93583 Lieutenant Charles Noel JANSON, 1 Welsh Guards: POW

Personal Number: 93583 [on WO 416 "7474"]
Rank: Lieutenant
Name: Charles Noel JANSON
Unit: Welsh Guards

Date of Birth: 25 December 1917
Place of Birth: London

Date of Capture: 29 May 1940
Place of Capture: Near Dunkirk, France

POW Number: 574
POW Camps: Oflag VIIC, Oflag VIB, Oflag VIIB, Stalag VIIA


London Gazette : 27 June 1939
https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/34640/page/4353/data.pdf
The undermentioned to be 2nd Lts. 28th June 1939: —
FOOT GUARDS
W . G'ds.—
Charles Noel JANSON (late Cadet Corpl., Eton Coll. Contgt., O.T.C.).

London Gazette : 28 June 1949
https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/38651/supplement/3177/data.pdf
FOOT GUARDS.
Lt. C. N. JANSON (93583) from Supp. Res. of Offrs., to be (Lt., 28th June 1949, with seniority 1st Jan. 1941.

 

Name: Charles Noel Janson . Date of Birth: 25 December 1917 . Place of Birth: London... | The National Archives
Reference: WO 416/195/172
Name: Charles Noel Janson.
Date of Birth: 25 December 1917.
Place of Birth: London.
Service: British Army.
Rank: Lieutenant.
Regiment/Unit/Squadron: Welsh Guards.
Service Number: 7474.
Date of Capture: 29 May 1940.
Theatre of Capture: Dunkirk.
Camp Name/Number: Oflag VII C, Laufen.
PoW number: 574.
Date of Death: [unspecified].
Number of Photographs: 0.
Number of Fingerprints: 0.
Number of X-rays: 0.
Number of Cards: 1.

 

View Record Janson Charles Noel 25 Dec 1917 May 1939 29 May 1940 Near Dunkirk

via Ancestry

PART I.
GENERAL QUESTIONNAIRE FOR BRITISH/AMERICAN EX-PRISONERS OF WAR.

1. No. -
RANK - LIEUTENANT
SURNAME - JANSON
CHRISTIAN NAMES - CHARLES NOEL
DECORATIONS -

2. UNIT (ARMY) - 1 BN WELSH GUARDS

3. DIVISION (ARMY) - G.H.Q. TROOPS, B.E.F., FRANCE

4. DATE OF BIRTH - DEC. 25 1917

5. DATE OF ENLISTMENT - MAY 1939 (S.R.)

6. CIVILIAN TRADE OR PROFESSION - Certificate of Proficiency in RUSSIAN, SCHOOL OF SLAVONIC STUDIES

7. PRIVATE ADDRESS - 16 WILTON CRESCENT, LONDON S.W.1

8. PLACE AND DATE OF ORIGINAL CAPTURE - Near DUNKIRK, MAY 20 1940

9. WERE YOU WOUNDED WHEN CAPTURED? - NO

10. MAIN CAMPS OR HOSPITALS IN WHICH IMPRISONED
Camp No. / Location / From / Till
OFLAG VIIC LAUFEN, BAYERN JUNE 1940 - SEP. 1941
OFLAG VIB DUSSEL, WESTPHALIA SEPT. 1941 - SEP. 1942
OFLAG VIIB EICHSTATT, BAYERN SEP. 1942 - APRIL 1945
STALAG VIIA MOOSBURG, BAYERN APRIL 1945


11. WERE YOU IN A WORKING CAMP?
Location / From/ Till / Nature of Work
-

12. DID YOU SUFFER FROM ANY SERIOUS ILLNESSES WHILE A P/W?
Nature of Illness / Cause / Duration
-
12 b. DID YOU RECEIVE ADEQUATE MEDICAL TREATMENT?
-


GENERAL QUESTIONNAIRE PART II TOP SECRET

1. No. -
RANK - LIEUT.
SURNAME - JANSON
CHRISTIAN NAMES - CHARLES NOEL


2. LECTURES before Capture:
( a ) Were you lectured in your unit on how to behave the event of capture? (State where, when and by whom).
NO
( b ) Were you lectured on escape and evasion? (State where, when and by whom.
YES IN FRANCE IN 1940 by an ex POW (1914-1918)

3. INTERROGATION after capture:
Were you specially interrogated by the enemy? (State where, when and methods employed by enemy).
NO

4. ESCAPES attempted:
Did yo make any attempted or partly successful escapes? (Give details of each attempt accurately, stating where, when, method employed, names of your companions, wherein when recaptured and by whom. Were you physically fit? What happened to your companions?)
FIRST ATTEMPT A TUNNEL AT VIIC OCTOBER 1940 - JUNE 1941 under the command of Lt.-Col. SIMPSON, D.L.I. unsuccessful.
Other minor attempts.


5. SABOTAGE
Did you do any sabotage or destruction of enemy factory plant, war material, communications, etc, when employed on working-parties or during escape? (Give details, places and dates.)
NO

6. COLLABORATION with enemy:
Do you know of any British or American personnel who collaborated with the enemy or in any way helped the enemy agains other Allied Prisoners of War? (Give details, names of persons concerned, camps, dates and nature of collaboration or help given to enemy).
NO

7. WAR CRIMES
If you have any information or evidence of bad treatment by the enemy to yourself or to others, or knowledge of any enemy violation of Geneva Convention you should ask for a copy of "Form Q" on which to make your statement.
(NOTE: Form Q is a separate form inviting information on "War Crimes" and describes the kind of offences coning under this title.)



GENERAL QUESTIONNAIRE PART II TOP SECRET
(continued)

8. Have you any other matter of any kind you wish to bring to notice?
NO


SECURITY UNDERTAKING
I fully realise that all information relating the matters covered by the questions in Part II. are of a highly secret and official nature.

I have had explained to me and fully understand that under Defence Regulations or U.S.A.R. 380-5 I am forbidden to publish or communicate any information concerning these matters.

Date MAY 4 [1945]
Signature C.N. Janson, Lieut.

 

See also:

• Person Page
  
• Charles Noel Janson b. Dec 1917 d. 15 Jun 2006: Our Douglas Family History
  
• Charles Janson
• Charles Janson
  
• "Charles Janson, who died on June 15 aged 88, was a foreign correspondent who founded two influential newsletters, one on Africa, the other on the Soviet Union; a poet; translator (mainly from Russian); musician and philanthropist.
  
  As the husband for 60 years of Elizabeth, Countess of Sutherland, he played a large part in running one of Scotland's largest estates, including the vast turreted castle of Dunrobin, on the north-east coast. As a publisher and editor, his most notable achievements were the creation of Africa Confidential in 1960 and of The Soviet Analyst in 1972.
  
  The former remains the authoritative source of news and analysis of African affairs; the latter, at first co-edited by Robert Conquest, relentlessly exposed the mendacity and vacuous ideology of the Soviet Union's rulers, winning plaudits from such dissident s as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov and Vladimir Bukovsky.
  
  Charles Noel Janson was born on Christmas Day 1917, to Wilfred Janson, a prominent City man whose family had become Lloyds underwriters in 1803. Young Charles was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, where music and languages were his forte.
  
  Commissioned into the Welsh Guards at the approach of the Second World War, he was captured with much of the British Expeditionary Force in north-west France in 1940. He spent the remaining five years of the war in prisons in Germany, mainly in Bavaria, where he learnt Russian from some emigré fellow prisoners, dug tunnels without himself escaping, and managed, bizarrely, to acquire a piano.
  
  Soon after his release, he married, in 1946, Elizabeth Leveson-Gower, daughter of the late Lord Alistair Leveson-Gower and niece of the childless George (Geordie), fifth Duke of Sutherland. Had she been a boy, she would have become the sixth duke after her uncle's death in 1963. But she did inherit the Sutherland earldom, Scotland's oldest (dating from 1235), and her uncle's vast Sutherland estates, including Dunrobin, Britain's northernmost great castle, with its 189 rooms and commanding view across the Dornoch Firth.
  
  Soon after his marriage, Janson became The Economist's correspondent in Paris, where he also wrote occasionally for The Sunday Times, answering to its then foreign manager, Ian Fleming.
  
  Writing a weekly dispatch to London in longhand and sending it by post, he won a reputation as one of the most insightful observers of the Fourth Republic and the antics of its many short-lived prime ministers; Janson's French was so good that he was often assumed to be a native.
  
  He befriended French intellectuals of the Atlanticist right - a rare breed at the time - such as Raymond Aron and Alain Besançon. The Duke of Windsor was his wife's godfather; he polished his Russian in conversations with his stepfather-in-law, Egor von Osten Driesen, an emigré Russo-Baltic baron.
  
  Near the end of his five-year stint for The Economist, Janson paid his first visit to Russia, staying for more than a month with Sir William Hayter at the embassy across the river from the Kremlin and sending a batch of dispatches predicting the difficulties of Khrushchev and Bulganin in the aftermath of Stalin's death.
  
  He then made his first forays into Africa, partly inspired by his life-long friend, Laurens van der Post, the writer and explorer. He visited Sudan, Congo, Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania, forging a close friendship with Michael (later Sir Michael) Wood, founder of a flying doctors' service which evolved into the Nairobi-based African Medical and Research Foundation.
  
  The Woods were leading lights in the Capricorn Society, a movement that inspired Janson with its aim of creating multi-racial harmony and political partnership between blacks and whites. After further trips to Northern and Southern Rhodesia (later Zambia and Zimbabwe) as well as South Africa, Janson realised that black nationalists, emboldened by Harold Macmillan's "wind of change", wanted unfettered power rather than partnership.
  
  Backed by other British figures in the Capricorn Society, Janson started a newsletter entitled Africa 1960, hoping to "make people take Africa seriously". After changing its title yearly until Africa 1967, it was renamed Africa Confidential, retaining a similar format on blue paper until the present day.
  
  Janson set its tone for sympathetic yet fearless reportage and analysis. He was quick to spot, for instance, at a time when most Africanists were still enthralled by him, that Ghana's charming leader, Kwame Nkrumah, would become a deluded despot, and that Tanzania's plausible leader, Julius Nyerere, then a friend of the Woods, would also bankrupt his country with his rigid collectivist Utopianism known as ujamaa. Janson left as editor in 1963.
  
  The Soviet Analyst gained a similar reputation for exposing the machinations of Soviet rulers, airing the activities of dissidents who might otherwise have disappeared into oblivion.
  
  It exposed a hitherto successful campaign by the Soviet disinformation network to blame Aids on an American biological warfare experiment - a canard that had been widely believed in the Third World. It also argued forcefully, when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985 with the apparent intention of giving Soviet communism a human face, that the Soviet system was utterly unreformable. Mrs Thatcher read The Soviet Analyst attentively when preparing herself to "do business" with Gorbachev in 1986.
  
  Janson was an ardent admirer of the dissident Soviet satirist Alexander Zinoviev, translating several of his works, such as Homo Sovieticus, and helping him when he fled into exile in 1978. Janson was much saddened when Zinoviev, after his return to Russia in 1999, made a remarkable volte face, becoming a nationalistic admirer of Stalin and Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic.
  
  A kind-hearted and sensitive man, Janson was nostalgic for an era of honour and chivalry that he knew had long gone. "It has been a pig of a century," he wrote.
  
  An accomplished player of the piano, harpsichord and clavichord, he was perhaps happiest listening to music in the House of Tongue, overlooking a sea loch on the north-west side of Sutherland, where he and his wife lived for many years, or at his retreat on Elba.
  
  Charles Janson is survived by Lady Sutherland, a daughter and two sons, the elder of whom, Alistair, Lord Strathnaver, born in 1947, is heir to the Sutherland earldom. Another son predeceased him."