German Soldiers, Sex Workers, and a Flat-Pack Church: Stories from Colchester Barracks

The army barracks at Colchester are some of the oldest, continually used, military facilities anywhere in the world. Since AD 43, there has been a garrison in Colchester, and this has profoundly shaped the surrounding land, people, and communities who call this part of North Essex home.

Growing up in Colchester was very exciting for my younger self. The regular buzz of Apache attack helicopters in the sky and the constant sound of gunfire reverberating from the marshes made me very aware of the rich and often dark history that lay around.

I remember at my first school, Langenhoe Community Primary, my younger brother and I were in the minority of children who did not have at least one of their parents serving in the armed forces. For them, this must have been worrying for many of my friends growing up, who would rarely be around for more than a year at a time before their parents were redeployed, oftentimes to Catterick in Yorkshire or Akrotiri in Cyprus.

The military itself is typically seen as a great machine-like institution, quite literally marching on. Yet, in reality, there lies hidden behind this facade a great wealth of peculiar, disturbing, and oftentimes simply funny histories that are well worth uncovering.

1. Boudicca Strikes

Originally, the city was called Camulodunum and was the first capital of Roman Britain, named in honour of Camulos, an early Celtic deity who was identified with Mars. It was not long until the first garrison was formally founded to protect the city in 43 AD as the formal home of the 20th Legion. The military base was built with “Vallum and Fossa” earthworks, typical of Roman fortresses at this time.

However, only five years later, the Legion began to withdraw, heading North, leaving behind only a skeleton defence for the burgeoning city. This led to disaster in 61 AD when the Iceni tribe, incensed by Roman efforts to seize the state following the death of their leader, Pasutagus, turned to his widow, Boudicca, to lead a devastating attack against the capital, Camulodunum.

The rebels found the city loosely defended by fewer than 200 centurions. Tacitus later wrote: "In the attack, everything was broken down and burnt. The temple where the soldiers had congregated was besieged for two days and then sacked," and today archaeologists continue to find layers of ash across the site of the ancient city as evidence that Boudicca’s forces burnt the city to the ground.

Ultimately, despite further successes at Verulamium, ancient St Albans, and Londinium, the Iceni were put to the sword by Roman Governor Gaius Paullinius. In one of his first acts as Governor, Paullinius decided to move the capital from Camulodunum to Londinium on the basis that more of the city had survived.

Today, Boudicca is widely celebrated for her bravery and battlefield nous. However, for Colchester and its barracks, it’s not outrageous to suggest that, had it not been for her, the future of the town could have been wildly different.

2. The Flat-Pack Church?

The Garrison Church is an impressive mid-19th-century timber-framed and weatherboarded building painted in bright white. It sits just outside the gates of the garrison, opposite the Hyderabad Barracks. So far, all sounds pretty normal. The church, however, is far from normal, having been built out of prefabricated sections meant to form “Nightingale” hospitals that were sent by ship to Crimea. The church is identical to the hospitals that were sent to support the British forces in Crimea and has often been confused as such. Indeed, it is a widely told story, that even I was told in school, that this church was dismantled and packed up by the troops, taken with them to Crimea, and then reassembled and used throughout the war before finally being packed up and taken home again.

The story of a moving church is most certainly entertaining and very intriguing; however, it is most certainly a myth. In reality, the church was hurriedly built in 1856 out of surplus prefabricated sections that had never made it to Crimea. This was because the military top brass quickly realised that troops would be returning home with no church to go to, and so they built something that was only ever intended as a stop-gap measure. This history has been lost because many other churches used by the military, of identical design, have fallen foul of arson, being entirely built from wood, giving the Colchester Garrison Church this unique and largely made-up history.

3. The Challenges of Sex Work

In the Victorian period, rank-and-file soldiers were not allowed to get married without the assent of their commanding officer. Following the arrival of the railway in the 1840s, Colchester soon developed a thriving population of sex workers who came up on the train from London. The thousands of soldiers based in the city provided ample custom, and before long, many public houses, within the vicinity of the barracks, realised they could take a cut of the earnings in exchange for providing sex workers with premises to ply their trade. This became such an issue for the military as many of their soldiers were unknowingly contracting STIs.

Before long, Parliament passed the Contagious Diseases Act of 1864, which targeted six garrison towns across the country, and decreed that any ‘suspicious’ woman found within the local area outside the barracks could be examined for an STI and taken for compulsory treatment. By complying with this law, the free houses were able to continue acting as effective brothels and were protected by law in doing so.

In Colchester, women who were found to be carrying STIs were effectively imprisoned in the Lock Hospital. There, they could be held for up to nine months against their will. The hospital has now long since been demolished; however, all that remains is the nine-foot-tall walls that originally surrounded the hospital compound, quite clearly intended to prevent the incarcerated women from breaking out.

Meanwhile, no laws or provisions were made for the soldiers, who were free to continue spreading STIs with impunity. This stark imbalance in the treatment of women and men highlights the hypocrisy of Victorian sexual mores and the harshness of the laws towards women in particular.

4. The British German Legion

During the Crimean War, 1854-1856, Colchester Garrison experienced a period of rapid expansion. This included, in 1856, the return of the British German Legion, an army group of some 10,000 German soldiers enlisted to help the British in Crimea. The idea would today be comparable to the formidable French Foreign Legion. Back then, however, this left the British Command with a problem, and they did not know what to do with all these German soldiers. At the time, Germany was still a rough conglomerate of twelve separate states, and many of these soldiers were political refugees or individuals escaping persecution in their home countries. This meant that in 1857, when the German Legion was disbanded, many simply did not wish to return home.

The British Government gave them an ultimatum: Either face deportation to Southern Africa and the Cape, or you have two weeks to find yourself a wife, get married, and settle in Colchester. Soon the race was on. Local churches could hardly keep up, and within two weeks, hundreds of marriages had been recorded. One church alone recorded performing 64 marriages within a single day. Unfortunately, for the remaining Germans, they were summarily marched to Harwich, where they were forced to board ships headed for The Cape, despite many protesting that they were in fact engaged to be married in the next few days. Today, the legacy of these dramatic few weeks is still visible in the demography of the city, which continues to have a large German population and a proud Anglo-German Society.

5. The Army Prison

Berechurch Hall Camp is today the only military prison in the country, and although it is not a prison in the usual sense of the word, it could quite easily be mistaken for one. Here, court-martialled soldiers serve their sentences before either being discharged or returned to their company. The first permanent facility was built to house prisoners in 1871 and led them in a variety of activities, which by 1913 included bridge building, signalling, and laundry practice.

During World War Two, the prison was, rather unsurprisingly, rapidly expanded for German, Austrian, and Italian prisoners who, in the early years of the conflict, were either captured at sea or were the survivors of enemy aircraft being shot down. The foreign prisoners were put to work on the fields, aiding farmers, to help maintain Britain’s food security, and as the famous adage goes, “Dig for Victory!”

During the war, and for unknown reasons, it was decided that an activity these prisoners might be interested in would be a Seminary. This proved to be highly popular, and by the end of the war, over 120 of the prisoners had successfully trained and been ordained as Catholic priests. When the war was over, these men returned to Europe, with the vast majority continuing in the clergy. For the prisoners who had worked on the farms, however, the farewell was not so easy. Many of the local farmers had become incredibly fond of their ‘Continental’ helpers, who had become known for their good manners and general politeness. Equally, many of the prisoners had been welcomed into these rural East Anglian communities, and later many returned, late in their lives, to pay their old friends a final goodbye.

Bibliography

Baker, Chris, The Long, Long Trail (2021) https://www.longlongtrail.co.uk/.

‘Barracks’, British-history.ac.uk https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/essex/vol9/pp251-255.

Baggs, A. P., Beryl Board, Philip Crummy, Claude Dove, Shirley Durgan, N. R. Goose, R. B. Pugh, Pamela Studd, C. C. Thornton, A History of the County of Essex: Volume 9, the Borough of Colchester, ed. Janet Cooper, C. R. Elrington (London: Victoria County History, 1994).

Camulos.com https://www.camulos.com/.

Crummy, Nina, Colchester Archaeological Report, CAR-report-0002.pdf (1995).

Maynard, Liam, ‘A Look at Colchester’s Military History’, Gazette (2022).

‘View of Colchester and Hyderabad and Meeanee Barracks, Colchester, 1920’, Britain from Above http://www.britainfromabove.org.uk/image/epw001857.