John Simkins
A new addition to our archives is a remarkable memoir by Captain Rev. Richard H. Hill about his wartime experiences. These included imprisonment at Montalbo and Fontanellato PoW camps. We are very grateful to his sons Steve and Peter for their permission to make this accessible.
Two things stand out about the memoir, which is an extract from Rev. Hill’s Reminiscences. The first is that the author’s perspective on the war, as a Padre, is very different from that of the fighting men. The second is a curiosity involving two paintings that he commissioned from fellow prisoners at Fontanellato, Captain W. “Bill” Glover and Lt. P. B. Swain.
When Hill and the 600 other internees escaped from Fontanellato in September 1943, he took the paintings with him. “I wrapped the pictures round a birch stick which I chose from the fuel store and folded round them a strip of old blanket and by this means I managed to carry them with me for the next nineteen months and they have hung in their frames on our walls at Berrington, Bromyard, Ledbury and Ludlow.”
Hill spent the first of those nineteen months on the run while attempting to reach the Allies in south Italy, and the rest of the time as a prisoner in Germany after his recapture.
Hill served with the Royal Army Service Corps and was attached to 72nd Field Regiment, R.A. He was captured in Libya on 1st June 1942.
Steve Hill says: “I find it quite extraordinary to contemplate that my father was involved in the Fontanellato escape, just as he was in the retreat from Dunkirk and the North African campaign. As a young man from rural Shropshire, brought up on a small tenanted farm before taking holy orders, he seems to me to have been entirely unsuited to such activities, both temperamentally, medically (he had a chronic chest problem having had pneumonia in his youth) and intellectually and yet he bore it all and did his duty and survived the deprivations of military life in wartime and those of a PoW.”
Hill’s memoir is beautifully written, both informative and humorous. He was very alert to the irony of being a man of God in the midst of war. He writes that in the Libyan desert, where he was originally captured, “congregations were always small, partly owing to the obvious practical difficulties but also to the strong antipathy to public worship which seems to possess most Englishmen”. But his role as Padre also brought him face-to-face with the consequences of bitter fighting as Rommel’s troops gained the upper hand at Bir Hacheim. “I took a hurried service for a gunner who had been killed. We buried him just as he was, without even a blanket shroud, in a shallow grave.”
Hill’s reminiscences about life in the PoW camps come from his unique standpoint. “In the excellent Red Cross library [at Montalbo] there was even a copy of the SPCK bible commentary, so with its help I prepared a course of lectures on the Bible which was suffered with great patience and endurance by a faithful few.”
In the mountain villages of the Apennines, on the run from Fontanellato, Hill and his two companions were given “a uniformly friendly welcome everywhere”. But eventually a Fascist reported them to two Carabinieri who reluctantly arrested them. At the police station a charlady “bewailed our plight and wept when she realised that we were to be handed over to the Germans. It was all most touching and interesting as an indication of the attitude of Italians in general toward the Germans.”
Hill died in 2000. Steve and Peter are now searching for a permanent home for the paintings. They would like if possible to return them to the families of the artists, Glover and Swain (who was also known as O’Brian-Swayne). If any reader knows of descendants of these men please let us know at info@msmtrust.org.uk.
