Churchill Sent Italian POWs to Orkney. The Chapel They Built There Is Still Standing

In January 1942 a shipload of Italian prisoners came ashore in Orkney, into a treeless place at the top of Britain, to build causeways across the channels where a German submarine had sunk a battleship with eight hundred and thirty-five men aboard. They were told the work was military. Under the Geneva Convention they could refuse it, and they did — and then they were fed on a punishment ration until they went back. And in the middle of that, given one hut and their own free time, they built the Italian Chapel: a Gothic front of concrete and scrap bolted onto a corrugated iron hut, painted inside to look like a stone cathedral, with an iron screen forged from scrap and a candlestick made from the brass of a wrecked ship. It is still standing. Around a hundred thousand people a year go to see it, and Mass is still said there. WHAT IS DOCUMENTED • The National Record of the Historic Environment, NRHE ID 2380 — the surveyors' own account of the building, not a retelling • HMS Royal Oak, torpedoed at anchor 14 October 1939, 835 dead; she is a designated war grave and diving on her is prohibited • Churchill's order to close the eastern approaches; four barriers, roughly 250,000 tonnes of rock and 66,000 concrete blocks • Around 1,200 Italian prisoners on the barrier works, in Camp 60 on Lamb Holm and Camp 34 on Burray • The strike over military work, and the ration that followed it • Domenico Chiocchetti, a church decorator in civilian life, who painted the sanctuary; Giuseppe Palumbi, who forged the screen; Giovanni Pennisi; Domenico Buttapasta, the concrete man • Chiocchetti returned in 1960 to restore it, and again in 1964 with his wife Maria • Camp 34 on Burray had a chapel too, decorated by its own men. It was pulled down. This one survives because the islanders formed a preservation committee in 1958 and have looked after it ever since WHAT IS NOT Nothing in this film has an invented protagonist. Every person named is in the record, which is unusual for this channel and worth saying: the Camp 60 story did not need one. Where the film shows a man whose name is not known — a prisoner arriving, a man at the concrete, a face in a queue — he is anonymous by design and is never given a name or paired with one. IMAGES Most frames in this film are reconstructions, generated for it and built to the detail in period photographs. They are not archive footage and are declared as synthetic. These photographs are real, and are in the public domain: • Italian prisoners taken at Bardia, 6 January 1941 — Capt. G. Keating, No 1 Army Film & Photographic Unit • Italian prisoners at El Alamein, 1942 — British Official Photo BO-BM-16010, US Library of Congress • The Home Fleet at Scapa Flow, April 1942 — U.S. Navy • Camp barbers in an Italian POW camp in England, 1945 — Ministry of Information, IWM D 26755 These photographs are used under Creative Commons licences: • Churchill Barrier No 2 by Russel Wills, July 1995, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Geograph and Wikimedia Commons — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... • Block ship, Scapa Flow, by John Haslam, 2008, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... • The Italian Chapel from the rear, by Bruno, CC BY 2.0 • The Italian Chapel from the west, by WeeHolly, CC BY-SA 4.0 • Moulds used to cast the barrier blocks, by Peter Turner, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Geograph #ww2 #prisonersofwar #orkney #orkneyislands #scapaflow #italianhistory #powcamps #ww2history #postwarbritain #britishhistory CHAPTERS 0:00 The battleship going over 2:58 The casting yard 5:49 Who was already living there 8:48 Roll-call in the dark 11:44 The roads are real 14:35 Relations improved 17:28 A hut, handed over 20:21 Corned beef tins 23:12 The same hands, twice 26:15 Where the name might be 29:09 Nobody made them 32:10 Set out at length