Philip Harker Newman (1911–1994): Dunkirk hero,war psychologist and orthopaedic surgeon to Sir Winston Churchill

Introduction

Philip Harker Newman (Figure 1) was born at 4 Elmhurst Road, Dovercourt, Essex on Thursday 22 June 1911, the son of a civil servant, John Harker Newman (1883–1942) and Violet Grace, née Williams (1884–1961) on the day of the Coronation of King George V. He was educated at Cranleigh School, Surrey and received his medical training at The Middlesex Hospital, London, becoming a Senior Broderip Scholar before qualifying in 1934, then an anatomy Demonstrator and obtaining the FRCS in 1938. Except for his time serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC), his entire medical career was spent at The Middlesex and Royal National Orthopaedic Hospitals. OPEN IN VIEWER

Military service

At the outbreak of the Second World War, Newman was orthopaedic registrar to Arthur Sidney Blundell Bankart (1879–1951) ¹ at The Middlesex Hospital.

In his diary kept during the war, ² Newman describes the atmosphere there on the day that the conflict began. He and a colleague were taken by Bankart to the hospital Secretary Superintendent’s Office where they were informed that the Government had reorganised all hospitals into an Emergency Medical Service (EMS), ³ wherein all current hospital staff would be deployed as a contingency against the large numbers of casualties expected early on. However, Newman had already voluntarily joined the Supplementary Reserve of Officers, a list of medical specialists:

After a few weeks, I was ordered to report to the Barracks at Crookham for preliminary training and later was posted as a surgical specialist to the 12th Casualty Clearing Station at Stockgrove Park near Leighton Buzzard. ⁴

Newman’s unit arrived in France with the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) on 1 February 1940 to spend three and a half months idling before seeing action. The unit prepared for the massive influx of casualties that was expected following the German advance towards the English Channel in May 1940. Newman’s unit was redeployed to the area around Bethune, a town 45 miles south-east of Calais and 116 miles north of Paris and ordered to set up base on the sportsground at Annezin. From 10 May 1940, the clearing station was under almost constant attack from shelling and the air. As the BEF front line retreated in the face of the German advance, the unit found itself suddenly out beyond the front line and on Monday 26 May 1940, the unit was ordered to retreat to Dunkirk. On Tuesday 27 May, Newman, in charge of the second party to leave with three lorries and about 40 men began a difficult journey to a Château (named Chapeau Rouge because of its red roof) at Rosendael on the outskirts of Dunkirk where they would set up their CCS. Progress was slow as the roads, strewn with abandoned vehicles and cattle were frequently strafed from the air. Newman arrived at the Château on Wednesday 28 May aware that the BEF was now leaving Dunkirk as quickly as possible and realised that: ‘There was an awful languid feeling among all of us in having to open up again and hold the baby while everyone else was running for home’. ⁸

Newman set up an operating theatre in the drawing room of the Château and within two hours had two teams operating. However, life in the Château was not easy and bombing was frequent. Newman in his diaries describes the days as being

… hectic in the extreme. Food was all tinned and only dished up in a very jumbly and small room to feed twenty officers. Almost every meal consisted of bully beef and biscuits and one ate it standing up. ⁹

Back at the Château, Newman was informed that one officer and 10 men were to remain behind for every 100 wounded personnel and at that time, there were 250 wounded men in the clearing station. The next day at a ballot held at 2.30 p.m. to decide who would stay or leave officiated by Cockie O’Shea the Roman Catholic Padré, Newman found that he was one of those drawn to remain, his name being the last of 17 to be drawn from a bowler hat found in the Château. Newman wrote that he ‘was down the drain anyhow’. ¹¹ O’Shea gave him his crucifix with the words, ‘this will see you home’. ¹² This crucifix remains to this day in the safekeeping of the Newman family. ¹³ Another of his departing colleagues gave him a copy of the New Testament. Newman was now left with two other officers and over 300 wounded soldiers.

The following day the Château took a direct hit from a shell. At about 6 a.m. on the morning of Tuesday 4 June 1940, Newman was woken to be told that the Germans had arrived. He went out to the front of the Château to find German soldiers ‘sitting all over the place talking to patients.’ ¹⁴ Helmut, a wounded German airman who had been brought to the Château a few days earlier and had been teaching Newman a few German phrases, spoke favourably of the British to his countrymen with the result that the Germans did not much bother Newman or his colleagues on that first day. Indeed, they helped with looking after the wounded and brought soup around in the evening. Conditions for everyone at the Chateau were appalling with some wounded soldiers sharing ambulance accommodation in the grounds with their dead colleagues. Later that day, 50 French ambulances arrived to transport the CCS personnel to Zuydcoote some 8 km North East of Dunkirk where there was a large hospital, L’Hôpital Maritime, located on the dunes behind the beach. At that time, there were approximately 7000 wounded in the hospital. Newman realised that as the only British personnel there they would not be given priority for resources, but he managed to get 80 of his worst injured into the French wards. It was here that Newman met the first of several remarkably selfless individuals, a Belgian nurse, Madame Jeanne de Launoy ¹⁵ who had been a nurse in the First World War and had, according to Newman known Edith Cavell. Madame de Launay and her small band of nurses brought chocolates, sugar, shaving soap and other luxuries to the British captives in the hospital. Newman also befriended the French Curé who had a house in the hospital grounds where Newman on 19 June 1940 heard Churchill’s ‘finest hour’ speech which he described as inspirational.

On 11 July 1940, The Times carried the notice announcing the award of the Distinguished Service Order to Newman for Gallant Conduct with the B.E.F and Acts of Heroism in the withdrawal:

This officer was responsible for the surgical work in the CCS at Béthune. He organized three twin operating theatres, and later at Rosendael Dunkirk such work that could be undertaken with reduced equipment. His unremitting keenness, hard work and skill as a surgeon were a source of inspiration to all employed in the surgical division and were the means of saving many lives and of giving the best possible treatment under most exacting conditions to several hundred badly wounded officers and men. This officer cheerfully accepted the ballot whereby he was left in charge of wounded that could not be evacuated. ¹⁶

Newman was moved again, this time by train to a transit camp in Dieberg near Frankfurt en route to Stalag IX/H and then on to a 200-bed hospital for POW at Schleiz near Plauen on the Czech border. It was here that there arose the first realistic prospect of escape.

On arrival at Schleiz, Newman found himself reunited with some RAMC colleagues. One of these, a South African named Arthur Dearlove (1906–1974) ²² was keen to escape and in fact did so with the assistance of Newman and a colleague, who lowered him out of a window down sheets tied together onto a flat roof from which he jumped to ground level and ran away without two sentries seeing him. After a week of freedom, Dearlove was recaptured to spend the rest of the war as a POW at Spangenberg Camp for officers. Inspired by Dearlove’s apparent success, Newman considered the possibility of escape himself. Using the same method and armed with a map of central Europe torn from an atlas, he and a colleague made their escape reasoning that the Swiss border was about 500 km away and the nearest town, Hof about 30 km.They had no currency, no papers and spoke no German, so they pretended to be a couple of Polish workers. Their freedom was short lived. When walking through the second village on their escape route, a dog began barking then another and as they were leaving the village they were confronted by a policeman who suggested that they were POWs. They were taken to a jail house and then onto Camp Stalag 1XC pending transfer to Rouen Camp at Spangenberg. It was at Spangenberg that Newman first met Airey Middleton Sheffield Neave, DSO, OBE, MC, TD (1916–1979) ²³ who had been wounded at Dunkirk and taken prisoner (later to become the first British officer to escape from Colditz Castle).On arriving at Spangenberg, Newman learned that an escape tunnel was already under construction and he immediately volunteered to dig. However, when the tunnel was nearing completion, it was announced that some badly injured soldiers and their doctors were to be repatriated to Britain. Newman and others numbering about 1300 men were taken to Rouen by train in anticipation of the journey home. After waiting several days, the repatriation was cancelled. Newman was then taken to a camp at Sotteville along with 300 men. At Sotteville, Newman soon learned that the Germans were planning to evacuate the camp and move it further East. He and a colleague, Jock Finlayson decided that they would hide in a dug out below the floorboards in one of the hospital buildings and wait until the camp was deserted before making their escape. Two days after the camp was evacuated, they emerged and were now at large. However, shortly afterwards Finlayson became ill and they split up but failed to rendezvous as had been planned. Finlayson was arrested by local gendarmes, handed over to the Germans and taken as a POW to Germany. Newman however with the assistance of some brave French locals took a train to Rouen where he had been given the name and address of a contact which unfortunately proved fruitless. Feeling despondent and hopeless, Newman walked into Rouen Cathedral and underwent a spiritual experience. Leaving the cathedral, he walked along the quay contemplating taking a train to Paris although he had no documents and would almost certainly have been recaptured. Suddenly he was approached from behind by a man with a little girl who asked him if he was English. Incredibly it appears that the man knew that Newman had escaped from Sotteville. He led Newman to a café where he was introduced to a group of Gaullists who gave him wine and hospitality. The man, Bernard Pigeon and his daughter Paulette told Newman that he was safe and later they took him to their home. Newman by this time had been travelling aimlessly since his escape a week earlier, but he was to spend the next six weeks with this family while new identity papers were created for him. He adopted the identity of Henri Boseaux a male nurse travelling South to visit his sick mother and he was given a rail ticket to Chatterault. Eleven locals accompanied him to the station for an emotional send off. Initially, Newman had difficulty in finding the demarcation line between occupied and unoccupied France, and when his initial contact did not materialise, he went to Tours to meet a friend of one Tony de Salis whom he had met at the camp in Rouen. Newman eventually located the contact in a bookshop and presented his letter of introduction to the friend, a M Blois. On enquiring as to the location of the demarcation line, Blois told him to take a bus to La Haye Descartes about 50 km away and gave Newman money. Newman took the bus and alighted before it reached its destination as he had been advised and knocked on the door of a local farmhouse and was again given hospitality. The hostess knowing that he was an English escapee gave him directions to Descartes and arranged a rendezvous with another of her colleagues. Helped by a network of courageous locals, Newman crossed into free France in the back of a lorry behind some drums covered with empty sacks. He was now able to travel to Toulouse and on to Marseilles with a view to getting out of France to Spain. Through yet more contacts, he was introduced in Marseilles to a Red Cross worker who was running the PAT line ²⁴ an established escape route for POWs into Spain via The Pyrenees organised from a fifth-floor apartment on the Quai de Rive – Neuve in East Marseilles. Newman eventually crossed the Pyrenees and entered Spain. He was taken to the British Embassy in Madrid where, at a drinks reception for escaped officers, he was reunited with Airey Neave who had been driven from Barcelona in a Bentley. The two men travelled back to the United Kingdom together. From the embassy in Madrid, they were driven by motor-coach to Gibraltar then sailed by troopship to Gourrock on the Clyde arriving 13 May 1942 (Figure 2) and finally by train to Glasgow and onto London Euston by night train. Neave then describes their journey from London Liverpool Street railway station to the Essex village of Ingatestone on the last leg home where Newman had lived before the war and Neave’s parents still lived. Neave relates that ‘We two, at the close of our great adventure were unable to grasp that we were home’. ²⁵ Neave’s father was on the platform to greet his returning son but sadly Newman’s father had died just a week earlier. Unfortunately, there are no records of any conversations between the two men, but they remained friends and subsequently met on several occasions throughout their lives. ²⁶ OPEN IN VIEWER

Newman had been a prisoner of war for a total of 20 months. For his services at Dunkirk, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order and the Military Cross on 16 June 1942. ²⁷ For the next two years, he was posted to several military hospitals in England and in Shaftesbury he met his future wife Anne Elizabeth Basset (1920–1991) then a Sister in the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service Reserve and the eldest child of the Rector of Foxearth, Suffolk, where they married on 7 October 1943 in a ceremony performed by her father. ²⁸

In June 1944, Newman returned to Europe with the British Liberation Army and after D-Day went on to serve in Bayeux, Rouen, Antwerp, Lille, Ghent, Iserlohn and Munster.

He never forgot the selfless bravery of those people and members of the French Resistance whom he met on his way home and with whom for many years kept in close contact. He was reunited with the Pigeon family in Rouen in September 1944, having dinner with them at Café Lorraine. The Newman family met up with them again in 1956 during a French camping family holiday and Newman attended the wedding of Paule one of the Pigeon children in 1987.One of Newman’s sons, Anthony visited Paule’s sister Lucie in 1996 shortly before she died. ²⁶

The prisoner of war mentality

During his time as a prisoner of war, Newman studied the psychological and behavioural reactions of his fellow officers to incarceration. He became aware that some of them might need special support on their return to civilian life. His observations on and proposals for the subsequent management of these men were published in the British Medical Journal in September 1944 in The Prisoner of War Mentality. ²⁹

Newman proposed that prisoners of war exhibited a four stage behavioural response to captivity, namely:

Stage I: the breaking-in period

In Stage 1, the psychological effects of incarceration were most acute due in part to the abrupt transition ‘from the pleasant life of a pseudo-peacetime Army into the grip of Nazi persecution’. This stage was associated with a longing for freedom, for home and security, female society and sympathy. This last desire never deserted the captive and remained until the day of repatriation when ‘it crops up in different ways’. ³⁰

Stage 2 marked the recovery of morale. The prisoner now realises that there was a future and comes to terms with his situation, taking more care and pride in his appearance and shaving, undressing when going to bed, talking intelligently and being more organised. He makes himself a miniature home and displays photographs of loved ones or will keep a pipe or favourite book to hand. He develops a sense of revenge and becomes frustrated as there appears little that can be done to assuage it.

Stage 3 marks the period of lengthy boredom. Uncertainty as to the duration of incarceration becomes a major negative feature. Newman argued that it was sexual deprivation in the wider context because of the absence of female company that was the fundamental factor in the formation of the prisoner-of-war attitude. There developed a deep-seated fear of becoming a forgotten man, relieved of the necessity to work or have family responsibilities. Conversation becomes trivial and interest focuses on the small events of camp life. Newman posited that prisoners who did not make use of their time planning escape, engaging in welfare activity for their colleagues or otherwise working were storing up trouble for later life.

Stage 4 was concerned with the syndrome of behaviour on repatriation. Newman anticipated that only a small proportion of prisoners of war would show any signs of long-term psychological damage after return to civilian life, but he proposed such things as rehabilitation centres, information leaflets and ex-servicemen clubs in each town to facilitate reintegration into civilian life.

Newman’s paper has become something of a classic in the now well-established literature on military post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).^31–35

Return to civilian life

After the war, Newman returned to The Middlesex Hospital where he was appointed Consultant Surgeon in May 1946 succeeding Blundell Bankart and also appointed to The Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital at Stanmore in 1946. The Institute of Orthopaedics had been created in 1946 and in 1948 Professor Herbert Seddon (1903–1977) was appointed part time director of studies at the Institute and Clinical Director of the Hospital and became a close colleague of Newman. In 1952, Newman was appointed Secretary of The British Orthopaedic Association eventually to become President in 1976.

Newman specialised in spinal and hip surgery. He developed with others a classification system for spondylolisthesis which became internationally recognised and authored numerous papers in orthopaedic surgery.^36–42

In May 1960, Newman recorded a spoken account of his war time exploits in a BBC interview now held in the archives of The Imperial War Museum London where copies of his diary papers are also lodged. ⁴³

In June 1962, Newman operated with Seddon on a fractured neck of femur sustained by Sir Winston Churchill in a fall in the Hotel de Paris, Monte Carlo following repatriation to The Middlesex Hospital. ⁴⁴

Seddon’s operating notes in his personal papers reveal that Newman performed the operation with Seddon assisting a fact which had surprised Anthony Montague Browne (1923–2013), Churchill’s private secretary when Seddon told him that ‘Newman will do the operation twice as well as I can’ showing that Seddon acknowledged Newman’s superior skill in trauma surgery honed during his war time experiences. ⁴⁵ Churchill’s gratitude to Newman was shown by his gift of an inscribed silver salver specially commissioned from Asprey’s the Royal silversmiths and a box of 15 cigars. ⁴⁶

Newman retired from clinical practice in 1976 the year in which he also received the CBE to live with his wife in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, where he played golf, sailed and was active in the local St Johns Ambulance service. In 1983, he wrote his war time memoirs Safer than a Known Way, ⁴⁷ recently republished as Over the Wire. ⁴⁸

Phillip Newman died on 31 December 1994 ironically after sustaining a fractured neck of femur following a fall. ⁴⁹

Anthony Montague Browne felt that Newman had perhaps not received the recognition that was his due as Churchill’s surgeon. ⁵⁰ However, Newman’s contribution to the war effort has been acknowledged both in a three-part BBC dramatized documentary Dunkirk ⁵¹ released in 2004 and in the book Dunkirk, Fight to the Last Man. ⁵²