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POW Camps Birmingham and nearby

boro keith

knowlegable brummie
Is there any truth that there was a POW Camp on Billesley Common and the prisoners help build my old school Grendon Road and the prefabs at the Maypole
 
I was allways told that there was a camp on the common too but I can't find one listed. Perhaps there was some sort of holding area thete where the POW working parties were brought to every day from the outlying camps and somewhere for them to be fed.
Certainly POWs were involved in building the prefabs you mentioned Keith and my mother tells me that POWs filled in a bomb crater outside our house in Sladepool Farm Rd.
I never heard Grendon Rd school was built by them, I allways thought the place was pre-war.
 
I feel that Maypolebaz has a good answer as an assembly point/feeding station. The POW's did a lot of things, it seems, in the vicinity. As I have recorded elsewhere on the Forum they widened the River Cole from the Trittiford area to Colebrook Road - and possibly other stretches - dug trenches for gas lighting in the same area (in the Solihull administered area) and most likely did much more.
 
There were Nissen huts on Billesley Common, still there, derelict, in early 1950s. We sometimes played in them on our way home from Billesley Juniors. I think they housed homeless families though, rather than POWs.
 
I remember the Nissen huts on Billesley Common. They were certainly there in the early 50's and were lived in by homeless families although they were in an awful state. They were demolished - not too well - and the area turned into a car park. The surface was very lumpy with evidence of broken house bricks showing through. A fun fair was often held there.

I lived in a prefab on Wake Green Road and was told by my mother that German POW's laid the paving stones outside in around 1946. I was too young to understand Fritz and he didn't understand me!
 
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