Royal Navy – Cambridge Military History

Norman Cross: Prisoner Art from the Napoleonic Wars

West of Peterborough, along the Great North Road in Cambridgeshire, the first purpose-built prisoner of war camp was constructed near the hamlet of Norman Cross in 1796. Designed to hold prisoners from the French Revolutionary Wars, and later Napoleonic Wars, Norman Cross Depot averaged interring around 5,500 prisoners from across Europe before it was demolished in 1816. The site covered almost 15 hectares, surrounded by brick walls and guard towers. The prisoners lived in wooden barracks crowded throughout the site, at one time holding almost 7,000. Conditions were not grim, but it was a prison.

French, Spanish, Dutch, Italians, Germans, and Poles all ended up in the camp, guarded by local Cambridgeshire militia. Many of the prisoners were French, Spanish, and Dutch sailors, captured from Royal Navy victories on the high seas. Administered by the Admiralty, it may not surprise you that the Royal Navy recruited sailors from the Norman Cross Depot, seeing an opportunity to address manning shortfalls with knowledgeable seamen – and many of the captives were happy to leave. However, most of the prisoners stayed for years in the camp seeking ways to pass the time, keep busy, and possibly make some money. During its twenty years of existence, the prisoners of Norman Cross made beautiful art, mainly from the soup bones, straw, baleen, and wood they could find or acquire around the prison or from locals. These men, to pass the time and to make art which they could sell, created magnificent pieces which are highly prized today. This artwork, a type of scrimshaw or an early version of trench art can be seen at various museums and in private collections from the United Kingdom to the United States.

Although I have wanted to write about the artwork made at Norman Cross for several years, many outstanding examples of this craft found their way to the United States in the late 19^th Century, with important pieces ending up at the U.S. Naval Academy in Anapolis, Maryland. It was only recently that I was able to visit the Museum at the U.S. Naval Academy where I could see these works – and the treasured masterpiece which emerged from the skilled hands several French sailors – the model of HMS Victory which holds pride of place in Annapolis.

The Art.

The prisoners carved and sculpted with materials on hand: bones, straw, wood, turning these everyday items into fabulous pieces of art. The prisoners carved what they knew, or remembered of their home and ships they sailed on, with an aim of selling their artworks in a local market which became popular around the camp. Sailors carved bones into ships, often with their yardarms shortened so that the models would fit nicely on a mantlepiece. Rigging was made from memory, often incorrectly and sometimes even overly complicated to show off the intricacies of their craftmanship. Straw and wood were split and dyed, then glued into exquisite marquetry. Scaffolds with guillotines, dollhouses, games, and even automatons were created and then sold. This flourishing of prisoner art came to an abrupt end after Waterloo in 1815, when the prisoners were sent home and the camp demolished a year later and returned to farmland.

HMS Victory.

As mentioned before, the largest, most exquisite item created at Norman Cross Depot is undoubtedly the model of HMS Victory. According to the curators of the US Naval Academy Museum, after the defeat of the combined French and Spanish Navies at Trafalgar on 21 October 1805, fifteen French prisoners of war began the model of Nelson’s triple-decked flagship. It took them two years to complete the ship, aided only by prints from newspapers and their own memories of general ship’s design. In 1807, the model was complete and at several feet tall was seen as a wonder at the time. The Lords of the Admiralty organised the purchase of the model from the French prisoners, the amount paid is forgotten, and then presented the model to HM George III. The King then had the model placed on top of Nelson’s tomb – the hero of Trafalgar who died onboard HMS Victory – in the crypt of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, where it sat for 27 years, before it was removed and cleaned in 1834. Once it was removed, it was never returned to Nelson’s crypt. In 1915, during the height of the First World War, an American millionaire financier and sailing enthusiast, Edward Francis Hutton, purchased the model and brought it to the United States where it set in his private collection. In 1980, the model was in the posession of the Maitland family which gave HMS Victory to the U.S. Naval Academy where it now resides.

How to visit the old prisoner of war camp:

The site of the Prisoner of War Camp lies about six miles west of Peterborough. Exit the A1(M) on the A15 and head east toward Yaxley. At the southwest corner of the old camp, there is a large column, the Norman Cross Monument, crested by a bronze Napoleonic Eagle. Built and sited in 1914 by the Entente Cordiale Society, the monument was sadly toppled and the eagle stolen in 1990. An appeal was made, and the column was repaired and moved due to the A1 being expanded in the late 1990s. Now rebuilt, a bronze replica of the Napoleonic eagle was restored to the column. His Grace, the Duke of Wellington, unveiled the monument on 31 October 1998. The monument is dedicated to the 1,770 prisoners who died at the camp between 1796 and 1816. In the winter of 1800 to 1801, a typhoid epidemic swept through the camp, leading to the death of 1,020 prisoners, and several hundred others would pass away over the years the camp was open. This monument honors these men’s demise. There is parking available as well as an information board at the column.

To the North and East of the old camp, now agricultural land, were burial sites for the prisoners who died at Norman Cross. In 2009, Wessex Archeology joined with the archeologists of Channel 4’s Time Team, led by Tony Robinson, to dig at Norman Cross. The team of archeologists discovered graves, carved items, and even a set of dominos. The episode titled “Death and Dominoes: The First POW Camp” aired on 3 October 2010 and is worth watching. The Wessex Archaeology report can be viewed here as well.

Part of the brick prison wall still stands nearby but is incorporated into the private property of residents.

To view the prisoner’s artwork:

Visit the Peterborough City Museum, Priestgate, Peterborough PE1 1LF. There is no parking at the museum, so I’d recommend parking at the Queen’s Gate shopping center’s car park and walking. Navigate to: PE1 2AA. The Museum is also an easy walk from the Peterborough train station. For more information, see their website: https://peterboroughmuseum.org.uk/. The museum is free and has a fine collection.

If you are in Annapolis, Maryland, in the United States, the U.S. Naval Academy’s Preble Hall is the location of the museum, one of the world’s great naval collections. The prisoner’s artwork is located on the top floor. For more information, see their website: https://www.usna.edu/Museum/index.php where several other pieces of prisoner art can be viewed. The museum is free.

HMT Cambridgeshire (FY-142), an Armed Trawler during the Second World War

While several Royal Navy vessels throughout history have been named after the City of Cambridge and people from the area, there has only been one ship named after the entire county: His Majesties Trawler Cambridgeshire, a submarine chaser from the Second World War. Laid down as a 442-ton fishing vessel and launched in 1935, she was requisitioned by the Royal Navy in August 1939. Her conversion into a warship occurred in the desperate months of rapid military expansion before the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany. She was converted by the Royal Navy into an anti-submarine role by removing her fishing gear and converting her storage holds into crew berthing and a magazine, adding a 4-inch deck gun forward, and installing depth charge racks to drop explosives off the stern of the ship. She was armed with a navy crew. By the end of the war, over 200 armed trawlers like HMT Cambridgeshire would be hunting submarines, laying and sweeping mines, and patrolling the approaches to the United Kingdom and the waters around Europe. A dangerous but important role was played by these small vessels: the Royal Navy lost 72 Armed Trawlers during the war and hundreds of sailors were lost.

HMT Cambridgeshire would likely be remembered only as one of the many capable but largely forgotten small combatants from the Second World War except for her experience on 17 June 1940, when she rescued over 800 civilians and soldiers from the RMS Lancastria, sunk by the German Luftwaffe during the desperation evacuation of France.

The RMS Lancastria, a passenger liner which had been converted into a troop ship, loaded several thousand fleeing civilians and soldiers in her hold, throughout her interior, and along her weather decks as part of Operation AERIAL – the evacuation of remaining Allied military personnel from Western France. The panic in St. Nazaire, France, as the Nazis rapidly approached and the French Government was capitulating led to a frenzied loading of all available ships for evacuation to England. RMS Lancastria, designed to hold 2,180 passengers and 330 crew was part of this evacuation. Her Captain felt the ship could hold up to 3,000, but in the desperation to load and depart St. Nazaire an estimated 5,500 and 7,200 people were brought onboard – no ships manifest was recorded, time was too short. The RMS Lancastria set sail and was almost immediately under attack by German Ju 88 bombers. She was hit by several bombs and sunk within 20 minutes. It is still unknown, but somewhere between 4,000-7,000 refugees, military personnel, and crew may have died in the sinking. The overloading of the ship ensured people could not escape. There were not enough lifeboats, there were far too few life preservers. The loss of the RMS Lancastria is the worst maritime catastrophe in the history of the United Kingdom.

Thankfully, 2,477 men, women, and children were rescued by local ships coming to the rescue, with HMT Cambridgeshire saving more than any other. She brought between 800 to 900 survivors out of the cold waters and choking fuel, bringing them onboard over several hours under fire. Captain W. G. Euston, the Cambridgeshire’s Commanding Officer, maneuvered the ship while under machine gun fire from strafing German aircraft. He later recommended many of his sailors for decorations, specifically Stanley Kingett, who kept maneuvering the ship’s launch away from enemy planes to save hundreds of lives, and William Perrin who maintained machine gun fire on low-flying German planes, buying time for the Cambridgeshire’s rescue efforts. In fact, the ship’s machine gunners later claimed to have shot down one German aircraft during the rescue. Later that evening, still covered in discarded clothing, bunker fuel, and the discarded items of the hundreds she had rescued, HMT Cambridgeshire returned to St. Nazaire to take the Commander of the British Expeditionary Force, Lieutenant General Alan Brooke, and his staff from France.

HMT Cambridgeshire would later participate in Operation NEPTUNE, the naval portion of the D-Day landings in June 1944. She hunted for submarines as the British, Canadian, American, and Free French forces landed across Normandy, assisting in the return of British forces to France whom she had helped evacuate just four years earlier.

After Victory in Europe Day, the Royal Navy sold HMT Cambridgeshire at the end of 1945, and she converted back to a humble fishing ship. The proud warship’s name was changed to the Kingston Sapphire. She fished the North Sea and Atlantic until she was finally scrapped in Brugges, Belgium in 1954.

Pax Brittania: The Earl de Grey as First Lord of the Admiralty

Photo by Brandon Wilgus, August 2014 — Wrest Park, designed by the Earl de Grey, viewed from the formal gardens, looking at the Boudoir of the Countess de Grey © cambridgemilitaryhistory.com, 2014

Traveling west across the shire’s border are the rolling hills and farmlands of Bedfordshire, where Thomas Philip de Grey (1781-1859) designed and built his beautiful French-inspired rococo country home at Wrest Park. The interiors spill onto sunny terraces which open to the formal gardens and riding lanes that fan away from the stately home. As a Tory politician and peer, Thomas de Grey was involved in the post-Napoleonic era of British naval mastery, and the ordering of Great Power politics in the wake of the Concert of Europe. Called The Lord Grantham in his youth (one of his many courtesy titles), he studied at St. John’s College, Cambridge, and at the death of his father, became the Second Earl de Grey in 1833. King William IV made him first Lord of the Admiralty in 1834 and a Privy Counsellor. In an age dominated by the reformer Lord Melbourne, he served in the Tory Caretaker government of Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington and hero of Waterloo, and then in the Conservative government of Sir Robert Peel before the return of Lord Melbourne in 1835. He was made a Knight of the Garter a decade later, and would remain an influential Tory politician and country gentleman until his death well into Queen Victoria’s reign. De Grey was man of numerous talents and accomplishments. While running the Admiralty, he remained busy as an amateur architect, drawing the plans for Wrest Park and directly supervising its construction. He served as the first President of the institute of British Architects in London from 1834 until his death.

Royal Navy in the First Opium War — A Royal Navy paddle-wheel steamer in the First Opium War. Thanks to Alina Parazyan, who does not endorse my work, and http://commons.wikimedia.org for the use of the image.

During his time as First Lord of the Admiralty, de Grey presided over the most powerful navy in the world, at a time of uncontested British hegemony on the high seas. Although there were no major naval engagements from the War of Greek Independence from the Ottomans in 1827 until the first engagements of the Great War in 1914, the Royal Navy formed a vital part of the British power structure in the 19th Century. The Royal Navy was actively engaged bolstering trade, defending the growing empire, clearing the seas of pirates, hunting down slave ships and slave forts, and serving as a vital part of Britain’s strength – the diplomatic power of a mighty Navy ready to respond across the globe. It was a time of transition, as square-rigged sailing ships were being replaced by iron and steel, and steam propulsion was replacing the reliance on wind. The Opium Wars, demonstrating the global reach and determination of Britain to expand the Empire in the name of trade, however cynically, resulted in the securing of Hong Kong in 1839. De Grey presided over a fascinating time in the history of the Royal Navy, and one can easily imagine him entertaining over a shooting weekend at Wrest Park, or at his townhouse in London (which is now the Naval and Military Club on St. James’s Square), discussing the move from sail to steam and hammering home the need to innovate and expand the Royal Navy during a time of peace. His innovations and shepherding the Royal Navy through a time of dramatic change would ensure the Royal Navy’s uncontested supremacy for a Century, only threatened later by the naval race with the German Empire, leading to the Great War.

Wrest Park is managed for the Nation by English Heritage. The website for Wrest Park is: http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/daysout/properties/wrest-park/ Directions to Wrest Park, which is in the village of Silsoe, Bedfordshire: take the A6 towards Luton, signposted from Silsoe, or SATNAV postcode: MK45 4HR.