Last week we featured the squatters who, because of the acute housing shortage at the end of the Second World War, took up residence in disused military establishments.
We told of the several hundred people who lived in the airmen’s accommodation at Croft airfield. Nationally in October 1946, there were an estimated 46,000 people living in 1,811 derelict military outposts.
Ed Chicken in Staindrop draws our attention to concrete foundations which can still be seen in the wood on the edge of the village through which the 18th Century Coach Road runs. The Coach Road connects Raby Castle with Selaby Hall, near Gainford, which was often where the Duke of Cleveland’s heir lived, awaiting his turn at the castle.
In September 1939, the Royal Leicester Regiment was stationed at Raby Castle, and used Scarth Hall in the village as its Naafi, and we believe erected buildings in the Coach Road woods beside the Langley Beck.
Read more fascinating stories from our Looking Back column
The regiment left Raby in April 1940, and was sent to Scotland before taking part in the disastrous Norwegian campaign – they were driven out of Norway by the Nazis in just a couple of weeks.
In Teesdale in 1941, the military developed six camps – Stainton, Streatlam, Westwick, Barford, Deerbolt and Humbleton – which, particularly in the run-up to D-Day, held thousands of men. We’re not sure what use the huts in the Coach Road wood had once the Leicester had left, but after the war, squatters pressed them into service as emergency accommodation.
You can clearly see their foundations in the wood on the way to the “new cemetery”.
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