Stalag IVC

Private John Edward Stanness

Private John Edward "Jack" Stanness (centre), army number 4460703, of the 9th Battalion The Durham Light Infantry. He was captured at Mersa Matru in North Africa, 1942, and sent to P.G. 70 in Italy. Following the Italian armistice in September 1943, he was transferred to Stalag IVC, where he worked for 12 hours a day in a Czechoslovakian coal mine. Here, the steiger would draw two lines on the coal face to mark how much Stanness was to extract, but he soon became weary of this and would rub out one of the lines to draw a shorter segment. He got away with this for a few weeks, but evidently the steiger realised what was going on because Stanness turned up one morning to find not two lines, but a completely whitewashed coal face. Copyright: Hilton Stanness.

A letter sent home before he was taken prisoner. Copyright: Hilton Stanness.