Page 129 - They Also Served

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Claude Templer 1914.
Claude Frank Lethbridge Templer was born in Dharamshala, India, on 15th July 1895. Educated at Wellington College, he entered Sandhurst on the last peacetime course in 1914 and was commissioned into the Gloucestershire Regiment in November. Joining the 1st Battalion in France, he was wounded in the legs and captured during a raid on the German trenches on 22nd December.
For the next 30 months, Templer
was a troublesome POW, using every
opportunity to escape. In April 1915, he
escaped from Hanover-Münder together
with seven Russian officers after crawling
through an airshaft. They were recaptured just short of the Dutch border when one of the Russians panicked after being challenged. Templer, having evaded his pursuers for two miles and attacking them with the only weapon available, a bottle, was saved from lynching by a passing policeman. Moved to Burg camp, he immediately began digging a tunnel and was sentenced to 53 weeks in Burg Gaol for ‘damaging public property’.
Transferred to the high-security fortress of Wesel, from where he promptly escaped, he was recaptured and moved to Magdeburg. After attacking his guard on the train, Templer stole a bicycle and made it to within a mile of the Dutch border before he was taken. In March 1917, he was transferred to Augustabad, where his second escape attempt resulted in several days of freedom, ending with an injured ankle as he tried to board a moving freight train. Transferred to Ströhen, in August 1917 he and another officer used cutlery to dig a tunnel from the camp ablutions, supported by many others who blocked the entrance to the Germans by forming a disorderly queue for the bath. Dropping into a cellar below, they hid until nightfall when the camp commandant, visiting the last place where the two missing prisoners had been seen, issued loud instructions to the guards. Later, avoiding the location of the patrols, kindly provided by the commandant, they escaped from the camp during a rainstorm.
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