Our knowledge of Peter Johnson stems only from the memory of a local historian, the late Joe Mière, who met Johnson during the German Occupation. There were some key features about Johnson that stuck in Mière’s memory: he was Australian; his job was to saw timber; he was deaf and mute; and he was involved in an accident at work in which his thumb was cut off.
There is one major flaw: no record of any sort has ever been found for anyone with the name Peter Bruce Johnson. Both I and Paul Sanders, historian and author of The Ultimate Sacrifice, have reached the same conclusion: namely, that Mière must have remembered Johnson’s name incorrectly. No person of that name had a Jersey registration card, and no person of that name has a record in the International Tracing Service, which both of us have searched.
If Mière got the name wrong, were other details of the story wrong?
Last week I was contacted by Joanne McAuliffe in Australia, grand-daughter of Australian Thomas Patrick Nelson, a man deported from Jersey for theft during the Occupation. However, her family records clearly show that Nelson was living under an alias: his real name was Thomas John Nanson and he was born in the UK, although moved to Australia as a child.
Nanson lived a double life, it seems. Having returned to the UK as a young adult after spending his formative years in Australia, he married his first wife. A few years later, after getting in trouble with the law on several occasions during the 1930s, he came to Jersey under a new name and place of birth. Was this to escape a turbulent past, a failed marriage, and even another criminal conviction?
Nelson/Nanson claimed to have been born in Australia. Like Peter Johnson, he was also deaf, having lost his hearing as a consequence of serving in the Royal Artillery in the 1920s. His job at the time of his deportation was, like Peter Johnson, sawing timber. However, he appeared to have all fingers and thumbs intact and there is no memory in his family of any scars.
But that cannot be entirely true: his prison records from Fort de Villeneuve Saint-Georges Prison, on the outskirts of Paris, record his distinguishing marks in 1944, when he entered the prison. Nelson/Nanson is recorded as having multiple marks of an unidentified kind on his hands and forearms. This seems consistent with a recent entanglement with an industrial wood-cutting machine.
When Nanson/Nelson was deported from Jersey with a five-month sentence in March 1944 (incidentally, the same year that Peter Johnson was supposed to have been deported), he was first was sent to Saint-Lô Prison. He arrived in Villeneuve on 13 April 1944 and was kept imprisoned for four months, alongside a number of other Islanders including Geoffrey Delauney, Stanley Green, Walter Dauny and John Soyer (whose name also appears on the Lighthouse memorial dedicated to the Jersey 21). The men had to carry out forced labour, clearing bomb damage and digging up unexploded bombs in the outskirts of Paris, near the prison.
Unlike the others, Delaunay and Nelson/Nanson were fortunate enough to still be in Villeneuve at the time of its liberation by American forces. They were invited by members of the French Resistance to come into the centre of Paris to witness Charles de Gaulle march through the city to declare its official liberation.
After this exciting period, crucially, Nelson/Nanson did not return to Jersey. In this respect, he is like Walter Dauny, who was also found a few years ago to have survived Villeneuve and the war, and whose name was then removed from the Lighthouse memorial.
Nelson/Nanson was repatriated to the UK. He spent a while in London recuperating. His family in Australia understand that he lost his memory and needed to be cared for during this period. However, he recovered and returned to Australia in late 1945. He married again and had three children.
Was Nelson/Nanson the man that Joe Mière remembered as Peter Bruce Johnson, and who is assumed (on very scanty – and certainly not archival – evidence) to have died in Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp?
Let us review the evidence: both men were Australian. Both men were deaf and sawed timber for a living. One man had an accident at work and seriously damaged his hand; the other had multiple marks on his hands and forearms when he entered prison.
On the other hand, Nelson/Nanson was not mute, although his deafness may have caused him to be extremely quiet given that he was unable to hear anything anyone said to him. The two names are not the same, although Nelson/Nanson and Johnson are not miles apart (especially when we remember that Nanson’s middle name was John). We have already come to the conclusion that Peter Johnson must be an incorrect name due to the lack of archival evidence for anyone of that name.
So, was Peter Bruce Johnson really Thomas John Nanson? It seems very likely indeed. The two stories are too close to be coincidence. But can we be completely sure?
The truth is that we will probably never know. While very good records survive for Thomas Nanson/Nelson, nothing at all survives for Peter Johnson. We have nothing to compare Nanson/Nelson’s story with, other than Joe Mière’s memory.
What do you think?
- Gilly Carr invites readers to contact her if they have any memories or family stories of Peter Johnson or Thomas Nelson to share. She can be contacted on gcc20@cam.ac.uk.
