How I Researched 'Escape from Britain'

My grandfather travelled to the German colony of Tsingtao in 1898, aged just nineteen. He went there with his brother-in-law, a wealthy German industrialist who had recently married his sister, Amy, and he brought back a series of striking images taken on early photographic plates. The couple later continued on to San Francisco, where we believe they died in the earthquake of 1906. My grandfather would return to British India having visited Japan. That story is for another day...

Those daguerreotype photographs, and the stories my father passed down about my grandfather’s time as a volunteer officer in the German III Marine Seebataillon, stayed in my mind from childhood. Years later I encountered the extraordinary wartime account of Günther Plüschow, the Dragon Pilot of Tsingtao, and suddenly that fragment of family history felt connected to a much larger world.

I read Plüschow’s memoir, My Escape from Donington Hall, and even contributed some of my grandfather’s photographs to a later reprint. But when I began to study the story more closely, the inconsistencies became impossible to ignore. Parts of the narrative simply did not align with the known facts, and others conflicted with official documents, timelines and the practicalities of life in wartime Britain.

The deeper I went, the more contradictions emerged. Plüschow’s published memoir diverges sharply from his formal report. Some episodes appear stylised, simplified or too convenient to be literal truth. Basil Thomson, head of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, offered an intriguing clue. He believed Plüschow had stayed with a series of women, from former girlfriends to prostitutes, to avoid the compulsory registration required at hotels and guesthouses. This stands in direct opposition to Plüschow’s own insistence that he received no help while evading the police in London.

Practical difficulties also surface. Plüschow wrote that he disguised himself by darkening his hair with boot polish after seeing a wanted poster. Yet in 1915 most boot polish ran badly in rain, and meteorological records for London in May 1915 show days of almost continuous rainfall. Other elements, such as food purchased from non-existent workers’ unions or mysterious dining halls, seem more like literary shaping than lived experience. They may have been misremembered or deliberately obscured, but they do not quite hold together.

One of the greatest obstacles is that the most valuable evidence, the Scotland Yard files relating to foreign suspects, internal surveillance and wartime escapees, no longer exists. The Public Record Office depository was bombed during the Second World War and the records were destroyed. Without those documents, the truth of what Plüschow actually did in London will never be fully recoverable.

That is where the writer must turn detective. Escape from Britain was shaped by what could be verified: the surviving official accounts, newspaper reports, police practices of the era, the geography of London, and the broader political atmosphere of 1915. The missing pieces, the destroyed files, the silences and the contradictions, demanded imaginative reconstruction. Not invention for its own sake, but the careful assembling of what might have happened in the spaces where the evidence no longer survives.

The novel is not an attempt to diminish Plüschow’s brilliance or to highlight British propaganda. Plüschow lived and died long before the rise of Nazism. After the war he became a pioneering aviation explorer, ultimately losing his life in the 1920s in a flying accident in the wilds of Tierra del Fuego, a region he had first glimpsed years earlier while studying in the British Museum.

My aim was to take a remarkable episode of the First World War and, using everything the historical record still offers, rebuild the likely paths, encounters, hiding places and split-second decisions that followed his escape from Donington Hall. It is an attempt to reimagine a vanished story with respect for both fact and possibility.

The result is Escape from Britain, a novel shaped as much by what the archives reveal as by what they have lost.