Botesdale Camp

Two institutions across the lake

The camp’s prefabricated buildings stood opposite Redgrave Hall and its military hospital. The hospital was a separate establishment: an original inspection places Camp 56 about a mile from No.231 Redgrave Park prisoner-of-war hospital, and the Suffolk record gives Camp 231 a grid reference of its own, TM 0561 7724, describing German prisoners held at a former military hospital and letters from inmates dated 1947 and 1948. During the war that hospital site had been the 65th General Hospital of the United States Army, with 1,450 beds in purpose-built accommodation. Their shared park setting can obscure the distinction between them.

The park itself was an eighteenth-century landscape. Lancelot Brown remodelled the hall in the 1760s and formed the serpentine lake beside which the camp was later laid out.

Photographs taken by an employee from the camp’s water tower show rows of huts spread across the grounds. The panorama provides a view of the residential site as it existed after the war.

The camp before the Ukrainian arrivals

An inspection on 16–17 December 1946 counted 815 German and Austrian prisoners in the main camp and another 319 in two associated hostels. Thornham Park held 267 and Long Stratton 52. The combined figure of 1,134 therefore described a network, not one enclosure.

The same report recorded three English classes and private study, electric lighting and stove-heated classrooms. A theatre could accommodate 400. The inspector wanted more accessible reading material and noted contact with the local Anglican clergyman. These observations belong to the earlier German/Austrian phase.

The Ukrainian community

In July 1948 a return of the former Galicia Division personnel recorded 1,010 men in camps at or near Botesdale, one of the larger concentrations in eastern England. The wording describes a locality, not the occupancy of the Camp 56 compound alone. A parliamentary answer of 6 August 1947 had already made clear that these men, described by the government as members of the 1st Ukrainian Division of the Wehrmacht, would be screened again in Britain.

Local research preserves a June 1947 staff roll listing cooks, bakers, sanitation workers, barbers, tailors, cobblers, teachers and other services. It shows the labour needed to keep the camp running alongside work on surrounding farms.

A document dated August 1948 instructed the commandant to expect another 80 Ukrainian prisoners. The continuing transfers show that arrival and release did not happen in a single movement. Release from prisoner-of-war status into the European Voluntary Workers scheme was carried out across the country between August and October 1948, after which the camps passed to civilian authorities and were redesignated as hostels. Some former residents subsequently built civilian lives in Suffolk.

No branch record, news sheet or concert programme from Botesdale itself has been traced. What is documented for the Ukrainian camps generally is that residents ran English classes and lectures, kept libraries and reading rooms, published news sheets, formed choirs, dance and drama groups and sports teams, and received occasional visits from the Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain and from Ukrainian priests.

Farm work and civilian life

The War Agricultural Executive Committee operated at the site. Earlier prisoners had worked on neighbouring farms, sometimes under formal arrangements for billeting with farmers. Local accounts describe exchanges with villagers and everyday contact through work. One Botesdale woman, Beryl Churchyard, born in 1930, has recorded her memories of working at the camp.

A later account reports plans to convert part of the camp into a hostel for civilian agricultural workers. Former huts were also used as temporary housing before local council accommodation became available, and the Rainbow Valve Company took over one of the huts as a workplace. These successive uses should not be treated as one unchanged prisoner population.

What survives

A 2019 photographic survey records the water tower as the camp’s surviving prominent structure and documents the view towards the former hospital. The Suffolk Historic Environment Record likewise states that the camp has been demolished and only the water tower survives, while the hospital site is reduced to foundations. The published inspection photographs preserve the numbered camp’s administrative identity even though most of its buildings have disappeared.

Recent archaeological assessment continues to distinguish the two former camps within Redgrave Park. The 2025 Stone Cottages Solar Farm assessment locates Camp 56 northwest of the proposed site and records that its historic boundary did not extend south across Bury Road into the development area.