The Printer Went To War & More

Our printer, Tony Atkinson, was one of those shot and imprisoned by the Germans during the evacuation of the Dunkirk beaches. He joined the Sherwood Foresters in 1939 whilst working as a compositor for the Nottingham Evening Post. After capture he was hospitalised in Holland, transported to a POW camp in Poland where he put on prisoner shows with actor Sam Kydd, and then escaped. (Not being a "flyer", ordinary squaddies worked in the fields, and had access to the local town to buy everything but alcohol).

The work is a collection of stories he told to me, (and my late father), who during wartime walked from Poland to Luxembourg, then took on the guise and the uniform of a dead German Officer he found in a ditch. He took on the name Oberleutnant Anton Heidelberg - "Heidelberg" being the brand of printing machine he used at the Nottingham Evening Post. From Luxembourg, where he worked with the resistance, he relocated close to the brothels of Paris having dealings with the SOE and the Maquis. He journeyed from Paris to Southern France crossing the Pyrenees into Spain and then headed not to Gibraltar but to the Tungsten mines of Portugal where he hitched a ride back to the UK on a coaster that twenty years later would be converted into a pirate radio ship. Back in Blighty, our printer who spoke fluent Spanish, French and German, worked with BBC Monitoring, then for the rich, famous, and infamous celebrities of the time including pop stars, politicians, and prostitutes, (Profumo, Stephen Ward, Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice Davies) plus printing for the fans of Radio Luxembourg, readers of Pop Weekly, Teenbeat, Satellite TV News and a dozen other of my titles including, of course, Elvis Monthly. Todd Slaughter