June 13, 2025 • 12 mins
**This is a bonus episode. If you've not tuned in before, I recommend you start at Episode 1**
⚡ Island At War is a podcast dedicated to Guernsey’s occupation history. And the two men behind the show have chosen a fascinating way of telling the story - going month by month through the wartime years, making this an incredibly comprehensive listen.
💡 In this special bonus episode of the podcast we meet Keith Pengelley and Nick Le Huray, who’ve dedicated an incredible amount of time to uncovering what happened to islanders during World War 2. Hear some of the stories from that podcast that have stuck with them the most.
🔎 Nick writes a blog about the occupation and is finishing up a book about escapes from the Channel Islands. And Keith is a qualified tour guide - you can find his series of talks here: guernseywalkingtours.com
🎙️ Listen to Islands At War here: https://islandsatwar.buzzsprout.com/
📍 Your host is Ollie Guillou. This is a Channel Islands Podcasts production.
✉️ Share your messages and memories; email hello@ogpodcasts.co.uk
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:05):
In the early days of the life ofthis podcast, I came across
another two Islanders marking Guernsey's wartime history in a
podcast of their own, and obviously I just had to listen.
And what a pleasure it was to tune into Islands at War.
This podcast takes you through the occupation of the Channel
Islands month by month. They're currently at 1942, so
(00:27):
still a lot of content left in the pipeline.
Welcome back to a bonus episode of the Guernsey Deportees.
The two men behind Islands at War are Keith Pangele and Nick
Lihure. Nick writes A blog about the
occupation and is finishing up abook at the moment about escapes
from the Channel Islands, and Keith is a qualified tour guide
(00:49):
and works with the volunteer radio station G Net, so both are
very well versed on the subject of World War 2.
Their podcast focuses on the personal experiences of those
that lived during the time, using interviews, Diaries and
their own research to uncover what happened.
I asked them whether they found any stories that have
(01:10):
particularly spoken to them through the process of making
their podcast. I think it's ingenuity of people
as well. There's some of the stuff that
we've come across it. You just think that it's just
hilarious because they've, you know, pulled a fast one on the
Germans and it's have. You got any examples?
(01:31):
Oh, just Mr. Lesotho in Jersey. Oh well yeah, the chap in Jersey
he managed to hide and I I've still not quite figured this
out. This chap was a building store
manager and somehow he managed to hide in his builders,
merchants down a very narrow lane in Saint Helier, a mobile
crane and three concrete mixers,which he successfully hid from
(01:54):
the Germans. And I believe he he managed to
hide them for the entire occupation.
But at one point during I think it was early 1942, late 41, he
moved them to a different location.
How the hell do you do that without the Germans noticing?
I mean, at that, by that point you've got a massive amount of
Germans there and it's somehow he managed to do this.
(02:15):
I heard a story about somebody dismantle, I can't remember, it
was Guernsey or Jersey, but dismantling their car and
burying it so that the Germans couldn't get a hold of it.
Yeah, that wasn't uncommon and and also you, you see adverts if
you look in the Guernsey press, I think it was about the
earliest I saw was about a week after the occupation.
(02:37):
There were all already adverts from garages saying your car
need to be put back on the road properly.
Don't you know, just take it fora drive effectively you need,
you need us to come and recommission it properly.
That was if you were lucky enough to have got away with
that. Yeah, as I understand it, this
car did not work when they triedputting it.
Together I can imagine not but. Well, it was a paperboy in the
(03:00):
60s and 70s and certainly duringthat time you'd see the local,
the press, the local press. It wasn't unknown for cars to
suddenly be found in the 60s and70s.
They've been pushed into the back of an old packing shed that
might have overgrown was sat in a packing shed here that this
was a packing shed during the occupation.
The big grass space behind us now had vinery.
(03:23):
It was was a vinery and grew tomatoes.
But it went derelict in the war.The owner died and these things
became forgotten. Sheds overgrew and they were
discovered. I don't think you're going to
discover a thing like that now. But there is always little
things turn up and little thingsthat mean something turn up.
I mean, I, I knew somebody who'sobviously no longer with us, but
(03:45):
he drove to town on Liberation Day in 1945 because he'd
successfully hidden his car. Wow.
For the entire wall. He, I believe, built a false
wall in a packing shed and successfully no nobody ever
found it. But well, This is why the
tagline of the Guenti Deportees podcast is a little known story
(04:08):
of wartime resilience. And you've mentioned the word
ingenuity as well. And I think that was what the
occupation was all about, wasn'tit?
Is about resilient Islanders making it through no matter
what. Yeah, and that's, that's one of
the things that really annoys meas well when when you get people
say, oh, there was no resistanceor anything like that.
Well, they they couldn't do any armed resistance because you're
(04:30):
on an island and you've, you're surrounded by water and you
haven't got any mountains to runoff to after you've done
something. You've got no weapons.
But what you could do I I recently came across the
description in in one of the unpublished Diaries of chap
saying that he'd been out milking German trucks, which
(04:50):
meant he was that's how he was getting some petrol.
I thought milking them was quite, quite a good one.
But just just the choking of V signs on bicycle seats or or
just generally doing anything toit to annoy the Germans and just
they just see how far you could.Push it.
Well, here's one that my grandmother, she told me that
she, she had to work and she hadto work for the Germans.
(05:12):
And she had a, an early shift atwhat was Saint Margaret's Hotel
along Forest Rd. And she had to do a date, an
early shift where she really basically cleaned the bedrooms
of the German officers, made their beds, tidied up, did
whatever housekeeping. And when she left, she would
walk through the large kitchen and she said if there was no one
(05:32):
around, she said there was always big pots of soup bubbling
on the stove. And if no one was around, she'd
go over to this huge sack of salt in the corner, get 2 great
big handfuls of soup, dump it inthe soup, make it inedible on
her way. And that was her, her
resistance. And really, I describe it to
people as, you know, skins really.
Yeah, absolutely. Or or just sheer bloody
(05:54):
mindedness in in some cases, characters.
Stubbornness. Yeah.
Just that good old Guernsey donkey stubbornness.
Yeah, I mean, you, you get the what was referred to as the the
Sark Matthews party who were sent to go and salvage the
Germans got them to go and salvage a boat that had been
wrecked in in Sark, wanting to put it back into use.
(06:15):
And they dragged it out for so long that with so many different
oh, it's the wrong tide. This is proving far more
difficult than than we thought, you know, And they dragged it
out right up until liberation, really.
So it never got in. It didn't get well, it didn't
get, the Germans didn't get it back in use.
But yeah, they so they were quite well known for doing
things like that. It was little things like just
(06:37):
not doing things properly as well if they did have to go and
work for them. And there was a lot of
clandestine resistance as well, you know, hiding radio sets and
things like that that were also forms of resistance to the
extent that they could resist. Yeah, absolutely.
And you could get into a lot of trouble.
I mean, one of the other fascinating, well, I find it
fascinating facts that I found out by doing some research was
(07:00):
there were over 90, 1900 people who were sentenced for offenses
against the Germans. And that is acknowledged to be
an incomplete list, which when you think there were only 20,
just over 20,000 people in Guernsey, that's quite a lot of
people. And, and some, some of them got
done more than that. That's 1900 individual people,
(07:24):
you know, down to the fact that we didn't have room for them all
in the prison and you know, and to you wait your turn, you get
sentenced and and wait your turn.
And they're that similar problemin Jersey as well.
It's just find that hilarious that and sometimes they were
allowed to go home for a bit because and they decided that
there was somebody else that wasmore in merit of being in in the
(07:45):
clink than you were. So they you'd be halfway through
your sentence or something. Yeah, you can go home for a week
or whatever because we need to lock up so and so.
Bring up some space. And one of the things I can
confirm to any of your listenersor is that the fabled potato
peel was indeed given away by the Germans.
My grandmother remembers once going to get a big packet of
(08:10):
potato peel and when she was there, she saw the houses in
that area were were empty because of the evacuation.
And she was able to rent a bigger house for the family to
move to during during the occupation.
And had it not been going to this depot to pick up the potato
peel, that would have enabled her to move the family.
The point about the potato peel is that the when the Germans,
(08:31):
certainly in the early part of the war peeled their potatoes,
they cut them into rectangles. So the potato peel had quite a
lot of potato attached to it. And that's why the potato peel.
Well, obviously we, you know, itformed the basis of a film and a
book, but it genuinely was givenout to anybody, any civilians
that wanted it at the time. Come the end of the war, the
Germans weren't giving anything away.
(08:52):
I am very honored to have had you purchase Early Access for
the podcast and to binge it. I did.
I just didn't stop listening. It was.
Great. And I think for me, that was a
deeply moving experience to hearand then re listen to as I was
producing the podcast, my grandma's story.
And so I'm interested to hear ifany stories that you've heard
(09:13):
during your time doing this podcast have moved you in a
similar way. Well, I think not so much moved
me terms emotionally, but some really do sort of create poses.
They really make you think. The one I'm thinking of Nick,
was where we read in a diary that the some local women were
seen talking to a German soldierand someone had seen this and
(09:34):
they thought that the whole groups body language seemed to
be very familiar. Why were these women talking to
this German soldier? So this person, being a Guernsey
person, was very nosy, attached it themselves to this little
group of people talking. And she claimed that the German
soldier was talking patois. So that's sort of, it's not an
easy language to learn. And then the the explanation
(09:55):
apparently was that the German soldier had come over here in
the 30s, worked in the hospitality industry, married a
woman, their family all spoke patois, picked patois up, went
back to Germany to see a relative.
That's what happened to thousands of people of German
descent. Hitler closed the borders, kept
him and forced him into the army.
(10:15):
He ends up coming to Guernsey tofind that his wife and children
evacuated. Well, we don't know if it's
true. So if it's true, it is heart
wrenching. But we're, we're sort of, we
have to put that aside and move on.
But we, we, we, it's on our radar, on it to try and prove.
It, it is. And I've asked multiple people
who might be able to help and they all think, well, it's a
(10:36):
great story, but they can't findanything.
I mean, certainly some of the stuff that I've read, some of it
not necessary that we've talked about on the podcast.
It was just the emotional impactthat it had on some people,
particularly where there were relatives of theirs who were
taken. I'll during the occupation were
(10:58):
unable to get the drugs to treatthem.
That's true and. Basically, they just watched
them decline and quite a lot of that is far too depressing for
the podcast, frankly. But we did, we did touch on it a
couple of times and particularlyaround people who died through
diabetes was one of the things where the Germans had access to
(11:18):
plenty of insulin or other treatments that they could have
could have given them but were unwilling to give it to the
civilian authorities. Things like that I just find
appalling. It's.
Been an absolute pleasure and best of luck with the podcast
and the future of the show. It's a wonderful podcast that
everyone should listen to. Thank you guys.
Brilliant. Thanks, Ollie.
Thank you, Ollie. Nick is currently working on a
(11:41):
book, Almost Finished, about people who escape from the
Channel Islands, primarily the Bailiwick of Guernsey and some
of the more interesting ones in Jersey.
And Keith is undertaking a series of illustrated talks in
autumn through to spring 2026. And you can get all the info for
that at guernseywalkingtours.com.
(12:01):
In the next bonus episode, we meet Maisie Le Page, who's
originally from SARC and lived there during the occupation.
She tells the story of her father who was part of a covert
news operation in the islands and why this led to her favorite
panda being pierced with a bayonet.
Thanks to your support, this podcast has made it into the
(12:22):
Apple Podcast charts as one of the top history podcasts in the
UK. So if you haven't already,
please subscribe to the show to boost us further up the charts
and get this message out there.
In the early days of the life ofthis podcast, I came across
another two Islanders marking Guernsey's wartime history in a
podcast of their own, and obviously I just had to listen.
And what a pleasure it was to tune into Islands at War.
This podcast takes you through the occupation of the Channel
Islands month by month. They're currently at 1942, so
(00:27):
still a lot of content left in the pipeline.
Welcome back to a bonus episode of the Guernsey Deportees.
The two men behind Islands at War are Keith Pangele and Nick
Lihure. Nick writes A blog about the
occupation and is finishing up abook at the moment about escapes
from the Channel Islands, and Keith is a qualified tour guide
(00:49):
and works with the volunteer radio station G Net, so both are
very well versed on the subject of World War 2.
Their podcast focuses on the personal experiences of those
that lived during the time, using interviews, Diaries and
their own research to uncover what happened.
I asked them whether they found any stories that have
(01:10):
particularly spoken to them through the process of making
their podcast. I think it's ingenuity of people
as well. There's some of the stuff that
we've come across it. You just think that it's just
hilarious because they've, you know, pulled a fast one on the
Germans and it's have. You got any examples?
(01:31):
Oh, just Mr. Lesotho in Jersey. Oh well yeah, the chap in Jersey
he managed to hide and I I've still not quite figured this
out. This chap was a building store
manager and somehow he managed to hide in his builders,
merchants down a very narrow lane in Saint Helier, a mobile
crane and three concrete mixers,which he successfully hid from
(01:54):
the Germans. And I believe he he managed to
hide them for the entire occupation.
But at one point during I think it was early 1942, late 41, he
moved them to a different location.
How the hell do you do that without the Germans noticing?
I mean, at that, by that point you've got a massive amount of
Germans there and it's somehow he managed to do this.
(02:15):
I heard a story about somebody dismantle, I can't remember, it
was Guernsey or Jersey, but dismantling their car and
burying it so that the Germans couldn't get a hold of it.
Yeah, that wasn't uncommon and and also you, you see adverts if
you look in the Guernsey press, I think it was about the
earliest I saw was about a week after the occupation.
(02:37):
There were all already adverts from garages saying your car
need to be put back on the road properly.
Don't you know, just take it fora drive effectively you need,
you need us to come and recommission it properly.
That was if you were lucky enough to have got away with
that. Yeah, as I understand it, this
car did not work when they triedputting it.
Together I can imagine not but. Well, it was a paperboy in the
(03:00):
60s and 70s and certainly duringthat time you'd see the local,
the press, the local press. It wasn't unknown for cars to
suddenly be found in the 60s and70s.
They've been pushed into the back of an old packing shed that
might have overgrown was sat in a packing shed here that this
was a packing shed during the occupation.
The big grass space behind us now had vinery.
(03:23):
It was was a vinery and grew tomatoes.
But it went derelict in the war.The owner died and these things
became forgotten. Sheds overgrew and they were
discovered. I don't think you're going to
discover a thing like that now. But there is always little
things turn up and little thingsthat mean something turn up.
I mean, I, I knew somebody who'sobviously no longer with us, but
(03:45):
he drove to town on Liberation Day in 1945 because he'd
successfully hidden his car. Wow.
For the entire wall. He, I believe, built a false
wall in a packing shed and successfully no nobody ever
found it. But well, This is why the
tagline of the Guenti Deportees podcast is a little known story
(04:08):
of wartime resilience. And you've mentioned the word
ingenuity as well. And I think that was what the
occupation was all about, wasn'tit?
Is about resilient Islanders making it through no matter
what. Yeah, and that's, that's one of
the things that really annoys meas well when when you get people
say, oh, there was no resistanceor anything like that.
Well, they they couldn't do any armed resistance because you're
(04:30):
on an island and you've, you're surrounded by water and you
haven't got any mountains to runoff to after you've done
something. You've got no weapons.
But what you could do I I recently came across the
description in in one of the unpublished Diaries of chap
saying that he'd been out milking German trucks, which
(04:50):
meant he was that's how he was getting some petrol.
I thought milking them was quite, quite a good one.
But just just the choking of V signs on bicycle seats or or
just generally doing anything toit to annoy the Germans and just
they just see how far you could.Push it.
Well, here's one that my grandmother, she told me that
she, she had to work and she hadto work for the Germans.
(05:12):
And she had a, an early shift atwhat was Saint Margaret's Hotel
along Forest Rd. And she had to do a date, an
early shift where she really basically cleaned the bedrooms
of the German officers, made their beds, tidied up, did
whatever housekeeping. And when she left, she would
walk through the large kitchen and she said if there was no one
(05:32):
around, she said there was always big pots of soup bubbling
on the stove. And if no one was around, she'd
go over to this huge sack of salt in the corner, get 2 great
big handfuls of soup, dump it inthe soup, make it inedible on
her way. And that was her, her
resistance. And really, I describe it to
people as, you know, skins really.
Yeah, absolutely. Or or just sheer bloody
(05:54):
mindedness in in some cases, characters.
Stubbornness. Yeah.
Just that good old Guernsey donkey stubbornness.
Yeah, I mean, you, you get the what was referred to as the the
Sark Matthews party who were sent to go and salvage the
Germans got them to go and salvage a boat that had been
wrecked in in Sark, wanting to put it back into use.
(06:15):
And they dragged it out for so long that with so many different
oh, it's the wrong tide. This is proving far more
difficult than than we thought, you know, And they dragged it
out right up until liberation, really.
So it never got in. It didn't get well, it didn't
get, the Germans didn't get it back in use.
But yeah, they so they were quite well known for doing
things like that. It was little things like just
(06:37):
not doing things properly as well if they did have to go and
work for them. And there was a lot of
clandestine resistance as well, you know, hiding radio sets and
things like that that were also forms of resistance to the
extent that they could resist. Yeah, absolutely.
And you could get into a lot of trouble.
I mean, one of the other fascinating, well, I find it
fascinating facts that I found out by doing some research was
(07:00):
there were over 90, 1900 people who were sentenced for offenses
against the Germans. And that is acknowledged to be
an incomplete list, which when you think there were only 20,
just over 20,000 people in Guernsey, that's quite a lot of
people. And, and some, some of them got
done more than that. That's 1900 individual people,
(07:24):
you know, down to the fact that we didn't have room for them all
in the prison and you know, and to you wait your turn, you get
sentenced and and wait your turn.
And they're that similar problemin Jersey as well.
It's just find that hilarious that and sometimes they were
allowed to go home for a bit because and they decided that
there was somebody else that wasmore in merit of being in in the
(07:45):
clink than you were. So they you'd be halfway through
your sentence or something. Yeah, you can go home for a week
or whatever because we need to lock up so and so.
Bring up some space. And one of the things I can
confirm to any of your listenersor is that the fabled potato
peel was indeed given away by the Germans.
My grandmother remembers once going to get a big packet of
(08:10):
potato peel and when she was there, she saw the houses in
that area were were empty because of the evacuation.
And she was able to rent a bigger house for the family to
move to during during the occupation.
And had it not been going to this depot to pick up the potato
peel, that would have enabled her to move the family.
The point about the potato peel is that the when the Germans,
(08:31):
certainly in the early part of the war peeled their potatoes,
they cut them into rectangles. So the potato peel had quite a
lot of potato attached to it. And that's why the potato peel.
Well, obviously we, you know, itformed the basis of a film and a
book, but it genuinely was givenout to anybody, any civilians
that wanted it at the time. Come the end of the war, the
Germans weren't giving anything away.
(08:52):
I am very honored to have had you purchase Early Access for
the podcast and to binge it. I did.
I just didn't stop listening. It was.
Great. And I think for me, that was a
deeply moving experience to hearand then re listen to as I was
producing the podcast, my grandma's story.
And so I'm interested to hear ifany stories that you've heard
(09:13):
during your time doing this podcast have moved you in a
similar way. Well, I think not so much moved
me terms emotionally, but some really do sort of create poses.
They really make you think. The one I'm thinking of Nick,
was where we read in a diary that the some local women were
seen talking to a German soldierand someone had seen this and
(09:34):
they thought that the whole groups body language seemed to
be very familiar. Why were these women talking to
this German soldier? So this person, being a Guernsey
person, was very nosy, attached it themselves to this little
group of people talking. And she claimed that the German
soldier was talking patois. So that's sort of, it's not an
easy language to learn. And then the the explanation
(09:55):
apparently was that the German soldier had come over here in
the 30s, worked in the hospitality industry, married a
woman, their family all spoke patois, picked patois up, went
back to Germany to see a relative.
That's what happened to thousands of people of German
descent. Hitler closed the borders, kept
him and forced him into the army.
(10:15):
He ends up coming to Guernsey tofind that his wife and children
evacuated. Well, we don't know if it's
true. So if it's true, it is heart
wrenching. But we're, we're sort of, we
have to put that aside and move on.
But we, we, we, it's on our radar, on it to try and prove.
It, it is. And I've asked multiple people
who might be able to help and they all think, well, it's a
(10:36):
great story, but they can't findanything.
I mean, certainly some of the stuff that I've read, some of it
not necessary that we've talked about on the podcast.
It was just the emotional impactthat it had on some people,
particularly where there were relatives of theirs who were
taken. I'll during the occupation were
(10:58):
unable to get the drugs to treatthem.
That's true and. Basically, they just watched
them decline and quite a lot of that is far too depressing for
the podcast, frankly. But we did, we did touch on it a
couple of times and particularlyaround people who died through
diabetes was one of the things where the Germans had access to
(11:18):
plenty of insulin or other treatments that they could have
could have given them but were unwilling to give it to the
civilian authorities. Things like that I just find
appalling. It's.
Been an absolute pleasure and best of luck with the podcast
and the future of the show. It's a wonderful podcast that
everyone should listen to. Thank you guys.
Brilliant. Thanks, Ollie.
Thank you, Ollie. Nick is currently working on a
(11:41):
book, Almost Finished, about people who escape from the
Channel Islands, primarily the Bailiwick of Guernsey and some
of the more interesting ones in Jersey.
And Keith is undertaking a series of illustrated talks in
autumn through to spring 2026. And you can get all the info for
that at guernseywalkingtours.com.
(12:01):
In the next bonus episode, we meet Maisie Le Page, who's
originally from SARC and lived there during the occupation.
She tells the story of her father who was part of a covert
news operation in the islands and why this led to her favorite
panda being pierced with a bayonet.
Thanks to your support, this podcast has made it into the
(12:22):
Apple Podcast charts as one of the top history podcasts in the
UK. So if you haven't already,
please subscribe to the show to boost us further up the charts
and get this message out there.
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