Guernsey Shopkeeper Hid 3 Stranded Soldiers in Her Shed, With Germans Next Door

In 1940, Guernsey shopkeeper Ada Le Poidevin and her husband, Walter, hid three British soldiers in their garden shed after the men were left behind during a raid on the Nazi-occupied Channel Island. German troops were living next door. Her niece, Liz Walton, pieced the story together, and it circulated in mid-November 2026.¹³

Walton is 79 and a retired teacher from Guernsey. She inherited Ada’s diaries and photographs when her aunt died at 88, then checked them against official records, including Ancestry.com. The account appears to come from a report by the SWNS news agency that was picked up by the Good News Network and other outlets.¹² All the published versions rest on that one family account.

Three soldiers, one shed, very close neighbors

According to the reports, the three soldiers were stranded after a 1940 raid on the island. Ada and Walter kept them in the shed even though discovery could have carried severe consequences.¹³

The raid was probably Operation Ambassador, a British commando raid on Guernsey on July 14 and 15, 1940, though the published accounts of Ada’s story do not name it.⁵

Walton described the stakes in the Good News Network story:

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“There were huge risks because there were Germans living next door and people were being sent off to concentration camps”¹

The hiding place could not last. According to NationalWorld, the men eventually decided they had little choice but to surrender to the Germans, and they were taken prisoner.²

All three survived the war. They stayed close to Ada and Walter and regularly came back to Guernsey to visit them. The Good News Network reports that they also attended the couple’s Golden Wedding celebration.¹³ A garden shed is an unlikely start to a friendship that made it to a 50th anniversary party.

The first war came first

The 1940 rescue was not Ada’s first brush with wartime danger. Born on Guernsey in 1895, she volunteered with the Salvation Army in France in 1917. She provided refreshments, mended clothes and wrote letters for soldiers.¹² The camps where she worked came under enemy fire and took heavy shell damage.¹

After the war, she spent four years helping grieving families travel to France to visit graves. When families could not make the trip, Ada went to the soldiers’ graves herself, left flowers and sent photographs and pressed flowers home to them.¹

“As a person, Ada was immensely kind and caring,” Walton said in the Good News Network story.¹

One piece still missing

Ada told her niece she had received a silver medal for her Salvation Army service. Walton has never been able to track it down.³