Superior Camp became vacant in 1946 with the departure of the Canadian Army. With the cessation of all military activities on Ludshott Common, the landscape was returned to civilian authority, and the National Trust. The Common itself had become a desolate quagmire after the years of intense tank activity, and the National Trust and local Council faced the daunting task of restoring it to its natural beauty. However, there was one part of the Common that was not yet returned to the National Trust, and was certainly not about to receive efforts to return the site to its natural state - that part was Superior Camp. The history of the Camp now entered a new phase of civilian occupancy that comprised a unique chapter in the history of Ludshott Common.
Section 1 – The conversion of Superior Camp
It was not long after the departure of the army in 1946 that Superior Camp, rather than being demolished, was put to further use. The Camp was only five years old, and if the buildings on the site had provided warm, comfortable accommodation for Canadian soldiers, then they could do so again for local residents in need of housing. One of the civilian families that made the Camp their new home was the family of Sue Hodgkinson, who was born on the camp in 1948. Ms. Hodgkinson spent many happy childhood years living at Superior Camp. ‘The residents of Superior Camp were all newly married couples who were on the Council House waiting list.’ She explains, ‘There were no Council Houses available so they were accommodated at Superior Camp and Eyrie Camp in Headley’.
Management of the civilian estate at Superior Camp was the responsibility of the Petersfield Rural District Council. Fortunately, the Council compiled all their official correspondence relating to the Camp into one file once they Camp was closed and this file is available for the public at the National Archives in Kew. These documents give an almost complete chronology of the Camp’s management during the civilian phase, and contain not only the internal correspondence of the Council, but letters from the National Trust and Ministry of Housing and Local Government. The author makes reference below to a select few of these documents (of which there are hundreds).
The earliest document pertaining to the Camp dates to January 1947. It is an internal letter by the Petersfield Rural District Council (henceforth referred to as the P.R.D.C.) detailing the measures taken to convert the army huts into suitable civilian residences. It relates that 140 of the buildings are of wooden construction (these would have been the standard Nissen huts) and six were built of brick (these would have been the guardhouses, as established in the last section). The document relates that street lighting was already in place at the Camp, water was supplied by two 50,000 gallon water tanks, and sewers and disposal works were provided for the Army Camp and would need little adaptation. In short, the Camp was already in almost perfect condition for civilian habitation.
A much later document from the Ministry of Housing and Local Government looks back on the establishment of the camp during the debate over its closure, and is dated 25th October 1957. It states that: ‘the accommodation is of a far higher standard than is normally found in hutted camps. The huts were well converted (at a cost of £275 a hut) in 1947 and have been fairly generously maintained since’. By the time the huts became home to the civilian families, they were generous, comfortable residences equipped with bathrooms, electric heaters and interior water closets. Besides the homes, further facilities were provided by the Council, as Sue Hodgkinson remembers: ‘All the services were laid on at the Camp, electricity, water, sewerage, telephones and a Doctor's surgery was managed by a practice from Grayshott.’
The life at Superior Camp was pleasant enough that by December 1955 an internal letter at the P.R.D.C. noted that there were now 146 families living there. The community thrived enough to attract local business, in the form of an enterprise named Cornish, that opened a convenience shop opposite the Hodgkinsons’ house on Superior Road. Peter Spice has confirmed that this store was located in the building immediately north of the central NAAFI building.
Section 2 – The Proposed School
Records at the National Archives and the Hampshire Record Office maintain that the population at Superior Camp thrived to the point that the Hampshire Education Authority proposed to build a school on site at the Camp. A letter dated 3rd May 1949 from one W. Coates of the County Education Authority, relates: ‘Children of school age living at Superior Camp now attend in the main the Grayshott C.E. and Headley the Holme C.E. schools, both of which are crowded.’ It seems that the school was proposed to alleviate the pressure on the existing schools. W. Coates’ letter estimates that as many as eighty children may be expected to attend the Superior Camp school by 1951. A letter addressed to the Local Education Authority in April 1949 discusses the location of the camp, and reveals: ‘It is assumed that the [temporary primary] school will occupy the premises that were to have housed the proposed secondary school, the arrangements for which broke down because of the high cost and the short period of tenure.’ Interestingly, this divulges that the school was initially intended to be a large secondary school, but high costs and the ‘short period of tenure’ (meaning, presumably, the uncertain future of this deliberately temporary Camp) conspired in the conversion of this proposal to a primary school.
From this point, architectural plans held at the Hampshire Record Office in Winchester have revealed in detail the practical designs for the school. The scale of the proposal is striking, especially given the temporary nature of the Camp. Fig. 4.1 is the first proposed plan, for the secondary school, and shows the blueprint for the main school building. The title reads ‘Conversion of the existing NAAFI building’, and one can clearly see from the outline that this is the central building from the aerial photograph. The school building contains quite a wide range of rooms. The annotations can be quite hard to make out in the plan but the rooms include: five large classrooms, separate cloak rooms and toilets
Fig 4-1: Architectural Plan showing the interior layout of the proposed school and its wide range of facilities and rooms.
for boys and girls; store rooms; a large kitchen; a staff room; and a large dining hall. Besides this, other nearby huts were to be converted into: domestic quarters, presumably for the school’s superintendent and a ‘practical intern room’ comprising a domestic science room and woodworking room. When the proposal was changed to a primary school of 120 pupils, instead of a secondary school of 200 pupils, the blueprints for the building were left largely unchanged.
However, these plans were never to reach fruition, as a letter dated the 26th May 1949 states: ‘the proposal to provide a temporary primary school at Superior Camp has been discussed with H.M. Inspector [and the Ministry of Education] and that the Authority do not wish to proceed with this matter.’ It is not surprising that this school was never built, since its size and extensive facilities belied the temporary nature of Superior Camp. As the architectural plans bear out, the school would have been very well equipped with classrooms and workrooms and been quite an important educational centre in the community. The provision of such a school on land that was borrowed under requisitioning powers and due within the next ten years to be returned (normal requisitioning powers extended until the end of 1958, as we shall see later) would have been a very unsound investment of Council funding and labour. Letters found in the Petersfield Rural District Council’s file at the National Archives have also led the author to suspect that protest from the National Trust also contributed to the abandonment of the school plans, as can be seen below.
Section 3 – The Camp Closure Debate
From its initial construction in 1941 by the Canadian Army, Superior Camp not only existed on borrowed land, but borrowed time. During the war, the temporary nature of the Camp was never in doubt or debate. As we have seen in the first chapter, the temporary army camp was a formulaic institution. They were established in times of greater military activity to be used as long as the need remained – the more permanent military bases were known as barracks. It was understood that the Camp would be used either until the national emergency had passed, or the units stationed there were relocated.
The conversion of the Camp to a civilian estate was made under less certain circumstances. The local Council simply adapted an available opportunity, the vacant accommodation, to an existing problem: the Council waiting list. The opportunity was made all the more tempting by the existence of functional services on site, and if the prosperity of the new Superior Camp community was taken as the measure of success, then the Camp was an opportunistic but commendable accomplishment. Of course, this was an achievement that wouldn’t last, since the Council had, by omission or design, failed to acknowledge the rights of the National Trust to the land, and that the requisitioning powers that gave the Council control over the site would not last forever.
The first concrete evidence of the National Trust’s protest over the use of its land is found in the form of a letter written to the Ministry of Local Government and Housing at Whitehall on the 7th December, 1955, from the Trust’s Area Agent. The letter relates that the ‘land was requisitioned by the military authorities… for an army camp. The trust acquiesced… but we assumed that the land would be restored and returned to the Trust as soon as the emergency was over.’ It reveals that protest over this use of the land from the National Trust extended back to the beginning of the issue: ‘the authorities decided to use the buildings for temporary housing to which we made strong protests at the time.’ Furthermore, it reads: ‘There was considerable correspondence between the Trust and the Ministry in the past, especially in 1948, concerning the future of the camp site.’ Since 1948 was the year that the school plans were drawn up and discussed, the author surmises that protest from the National Trust may have been significant in informing the Ministry’s decision not to approve the school. The National Trust go on to outline three reasons for insisting on the removal of the camp:
‘1. This land is held for the benefit of the nation and the public are precluded from enjoying the land by reason of this requisition.
2. Our adjoining woodlands have, in the past, suffered depredations from the activities of the camp who seem to have small regard for the rights of owners.
3. We are losing subscriptions upon which we depend for the upkeep of Ludshott Common because the local people consider this camp to be a complete blot on the landscape and feel that the Trust is failing in its duty… in securing its removal’.
This protest letter was to be the beginning of a heated, drawn out debate between the National Trust and Petersfield Rural District Council that would last several years, and involve the Ministry of Local Government and Housing and even the House of Commons. It is not difficult to sympathise with the position of the National Trust, but the points raised by the P.R.D.C., that housing was in short supply after the war and the 146 families living happily on the Camp could not be easily relocated, were also valid.
A compromise was initially proposed by the P.R.D.C. in July 1956. They would commit to the removal of the families, but asked for the National Trust to allow them the land under lease until 1965, enough time for them to arrange the difficult relocation. However, this solution was ill-received by the National Trust, as a letter from the Ministry of Local Government and Housing dated 21st January 1957 explains. The National Trust had ‘no legal power to grant a lease on any part of the Common, as it is Common land’. Under Section 29 of the National Trust Act 1907, the National Trust have an obligation to ensure that common land in its ownership is not built on, and is kept available for public enjoyment, and therefore ‘at the 31st December 1958 requisitioning power comes to an end then the Council will have no right on Ludshott Common’.
Therefore, the P.R.D.C. was left with little choice but to get started with the relocation arrangements, and quickly. By this point, some of the personnel at the P.R.D.C. were beginning to acknowledge the Trust’s position out of concern for the Camp’s residents, as an internal letter dated 9th May 1957 bears out: ‘the huts are half-way houses, they are let to people on the waiting list and tenants are offered a council house after three of four years in a hut… people are worthy of being housed in more attractive dwellings than the camp can offer’.
Towards the end of 1957, the controversy had reached new heights, as the P.R.D.C. was having trouble making relocation arrangements, and the National Trust would not relent. A member of the House of Commons, one Hon. Peter Legh M.P., was called in to mediate in the dispute. He judged in a letter dated the 2nd October 1957 that this was ‘an acutely difficult problem which the council brought on themselves by refusing to plan for a situation which for years they had seen looming ahead of them’. Mr. Legh goes on to identify another problem associated with the Camp: ‘if the Minister should agree to re-requisition there would be great indignation among the inhabitants of the adjoining village of Grayshott. They suffer much from the continuous anti-social activities of many of the camp dwellers. The camp is also an appalling eye-sore.’ The issue of local perceptions of the Camp will be dealt with in the next section.
Ultimately, Mr. Legh’s efforts were rewarded as the National Trust and P.R.D.C. reached a tentative compromise. The Ministry of Local Government and Housing would seek a special extension of requisitioning powers concerning the site, giving the P.R.D.C. a final deadline of January 1961. The National Trust agreed, although it insisted that mediation from Whitehall was continued by Henry Brooke M.P., fearing that the P.R.D.C. would seek some pretext to delay their relocation responsibilities. The Council had been searching for council housing for the Camp residents at the nearby villages of Liphook and Liss, and renewed its efforts when the special extension was granted by the Ministry of Local Government and Housing on 29th August 1958. Although the relocation arrangements were far from complete, since the Council had at the time secured less than one hundred houses, this breakthrough was enough to inspire optimism that the situation was nearing a satisfactory conclusion. Mr. Jenkins, the P.R.D.C.’s housing manager, had already begun seeking contractors to undertake the demolition of the camp by the time the extension was authorised and the Council committed to clearing the Camp as soon as possible. The clearance and demolition of the Camp will be discussed in Section 5.
Section 4 – Perceptions of Superior Camp
In the previous section, some of the official correspondence surrounding the future of the Camp alluded to alleged ‘anti-social behaviour’ on the part of the Camp’s residents. We have seen in Section 1 that the Camp developed into a thriving community within a few years of its conversion into a civilian estate. However, these allegations suggest that the Camp and its residents may not have been as welcome in the wider community as its relative prosperity suggests. In this section, the differing attitudes towards Superior Camp will be investigated, in order to reveal what Superior Camp really meant to its inhabitants and the wider community of which it was part.
By far the most damning impressions of Superior Camp are those of the National Trust and its benefactors. These views were made clear at a meeting between the National Trust and the Ministry of Local Government and Housing on the 17th November 1957. One of the representatives for the National Trust was Miss Dorothy Hunter. Her father, Sir Robert Hunter, was one of the co-founders of the National Trust, and the nearby Waggoners Wells is dedicated to his memory. A memorandum handed over by Miss Hunter can be found in the P.R.D.C.’s record of Superior Camp at the National Archives, and sets out the Trust’s view of Superior Camp and its residents. The Camp is described as ‘a sprawl of unsightly huts… the great majority of the huts are constructed of weather-board, which has now turned a dingy black.’ Although Miss Hunter acknowledges somewhat condescendingly that ‘some tenants have made valiant attempts at gardens’, she concludes that: ‘the whole effect is dismal and unsightly in the extreme.’
Her displeasure at the Camp was not restricted to its aesthetic qualities. ‘A great many of the camp children go to Grayshott School, where they create a great deal of difficulty, being much more backward than the Grayshott children… the children and young people get very out of hand and cause much damage on the common and on neighbouring private property… On National Trust property trees are cut down, undergrowth broken, concrete ends of seats have been torn up, a concrete sluice between the ponds broken and injury caused to swans and cygnets on the pond’. These comments support the original views expressed by the National Trust Area Agent in their letter of 7th December 1955, where they complained that the residents had ‘small regard for the rights of owners’.
Given the interest that the National Trust had in seeing Superior Camp demolished, it is difficult to gauge the extent of this ‘anti-social behaviour’. The best approach is to look at these allegations objectively, in terms of the alleged acts of anti-social behaviour. Some of the allegations, such as Miss Hunter’s condemnation of the Superior children causing ‘difficulty’ on account of being ‘backwards’ are naturally difficult to sympathise with. The more impartial assertions are without exception restricted to cases of vandalism, all of which are related to National Trust property and the areas immediately surrounding the Camp. Understandably, the National Trust was opposed to the civilian estate from the start and would have been loathe to see their landscape being altered by its inhabitants. However, what the National Trust had failed to acknowledge is that, regardless of their views on the matter, 146 families had made the Camp their home. Minor leisurely modifications to the landscape would be quite unavoidable, especially considering that the Camp was occupied for over ten years.
The tenants of Superior Camp were also subject to negative attitudes from the surrounding villagers on occasion, as Sue Hodgkinson remembers. ‘An interesting comment from my Aunt, of which I was totally unaware because of my young age at the time, was the fact that the Residents of Grayshott looked down their noses at the Camp residents and viewed them as no more than gypsies and second class citizens. My Aunt recalls several times when she was faced with a very stony look when asked where she lived.’ This attitude of superiority is something that Grayshott resident Peter Spice also recalls: ‘In the village, if you mentioned you were from Superior, there was that sort of attitude, but there was no trouble down there’. Mr. Spice maintained that the Superior tenants were decent, good families: ‘you always get one or two bad people, but there was very little trouble. The Social club was broken into once, that was where all the alcohol and tobacco was, but very little overall’.
The villagers who held these views seemed to have made the same disregard as the National Trust: failure to recognise that the Camp was a large community that had to coexist with the surrounding villages just as it had to exist alongside the surrounding landscape. As Sue Hodgkinson remarks: ‘What these residents failed to appreciate was the fact that there were 102 family units on the Camp and their only real place to do their shopping was in Grayshott. The businesses therefore must have suffered considerably after the Camp was demolished and the residents moved elsewhere’.
Fig 4-2: A map of Superior Camp, c1956, drawn by an ex-resident in 1987 obtained from J.O. Smith. Although many of the residential buildings are missing, the location of main features such as the water towers, parade ground and Cornish shop are accurate.
Mr. Spice noted that such superior attitudes on the part of the local villagers were a minority. Indeed, this is not hard to imagine, since attitudes of social generalisation are just as common today as they have always been. It would be fair to say that the Superior tenants on the whole were no more anti-social than the Grayshott or Headley Down villagers were unanimously snobbish.
For the most part, life on Superior Camp was pleasant and its tenants made happy lives for themselves in the community for the years that they lived there. Ms. Hodgkinson remembers that there was ‘a tremendous community spirit at the Camp. They were all
young families, all in the same boat, trying to make a start after the War whilst Rationing was still very evident.’ The Superior community was involved in many parties and group activities, such as a street party to celebrate the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. The Parade Ground was used as a space to fly kites that Ms. Hodgkinson’s father made for the Camp’s children. Sue Hodgkinson has many happy memories of her childhood in the Camp, and also on the Common. ‘I have lots of memories of living in such a beautiful part of the country,’ she says ‘climbing trees and playing in the undergrowth making "dens" was great fun’. In fact, the sense of identity on the Camp was such that many of the Camp’s residents were reluctant to leave by the late 1950s. Ms. Hodgkinson recalls that they had gone to great lengths to make their properties as comfortable and pleasant as they could, and many wished to buy their homes and plots of land. Today it is difficult to imagine from the lone privet hedges that remain of the gardens and concrete foundations that the site was once home to such a thriving community. These clues were left as unintended reminders of the Camp’s history, as the demolition arrangements were never quite completed.
Section 5 – The closure and demolition of the Camp
Securing council housing for the 146 families at Superior Camp had proved difficult for the Petersfield Rural District Council, and the process was still not complete when the Housing Manager, Mr. Jenkins, was faced with further difficulties in organising the demolition of the Camp itself. Rather bizarrely, the Council had decided, on the request of the National Trust, not to demolish the Camp in one operation, but to demolish each building as it became vacant. The basis for this decision was that the National Trust were extremely keen to see the Camp decommissioned as soon as possible, even if this meant doing it piece-by-piece. The National Trust did not want the vacated buildings to become occupied by further squatters who might drift into the Camp without the consent of the Council. The Superior Camp residents had been encouraged to move out of the Camp of their own volition ever since the debate over the Camp’s future heated up around 1956. Also, the Council had been securing housing in stages around Liss and Liphook, as the local villages either could not provide sufficient council housing for all of Superior’s residents, or refused to take them all in. All this meant that the Superior tenants were moving away from the camp gradually, and the Camp could not be vacated and demolished all at once.
Mr. Jenkins drew up plans for the demolition job, detailing exactly what was to be done on site. After this plan was drawn up, a contract was made and the Council would look for a contractor willing to undertake the job as they had set it out. The plan stipulated that there was to be two phases to the demolition. The first was the demolition of the majority of the Camp’s less permanent features, including all the buildings. These features would take priority since they would be relatively easy to remove, and these were the buildings that could provide shelter for the potential squatters that the National Trust feared. It was the second phase, the removal of the more permanent, embedded concrete features that would prove more difficult. Features such as the concrete water towers and paving were much more difficult to dispose of, and were less attractive to contractors. Since the resident buildings were comfortably outfitted, the Council had promised some of the facilities they contained to the contractors who would undertake the demolition. These facilities were deemed to be in satisfactory condition to be sold on, and would provide an incentive to a contractor. The complex concrete features provided no such incentive, and were quite difficult to break down and dispose of.
Arrangements for phase two of the demolition, removing the concrete features, were further complicated since the Council could not be sure exactly whose responsibility the demolition was. Mr. Jenkins wrote in his report of 15th August 1958 that he was ‘uncertain whether the Council should be responsible for letting the contract for this work or whether the matter shall be dealt with by the site owner (in this case the National Trust).’ He did assert that the Trust would be compensated for all expenses incurred by the demolition, but the job of finding a contractor and overseeing the work would fall to them.
It appears from a letter from Mr. Jenkins to the Ministry of Local Government and Housing in December 1958 that the responsibility did fall to the Council. As the last remaining families moved away from the Camp, Mr. Jenkins drew up the contract and set out final instructions on the removal of the concrete features. Unfortunately, these documents are the final records contained in the P.R.D.C. file at the National Archives, and comprise all that has been recorded about the Camp. Neither the National Trust or the Petersfield Council today had any recollection of the Camp besides familiarity with its remains. The eyewitnesses I have contacted had all moved away by this stage in the Camp’s history. The final stages of Superior Camp’s life can be inferred from what is known from these records and the remains that persist at the site. In describing the concrete features at the site, Mr. Jenkins related that: ‘About one tenth of all the floors are concrete… [in Stage 1 of the demolition] the buildings shall be cleared down to the floor level only even though the concrete base and floors may stand out of the ground… the timber buildings and suspended floors are mounted on dwarf concrete walls which may project from 6 inches to 2 feet out of the ground’.
Fig 4-3: Just a few of the concrete 'tank traps'. There are dozens on the site
Fig 4-4: One of the many manholes on the site which have only been partially obscured naturally.
Today, it is obvious that Stage 2 of the demolition was only partially carried out. Some of the features, such as the elevated water towers, static water tanks, telephone poles and wires have been successfully removed, most probably during or immediately after the demolition of the Camp buildings. As we have seen above, conspicuous features such as the base of the rifle range wall, large concrete tank-traps left by the Army (Fig 4.3), manholes (most of which stand 1ft out of the ground – Fig 4.4), concrete foundations and dwarf concrete walls remain. These dwarf walls are most obvious in the case of the NAAFI building, where the walls stand some two feet high. Mr. Jenkins’ report explains some of these omissions, such as the concrete road, which was deemed too large and complex to remove; and the buried sewer system, which Mr. Jenkins reported would not be a problem since it was under the ground. The failure to remove the manholes is particularly striking, since Mr. Jenkins specifically pointed out that these were deep, open holes that constituted a significant tripping hazard and should be removed in the interests of public safety. Some of these manholes have naturally filled with dead leaves and earth over the years, but others remain a hazard to this day. The author found one filled with household refuse in bin-bags and even machine parts.
The overall effect of this operation is one of incompleteness. It was clear to me when I first inspected the site in summer 2006, knowing nothing of the Camp’s history except rumours of wartime activity, that something had been lost there, and that the site had been neglected. I am in some way indebted to the inefficient demolition of the Camp, since these remains have not only provided significant clues for piecing the history of the Camp together, but also inspired the pursuit of this investigation from the beginning.
(c) Matthew Tilley