Hempton Green Camp

From Rimini to Norfolk

The community archive records a peak of 1,001 Ukrainians at Hempton Green, the largest number sent to any single camp, later falling to about 875. A separate July 1948 survey gives 1,682 men for camps at or near Hempton. The figures describe different geographical groupings; the larger total is not the occupancy of this single compound.

The men were not cut off from the wider Ukrainian world. In 1948 one of them advertised in the Paris Ukrainian paper Hromada, giving his address as No 82 P.O.W. Camp, Hempton Green Camp, Fakenham, Norfolk, and asking for news of a relative. His notice sits in a column of others written from displaced persons camps in Germany and from hostels elsewhere in England, a reminder that the camp was one address in a scattered search for missing families.

Working on local farms

Agricultural work shaped the camp’s daily routine. Men travelled to farms under Ministry of Agriculture contracts, taken out in lorries by drivers known as gangers who also supervised them at work, under a supervisor from Norwich. Local recollections describe potato harvesting, a large workshop where prisoners made tools, toys and small wooden objects, and the round or diamond patches, bright yellow or orange, that the men had to wear on the backs of their jackets. One son of a Ukrainian at the camp recalled his father describing harsh early conditions and hunger strikes, then an easing, with a weekly visit into town, and work that ranged from farms to mine clearance.

The working-camp system also extended beyond the main enclosure. A local history account identifies a POW hostel at Holkham as an outpost of Camp 82. That relationship helps explain why a locality could account for substantially more men than the main camp alone.

From custody to civilian life

Former Galicia Division personnel nationally lost POW status during August–October 1948 and entered the European Voluntary Workers scheme. Remaining in communal accommodation could therefore continue after release from military custody.

At Hempton, the archive dates acquisition by the Ministry of Works to September 1948. Families awaiting council housing moved into the huts, and the site became Green Lane Estate. A contributor dates the Ukrainians’ departure from the camp to September 1949, and a few men stayed on living at the site while others settled in Norwich and elsewhere in Norfolk. These are local residential facts rather than the national change of legal status.

The place that remained

The camp’s Ukrainian connection survives nearby in Holy Trinity Church, Hempton. Historic England records a painted hanging crucifix carved by a Ukrainian former prisoner of war. The object is part of the church interior, not evidence that the church itself stood inside the camp.

The Grade II listing describes the church’s 1954 enlargement using stone and flint salvaged from a bombed Norwich church. Its postwar fabric and the Ukrainian carving place the history of resettlement within a building still standing in the village.

The former camp continued as housing into the 1960s. Plans agreed in 1964 provided for hut demolition and space for up to forty caravans; redevelopment followed later in the decade.

The estate had its own small institutions in the years that followed. A Methodist minister served as warden and lived there with his family, a bungalow rented at ten shillings a week in 1952, and a grocery and provisions store traded beneath the brick tower that held the camp’s water tank. Caravans began to arrive during the 1950s.

Nothing of the camp survives above ground. The Norfolk record notes that the western part of the site is under the Green Lane housing estate, that mobile homes now stand on the sites of the former huts, and that the exercise ground to the east has returned to arable cultivation.