Our Land at War

by Duff Hart-Davis

  Among the men trained at Llanberis were members of the Lovat Scouts, the Highland regiment first raised by Simon, the sixteenth Lord Lovat, to fight in the Boer War. In civilian life many of the men were deerstalkers, and when it came to targets for snipers, as the founder of the regiment pointed out, there wasn’t much difference between a deer and a German, except that you could eat the deer.

  Purely in terms of personnel, the largest establishment in North Wales was the naval training camp HMS Glendower at Penychain, outside Pwllheli, which housed 100 officers, 5000 ratings and (well segregated) 500 Wrens. It was sited and built by the redoubtable Billy Butlin, who had opened his first holiday camps at Skegness in 1936 and Clacton in 1938, and quickly established a new form of resort, in which brash popular entertainments, led by the Redcoats, persuaded people not to lurk in their chalets, and created a festive atmosphere, even in the most miserable British summer weather. In 1939 Butlin’s two existing camps were requisitioned for military use, and he built the new one in Wales (and another at Ayr) on the understanding that after the war he would be able to buy them for his own use.

  With its standard layout of one double bed, one single bed and a cupboard in each chalet, Pwllheli was by no means suitable for occupation by naval ratings, and to prevent a breach of King’s Regulations the double beds had to be fitted with dividing boards. As the camps were designed for summer only, there was no heating, and at night the ratings huddled in their overcoats – until the Admiralty relented and put electric heaters in the chalets and blowers in the dining halls.

  Twenty-One

  Evictions

  Sweet smiling village, loveliest of thy lawn,

  Thy sports are fled, and all thy charms withdrawn.

  Amidst thy bowers the tyrant’s hand is seen,

  And desolation saddens all thy green …

  Sunk are thy bowers, in shapeless ruin all,

  And the long grass o’ertops the crumbling wall.

  Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village

  As preparations for the invasion of Europe built up, so too did the number of Allied troops in Britain. At the beginning of 1943 Operation Torch – the series of battles which drove the Axis forces out of North Africa – had temporarily drained off thousands of American soldiers, and the total of US ground forces on UK soil fell below 20,000. But in the autumn and the spring of 1944 new drafts, and men returning from Africa, sent the total rocketing, and by May it was 620,000. There were also 170,000 Canadian troops in the UK, to say nothing of the British forces waiting to go into action.

  Increasingly in 1943 and 1944, with farmers under pressure to produce more food, landowners complained vigorously about the havoc wrought by military units invading their territory. In designated training areas damage was acceptable, and property inevitably suffered – as on the South Downs of the Arundel estate in Sussex, where the Duke of Norfolk’s turf was ripped up by the tracks of tanks, exposing the underlying chalk and allowing erosion to set in. But farmers were incensed if unauthorized slit trenches were dug in their fields and left unfilled when the troops went away. Wire fences were cut, gates were smashed or left open so that cattle escaped, crops were trampled, chickens and ducks purloined, rabbits and hares shot (with weapons far more lethal than shotguns) as troops went on the rampage. After one exercise in which a Canadian unit carried out a mock attack on Horsham, a soldier wrote home: ‘What with going through people’s fields and hedges and cutting down big trees – the engineers actually blew up a farmer’s bridge – and tearing across country the way we did, you can bet we enjoyed ourselves.’

  The need to give all these men realistic training, which included the detonation of explosives and the firing of live ammunition with small arms and artillery, presented the War Office with an acute problem. Unlike America, Britain had not – and has not – vast, uninhabited spaces in which troops can fight mock battles without disturbing farmers or the civilian population; and by the middle of the war competition for the use of land had become intense. On the one hand farmers, goaded by the War Ags, were fiercely defending their acres on the grounds that they had been ordered by the Government to grow as much food as possible. On the other hand, senior American commanders were claiming that it was ridiculous for the Government to deny them adequate facilities for the sake of a few cows or sacks of wheat. The only way the War Department could find the space it needed was by clearing the inhabitants from whole swathes of country – a procedure which naturally caused anguish among families forced to leave home.

  Anyone looking at a map of East Anglia will notice a large, clear space immediately north of Thetford. Everywhere else on the borders of Suffolk and Norfolk small roads wind about in all directions; but this one stretch of country is blank: no roads, no towns, no villages. The reason is simple: in 1942 it became the Stanford Training Area, and the exclusive preserve of the armed forces. The military takeover of the strange, sandy, gorse-covered landscape known as the Breckland, marked out by lines of Scots pines, destroyed three villages – Stanford, Tottington and West Tofts – as well as parts of ten surrounding parishes, and sent 1600 people into exile. Most of them were tenants of the main landowner, the eighth Lord Walsingham, an army officer who had had an outstanding record in the First World War, being wounded three times, mentioned in dispatches five times and winning a DSO. Having retired in 1923 at the age of thirty-nine, he had re-enlisted in 1939 and commanded a battalion of the Royal Norfolk Regiment. It was he, in the end, who lost most from the evacuation, for the Army took 17,000 of his acres and paid scant compensation.

  The military started training on the Breckland well before the formal takeover, and they allowed people to remain in their homes while bullets cracked past them and armoured vehicles roared over the heath. One farmer of abrasive character, Lucille Reeve – an accomplished dowser and an avowed Fascist – distinguished herself by advancing furiously on some tanks which had invaded her land, and, with the assistance of her two dogs on leads, driving them off. By her own account, she was ‘very tough’ (she reminds one of Boadicea, Queen of the Iceni, who is said to have lived at what is now Thetford).

  In a small book published after the war, Farming on a Battleground, she gave a graphic account of her battles, first with the all-devouring rabbits, then with disobliging neighbours, then with the military. Because she attended a Rogation service in the fields, people accused her of witchcraft and advised her sarcastically that for growing good crops in that sandy soil manure was more effective than prayer. When she fell over in the kitchen and bruised her face, they claimed she had been beaten up by soldiers for being a Fascist. ‘Truly my enemies were more numerous than my friends,’ she wrote, ‘and annoyed, no doubt, that I had not been interned with other people who support Sir Oswald Mosley in his plans for Britain for the British.’

  For a couple of years she struggled on, showing no mean courage as war training intensified all round her: she had a practice bombing range on one side of her house and a dummy aerodrome on the other. For one whole day her farm was surrounded by military police – to her ‘the British Gestapo’. ‘Of course,’ she wrote sarcastically, ‘I was planting the clover leas for Hitler to land his planes on.’ Then on 13 June 1941 she was told that all her land was needed by the army. Soldiers pulled up her anti-rabbit fences of wire netting. Tanks drove over an avenue of young trees which she had just planted. ‘How I hated the war, and more specially the tanks,’ she wrote.

  Other locals survived near misses – until one day in May 1942 another farmer, Chester Riches, was accidentally shot dead as he was driving his cattle near Orford, and the authorities decided that the whole battle area must be cleared. Provoked into drastic action, the War Office organized two public meetings, one in Tottington and the other under the beech trees in the school yard in West Tofts. General Kenneth Anderson, GOC Eastern Command, assured the assembled villagers that the army would not smash up their homes, but Vera Tolman, headmistress of the school, never forgot how he gave them ‘the fatal
news’.

  He didn’t have to ask for silence. We all stood there stunned – even the babies and the children were hushed. I don’t think we even discussed it with one another. We just went home too unhappy to speak. The war had taken our husbands, and now our homes and way of life were to go.

  The General’s colleague, the Earl of Cranbrook, Deputy Regional Commissioner of the Eastern Region, explained how accommodation would be found for displaced persons. He assured the people that their houses would not be used as targets, and that no street fighting would take place. If an accident occurred – if a burst of machine-gun fire or a shell splinter went through a roof – it would be immediately repaired in order to prevent damage from wind and weather. Both meetings were chaired by Walsingham, who was sympathetic to the villagers, regarding them almost as members of his own family; nevertheless, he urged them to go without making a fuss, saying that the training to be carried out on the Breckland would, in the long run, save a great many casualties among their relations and friends.

  Cranbrook later remarked in the House of Lords that the people ‘were much more shaken by the shock of eviction than would have been a more sophisticated and urban population, less tied by tradition to their homes and to the countryside on which they worked’. He also recalled, in the same debate, the ‘quite unequivocal’ promises that they would be able to return when the war was over.

  Complaints proved futile. An appeal to the King evoked a bland answer supporting the War Office’s decision. The clear-out went ahead at bewildering speed. Not only had furniture and belongings to be removed from the houses: live and dead stock also had to go, and new homes had to be found for animals as well as for humans. The squire was scarcely better off than his former tenants, as his family house, Merton Hall, had already been commandeered, and for the time being he had to live in a prefabricated bungalow. Lucille Reeve found temporary refuge in a wooden hut, but eight years later she hanged herself in an outhouse.

  The War Ag committee, harvesting prematurely and using unskilled labour, managed to salvage £40,000 worth of grain and seed, but hundreds of acres of sugar beet were lost. Full-scale military activities began as soon as – or even before – the evacuation was complete. Vera Tolman was allowed back into West Tofts to collect some coal. She rode in on her bicycle and met the coalman, who loaded up his lorry. Then she locked the school door for the last time, and as she turned round she found herself face-to-face with a huge, antlered red deer, which must have come out of Thetford Forest. For a few moments she and the stag stared at each other; then both turned away, and she left the village for ever.

  One site of international importance narrowly escaped destruction: Sutton Hoo, where a cluster of low, grassy mounds lie in flat ground beside the estuary of the River Debden, some seven miles from the sea in Suffolk. Excavations begun there in 1938, and continued in the spring and summer of 1939, caused huge excitement among archaeologists, for they revealed the miraculously complete remains of a seventh-century Anglo-Saxon burial, and the skeleton of an oak ship nearly 100 feet long. The body of the buried man – possibly a king – had been dissolved by the acid sand, and most of the artefacts had been crushed by the tremendous weight of earth above them; but the fragments were meticulously collected and given by Mrs Pretty, owner of the land, to the British Museum.

  When war broke out the site was lying open, covered only by a blanket of protective bracken, and it was direly threatened by anti-invasion measures, when trenches to frustrate glider landings were gouged out of the heathland right to the edge of the mounds. In 1942 the burial ground became part of the Breckland training area; infantry and tanks began swarming all over it, until stopped by the initiative of Lieutenant Ted White, an archaeologist who later became a trustee of the National Maritime Museum. So, by a whisker, was saved one of the richest sites ever discovered in Britain.

  On 1 November 1943 the people of Imber, a village in the middle of Salisbury Plain, were similarly driven out. Called to a meeting in the school, they were given forty-seven days’ notice to leave their homes, making the deadline for their departure 17 December. The 150 inhabitants were appalled, but not entirely surprised, because the War Office had been buying up land on the Plain and using it for manoeuvres for more than fifty years, and indeed the ground on which their houses stood already belonged to the Government, which had acquired it from them between 1928 and 1932, so that they were tenants of the State. They were told that compensation would be paid, and most people offered no resistance when evicted. Only the family in one farm had to be forcibly turned out by the army; but Albert Nash, for forty-four years the village blacksmith, collapsed on his anvil and died a few weeks later – according to his doctor, of a broken heart.

  Apart from immediate human problems, the sheer antiquity of Imber made its abandonment seem tragic. An ancient settlement, the village had existed in some form during the Iron Age, between 800 BC and AD 100, on a junction of track-ways crossing the plain. It was listed in the Domesday Book of 1086, and in 1850 it had housed about 450 people, mainly in the single street along the stream known as the Imber Dock. The thirteenth-century Church of St Giles, with its fine, square tower, contained rare wall paintings; there was a Manor House – Imber Court – a post office, a forge, a carpenter’s shop, two stores and a pub, the Bell. The people were mainly engaged in farming, but many of them had special skills, and in summer four men travelled the country practising the ancient art of making dew ponds.

  This humble community was evicted allegedly so that US troops could practise street fighting among the buildings; but in the event no such urban battle training took place during the war, and the only reason for the evacuation seemed to be the fact that the village would be in danger from the impact of artillery shells. Vague assurances were given that everyone would be able to return after the war – and some people were so sure of going back that they left their possessions behind. But no one ever returned to live in Imber.

  A similar fate overwhelmed the people of Tyneham, a village tucked away in a valley between the Purbeck Hills and the sea on the Jurassic Coast of Dorset. In the middle of November 1943 the inhabitants were shocked by the arrival of a letter which brought echoes of the notorious Highland Clearances of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when families were thrown out of their homes to make way for sheep. The communication from the War Office was brutally direct:

  In order to give our troops the fullest opportunity to perfect their training in the use of modern weapons of war, the Army must have an area of land particularly suited to their special needs and in which they can use live shells. For this reason you will realise the chosen area must be cleared of all civilians …

  At the bottom of the sheet was a handwritten note: ‘Including your properties – see overleaf.’ And then on the back:

  It is regretted that, in the National Interest, it is necessary to move you from your homes, and everything possible will be done to help you, both by payment of compensation, and by finding other accommodation for you if you are unable to do so yourself.

  The date on which the military will take over this area is the 19th December next, and all civilians must be out of the area by that date … The Government appreciate that this is no small sacrifice which you are asked to make, but they are sure that you will give this further help towards winning the war with a good heart.

  C. H. MILLER

  Major-General I/C Administration

  Southern Command

  At least the houses in Tyneham were not set on fire by vindictive factors, as they were in Sutherland and elsewhere; and at least the people were promised that they would be able to return when the war was over. But there was no appeal against the eviction order, and all 225 inhabitants had to leave the single street of scattered grey cottages. The last to go, Bessie Taylor, seamstress at the Manor, posted a notice on the door of St Mary’s Church:

  Please treat the church and houses with care; we have given up our homes where many of us have liv
ed for generations to help win the war to keep men free. We shall return one day, and thank you for treating the village kindly.

  Most of the inhabitants walked out, up the long haul onto the ridge above the valley, driving their animals before them; and no doubt when they reached the top they paused to look down on the little village where they and their families had lived for so long. Not only their homes, but also their livelihood, had been seized from them. As they had no other land on which to keep their animals, their stock was sold off: 313 dairy cows and bulls, seventy-one sheep, thirty-three pigs and 167 fowls were auctioned by Henry Duke & Son. The people dispersed, some to their families, some to new houses in Wareham, others to whatever shelter they could find.

  No one was more distressed than Lilian Bond, whose family had owned the Elizabethan Manor House. From the age of eleven she had grown up there, and she had lived there for fifteen years until she married in 1914. A talented amateur actress and artist, she took a keen interest in local history, and in a memoir published in 1956 she wrote lyrically of the valley’s remoteness, its deep serenity, cut off as it was from the rest of the world by the unbroken line of the hills. She remembered especially how ‘the clean salt breath of the sea and the Tyneham valley, healing, reviving and exhilarating, met and refreshed the traveller’ as he came over the ridge. She recalled the mighty hauls of mackerel made by the fishermen down in Worbarrow Bay, and boasted mildly about how, as a girl, she had become a skilled mouse-catcher. Her record bag was seven in an evening, and although she never achieved her ambition of making a pair of mouse-skin gloves, she did make a ‘satisfying mouse-skin table mat’, which she treasured for years.