Life after Treason

Walter Purdy was one of just four Britions to be tried for treason after WWII (a fifth. Patrick Heenan seems to have been court martialed in Singapore before the fall and executed).John Amery and William Joyce (British by dint of fraudulently obtaining a British passport just before the outbreak of war) were hanged but Purdy and Thomas Cooper a Briton who saw active service in the SS had their sentences commuted.

I found this article in the Southend Echo newspaper just a coule if days ago and intereting reading it is (to me anyway). I thought I'd share it even though it is several years old

Quiet man of Thundersley was the Colditz traitor

He was, or seemed, a nondescript man without ambition, lacking any sort of attitude or opinion. Born in Barking, he moved east to Essex, settling in Thundersley after the war. That move appeared to be the most dramatic thing that Walter Purdy had ever done with his life. He did some sort of job with a firm that made water softeners, then towards the end of his life worked as a storekeeper for Ford in Dagenham. He died in Southend Hospital on July 26 1982. And that was the end of this particular version of Solomon Grundy.

Yet the apparently ordinary Englishman hid a sensational personal secret that was to become the stuff of legend. He had been tried, and come within an inch of being hanged,..  In semi-fictionalised form, he was to enter TV legend as a character so unlikely that many viewers of the TV series Colditz assumed he was invented for dramatic effect. Yet he was real. Walter Purdy of Thundersley was the Colditz traitor.... The castle was a swarming hive of busy and ingenious escape-artists, plotting, hacking, building, forging, disrupting, all with the aim of getting out of Colditz, back to Britain and on with the fight. And even if they couldn't escape, at least they could disrupt the Grman war effort by causing maximum chaos and tying down as much enemy manpower as possible. Colditz, if you were British, was a very single-minded community. Yet one inmate was secretly working directly counter to this effort. He went by the name of Bob Poynter. He was as English as any prisoner in Colditz, but he was working for the Nazis. Bob Poynter was the assumed name taken by Walter Purdy.

Purdy's extraordinary path to becoming the Colditz traitor started somewhere back in his adolescence. Only the bare facts are known, but it is possible to second guess the process. He was born in Barking to a dockland family on May 17 1918... like so many others in that generation, Purdy joined the British Union of Faschists. He was 16-year-old when he signed up at the Ilford branch... It is likely that, during this period, Purdy encountered another blackshirt, a figure who was to influence him deeply. This charismatic individual, William Joyce, was destined to become the most notorious traitor of World War Two. Away from the streets of London, Purdy began to build a successful career for himself as a ship's engineer in the merchant navy. Soon after the outbreak of war, he joined an armed boarding vessel, HMS Van Dyck. He was now serving as a merchant navy officer under Royal Navy orders, with the rank of sub-lieutenant. Purdy's war didn't last long. On June 8, Van Dyck was bombed and sunk off the Norwegian coast. After 36 hours in a lifeboat, Purdy was captured and became a prisoner-of-war.

Purdy ended up at the naval internment camp, Marlag, in northern Germany. The head of security at the camp, Onderfuhrer Gussveld, took an interest in identifying POWs who might be sympathetic to the German cause. Purdy caught his eye when he noticed a book that the naval lieutenant was reading. It was a tract about the increasing decadence of the British Empire, called Twilight Over England. Its author - William Joyce,  The first stage of turning Walter Purdy began with something as inoffensive as a book-signing. Gussveld offered to send the book to the author for his signature. Purdy willingly complied.

In 1943, Walter Purdy joined Lord Haw Haw's radio unit in Berlin. Starting in August, he began to make anti-British broadcasts of his own. In a brazen act of identity theft that puts other recent cases to shame, he assumed the name Bob Poynter, stolen from a fellow POW naval officer he had encountered in camp. He was also integrating into German society. He was billeted with a German couple, and while there he met a pastry cook named Margaret Weitemeier. The pair were soon living together as man and wife. In April 1945, Margaret bore him a son, Stephen.

On March 8 1944, a naval lieutenant named Bob Poynter arrived as a POW at Colditz Castle. Soon after his arrival, German guards discovered the whereabouts of a hide, a wireless set, and an escape tunnel. POWs began to suspect the unthinkable, a British traitor in their midst. Already suspicion was falling on Poynter. Some prisoners remembered him from previous camps as Walter Purdy. One prisoner believed that he ahd seen Purdy salute the Nazi swastika.

Eventually Purdy was summoned before the camp security committee. Their cross-examination skills soon wrung a confession out of the man from Essex. He confessed that he had been a "rat and a traitor." According to one witness, Brigadier Grismond Davies-Scourfield, the decision was taken to hang Purdy within Colditz. In the end, however, nobody could be found to volunteer for the grisly task of execution. Instead, the Germans were told to remove him from the camp, because his safety could not be guaranteed. The Colditz commandant took the threat seriously, removing Purdy to a cell outside the main prison area. In June, he returned to hs old life in Berlin as propaganda broadcaster, interpreter and live-in lover.

At the end of the war, Purdy was picked up by American forces and returned to England. For a while he remained at liberty, and was even awarded a disability pension based on wartime hardships.  Conveniently forgetting his German missus and son, he started an affair with a Mrs Betty Blaney. Discovering about his past, his new squeeze began to blackmail him. Blaney ended in the dock at the Old Bailey charged with extortion.

All this time, Scotland Yard had been preparing a case against Walter Purdy/Boby Poynter. In December 18 he faced the Attorney General, Sir Hartley Shawcross, on a charge of High Treason. Those testifying against him included Margaret Weinemeiier, his wartime German "wife." It took the jury a mere 17 minutes to bring in a verdict of guilty. The judge donned his black cap and Purdy was sentenced to death.

IThe executioner Albert Pierrepoint was summoned to Wandsworth jail, where Purdy now resided. The execution date was fixed for February 8 1946. On February 6, just two days before that date, the Home Secretary commuted Purdy's death sentence.

Purdy was released from jail in November 1954, under Home Secretary's licence, although a departmental memo described him as "the greatest rogue unhung." He married twice, his first wife dying soon after their wedding. His second wife bore him a son. She remained in ignorance of his past until after his death. Purdy told her that he spent his wartime in submarines - an appropriate lie for a man who sought to submerge his past identity. Eventually, the full Purdy story as told above was unearthed by a dogged researcher named Joe West, a helicopter pilot and TV producer. Joe tracked Purdy to his lair in Thundersley, but by then then the Reaper had claimed the old traitor. For 36 years he had successfully eluded his history, hiding it under a mask of anonymity. In the end, Walter Purdy proved far more competent at being a nobody than a trait

Intersting stuff I hope you agree

Patrick Heenan – The Singapore Traitor

Readers of this blog will know that I am fond of the backwaters of history – those events which, while important in some way, shape or form, either do not materially affect the course of history or are forgotten for one reason or another.

I am quite interested in Britons and Commonwealth citizens who served the Axis powers. Some of the characters are known to most (eg William Joyce) others are rather less well known but not forgotten to history(John Amery, The Brtisches Freikorps, or BFC) while some are largely forgotten except by people with an interest (eg Harold Cole, Theodore Schurch,, Oswald Job).

I am not so familiar with the actions of those who aided the Japanese war effort so it is perhaps unsurprising that I had never heard of Patrick Heenan until I cam across his name last night when looking for something else.

According to his Wikipedia entry Patrick Stanley Vaughan Heenan was a New Zealand born captain who was apparently convicted ofof treason for after spying for Japan during the Malayan campaign of World War II.



In 1932, Heenan he was placed on the Army Supplementary Reserve. He was commissioned in 1935 and put on the Indian Army's Unattached List, and was sent to India. After six months' training with a British regiment. He was accepted by the 16th Punjab Regiment

n 1938-39, he took a six-month "long leave" (an Indian Army tradition) in Japan.

During 1941, his unit was sent to Malaya. He was transferred to an Indian Army air liaison unit and posed to Alor Star, in northern Malaya, in June 1941.[15] It was in this area that most of the RAF, RAAF and RNZAF squadrons in Malaya were based.

Heenan apparently assisted the Japanese invasion of Malaya through radio transmissions. He was arrested on 10 December and sent to Singapore where he was reportedly court martialled

He remained in custody at Singapore for several weeks. The Japanese gradually drove the Allies out of Malaya, and on 8 February they invaded Singapore Island. Within days, it became clear that the battle was being won by the Japanese. He was apparently sot by his guards on February 13 and dumped in
Keppel Harbour.

Although the Japanese would have beaten the British and Commonwealth forces in Malaya and Singapore without Heenan’s help his assistance possibly did allow them to destroy the FAF, RAAF and RNZAF units a little more quickly (their destruction was inevitable as the equipment deployed to E Asia was decided second rate – Brewster Buffaloes were no match for Zeroes)

I would like to find out more about this man. Odd Man Out, a book written bout the Heenan case by Peter Elphick and Michael Smith, was published in the early 90s and is available for pennies second hand on Amazon. I think I will be purchasing my own copy very soon.

I can’t find a photograph of the man, Rather amusingly a Google picture search throws up the American mass murderer Carl Panzram - Not a very nice man (to sa the least!). The not-wife has recently bought a book about him. I must read that too

PG Wodehouse and his pain at being branded a traitor

Yesterday’s Observer and today’s Independent both reported on the emergence of a previously unpublished letter from PG Wodehouse to his publisher David Grimsdick. The letter which, is being auctioned this week, gives an insight into his pain at being branded a traitor during WWII.

In 1940, Wodehouse was resident in Le Touqet in France. When it was overrun by the Germans he was interned in a camp in Silesia. He subsequently made a number broadcasts from Berlin which tarnished his reputation and led to his vilification in wartime Britain. The journalist William Connor, better known as the Mirror columnist Cassandra, was commissioned to denounce him both in print and a prime time radio address. In the House of Commons, Quintin Hogg, who later became Lord Hailsham, demanded he should be punished as a traitor and shot. His most bitter detractor was A A Milne a former classmate and friend. Milne's attacks on Wodehouse led the author to later comment: "Nobody could be more anxious than myself ... that Alan Alexander Milne should trip over a loose bootlace and break his bloody neck."

Wodehouse was interrogated by officers from MI5 who found no sign of treasonable conduct and cleared him of any wrongdoing. In a letter to the Home Secretary in September 1944, Wodehouse admitted he had been "criminally foolish" but said the broadcasts were "purely comic" and designed to show a group of captured Englishmen keeping up spirits. But he failed to shake off the stigma of traitor and he spent the rest of his life in Long Island, America.

Robert McCrum, author of Wodehouse: A Life, hailed the letter as an important find: "First it shows his obsession with the issue of the broadcast and his time in the camp. Second, he refers to his MI5 interrogator as an ass, which is unusual because he normally diplomatic and insouciant... Ten years on, he was still fighting a rearguard action against his detractors. I think he was really hurt by the row over the broadcasts. "

Wodehouse was finally knighted just before his death in 1975.

There is no question that Wodehouse was a traitor. He was foolish yes, but his broadcasts cannot be compared to those of Joyce, or the small number of Britons who worked willingly for the Reich.

The Transcripts of his broadcasts can be read here. They are pretty innocuous stuff.

Heil Wodehouse , deals with Wodehouse’s broadcasts in depth.