up creating a very significant legacy.
HMS Charybdis had been sunk by a German torpedo boat with the loss of 400 men on 23 October. By mid-November, 19 of their bodies had washed up on Guernsey. The German authorities, presumably in an effort to demonstrate their fair-minded respect for ‘the enemy’, allowed a military funeral to take place at the Foulon Cemetery, which islanders were permitted to attend. Bill was among an estimated 5,000 who turned up – about a quarter of the local population, reduced as it was by military service, evacuation and deportation. The enormous gathering and the 900 wreaths were a clear demonstration of islanders’ loyalty to Britain and its armed forces.
Perhaps Bill noticed a certain nervousness among the occupiers, as he decided to take a massive risk. A couple of the coffins had Union flags draped over them and Bill made his way toward one of them.
‘He stuffed it up his coat and did a runner, basically,’ says Geoff, with inherited brevity.
‘I knew nothing about this until one day my mum asked me to go upstairs at their house on Norman Terrace and she said “What do I do with this?” and she pulled a bit of the chimney breast apart, in the front bedroom, took this biscuit tin out and inside was the flag. That’s when the story came out.’
Doris had a flagstaff made and the family donated it to their local church – St John’s in Les Amballes. Geoff explains that the corner of the church around that flag only became a focus for memorialisation of HMS Charybdis and HMS Limbourne as a result of this bequest.
‘When the Charybdis survivors used to come over, they stayed at La Villette Hotel,’ Geoff recalls. ‘They went to the fire station, met with the marines and marched to the Foulon Cemetery. But when the corner was created, they went there for a little service, went across the road to the girl guides centre for some food and then went off for their march.’
Bill’s diary entries before, during and after the liberation are in turns harrowing, exciting and comforting. On 22 April, he says: ‘Some Germans broke into my house last night, no damage done’.
On 25 April, Shirley’s ninth birthday, he says ‘thinking a lot today of wife’, and on 27 April comes that desperate message – in a different colour to the day’s main entry – ‘strength still failing’.
The next day Bill receives one fifth of a Red Cross parcel, for which he is ‘very thankful’.
The day after that, he visits the Foulon Cemetery in a late-April snow shower to put flowers on his dad’s grave.
‘Can we hold out much longer,’ he asks on 1 May. But on 3 May the SS Vega arrives at 10pm and although the food will take time to be distributed, Bill is busy for the next few days doing just that.
‘Tuesday 8 May – Went with Percy Legg on flour lorry to Guille and Senner, in afternoon stayed home putting up our flags, in evening went as far as Town with the boys. Great news today – the Germans have surrendered. Weather fine day, rain in evening.’
On Liberation Day itself, he ‘went aboard a destroyer and boy did I smoke’ and as the huge American ships arrived at the old harbour with their tonnes of supplies on the Saturday, he was among those who sang Sarnia Cherie to the visiting BBC reporter.
Bill’s diary ends in September 1945, with Doris and Shirley yet to return to him. The process of return was complex and time-consuming and they only got back towards the end of the year.
Geoff came along the following year and the de Carterets built a new life for themselves. Doris, who had worked at Montague Burton’s making uniforms during the war, worked as a nurse at the Town Hospital.
Bill continued on the cranes. He died in 1972, Doris in 2012 aged 102. By living so long, she was able to pass on many of Bill’s stories.
‘I’d like to have sat down and talked with him but it’s too late now,’ says Geoff.
‘It makes me sad reading all the diaries but it makes me happier to read about the liberation, that he’s been relieved, he’s got through it and eventually, they’re going to get back together again, my mum and my dad. They had some happy years after the war, albeit starting at square one.’
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