Great Escapes: The story of MI9’s Second World War escape and evasion maps. Barbara Bond

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       Details from a selection of Bartholomew maps showing their symbology, level of detail, density of place names and scale information. They also show the problems for the user caused by show-through from the map printed on the other side of the fabric.

      A further map included in this series (but which had no identifying letter) was a General Map of Ireland, produced in two sheets, printed back-to-back. This was almost certainly the map mentioned in the records as ‘Shamrock’, 500 copies being printed on fabric on 16 February 1942. There was apparently some discussion about the position of internees in the Republic of Ireland since, under the Geneva Convention, internees were held until the end of the conflict. On 5 March 1943, in a MOST SECRET internal minute from MI9 to the Director of Intelligence, a discussion between Sir John Maffey, the British representative in Eire, and the Irish Government was reported. It concerned the possibility of faking the escape of British prisoners of war interned in the Curragh. The deal fell through, apparently because the Irish Government wanted fighter aircraft in exchange. Whether the internees might be encouraged to escape anyway was a moot point since there was the distinct possibility of political embarrassment. The fact that the General Map of Ireland was produced at all appears to bear testimony to the fact that MI9 prepared for the possibility of escape and it was certainly recorded in the War Diary that nine RAF officers escaped from the Curragh Camp in Eire on 25 June 1941. Three were recaptured and six reached England. MI9 apparently wrote a special SECRET report on the escape, but this has not been identified.

      Those sheets where surviving copies have been located in British record repositories and the various states in which the sheets were produced, either singly or in combination, are detailed in Appendix 1. A total of fifty-nine sheets have been identified in this initial group of the escape and evasion maps, of which over forty are clearly based on Bartholomew maps. Some of these carry the original Bartholomew job order number which has allowed them to be compared directly with the lithographic paper copy held in the company’s print archive now housed in the National Library of Scotland’s map collection in Edinburgh. Sixteen sheets which are believed to have been produced but for which no copies have been identified to date in British record repositories are listed in Appendix 2. This group is either noted on the print records, shown on adjacent sheets diagrams, represents gaps in the assumed consecutive numbering sequence or, in one case, has been spotted by a colleague at a map fair but no details were recorded.

       Summary of fabric maps presumed to be based on Bartholomew originals

       ◊ These are maps which are assumed to have been produced based on Bartholomew maps but for which neither copies nor related records have ever been found

       ◊ 16 sheets identified

       ◊ Coverage includes Europe, Scandinavia and parts of Africa

      For full details of the maps, see Appendix 2.

      By autumn 1942, there was an increasing awareness that the small-scale maps being issued to aircrew were regarded by them as too small-scale. The need for better maps at larger scales gained momentum and ‘a new series gained approval’. It is not clear what this new series was, but it is likely to have been the fabric versions of series GSGS 3982 (see the following section), as they started to be produced at that time, their earliest print dates being the late summer and autumn of 1942. At this stage valuable information about the Swiss frontier was also being incorporated into a map of the frontier area produced at 1:100,000 scale.