Image: Sutton Park in 1938. Reproduced with the permission of Sutton Coldfield Library
When the Second World War broke out on 3 September 1939, there were 70,000 Germans and Austrians living in Britain. Across the country 120 tribunals were established to interview these ‘enemy aliens.’ Most emerged from these interviews without having any restrictions placed on them, but about 600 were sent to internment camps. This figure increased dramatically in summer 1940 when Britain faced invasion. In total 8,000 Germans and Austrians were interned, as well as 4,000 Italians. Arrangements were made to send a large contingent to Canada, but there was great public concern when one ship was sunk by a U boat, with a large loss of life. This, and the diminishing threat of invasion, led to a change of policy. Gradually almost all of the internees were released, with about 5,000 remaining in a camp on the Isle of Man in 1942.
At the height of internment in August 1940 a camp was established in Sutton Park. The camp consisted of tents, which provided accommodation for 700 men transferred from the camps set up at the race courses at Kempton Park and Lingfield. The buses to convey these men to the camp failed to meet them at the railway station and they had to walk, carrying their possessions. The site at Sutton Park was near Longmoor Pool by the Banners Gate entrance. It had been inspected and deemed suitable, but conditions were so unpleasant that questions were soon being asked in the House of Commons. Eleanor Rathbone, an independent MP and a great champion of refugees, declared that ‘there was not even a palliasse or chair in place so that sick and elderly internees had to sleep on the bare ground.’ When the Conservative MP Major General Alfred Knox observed that soldiers slept on the ground, Rathbone replied, ‘They are not sick men of fifty.’
The Birmingham Daily Post was excoriating in its criticisms of the government. It drew attention to the appalling facilities. There were insufficient beds or ground sheets, no washing facilities, badly-cooked food and little medical attention. These men were neglected and bored. The paper demanded answers: ‘Who was responsible for their coming? And what reason ever was there to suppose, or even hope, that Sutton Coldfield would supply accommodation of which the Ministry for Home Security would have no need to be ashamed? The deficiencies – although it was presumably somebody’s business to deal with them – remain unremedied’.
The men who were sent to Sutton Park stayed there a fortnight, and were eventually sent to the Isle of Man. With their departure, however, came several hundred Czechoslovakian soldiers, many of them Communists, who refused to serve with the British forces. One of them men was Jan Ludvik Hoch, later known as Robert Maxwell, the publisher.
There was also a prisoner-of-war camp in Sutton Park, located on the site of the camp for internees. It is possible that this initially housed Italian POWs, but, after the D-Day landings in 1944, German POWs began to arrive in large numbers. There is something of a mystery about this camp – it is not included in what purports to be a complete list of prisoner-of-war camps in Britain during the Second World War. Yet it certainly existed. I have talked to someone who remembers seeing the POWs in the camp on a walk with her parents and brother; her main memory is of the amusement of the POWs when her father stumbled after putting his foot in a rabbit hole; another person recalls seeing the POWs playing football; and someone else sent me a photograph of a family outing to Sutton Park in 1943 with the huts of the camp clearly visible in the background.
There is no archaeological evidence relating to the POW camp – the plastic bottle I found when I had a look at the site, I have concluded, was probably not left by a POW! The documentary evidence is also very thin. The minutes of the town council during the war years do not mention the camp – though, after the war, the return of the land to the council and the removal of an ashed road laid down by the military authorities are recorded.
So we have to rely on reminiscences. The POWs arrived in Sutton by rail and were brought to the camp in trucks. I have talked to one person whose father – a coalman by trade – picked up the prisoners at the railway station. He recalled them being very likeable men and he formed a warm bond with them; they made toys – one on wheels with wings – and sandals from rope which they gave to him for his children.
Prisoners-of-war were generally well-treated in British camps – those in charge were only too aware of their own soldiers in German camps – but there were, unsurprisingly, complaints about the cold and damp in the camp in Sutton Park. In the final stages of the war, the POWs left the camp each day in US army trucks to work on local farms. When the war ended, the POWs remained. In October 1945 they built a huge bonfire on Crystal Palace hill ‘and the glow could be seen from Walsall.’ Over the next year or so most of the POWs returned home, to a country utterly ruined by invasion and occupation.
Acknowledgements: I am grateful to Robert Cheshire for accompanying me on a visit to the site and to Roy Billingham, Eileen Donohue, Mike Hodder and Janet Jordan for their help in writing this piece. Members of the Nextdoor website also shared what they knew about the POW camp with me.
Stephen Roberts, August 2021
Stephen Roberts is Honorary Archivist at Bishop Vesey’s Grammar School