The Claim of the Prisoners

The Times, 6 September 1916. One of St Peter’s First World War documents, from the years when British prisoners of war were interned at Château-d’Œx, 1916–17. Transcribed in full from a cutting made available by The Times Archive.

In this report: who paid for the wives’ journeys — Mr. Fenwick Harrison and Sir Robert Younger each offering to send out fifty wives and mothers at their own expense — and the unfinished argument over whether any British prisoner in Germany was still ‘friendless’.

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Headline as printed: The Claim of the Prisoners.

Handwritten annotation

The Times 6/9/1916

The suggestion, originally made in an article by Lord Northcliffe, that steps should be taken to send on a visit to Switzerland the wives of the British non-commissioned officers and men now interned there has been received with widespread approval. The idea is warmly supported by Mr. Arthur Stanley, Chairman of the British Red Cross Society, by Sir Robert Hudson, Chairman of the Society’s Finance Committee, and by Sir Hedley le Bas, joint honorary secretary of the Kitchener Memorial Fund. Mr. Fenwick Harrison and Sir Robert Younger have each offered to send out fifty wives and mothers at their own expense, and besides the larger amounts contributed by Lord Derby, the Duke of Portland, and others, many individual gifts of smaller sums have been forwarded to the office of The Times and elsewhere, with the request that they may be devoted to the same object. Arrangements must, of course, be made with the Swiss and French authorities for the reception of the men’s wives and mothers in the Château d’Oex district and at Murren, and for the granting of the necessary facilities for their journey through France. But in both cases we may assume with confidence that our Ally and our friends the Swiss, who have already shown such great kindness to the wounded British prisoners, will gladly do everything that they can to help, and it is already certain that this practical measure of sympathy with the men who have fought for us, which will bring gladness into so many lives, will be carried through with all possible dispatch.

There remains, however, the question of our prisoners who are still in Germany. Their lot is not so happy. In the last of the articles in which he examined certain sidelights of the war, as seen from the vantage-ground of neutral Switzerland, Lord Northcliffe recorded his conviction that their treatment demands much greater attention than it is at present receiving. He also made a special appeal on behalf of “friendless” prisoners—those who do not receive from home parcels of bread and other food to supplement or replace the meagre fare provided in some of the prison-camps. In a letter which we published the other day on this subject Mr. Young, the secretary of the Prisoners’ Aid Society, categorically assures the public that there are no “friendless” British prisoners of war. The organization for the relief of prisoners is, he says, complete; for each man there exists in England his proper care committee, and he finds it difficult to understand why anyone should assume that these committees, in spite of the excellent methods and the self-sacrificing labours of the ladies and gentlemen in charge, are neglecting their work. Coming from a responsible official of a society, which, in spite of limited powers, has done much valuable work in the difficult undertaking of co-ordinating the efforts of the various committees; these positive statements must be treated with respect. We can even make allowances for the zealous spirit in which Mr. Young defends the committees against charges which were never brought against them in The Times. At the same time, though there is no doubt that the number of friendless prisoners has been greatly reduced, his assertion that it has been altogether eliminated appears to be a trifle too positive, a little too good to be true. It does not, for one thing, agree with the stories told by some of the prisoners now in Switzerland. It is flatly contradicted in the case of at least one prison-camp by the reports of Dr. Taylor, who complains generally of our complete and most lamentable want of organization, and says that in Ruhleben (none the less a prisoners’ camp because its inhabitants are civilians) there are, or were, 250 men who receive practically no aid whatever from outside, and 500 more who receive parcels too seldom to be of material help.

In view of these and other facts, the conclusion which we have already expressed that we are failing as a nation in our duty towards our prisoners is unavoidable. Lord Newton’s Inter-Departmental Committee has not the time, and the Prisoners’ Aid Society has not large enough powers, to bring about the necessary co-ordination of the many excellent organizations engaged in the work. The Government, as a Government, cannot be expected to approach the enemy with an official request to be allowed to provide our prisoners with food. But what they can do is to see that whatever body undertakes the work shall be the sole and absolute authority, with full powers to deal with all questions connected with the prisoners’ welfare. At present the Inter-Departmental Committee, the Prisoners’ Aid Society, and the Prisoners of War Committee of the Red Cross are all engaged in one way or another in co-ordinating the efforts of a multiplicity of other organizations. Till it is arranged that the co-ordination of charity begins at home, and the three bodies are amalgamated into one, the admitted overlappings and the lacunæ which are their natural corollary are practically certain to occur. On all grounds it seems to us that the only satisfactory way of really making the organization complete is to take the prisoners’ branch of the Red Cross Society as at all events the nucleus of this suggested central administrative body. The position and experience of the Society are such that to it more safely than to any other committee could be entrusted the indispensable duty of satisfying the national conscience and paying to the uttermost farthing the debt which we owe to our prisoners of war.

Facsimile of the original cutting: The Claim of the Prisoners, The Times, 6 September 1916 — **Facsimile** — *The Times*, 6 September 1916, page 9. Scanned by the News UK Archive & Record Office and supplied to St Peter's in April 2016. Reproduced with acknowledgement to Times Newspapers Limited. Open the full-size scan.

End of the transcribed document

Notes by St Peter's — not part of the document above

St Peter’s and the 1916 internment

The Château-d’Œx chaplaincy was placed on the Colonial and Continental Church Society’s list in 1866, and for the thirty-three years before St Peter’s was built the English congregation had no building of its own. Served by seasonal chaplains, it met in the village’s Protestant church — the Temple, up on the hill — and, when the climb or the snow made that impractical, in the lounge of the Hôtel Berthod, the Pension Morier and the Salle des Catéchumènes. The season was a summer one — June to September, before winter sports drew visitors to the valley. The church was built in 1899, on land given by the Berthod brothers and with a loan from the Society; it was consecrated on 27 May 1902 by Thomas Edward Wilkinson, Anglican Bishop of North Europe, and enlarged in 1911, by which time the chaplain could no longer seat everyone who came.

From 1916 neutral Switzerland took in wounded and invalid prisoners of war from both sides — French, Belgian, German and British — released from enemy camps under agreements between their governments. Château-d’Œx received the British. The first train reached Montreux on 30 May 1916 carrying 304 men, including 32 officers. The chaplain, the Revd E. Dudley Lampen — the parish’s first permanent chaplain, in post since 1908, and assisted during the war by the Revd Isaac Hutchinson — later described the whole episode as “the sojourn of 750 British soldiers in this valley”.

St Peter’s was their parish church. They filled it for services, and one of the internees, a professional organist in England before the war, played the church’s American harmonium. In August 1916 Lampen wrote to The Times asking readers to fund a proper organ — “a permanent memorial of the historic sojourn of our British officers and men in this valley”. The fund’s treasurer was Colonel E. Vansittart of the Royal West Kent Regiment, himself one of the officers who had arrived on that first train. The organ was dedicated on 8 March 1917: a Goll of 1916, opus 462, and the organ still played in the church today.

These First World War reports were traced for the centenary of the internment, which Château-d’Œx marked on Sunday 29 and Monday 30 May 2016 — a hundred years to the day after the first train. The complete archive → · The fuller account of 1916 →

About this transcription

Source: The Times, 6 September 1916
Archive item: The Times (1916.9.6 p9) (1 image)
Transcription: Machine-transcribed in two independent passes.
Status: Verified before publication — two independent transcriptions were compared, and any reading still in doubt is left unresolved and noted below rather than settled.
⚠️ The archive filename’s date is wrong for this item. The date above is taken from the cutting’s own annotation or masthead, which is the authority.

Transcribed verbatim, preserving the spelling, punctuation and capitalisation of the original. Square brackets mark a reading that is uncertain or a passage cut off by the edge of the scan. Where the text of a figure or a name could not be established, it is shown as unresolved rather than guessed.

Editorial notes

Signature and date as printed

(none — an unsigned leading article)

Dating evidence

The archive filename reads The-Times-1916-6-9, and the cutting is annotated by hand “The Times 6/9/1916”. Neither settles the order of the day and the month, and both have been read as 9 June. The date is 6 September 1916, and it rests on the document, not on the annotation:

The masthead on the facsimile of this page prints “WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 1916”.
The News UK Archive supplied the scan under its own label, The Times (1916.9.6 p9).
The article responds to Lord Northcliffe’s appeal, which The Times printed on 31 August 1916 — a document St Peter’s also holds. A 9 June response to a 31 August appeal is impossible.
The adjoining column plans a Rumanian Flag Day “some time next month”. Rumania entered the war on the side of the Allies in late August 1916.

Uncertain readings

“of a society, which” — the mark after “society” scans as a full point. A comma is read here because a full stop is ungrammatical in the middle of the sentence, but the scan cannot settle it.
“Murren” — printed here without the umlaut. The same day’s report on page 5 prints “Mürren”. Each is left as its own page prints it.
The cutting is annotated “6/9/1916” in a hand that is not identified. The annotation is not the authority for the date; the masthead is.

Editorial method

Names printed in small capitals — LORD NORTHCLIFFE, MR. FENWICK HARRISON — are rendered here in ordinary case, as elsewhere in this archive. No wording, spelling or punctuation is otherwise altered.

The centenary website of 2016 held this cutting as a three-page PDF that stops mid-sentence at “and says that in Ruhleben (none the less a”. The text is complete here because it was transcribed from the full page scan, which carries the article through to its end.