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When we arrived at the camp we saw long rows of low tents about four feet high with a thick layer of straw over the ground. Each man was given two Italian army blankets, very thin, and measuring about 6 feet by 3 feet. We slept in threes with six blankets over us. The rations were the same as at Benghazi, we didn’t even get an extra roll on Christmas day, which we spent at this camp. The officers who had been captured with us were in a small camp next to ours. They managed to get some Italian cigarettes from somewhere and they passed these over the wire to us on Christmas day. As most of us were heavy smokers, this was greatly appreciated.

On the last day of 1941 we were marched from the camp to the local railway station where we were put on to a train and taken up the east coast of Italy to Porto St Giorgio. We were then transferred to a small mountain railway and taken inland to P.O.W. Camp 59 - this was to be home for the next fifteen months.

The camp consisted of about ten long low wooden huts on each side of a central roadway. At the far end of the camp was a small cookhouse, bathhouse and a small gate leading to the recreation ground. Each hut had a latrine and wash house at one end and inside of the huts were a number of two tier wooden bunks set in blocks of four, this meant eight men to a block and about twenty blocks in a hut. A pair of high wire gates separated our compound from the guards quarters and the whole area was surrounded by a ten feet high wall on top of which at intervals were sentry boxes fitted with searchlights.

We actually passed through the gates into the camp as the bells of local churches were ringing in the new year. I certainly wasn’t looking forward to 1942. There were already a few prisoners in the camp and they soon helped us get settled in. We were given a straw filled mattress and an extra blanket and managed to have a reasonable nights sleep even though there was no form of heating in the huts. My particular pal was Charlie Beales, he had been left at Brindisi, I shared a bunk with Ted Smalley who had also been in my section. Charlie arrived a few days later and was put into another hut.

At that time our rations were a cup of ersatz coffee (made from dried acorns) at 9am, then two bread rolls and on three days a week small portion of cheese at midday. Then at 5pm we had the main meal of the day, one full ladle of skilly, either rice of macaroni with vegetable soup. The rice and macaroni alternated daily and never varied the whole time I was prisoner. Six men were chosen to do the cooking and they soon learned to make the most of the short rations. Sometimes there would be a little skilly left over and each hut took it in turns to have second helpings known as ‘back up’. After a while the cooks got good at judging the amount to cook and there were rarely any ‘back ups’.
After a couple of months some of the moaners in the camp complained that the cooks were getting fat and demanded that the cooks were changed. Six of the complainers took over the cooking and made such a mess of it that we had no cooked meal for two days. The first day they overcooked the macaroni and it came out like wallpaper paste and was uneatable. The Italians refused to give us extra rations and when the new cooks messed up the rice on the second day we kicked them out and had the old cooks back
Each morning and evening we had to parade out in the road for roll call. We lined up outside of our huts and the guards did a physical check. The prisoners used to dodge about causing the guards to miscount. If the number was short extra guards were called in as it was assumed that someone had got out. The guards called in were those who had recently gone off duty and were not too pleased at being called back. If the numbers were over the Commandant gave the checkers a hard time - even he realised no one would break in.

Although food was short and cigarettes were non existent, we kept reasonably cheerful until Friday 13th February, 1942 when the Italians cut our rations by half. There was nothing we could do except grin and bear it. When we first got to the camp we were allowed to write a post card home to let our relatives know we were safe. My parents received the card in May 1942 — so for six months the only news they had was that I was ‘missing in action’ . After this we could write one card and one letter a month, but our friends and relatives could write as often as the wished although not all the letters got through.
Most of the mail I got was from my parents and my sisters. My brother Jack was a conscientious objector, he did his statutory six months imprisonment and then went to work on a farm. I only ever received one letter from him in the camp, he said he envied me basking in the Mediterranean sunshine. He obviously had no idea what the weather was like because I was sitting out side of the hut reading the letter with three foot long icicles hanging from the roof.
The only other letter I wasn’t too pleased to receive was from my Auntie Elsie who was a member of the Mormon Church. She wrote to tell me I was paying for my past sins. I didn’t think I had been that bad!

In March 1942 we received our first Red Cross parcels. These were parcels of food sent by the Red Cross and were supposed to be issued at the rate of one per week.
The parcels contained, one tin each of, meat, vegetables, fruit, steamed pudding and fish. Small tins of tea, sugar and cheese. A bar of chocolate and a tin of 50 cigarettes..
This really cheered us up and we thought that with one parcel a week each, life would not be too bad.
However the most we got was one between two and sometimes went for weeks with out a parcel. If we complained the Italians just said that the train carrying the parcels had been bombed by the RAF.
During the summer of that year the Italians started allowing one hut at a time to go on a march outside of the camp. We enjoyed this although it did not happed too often as there had to be two guards for every three prisoners and they did not have too many to spare. One day when we were out we realised the guards were not that keen on this duty as they were not good on the march — we increased the pace to 140 steps per minute and the guards were almost running to keep up. They complained to the Commandant and he stopped the marches.

The Italians only allowed a certain amount of timber into the cookhouse to cook the rations, so if we wanted to cook anything from the food parcels we had to find our own fuel. Each bunk had a number of slats to support the mattress, these dwindled away as they were used for fuel after a while some of the men had just string supporting their mattresses. Then one of the men invented a blower which allowed the food to be heated or tea brewed using very little fuel. The blower consisted of a fire box made out of empty tins with a fan on a spindle driven by a leather or string belt.
Prisoners then vied with each other to improve on the manufacture of these blowers. Occasionally we received parcels from the Canadian Red Cross, these were very popular as the tins were bigger than the British ones. One of the main items was a one pound (about half a kilo) tin of dried milk called KLIM (milk backwards). These tins were used for a number of jobs, one man even made a working pendulum clock entirely from KLIM tins.

Inside the compound there were a number of wooden sentry boxes used by the internal guards. On one occasion, for some reason one of these boxes was unoccupied — when we realised this, the box disappeared in minutes and was distributed around the camp. There was hell to pay but no trace of the box was ever found.

The hut I was in was nearest the wall and a tunnel was dug from the hut under the wall and came up outside the Italian quarters. On the night of the break out fourteen men got through alright, then a naval chief petty officer, a huge bear of a man, got stuck and couldn’t go backwards or forwards. He was caught by the guards and the other fourteen were back with us within two weeks

After this the guards checked the inside of the huts every week to make sure there were no more tunnels.
The punishment for any offence committed against the Italian rules was so many days solitary confinement. The cell block was just inside the main gate and there were about 12 cells in the block. I don’t think there was a time when the cells were empty and most of the time there were two or more to a cell so few people actually did ‘solitary’. Those in the cells were only allowed Italian rations, no food parcels or cigarettes. We soon got over this by mixing the Red Cross food with the skilly
which we took into the cells. In the food parcels were small tins containing Oxo or Marmite. These tins would hold about six cigarettes. These were put at the bottom of the mess tin and covered with skilly. The guards got quite annoyed when they saw the man in the cells smoking but they never discovered how the cigarettes were getting into the cells.

Christmas 1942 came and went. We had saved bits from our parcels and had quite a reasonable feast. We had a moving carol service on Christmas Eve it ended up with the whole camp outside of the huts singing all the carols that we knew. The guards joined in where they could. By this tine we were getting new prisoners into the camp from the North African landings and the news that they brought us mad us realise that we might not have much longer in the camp. In April 1943, the Italians decided that camp 59 should be used for the American prisoners coming in and we were moved to camp 53 which was some miles inland from Ancona on the east coast.

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