24th October 2024
During the First World War, some 12,000 Turkish soldiers were taken prisoner in the Sinai, Palestine and Mesopotamian campaigns and transferred to camps in India and Burma. Like POWs in other theatres, they were able to send and receive mail in the camps.
I recently chanced across 11 covers sent by these Turkish POWs, as well as two newspaper wrappers and other related items at the bottom of an old Weetabix tin. This wasn’t from just any stamp collection; however, it was one that had been brought to Warwick & Warwick by the descendants of Lt. Col. Thomas Moore Kirkwood (1865-1933), who served as Commandant of Bellary POW Camp in India.
Previously serving as a camp for interned enemy women and children, mostly German missionary families, Bellary was converted into a POW camp for Turkish prisoners in January 1917. A report by the Red Cross, on a visit to Bellary in March 1917, indicates that though there was capacity for 500 POWs, just 137 were held at the camp. By comparison, Sumerpur held 3366 POWs, Ahmednagar held 1621 and Thayetmyo, in Burma, held 3591, according to the report. Little mail is recorded sent from Bellary and the number of surviving incoming covers must be far fewer.
The Red Cross report also provides interesting details about letter-writing by prisoners at Bellary. The report states: “Prisoners are entitled to receive an unlimited number of letters and postcards, but very few are delivered (70 in eighteen months). They all come from Sumerpur, the prisoners’ old camp; none from Turkey”.
The lack of mail was the subject of grievance among the prisoners. The report states: “Bitter complaints were made about correspondence. ‘I get no news of my family,’ is a phrase that one heard constantly. The prisoner who got no letters assumed that the postal service was no good. Others were worried about the trade they had lost, their ruined businesses, their lands going to waste. Each one had his troubles.”
Here is a cover sent from Sumerpur from Kerkuk, in modern-day Iraq, via Cairo. At the base, you can see that the cover was opened by an Ottoman censor and resealed. In the top-right is a neat Sumerpur POW camp censor cachet is violet, indicating that it had been censored by the camp interpreter before being released.
This cover is addressed to a POW, Sous Lieutenant Mahmoud Hamdi, at Thayetmyo on pre-printed Red Crescent stationary. At the bottom-right is a Thayetmyo censor cachet, with the initials of the Commandant Major R. J. Hilson.
The POW could not be found at the camp, so a clerk at Thayetmyo redirected the cover in red manuscript, writing ‘Try Bellary’ on the front. Only five other surviving items of incoming mail to Thayetmyo are recorded.
Envelopes and paper were supplied free of charge by camp authorities for prisoners to write letters. Much of the surviving covers are from correspondence with relatives back home, but there are a few rare examples of surviving inter-camp mail. Two of the covers are sent from the POW camp for Turkish officers at Sidi Bishr in Egypt to the camp at Bellary. Both were sent on the same day and have the same markings, including a ‘Base Army Post Office / Z’ cds, a PO which was based in nearby Alexandria in this period. There is at least one other surviving inter-camp cover, illustrated in Kemal Giray’s book on Turkish POW mail.
This most interesting range of postal history will be offered as Lot 170 in Warwick & Warwick’s November Philatelic Auction on 6th November 2024 with an estimate of £300.
Our upcoming auction catalogues are available to view on our website, which also has details on how you can place bids. Our Twitter and Facebook accounts also include updates of all our latest auction news.
By Patrick Hayes