Some people’s life stories have the ability to simply stop us in our tracks. Our attention may have been drawn by something that they had once done or something that they were involved in. The incident motivates us to take a closer look at the subject’s life in a bit more detail. This is especially true when they have been involved in something that is outside of the normal experience of most people and so we are drawn in to find out more.

An example of someone with an interesting story such as this is Alfred George Fripp, known as ‘Alfie’ to many but ‘Bill’ within his family. Alfie Fripp is fascinating because of his wartime experience as air crew in a Bristol Blenheim bomber when the war broke out. He would rise up from the ranks to end his military career as a Royal Air Force squadron leader; it was, however, his early internment as a POW and his connection to that episode known as the ‘Great Escape’ for which he is perhaps best known.

Alfie was already serving in the RAF as the Second World War broke out, having joined up in 1930. He and his fiancée Vera got married on 3 September 1939 – just three days into the conflict. There was no time for a honeymoon with his new bride, though, as at the time he was a flight sergeant serving in Bomber Command; with the outbreak of war he became part of the three-man crew of a Blenheim in No. 57 Squadron. Very soon his job would cause him to be separated from his new wife until the end of the war.

It was in the middle of the month after their marriage that Alfie’s aircraft was shot down by the Luftwaffe while flying over Germany. Alfie, the pilot, Flying Officer Casey, and Aircraftman 1st Class J. Nelson managed to get out of the downed plane relatively unhurt with just a few cuts and bruises to show for their ordeal. Unfortunately they were soon captured by the enemy and so began their long stretch as prisoners of war. F/O Casey was destined to never come home at all – he became a victim of a Nazi war crime ordered by Hitler.

Alfie’s part in the Great Escape
Sgt Alfie Fripp’s time as a POW was to be a long, drawn-out affair that would see him becoming one of the longest-held prisoners of WW2 and so attain the distinction of being one of the ‘39ers’ (those British servicemen taken prisoner in the first year of the war). His protracted incarceration throughout the war meant that he saw the insides of 12 different camps, including Stalag Luft III, the infamous prison camp that would become the site of the ‘Great Escape’ immortalised in the 1963 film of the same name with Steve McQueen.

While Alfie Fripp was held in these POW camps he often took on the role as a representative of the Red Cross with access to the packages arriving from the humanitarian organisation. This put him in a good position to help in the run-up to the famous escape as in his role he would collect parcels from the Red Cross, some of which were ‘Special’ parcels, notified in coded mail sent to the camp before the packet’s arrival. Alfie would be responsible for looking out for these deliveries that contained useful items that the escape committee would need. As fate would have it, however, Alfie Fripp missed out on the planned escape from Stalag Luft III because he was moved by the Germans to be interned in another camp. His pilot, Flying Officer M.J. Casey, did take part in the famous escape, only to run out of luck and to be recaught by the enemy. Of the 76 successful escapees, 73 were recaptured, most within a few days of the breakout and for the majority of them their fate was grim. Fifty of their number, including Casey, were murdered in cold blood by the Gestapo on Hitler’s orders. These men were executed against the Geneva Convention, which stated that POWs could not be killed for trying to escape.

Alfie Fripp endured captivity until the end of the war when he and other POWs were forced to undertake what became known as the Long March. This was a forced march during the final months of the Second World War in Europe from their camp in Poland and into Germany. As the Nazi German forces retreated while the Army of the Soviet Union advanced, about 30,000 Allied POWs were force-marched westward in appalling winter conditions, lasting about four months from January to April 1945. Alfie Fripp survived this and eventually returned to his wife, living into old age and dying in 2013 at the age of 98. At the time of his death he was the last of the ‘39ers’ and he was the oldest-surviving and longest-serving British POW.

Born in Hampshire, raised in Dorset
Alfie Fripp was born in Alverstoke, Hampshire in June 1914, though he was brought up in Dorset. Home was the market town of Wimborne Minster at the confluence of the River Stour and the River Allen, five miles north of Poole and on the Dorset Heaths. His father, Austin Fripp, had been a regular in the Royal Marines – a search of the records on TheGenealogist allows us to find him recorded in the 1911 census when he was on board HMS Victory. The ship was not in dry dock, as it is today, but moored in the ‘stream’ at Portsmouth Harbour. While we may think of the Victory as being a prestigious posting, at that time the old warship, once famous as Nelson’s flagship, was by this time rotting away in the harbour as the Navy lacked the funds for her repair. The census reveals that her commanding officer was a mere chief boatswain and that she was afloat at the time in a line of ships moored at Portsmouth.

Later in life, having left the Royal Marines, Alfie’s father Austin Fripp became a postman in the pleasant Dorset town of Wimborne Minster. This was a return to his roots as Wimborne is situated near to his birthplace in Crichel. We can see this change in career from the Royal Marines to the Royal Mail by looking at the details provided in the 1939 Register found on TheGenealogist. Most usefully it includes a map that locates the road in which the family lived as WW2 broke out. While other versions of the 1939 Register may have maps, TheGenealogist’s search results provide a much more precise location of where a household was in its neighbourhood. In the Fripps’ case it reveals the actual street in which Austin had lived. The house, which in the 1939 Register was named as ‘Beicos, East Boro’ may well have been lost now – on a recent visit to the town, while passing through Dorset and staying in a B&B just around the corner, I couldn’t help but notice that various post-war developments had sprung up and the street appears to have been renumbered to take account of the additional homes that had been built since 1939.

At one end of the street there are two thatched roofed 17th century cottages numbered 83 and 85. A glance at a website for listed buildings revealed that they are listed but that originally their address was Nos 18 and 19 East Borough, Wimborne. This tells us that the street has been renumbered over the years and makes it difficult to work out exactly where in this road the Fripps’ former house had once been. What we can tell, though, is the exact road that they lived on and so get a feel for the neighbourhood. We can see echoes of its past in the mixture of buildings. There are cottages, larger houses and even some of the modern developments give hints to what once stood in their place.

For example, further down the road there is a newer retirement housing development that today occupies the former site of the Wimborne & Cranbourne Workhouse and carries a plaque to explain this. Consulting TheGenealogist’s Map Explorer reveals this previous institution with its chilling reputation marked on the 1893–1900s map. One of the great features of Map Explorer is that subscribers can change the map layers for both the historical and modern maps. By choosing 1937–1961 as the Historic Middle Layer on this map tool we are then able to see that the former workhouse has by this time become the Public Assistance Institution – it is noted as the PA Institution on the map.

Four inches too short
Turning back to the subject of this piece: as a child Alfie Fripp had set his mind to become an artificer apprentice in the Royal Navy. When it came to his medical exam, however, he was rejected as he was almost four inches shorter than the senior service’s minimum height requirement. Learning, however, that the Royal Air Force was open to recruiting apprentices of all heights, Alfie took the RAF entrance exam to become an electrical apprentice and enlisted in the RAF on 30 September 1930 at RAF Halton. After a couple of years in the air force it was in 1932 that he began training to become a wireless operator. Once qualified he was posted to serve in No. 57 Squadron RAF in 1939. For that reason, while his family is recorded in the 1939 register, he is not. Military personnel on their bases at the time had been the responsibility of their branch of the services.

We have seen his parents recorded in Wimborne Minster, but what of his new wife? Three days after the declaration of war on 3 September 1939, just before 57 Squadron was called to war duty, Fripp had married Vera Violet Ahlandt in Ploughley, Oxfordshire. Searching for the newly married Mrs Vera Fripp in the 1939 Register reveals her at a property named Basildean on Bicester Road, Ploughley. By looking at the map this would seem to be close to her husband’s RAF base at Upper Heyford, which was about six miles north-west of Bicester in Oxfordshire.

The squadron to which he belonged had been re-equipped the year before with the Bristol Blenheim Mk I twin-engined monoplane – this was the type of bomber in which Alfie would fly missions as its radio operator. By searching for Sergeant Fripp and keyword No. 57 Squadron in the Military Records on TheGenealogist reveals his mention in the RAF operations record books (ORBs) for 16 October 1939.

These journal-like reports that are held in The National Archives have been digitised, so they can be easily searched on TheGenealogist’s website. We can easily find here that the Blenheim, numbered L1141, had taken off from Amy in the North of France to carry out a photo reconnaissance of the railway in the industrial area north-west of Essen in Germany. The ORB details that the aircraft did not return and consequently was posted as missing. The compiler of the record that day surmised that the plane had been forced down by an enemy fighter and then destroyed by fire. The crew, he had written, had escaped and were then being held as prisoners of war.

Turning to other entries in TheGenealogist’s Military Records we can find A.G. Fripp in the Prisoner of War lists recorded as a POW in Stalag 357, Poland.

Return to Stalag Luft III
Once the war was over and Sgt Alfie Frip was released from the POW camp he continued to serve in the RAF until 1969. In that time he was commissioned as an officer and would eventually rise to the rank of Squadron Leader. When it was time to leave the air force, Alfie moved to Bournemouth in Dorset and joined Brockenhurst’s sixth form college, where he supervised the scientific laboratory, working there for ten years before finally retiring at the age of 65.

It was in 2009 that Alfie Fripp returned to Stalag Luft III, where he and others commemorated his fallen comrades; in 2013 Alfie died aged 98 at a hospital in Bournemouth. His passing was noted in the media, including in a tribute on BBC Radio 2 which played the David Bowie hit ‘Heroes’. Fittingly this track featured the guitar playing of Alfie’s nephew, Robert Fripp, a musician, songwriter and record producer, best known as the guitarist, founder and longest-lasting member of the progressive rock band King Crimson.

When we set out to research a WW2 ancestor, finding them within the records on TheGenealogist can really add to the story. The 1939 Register provides the facility to discover the location where civilians were recorded living at the time war broke out – these records were created in order that people could be issued with ration books and identity cards. TheGenealogist’s 1939 Register collection gives the user a more precise location map than most of the other versions. In many cases its Map Explorer will identify a property or the street in which our ancestors had lived, which can be useful if you wish to visit their locale and see the lie of the land.

We have also seen that, in the case of RAF personnel, the journal-like records of the operations record books can provide us with information about what our aircrew forebears were deployed to do on a daily basis and, as with Alfie Fripp and his aircrew mates in the Blenheim L1141, the stark reality that some were shot down and taken prisoner. {