ABOUT 300 Colchester racing pigeons were involved in secret service work in Occupied Europe during the Second World War, a little-known fact faithfully reported in Hervey Benham’s book Essex at War which recorded what happened between 1939 and 1945.

This remarkable aspect of the war is described by Mr Benham as follows: “Let the pigeons’ part not be overlooked.

“Twenty-two Colchester pigeon fanciers played behind the scenes their part in the winning of the war.

“Prior to 1939 these men trained their birds for show purposes and for racing, but when in April 1943 a Special Section Carrier Pigeon Service was formed, efforts were wholeheartedly turned towards war.

“Mr Arthur A. Finch, of 12 Speedwell Road, Colchester, was appointed Pigeon Service Officer for the Colchester Section, and Colchester fanciers supplied approximately 300 birds for special secret service work in Occupied Europe.

“Several were used by the Maquis and gave the exact position of flying bomb sites.

“Several of the 300 birds never returned, many being wounded.”

The “Maquis” was the name given to members of the French Resistance against the Nazis. Pigeons would be smuggled into Occupied Europe in boxes dropped by parachute at pre-arranged locations.

These would be picked up by the Resistance who would then put messages in small containers fitted to the legs of pigeons which would then fly home to their loft in Britain, 22 of which were in Colchester.

The messages were then handed to the military authorities.

  • The rest of today’s “Out and About” is the first in a series over the next few weeks of snippets of local historic interest n Colchester was once one of the most important centres of Christian religion in England.

It was home to St John’s Abbey (built 1096), St Botolph’s Priory (1102), Crutched Friars (1240) and Grey Friars (1309).

n Catherine of Aragon, one of the six wives (1509-1533 when divorced) of Henry VIII, stayed at St John’s Abbey in 1515.

His fifth wife, Catherine Howard (1540-1541 when beheaded), had a family connection with Colchester, today’s Red Lion Hotel previously being a house lived in by the Howards.

There is also a suggestion that his sixth wife Catherine Parr (1541-47 who survived) owned a house at The Hythe.

  •  The present St Botolph’s Church was built in 1836.

The previous parish church, formerly part of St Botolph’s Priory, was destroyed in the Siege of Colchester in 1648 and for the next 188 years they had to hold services in other churches in the town.

An article in the Essex County Standard (published then on a Saturday) on 13th April 1912 said that until the Siege it was “the chief parish church of Colchester and was the one to which the Corporation went in state on Sundays and high days. But the siege reduced it to a ruin. Little has been done to preserve it since, and it is testimony to the good workmanship of its builders that even over 700 hundred years of use and disuse so little of its construction and fabric has decayed.”

  •  This year is the 900th anniversary of the consecration in 1116 of the first St Giles’ Church. The current building closed as a church in the mid-1950s and for many years was Colchester headquarters of St John Ambulance before about 40 years ago becoming a Masonic Hall.

This replaced the Masonic Hall, dedicated in 1902, in Abbeygate Street which was demolished because it was on the route of the Southway inner-relief road. The executed bodies of Royalist leaders Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George Lisle – from the 1648 Siege during the English Civil War – are buried in the church which is the only one in Colchester with a wooden tower.

  • The ornate mural on the ceiling in the Council Chamber of Colchester Town Hall was painted in 1901 by Mr Charles Baskett, Headmaster of the School of Art which was in what today is the Co-op Bank. The council refused to pay him on the grounds that he was employed by them already!

The foundations of arguably the oldest Christian church in Britain, from the closing era of the Roman occupation which ended in the 5th Century, are in Colchester. Find out where by coming on my New Year’s Day Walk, 10am Sunday, from the Arts Centre.