Allington

A working camp and its network

The land belonged to Pelham Welby before it was requisitioned. Italian prisoners built the camp in 1942, and the village history records it opening late that year as a working camp for about 500 Italians, with a Red Cross report of February 1943 giving roughly 750. The site subsequently became a German working camp, housing men employed outside the compound as well as supporting smaller accommodation centres. Four bungalows on Sedgebrook Road housed the drivers who carried men to work.

The Foreign Office file for the camp, FO 939/133, covers 1945 to 1948 and records a network whose shape kept changing. In April 1947 an inspector counted 2,317 men: 996 in the main camp, 615 at Woolfox, 275 at Harrowby, 219 at Harlaxton and 214 in billets. In July 1947 the total had risen to 2,606 with 1,003 at Allington itself. By October 1947 Woolfox had gone and Saltby, Buckminster, Edmondthorpe and Redmile appear instead, the last of these hostels lying across the county boundary in Leicestershire. These are figures from the German prisoner administration.

Learning, print and recreation

Education depended heavily on prisoners able to teach. Inspections in 1945 found that transfers had disrupted English lessons and discouraged learners. In April 1947 some 115 men were attending classes across the camp and its hostels under eight teachers, with about 160 more studying alone, and the inspector noted that no space was available for an information room, a mess hut serving as reading room and classroom. Later plans sought more library space and a quiet room adapted from a dining hut. By the spring of 1948 English teaching at the main camp had ceased.

The camp had a library of about 800 volumes and printed its own fortnightly paper, the Lagerpost, at Grantham Publications Ltd in runs of 2,500 so that every man could have a copy. A theatre group of fifteen staged five comedies and a classic, an orchestra of ten played light music and a choir of thirty-five sang folk and homeland songs. Football, boxing between hostels and table tennis were the main sports, and by October 1947 the camp football team was unbeaten against army and local sides. Men attended churches in the surrounding villages and the Methodist church in Grantham, and parties were taken to sittings of Grantham Town Council.

At Christmas 1947, more than a hundred civilian invitations reached Allington for German prisoners. Some came from local households and others from much farther afield. Men remaining in camp had a concert and additional food for the holiday. The report captures a period when contact outside military custody was becoming an important part of camp life.

Ukrainian arrivals and civilian settlement

The German phase was running down as the Ukrainians arrived. An inspection of 31 March to 2 April 1948 recorded 1,120 German and Austrian prisoners in the camp and four remaining hostels, of whom about 400 in the main camp were new arrivals not yet sorted out.

The July 1948 return records 1,319 Ukrainian men in camps at or near Allington. The geographical wording matters: this was a concentration around Allington, not a verified occupancy figure for the main Camp 51 compound. It belongs to the history of the former Galicia Division personnel brought from Italy, rather than to the earlier German prisoner return.

After the change to civilian status, which was carried out between August and October 1948, the camps were taken over by civilian authorities and redesignated as hostels. The wider pattern was continued communal accommodation while men worked and sought private lodgings. Leaving military custody and leaving a hostel were therefore separate steps in settlement.

A residential landscape

The village history describes the ground being divided after the camp closed: one part went to a pig farm, the rest to static caravans set on the old building bases, with a cattery and a social club following, and park homes eventually replacing the caravans inside the original camp boundary.

A field visit reported in 2020 found prefabricated homes on the former site. The site manager described an earlier division between pig farming and static caravans, followed by more extensive residential development. Older bases remained visible in places, although replacement foundations had also been laid for new homes. The surviving landscape records successive reuse rather than an intact wartime camp.