RAF airman who ‘escaped’ from Colditz by feigning mental illness after three failed tunnelling attempts
Perched high on a rocky outcrop in Saxony, looking down on the winding River Mulde below, Colditz Castle was thought by the Germans to be escape-proof. It became a special camp for “bad boys”, PoWs who had irritated the authorities so much that they were to be “banged up” for the duration. Among its illustrious inmates were Douglas Bader, the amputee fighter ace and relentless Nazi-baiter; David Stirling, founder of the SAS; and Charles Upham, a New Zealander and the only man to win two Victoria Crosses during the Second World War.
Yet in spite of its reputation as a high-security camp, more prisoners broke out of Oflag IVC than perhaps any other PoW camp, but few “home runs” were achieved in the strange manner taken by Francis Flinn, who feigned mental illness for several months after three escape attempts had been foiled.
Flinn was an RAF flight lieutenant who had been captured in September 1940 and sent to Thorn — then annexed by Germany, but known today as Torun in Poland — after being shot down while flying for Coastal Command on a sortie over the Baltic. He had arrived at Colditz in April 1941 after being caught in a Luftwaffe hangar in the supremely impudent act of figuring out how he might make his escape in a Heinkel bomber. This was in itself enough to qualify him as a troublemaker, and Colditz was the only possible destination thereafter.
By July he was already involved in the first of his escape attempts through what became known at Colditz as the “toilet tunnel”. The plan, which involved British, Polish and Belgian prisoners, was to tunnel from the British quarters under a wall and into the German Kommandantur lavatories. Since some construction work was in progress at Oflag IVC, the plan was simply to brazen it out and walk through the main gateway of the camp dressed as labourers.
Tunnel digging had not yet reached the levels of sophistication it was to achieve later in the war, and the Germans were alive to the sounds of digging from fairly early on in the operation. They allowed the tunnelling to continue but then pounced, hoping to maximise their haul of escapers, and arrested ten men. Flinn’s punishment was solitary confinement.
In his second escape attempt, Flinn was involved in a French tunnel. He had appropriated a crowbar from a workman who was employed in the camp, and hidden it. The crowbar proved very useful in levering out large stones encountered underground, but the tunnel was discovered by the Germans before its completion.
A third attempt also ended in failure and further periods in solitary confinement followed. Indeed, Flinn was to endure 171 days in solitary during the years he spent at Colditz.
He now embarked on a most difficult course of action, feigning mental illness for a polonged period of time. It was a lonely odyssey that he could not possibly share with the other prisoners for fear of being inadvertently betrayed to the Germans. It was also a plan that might well have backfired, for he might well have been consigned to a mental institution. By May 1944, however, he had feigned a state of madness for several months, and convinced members of a visiting Swiss Medical Commission that he was genuinely insane. He was eventually repatriated with other prisoners who were ill or handicapped in various ways.
As was the case for many PoWs, his experience of Colditz remained with him for some years after his repatriation, but he went on to manage a successful business in the North West of England, supplying syrup for the ice cream trade for several years. Later, in the 1970s, he ran a kitchenware shop in Southport, assisted by his wife, Jean.
He is survived by her and by two sons.
Flight-Lieutenant Francis Flinn, wartime PoW, was born on June 14, 1916. He died on November 16, 2013, aged 97
Soldier, adventurer and writer who painted the world’s rainforests
A widely travelled artist, Major Harry Holcroft was as much at home in the insect-infested jungle as he was in the rolling countryside of Provence where he lived. He painted the botanical and animal life of the world’s great tropical rainforests of Central and South America, Africa, India and Southern Asia. His pictures sold well. During the 1970s he received commercial commissions for companies as diverse as Drambuie, Bear Stearns, BP Oil and The Economist, and in the 1980s he painted many watercolours of the Middle East.
Above all, it was for his intrepid jungle expeditions and paintings of desolate rainforests that he is best known. His adventures were all the more impressive because from an early age he had suffered from osteoporosis, the degenerative bone disease. During his life he had four hip replacements. Although a family man he was a free spirit, with a solitary streak. He loved travelling and painting the world. He would take with him little more than his “toybox”, a blue briefcase, containing sketchbooks, watercolours, pencils and the silk cocoon in which he slept.
During his travels in the rainforest he often snacked on local delicacies such as red ants. In one Brazilian tribe the children fill the hollow centres of palm stalks with palm oil and leave them out overnight to attract ants. Next morning when the stalks have turned pink with the ants, they pick them off and enjoy them like popcorn. Holcroft joined them and found the ants peppery.
He served for 23 years with the Household Cavalry, including tours of Cyprus, Northern Ireland and Germany, before he was invalided out and chose to paint full-time.
Holcroft was a thoughtful, kind and courteous man and made friends easily. Good-looking and stylishly scruffy, he charmed everyone he met.
He painted the rainforest because he was haunted by its devastation and attracted to its subtle changing light, vivid colour, feeling of space and primeval chaos. As an artist, he felt challenged by the impenetrable jungle landscape which offered no perspective or horizon. Over the course of his travels, he witnessed the dwindling of the forests of Central and South America and Borneo owing to deforestation. He made five trips to the Amazon. His paintings drew attention to the plight of the world’s forests and his work was shown in the West End, New York, Los Angeles and Provence.
He was also comfortable in the searing heat of India. His parents had married in Assam, where his mother’s family had been tea planters and colonial administrators. He had spent the past two winters as artist-in-residence of Ahilya Fort, Maheshwar, central India, the family seat of his friend Prince Richard Holkar. Holcroft had spent much time drawing and painting the Narmada river and helped in teaching art to children at the the local school.
He was also an accomplished writer. He was particularly inspired by the example of Colonel Frederick Gustavus Burnaby, a 19th-century military man, whose portrait hung in his regimental mess. Burnaby had explored Asia Minor and beyond and Holcroft, following in his hero’s footsteps, travelled across Europe to China to trace the 15th-century Silk Route, keeping an illustrated diary along the way. This journey, in three trips, took him three years. His illustrations accompanied by his lively text were published in The Silk Route in 1999. His other published works include: The Spice Route (2000), The Slave Route (2003) and Rainforest: Light and Spirit, a collaboration with the botanist and ecologist Professor Sir Ghillean Prance (2009). The Prince of Wales, who wrote the foreword, referred to it as a “call to arms”.
Carrying little more than his briefcase, Holcroft travelled across desert, mountain, oceans and jungle, while researching his books. He was writing a book on the South Seas and the Pacific when he died suddenly in India after falling down a flight of steps.
Harry St John Holcroft was born in Birmingham in 1951 and educated at Downside where the art teacher, a one-armed monk, encouraged his artistic talent. He read development economics at Hertford College, Oxford, and studied art at Ruskin School of Drawing.
He married Sarah Jane Brooks, the daughter of Christopher Brooks and Patricia Matthews, the late Viscountess Rothermere, in 1988. She survives him with their two sons, Christopher and Harry, and his two daughters, Olivia and Samantha, from an earlier marriage.
Major Harry Holcroft, soldier and artist, was born on May 2, 1951. He died after a fall on November 3, 2013, aged 62
Patrick Kavanagh
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Metropolitan Police Commissioner whose calm approach led to the foiling of the Iranian Embassy siege
The Iranian Embassy siege of 1980 was the first occasion on which the British public was actually able to watch the course of a counter-terrorist operation live on television.
Six armed men had stormed the embassy in Princes Gate, South Kensington, and taken 26 people hostage. For a week in late April and early May, news channels ran extraordinary footage as the six men, who were campaigning for the autonomy of Iran’s southern Khuzestan province, demanded the release of Arab prisoners held in Iranian jails. They also demanded their own safe passage out of the country.
The build up of tension on the streets of central London was almost palpable.
On the sixth day of the siege, the terrorists killed one of the hostages, giving the British audience a taste of the gruesome nature of such confrontations. The victim’s body was thrown from an embassy window.
Tired of the inflexible stance adopted by the British Government towards their demands, the gunmen became unnerved by the “softly, softly” approach of the Metropolitan Police.
Patrick Kavanagh, the Deputy Commissioner, was part of the police team that orchestrated a low-key, but masterly programme of what appeared to be non-activity on the part of the forces of law and order outside the embassy between April 30 and May 5. Then everything changed.
In a burst of activity, the SAS stormed the embassy in an action that captured the imagination of the public. The special forces abseiled from the roof of the building, broke in through the windows and killed five of the six terrorists. The survivor faced the courts and served 27 years in a British prison.
Police patience, suddenly supplemented by the kind of violent military activity that is the SAS’s forte, had produced what the military like to call a “tidy” result.
The hostage takers’ cause was largely forgotten in the tumult of the Iran-Iraq war that began soon afterwards, but the siege was not without its impact of the Metropolitan Police. Applications to join the force soared from young people who had been impressed by the cool actions of Kavanagh’s team.
He was well prepared for this moment, having served with both the Rifle Brigade and the Parachute Regiment during his service in the Second World War.
As well as counter terrorism, the other major preoccupation of the Met during his years as Deputy Commissioner was Operation Countryman, the controversial enquiry into corruption in the force. It proved hugely divisive within the Met and had a considerable impact on morale.
Patrick Bernard Kavanagh was born in Hull in 1923, the son of a Customs and Excise officer. His father’s work took the family across the country and he finished his education at St Aloysius College, Glasgow. He got his first job in a stockbroker’s office in Cardiff. At the age of 17 he became an accounts clerk with the engineering firm GKN, but he was “rescued” from this humdrum job by the onset of war, joining the Rifle Brigade in 1941 before transferring to the Parachute Regiment in 1943. “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” he recalled. The move thrust him into some of the heaviest fighting in North-West Europe.
As the Battle of the Bulge reached its climax during the bitter winter of 1944-45, he was moving with his unit through a village in the Ardennes when it came under fire from a German sniper. An enemy round struck him in the chest, but ricocheted from the metal cigarette case he carried in the breast pocket of his tunic. The bullet skidded upwards and embedded itself in his shoulder. It was the end of his war. He was invalided home. The cigarette case had saved him from almost certain death.
Kavanagh remained in the Army and, after recovering from his wound, served a further year in Palestine.
Demobbed in 1946, he had no hesitation in choosing a career in the police, but the police proved hesitant in selecting him. Although he was considered fit on leaving the Army, the Met rejected him for on medical grounds. He had too few of his own teeth, he recalled.
Instead, he found himself as a bobby on the beat with Manchester City Police, eventually reaching the rank of superintendent after seven years with the force. He moved to South Wales and in 1964 was appointed Assistant Chief Constable of Cardiff City Police. When it amalgamated to form South Wales Constabulary in 1969 he became Assistant Chief Constable of the new force and was promoted Deputy Chief Constable in 1972. By the time he was appointed Deputy Commissioner of the Met in 1977, he had been awarded the Queen’s Police Medal for distinguished service.
After the dramatic events of 1980, he remained with the Force until 1983.
Kavanagh was a down-to-earth, pragmatic individual , with a common-sense approach to his job. He liked to cut through things and was the first to admit that he hated “faffing around” at work. When he arrived at the Met there were things he wanted to change and he was not particularly tolerant of a “we’ve always done it this way” attitude. Nevertheless when they reflected on it, his subordinates found him “firm but fair”.
If any officer got a dressing down from him, they seldom had cause to feel they had been harshly treated.
After his retirement, he was a member of the Gaming Board for Great Britain for eight years, and pursued his interests in walking and birdwatching.
His wife, Beryl, the daughter of a Royal Naval Reserve officer, died in 1984. They had three children. He is survived by his son, Peter, a solicitor, and by two daughters, Gill, who was a BBC production assistant, and Sue, who served as an officer in the Women’s Royal Army Corps and saw her own three sons all make careers in the Army.
Patrick Kavanagh, CBE, QPM, Deputy Commissioner, Metropolitan Police, 1977-83, was born on March 18, 1923. He died on December 11, aged 90
Cosmopolitan uncle of North Korea’s dictator and an influential figure in the nation’s ruling class
The apex of Chang Sung Taek’s career came on a snowy day in December 2011 when he trudged through the streets of Pyongyang alongside the coffin of his brother-in-law and friend, Kim Jong Il, the “Dear Leader” of North Korea. Walking in front of him was his nephew, Kim Jong Un, 28, a man with little military or political experience and now the country’s new leader.
Many foreign experts, and perhaps Chang himself, assumed that their relationship would be one of regent and young king, at best, and quite possibly that of puppeteer and marionette. But less than two years later, Chang was publicly humiliated, denounced and executed, the victim of the most spectacular and violent purge seen in North Korea in more than 50 years. It is a fate that should have come as no great surprise to a man who spent his career defying authority, challenging the powerful, and gambling with his life in the world’s least forgiving political system.
Chang Sung Taek was born in North Hamgyong Province in 1946, and studied political economy at the elite Kim Il Sung University. He showed no more than average academic ability, but excelled as the leader of a musical troupe, in which he danced, sang and played the accordion. It was there that he attracted the attention of a fellow student, Kim Kyong Hui, the daughter of the country’s founding president, Kim Il Sung.
The fact that the “Great Leader” initially opposed the romance would have been a disincentive for most North Korean suitors. But Chang persisted, even after being expelled from the university, and contrived to follow Kim to the comparative freedom of Soviet Moscow where they both studied at the state university.
They overcame paternal objections and married in the early 1970s. Chang began an unsteady climb up the Korean Workers’ Party. He seems to have been purged for the first time in the mid-1970s, and ended up as a manager at Kangson Iron Works, where he suffered serious burns. One rumour has it that, even early on, he was hosting secret parties which were held to rival those of the young Kim Jong Il.
But he returned to favour in the 1980s, and became responsible for the Kim Il Sung Youth League and the party’s Youth Labour Brigades, as well as a deputy of the Supreme People’s Assembly, North Korea’s tame parliament. He also supervised the construction of giant apartment blocks in Pyongyang during which, according to reports of his final trial, he began embezzling valuable metals.
During the 1990s, he rose through the hierarchy to become head of the most powerful bureau of the Korean Workers’ Party’s, the “organisation and guidance department”, which gave him influence in the state security apparatus, the public prosecutor’s office, and “Bureau 39”, a shadowy department accused by the US Government of raising funds through such illegal activities as manufacturing and disseminating counterfeit currency, opium, heroin and amphetamines.
In 2002 two years after a historic meeting between North and South, he led a delegation of senior officials on an unprecedented tour of South Korean industrial sites. The most senior North Korean defector to South Korea, the former chief ideologue, Hwang Jang Yop, spoke of him as a potential successor to Kim Jong Il, who had himself succeeded Kim Il Sung in 1994. Then in 2003 he vanished from North Korean life, presumably after another purge.
He reappeared without explanation in 2006, and the following year a new and powerful post was created for him: head of the Party’s “administrative department”, in charge of the courts, the prosecutors, and the police — including those responsible for internal spying. In the same year, his 19-year-old daughter died of an overdose of prescription drugs, apparently a suicide, in Paris where she was studying.
In 2008 it was Kim Jong Il who disappeared from view for several months after suffering a stroke, and Chang who deputised for him. Ever greater titles followed: in 2009 he joined the Central Military Commission, and the following year he and his wife joined the Politburo. The couple, and Kim Jong Un, were also appointed four-star generals, although none was known to have military experience.
It was assumed that Kim Jong Il was elevating his sister and brother-in-law as underwriters for a young man almost unknown within North Korea. Chang was a cosmopolitan among North Korean cadres, and made several visits to China, alone and with the older Kim. There was speculation that he sought Chinese-style economic reforms, but if this was the case, he had little success.
Then came Kim Jong Il’s death, and the succession. Until a leak from South Korean Intelligence last week, no foreign North Korea watcher saw Chang’s political demise coming. He was frequently photographed at young Kim’s side. Whether he really was, as the charges against him stated, plotting a coup against the leadership, is a matter of speculation, and goes to the heart of the question about his whole career. Was he a brilliant calculator, who knew until just before the end how far to push and when to stop, or just a rash gambler whose luck finally ran out?
Chang Sung Taek, bureaucrat, was born in January 1946. He was executed on December 12, 2013, aged 67