THE railways were on strike. The government was threatening to cut railwaymen’s wages. For nine days hardly a train moved at a time when main roads between towns were little better than country lanes.

Support for the strike was strong and eventually the government yielded to the railwaymen’s not unreasonable demands. This was 1919 in the ‘land fit for heroes’.

At Raikeswood Camp in Skipton, the German officers and men were becoming impatient. The peace treaty had been signed in Paris. Surely they would be going home soon, but then there were no trains.

Skipton prisoner Otto Goerg wrote to his sweetheart Lizzie Krenz in Berlin.

“Unfortunately your second parcel has still not arrived, and because of the strike it will probably not reach me at all…The strike has hit us very hard. Supplies of some foodstuffs have fallen to a half and there is no coal at all for heating. We cannot even think of coming home. Things are looking pretty bleak.”

Their huts remained cold during this first week in October, and there were no showers. The frustrated prisoners removed the wooden edging strips which lined the paths to use them as fuel. The British Assistant Commandant, nicknamed ‘I-can-kill-you’, was outraged, but was met by a chorus of whistles and coarse gestures. Meanwhile a steady plume of smoke rose gently from the barracks housing the British guards.

The German officers tried to establish a dialogue with the striking railwaymen, another group with a deep-seated grievance against the government, but one prisoner took direct action.

He absconded from one of the rambles organised for the German officers and wandered unopposed through the busy streets of Skipton to arrive at the railway station. He then demanded a ticket for London saying that Mr Balfour, the Foreign Secretary, required him to be there. Eventually he was talked round by a sympathetic British officer. The Craven Herald reported that the officer was ‘mentally defective’.

Just 21 months earlier, the first German officers had arrived in Skipton. These officers had been transferred from a now overfull camp at Colsterdale in the north-east of the Yorkshire Dales.

They had been captured at the Battle of Cambrai at the start of what had seemed like a great British victory. The camp was originally built to house navvies constructing Leighton Reservoir to supply water for the city of Leeds. Work on the reservoir was suspended after the outbreak of war, and the camp was expanded to accommodate and train volunteer recruits from the Leeds Pals ready for service abroad. Later still it was converted into a prisoner-of-war camp for German officers.

A two-foot narrow-gauge railway had been constructed to supply the navvies with building materials and other essential supplies. It also carried labourers and, unofficially, some local residents. The line had been lightly constructed with wooden viaducts, sharp curves and steep gradients, and there had already been one tragic accident. At least one German prisoner had been transported to the camp on the ‘toy’ train, but the larger groups of fifty prisoners bound for Skipton were marched four abreast along the six-mile route to Masham through a snowy and icy landscape flanked by some fearsome-looking British bayonets.

Masham was served by the North Eastern Railway – one of over a hundred large and small railways which once made up Britain’s railway network, but had since been placed under government control to facilitate the supply of men and materials to and from the front.

The prisoners gratefully sank into the soft red plush seats and enjoyed a few hours’ freedom from the hated barbed wire as the train ambled across the Yorkshire plain via Ripon and Harrogate to Leeds where a huge placard urged everyone to ‘Buy War Bonds’.

A further train brought them to Skipton where they were formed up into marching order on the station forecourt ready to be paraded up the High Street under the watchful eyes of the curious townsfolk. Some officers strode along defiantly while others felt intense shame and embarrassment. When they reached their new camp it seemed just as miserable as the one they had so recently left.

The German book ‘Kriegsgefangen in Skipton’ records that some of the enlisted men worked on the railways, but does not provide further details. Officers were exempt from work.

A booklet printed for the relatives of the 47 prisoners who died in the influenza pandemic features a map which clearly shows Skipton, but places their graves at Morton Cemetery on the wrong side of the railway line to Leeds.

At night the prisoners would hear trains heading towards the east coast. The German book finishes with a long poem in a North German dialect where the writer dreams of standing on the station at Hamburg following his release from Skipton. One prisoner, a student theologian, was extremely meticulous. He took his sermons and other writings from Raikeswood with him when he left and even kept his train ticket for the journey home.

It languishes in a university archive along with a copy of the German book which was a Christmas present for his father.