Scenes depicted in The Barbed Wire Studio offer a fascinating window into the lives of the hundreds of thousands of military men captured and imprisoned in camps across Germany, Poland and Austria between 1940 and 1945.

Cris always knew about his artist father's prisoner-of-war days.

But it wasn't until the death of his mother Ethel three years ago that he was able to get into the locked cupboard at their Worksop home and begin to do something with the works his father produced.

The collection is made up of around 270 paintings and drawings created with a mixture of watercolour, oil, pen and ink, as well as many photographs.

They cover Frank Whetton's life from his capture in Doullens near Dunkirk in France, through his brief stay in Bitburg, Germany, a two-year stint at Torun in Poland, and on to Hohenfels in Germany where he spent the rest of the war.

Fortress 15 at the Torun camp features in many of the staff sergeant's paintings and drawings.

His work features scenes both inside and outside the fortress, with one particular painting depicting his punishment for stealing two potatoes.

It shows him and a friend constructing a jetty on the coast at Gdynia under the watchful eye of an engineer, his uniform painted with complete precision.

Frank learned under the guidance of Australian painter Justin O'Brien, already an established artist when he was captured, and in turn went on to teach Terry Frost who eventually became one of Britain's foremost abstract artists and received a knighthood.

It was when Frank was moved to the Hohenfels camp, sometime around October 1942, that his work really took off.

His paintings from there show the cheerless interior of the huts where they lived, depicting everyday scenes of prisoners reading, talking and cleaning boots.

But the mundanity was nothing compared to the punishment camp the Germans had originally planned for the prisoners.

However, the British had other ideas, as Cris explained: "There was no way the Allied prisoners were going to be punished.

"Fortunately, the German commander had been captured by the British in the First World War and was treated well – so he wasn't going to cause trouble by punishing them.

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