Plumber finds WWII PoW camp in his back garden

[Pobeda45]

My lady forwarded me this article...I thought you guys would get a kick out of it too.

George


Plumber finds WWII PoW camp in his back garden | Metro.co.uk

"Most people get excited if they dig up a trinket in their back garden but David Murray was left ‘shocked’ when he unearthed the remains of a prisoner of war camp.

The 39-year-old’s interest was stirred when he found a German soldier’s World War II ID tag as he was digging behind his bungalow.
An hour later he had located bottles, uniform buttons and ammunition from the Hertfordshire camp which once housed 10,000 German PoWs.
Weeks on he has now recovered 2,000 items – including a live grenade he tried to defuse himself.

‘It was a huge shock when I found the tag,’ said Mr Murray. ‘It was just poking out of the ground so it was just luck I saw it glint in the light.
‘I didn’t realise what the grenade was – it didn’t look like the ones you see in the films. I tried to defuse it a couple of times myself but I couldn’t get the screws off the top.

‘It’s a good job because the RAF said it was very unstable. They weren’t very happy with me when I told them I’d been holding it next to my ear and listening to see if it would go bang. It’s really incredible to think that 70 years ago 10,000 PoWs were walking around in my back garden.’
Plumber, Mr Murray, has now turned guardsman and ‘continuously’ paces the perimeter of the site to watch for night hawkers, who he fears will steal the historic artefacts.
He has so far excavated 0.4ha (one acre) of the 16ha (40-acre) Wynches Camp in Much Hadham but thinks it could take years before the whole area is exposed.
He is working alongside historian Richard Maddams to research the camp which was bulldozed in 1950."

[CtahhR]

From the title of this post it make me think that it was still active... That'd surprise me to find a still functioning POW camp in the back garden... but stranger things than that happen around here!

[Pobeda45]

That article made me jealous I don't live in the UK myself. This said, when I lived in Russia as a kid in the early 80s, we had a family retreat 50 miles from Moscow, near Naro-Fominsk. It was in the direct line of Winter '41 fighting, and we'd routinely find bullet casings just centimeters below surface.

George