‘My grandfather was in first Great Escape’
Jock Tullis took part in the first Great Escape 100 years ago. Guy Kelly talks to his grandson
To most people, say the words “the great escape” and they’ll immediately think of Steve McQueen jumping over a barbed wire fence on his disguised Triumph. Or an impossibly young Dickie Attenborough, RAF cap at a jaunty angle, giving orders on the sly. Or just about any scene from John Sturges’s iconic 1963 film, in fact.
So successful was Sturges’s telling of the true story – adapted from Paul Brickhill’s book – of a mass breakout from the Nazi prisoner of war camp Stalag Luft III in 1944, that those events are etched into the public’s consciousness. Yet while entirely worthy of the Hollywood treatment, few people know it wasn’t the “Great Escape” of the 20th century. More than two decades earlier, the tail-end of the First World War saw a group of plucky soldiers attempt a bid for freedom every bit as daring, and arguably even more ingenious.
“This one truly was first,” says Bill Franklin, tapping a stack of historical papers at his family home in west London. “It’s 100 years on now, so it’d be nice if people appreciated it...”
On July 23 1918, Franklin’s grandfather, 2nd Lieutenant Jock Tullis, was one of 29 Allied prisoners who managed to tunnel free from the infamous Holzminden POW camp, in what would become the biggest breakout of the Great War. He was also one of 10 who – thanks to a combination of survival skills, subterfuge and sheer bloody-mindedness – made “home runs” all the way back to Britain.
“He was so modest, he didn’t talk about it a lot at all,” Franklin, 67, says, “and it was rather sad because the 10 who made home runs were all awarded the Military Cross by George V, including Tullis, but because he thought that was unfair on those they left behind, we in the family didn’t know for years.”
Born in Glasgow in 1894, Tullis left an engineering apprenticeship to enlist in the Scottish Yeomanry at the age of 20, shortly after war broke out, before transferring to the Royal Naval Air Service the following year. In September 1916, Tullis was engaged in a high combat tussle with enemy planes. Fighting one off, he was hit, and his Sopwith Strutter crashlanded behind German lines. He was taken to a POW camp, then another, before ending up in perhaps the most feared of all.
Holzminden held 550 officers and 100 orderlies in a seemingly inescapable compound near Hanover. In just the first month of its opening in September 1917, there were 17 escape attempts. All were unsuccessful.
“They were always trying to escape these camps, and he had made attempts from both the previous places he has been held,” Franklin says. “The point in a tunnel was to give you a head start from the guns.”
Though escapes are perhaps more c closely associated with the Second World War, almost every POW camp in the First quickly established an e escape committee, run on a military hierarchy. Holzminden was no different. Some were put in charge of clothing, others, stockpiling food, and around a dozen were required to do the hard physical labour, earning them the first dozen spots to enter the tunnel.
After that, the hierarchy was “kind of done on merit”, and so Tullis, “a planner but not a digger,” was assigned something like number 15, Franklin says – his past experience earning him the reputation of being “a good guy, a keen escaper” among his comrades.
Using trowels, spoons and chisels, the digging team worked in three-hour shifts and hid the excavated earth in the cellar roof using a makeshift pulley system. Three German staff at the camp provided some assistance – including giving them torches and passing on letters – but it was otherwise a masterclass in clandestine organisation.
Nine months after the first clod of earth was chipped away, a narrow 180ft tunnel was complete, its entrance concealed under a staircase in the orderlies’ quarters, its sides shored by bed slats, fitted with a rudimentary ventilation system and just about big enough for a man to squeeze through – but not turn around.
At midnight on the 23rd, it was time. “The plan was for a lot more men to get out [some records suggest more than 100 were lined up] p] but the 30th man in was a stout chap, ap, and he got stuck as the tunnel started rted collapsing.” For the rest, the escape e was aborted. But the 29 who made it t through now faced the even greater challenge of making the 175-mile journey urney to Losser on the border of Holland nd – neutral in the war – from where they could gain safe passage home. The e Germans alerted farmers, villagers ers and schoolchildren to be on the lookout, as well l as using bloodhounds, , and 19 were swiftly caught. But 10, including Tullis, remained on the run. “A lot of escapes failed because they’d just get lost, but Tullis was a real outdoorsman. In the camp, he learned to hide a small compass under his tongue, to avoid searches, and with that and the stars, plus some tiny maps, he was all right. But it wasn’t easy. They only had two dry days in two weeks.”
Dressed in homemade German uniforms and splitting into pairs or threes, many escapees navigated the fields and bogs of northern Germany on foot, sleeping under the stars and eating basic rations.
“Tullis was in a three, and one part I always liked was that he would grease his Burberry raincoat with fat, making it waterproof, and bundle his clothes and belongings in it to cross rivers. It worked a treat,” Franklin says, with a smile. Tullis reached the border in 14 days, and describes the feeling in a lecture he later gave. “We were over and free, the Dutch people treated us with every consideration and kindness, and after nine days in Holland, we were brought back to the dear old country.”
Returning to Scotland after two years, Tullis found the RAF had been created, and soon returned to action, just as the rest did, flying over the same airspace he’d been shot down from. After the war he married, qualified as an engineer and joined the family business, bus making leather drive belts. He died in 1976.
“The escapees escape all formed the Holzminden D Dinner Club and had reunions regularly for years, but they never neve made much of it,” Franklin says says. In honour of the centenary, Tullis’s Tu grandson and great-grandson, great-grandso Paul and James Dean, recently ran the escape distance, raising raisin money for the RAF Benevolent Benevole Fund.
“Some “Som stories are retold, others aren’t,” Franklin says. “This “Thi one deserves a bit
of attention, at I think.”
‘Some stories are retold, others aren’t. This one deserves a bit of attention, I think’