Former Ilkley man's vital invention (From Bradford Telegraph and Argus)

Former Ilkley man's vital invention

4:19pm Thursday 9th July 2009

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It might have been made from odds and ends scavenged from the Nazi camp where he was held captive, but Captain Ernest Shackleton’s secret radio gave British prisoners of war a vital link to the outside world.

The former Ilkley Grammar School pupil’s incredible device, which was used to listen to BBC and American broadcasts, is one of the highlights at a new exhibition on prisoners of war (POWs) at the Imperial War Museum North in Salford, Manchester.

Capt Shackleton, who was captured in June, 1940 during the fall of France, built the radio while in captivity at Oflag Ixa Rotenburg between 1943 and 1945.

The POWs asked for a film projector, which was monitored by prison guards until it broke.

Shackleton, who studied engineering at Leeds University and worked as a professional radio engineer with GEC before the war, used the projector for the radio’s core and added objects such as Rowntree’s cocoa tins, toothbrushes, beer bottles, toilet roll tubes and candle wax.

The device, which was hidden under the floorboards of a hut, was operated with two knitting needles and ran on the hut’s mains electricity.

It worked until the POWs were liberated in March, 1945 and remained undetected despite guard searches and surprise visits from the Gestapo.

Capt Shackleton, who lived in Ben Rydding, told the Telegraph & Argus’s sister paper, the Ilkley Gazette, in October, 1945: “The taking of news in a German camp was exciting to say the least, as one false step would have been more than disastrous.

“The apparatus would have been confiscated, and readers can imagine what would have happened to the operators had they been caught.”

Amanda Mason, the exhibition’s researcher, said: “The exhibition really shows the incredible ingenuity and bravery of prisoners of war. Captain Shackleton’s radio is an outstanding example of this. When he was liberated in 1945, Shackleton insisted on being taken back to the camp to collect his radio so that he could give it to the Imperial War Museum. We are really pleased to have this opportunity to display it and to tell his story. He was a real Yorkshire hero.”

l Captured: The Extraordinary Life of Prisoners of War will run at the Imperial War Museum North until January 3, 2010.

e-mail: hannah.baker @bradford.newsquest.co.uk

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