A Great Escape!

One of thousands of men captured he was also one of the few who managed to escape.

He had a Yorkshire horse trainer and his Belgian wife to thank for his life, so at the end of the war Fred sat down and wrote an account of his capture and his breakout.

This is his story taken from his memoirs, written by his proud great granddaughter Kary Stewart.

NINETEEN-year-old Fred Shorrock, enlisted in 1915 and the following year was drafted to France; he was wounded at Grandcourt, going over the top.

That he escaped with his life then is a miracle, but was nothing compared to what was to come when he was taken prisoner.

The Germans came one Sunday morning, March 24, 1918, only a few months after he returned to the front.

Bewildered and stripped of their meagre rations and of many of their possessions, the soldiers were marched silently for hours, passing several compounds of more prisoners to a guarded farmhouse, where conditions were dire.

For four days they were held without any food and barely anything to drink. It was to be the first of many such camps.

“Our next camp was the worst of all,” wrote Fred in his account. “We had to sleep in a tunnel slimy with damp, in one side of the lock bottom and there were 200 of us. It was awful and we were worse than pigs in a sty.”

Forced to do hard manual labour, despite suffering from the effects of near-starvation, the prisoners were marched from camp to camp until a lucky break set off a chain of events that would eventually lead to Fred’s escape.

He was one of 38 out of 1,500 men picked to work as bakers and, at last able to eat as much as they wanted, they began to regain their strength. For the first time since becoming a PoW he also received letters from home. The elation of getting news from family was short lived, however.

His youngest brother Percy had been killed on the same day he had been taken prisoner and his mother was very ill.

After months of hardship all he could think about was getting home. When his friend Joe Carter, a Grenadier Guardsman, suggested escape, Fred decided he had no choice.

They were camped in a schoolroom in the Cambrai region, surrounded by a double line of barbed wire and patrolled by guards.

One day after work they gathered bread, cut down pairs of wellington boots as suitable footwear and pinched a blanket, jam and lard.

At 8pm when they knew the guards were relieved they made their way to the farthest corner of the camp, squeezed through the barbed wire and headed away over the fields.

After the war they would find out they were missed within the hour and a search party was quickly organised.

The French countryside was full of sympathetic farmers quietly suffering the German invasion, so the two friends were offered places to sleep, food, tea and dry clothes and warned of German patrols.

Bedding down in an empty hut one day, led them to an important chance meeting.

“We were rudely awakened being jabbed with pitchforks by several excited Belgians and told in French to come out quick,” recalled Fred.

“Joe kept saying ‘English soldiers’ in French, which eventually they seemed to grasp and after talking among themselves, they told us there was a woman in the village who could ‘parlay anglaise’.”

That woman was Mrs Jackson, and she offered them shelter that night. In the safety of her house, they settled down to eat their first good meal in weeks.

“Well, and how are you getting on lads?” said a Yorkshire voice behind them, much to their amazement.

Mr Jackson himself had a story to tell. Being an Englishman, the German soldiers had come to intern him and his son in December, 1914. While they were at the front door, the pair escaped out the back and headed to Brussels, where his son had remained.

Mr Jackson, however, could not bear to be away from his wife and had returned after a few days. He had not been out of the house since.

“He showed us his hiding place,” recalled Fred. “A whole side of a cupboard hung with pots, swung outward on pressing a secret spring and showed an aperture under some stairs, big enough for Mr Jackson to stand or lie down — and every time a knock came to the door, he had to go in this cupboard.”

But this was not the couple’s only secret. They had a room housing nine Belgian refugees and another opposite, which had housed German officers and NCOs on and off for four years – the men oblivious of the others the house hid.

That night Fred and Joe slept on real beds and for the next four days ate like kings. Mrs Jackson even unlocked the door into the empty German officers’ room and they shaved with their razors and smoked their cigarettes.

Meanwhile, the Allies were making advances into the village close to where my great-grandfather and his friend were hiding.

Mrs Jackson told them to leave – the village had been put on the reserve line, meaning that more Germans could fill her house at any time. In four days the pair became lifelong friends with this brave and generous couple and it was an emotional farewell for the two seasoned soldiers as they shook hands with Mr Jackson and set off out of the village with Mrs Jackson.

“After going along the main road with us for a while, until we were clear of the village, Mrs Jackson stopped and kissed us both,” remembered Fred. “She wished us Godspeed and expressed the wish that we should meet again, and after we gave her our sincere thanks for all they had done for us, we went on our way.”

In the cold and on their own, the pair wondered where their escapade would take them next. “La guerre finis” shouted Belgians as they passed.

Fred and Joe couldn’t believe it but, taken in again by a local and given fresh clothing, they were finally convinced.

“At eleven o’clock bells rang and people cheered and sang the Marseillaise,” recalled Fred, as the Armistice came.

Leaving the village and walking towards their own lines, free men once again, they were met by a sight which brought home to them it really was over.

It was Mr Jackson, dressed up in sporting jacket, riding pants, leggings and bowler hat acting as interpreter for the British officers. He had come out of his hiding place for the first time in four years and had been lauded as a hero by the entire village.

Fred returned to Blackburn and married Janie at Chapel Street Congregational Church in 1919 and their daughter Hannah was born a year later.

Many years later, my great grandfather took his family to meet the Jacksons. We have lost touch with their family now, but the story of how a Yorkshire man and a feisty Belgian lady came to the aid of my great grandfather and his friend during the Great War is a story we will remember for many generations to come.