Clee with Weelsby was a rural parish that was administratively absorbed by the borough of Grimsby in the late nineteenth century. Clee itself was the mother village of three Anglo-Saxon daughter settlements (or ‘thorpes’). By the time of Clee’s absorption into Grimsby, the thorpes has grown together to become a small town (Cleethorpes) which with investment by a railway company developed into a seaside resort.
Clee, or Old Clee as it’s now known, was of course the site of a battle during the Civil War that never made it into the history books. 😉 Click here for the Battle of Clee Fields
Close by is an open space/parkland called Weelsby Woods. Beyond that lies the open countryside of Lincolnshire. Weelsby Woods was donated by local bigwig Sir Fred Parks. During WWII it was the site of a POW camp for Italians. My father remembers seeing them marching off on work details, happily singing, presumably as they had a stereotype to live up to. He also said that later in the war the camp housed former Soviet soldiers, captured in Wehrmacht uniforms in Normandy, though I haven’t seen this corroborated. Naturally he told me that they sang sad songs when on the way to their work details. After the War these Soviets were shipped back to the Motherland and the People’s retribution.
After the War ended the camp was used by Free Polish forces pending repatriation/resettlement. Many stayed in the UK and some settled in the Grimsby area, some surviving to see a new wave of Polish immigrants in the present century. Their contribution to the War effort and local community was recognised in 2010. Here’s a commemorative board with some pen portraits of some of the officers.
I didn’t notice the statue honouring Wojtek the bear, the mascot of the Carpathian Brigade’s attached artillery unit.
Wojtek was adopted by Polish troops on the way through Iran in 1942. The troops concerned had been released by Uncle Joe to fight with the western Allies. Wojtek emulated the gunners’ supply team and carried ammunition to the battery’s 25-pounders. In action! He was promoted to corporal for distinguished service at Monte Cassino.
Late edit: I just remembered that as a youth of 16 I got speaking to an old lady in Cleethorpes who claimed to be a Polish princess. She said she was married to a Polish prince from Silesia. Her husband didn’t seem inclined to either confirm or deny that story, but he was Polish. The woman said her husband was in the Polish army when the war broke out in 1939, and because he was Silesian he was drafted into the Wehrmacht as Germany had reclaimed the former Prussian province. According to the old lady’s story, the man joined the German Fallschirmjägers and on being captured by the British then took the opportunity to swap back to the Polish army where he became a member of the Polish parachute brigade and fought at Arnhem. I took it with a pinch of salt but thought that the Silesian part of it was plausible.
PS: apologies for the formatting. I seem to have a glitch with Blogger. - Late Late edit: I managed to resolve this from my laptop.
Never heard of the story of Wojtek the bear. Great story and he even received a promotion for distinguished service. Bears' Lives Matter.
ReplyDeleteIt always makes me smile.
DeleteVery interesting post and photos. A lady who was an honorary grandmother to my children ( long but lovely story ) told me that she and her husband invited two German pows out at Christmas one year during the war. One, like her husband was interested in radios. She remembers that one of the pows was a really friendly chap who they kept in contact with for years and the other was a very keen nazi and less friendly. Your discussion about the song stereotypes reminded me of that.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing that Alan. I wonder how much longer stories like these about the War will be passed on.
DeleteInteresting post,at the RC secondary school I went to in north London it was pretty much entirely immigrant, Irish, Italian, Polish, Spanish, German,anything except English really and a lot of the Polish kids dads had been in the nationalist army and stayed on,interestingly we also had Ukrainians who's dads had been press ganged into the Whermarcht ( out of all the Soviet nationalities more Ukrainians managed to stay in the west and avoided deportation) some of the Italian kids dads had been blackshirt fascists so a bit of a mix. I have read of Free Polish troops recruiting ethnic Poles from captured Germans, so maybe the princess was right, I mean it's difficult being the fourth largest allied army when your occupied!
ReplyDeleteBest Iain
Thanks for your post Iain. Very interesting. There were quite a few Ukrainians who settled in GY too - I remember there was a jeweller whose name escapes me.
DeleteWho is bin or isn’t Ukrainian is a tricky subject given the way territory from the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth got parcelled up and passed around. The way I understand it much if the aristocracy in Galicia was Polish and many of the ordinary folk were other ethnicities including Ruthenian, Ukrainian, Slovak etc. Some of it was part of Austria-Hungary, some Tsarist Russia and all eventually USSR.
Then as you say there was the German-Polish question- Pomerania, Silesia, West Prussia. Bloody confusing. And now it appears some’ethnic Poles’ in Poland are discovering that they are German again after all.
One history of Ukraine I’d read , well more specifically of Dynamo Kiev, suggested that whilst many Nationalist Ukrainians volunteered to fight with the Germans against the Soviets/Russians, the Nazis weren’t keen on having Slav ‘untermensch’ helping out. But then many captured Soviet POWs had a choice of join the Wehrmacht and eat and live or be worked to dearth.
If ever there was a case of the truth never being pure and rarely simple, this was it.