A peculiar nostalgia? Oral histories of childhoods in a postwar Polish Resettlement Camp in the UK
September 1939 saw the defeat of the Polish army by Stalin’s USSR to the east and Hitler’s Germany to the west. Germany and Russia subsequently partitioned Poland. Stalin consolidated his hold on eastern Poland by deporting anyone thought likely to resist via cattle trucks to labour camps in Siberia. Estimates vary, but by 1941, approximately 1.6 million Poles had been deported. In June of that year, Hitler broke his alliance with Stalin by attacking the Soviet Union. This brought the Soviets into the Allied camp—awkwardly, with Poland, whose government-in-exile was still recognised by the Allies. Consequently, Stalin declared an amnesty for all Poles who had been held in prisons and labour camps in Siberia for the previous two years. All able-bodied men were recruited into the free Polish army, which went on to become the third largest fighting force in the west. The approximately 400,000 civilians who had survived Siberia were placed in refugee camps in British colonies in Africa and India, to await the end of the war and return to their homes in Poland. Unfortunately, the political settlement between the allies meant that when the war ended, the Soviets fully incorporated eastern Poland into the Soviet Union. The rest of Poland became a puppet state with an oppressive Communist government imposed by the Soviet Union. In July 1945, the British government withdrew recognition from the exiled Polish government in London and recognised the regime imposed by Russia. This resulted in a dilemma: what to do with a displaced population owing its allegiance to a government they no longer recognised, and hostile to the government it did?
To solve this problem, a Polish Resettlement Corps was raised as part of the British Army. Polish servicemen wishing to remain in the West were recruited into it for their demobilisation and resettlement. Some 125,000 chose to do this, and remained in Britain. The number grew to 200,000 when soldiers were joined by families who had spent the war in refugee camps in British colonies.
The only way such a vast number of people could be accommodated in post-war Britain (whose housing stock had been badly damaged) was by placing them in ex-army camps. Dozens across the country were turned into Polish resettlement camps, having been built in rural areas in the early 1940s for the American and Canadian troops. Blackshaw Moor in Staffordshire became one of them.
The hamlet of Blackshaw Moor lies in the Staffordshire Moorlands, on the southern edge of the Peak District. In 1942, four adjoining army camps were built, and occupied by American troops until the end of the war. In 1946 camps 1, 2, and 3 were turned into civilian resettlement camps, with seventy-five huts made ready for Polish troops and their families. The site was in use from 1946 until 1964.
The heart of the community was located in Camp 1. Here was a nursery and grocer’s, as well as a clubhouse and Catholic chapel with a resident priest. A Polish school also ran on Saturdays to teach children about Polish culture, history and language. Children enrolled in St Mary’s Catholic School in the neighbouring town of Leek when they reached age four. People were not given much choice for employment, so either worked in local agriculture or in the nearby quarries, copper works and textile mills.
The huts where families lived had a concrete foundation and steel frame with some sort of plaster board walls. Roofs were painted yearly with tar to withstand the cold and the rain. Each hut was split in half so that two families could live in one. Each family had a key for the communal toilet and wash rooms, hot water from the boilers could also be collected there for bathing or laundry. The only source of warmth came from the cooking range, and with no electricity in the camp until 1952, they made do with candles. I interviewed people who had lived there as children for my dissertation research: they told me it was a harsh existence, but bearable.
A smartly-dressed girl stands in front of the converted military huts of Blackshaw Moor Polish resettlement camp. Family photo of Krystyna Hermit (used with permission).
As time went on, families moved abroad or into the surrounding area. By the 1960s, the lower part of camp 2 was demolished to make room for a new council estate for the fifty-two Polish families still left in the camp. By 1964 they had all moved there and the camp was empty. Over the years, the community dwindled to a handful of aging camp dwellers, and now only two descendants live on the estate. When the camp closed the land was returned to the local farming family, and has since been abandoned to the elements.
Growing up in an ex-army camp in the isolated moorlands of the Peak District does not seem likely to produce nostalgic memories of an idyllic childhood. When I began my research, I was expecting expressions of relief at leaving the camp, and reflections with little positivity. This was not the case. The people I spoke to were keen to speak about their vivid and wonderful memories of their childhoods at the camp. The local farmer told me he often gets people who lived there ‘making pilgrimages’ and walking around the land. People told me how they go for walks around the ruined camp, because ‘it’s home, it’s a part of me’. I was struck by this peculiar nostalgia, especially the return visits to what’s left of the camp. What compels people to still think about and return to the camp, decades after they left?
For the second-generation Polish who grew up at Blackshaw Moor and are now in their 70s, nostalgia for life there seems to have been created out of their belonging to an exiled community. Ultimately, it reveals relationships that exist between the past, present, and future which seem embedded in the landscape itself.
This longing for their childhoods at Blackshaw Moor is rooted in the political context which created the Polish community there. Coming to Britain in the aftermath of the war meant that the camp became the site where a new community was built. Their parents were building this new community out of a collective trauma and dispossession. For the first time since they were deported, they were gathered together into a physical space claimed as their own. Their parents and communities’ memories of exile meant that the camp became irretrievably defined as a place of survival. As one person told me, ‘there was an underlying joy of we are the survivors, millions were taken from that part of Poland to go to Siberia, but we are the few hundred thousand who escaped and lived to tell the tale’. Nostalgic returns allow them to reconnect with the space which was the physical root of these connections. The landscape thus becomes a form of coding history itself, seen in these visits, which reflect a very personal expression and experience of growing up in the Polish camp.
For the people from Blackshaw Moor, nostalgia is more than just a longing for a past which cannot be returned to. It is multiple and fluid, a powerful inherited memory that arose out of their parents and community dealing with their post-war exile. Nostalgia constitutes an angle through which to explore the disappearance and creative persistence of an identity which was fostered at the resettlement camp, ultimately showing a partial reconciliation between the past and present of a community born out of migration.
Further reading
Polish Resettlement camps in the UK
Zosia Biegus and Jurek Biegus, Polish Resettlement Camps in England and Wales (PB Software, 2013)
Zosia Biegus and Jurek Biegus, Blackshaw Moor Polish Resettlement Camp 1946-1964 (Churnet Valley Books, 2015)
Post war Polish migration history in the UK
Kathy Burrell, Moving Lives: Narratives of Nation and Migration among Europeans in Post War Britain (Routledge, 2006)
Kathy Burrell, ‘Migrant Memories, Migrant Lives: Polish National Identity in Leicester since 1945’, Transactions of the Leicestershire Archaeological and Historical Society, 76 (2002), pp59–77
Tadeusz Pietrowski, The Polish Deportations of World War II: Recollections of Removal to the Soviet Union and Dispersal Throughout the World (McFarland, 2004)
Bogusia Temple, ‘Time Travels: Time, Oral Histories and British Polish Identities’, Time and Society, 5 (1996), pp85–96
The header image shows the ruins of Blackshaw Moor camp 2—stretches of concrete broken by vegetation, and a wooden frame in the middle distance—against a background of trees and the rising peaks of the Staffordshire Moors.
