Cockayne Hatley Prisoner of War Camp

During and immediately after the Second World War a prisoner of war camp was established in Cockayne Hatley on three acres of ground to the back of The Old Rectory. The camp was made up of about 20 Nissen-style huts, of which only one concrete base remains, with the Old Rectory itself used as the camp mess. Cockayne Hatley Hall may have been used as quarters for the British camp staff.  

Initially the camp was used for German prisoners of war and was wired and guarded. Later it was used for Italians and security was relaxed. By 1946/7 it was again occupied by Germans, operating as a satellite of Potton camp. In January 1946 the use of prisoners of war as drivers for trucks taking other prisoners to work on local farms triggered a strike among drivers employed by the Bedfordshire War Agricultural Executive Committee. As a result around 1200 German prisoner in camps at Potton, Colmworth, Luton, Ampthill and Cockayne Hatley were left idle. A spokesman for the strikers said that drivers had been detailed to train German co-drivers and complained that “This means that Germans are taking Englishmen’s jobs at lower rates of pay … yet when ex-Service men recently demobilised from the war have applied for driving jobs, they have received the reply that there are no vacancies”. 

Later that year in a tragic accident a German prisoner billeted at what was described as the Cockayne Hatley “hostel” was killed after a fall from a bicycle while cycling to work on a farm at Sutton. A fellow prisoner cycling with him, Sergeant Ernst Selle, heard Werner Schadow fall behind him as they were going down a steep hill, and thought he had braked too suddenly. Sergeant A M Robertson of the Pioneer Corps detachment in charge of the hostel told an inquest that Schadow, a 20 year old farmer from near Berlin, had been in good health, and that the bicycle was in good order. The young German died of a brain haemorrhage immediately after he was admitted to hospital in Bedford the same morning.  

Sources:  

Heritage Environment Record no. 21160 

Bedfordshire Times, 25th January 1946 

Biggleswade Chronicle, 18th October 1946