Thurleigh Airfield Museum

Bedford is fortunate in having two excellent private airfield museums dedicated to curating and displaying material from the Second World War. Sections of the American 8^th Air Force were based in north Bedfordshire (& elsewhere in East Anglia), engaged in aerial bombardment of occupied Europe as part of the Allied offensive.   Both Museums are just off the A6 road from Bedford to Rushden.  

Twinwood Airfield is well known for its Glen Miller Museum, original airfield control tour and a range of WWII airfield buildings and wartime displays.  Slightly less well known, but well worth a visit, is the 306^th Bombardment Group Museum at Thurleigh Airfield (now a Business Park), sited in an original wartime building donated by Dr Jonathan Palmer, of Bedford Autodrome, and opened on 27 July 2002.

Thurleigh is the creation of its curators, retired locals Ralph and Daphne Franklin, who have built it up over the last 10 years to what is now a superb collection of material (much of it donated by veteran US servicemen and their families), both military and social.  Not only does it evoke the experiences of the American servicemen who served there from 1942 to 1945, but also has excellent displays on Home Front life: a 1940s kitchen, a local pub, wartime GI-bride weddings, and the ‘land girls’ of the Women’s Land Army.

On Sunday 8^th July I joined scores of others who gathered, despite the occasional rain, to celebrate the museum’s 10^th anniversary and to witness the re-dedication of the memorial to the 306^th Bombardment Group who served here during the Second World War, and many of whom lost their lives in the daylight raids on Germany.  Wartime vehicles, re-enactors and the superb Mainline Big Band turned up to help recreate the wartime atmosphere with Glen Miller music and dancing in the adjacent marquee.

Dr Vernon Williams, a history professor at Abilene Christian University in Texas, attended the event to represent the 306 Bomb Group Association which is still active in the USA.  He is webmaster of their online site and editor of the newsletter Echoes.  Vernon is quite well-known in north Bedfordshire as well as in Cambridgeshire and elsewhere in England as the director of a major oral-history project entitled the East Anglia Air War Project.  Beginning in 2003, he has conducted countless interviews with US veterans, both flight and ground crew, who served here during the war, and also those English people who came in contact with them during those years.  His aim has been to explore not only the operation of the air war – he is a military historian – but also the nature of the relationships developed between the host population and their American ‘cousins’.  He visits the East of England twice a year to conduct his research.  He is currently working on writing a number of books based on his extensive research. I, for one, am looking forward to his book on the Anglo-American relationships forged locally during wartime. (He interviewed some of ‘my land girls’ and extracts from their video interviews have appeared in some of his historical documentary films, for example, the DVD Thurleigh at War).

Barbara and Charles Neal also attended, representing the UK's 306th Bombardment Group Association.  Barbara is the secretary of the organisation and Charles heads the Second Generation efforts within the 306th BGA.  The two of them laid wreaths during the Memorial ceremony.

 

Small specialist museums such as these carry out a useful role in complementing the work of the major museums by introducing members of the public, some of whom are possibly intimidated by the larger ones, to topics and periods in our history which deserve our attention.

Both Twinwood Airfield (open Sundays only) and Thurleigh Airfield museums (Saturday & Sundays) are open each weekend during the main ‘tourist’ season.  For further information about hours and events see Twinwood's and BGA's websites.

Stuart Antrobus

PoWs in Bedfordshire

An account of prisoners of war in Bedfordshire during the Second World War has been long overdue. 

 Stephen Risby has blended both military and social history to produce an excellent history of the subject*, which answers the questions: why were they here, what did they do, what were the problems and how were they perceived locally?

 

To answer these, the author has carried out extensive documentary research, as well as drawing on the Mid-Bedfordshire oral history research, “Changing Landscapes, Changing Lives”, to bring to life the experiences of both prisoners of war [POWs] and the civilian population who had contact with them.

There are chapters dealing with the various POW camps and hostels in Bedfordshire, what camp life was like and the public attitudes to both German and Italian POWs. There is also a chapter devoted to the unfortunate ‘Tilbrook Incident’ in which an Italian prisoner of war killed his English working party guard and was himself shot by a member of the Home Guard. This extremely atypical event gained national notoriety and the soldier was awarded the British Empire Medal.

What is particularly good about Stephen Risby’s book is the careful way he gives the historical background to the presence of prisoners of war in this country. In particular he explores the distinct national stereotypes of German and Italian soldiers, as perceived by the British government and members of the public, which affected the different ways in which German and Italian POWs, always kept separate, were regarded, employed as a labour force and held with varying degrees of security.

There are useful endnotes on sources (but no page references) and a helpful bibliography but no index. Finally, there are five appendices of transcribed documents which illuminate the topics of the treatment of prisoners, what constituted a POW establishment, an International Red Cross committee report on the Ducks Cross POW camp, instructions on camp maintenance and an end-of–the-war official visitor’s report on the Colmworth and Ducks Cross camps and various other hostels around the county. This well-illustrated paperback is very readable and informative.

* Stephen Risby, Prisoners of War in Bedfordshire, Amberley Publishing, 2011. ISBN 9781445603124 £14.99


Contributed by Stuart Antrobus

Bedfordshire at the Imperial War Museum

Staying with the wartime subject of the last post (A Soldier in Bedfordshire 1941-42), I recently discovered the rich collections of the Imperial War Museum - illustrations, posters, interviews, films, books, diaries, letters and personal accounts of wartime or by service personnel.

A basic search in the IWM collections' catalogue for Luton resulted in 128 hits, beginning with a beautiful picture of the De Havilland Mosquito B35, probably built by Percival Aircraft Ltd at Luton in 1945 and a long description of the aircraft itself.

A search on Bedfordshire brought up more than 400 hits including diaries and letters written by men of the Bedfordshire Regiment during WWI and a 1918 film of the Inspection of volunteer regiments at Bedford in March 1918 by Field Marshal Viscount French.

For anyone researching 20th century Bedfordshire, this is a collection well worth consulting.

A Soldier in Bedfordshire 1941-42 - BHRS's 2009 volume

BHRS's 2009 volume A Soldier in Bedfordshire 1941-42 was launched at the Society's AGM in Bedford on 19 September.



It is the diary written for Mass Observation by Denis Argent who was in a bomb disposal unit stationed in Bedford then Luton for a few months. Mass Observation, a social research organisation set up in the late 1930s to record 'how we were', relied on ordinary people to submit diaries and answer questionaires for its archive of everyday life. Denis Argent, who had been a journalist before joining up, took his diary very seriously and wrote about daily life as he saw it in Bedford and Luton.

The diary is full of army routine, transport problems, politics, leisure, films, books, music and bomb disposal, including an account and pictures of digging up a bomb in Bedfordshire. Denis was also a conscientious objector at the beginning of the war and he writes a lot about how conchies viewed themselves.

The book was launched with a lively presentation by Dorothy Sheridan, Development Director of the Mass Observation Archive and Bob and Patricia Malcolmson, who edited the diary for publication and who have edited several MO diaries. Sussex University hosts the MO Archive, which is very much an ongoing project - view its website to find out what is currently going on.

The dairy is available from booksellers and the publisher, Boydell & Brewer at £25.