In March 1945 70 German Prisoners of War escaped fro a camp in Bridgend. Four of them stole a GPs car and made for the railway station where they boarded a train and travelled 160 miles to Birmingham. Jumping off the train at Water Orton at night and hiding up in a wood by day.

 

On 15 March, Henry Aubrey Tomlinson of Park Hall Farm went Rook catching armed with a double barrelled sporting gun and caught four Nazis instead. All were Officers and offered no resistance.

Tomlinson said: “As soon as I reached the top of the railway bank at the wood, I was staggered to find four Jerries right at my feet, two of them asleep. We stared at each other with dazed surprise for a moment, and then it came to me with a flash that they were escaped prisoners and I raised my gun and told them to stand up. They were loaded with haversacks of food and it was obvious they had been down to the brook to get some water.

 

They were meek enough and one of them, who was a U-boat officer, and spoke almost perfect English, asked me how I felt up there.

 

Only Two Cartridges

 

“I told him I was from the police – I am a section leader in the Special Constabulary at Castle Bromwich – and I told them that I had been sent to bring them in. I didn’t want them to know that I had stumbled upon them by accident, and that I had only two cartridges in my gun.”

 

“I marched them across the field and took them up to one of my work-men, Bill Perris, who was in the British Army of Occupation in Germany in the last war. He took two, I took the others.”

 

“One of the other men, who also spoke English, said they were trying to make for Birmingham, while one of them said he wanted to get to Nottingham.”

 

Interest in War News

 

“They were dirty and unshaven, but they seemed pretty fresh, and were keenly interested in the progress of the war. My prisoner, who told me he was from Westphalia, asked if we had crossed the Rhine. I told him that we had and that the war was going very well for us. He became very animated and turned to his three companions and spoke rapidly in German with them for a time.”

 

“I think I have at last got my own back on Jerry for a little episode in December 1940, when the Luftwaffe flew over my field and machine-gunned me and my horses.”

Henry Aubrey Tomlinson was born 5 May 1901 the son of George Henry Tomlinson and Amy Elizabeth Harris. In the 1939 census he is recorded as a farm owner living with his parents and sister at Park Hall Farm. He died in 2000 and appears never to have married.