Another obit from a London newspaper, this one from the Times.

From The Times: February 27, 2010
Gladys Skillett : wartime deportee and nurse


Gladys Skillett was the first of the Channel Islands’ wartime deportees to give birth in captivity. It was an event that started an enduring friendship with a young German woman about her own age and in the 1950s paved the way for the start of a special relationship between Guernsey and the Swabian town of Biberach an der Riss where the deportees were held in the nearby Lindele internment camp.

A fact not often noted: the Channel Islands were occupied by the Nazis.

In September 1942 just over 2,000 Channel Islanders were selected for deportation because either they or their spouses or a parent had been born in the UK. Gladys, with her English husband Sidney and their year-old son Colin, was among 834 men, women and children from the Bailewick of Guernsey to go. It should have been 836 but a retired major, one of 11 deportees from Sark, killed himself by slashing his wrists and his wife, who had survived their suicide pact, was taken to hospital.


When she left Guernsey, Skillett, a former nurse, was already five months pregnant with her second child. By the time she was ready to give birth, the four months since her departure from Guernsey had embraced a first British land victory at El Alamein, increased RAF night bombing and, above all, a major defeat looming for the German Army at Stalingrad. In the maternity ward of the small hospital in Biberach where the Guernsey woman arrived in labour most of the other beds were occupied by women who had husbands in uniform. They wanted nothing to do with this lone Englander — with one exception.


Maria Koch had a man in the Wehrmacht. Julius, a forester in civilian life, was then serving in a signals unit in the Netherlands. But Koch was a practising Catholic and when a midwife asked her if she would mind sharing her room with the English patient, confined to a bed in a draughty corridor, she instantly agreed. Shortly afterwards and within about an hour of each other both women had produced healthy boys.


At first their mothers communicated almost entirely by sign language, but they were soon getting on well enough for Koch to persuade a visiting relative to buy her companion a Kinderschöppele, a baby’s milk bottle. Before long the two babies, who would be christened David and Heiner, were each sucking on identical bottles and Koch taught Skillett a new German word: Milchbrüdern — milk brothers.


They were soon separated, but a fortnight after his son was born Julius Koch was granted home leave. When Maria told him about Heiner’s milchbrüder he arranged through a friendly guard to visit the Skilletts in the Lindele camp, which was just outside the town on a plateau from where on a clear day its inmates coulds see the peaks of the Swiss Alps. Earlier it been a prisoner-of-war camp and the source of the most successful mass British escape of the war when four out of 26 officers who had tunnelled their way out made home runs to the neutral border 40 miles away.


The Kochs could not actually enter the camp any more than the Skilletts could leave it. Instead, the British and German families stood either side of the barbed wire holding their new-born sons aloft and, unable to say very much to each other, smiled a lot. Such spontaneous celebrations of common humanity in the midst of the 20th century’s second Anglo-German war were, to say the least, unusual.


Gladys Eileen Dillingham was born in Guernsey in 1918 some six months before the end of the first one. Her father, Sergeant Ernest Dillingham, a regular soldier from Camden Town, North London, was fighting in France at the time with the garrison artillery.


Ernest had met her patois-speaking mother, whose maiden name was Ingrouille, during a prewar posting to Castle Cornet in St Peter Port, and when, in 1924, he retired from the Army the family settled permanently in Guernsey. The pace was still distinctly rural. One of Skillett’s earliest memories was the thrill of weekly pony and trap rides to market with her maternal grandmother at the reins. Later, looking back on her childhood, her biggest regret was that neither her grandmother nor her mother bothered to teach her the Norman French that they used.

Although British, the Channel Islands are very close to France. Norman French, a curious term.

In the summer of 1940, now a trained nurse, she almost got away before the Germans arrived. On Friday, June 28, her bags were packed and she had a ticket to board the last Weymouth-bound mailboat for the next five years. Then, in late afternoon, came the Luftwaffe’s first and only attack on the island, killing 33 people at the harbour, one of them her mother’s brother, a grower trying to load his tomatoes. Many more were wounded.

Skillett unpacked her uniform and cycled to an emergency hospital together with Sidney, her boyfriend of four months, who without the slightest medical training found himself assisting a couple of hard-pressed surgeons in the operating theatre. All those who had received morphine had their foreheads crossed with Nurse Dillingham’s lipstick so that they would not be overdosed. The young couple worked throughout the night. When they emerged it was daylight and Skillett had missed her boat. Three months later they were married and living for five shillings a week rent in a house that had been evacuated by its owners and left in charge of neighbours. There they might have seen the war out had not Heinrich Himmler needed civilian internees. The SS chief wanted to trade them for German citizens, particularly the 500 or so technicians who in 1941 had been rounded up in Iran when Anglo-Soviet forces deposed its pro-Nazi Shah. (By an odd coincidence one of Skillett’s old beaus, serving in Iran as an officer in the Intelligence Corps, played a large part in tracking them down.) Anyone born in the UK qualified together with spouses and children even if they were native Channel Islanders.

Pro-Nazi Shah?

The London-born Sidney Skillett was an obvious candidate but he was in the building trade and doing essential harbour maintenance work, which convinced the Germans that he should be exempted. There seemed little chance that his father-in-law, the retired soldier, would enjoy the same luck and this greatly troubled Gladys because her mother had recently become very deaf and unwell. So she persuaded her husband that they must convince the Germans to accept them and their son as substitutes which he duly did.

What this selfless daughter had no way of foreseeing was that her parents would soon be much better off had they gone to Germany. As the war progressed, regular Red Cross parcels made living conditions for the internees infinitely superior to those in Guernsey where a tightening Allied blockade starved occupiers and occupied alike. By 1945 the German civilians living around the camp also had much cause to envy them.


Skillett never forgot Maria Koch’s kindness to her and, after Julius’s return to the army, there had been other meetings at the barbed wire and sometimes an exchange of small gifts. On April 23, 1945, St George’s Day, the Lindele camp was liberated by General Leclerc’s French colonial troops and the Guernsey woman sought out her German friend. Before her she pushed a rickety pram containing her latest child, three-month-old Gloria. Beneath the baby was an assortment of Red Cross goodies for Mrs Koch and David’s Milchbrüder, Heiner. Julius was missing, last heard of at a headquarters near Berlin.

A pensive Skillett, holding Heiner, stares out of a photograph taken with the Skilletts and their infant sons as they sit on a grassy bank outside the camp. It was photographed during this interlude between the Skilletts’ liberation and repatriation and Julius’s astonishing homecoming, having evaded Russian and Allied patrols.


But this was by no means the end of their story. Indeed, in many ways, it was still at the beginning with regular meetings in Guernsey and Germany, particulary at birthdays, between the Milchbrüdern Heiner, who became a school teacher, and David, a police inspector. When they became 60, David and Heiner marched, as tradition demands for Biberach’s sexagenarians, in the annual Schützenfest accompanied by her younger sister Gloria, now a deputy in the Guernsey States of Deliberation.


Sidney Skillett died in 1980, having made a fortune by building and running highly successful self-catering holiday chalets. Gladys Skillett is survived by seven children.


Gladys Skillett, the first of Guernsey’s wartime deportees to give birth in captivity, was born on May 2, 1918. She died on February 11, 2010, aged 91