Lieutenant, Durham Light Infantry
Born: September 14th 1917
Died: July 16th 1945
Age at death: 27
Died in England, soon after repatriation from a POW Camp, July 16th 1945.
Douglas was born on 14 September 1917 to Peter Prins, an employee of the Firestone Tire and Rubber Export Co. in Akron, Ohio. Douglas was probably born in the US: we have been unable to find any records of his birth in the UK, and his guardian when he entered the College was not his mother or father but a C. P. Vickers of Seaford in Sussex.
By the time Douglas joined the British Army’s Durham Light Infantry in 1939 he had anglicised his surname to Prince, perhaps out of a fear that he might be considered to be of German ancestry, though his original surname is actually Dutch.
Douglas was described by his battalion commander as ‘a young officer of the highest calibre’ and a ‘constant source of inspiration’; but he had a frustrating war. Captured while defending the rear at Dunkirk, he spent the next five years as a prisoner. In February 1941 the College magazine jubilantly reported that he had been captured rather than killed, and noted ‘that friends would do him a very great kindness if they would write to him’. He was probably not mistreated – most British, and indeed American, prisoners were treated humanely by the Germans – but he nevertheless died in July 1945, soon after repatriation, at the early age of 27. It is possible that he never recovered from wounds incurred in the French campaign, just like Sir Edmund Nuttall (q.v.). However, in the short time left to him after his return to England he married Jacqueline Fisher in Oxford. We can surmise that she had been waiting for him those five long years, and that, with both Jacqueline and Douglas aware that he was dying, they decided to marry quickly in order to snatch a few weeks of married bliss. Prins is buried in the Oxford (Headington) Cemetery.