By Eilidh Dorgan, Sunbury Resident
The “Medium-Sized Man” Dominic Bruce, 5 ‘3, was a war hero, Houdini hobbyist, and all-around cheeky chap who lived in Blakesley Lodge, Green Street, Sunbury. Born in Durham County in 1915, Bruce has come to be best known for his seventeen attempted escapes from POW camps in WWII. Of all of these attempts, his greatest hits include: picking the lock of his and his friend’s solitary confinement cells to play poker, dressing up in German uniform to slink out of capture, and contorting himself into an unimaginable shape to fit into a box meant for prisoners’ ‘excess possessions (I cannot imagine that they had many to begin with, so what the excess could have been is anyone’s guess). Of all of his escape attempts, the latter was the most successful as he was able to untangle himself from the box once in a storage room and, using a makeshift rope made from bed sheets tied together fled the prison through a window, after leaving a note in German to let the guards know that he was not best pleased with his present living circumstances and was leaving in search of greener pastures. Bruce then stole a bike and managed to travel over four hundred miles from the camp before being caught trying to stow away on a Swedish Freighter.
During his travels via stolen bike, Bruce was able to create a little bit of mischief as he passed by marching British soldiers being guarded by Germans and shouted words of encouragement over to them, declaring that they were winning the war and to keep their heads up. The German soldiers were not best pleased by this, but when they turned to shoot the bodiless British voice, Bruce had already quickly steered himself and his stolen bike into safety while (probably) chuckling to himself heartily.
Throughout his imprisonment in WWII, Bruce was able to keep his spirits up by pranking others (rightfully so). With one of his most notorious pranks being inflicted upon a poor group of newly arrived inmates who were greeted by an alleged German doctor who, without inspection, immediately informed them that they were all covered in lice, ordered them to strip naked, and doused them with purple liquid of unknown origin and of smell foul. The new inmates later felt quite silly when they realised that they had been hoodwinked by a fellow British inmate and that they had allowed themselves to be covered in lavatory disinfectant mixed with purple paint.
Of all of his pranks, my personal favourite was when he successfully convinced Viscount Lascelles, cousin of King George V and a fellow inmate, that the average height of a person was 5’3, Bruce’s own height. Viscount Lascelles apparently believed this heartily and one can only imagine how baffling it must have been to him that he was apparently always in the company of above-average heighted and sometimes giant-sized people. Lascelles went on to believe this for quite a period of time until he rattled off this incorrect fact casually to another inmate who quickly linked it back to Bruce (he should have chosen a different height) – which then led to his nickname as “The Middle-Sized Man.”