Polish Resettlement Camps in the UK: History and Records

Polish resettlement camps (officially “hostels”) were former army and air force camps in Britain where Polish soldiers’ families, dependants and older or disabled Poles lived after the Second World War. Under the Polish Resettlement Act 1947 the Assistance Board, and from 1948 the National Assistance Board, housed and fed those who could not yet find work or homes of their own. Most camps opened between 1946 and 1948; by 1966 only two were still run directly by the National Assistance Board.

There is no single register of camp residents. The surviving evidence is scattered: government files at The National Archives (series AST 18 for the hostels and ED 128 for the Polish schools), camp school registers in county record offices, birth and marriage records for the camp’s registration district, and Polish community archives. This guide explains what each source holds and how to work out which camp your family lived in.

Why Polish families lived in camps in Britain

At the end of the war most Polish servicemen under British command would not return to a Poland under Soviet control. The British government offered them a home, and the offer extended to their dependants and to Polish refugees who had gathered around the Polish units in Italy and Germany. According to The National Archives, some 130,000 Poles arrived in Britain between 1946 and 1948. The soldiers passed through the Polish Resettlement Corps; their wives, children and elderly parents needed somewhere to live.

Many of these families had been deported from eastern Poland to the Soviet Union in 1940 and 1941, left with the Anders Army in 1942, and then spent the rest of the war in refugee settlements in Iran, Lebanon, India and British East Africa (Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika and the Rhodesias). From 1947 they were shipped to Britain to be reunited with husbands and fathers. Housing was scarce, so the government used empty military camps: Nissen huts, wooden barracks and wartime hospital blocks, mostly in the countryside.

The Polish Resettlement Act 1947 and who ran the camps

The Polish Resettlement Act 1947 received Royal Assent on 27 March 1947 and came into force on 1 April 1947. It explains which body created which record:

Assistance Board / National Assistance Board. Section 3 allowed the Board to provide accommodation in camps, hostels or other establishments for eligible Poles and their dependants. In 1948 its successor, the National Assistance Board, was housing more than 16,000 people.
Ministry of Health. Health services for resettled Poles (section 4).
Committee for the Education of Poles in Great Britain. Set up on 1 April 1947 under sections 6 and 11 of the Act and chaired by Sir George Gater, it ran the Polish schools in the camps and boarding schools until it was wound up on 30 September 1954.
After 1966. The National Assistance Board’s duties passed to the Supplementary Benefits Commission. By then only two directly run establishments remained, with 565 residents. Responsibility later passed to the Ministry of Defence, which still runs Ilford Park Polish Home in Devon.

Before the Act, from 1945 to March 1947, welfare for Poles was handled by the Interim Treasury Committee for Polish Questions. Some camps started life as Polish Resettlement Corps or army camps and only later became National Assistance Board hostels, so the same site can appear under different authorities.

Examples of documented camps and hostels

The camps below are documented in official catalogues or reliable local sources. GOV.UK’s history of Ilford Park puts the total at 45 resettlement camps across Great Britain, with clusters in Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Staffordshire, Leicestershire, Cambridgeshire and North Wales.

Camp	Area	What the records show
Northwick Park	Near Blockley, Gloucestershire	National Assistance Board hostel; audit reports 1951–1965 (AST 18/68) and a closure file 1967–1971 (AST 18/124)
Ilford Park (Stover)	Near Newton Abbot, Devon	Opened in 1948 in a wartime hospital camp; now the last remaining home, run by the MOD. Camp papers, church and school records 1950–1982 at Devon Archives (7758)
Fairford	Gloucestershire	Polish primary school records 1947–1958 and nursery school 1950–1957 at Gloucestershire Archives; education files in ED 128
Daglingworth	Gloucestershire	Polish primary school admission registers, pupils’ record cards and attendance registers 1948–1961 at Gloucestershire Archives (S107/1)
Springhill Lodges	Near Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire	Residents transferred to Stover (AST 18/116, 1952–1959)
Penrhos	Near Pwllheli, Gwynedd	Former RAF Penrhos; Polish home from 1949 run by the Polish Housing Society, with National Assistance Board files on the hostel for the elderly and infirm (AST 7/1564, AST 36/727–729)
Hodgemoor	Near Chalfont St Giles, Buckinghamshire	Camp from 1946 to 1962 for about 600 people, with church, school, hall and shop
Blackshaw Moor	Near Leek, Staffordshire	Resettlement camp 1946–1964; subject of recent oral history research

Other camps, such as Husbands Bosworth in Leicestershire and Checkendon in Oxfordshire, are well described in local histories. Treat dates from secondary sources as approximate and check them against the record office catalogue.

Schools, churches and daily life in the camps

National Assistance Board staff ran the hostels under written rules for residents. Families paid maintenance charges once they earned wages, and AST 18 files cover charges, evictions, catering, tuberculosis, entertainment and even “political activities”. Most working adults found jobs on nearby farms and in factories, hospitals and mills.

Each larger camp had a chapel with a Polish priest, a primary school or nursery, a hall for dances and national celebrations such as 3 May (Constitution Day), a shop and often a library. Older children went to local British schools or to Polish secondary boarding schools. The Gater Committee aimed to prepare children for British schools and careers while keeping up Polish language and history, so the number of purely Polish schools was steadily reduced before the committee was wound up in 1954.

School records are often the best surviving list of who lived in a camp. Admission registers typically give the child’s name, date of birth, parent or guardian and dates of admission and leaving, and may note a previous school, which can be a Polish school in Africa, India or Lebanon.

What records exist and where to find them

The National Archives, Kew

AST 18: Assistance Board and successors, Polish Resettlement registered files, 1946–1999. Policy and administration files for individual hostels. These are not personal case files, but they name camps, dates of opening and closure, and sometimes residents.
ED 128: Committee for the Education of Poles, 1941–1968. Files on camp schools (for example Fairford, Stover and Doddington Park), Polish schools in Africa, lists of pupils transferred from Uganda to the UK, and teachers’ refresher course files described by name.
WO 315: records of the Polish Resettlement Corps and the Army Records Centre (Polish Section), 1932–1959.
Other series with hostel files include AST 7, AST 36, MH 76 and BN 18. Search Discovery for the camp name plus “Polish”.
BT 26 inward passenger lists (1878–1960) record ships arriving from ports outside Europe and the Mediterranean, so they can include families sailing from East Africa or India. They are available on Ancestry.

Many files are open; some later pieces are subject to closure. Check each item’s access status in Discovery before planning a visit or ordering copies.

Local record offices

County archives hold camp school registers, local authority files, newspapers and photographs. Examples include Gloucestershire Archives (Fairford and Daglingworth Polish schools) and Devon Archives and Local Studies (Ilford Park). Search Discovery’s “other archives” results, then contact the record office for the full catalogue.

Civil registration and church records

Births, marriages and deaths in a camp were registered in the local English, Welsh or Scottish registration district. A birth in the GRO index in an unexpected rural district, often with a Polish surname misspelt, is one of the best clues to a camp. Baptisms and marriages performed by camp chaplains may be traced through the Polish Catholic Mission or the local Roman Catholic diocese.

Polish community archives and oral history

The Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum in London holds records of the Polish armed forces and many civilian organisations in exile.
The Kresy-Siberia Virtual Museum collects family accounts, photographs and documents of deportees and the refugee settlements.
The website polishresettlementcampsintheuk.co.uk, linked to Zosia Biegus’s book Polish Resettlement Camps in England and Wales 1946–1969, covers about 30 camps with photographs, residents’ stories and ship lists.
University theses, local history societies and projects such as the Bradford Heritage Recording Unit have recorded interviews with former residents.

How to find which camp your family lived in

Collect family papers: letters with a camp address, Polish Catholic Mission certificates, school reports, photographs of huts or a camp chapel.
Search the GRO birth and marriage indexes for children born between 1947 and the early 1960s and note the registration district.
Apply to the MOD for the soldier’s Polish service record; GOV.UK still directs requests for Polish personnel who served under British command to the MOD (see our guide to MOD Polish service records). PRC files often give addresses and details of dependants.
Check naturalisation records: an application from the 1950s usually lists every address since arrival.
Search Discovery for the camp or nearby village and “Polish” to find school registers and hostel files.
Ask Polish parishes and clubs near the old camp; many grew directly out of camp communities.

Illustrative example: a family story mentions “the camp near Cirencester”. A daughter’s birth appears in the GRO index in the Cirencester district in 1950. Gloucestershire Archives holds admission registers for Daglingworth Polish Primary School, a few miles away. The register confirms the older son’s admission, his date of birth and a previous school in Tengeru, Tanganyika, which links the family to the East African settlements and the ED 128 files on Tengeru.

From the camp back to Poland

A camp record rarely ends the research. Its value lies in the clues to the family’s earlier route:

A previous school or settlement abroad (Tengeru, Koja, Masindi, Valivade in India) shows the family left the USSR with the Anders Army in 1942. The next step is the evacuation and army records described in our guide to Anders Army records.
Places of birth in eastern Poland on school or naturalisation records point to parish and civil registers, now held partly in Polish and partly in Ukrainian, Belarusian or Lithuanian archives.
Deportation in 1940–1941 can be checked in the Index of the Repressed (Indeks Represjonowanych), run by Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance.
Families who came from Germany rather than Africa or the Middle East may also appear in displaced persons records, and some Poles came as European Volunteer Workers rather than through the Resettlement Act.

Watch for spelling: British clerks wrote names as heard, so Szczepański might appear as Sczepanski or Stepanski, and first names were often anglicised. Dates of birth were sometimes changed during the war, so compare several documents before searching Polish registers.