Prisoners of War
Prisoners who worked on the farms during the war
Richard Ball lived at Folly Hall with his parents and grandparents, his father went away to war. He remembers:
‘We did at the end of the war have a German prisoner that helped out on the farm…
It’s amazing, he lived in, but in the evening even in the winter on the coldest of nights we would sort of peer out of the kitchen window down the yard and he had a mirror and four nails banged in a wall to see and he stripped to the waist middle of winter and washed in cold water and shaved and he was like a beetroot when he had done. Winter and summer alike he’d strip and wash in cold water out of a bucket.
And afterwards he borrowed my granddad’s bike, we never really knew where he went, but he always came back.
When my Dad came home he said ‘I’ve been fighting them ****’, what’s he doing here?’
In 1957 this POW came back to visit the Harrison family on a motorbike.
Robert Jalland from Manor Barn Farm:
‘I remember father saying whoever you drop off don’t drop Italians off, because they don’t work. So we always used to have these Germans and they were great blokes in somuch that they kept in correspondence with Mother many years after the war.
Frederick used to drive the lorry because he was so trusted and Tito was the other one.