CHANNEL Island journalists who were deported and imprisoned for continuing to share UK news during the Occupation are to honoured with a memorial plaque in Fleet Street.
Jerseyman Joseph Tierney and Guernsey reporter Joseph Gillingham both died in prison for conveying news which had not been authorised by German authorities.
They will be commemorated alongside Guernseyman Frank Falla, who survived the Occupation and later wrote “The Silent War” in 1967, which details how Channel Islands residents defied Nazi censorship by running clandestine channels of information and underground information services.
Mr Tierney used a retained radio set to record all the news he received, which he later distributed on news-sheets spread around St Helier and the Hospital. He was arrested on 3 March 1943 and initially kept as a prisoner in Jersey before being deported that September.
Mr Gillingham and Mr Falla both contributed to the newsletter GUNS – Guernsey Underground News Service. Mr Gillingham died a month after leaving Frankfurt am Main-Preungesheim and Naumburg concentration camps, while Mr Falla was a prisoner of German concentration camps.
The Chartered Institute of Journalists set up a fundraising appeal for the memorial plaque, which passed its target of £1,000. The plaque will be placed in the journalists’ church St Bride’s in Fleet Street, London.
The appeal came after work from Dr Gilly Carr, a Cambridge University academic who spent a decade uncovering the fate of Channel Islands residents during the Occupation.
Dr Carr’s research led to the 2016 BBC documentary Finding Our Fathers, which followed the discovery of where Mr Gillingham and Mr Tierney had been buried in Europe.
