WATCH: Brits kidnapped while suntanning
In 1947, the Irgun captured two British military policemen from a Ramat Gan swimming pool
This newsreel shows British Constable P. C. Ward and Sergeant E. F. Hackett after four armed members of the Irgun kidnapped them from a bathing pool on June 9.
Held overnight in the Kiryat Shaul settlement, the two were unharmed and were freed by a military patrol the next day.
“That’s the wardrobe in which they were carried off,” the narrator reports, as the two men show the camera the place of their overnight imprisonment. “Ward and Hackett were tied to the bed with a rope by their captors, who said that it was going to be used later for hanging them.”
(The Associated Press and Movietone News recently released their vast video archives on YouTube, allowing the public to freely access a million minutes worth of historical news clips dating back to 1895 — including many iconic scenes from Israel’s history featured in this Times of Israel series.)
