Cowan, S
Stan Cowan
Information provided by Martin Hunter
Date: 9 February 2012
Stan Cowan is mentioned in Martin Hunter’s report on his grandfather, Lance Corporal James ‘Jimmy’ Hunter, RASC, POW at Stalag VIIIB
He was in the choir for a Concert Party in the camp that performed plays like The Mikado, and they performed at The Berlin Opera House for some high-ranking German officers and their wives, as well as a ‘Holiday Camp’ for POWs who agreed to work for the German war effort. They were allowed to walk around Berlin accompanied by a German guard.
He was good friends with a certain ‘Sergeant Brown’ who was a sort of important Quartermaster who travelled with Grandad’s concert party.
He also said that during an air raid one night, a crew member from a shot down RAF bomber came down by parachute within the camp undetected by the camp guards. Grandad seemed to think he was Australian, Canadian or from New Zealand, quite small and slightly built. The concert party were due to travel around Germany, and they decided to smuggle this aircrewman in the false bottom of a trunk used to store the concert party’s costumes, with my grandad and his best friend Stan Cowan from the Isle of Man taking turns in the bottom of the trunk to give the ‘escapee’ a break from the trunk’s confines.
He met an English lady, called Marjorie Booth [an internet search for Marjorie Booth Lamsdorf returns some very interesting material], who’d married a German officer before the war. This officer was something to do with running the Camp. She was interested in opera and used her connections to get sheet music, instruments and scripts for plays and concerts for the concert party to perform. He remembers her because she was from Leyland, Lancashire near where my Grandad lived.
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