German gardener worked on churchill’s chartwell estate while a pow in tonbridge
The Weald of Kent Grammar School in Tonbridge has been the focus of national attention lately, as the debate over new grammar schools re-surfaces. (Construction has just started on The Weald’s “extension” in Sevenoaks.)
We wonder how many Weald pupils realise that during the war the land just behind their school was the site of a prisoner-of-war camp?
The camp, known as Camp 40, was created on land then belonging to the Somerhill estate, close to the junction of Tudeley Lane and Pembury Road, to house captured German and Italian airmen and soldiers.
It was one of 456 such camps that eventually sprouted up across the country. There were four in Kent, the others being at Stanhope, near Ashford; Walderslade, near Chatham; and Swanscombe.
After the war, many of them, including Somerhill, were used as temporary housing for those made homeless in the Blitz.
The Tonbridge Historical Society has an extract from a diary kept by a German soldier who spent three years as a PoW there.
Vinzenz Fetzer was captured in France in October 1944, but he was not allowed to return to Germany until early in 1948.
A copy of his diary was donated to the society by his grandson Jochem Fetzer in 2009.
Vinzenz Fetzer was 39 when he arrived in Tonbridge. Before the war he had been a gardener, and he delighted in the war work he was given, toiling on local farms. He even spent some time working at Churchill’s Chartwell home.
When he was eventually repatriated, he returned to his parents’ farm in Denkingen in south-west Germany and eventually set up his own nursery garden. He died in 1978. A full translation of his diary can be found on the Tonbridge Historical Society’s website: visit www.tonbridgehistory.org. uk