Eighty years on, Peter Butterworth's recently discovered
German prison identity card is going on display as
part of an exhibition telling the story of his life as a
prisoner of war.
Butterworth served in the Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm
during the war but was shot down in 1940, spending
the rest of it as a prisoner of war.
A cache of prisoner of war documents recently
released from a German archive is now going on
display at the National Archives in London, which
adds new detail to the gradually unfolding story.
The documents arrived from Germany and have been
catalogued by a team of volunteers.
For his son Tyler Butterworth, it has been a revelation
"They keep declassifying things and more seems to
bubble up. It's remarkable."
However, in Stalag Luft 3, he was an officer and code
writer in MI9, the military intelligence agency
responsible for organising escapes from prison
camps. It was a mystery to even his own son until
long after his death in 1979.
He did suffer from what we now call post-traumatic
stress disorder (PTSD). He never said this to my
sister and I, but my mother (the impressionist Janet
Brown) told me about things that happened,
especially right at the start of their marriage, after the
war, where he'd suddenly leap out of bed at night and
throw himself on the floor and start hiding. She had
to barricade the bedroom door because the staircase
was outside."
Butterworth helped hide the soil from the tunnels in
the camp theatre. Inmates would be encouraged to
smoke pipes near where the soil was stored to mask
the smell.
In the Wooden Horse escape, in which a tunnel was
dug underneath a vaulting horse, he was one of the
organising committee. When the story was adapted
in 1950 for the big screen, he auditioned for a role but
was turned down for not looking sufficiently like a
pnsoner
Alongside him in Stalag Luft 3 was another prisoner,
Talbot Rothwell, who would go on to write many of
the best Carry On films. He and Rothwell convinced
the camp commandant to allow them to build a
theatre, with the sounds from the performances
helping drown out the noise of digging the tunnels.
