Life in Foxley Camp

Foxley Camp was built in the grounds of Foxley Manor which had previously been a

significant country estate in Herefordshire. Foxley House was built in 1717 by Baron Robert Price and the ‘picturesque’ landscape was designed by Uvedale Price. The estate was sold in1856 to John Davenport and later sold again. It eventually became a World War Two military hospital for Canadians and Americans during 1944-1945. Following the war it served as a Polish resettlement camp hosting many families.

The following photographs are a small selection taken from a collection inherited by Henry Pavlovich from his father, Zbigniew Pawlowicz, a Polish refuge. Henry Pavlovich lived, with his parents, in Foxley Camp from birth from 1947 until about 1955 when it was gradually closed and the residents rehoused in Hereford. Zbigniew Pawlowicz took many pictures of everyday occurrences and special occasions such as religious processions, weddings, his family and other residents of Foxley.

Zbigniew Pawlowicz was sent to Foxley Camp by the Polish Resettlement Corps at the end of World War Two. He originally came from Wilno in interwar Poland, now known as Vilnius the capital of Lithuania. At the beginning of the war, he was imprisoned by pro-German Lithuanian forces and then briefly conscripted into the Soviet Red Army when it invaded Poland. He escaped and lived rough within Lithuania until captured by German forces in 1941. He was then used as a slave labourer in the Organisation Todt in Germany which was a Nazi paramilitary engineering and construction group from 1933-1945 responsible for major infrastructure and military projects. After escaping to Italy, towards the end of the war, he joined the Polish and British Allied forces in Rimini, from where he was sent to Liverpool and then Foxley. Herefordshire.

Jadwiga Pawlowicz the wife of Zbigniew and mother to Henry, came from what is now west Ukraine. Between World War One and Two it used to be on the eastern borderlands of Poland.  In 1939 the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland. She and her parents and siblings were taken by Soviet forces in 1940 and sent to the Soviet Arctic and Siberia. Stalin, the leader of the Soviet Union wanted British and American military aid and agreed to liberate Polish prisoners so that they could form an army under Polish General Anders. In the meantime, Jadwiga had escaped from the labour camp near Archangel and made her way to Uzbekistan to join the Anders Army. From there she travelled through several countries and then to Rimini.

Henry Pavlovich has written a detailed story of his and his parents’ life in Foxley Camp in his book ‘Worlds Apart’ 2007.