Eastcote/Pattishall POW Camp 1914-19

[Pattishall]

I have some data on the Camp at Eastcote, Pattishall, Northamptonshire that was in operation during WW1, initially for German internees and then for POWs, but I am keen to find out more, especially anything on the internees and POWs themselves and those who guarded them. Have any letters survived, written by the internees or POWs to families in Germany, describing their first-hand experiences of the conditions at this camp? I come from this part of Northamptonshire. I have looked at some local (Northampton) newspapers from 1914 to 1919, but any reports on the camp are obviously seen through the eyes of the British.

[fritz]

Hi Pattishall,

welcome on this forum.

very interesting your post. My grandfather was POW in this camp and other sites that belonged to Pattishall/Towcester.

Some information about my grandfather you can find here

http://ypres1917.3.forumer.com/index.php?showtopic=809

Two years ago I corresponded an Englishman living in Tadcaster, who sent me a good deal of facts about this camp, but of course not specific about my GF. So I would like to get more.

Yes, some letters of him survived the time and they are still readable.

Best regards

Fritz

[Carmania]

Pattishall, welcome to the Forum.

Eascote Camp was inspected on at least three occasions by representatives of the United States Embassy in London. In February 1916 it housed civilian internees, in April 1916 it contained a mixture of both civilian internees and military prisoners but by September of the same year it housed exclusively military prisoners.

I have copies of these reports and can forward them to you once you have sufficient posts to access the PM/Converstion tool, 5 or 10 not sure.

Aled

[Pattishall]

Hi Pattishall,

welcome on this forum.

very interesting your post. My grandfather was POW in this camp and other sites that belonged to Pattishall/Towcester.

Some information about my grandfather you can find here

http://ypres1917.3.f...p?showtopic=809

Two years ago I corresponded an Englishman living in Tadcaster, who sent me a good deal of facts about this camp, but of course not specific about my GF. So I would like to get more.

Yes, some letters of him survived the time and they are still readable.

Best regards

Fritz

[Pattishall]

Fritz.

Thank you for the information about your grandfather and also the link that shows some photographs of him. May I copy those and add them to the items I am collecting together ?

Did you grandfather send several letters to Germany from Eastcote/Pattishall? Did he describe the conditions in the camp and how he was treated by the guards?

About 30 POWs and one internee died while at this camp between August 1915 and September 1919. Their names, ages of most of them and the dates of burial were recorded in the burial register of Pattishall parish church. I have copies of all these data if you (or anyone else) is interested. I am friendly with the farmer who owns the land today where the camp was situated and have walked all around the fields taking photographs. However, there are very few signs now that the camp ever existed.

Pattishall, welcome to the Forum.

Eascote Camp was inspected on at least three occasions by representatives of the United States Embassy in London. In February 1916 it housed civilian internees, in April 1916 it contained a mixture of both civilian internees and military prisoners but by September of the same year it housed exclusively military prisoners.

I have copies of these reports and can forward them to you once you have sufficient posts to access the PM/Converstion tool, 5 or 10 not sure.

Aled

[Pattishall]

Aled.

Thanks for your welcome!

I look forward to being able to receive a copy of those reports - when I have passed the appropriate tests or met the necessary criteria. I have read the relevant pages of Graham Mark's book, that refers to an inspection, but would very much like to read the actual reports. I have a very frail copy of the book "German Prisoners in Great Britain" published around 1916 (I think - it has no date in it) which is all photographs of scenes and prisoners in six camps in Britain including 17 of Eastcote. No names of individuals are mentioned, and it has no descriptive text, in fact no text at all, apart from a rather bland foreword.

I also have some picture postcards of prisoners in Catterick Camp in 1918 and 1919 that I would be prepared to swop for any similar cards of Eastcote/Pattishall, as I am not really interested in Catterick - or I could copy them and e-mail to anyone researching Catterick.

[Carmania]

Pattishall

I've sent you a PM with my email address.

Aled

[fritz]

Hi Pattishall,

yes, you are allowed to copy my stuff.

I possess a dozen or so of letters of my grandfather he sent from Pattishall to Germany. My grandfather was captured in the battle of Arras, April 1917 and sent to England in summer. He spent his time in Pattishall but very often he has to work outside the camp mostly as farmhand.

He never lamented about bad treatment. He told nothing about the guards, I guess their relation was impersonal but correct. But he often told about his good time in Mendlesham. He teached the farmer´s children German and the kids teached him English.

I already know about the German dead in Pattishall. Most of them died by an epidemic of influenza. Odd, the priest did not want to bless the Catholic dead and so the camp commander had to do this duty. Now they are buried in Cannock Chase.

Yes, I am interested in your pics of the camp ground then and now. As attachment I send a Google aerial with the position of the camp for all who are interested.

Best wishes

Fritz

[Pattishall]

Thanks. I will pick this up.

[Pattishall]

Hi Pattishall,

yes, you are allowed to copy my stuff.

I possess a dozen or so of letters of my grandfather he sent from Pattishall to Germany. My grandfather was captured in the battle of Arras, April 1917 and sent to England in summer. He spent his time in Pattishall but very often he has to work outside the camp mostly as farmhand.

He never lamented about bad treatment. He told nothing about the guards, I guess their relation was impersonal but correct. But he often told about his good time in Mendlesham. He teached the farmer´s children German and the kids teached him English.

I already know about the German dead in Pattishall. Most of them died by an epidemic of influenza. Odd, the priest did not want to bless the Catholic dead and so the camp commander had to do this duty. Now they are buried in Cannock Chase.

Yes, I am interested in your pics of the camp ground then and now. As attachment I send a Google aerial with the position of the camp for all who are interested.

Best wishes

Fritz

[Pattishall]

Thanks for the information of your grandfather's letters and the google map of the camp area.

In several cases, the names of those who were buried in Pattishall (bodies later moved to Cannock Chase) are not quite the same in the parish records as they are in the British Government's official death records held by the Registrar General i the General Register Office. I have copies of the index references for all of the GRO registered deaths, with the names, ages of all of them and the reference numbers. If anyone wishes to purchase copies of the original death certificates (which I do NOT have), I can share those data. At the moment, it is only hand-written but I will type it up soon. I am not sure which record of the names is correct or more accurate - but if anyone requires copies of the certificates they will have to use the RG's versions.

I believe that the camp area was larger on the north side than the area you have marked on the map.

The road at the top left-hand side of the satellite picture is Banbury Lane. I found evidence locally that the camp boundary extended to Banbury Lane (though not to the corner of School Lane and Banbury Road), and probably to Gayton Road, the small road along the right-hand side of the picture. The boundary you have marked on the south is Bird's Hill Lane. I understand, from talking to people living in Pattishall/Eastcote today, that the camp also used a field or fields on the other side of either Gayton Road or Bird's Hill Lane (I am not sure which, I think between Gayton Road and Greenway, but I can check on my next visit) for drying the camp laundry.

I will sort out some photos for you very soon, but will not have time to do this for a day or two.

[fritz]

Hi Pattishall,

thanks for this correction about the boundaries of the camp.

With this post I attach of my GF´s letters the typical form of POW-letters. It is written with ink, so all is very clear to decipher. Of course all these letters were read by a censor. This may the reason for the weak information in it about the life in the camp. Mostly "I am well, how are you, thanks for letters or parcels, please send me..."

Most information I possess are not digital, so I have the same problem as you to type or scan the selected material.

Please send me an email-address if you need a higher resolution for this attachment or further.

Looking forward to your next post. And don´t hurry. We have all the time of the world.

Kind regards

Fritz

[Pattishall]

Just in case anyone else is interested in the Eastcote/Pattishall Camp, I have now been to The National Archives at Kew in England and have begun to look through some relevant Foreign Office files from 1914 to 1921 relating to camps for German Internees and Prisoners of War in the FO383 series. There are masses of documents arranged in a "sort of" date order, relating to Camps in the British Isles, New Zealand, India, Canada and elsewhere, though not filed or indexed by country or camp. It will simply be a matter of working through each document and picking out the detail I need - it will take ages but there are wonderful snippets of information. I also found it difficult not to get side-tracked by other fascinating data though not related to Eastcote or Pattishall. I now realise that as the War progressed, Pattishall became the base camp for about another 20 working camps. I read some reports on conditions in those - generally the prisoners were happier in the working camps as they were given "real" tasks, felling timber or laying railway lines, rather than just being kept occupied as they were at Pattishall by making model boats or gardening or similar small activities.

Some well-established Forum members have, by mutual agreement, e-mailed some details of Eastcote/Pattishall direct to me for which I am very grateful.

I visited the site of the former Camp again two days ago but the weather was against me and everything was covered in snow by the time I got there. I had a quick look in the local studies library at some 1914-1919 newspapers, but again because of the weather quickly getting worse, I gave up and returned to my home 100 miles away. But, I shall return to continue the hunt when practicable.

[warproject]

Hi All.

I missed this when it was 1st posted.

As some folk already know I am doing a project on WW1/WW2 men and women who

died in Northamptonshire.

I have all the burials for the prisoners at the Camp and their photographs of graves at Cannock.

I agree not all the names were entered correctly in the register.

If anyone feels that they could help me with my research project please get in touch.

T.I.A.

Sandy

[warproject]

Thankyou Fritz for your 2 P.M.'s.

Sandy

[andydeans3]

Good morning.

The last posting on this thread is quite a while ago, hope it's still "live".

My mother is German, father British. Mum's lived in Scotland for 60 years now.

Her father was a POW in England, at Pattishall from around 1916, to 1919.

He learned to speak English while he was there, which in fact was the spur for my mother to major in English language at school.

However I digress.

I would love to know if my grandfather's name appears anywhere on the records for the camp. I have already ascertained that a lot of WW1 POW camp records were lost in the bombing of London in WW2. Rather ironic really. The ones that do exist, are apparently at the National Archive, but have not been digitized, so a very long process to search.

Does anyone know if names of German WW1 POWs from Eastcote/Pattishall are likely to be found anywhere else apart from the National Archive.?

Corporal at the top of this thread, I will ask my mother if she has any surviving documents from his days as a POW, and come back.

She certainly has a lot of old papers that come from her family.

I'm not at home at the moment, but will be home, at the end of April.

The Hiker.

[Pattishall]

Hello Hiker,

This thread is not dead, but I have not been looking at the posts recently !! I have been doing a great deal of research on this camp over the past 12 months, and later this year will be publishing a small book on it in conjunction with a friend who used to live in Pattishall village. In that book I'll be listing a few names of men (with a little biographical data on them that I've found) whom I have proved were "resident" there between 1914 and November 1919 when the Camp was closed. There is no complete list of German POWs (or those of other nationalities who were held there) in The National Archives, as those lists were sadly destroyed by "enemy action" in the records depository during WWII. But there is a lot of material that simply has to be waded through, page after page to glean snippets of information. It's an extremely long job. There is almost nothing in the county archives in Northampton on the Camp or the POWs. However, from inspection reports and a huge variety of other sources I have been able to identify a number of the several thousand POWs who were held there and also at its satellite working camps. 18 men escaped from Pattishall Camp (and generally re-captured) and I now have the names, and in most cases descriptions, of most of those, as well as information on a further 70 or so who escaped from its satellite working camps. I have also collected the names, ages and other data on all those who died while in Pattishall and have been to Cannock Chase where they have been reburied to see their graves. My research is continuing and this small book is simply a prelude to a much larger book that I hope to complete over the next couple of years - but we wanted to get something in print this year, while I continue to gather more detail, particularly on Pattishall's satellites scattered over the south and east of England. Members of this Forum have suggested places where I might look for records and documents, and that has been a great help. Other friends and colleagues have helped me to translate materials that are available only in German, and to read hand-written items in the old German script - a nightmare when I was first faced with it.Children and grandchildren of men who were POWs at Eastcote/Pattishall and local residents have been extremely helpful in loaning me letters and photos that their relatives sent to Germany from the Camp. If anyone else who reads this has any similar material, or even anecdotes or family stories, please get in touch - and I will try to incorporate your/their contributions in the larger publication that I am still working on.

Hoping this is helpful, and even reassuring, to some of you.

Pattishall.

[andydeans3]

Pattishal

I will ask my mother if she has any letters, or snippets about her father's life at Pattishall.

I could certainly get you some photos of him.

His name was Kurt Leuenberg.

He returned to Germany after the war, so did not die there.

I've sent you a personal message with my E mail address.

Please get in direct contact.

I monitor my E mail constantly, I haven't been on this site for months.

Andy

[Pattishall]

Dear Hiker Andy,

I will contact you via PMs.

Thanks,

Pattishall

[Pattishall]

At long last, a 72 page illustrated book on the Eastcote/Pattishall (Northamptonshire) WW1 POW Camp has been published. Its title is "Detained in England 1914-1920: Eastcote POW Camp Pattishall" by Chapman and Moss. Copies are in the Imperial War Museum, The National Archives, Northampton Public Library and Northamptonshire Record Office. Contributors from this Forum have been acknowledged in the Preface, some of whom provided information on relatives or photographs, some loaned copies of letters from the German POWs held at Pattishall or its 160 dependent satellite working camps that were in the British Army's Eastern Command area (13 counties in the lower right-hand quadrant of England under a line roughly drawn from The Wash through Rutland to the Isle of Wight). Further books are to follow on both the parent (Pattishall) and the satellite WW1 POW Camps - some for civilian internees, others for combatant military POWs.

[Carmania]

Congratulations!

Aled

[warproject]

We only had this book in Northampton Library last week. !!!!!!!!!!!

Excellent reading.

Sandy

[Pattishall]

Thanks. Hope it proves useful to Forum members.

Perhaps the library's cataloguing team had a huge influx of new titles towards the end of last year!

I understand the book is also available in Towcester and Wellingborough Museums.

[Steve20y]

Fritz.

Thank you for the information about your grandfather and also the link that shows some photographs of him. May I copy those and add them to the items I am collecting together ?

Did you grandfather send several letters to Germany from Eastcote/Pattishall? Did he describe the conditions in the camp and how he was treated by the guards?

About 30 POWs and one internee died while at this camp between August 1915 and September 1919. Their names, ages of most of them and the dates of burial were recorded in the burial register of Pattishall parish church. I have copies of all these data if you (or anyone else) is interested. I am friendly with the farmer who owns the land today where the camp was situated and have walked all around the fields taking photographs. However, there are very few signs now that the camp ever existed.

Pattishall. Hi. I understand you are the guru on First World War Internment Camps. I am looking for any information about one that was apparently located in Billericay in Essex. Can you help at all please? Regards Steve

[Pattishall]

Steve.

Not sure about being "the guru" but I have details on many of the WW1 POW Camps used to accommodate both civilians and combatants, especially the camps in the British Army's Eastern Command area and in Gloucestershire. All the working camps in the Eastern Command area (in which Essex was located) were satellites of the parent camp, Pattishall in Northamptonshire. I know of 26 working camps in Essex and have visited and photographed most of the sites where the camps were situated. At Billericay, the combatant POWs were housed in a part of the Billericay Workhouse, which is still standing, though now converted into a private complex of "up-market" flats, maisonettes, etc. I have written a book on the parent camp (Pattishall - also called Eastcote in its early days) and am now working on one on its satellites, but that is still a long way away from completion. According to my index to my notes, the Billericay working camp was inspected by officials from the Swiss Embassy (nothing to do with the Red Cross) on 7 May 1918 who wrote their report on the camp on 10 May 1918. I do not have the details of that report to hand, but can dig out the file next week, if you are interested in what it might contain: I know it states the number of prisoners but none of their names, apart from the (German) camp leader, their sleeping and recreational facilities, the name of the Commandant and of the local doctor, how often the doctor visits, what work the POWs are employed on locally, but not where, how much they are paid, their general health and behaviour and if the inspector felt the camp was well managed or not. The POWs did not necessarily spend all of their period of captivity at a single working camp and may have been transferred to and from the parent camp - and occasionally were moved from one parent camp to another. If you are interested in a particular POW I might have some information on him in my files, but there is no comprehensive list of the POWs in UK (or German) archives.