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This story is contributed by Joe Clifford and added to the site with his permission.

I was just coming out of church on a lovely Sunday morning when war was declared. I was working in Manchester at the time as a pattern card maker . I went into the army in February 1940 and eventually after various POW camps I was sent down to a place called Midget Place just outside Aldershot and this was where I first met Rudolph Hess, and this was January 1942. He had landed in May the previous year and had been in Scotland and he came to the Tower and when he came out of the Tower that was when I met him in Aldershot in Midget Place and he was sitting in a tennis court….that was where he used to sit….and I was one of the guards there. We didn’t realise we were to have this job until we got there. He was a rather haughty and aloof man. We were his servants, that was how we looked down on him. I only knew he was the deputy leader of the Nazi party and probably the only intellectual in the Nazi party. He used to draw and write, otherwise he was very quiet. He could speak English but he very rarely spoke in English. He was treated as an officer. Whatever the officers had he had the same sort of meals. He dined with the officers. It wasn’t like being in a prison. He had a very comfortable life….I was with him for three and a half years.

We moved from Aldershot to Maindiff Court near Abergavenny on the last Friday in June of 1942. He came in his car and we were there a few hours ahead of him. The superintendent’s wife told me that they only had 24 hours notice to evacuate part of Maindiff. The hospital was divided into two parts - he had half and the rest was for the Dunkirk wounded. But they never had any trouble you know.

The people around the town knew he was there….but it never got in the press or anything. When we originally went to Maindiff Court he used to walk around the area outside the hospital with an officer and two RAMC fellows about fifty yards behind him. But when he became well-known they used to take him round in a car to the various beauty spots around Abergavenny, the Sugarloaf and Whitecastle was his favourite place he used to love to sit and draw by the lake there.

Several high ranking people came down to see him …the Swiss foreign minister, people like that you know.

Ninety per cent of the time he was quiet but now and again he’d rave and shout and stamp his feet and on one occasion he did stab himself, superficial wound on his stomach….he used an ordinary knife. He dressed in a blue sports coat and grey flannel trousers and in the summer he’d have brown sandals on. He didn’t wear a hat. In the winter he wore a long blue coat. Now and again he would dress up in his uniform — the uniform he flew over in from Germany. He had a personal driver and a Morris shooting brake…that was his personal car. By the Geneva convention he had to have this sort of treatment.

One of my most vivid memories was when I landed in Preston and two of us had one bowl to drink out of tea. Another occasion I was walking through Liverpool and I heard this bomb…and there was no interval I was walking along and I was flat on the ground and my stomach was going up and down and I was praying. If you heard the whistle you were OK they came very close mind you.

I vaguely remember the end of the war. I can remember the street parties….Hess wasn’t
very happy. Whenever he got disappointing news he would always show it…very much concern then. He was very friendly with Lieutenant May…but I don’t know what they would talk about. Lt May went to London and he must have spoken out of turn because he finished up in jail. He went on the weekend, and on the Monday there was a huge splash in the papers and everything.

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