My name is STEFAN DE BATSELIER and I'm a professional photographer. Belgian born and London based, I make my living photographing rock bands, musicians for various magazines and record companies.

In the seventies,Belgian television showed a BBC series called "Colditz". Being twelve years old I got instantly hooked,just like many of my school friends. We all had the board game,the Action Man etc.
Of course I read the books written by Pat Reid on which the series was based. During the course of the next few years the profound interest and enthusiasm lessened
somewhat, but there was obviously something from that series which stayed with me over the
years. UK Gold showed the series again in 1996 and that brought it all back to me.
On a trip to Leipzig in August 1997 I suddenly remembered that the castle was only about 48 km
from there. I visited it and the interest and enthusiasm was aroused again.
This time I wanted to know more. Two years later, quite by accident, I found out about THE COLDITZ SOCIETY,joined them and went to one of their meetings in October 1999. Fascinating stuff. I took along my camera and photographed five ex-prisoners who attended that meeting. It was great meeting those people in the flesh as it were and hear their stories.

To cut a long story short...
I wrote a letter to Gris Davies-Scourfield with the request to visit and photograph him and to my surprise he phoned me last Wednesday(15-11-00) and invited me to lunch sometime("My wife's a very good cook")
I then decided to embark on a photographic project to try and photograph every survivor from
Colditz in the United Kingdom. Ultimately this could culminate in an exhibition and maybe, if a publisher is interested enough, become a "coffee table book".

Very ambitious indeed but you can only try.

To that purpose I wrote a letter to Kenneth Lockwood, secretary of the COLDITZ ASSOCIATION and himself an ex-prisoner. On Monday(21-11) I was very surprised to suddenly hear his voice on the other end of the phone.He was very enthousiastic about the whole thing and even suggested to get the Imperial War Museum
to host the Exhibition and maybe get publishers Hodder & Stoughton interested in doing a book. That got me very excited and there's no way back now. It has to be done. As Kenneth said"we aren't getting any younger". So it is very motivating to have his full support. He gave me the addresses of two people to start with.

The idea of this modest web site is to provide a kind of diary of the progress of this undertaking. I'll be doing this in my spare time and it'll involve criss-crossing the country. So basically it will take some time.

For people who happen to surf into this web site and have a passing interest in Colditz I'd like to say that there will be a lot of names mentioned here with whom you might not be familiar. I apologize that there isn't space and time to explain,so you'll have to refer to the Colditz literature to find out the details.

So here are the first four people on my list:

JOHN CHRISP (now 93). I think he's the oldest survivor.
JOHN HOGGARD
GRIS DAVIES-SCOURFIELD and PETER ALLAN
Pictures will be posted as soon as they are available.

Update 24th November 2000.

I spoke to John Chrisp on the phone. He's got to undergo a serious operation so he told me to phone him back in May 2001. I wish him all the best.
I also spoke to Gris Davies- Scourfield and we have pencilled in the 7th of December 2000 to do a photo session.

Update 25th November 2000
Just added a link"the photographs" and put some old photos on that page just to test it. I'm trying to get to grips with HTML as soon as possible as I can't control the lay-out and the look of the pages at the moment. But for now,it's better than nothing.

Update 27th November 2000
Spoke to John Hoggard and we'll be doing a photo session on the 13th of December.