Captain Tommy Catlow

4 December 1914 – 23 August 2014

Captain Tommy Catlow, who has died aged 99, was one of the last British survivors of war time imprisonment in the notorious Colditz Castle.

At dawn on 16 February 1942 Tommy was dozing in the hold of a Wellington bomber taking him from Gibraltar to Malta, where he was due to take command of a submarine. He was woken up as flak burst around the bomber and two German fighter aircraft moved in before the Wellington crashed to earth on Sicily.

 Tommy was captured and was well-treated initially, travelling first-class by rail to Rome with a four-man armed escort. Once in Germany, however, he spent 10 weeks in solitary confinement, undergoing repeated interrogation before being sent to prison camp at Sandbostel. He resolved to escape, and when he moved to a camp for naval Pows at Westertimke, he formed a six-man team which began digging a tunnel with plans to escape to Denmark.

With his limited knowledge of German, forged papers and some German currency that had been smuggled into the camp, he travelled by train and on foot, successfully crossing the border into Denmark. Several days later, weakened by hunger and thirst, he sought help at a farm – only to find that it was being worked by a German family who turned him over to the police.

Tommy’s punishment was six weeks in solitary before he was sent to Colditz in Saxony, the high-security prison for incorrigible escapers. It was, he later observed, a mistake to assemble “an international array of talent which boasted an expert in almost every field from mechanical engineering to lock-picking, while the sheer vastness of the place, with sprawling attics, disused cellars and empty rooms, provided the facility to work on an astonishing number of escape plans”.

He arrived there in November 1942, and for the next two-and-half years was never without an escape project, spending many months “grovelling in tunnels”. He tried slithering along a sewer, and hiding beneath the coat of an exceptionally tall prisoner to fool the thrice-daily headcount. Meanwhile, as “parcel officer” he was able to communicate by coded letter with M19 in London, which sent cash, maps, blank German passes and other escape aids through the post, skilfully concealing them in items such as record sleeves and tines of food. In his “leisure” hours, he learnt Russian from a Polish general who had been captured in Warsaw.

In early April 1945 the British prisoners were told by their captors to be ready to leave Colditz within the hour. They mutinied, and for three days controlled the camp while, the streets of the town below the castle, American troops fought an SS battalion. On 16 April an American Jeep with a lieutenant and three GIs of the 69^th Division drove into the castle forecourt: “We British kept our upper lips appropriately stiff” wrote Tommy who was the only WWII submariner to be shot down in the air and captured. During his captivity his weight had dropped from 14 ½ to 9 ½ stone.

On the 60^th anniversary of the liberation of Colditz, he revisited the prison with Major Peter Parker and Lieutenant Kenneth Lee, telling the press: “I suffered because of the terrible cold in winter and the bad food. We were always trying to escape, but I spent most of my time helping the others to get out. I never made it myself.”

Following his release from Colditz, Tommy remained in the Navy. Tommy retired to Lancashire to enjoy a life of sheep farming, shooting, fishing and golf. His autobiography, A Sailor’s Survival, was first published in 1997, and has since been reprinted three times.

Tommy Catlow married Jean Nuttall, a childhood friend who had a successful wartime career in the WRNS, 1947. She died in 2010, and he is survived by their three daughters.