Ruhleben Prisoner of War Camp

Ruhleben, which was within a mile of the garrison town of Spandau in Germany, housed some 4,000 men who all happened to be in Germany when a decree was issued that all male British subjects - except clergymen, doctors, lunatics and bed-ridden invalids - between the ages of seventeen and fifty-five, and all British officers of whatever age, whether on the active or the retired lists, should be arrested on the 6th November 1914 and interned.

The camp was housed on a trotting race course, situated a few miles from Berlin. The principal buildings were three grandstands, a restaurant known as “The Tea House”, a club house known as the Casino, residential quarters and offices for various functionaries, and eleven stables - one of them built of wood and bricks and the others of bricks and concrete. These stables served as barracks for the prisoners, who were housed both in the horse-boxes (some of which were full of dung when they arrived) and in the lofts - normally used for storing of fodder. Subsequently, as the numbers of prisoners increased, supplementary wooden barracks were hastily run up. The floors and walls of both the lofts and the boxes were of concrete. At first, the prisoners had to sleep on these concrete floors on which an inadequate provision of straw, not overclean, were strewn. After some time, straw sacks - called mattresses (!) - were supplied; after a further interval, the occupants of the boxes were provided with plank beds. One blanket - usually, in fact, a worn and dilapidated horse cloth - was each man’s official allowance of bedclothes (even in the winter); any other protection from the cold which any man needed, he had to furnish at his own expense. Into each of the horseboxes, about eleven feet square, six men were crowded. The men in the dimly lit lofts were packed, shoulder to shoulder, all round the walls, and also up and down the middle; and in this confined space, they had to live, sleep, eat, keep all their spare clothes and changes of linen, and dry their washing on improvised clothes-lines stretched from beam to beam.

There was no surface drainage - and as there was a great deal of rain in the late autumn of 1914, the camp was generally a cold quagmire, swept by piercing winds from Poland and the Pinsk marshes, and interspersed with puddles, which swelled until they became lakes. Through this morass, men had to wade three times a day for a distance of at least a quarter of a mile, to fetch their food from kitchens installed underneath the grandstands. Naturally too, they had to traverse the same morass in order to reach the military latrines which had been dug for them.

In September 1915, the 150 German soldiers were withdrawn and the 4,000 prisoners began to constitute a really self-governing community. From then on, Ruhleben was a bit of England - a small British colony, as it were, planted in the heart of the enemy’s country. The building of the city then began; and a homely touch was given to the process by the bestowal of English names upon the various quarters of the camp. The theatre was the Ruhleben Empire. A large gate through which the prisoners had to pass was known as the Marble Arch. There was a shopping quarter called Bond Street, a slummy quarter called Whitechapel, and a literary quarter known as Fleet Street. There was also a great open space known as Trafalgar Square where all the public meetings were held.

The Soup March

The men settled down with fixed resolve to leave the place far better educated than when they entered it, by acquiring modern languages, or knowledge of some science or the like, or even dead languages, as it seemed to be the finest way of finding a blessing in disguise of a colossal misfortune. They were fortunate in that a great many teachers were interned at Ruhleben; teachers on holiday in Germany and, of course, a number of mostly youngish men engaged in teaching English in Germany when the war broke out. The staff of the hundred classes of the Ruhleben Camp consisted chiefly of university men, or men whose profession was teaching. The scholars were soon able to transform Ruhleben into a passable imitation of a university town, with secondary and elementary schools feeding the university and later technical schools supplementing its activities. Probably it was in languages that the school was strongest; probably there were more competent teachers of a large number of languages at Ruhleben than there had ever been either at Oxford or Cambridge. The languages catered for included English, Latin, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek (modern as well as ancient), Russian, Polish, Danish, Yiddish, Serbian, Hebrew and Arabic; and there were serious students of almost all of them.

There were navigation classes given by Captain Hendricksen, a master mariner, enabling the young ship’s officers and apprentices in the camp to pursue their studies. These classes were, after negotiation and correspondence, recognised by the Board of Trade, and it was promised that attendance at his lectures would be counted to his pupils’ credit in computing the date at which they should be eligible to present themselves for examination. The promise was fulfilled, and the proportion of passes achieved by Captain Hendricksen’s pupils was one of which any tutor might be proud.

Cover of Sketch Book

It was also arranged that London Matriculation examinations should be held in the camp itself; and here also the proportion of passes was higher than in most English schools. The question papers were kept under seal by the German Censor until the morning of the examination, and the answers were also handed to him and forwarded by him to England. Laboratories and schools for handicrafts were started at the end of 1916.

An example of one of the clubs in the camp was the Summer House. Their premises consisted of a shed and an allotment (which was turned into a garden). Men gossiped there, wrote letters and played cards and chess. A steward, wearing a white apron, served coffee and lemonade. Everything was done, as far as it might be, on the lines of a London club, and the members could almost forget, on summer afternoons, that they were prisoners of war.

Smugglers did a roaring trade in the camp with English and French newspapers. German soldiers, anxious to supplement their pay, yielded to the temptation to buy them in the cheapest and sell them in the dearest market. At first, the price was high - as much as 40 marks being charged for a copy of the Times, the Daily Mail or the Daily Telegraph. The price soon fell to 10, to 5, and even to 3 marks. Distribution of the copies were undertaken by a mysterious gentleman, known to the camp as “the W. H. Smith of Ruhleben.” They were “lent to read” as in the days of old in England, at a charge of one shilling per hour on the first day, sixpence per hour on the second day and still smaller sums on the succeeding days. Subscribers had to conduct their negotiations with intermediaries, who refused to disclose the names of their principals. Their subscriptions were collected and their papers delivered by perfect strangers, and fetched by other strangers after the hour had elapsed. It was a point of honour to ask no questions. Men formed reading clubs, and one might sometimes see six or eight men assembled in a box dividing a paper amongst them, each of them reading a single sheet. The papers sometimes got into the camp within three days of their publication, and they were never more than fourteen days late!

Robert Walker The prisoners plunged into outdoor games with the national zest of the British, and were able to play football, rugby, cricket, hockey, lawn tennis, athletics, boxing and even golf. At the end of their stay in the camp, though there were onlay about 2,500 men left, the members of the golf club numbered about 800. They were allowed to monopolise the ground for two hours every morning for two hours every evening, and also for a full half day every week, on any wet day, and for a solid week or so every three months - when they were playing off their tournaments. It was only a five-hole course measuring 250 yards by 100 yards, laid out on a sandy soil, with a few tufts of grass and heather. Much amusement was found on it, and beginners were able to get good lessons from the ten well-known golf professionals interned with them.

A Ruhleben Football Association was formed with a ready-made substitute for league clubs in the shape of various barracks in the camp, and an elaborate league competition was started. Rugby football was barred at the beginning of the season as being “too rough and not at all a nice game” but eventually a number of international games were played between teams representing England, Ireland, Wales, Scotland and the Colonies.

Cricket enjoyed great popularity at Ruhleben, and the various barracks were as keen about securing the championship as the various boarding houses in the great Public Schools.

Lawn tennis caught on from the very beginning. It cost twenty marks to belong to the club, beside the cost of racquets, balls and shoes - at least another thirty marks. People who had money were allowed to make purchases. So many people joined from the outset that seven courts could be laid down at once.

Sir Timothy Eden, Bart., elder brother of Sir Anthony Eden, was interned for some time in Ruhleben, and became the Recreation Committee’s representative for the Ruhleben Dramatic Society, taking an active part in many of its productions.

The prisoners’ magazine, “In Ruhleben Camp”, was always enlivened with most humourous advertisements.

For example :

“Why send for parcels - when you can buy all that the heart (or the stomach) desires at THE POND STORES.”

“Fruits in Season, Tinned Delicacies, Sweets, etc. Open from 9.30-11.00 a.m. and 3.30-5.00 p.m. (Sundays closed, Saturdays open till 6 p.m.)”

“S.SUSSMAN. Russian tailor. Grand Stand No. 1 (next door to Catholic Chapel). All work done personally. Estimates free. Home address : Barrack 22, Box 26.”

“BOOTS ! BOOTS ! BOOTS ! (To say nothing of Shoes and Clogs !). Small repairs done ! Very neat work. Small patches a speciality. W. CHAPMAN, BARRACK 8, BOX 8.”

Further reading -
“IN RUHLEBEN” by Douglas Sladen
“MY VISIT TO RUHLEBEN” by Bishop Bury
“THE RUHLEBEN PRISON CAMP” by Israel Cohen
“THE HISTORY OF RUHLEBEN” by Joseph Powell and Francis Gribble

David Cohen Fine Art