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Half Pint: Lodge Moor POW Camp with Bob Johnston - Ep 31
620 Plays4 years ago
Archaeology and Ale is a monthly series of talks presented by Archaeology in the City, part of the University of Sheffield Archaeology Department’s outreach programme. In this episode, we introduce Half Pint. The short interview-style format which we will be undertaking during the COVID-19 lockdown. For our first Half Pint, we are happy to welcome Dr Bob Johnston from the University of Sheffield speaking about his work on the Lodge Moor POW camp in Sheffield. Bob is a senior lecturer of landscape archaeology at Sheffield's department of archaeology. His work focuses on the archaeology of Bronze Age Britain and Ireland. While being one of the researchers in charge of the ongoing work at the Lodge Moor site in Sheffield Bob is also involved in several public archaeology and heritage projects. For more information on Bob and on the Lodge Moor project please follow the links below.
For more information about Archaeology in the City’s events and opportunities to get involved, please email [email protected] or visit our website at archinthecity.wordpress.com. You can also find us on Twitter (@archinthecity), Instagram (@archaeointhecity), or Facebook (@archinthecity)
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Transcript
Introduction & Podcast Series
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
Archaeology in the City Initiative
00:00:29
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Episode 31 of the Archaeology Nail Podcast and the first segment of Halfpint, our new short-form interview series created as part of the 2020 Digital Woodland Heritage Festival. The podcast and festival are brought to you by Archaeology in the City, the community outreach program from the University of Sheffield's Department of Archaeology.
Research on Lodgemore POW Camp
00:00:51
Speaker
In this half pint, we have the University of Sheffield's own Bob Johnston telling us about his work on the Lodgemore POW Camp right here in Sheffield.
00:01:09
Speaker
So my name's Bob Johnston. I'm a senior lecturer in landscape archaeology in Sheffield, which means that I research and teach landscape archaeology primarily of Britain.
00:01:25
Speaker
So how did the Lodgemore Project come about, and what was it that drew you to this part of Sheffield's history? Well, we started working there as part of an undergraduate module that I coordinate. It's a core module for our
00:01:44
Speaker
second-year undergraduates. It's called Archaeology Matters and the purpose of the module is twofold really. One is to enable students to learn about the archaeological research process by doing a group research, small group research project. But the second aim of the module is for students to
00:02:07
Speaker
learn more about the active role that archaeology plays in landscapes and communities today.
Lodgemore's Historical Importance
00:02:16
Speaker
And we were attracted to Lodzmer both because of its importance in Sheffield's heritage, its proximity to the department, but also because it's a location that is being
00:02:34
Speaker
studied and conserved as part of a large heritage project called the Sheffield Lakeland Landscape Partnership. Red Marsh Plantation is in the same area as the Lakeland Landscape Partnership and we wanted to work the students research to contribute in some way to that wider, the agenda of that wider project.
Military History of Lodgemore
00:03:02
Speaker
Could you give us a brief history of Lodgemore and what happened there, and tell us what part of that history the project was seeking to better understand? So we've been working at Redmar's plantation on the edge of Lodgemore, only since last year, last February I think we started.
00:03:25
Speaker
And the area where we're working is currently majority of public land owned by the Sheffield City Council. It's a piece of woodland and it's important from an archaeological point of view, a historical point of view,
00:03:45
Speaker
because it was the site of two prisoner of war camps, one in the First World War and the Second World War, and the area has a longer history than that, most of it more recent perhaps.
Student Research Insights
00:04:03
Speaker
a race course briefly in the 1870s. It was a military camp at the beginning of the First World War when the Sheffield City Battalion, the Pals, had trained on the nearby Merlin. But it's
00:04:21
Speaker
substantial archaeological remains, the ones you can see in the woods today, relate to the Second World War camp was in place really from the 1942 I think were there around 1943, perhaps through until 1948, I think the last prisoners left in 1947. So our project is particularly concerned with that, with those military camps and above all really the archaeological remains of the Second World War camp.
00:04:49
Speaker
Tell us more about the fieldwork you conducted at Lodgemore, what you found, and what it taught you about the lives of those prisoners. Yeah, so it's a good question about what we find and what, if anything, has been kind of unexpected. The research is in an early stage because the students
00:05:12
Speaker
The first group of students started last year and they did their small projects last year, six groups and all. This year's students had some terrific plans, but of course the COVID-19 lockdown has put pay to all of that. So we haven't made any progress this year, unfortunately. So we'll have to save that for next spring.
00:05:39
Speaker
But the work that last year's group did was really terrific. And, yeah, I thought they produced some really sort of interesting insights into the history of the camp and the lives of the prisoners and the scale of the community that was up there on the Merlin edge in the latter stages. And just after the Second World War, the students showed that
00:06:07
Speaker
At times there were nearly 11,000 prisoners in the camp at its height in 1945.
Post-WWII Transformation
00:06:14
Speaker
Many of them were living in tents in a kind of additional compound on the west side of the camp. Another thing that the group showed was the extent to which the present day woodland has considerably obscured the remains of the camp.
00:06:37
Speaker
and the challenge in terms of how the City Council faces in terms of managing and interpreting the site for the public. There was a lot of undergrowth really and many of the archaeological remains are overgrown and inaccessible. So there's a big question there about how best to and where to
00:07:04
Speaker
sort of open up and make more accessible and interpret parts of the camp. And I think that's a big challenge for the Lakeland Landscape Partnership and the work that the students did was great in terms of sort of mapping out where the site is most visible and where in the future work might be done to try and open it up and interpret it.
00:07:29
Speaker
So I thought that was really terrific. I know a great piece of work, one of the groups was around the material remains that survive across the camp, particularly the sort of the physics, small objects that are left, the bits of brick and small artefacts, bits of china and pieces of porcelain from
00:07:52
Speaker
latrine blocks and so on that are just kind of scattered around and they did a piece of work mapping those objects and that material. That was a really nice piece of research and showed the potential to do a lot more of that and potentially undertake small amounts of excavation. What happened to Lodgemore after the war ended? Did it see any more usage and is there anything left there now?
00:08:19
Speaker
It more or less fell out of use. There were several different plans of ways to use the buildings or at least use the area of the camp. But they came more or less to nothing. The plantation was put there. The woodland was planted in the late 1950s, I think.
00:08:39
Speaker
and it's been plantation ever since. The council have a camp for the travellers community on a part of the area close to where the former entrance would have been into the POW camp in fact.
Lodgemore and Local Heritage
00:08:57
Speaker
So that remains the only area of the camp that is still lived on and has a sort of resident community.
00:09:05
Speaker
Do you think that Lodgemore has any significance to Sheffield's history? It does, and lots of people informally have an interest in the camp's history. The research that's been done has been done by people voluntarily, if you like, researching the history, the archaeology of the camp.
00:09:37
Speaker
I suppose for me an obvious way in which it matters, I don't want to speak for the wider values that people might hold about that place, they're very varied I think, but for me one of the reasons that it matters is that
00:09:54
Speaker
you know, at a point in the mid to late 1940s, the closing part of the war and subsequent few years afterwards, there was a very large community of prisoners there who came from
00:10:12
Speaker
Germany from Italy, from Ukraine. You know, they were they worked in local farms. They they attended meetings of the council. Some small numbers stayed in Sheffield. We know some of you married local local women and had families here. Many others went back to their home countries and carried with them
00:10:41
Speaker
memories of their time interned in Sheffield and I think that story of the kind of
00:10:55
Speaker
internationalization of war and its impact in many different places, not just on the battlefield, but within the communities here back in Britain is a really important story, makes up a series of really important stories that need to be sort of explored and told and remembered for a whole variety of political and social reasons. And I think they
00:11:24
Speaker
a place like Lodzmer is important because it provides the locus around which those stories can be organized, the place from which they can emanate or be connected with. And I think that gives them a
00:11:41
Speaker
a tangibility which is really valuable, really important even if in some respects physically it isn't a lot to look at at the moment anyway but the stories that are associated with it give it immense kind of cultural and social importance.
Engage with the Podcast
00:11:58
Speaker
Thank you for listening to this archaeology and ale half pint. For more information about Bob or the Lodgemore project, please visit the show notes which accompany this episode. And for more information about our podcast, please visit our page on the archaeology podcast network. You can get in touch with us at archaeology in the city on Facebook, WordPress, Instagram or Twitter. If you have any questions or comments, we'd love to hear from you. Keep an eye on your favorite podcast app for more half pint episodes coming soon.
00:12:27
Speaker
See you next time.
00:12:45
Speaker
This show is produced by the Archaeology Podcast Network, Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle, in Reno, Nevada at the Reno Collective. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network.
Production Credits
00:12:55
Speaker
Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.