Captain Kenneth Lockwood

Oct 11 2007 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

IT WAS deadly serious, yet sometimes there was a hint of the public school wheeze about the English officers, who foxed their German captors, often for brief periods, as Europe descended into hell.

There was so much to learn.

And the chap in a dress crawling through a tight tunnel found that the biscuits he had used to swell his bra were starting to crumble.

Indeed, that particular escape bid from Laufen Castle, near the German/Austrian border, crumbled altogether and all six escapees were recaptured.

But it led to Kenneth Lockwood being sent to Colditz Castle, where the hard-line prisoners were kept, and where he became secretary of the escape committee, responsible for much of the meticulous organisation behind the scenes.

The tone was set when Lockwood first saw the grim walls of the ugly structure, overlooking the River Mulde, in eastern Germany.

The Germans boasted that nobody could successfully escape from the castle, which had stood there in some form since 1014.

“Uppermost of all,” he later said, “we wondered how we were going to get out of the place”.

In fact, Lockwood didn’t, but Mike Reid, a comrade from Laufen and chairman of the escape committee, did make it on his fourth attempt.

After an education at Whitgift School, Croydon, Lockwood entered his father’s firm in the Stock Exchange, before joining the Territorials with the 22nd London Regiment, popularly known as the Bermondsey Boozers.

He was captured by the Germans in May, 1940, during the British retreat to Dunkirk. The failed break-out from Laufen taught Lockwood and Reid that the Germans would deal ruthlessly with escape attempts.

But that didn’t weaken their resolve to continue with escape efforts at Colditz – these were chronicled in Reid’s book, The Colditz Story, made into a film with Richard Wattis playing the Lockwood part.

Soon after Colditz was liberated by the Americans in 1945, he visited a nearby death camp, where Hungarian Jews had been systematically murdered.

Lockwood, who was unmarried, resumed work in his father’s firm and then became secretary of the Colditz Association of former prisoners, defending their reputation against the romantic whims of revisionist history, while revisiting the castle in 2000 for the TV documentary, Escape from Colditz. Ten years earlier he had been appointed MBE.

Captain Kenneth Lockwood, PoW;born December 17, 1911, died October 8, 2007.