John Player

I mentioned earlier (well, in July) that my Mum is into family history and has revealed delights from the past such as Yankee Jack Jepps hanged in Australia for armed robbery or some such harmless fun.

Seeing as there have been no mobs at my door demanding a second installment I have waited until now to add another ancestor to the collection. This weekend seems an appropriate time to recall Able Seaman John Player, late of the HMS Nestor and killed as a result of the 14/18 war.

In fact we know quite a bit about John Player's death as it was mentioned a number of times in Parliament and was the subject of an inquiry. John was captured early in the war and so didn't get to write some of the incredibly dull letters home that all the rest of the male members of the family got to write before they were killed.

He spent most of the war in Belgium then Brandenburg, rotting in a prisoner of war camp. However, as the end of the war was approaching, the cell block that John was in caught fire. Although many prisoners escaped the blaze those who were too slow in getting out were were met by the camp guards who were under strict orders not to allow any detainee to leave the building. They forced the prisoners back into the cells on the points of their bayonettes.

John was one of those prisoners who were stabbed by a guard's bayonette as he tried to crawl out of a window and then burned to death.

The story does not end there though, because Italian soldiers at the same camp were horrified at what had happened. The next day the Italians led a large contingent of prisoners through the camp intent on demanding an audience with the boss and that the guards should be brought to justice.

Time and again they organised protests of this kind risking being killed just as John had been. Although no-one was brought to justice, as the post-war documents detail, the Italians are said to have won the camp prisoners better treatment and certainly respect.

I know very little about John's life before the war and what people thought of him, which is a shame. I don't claim to know much about the man apart from the abhorant circumstances of his death, but I do know that where there is force there are the seeds of resistance and that soldiers from all over Europe were willing to stand up and protest against the murder of a man they'd never met. That spirit lives on.

Update: Just had a chat with my Mum who filled in a few details. Like the fact that John was in a special punishment wing of the camp because, when they were being shipped to Brandenburg, he jumped off the boat and secured the mooring - as a sailor he was just being useful but the guards thought he was being uppity and punished him for it. All nine of the prisoners in the punishment cell died in the fire.