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Indictment

Winter Le Brocq, illustrated by Edmund Blampied

This was written in June 1944 as the Allied Armies were fighting the Germans in Normandy. The Germans had confiscated all radios, something that affected Edmund and Marianne Blampied more than losing their car. But some people had hidden a radio and listened to the news on the BBC, and transmitted it from person to person. What they didn't know was that the island wasn't to be freed from Occupation for another 11 months.

Winter Le Brocq was the author of one previous small book of poetry, The Wishing Well, and other poems (A.H. Stockwell, London, 1926). A play by Winter Le Brocq called Montparnasse was performed at the Opera House in Jersey in 1944. The only item about Winter Le Brocq I can find is his registration card during the Occupation, which gives his date of birth as 9th December 1904, so he would have been 40 y when this was published.

Horace Wyatt, who wrote the book Jersey in Jail, published soon after the Liberation of Jersey, wrote a poem called Peccavi! in response to this poem, which was also printed as a broadsheet (Commercial Art Co. Ltd, Printers, Jersey, undated).

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Cover and middle pages of the broadsheet (click on each to enlarge)

A copy of the poem signed by poet and illustrator

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