You have to look very carefully but...
as you wander or drive around the more rural parts of the UK you can occasionally see one of what would have been the most common buildings in wartime - yet the man that designed them is buried here in this overgrown and forgotten grave in Kent.
Born in 1871 to a Norwegian father and an English mother, Peter Nissen would one day become a Lt. Colonel in the British Royal Engineers and put his mind to designing a temprary building to house soldiers and stores in temporary camps needed for the Great War. The "Nissen Hut" became adopted by the British government in 1916 when over one million men needed to be accomodated as part of Kitchener's New Army preparing for the Battle of the Somme.
Six men could put up the steel frame and corregated iron roof and wooden floor in around 4 hours - the record was 1 hour 27 minutes - and dozens of these buildings could create a complete camp with an officers mess, catering, medical, stores, maps rooms and roads in just a few days. During World War Two from 1941, these camps that were left over from World War One were cleaned up to house Canadian and then US Army troops preparing for The Dieppe Raid and D-Day while thousands of new ones were built for American air-crews on their new airfields across East Anglia.
After D Day and 1945, the Nissen Huts then became home to 110,000 Polish troops and a further 50,000 Polish civilians and children after 1947 who had been given permission to re-settle in the UK. The Poles created small Polish homes and towns from the old Nissen Huts, decorated them with curatins, pretty gardens and divided them into bedrooms and kitchens for families who had to begin again with nothing - some even became churches and chapels in which to get married and christen children.
Today, the vast majority of the Nissen Huts have gone - forgotten and destroyed but others can still be seen as part of older farms and one or two have been converted into small museums dedicated to their former inhabitants - think of the stories that they could tell. In my 2024 book on the US 1st Battalion, 116th Infantry called Empire Javelin, the five companies that would be in the first waves spent their final few weeks alive in the Nissen Huts of Uphill Camp in Ivybridge. The phrase Nissen Hut was once as common as Bacon & Eggs so let try and remember this remarkable little building that was such a huge part of our history.
Although hundreds of Nissen Huts were used to house German and Italian Prisoners of War until 1950, it would be the Polish communities that would be the final users of the Nissen Hut camps and some even remained as Polish camps until the 1970's as the challenges of finding jobs and starting a new life in the UK was simply too much for many of the older inhabitants and they spent the rest of their lives living in a Nissen Hut.
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