Alan Mackay

Published on Monday 10 November 2008 21:15

Journalist and PoW in 'Great Escape' camp Born: 5 November, 1920, in Dundee. Died: 23 October, 2008, in Dunfermline, aged 87

THE first time Alan Mackay's Wellington bomber was shot down, returning from a bombing raid over Germany on 11 February, 1941, he managed to land in Suffolk, ploughing up three fields but saving himself and his crew. A month later, the 20-year-old Fifer was not so lucky. His brand-new "Wimpy" (Wellington) was downed by Nazi gunners over north Africa on its way to support the "Desert Rats" of the Eighth Army. Captured by the Germans on a beach near Benghazi, Libya, he spent the next four years in prisoner-of-war camps, including Stalag Luft III, site of the "Great Escape", made famous in the 1963 film starring Steve McQueen.

Mackay had been a trainee journalist before the war, working for D C Thomson's People's Journal in Aberdeen for ten shillings (50p) a week, but his captivity forced him to complete his training in somewhat unusual fashion. To counter "duff gen" – false news or rumours among his fellow "Kriegies" (the nickname they took from the German Kriegsgefangener, or prisoner of war) – he launched his own newspaper. Its first edition, handwritten and as yet untitled, appeared on a camp wall on 15 February, 1943 under a note of optimism: "313 days to Christmas".

The newsletter quickly became the Daily Recco, partly to sound like one of Scotland's most popular papers, but also because it was based on Mackay's reconnaissance of issues of interest to the PoWs. Pinned up outside its "editorial offices" – Block 42N, Stalag Luft III, near the Polish town of Sagan – the Recco was an immediate success. Until it was banned by the Germans later in the war, Mackay reckoned it was "the only free press in Nazi-occupied Europe".

Eventually produced on a typewriter, the paper covered serious news about the progress of the war, gleaned from radio reports, German newspapers and new prisoners, as well as a letters column, classified ads ("Wanted: knitting needles for cigarettes"), chess puzzles and even information on the activities of the camp's Caledonian Society. With no access to meteorological information, it carried a box recording "Yesterday's weather – Max 65F, Min 30F".

Mackay had been transferred to another camp, Stalag Luft VI in Heydekrug, now part of Lithuania, when the great escape from Stalag Luft III took place in March 1944, but he was still publishing the Recco, and it ran the German statement about the escape, claiming 47 officers had been shot resisting arrest. Mackay and his fellow prisoners knew they must have been executed, as portrayed in the movie.

Towards the end of the war, Mackay was in another camp, Fallingbostel, near the concentration camp of Belsen. With British, American and Soviet troops advancing on all sides, and allied fighters and bombers in action, he and his fellow Kriegies were placed on a forced, zigzag march as human shields for their fleeing Nazi guards. Weighed down by bundles of all 69 issues of his pride and joy, the Recco, Mackay was forced to leave them with a German farmer's wife, who turned out to be South African. When American fighter planes fired on their group, Mackay and a couple of PoWs decided to make a run for it. With the Germans in disarray, they commandeered an abandoned open-top Nazi Mercedes staff car, reached British lines, drove all the way to Brussels and got "plastered". Soon he was back home in Broughty Ferry.

Later, in 1945, a cousin of his who was involved in the Nuremberg war crimes trials traced the German farm and the South African hausfrau, and retrieved the copies of the Recco intact. They are now held by the RAF Museum in Hendon, north London, and feature prominently in Mackay's 1998 memoir 313 Days to Christmas (Argyll Publishing).

Alan Mackay was born in Dundee and went to the city's Harris Academy before joining D C Thomson as a junior sub- editor until war broke out. He joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve and learned to fly in Tiger Moth aircraft from Scone aerodrome. In his memoir, he recalled "buzzing" a football match in Broughty Ferry to impress his father in the crowd.

After the war, he returned to journalism and covered events in Fife for nearly 40 years, first as a staff reporter for the Daily Record, where he was known for supporting the underdog and the voiceless in his column under the nom de plume "Alan Adair – frank but fair", and another titled "Mr Miner" in support of Glenrothes miners.

His popularity led to his being "poached" by the Scottish Daily Express, where he flourished until setting up, with a friend, his own news agency, the Fife Press Service, serving major newspapers in Scotland and sometimes down south.

After retirement, although increasingly losing his sight, he spent his time painting, making pottery, dyeing silk scarves (which he gave as Christmas presents to friends and family), growing his own herbs, making marmalade and rattling off The Scotsman crossword to try to win another pen. He also enjoyed playing golf, having a pint in the Harbour Bar, Kircaldy, marching with his daughter against the war in Iraq and "travelling the land looking for the tastiest bridie".

For the past 15 years, he was also a devoted carer for his wife, Margaret.

Alan Mackay is survived by Margaret, children Ronnie and Alison and sister Moira.