It is a remarkable coincidence that at the same time the Gazette was recalling the amazing efforts of the law society at Oflag 79, a PoW camp in Germany during the Second World War, one of its members was getting in contact with Chancery Lane.

Robert King wanted to donate to the archives of the library the above picture of the camp's law society, which as it happens appeared, if rather grainily, in the August 1944 issue of the Gazette, possibly the first time this magazine ever reproduced a photograph.

Mr King is now 83 years old, and retired in the early 1990s, having been senior partner of leading Wolverhampton firm Manby & Steward, and a Law Society Council member from 1969 to 1987. He is also a past chairman of the Solicitors Benevolent Association. His is a war story that is not especially unusual, and as a result is perhaps all the more interesting to those of later generations.

He was studying law at Cambridge when he was called up, and was captured in 1943 while part of the force defending the island of Leros in the Dodecanese. Enemy intelligence found after the war revealed that the German invasion force expected to take the island in a day; in the event it took five, notwithstanding that the British had no air cover. Casualties were high, however. The First King's Own, of which Mr King was the three-inch-mortar officer, lost more than half of its officers, with 15 killed and four wounded.

The prisoners were ferried to the Greek mainland and marched to a temporary prison camp outside Athens. He says: 'My abiding memory is of marching below the terrace of the Hotel Grand Bretagne, watched by German officers eating their breakfast in the open air. I vowed there and then to return one day and drink in that renowned European hotel. I did, but it was 23 years later.'

Shortly afterwards, the soldiers spent two weeks in cattle trucks being transported to Germany by train; the conditions were poor and Mr King developed dysentery, from which he took some time to recover. Eventually he was transported to his first permanent camp, Oflag 8F on the Czech border.

What is striking to those who never experienced a PoW camp is how organised and almost routine life was, what Mr King says was known as forgetting the wire. There was a camp university, where prisoners could study virtually any subject, a theatre group; which put on JB Priestley's An Inspector Calls on the night Mr King arrived; a camp orchestra, night club and painting group. 'Life was not normal but there was an essence of normality,' he says. 'There was really nothing else to do.'

A secret radio was constructed, many parts of which were bought via foreign workers who were in and out of the camp every day. Each night at about six o'clock, a BBC news bulletin was read in each room. One reader would go around the camp while prisoners called stooges would stand guard. In the event of a guard approaching, the cry 'Goon up' would go out.

The camp was, he says, comparative luxury, with central heating and bearable accommodation. The bunks had loose slats in their bases, which had occasionally to be donated to shore up a tunnel being dug as an escape route. Mr King says there were, of course, detailed escape plans laid. Maps, false papers, foreign workers' clothes and money were put in place, but he knows of no successful escape from Oflag 8F.

In any case, before the tunnel was completed, they were moved again because of the advancing Russians, to Oflag 79 on the edge of Braunschweig. Crucially, the radio, nicknamed the canary, survived the journey, possibly secreted in Red Cross parcels. If this was the case, it would have been in breach of all of the undertakings given to both the Red Cross and the Germans, and would have had disastrous consequences if discovered.

Mr King says life at the new camp continued much as before. Various plays and other performances were put on, but for Mr King, a particular revue stays most in the memory. 'The final scene was a blacked-out Piccadilly Circus full of New Year revellers. Suddenly all the lights of Piccadilly, including the circulating windmill, went on. Even after 60 years, the impact of that scene is still with me. The effect on an audience that had not seen bright lights for nearly five years can be imagined.'

As 1944 progressed, however, conditions deteriorated, Mr King says. The German guards became more assertive and there were more spot checks and searches. The PoWs had a strategy to disrupt the twice-daily count of their number as much as possible without provoking dangerous situations. However, they had to take care; an Indian officer was shot dead for crossing the trip wire laid inside the perimeter fence while trying to retrieve a deck tennis quoit.

Simple tricks of deception proved to be the best. 'When an escape took place, it was not possible to disguise this for more than 48 hours. Thus if three chaps got out, the senior British officer would go to the German commandant after 46 hours and tell him that eight prisoners had escaped. Five would be secreted in the attics, so that at some future time five could be got out without being discovered missing.'

Mr King had been in no doubt that he wanted to become a lawyer. His indecision over which branch was solved after meeting fellow prisoners who were solicitors. The camp law society was already in full flood when he arrived at Oflag 8F and continued at Oflag 79. He recounts all manner of debates, from moots and mock arbitrations to a discussion as to whether, if a solicitor received a client at 12.30pm, he should offer a glass of sherry. Light-hearted camp disputes would be settled through a legal process; a writ would be drawn up and served and then pleadings would be drawn up and flying all over the place.

He had been studying at the camp law school since Oflag 8F for what was then the solicitors' intermediate examination. It came in two parts: law papers, and bookkeeping and trust accounts. Mr King was particularly keen to see off the latter as his law degree, if he ever got back to Cambridge, would give him an exemption from the law papers.

Initially, lectures were given by practitioners from memory, although textbooks began to arrive from the Law Society and individual practitioners through the Red Cross, which was also responsible for transporting examination papers. The Law Society had set special papers limited to the set books and law reports which were available to the PoWs, so there were no questions on recent developments in the law.

Six students sat the final exam and six the intermediate in late 1944. With the increasing chaos in Europe as the war moved towards an end, they were not hopeful that their papers would make it back to London, via Geneva, and indeed upon the soldiers' eventual return to London in April 1945, it transpired that they had not arrived. 'About a month later came the news that they had turned up and would be marked immediately, with the results published three weeks hence. We all passed.'

Mr King continues: 'That we did so was entirely due to the solicitors and barristers in the camp who were prepared to give lectures and tutorials, often without the benefit of adequate resources and in adverse conditions. Our debt to them was great because for many of us, it meant that we could continue to pursue a career in law after five or more years.' 

As the end of the war approached, conditions in the camp became more bleak. With just half a Red Cross parcel a week, food was increasingly scarce and Mr King says hunger had a curious effect. 'We would become obsessed with anything to do with food. It was not unusual for someone to be unable to sleep at night because he could not get his mind off, say, a bacon sandwich. Lectures were even started about food.'

Tension grew as the Allied Forces moved inexorably towards the Rhine. 'There was the feeling that freedom which appeared to be so near would be snatched from our grasp,' he says. The risk was that the Germans would attempt to move the prisoners further east, and there were apparently orders to this effect, but the senior British officer and a German foreign office official persuaded the German commandant that it was by that stage in his interests to co-operate with the British.

'On the evening of 11 April, we began to hear guns,' Mr King recalls. 'They came nearer and shells passed over the camp all night. I doubt if anyone slept at all. At about 9am, there was a commotion at the gate. There were two American corporals in a jeep with a French foreign worker, looking highly embarrassed, surrounded by hysterical British officers. Many wept openly. It was over. '