Guernsey Deep Dive

Close your eyes and picture a silver shilling: cold, small, the king's profile staring up at you. Now imagine someone taking a file to that portrait, scrubbing the face away until nothing remains but a raised V — a tiny, defiant act that turned currency into clandestine courage. This episode follows Roy Machon, a projectionist from Guernsey, whose painstaking craft of turning coins into secret V-badges began as a delicate form of resistance and unraveled into a nightmare that almost erased him from history.

We start in Guernsey, 1941: an occupied island where whistling Beethoven's Fifth and chalked gestures kept hope alive. Roy and his friend Alf pushed farther — hundreds of shillings were clipped, filed, and transformed into hidden silver emblems worn under lapels, a handshake of trust in a community under siege. Their work was brilliant, dangerous, and ridiculously intimate: each badge required patience, secrecy, and a willingness to trade monetary value for symbolic life.

When betrayal came in June 1943, the glitter of metal filings on the workshop floor became a smoking gun. Arrest, solitary confinement, trial in a language he couldn’t understand — Roy’s courage collided with a brutal system that offered no mercy for small acts of defiance. A brief release, a farewell party that turned political in the eyes of occupiers, and a second arrest changed everything. What began as quiet resistance led Roy from civilian internment in Lauffin to the utter isolation of Munich’s Stadelheim Prison, where he discovered he was the only British inmate.

Stadelheim is described as an engineered cruelty. Eleven-hour days splicing steel cable — the same cables that moved Messerschmitt controls — brutal beatings for perceived slowness, and a calendar of terror where selections sent men away and soup on certain days carried the whispered horror that it contained the flesh of the executed. Roy protested that it was illegal to force prisoners to work on war material; he quoted the Geneva Convention. The answer was violence. Repeated blows left him permanently deaf in one ear and maimed the other. The machinery of oppression had not only stolen his freedom but also his hearing and his faith in human decency.

When his body finally collapsed in July 1944 he was sent back to camp hospital and, after liberation, home. But the war’s end was not the end of Roy’s struggle. He returned physically broken and psychologically scarred, living with deafness and a terror that freedom might be a trap. He marched publicly in Guernsey’s liberation parade wearing the V he had once carved, a public reclaiming of a symbol that had cost him so much — but privately he faced the most infuriating cruelty: bureaucracy.

In the 1960s he applied for compensation and was denied. Officials split legal hairs between ‘‘brutality’’ and ‘‘persecution,’’ demanding documentary proof that didn’t exist for a lone British prisoner in an obscure Munich jail. With no fellow inmates to corroborate his experience, testimony and injury were not enough. The state that had been his home refused to acknowledge the full scale of what had been done to him.

This episode is a deep dive into a story that resists tidy heroics. It’s about the power of a tiny, secret emblem and the vast, quiet cost that can follow when resistance happens without witnesses. Roy’s life asks us: what do we owe those whose suffering is lived in shadows and erased by paperwork? Listen as we trace a single shilling’s journey from palm to protest to prison, and consider how history remembers — and forgets — the silent acts that deserve to echo.