Roger Hilton Artist Letters From Prison Camp 1942: 1944

By Matthew Hilton

Roger Hilton was an English gentleman ranker in 6 Troop 3 Commando and was captured during the exploit at the Berneval gun site, part of the Dieppe Raid on Occupied France in 1942.
He later became a leading British exponent of modern art, representing his country at the Venice Biennale and being made CBE.
Beneath the cheeriness the letters show how an out of the common man wrestles with the common misfortune of being a prisoner of war. Illustrated.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Matthew Hilton
• Release date: Aug 29, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370239351

Matthew Hilton

Matthew Hilton grew up in West London, England and ran away to join a street theatre before turning himself into a professional fireman. Wanting to cool down he had a productive career as a graphic artist before moving to France in 2004 when writing got the better of him. He now lives in the hills south east of Toulouse.

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Roger Hilton Artist

letters from prison camp

1942 - 44

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Roger Hilton was an English gentleman ranker in 6 Troop 3 Commando and was captured during the exploit at the Berneval gun site, part of the Dieppe Raid in 1942. He later became a leading British exponent of modern art, representing his country at the Venice Biennale and being made CBE. Beneath the cheeriness the letters show how an out of the common man wrestles with the common misfortune of being a prisoner of war.

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Introduction

All at once I get it right. There are three of us in the Land Rover, my father Roger, myself and the sculptor Kenneth Armitage. It is perhaps 1959 and we are driving down Latimer Road in London’s Notting Dale area to inspect Kenneth’s studio. I am chucked up between the two men in their forties and the gear levers with the coloured knobs.

I can't remember what it was I said, but they laughed and I was one with them them for as long as it took to get to the studio, a rickety room above a stable. There were still rag and bone men - steptoes - then with horses and carts. We called them totters. Was it in Silchester Mews, by the prefabs where the V2 had fallen?

It was around that time that Roger Mayne photographed my father in his studio at the top of our house on St Anns Road, the window covered by an old blanket.

Like many boys I kept my distance. I would sometimes creep upstairs after lunch and spy on my father when he took a nap. I would find him curled up in an elephant sized orange armchair with the italian aristocrat financed art review Botteghe Oscure or the lively sometimes saucy magazine Lilliput on the floor. Knees almost to his chin, his spectacles off, pinch marks showing on the small, ambitious nose, curled in the chair like some forgotten link between apes and reptiles.

It never came to me to ask about his time in Stalag. He was, I was learning to tell my school friends, an Abstract Artist. He had also been a Commando, that word with an un-english o hanging off the end. By this word I would come to understand once and for all that my father knew how to kill people, silently, if need be with his bare hands.

For my generation the prisoner of war universe, ten or twelve years after its reality in central and eastern Europe, was recreated in comics, films and paperbacks. We scampered about in this universe. It was itchy, the prisoners - we learn’t - were often cold, nearly always hungry. Small things got magnified. Living with others was a test. We knew a lot about the mechanical aspects, the tunnels and disguises, the trousers designed to trail sand from forbidden diggings, the ventiators made from milk tins.

Secret Radios queened it over all the other prisoner fabricated objects. A Captain Seaford, a medical officer at Teschen Stalag VIIIB, constructed one in his medicine bag. It was called the Canary. Could be made by ingenious teenagers. The quartz crystals, vital to its working, were stolen by Royal Air Force ground crew from electrified railway lines. The crystals also came by way of Secret Agents, often Poles.

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Once we almost get a view of Roger. ...I hold the bags under the machine which fills them, very dusty, I wear a kind of bath sponge over nose and mouth. The dust unfortunately penetrates through all my clothes & follows me everywhere I go. I am going to ask the M.O. to syringe my ears tonight. We have a young Canadian doctor with us now. November 28 1943.

The Doctor is Major Clare who writes ...October 1943 my Sergeant and myself were moved to a camp at Oberglogau, 15 kilometres from my 1st camp at Krappitz. A number of the men were Canadians sent out in 1942, before the chaining episode. The others were a new draft of P.O.W.’s transferred from Italy when peace broke out there. They were all working in a sugar factory, using sugar beets, in 12 hour shifts.

The letters often show him working to relieve the separation he felt from his fellows. When he had been imprisoned for some fifteen months he writes ...I haven't talked to anybody conscious for some time. Before adding Though unconsciously what a world of wisdom surrounding me making me feel small. Very lost - November 1943

A separation from his fellows sometimes brutal leaving little protection ...all the old gang were to have stayed, but for some reason an exception was made in my case - December 1943.

The posture of the gentleman ranker is likely to be strained. Unused to physical labour and unversed in coarse language he must be