Windlestone Hall

A country house adapted for new lives

The hall stands in a rural estate near Rushyford, with gardens, terraces, woodland and parkland. The Eden family developed the property over several centuries; the nineteenth-century house incorporated earlier buildings. Its setting explains the striking backdrop in the residents’ photographs: a colonnaded mansion rather than rows of purpose-built migrant housing.

The listed building record describes the house the residents photographed: a rebuilding of about 1835 attributed to Ignatius Bonomi for Sir Robert Johnson Eden, in ashlar sandstone, its long east front carrying a balustraded Doric colonnade across the first seven bays. That colonnade is the backdrop in the family photographs. Windlestone and neighbouring Rushyford lie on the old Great North Road, at the former crossing of the London to Edinburgh route, and the Eden family had held the estate since the Elizabethan period.

The parish council records a use between the Eden family’s ownership and the wartime camp: in 1920 Windlestone Hall became the headquarters of the Wayfarers Benevolent Association. Its account lists the later uses of the hall as a prisoner-of-war camp, a refugee centre and a residential school used by Durham County Council, and gives no dates for any of them.

The prisoner-of-war years

Before the civilian hostel, Windlestone held German prisoners of war. A 1945 letter from Father William Malone, a priest in Ferryhill, reported 210 German prisoners there. Camp officials would allow Sunday Mass in the recreation hall but would not let the men leave to attend church.

Malone already had two Sunday services to conduct and could not provide another at the camp. His letter, preserved in the diocesan correspondence and later transcribed by historian Aidan Harrison, records a practical obstacle to worship during captivity. This prisoner population belongs to an earlier phase, before the European Voluntary Workers photographed after the war.

How long the camp ran, and under what number, is not settled. Emily Gilbert, writing about Baltic workers, states that a published list of British prisoner-of-war camps enters Windlestone Hall as Camp No 4 and that the site later housed Latvian workers. That number could not be confirmed from an institutional record. The North East War Memorials Project lists a Windlestone Hall Camp at Rushyford among County Durham camps without giving a number, dates or occupants, and a catalogue search of the Foreign Office prisoner-of-war camp files produced no Windlestone entry.

Work and time together

Photographs supplied to historian Emily Gilbert by Pauline Szelewski and Sarah Dauksta show the civilian hostel at a more personal scale. Their fathers lived at Windlestone. One photograph shows farm workers resting outside the hall; another records Latvian residents playing a ball game in its grounds.

Gilbert places Windlestone among the countryside hostels that housed agricultural and forestry workers, and notes that the authorities tried to move women into private billets first, so it was often men who stayed longest in the larger camps. Some hostels held a single nationality; many held a mixture. The evidence from Windlestone points to a mixed house, with the Ukrainian directory entry, the Latvian photographs and the Lithuanian branch notice all attaching to the same address.

The images preserve the spaces between working hours: sitting together on the grass, posing for a photograph and joining a game. They identify Latvian residents and farm workers, rather than providing portraits of a specifically Ukrainian group.

A community supporting causes abroad

On 9 December 1948, Britanijos Lietuvis recorded a contribution of £2, 1 shilling and no pence from the Windlestone Hall branch of the Lithuanian association to the National Fund. Ten shillings of that total came from P. Kairys.

The modest entry places Windlestone within organised Lithuanian community life in Britain. Residents were not only finding employment and accommodation: they were also contributing to collective causes and remaining connected through their own press.

After the hostel

Plans to convert the hall followed quickly. A Ministry of Education special schools file covering 1950 to 1955 is titled Windlestone Hall proposed Special School for Delicate Children, which places the change of use in the years immediately after the hostel. Historic England’s account records the hall and a smaller area of land passing to Durham County Council, while much of the wider estate continued in separate uses.

The school that opened took children with chronic illness rather than displaced adults. The Northern Echo records a residential school for 130 children with chronic health conditions, predominantly asthma, from 1958 to 1984, with doctors and nurses on the premises; a former pupil, Malcolm Miles of South Shields, arrived in 1969 at the age of nine and stayed until he was sixteen. From 1984 to 1998 the hall took children with behavioural problems. Durham County Council’s residential school closed in 2006, and the empty hall was later sold.

Admission registers and log books for the school, covering 1958 to 1983, survive at the county record office in Durham. Nothing comparable has been traced for the hostel years, which is why the residents of that phase are still known largely through photographs kept in their own families.

The DiCamillo Companion dates the county council’s purchase of the house to 1954, and its sale, after the school closed, to 2011 for £240,000. The span it gives for Windlestone Hall School, 1957 to 2006, begins a year earlier than the Northern Echo’s, and the admission registers at the county record office begin in 1958.