Prisoners Of War, General Correspondence, 1915

There are 547 volumes in series FO 383 and this small selection concentrates on four of those volumes - FO 383/39 to FO 383/4 - covering the period January to June 1915. You will find some named individuals here, and letters from relatives complaining about the conditions faced by their loved ones, but the collection is more about the general concerns, at government.

FO 383 is the Foreign Office: Prisoners of War and Aliens Department and covers general correspondence dating from 1906. This from The National Archives website: “The series is arranged by date, and then by country or territory. The individual documents in FO 383 comprise bound volumes within which are arranged files and dockets of correspondence. The file ranges appear on the spines of the volumes, together with the country or territory as designated by the Foreign Office central registry system from 1906. Those countries or territories are then stamped at the top of the individual docket covers for the correspondence within each volume. These internal docket covers also contain two numbers. The file number is the number in the top right-hand corner of the docket cover, either handwritten and preceded by 'F' or stamped 'File No'. The number appearing in the middle at the top of the docket cover is the specific correspondence number. The correspondence for each file number is then arranged in chronological order. All of the files adopt the number of the first correspondence docket number within the sequence of that file. Some files contain a different sequence of docket covers, included as enclosures.”

By January 1915 it was clear that, far from the war being over by Christmas, battle lines had been drawn and armies were digging in. The original British Expeditionary Force (BEF) had suffered heavy losses in those opening months of the war, with many men killed, wounded or missing. Amongst the missing, were thousands of men who had been captured, some on the first day of fighting, at Mons, on the 23rd August 1914, and many thousands more in the days and weeks that followed. Some regiments’ regular battalions had virtually ceased to exist, and now there were concerns back in England about how those who had been captured were being treated.

There are letters within these papers from concerned relatives drawing attention to conditions in the camps, and also actual reports from neutral observers about conditions in those camps. These are fascinating, as are reports from some of the soldiers about their actual capture.

There are lists of prisoners within these four pieces from FO 383 but above all, the documents provide fascinating insights on what it must have been like to be a prisoner of war.

Henry Crawford MacBryan, a surgeon from Wiltshire, addressed his concerns to Secretary of State for War, Field-Marshall Lord Kitchener. MacBryan’s son, Lieutenant John Crawford William MacBryan of the Somerset Light Infantry, had been wounded on the 26th August 1914 and subsequently incarcerated at three camps: Torgau, Burg and Magdeburg. He explained that his son was “deteriorating both in mind and body as a result of his wound and treatment. Now, My Lord, it is with the greatest reluctance that I write to bother you when you are so overworked, but I do so because I rely on your great sense of justice. I may mention that I am giving all my four sons to the service of the country.”

John MacBryan survived the war and went on to help Team GB win a gold medal in cricket at the 1920 Olympic Games. He would go on to serve in the RAF during the Second World War. His brother, Edward, was not so lucky. He was killed in action in France in 1916. Another brother, Reginald, was also wounded in the First World War but stayed on in the army and was later stationed in India with the King’s Own Scottish Borderers. Gerard, the youngest brother, was a Naval cadet, but suffered with his mental health and later moved to Sarawak, Malaysia.

Among the correspondence are numerous complaints of camp conditions, revealing the hardships faced by loved ones. One such report was sent by a trooper to his wife concealed within a split apart postcard to get through German censorship. Internal documentation reveals that this was sent originally to the King, and was subsequently submitted to the Foreign Office by Sir George Holford, the King’s Equerry, who proposed that the report should be sent to the American Ambassador for investigation.

“We are being starved here” the note read, “we get rice water and horse beans only, no solid food, one loaf of bread for six days, several men have been run through with bayonets by the Guard and a large number are being flogged and tied to a barbed wire post for six hours with their toes just touching the ground, they do this without any just cause. We have one blanket and all the men are suffering with itch and dysentery. The guards knock us unmerciful with rifles and sticks, we have hardly anything to wear as our captors took them away. It is worse than being in hell, they have given pants, coats and shirts to the French, but will give the British nothing. The wounded do not get proper treatment and several have died and there will be a lot more yet.”

Letters often went missing or were censured by German officials to remove any damning information, and care packages infrequently reached their target. In her letter concerning her brother Private J Holmes of the Royal Munster Fusiliers, Mrs J Keene wrote that “... he is continually complaining of the shocking treatment he is receiving. He states that he has to do menial labour, receives no pay, has no shirt to his back & his clothes all torn in tatters & boots worn out... I shall be glad if you will kindly investigate the matter or instruct me how I can get in touch with him as I fear such continued treatment will lead to his utter breakdown in health.”

Alongside those captured in battle, the correspondence files also document a less well-known side of the prisoner of war experience: that of civilians interred due to their presence in Germany at the outbreak of war.

Ruhleben, west of Berlin was a large camp specifically for civilian internees. Originally a racing track, it held citizens of the Allied powers living, studying, working or on holiday in Germany at the outbreak of the war. Also held here were crews of several civilian ships stranded in German harbours or captured at sea, and fisherman from trawlers in the North Sea, those men mostly from Hull, Grimsby and Boston. There were between 4,000 to 5,500 prisoners at any given time, so it was a large camp and records show that conditions were grim.

One such civilian victim was Walter B Davies, whose father’s letter to the Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs tells the story of a mob attack on Walter in the lead up to the war, before he was interred at Ruhleben. He “begs that the Foreign Office should continue to keep this case under special notice in view of the fact that [my son] has suffered a very serious permanent injury, due to the fact that he was brutally assaulted in the street at Elberfeld on August 3rd, the day before the declaration of war.”

Walter was in Germany at the outbreak of the war, employed as a tutor. He was arrested on the day before the declaration of war was issued and spent several months in two camps, first Minden, then Ruhleben. He returned to the UK among a large group of civilians that were released, emaciated and – according to newspaper reports - “temporarily broken in health”. His brother, Lieutenant H.B. Davies was killed in action later in 1916.