Moorby

The camp and its changing population

The camp was originally built by Italian prisoners, subsequently housed Germans, and later accommodated Ukrainian displaced people. This sequence was clarified in a correction published by the Society for Lincolnshire History and Archaeology in 2005. It prevents the camp’s different populations being treated as a single unchanging community.

At its largest the camp was the head of a network. The survey of 27 November to 6 December 1946 put one officer and 2,940 other ranks under Lieutenant-Colonel P. J. M. Ellison: 900 in the main camp at Moorby, 1,100 in the satellite at Tattershall, and the rest in hostels at Tumby, Sibsey, Addlethorpe, Boothby, Bilsby and Skegness or in billets. By the inspection of 10 to 13 March 1948 the same command had shrunk to 695 men, of whom 606 were at Moorby.

That March inspection is also where the Ukrainians enter the file. The visiting officer noted in a single sentence that the camp “also has a Satellite of Ukrainians”. Nothing else in the transcribed reports describes them. Separately, a July 1948 return counted 1,264 Ukrainian men in camps at or near Moorby. Those men were former soldiers of the Galicia Division brought from Italy in 1947 and still held as prisoners; the figure covers a locality, not the population inside Camp 79.

Work and an isolated setting

The March inspection describes an isolated camp with limited transport. Men working at a Boston canning factory left at seven in the morning and returned at half past eight at night, though not on Fridays and Saturdays, and Boston was fifteen miles away. The report records one hot tap for six hundred men and an inadequate coal allowance, alongside a camp newspaper and organised lectures. These observations concern the inspected German camp, not a separate account of Ukrainian living conditions.

The 1946 survey found a camp that an inspector called education minded and well off. It had a printing press issuing 250 copies of a twelve-page magazine every fortnight, a library of some 3,000 books circulating between the main camp and the hostels, weekly discussion groups, films from the YMCA and the British Film Unit, and 150 men studying English, Spanish, Russian and technical subjects. An orchestra and a theatrical group travelled out to the hostels.

Some of that reached the surrounding villages. In February 1947 the camp choir and orchestra gave a sacred concert at St Mary’s parish church in Horncastle, whose vicar had himself been a prisoner in Germany, and over a year of such visits to churches and chapels in east Lincolnshire the musicians raised 80 pounds 13 shillings for the Save Europe Now fund. In September 1947 a room behind Church Lane in Horncastle was opened as a club for prisoners visiting the town from Moorby.

The handover to the hostel programme

By August 1948, Moorby was being prepared for use in Lincolnshire’s agricultural hostel programme. The Lindsey Agricultural Executive Committee was recruiting Irishmen, Poles, Ukrainians, Hungarians, unemployed men from Merseyside, Hull and Grimsby, former prisoners of war, schoolchildren and European Voluntary Workers to overtake arrears of farm work. Moorby and Brigg were named as ex-prisoner-of-war camps then in course of preparation, among 23 permanent farm hostels the committee hoped to have open by the end of the year. The committee complained that the Ministry of Works had provided about half the accommodation promised.

A report of 27 September 1948 shows the transition under way at Moorby itself: a Ukrainian resident of the camp, prosecuted at Horncastle over a theft of tea, was said to be three days from civilian status.

A postal address in a scattered community

In April 1949, the Ukrainian periodical Hromada printed a tracing notice carrying a Moorby Hostel address near Revesby and Boston. Such notices connected people across the postwar diaspora through named places where letters could reach them. Here the surviving address gives direct contemporary evidence that the hostel was part of Ukrainian correspondence networks after the military-camp period.

The notice does not provide a population total or describe a local organisation. Its significance is more immediate: Moorby remained a usable point of contact for someone seeking a missing relative. The hostel address carried that search beyond Lincolnshire to the readership of a Ukrainian publication issued in Paris.

Agricultural hostel and later farm use

The Ordnance Survey six-inch map of the mid-1950s shows an agricultural workers’ hostel on the former camp site, and the county record carries that use to about 1970. By 2002 the mapping records poultry houses belonging to a farm there. The site’s reuse as a turkey farm is also recorded in the 2005 local-history correction, completing a sequence from wartime accommodation through postwar labour housing to agricultural buildings.

No source read gives an opening or closing date for the Ukrainian hostel phase, the name of the body that administered it, or a count of the people who lived in it.