Occupation football programme shows team of slave labourers
TWO rare football programmes from the Occupation have emerged which show that slave labourers had a team to take on Guernsey’s top side – but the match was eventually blocked by the German authorities.
London auctioneer Graham Budd is selling the two programmes next week and they are expected to fetch between £600 and £800.
The Vauxbelets Old Boys Association, who were the ‘Occupation champions’, were due to play the ‘Continental XI’ on 8 June 1943 at Beau Sejour.
‘Continental XI’ was made up of men who had been brought to the island to build Hitler’s Atlantic Wall and carry out other engineering projects, such as constructing the Underground Hospital.
The team was made up of six Spaniards, three Belgians and two Frenchmen.
However the match never went ahead, despite the programme being produced, because at the eleventh hour the Germans decided that it was ‘verboten’.
Historians have speculated that the Germans may have been fearful the slave labourers would attempt to escape, plus mixing with the locals and developing solidarity was not encouraged.
Instead another team called ‘Island XI’ was drafted in as a replacement, and they surprisingly beat the Guernsey champions 4-2.
After the war, Len Duquemin, who played for the VOBA, went on to play for Tottenham Hotspur and scored 134 goals in 307 games.
The game that did not go ahead is the most interesting from a historical perspective because historians believe it reveals something about the culture of the time.
Only two other copies of the ‘Continental XI’ programme are known to exist.
Mr Budd said they were a very exciting find.
‘Wartime football programmes are a specialist field because there are some people who do collect them, they reveal a lot about social history.
‘Some of the match programmes have air raid warnings on them and evacuation routes, and people were encouraged to recycle the paper for the war effort, so you can see why they are so rare.
‘Of course this match was on the Channel Islands, which were the only occupied British soil during the Second World War, so it’s been fascinating looking at them and finding out about them and cataloguing them.’
The match was played in aid of The Star newspaper’s help the children fund.
At that time the newspaper was censored by the Nazis and it reported that the teams were ‘revised’ because of ‘circumstances which could not have been foreseen’.
