Censorship in the shadow of war
Prior to the German Occupation of Guernsey from 30 June 1940, mail going into or out of Guernsey was occasionally censored in London. Where PC 66 censor labels were used to reseal opened mail, this signified that it was carried out by the War Office, until responsibility for censorship was transferred, in April 1940, to the Ministry of Information, which used PC90 censor labels.
The cover at Figure 1, from Northern Ireland to Guernsey on 8 June 1940, was sent three weeks before the German invasion, but has been censored on its way to the Island and was resealed with a PC 66 label stating “OPENED BY CENSOR 2456”.
Civilian mail censorship during Occupation
An immediate consequence of the German invasion and occupation of the Channel Islands was that communications with the mainland of Britain ended. Although a link with the Islands was established via the Red Cross from October 1940, it was only after the establishment of a Red Cross Bureau on Guernsey on 13 January 1941 that messages could be sent out of the Island.
For the thousands of Islanders who were evacuated in the days before the occupation began, communicating with family left behind in the Island was a priority. In those early days, one of the few methods open to those evacuees was to send a letter via Thomas Cook & Son, who were the official forwarding agents for mail within, to and from enemy-occupied countries and Britain. A letter to an Island address would be put in a stamped envelope addressed to Thomas Cook & Son, London, together with a two shilling postal order. These letters were then sent via PO Box 506, Lisbon – Thomas Cook’s office in Portugal. Few examples of mail using the above route are known and all bear the boxed cachet “DETAINED IN FRANCE / DURING GERMAN / OCCUPATION”.
The envelope at Figure 2 below is addressed to my uncle Edward Elliston, my father’s eldest brother, who had recently moved to Mount Durand from La Couture. The letter is likely to have been from my aunt, Winnie Elliston, who was evacuated with her two children to Burnley just prior to the Occupation. The letter is cancelled with a Lisbon machine cancel on 6 September 1940. The stamp has been removed and, in addition to the “DETAINED IN FRANCE” cachet, it also has a boxed “RETOUR / A L’ENVOYER” cachet, a straight-line “INADMIS” cachet and “Oberkommando der Wehrmacht” (“OkW”) censor tape, coded “c” for Cologne, on its left edge. This scarce example of mail sent to Guernsey early in the Occupation via Thomas Cook represents a Channel Island rarity.
The cessation of postal communications to the Island after the commencement of the Occupation should have been common knowledge in the UK, but some businesses clearly thought that sending mail was still possible, as indicated by the commercial letter at Figure 3, from Hull to Guernsey in August 1941, which was opened by the UK censor and resealed with “OPENED BY EXAMINER 5,340” tape. It bears a “RETURNED TO SENDER BY THE CENSOR” label in green with a typed note enclosed to the sender explaining that the letter has been returned because to deliver it would mean going through enemy occupied territory, where the contents would likely be impounded.
During the Occupation, all civilian mail from the Island, whether it be from Islanders or Germans, addressed to any part of Occupied Europe had to be sent through the German’s Feldpost system. All such mail, including inter-Island mail, was censored by the German authorities either in Paris, Frankfurt, Munich, Berlin or Bordeaux, depending on the destination.
The inter-Island commercial cover at Figure 4, from Guernsey to Jersey, was taken to Paris for censoring, where it was opened and re-sealed with German censor tape. The “Geöffnet” (meaning “opened”) censor tape and OkW cachet on the back both incorporate an “x” being the code (“Kennbuchstabe”, or “Kenn”) letter for Paris.
The commercial parcel post label at Figure 5 was sent from Hamburg to Boots the Chemist in Guernsey on 11 February 1942. The label bears a 3 Pf and 50 Pf Hindenburg and 25 Pf Hitler stamps, cancelled with a Hamburg machine cancel. The label also has an OkW handstamp in red and bearing the “e” code indicating it was censored in Frankfurt.
Examples of mail from Guernsey are shown at Figures 6 and 7. The cover at Figure 6, from Guernsey to Jersey and dated 27 May 1943, has a strip of five olive green ½d Arms stamps with a machine cancel to three of them and a manual cancel to the remaining two. The reverse of the cover bears German Geöffnet censor tape and an OkW handstamp in red, both bearing the “x” code indicating that it was censored in Paris.
Another inter-Island item, the cover at Figure 7, from Guernsey to Jersey, was opened for censoring and then re-sealed with the brown tape used by censors on inter-Island mail, over stamped with a violet eagle and swastika censor mark on the front and back. The censor mark does not extend to the cover, so was probably stamped on the tape before it was fixed. This mark is scarce on inter-Island mail.
Following the Allied forces’ landings in Normandy in June 1944, the German Feldpost system in northern France moved its operations to St Malo. When that town fell to the Allied forces on 18 August 1944, the Channel Islands lost their last link to the rest of occupied Europe, marking the beginning of what is known as “the fortress period”, a period which ended with the liberation of the Islands on 8 May 1945.
During the fortress period, civilian inter-Island mail was sent to the Feldkommandantur (German field command office) in Jersey for censorship. After censoring, envelopes were resealed with plain brown tape, which was then ‘tied’ to the envelope with the office “Briefstempel” (meaning “postmark”) handstamp. These strikes, in black ink, were always indistinct.
The cover at Figure 8 to be shown in the next part of this article in the September Journal was sent from Guernsey to Jersey on 9 January 1945 and shows the censor tape and handstamp described above.
