Hursley Park during World War II and Vickers 1939 - 1956
A Temporary Home for Many
When a state of war was declared between Britain and Germany on 3 September 1939, the use of Hursley Park and its amenities was, as in the First World War, offered to the country. Very soon the wooded parts of the Park accommodated a tented transit camp that capitalised. on the camouflage provided by the mature trees. The camp was formed to handle some of the considerable number of overseas volunteers who had enlisted to serve with the British Armed Forces and fight the common foe. The men had to be carefully screened and sent on to appropriate units to help the overall war effort. Americans, Belgians, Canadians, Free French and Poles were among those identified who, when time allowed during their short stay in the Park, added a little to village life. The Poles showed a love for children, and used a raft they built as an exercise on the Park lake for giving rides to excited local children. Later, the camp handled a lot of those rescued from the great Dunkirk evacuation. Besides British troops, there were also Free French, Poles and other Europeans.
After an exciting voyage with other children on the Polish raft, one little girl took home a pheasant’s egg she found near the lake to her horrified grandfather, who took it down the garden, broke it and buried it. It was an indictable offence to interfere with game in this way, even during the war, and this poor man feared the worst of all outcomes from this innocent act. These inhibitions were not shared by everyone, as game of every sort was stealthily despatched to local larders to eke out the meagre wartime rations for domestic, trade and service people alike, right through the war. This could explain why rifle practices took place in the early morning or late evening, though getting men used to combat conditions in the half—light was just about plausible, until you saw the amount of game that happened to get in the way of rather too many bullets. Even after the war, the present title holder of the Hursley Heathcotes, while at Winchester College, took advantage of his family connections and cycled over to Hursley Park and caught rabbits to augment his inadequate college rations.
In 1939 the Park had a very good game reserve, with a herd of deer, game birds, and various animals. When wartime restrictions on feed came in, the herd had to be culled, and early in 1941 the Vickers Supermarine design staff, who were located in the Ballroom, were startled one morning by shots ringing out across the driveway. From the windows they saw a member of the Cooper family supervising some of the remaining estate workers in reducing the herd. This was a sad sight for the folk from towns not used to country ways, but there was a palliative sequel when they were the recipients of venison lunches soon afterwards.
During the war the Park, being convenient for Southampton Docks, was a temporary home for many service men travelling to and from overseas, and for men simply en route across southern England. Many thousands must have had brief stays under canvas in the Park. Of all the visitors, the Americans, with their large and more comfortable camp of wooden huts in the Merdon Castle area, outnumbered the rest. Such was the effectiveness of the war effort, they made up in one day the road that now forms the beginning of the Slackstead and Farley Chamberlain Road. Because of the dispersal of the huts under the tall trees, the site appears to have occupied many acres, and was a transit camp and field stores which played an important part in the preparation for the Normandy landings (D-Day). There were about a hundred huts in the camp making quite a contrast to the old Castle. Depending on the season, some were visible from Hursley House. The camp existed from about 1943 until just after the end of the war.
The recreational activities and visible life style of the camp came as a cultural shock to Hursley residents at the time. There were jokes about ‘just who is our real enemy?’ Certainly the number of camp followers rounded up by the Police in the mornings, was an unedifying experience for what was generally a God-fearing village. In a bid to be accepted as being something more than a mixed blessing to the village, the Americans added much to village life, especially at Christmas time with parties for the village and estate people. One such Christmas party was aided by a guitar-playing American cowboy who added to the fun, but had to be virtually pulled off the stage to allow other acts to follow and the party to continue. As public relations exercises go, it was quite successful, and for many these American events became something to look forward to. This was the time when many of the Vickers Supermarine staff were smoking American cigarettes, exchanged across the fence for beer money.
The D-Day preparations by the Americans here were extensive. Many local roads were closed to the public, and roads around Hursley were made single lane in places, because tanks, jeeps, and support vehicles, waiting to depart for the docks, were parked under any overhanging trees. The part of the Romsey Road known as the Straight Mile, between Ampfield and Crampmoor, was totally closed to any traffic. This allowed vehicles to be hidden from the air by the very effective canopy of mature trees over both lanes. The American servicemen were known to have driven lorries from the camp at all hours, right round the clock, to and from Southampton and Portsmouth Docks. Their efforts in taking laden lorries down, and bringing empty ones back, are still remembered by those who lived on the routes.
The American visitors were blessed in having generous food parcels sent from home and are remembered for sharing out their surplus rations with the villagers when they left. Anything on wheels was brought into service to move this very welcome, out-of-season harvest festival bonanza. These are the type of memories that surface fifty years after the event, which fortunately displace the many very sad ones.
Certainly Hursley Park was a very real experience for many thousands of servicemen during the war, and must today still be remembered for one reason or another by many all round the world. The organisation of the American camp allowed troops such as the 4th/7th Royal Dragoon Guards to prepare in a very orderly way with no last minute rush or wild panic. The camp was run on what was called ‘the hotel system’, which meant that all the administration, cooking and fatigues were done by a permanent staff, leaving the D-Day personnel to concentrate on the finishing touches and briefings for the great liberation — a rare thing in the history of the British Army, where the form was generally muddling through and winning the last battle.
Some months after D-Day when the camp had been vacated, a few of the Vickers staff walked the kilometre from Hursley House across the fields to the empty camp and found on the walls inside the huts some quite beautiful landscape and other paintings. So amongst these service men there had been some talented artists, and it is a pity that no photographic records were kept of these short lived works of art.
Considering the close proximity of Vickers’ design offices in Hursley House to Merdon Castle, it is surprising to find that some of the ‘D-Day’ huts there became a small prisoner-of- war camp towards the end of the war. We assume this was for low risk prisoners, because many of the Vickers’ staff remember playing in football matches against the inmates in the Park. On the other hand this could have been a ploy to lead the inmates to believe little of consequence went on at the ‘big house’.
As just a small country village away from Southampton, Hursley was spared the destruction from bombs, V1 Flying Bombs (doodle-bugs), and V2 rockets, and for this, some credit should go to the security and air raid precautions taken, especially in the Park. In spite of the secrecy surrounding the recovery of a German propaganda container which fell near the church one morning, failing to open properly and distribute its contents, a number of Vickers Supermarine staff did get hold of many of the leaflets and had a good laugh at the crude propaganda.
There were two aircraft crashes in the Park during these war years. On one Saturday four or five US. Army personnel took off for a joy ride in a light American spotter plane from Hursley Park towards Ampfield. The plane was grossly overloaded, and came down in a wooded section of the Park east of Knapp at Ampfield, killing all the occupants. The speed of the recovery of the wreckage by the Americans from Hursley Camp led to the usual crop of rumours that the plane was on the secret list. The fact that Spitfire engines were run up and tested in and around the experimental hangar at Southampton Lodge probably did nothing to dispel this rumour in those hush-hush war years. Small planes, properly loaded, could safely take off and land, but the combination of a small, overloaded plane and over-spirited men made this an accident impatient to happen. The other accident was a crash landing north of Hursley House by a Swordfish aircraft, piloted by the actor Ralph Richardson. The aircraft had to be disassembled, removed on a Queen Mary transporter and taken back to Eastleigh airport, from where it had taken-off. The fact that Ralph Richardson (later Sir Ralph Richardson) crash-landed and survived added more to his personal standing and kudos in this area than any of his acting performances could possibly have done. (A Queen Mary transporter was a very long and low articulated open transporter, with just two large independently sprung wheels at the back, pulled by a conventional lorry style tractor. Its unfamiliar length was likened to the famous Queen Mary ocean liner of the time.)