Victoria Camp

One camp and a wider network

The 2016 excavation report distinguishes the headquarters at Mildenhall, the Eriswell main camp and satellite accommodation. Ely was attached around October–November 1947; Cranwich was another satellite and later a hostel. Hostels at Woodcock, Cheveley, Soham, Histon and West Tofts, with other billets, served the surrounding farms.

Historic England and the Suffolk record classify Victoria as a standard working camp, listing water towers, guard rooms, barrack huts, ablution and cell blocks, a camp reception station serving as hospital and a cookhouse.

The camp’s paperwork survives at The National Archives as FO 939/165, covering 1946 to 1948 and not digitised; the passages below come from pages reproduced in the excavation report. The Norfolk record for Cranwich mentions only a 1930s labour camp and a wartime military camp, so the satellite relationship rests on the Foreign Office papers.

Italians, then Ukrainians, then Germans

Italian prisoners began arriving from the middle of 1941 and by March 1946 were being prepared for repatriation. An inspector’s form of 23 March that year records one German hostel and a German strength of 184. The camp spokesman on the same form is described simply as Ukrainian.

Through 1946 and early 1947 the camp filled with Germans and Austrians. An inspection of 29 November to 1 December 1946 recorded four hostels and a total of 1,943; another of 23 to 26 April 1947 gave 1,732.

The change came at the end of May. A progress report on a visit of 28 to 31 May 1947 gives the German strength as 998, roughly half what it had been five weeks earlier, and says why: there had been complete disruption at headquarters through displacement by Ukrainians. The German theatre group, it added, had disintegrated on the Ukrainian invasion.

By the inspection of 19 January 1948 the arrangement had settled. The form lists the main camp as Ukrainians plus 20 Germans, two German hostels holding 1,119 men and 230 billetees, and a Ukrainian camp spokesman; the one entry in the beginners’ row of the English classes grid reads Ukrainians. No number is typed against them, so the Ukrainian population at Codson Hill cannot be recovered from the form.

These men had come from Italy: in May and June 1947, 8,570 Ukrainians, mostly former soldiers of the Galicia Division, were shipped from Venice to Britain, reclassified as prisoners of war and set to agricultural work.

Work, learning and local connections

Oral histories collected for the excavation describe farm work, transport by lorry and huts warmed by stoves, trips into Mildenhall, and a Ukrainian prisoner making a ring from a silver coin. One resident remembered the Italians coming first, then a load of Ukrainians, and the Germans last.

The inspection reports document English teaching, newspapers, libraries, discussion groups, lectures, films and religious provision, but they were written for the re-education of German prisoners.

The camp was classified grey with a strong white leaning, prisoners could walk into Mildenhall in the afternoons, and inspectors found that heavy agricultural labour bred apathy towards politics. In July 1947 three men from the Woodcock hostel were charged with burglaries that included houses at Eriswell and Lakenheath, and a revolver taken from a house at Barton Mills was recovered when they were caught; the Bury Free Press reported the case on 18 July.

The parish history preserves a photograph of a Ukrainian former prisoner’s wedding at Victoria, and the chapel interior created by Italian prisoners: different communities on the same site at different moments.

The move into civilian accommodation

Former Galicia Division soldiers were released from POW status in August–October 1948 and admitted to the European Voluntary Workers scheme, after which the camps holding them passed to civilian authorities and became hostels.

The parish account recalls temporary accommodation for families whose homes had been bombed, and the interviewees remembered displaced families from London moving into the Nissen huts. Most structures were later taken apart by villagers and farmers; two concrete-framed huts survive in farm use.

Recovering the camp beneath the ground

Excavation between 1 and 14 March 2016, ahead of an Anglian Water development, revealed the foundations and services of living huts, a probable shower or drying room and a kitchen, with drainage and part of the fence dividing the prisoners’ compound from the guards’.

The records and the excavation also prevent confusion with other facilities nearby. Victoria is Camp 85 at Codson Hill, two miles from Mildenhall station and separate from the airfields at Mildenhall and Lakenheath.