Liz Hodgkinson explores the Polish resettlement camps, the birth place of actress Rula Lenska
Interviews with Rula Lenska, the actress now touring with The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel play, often say she was born in St Neots, Cambridgeshire, my home town.
In fact, she was born on 30th September 1947 at the Polish Resettlement Camp at Diddington, a tiny village about five miles away, although her birth was registered in St Neots.
But what were resettlement camps?
After the Second World War, many Polish refugees, including Rula’s aristocratic family, weren’t able to return to their homeland as they had supported the Western Allies. The British government took responsibility for them, founding the Polish Resettlement Corps in May 1946. The only way these people could be accommodated was by putting them into camps and barracks vacated by the Americans and Canadians after the end of the war.
Eventually, around 250,000 Poles came to the UK to be housed in the camps, often situated in remote locations on large country estates. The biggest was at Northwick Park, Blockley, which housed a thousand people. The camps were operational from 1946 to 1969.
Rula’s camp in Diddington, like most of the others, consisted of a vast collection of corrugated, rusting Nissen huts. The huts first housed prisoners of war and then became an American military hospital before being requisitioned as a resettlement camp.
I only knew about the camp because I used to pass it on my way to school on the bus and often wondered what went on there as it looked both mysterious and abandoned. I never saw any signs of life or any people.
The camp was in reality a busy place. Pretty much self-sufficient, it followed Polish customs and the Polish way of life. There was, initially, little integration with the locals who remained suspicious of foreigners in the English countryside.
The Diddington camp had a maternity hospital and more than 1,000 babies were born there between 1947 and 1949.
A secondary school was established, with about 300 pupils and a Catholic church was set up in one of the huts. All the teachers and ancillary staff lived on the site, which had water and electricity, although conditions were rough and ready and certainly very basic.
There was a cinema at the camp, which was just as well as there was absolutely nothing to do in Diddington, a village of only 100 residents with no shops or pubs. Then, gradually, from about 1955, the Nissen huts started to fall into disrepair, as the residents began to leave. Many went to live in nearby Huntingdon. Today, there is absolutely no sign that the camp ever existed and no memorial or plaque to commemorate it – which is sad.
