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Grizedale Hall was a large country house at Grizedale, Hawkshead, in the Lake District in Cumbria, England. After two earlier Grizedale Halls had preceded, it was built anew in 1905 in the style of Gothic Revival architecture. During World War II it became No 1 Prisoner-of-war camp to hold German officers and was finally pulled down in 1957.
The Grizedale estate had been acquired by the Rawlinson family in 1614 who kept it for some generations and it is assumed that the old Grizedale Hall had been built around that time. In the mid-eighteenth century Richard Ford came into possession of part of the Grizedale estate, though probably not of the hall itself, which by that time had become a farmhouse, known as the Grizedale Hall Farm. In the 1800s the old hall was demolished and a new farm house was built on its site which exists today under the name Grizedale Home Farm.
In approximately 1745 Richard Ford built a new home in Grizedale known as Ford Lodge situated 250 yards east of the old hall. His great-grandson Montague Ainslie who inherited Grizedale estate in the early nineteenth century turned his family's country cottage into a larger residence in 1841, which became known as Grizedale New Hall. It was pulled down around 1904 to make way for a large country house.
In 1903 Harold Brocklebank, a wealthy Liverpool based merchant and shipping magnate bought Grizedale estate. He was born in 1853, being the third son of Sir Thomas Brocklebank, 1st Baronet. After the old hall was pulled down, Harold Brocklebank completely rebuilt Grizedale Hall in 1905, the interior design having been completed by 1907. The architects of the new stone-built 40-room mansion in neo-gothic style were Walker, Carter & Walker of Windermere, Cumbria. Brocklebank inhabited Grizedale Hall with his wife Mary Ellen Brogden, three daughters and two sons until his death in 1936, when the hall and the 4,500 acre estate were taken up by the Forestry Commission. After serving as the first prisoner-of-war camp in the United Kingdom from 1939 to 1946, the hall stood empty. Due to its high maintenance costs the Forestry Commission auctioned off the fittings, fireplaces and staircases and demolished the hall in 1957, leaving only the single-storey adjoining building with storage rooms on the east side of the hall as well as the garden terrace. For several years the grounds were used as a campsite by the Camping and Caravanning Club. Some architectural remains of the hall like the walls and stairs of the massive garden terrace and the close with its gates can still be seen today, the car-park of the Grizedale Forest visitor centre being placed on top of the internal side of the former house.
During World War II Grizedale Hall was commandeered by the War Office and became officially known as No 1 POW Camp (Officers) Grizedale Hall since 1939, to hold the most elite of German POWs. As many of the prisoners were rescued survivors from sunken U-boats, it also became known as the "U-Boat Hotel". A well-known prisoner was Otto Kretschmer, Germany's most successful U-boat captain until his capture.
The camp incorporated watchtowers, a double perimeter fence that encircled the house and around thirty huts. Together these could hold around 300 prisoners. The camp also had a kitchen garden, a football pitch and a library containing German-language books. [1] The fighter pilot Franz Baron von Werra was initially held there and made a famous escape attempt in late 1940, inspiring the story of the 1957 film The One That Got Away , Grizedale Hall serving as the film site just shortly before its destruction. Other known prisoners were rear-admiral Hans Voss, SS-general Maximilian von Herff, General Wilhelm Ritter von Thoma and U-boat commander Werner Lott. The camp was emptied in 1946 of all remaining prisoners to be repatriated to Germany and Austria. The POW camp Grizedale Hall also inspired the 1970 war drama film The McKenzie Break and is site of the 1989 thriller A Cage of Eagles by James Follet. Italian POWs were also housed here, some carrying out gardening and other jobs in the local area.
A new building for the Grizedale Forest visitor centre called "The Yan" (Cumbrian for One) was built in 2008 in extension of the remaining annex to the former hall, a construction of timber and natural stone, designed by Sutherland Hussey Architects of Edinburgh and opened on 23 June 2008 by Lord Clark of Windermere.
The Lake District, also known as the Lakes or Lakeland, is a mountainous region and national park in Cumbria, North West England. It is famous for its landscape, including its lakes, coast, and the Cumbrian mountains, and for its literary associations with Beatrix Potter, John Ruskin, and the Lake Poets.
Ambleside is a town and former civil parish in the Westmorland and Furness district of Cumbria, England. Within the boundaries of the historic county of Westmorland and located in the Lake District National Park, the town sits at the head of Windermere, England's largest natural lake. In 2020 it had an estimated population of 2,596.
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Grizedale Forest is a 24.47 km2 area of woodland in the Lake District of North West England, located to the east of Coniston Water and to the south of Hawkshead. It is made up of a number of hills, small tarns and the settlements of Grizedale and Satterthwaite. It is owned and managed by Forestry England and is a popular tourist destination with waymarked footpaths, mountain biking, an aerial assault course, a 16-bed hostel, and a visitor centre with a children's playground, education centre, café and shop. The car-parking of Grizedale Forest Visitors Centre is situated on the site of the former Grizedale Hall where its remains can be still seen.
Wray Castle is a Victorian neo-gothic building at Claife in Cumbria within the boundaries of the historic county of Lancashire. The house and grounds have belonged to the National Trust since 1929, with the house open to the public on a regular basis since 2013. The grounds, which include part of the shoreline of Windermere, are open all year round and are renowned for their selection of specimen trees – Wellingtonia, redwood, Ginkgo biloba, weeping lime and varieties of beech.
Grizedale is a hamlet in the Lake District of North West England, in the middle of the Grizedale Forest, located north of Satterthwaite and south of Hawkshead. It is part of the civil parish of Satterthwaite.
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Werner Lott was a German U-boat commander in World War II. He was taken prisoner on 29 November 1939 after his boat was scuttled in the North Sea at position 60°53′N2°47′E after having been depth-charged by HMS Kingston, HMS Kashmir and HMS Icarus.
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Great Wratting is a village and civil parish in England, about four miles from Haverhill, Suffolk, in the valley of the River Stour. There is a ford across the Stour in the centre of the village, where bathing and fishing are common pursuits. The river here is heavily populated by crayfish, a non native species long since escaped from farms near the mouth of the Stour.
Harperley POW Camp 93 is a surviving purpose-built World War II Prisoner of War (PoW) camp built to accommodate up to 1,400 inmates at Fir Tree near Crook, County Durham in the northeast of England. A work camp for low risk PoWs, it was built on a hillside overlooking Weardale and across the valley from Hamsterley Forest. It was built, initially, in 1943 by Italian PoWs to similar plans of other existing Ministry of War Standard Camps of World War II in Britain and was typical of many military installations around the country. It is the main camp for a number of satellite camps, also numbered 93. Nearby Bishop Auckland used Harperley PoWs and Oaklands Emergency Hospital was another installation numbered Camp 93.
The Pine Grove Furnace Prisoner of War Interrogation Camp was a secret World War II camp for interrogating German prisoners of war (POWs) located in a remote region in southern Pennsylvania, selected partly because of its proximity to Washington, DC. It operated from 1943 to 1945. Some ruins of the facility remain today.
Heinz Schnabel and Harry Wappler were two Second World War German prisoners of war who escaped from a British prison camp and attempted to fly to the continent in a stolen aircraft on 24 November 1941.
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The Civilian Conservation Corps-Prisoner of War Recreation Hall is a historic building located in Eldora, Iowa, United States. Known as Camp Flying Goose, the Civilian Conservation Corps' (CCC) Company 1755 made Eldora their home base in 1933. They constructed this building that year for their use as a barracks while they worked on projects in the area, which included building Upper Pine Lake in Pine Lake State Park. CCC Company 1752, the Erosioners, replaced them two years later, and they built many of the facilities in the park. With the start of World War II, the CCC left the camp. The National Youth Association used the camp from 1940 to 1942.