Danny Howell writes:
Among the Longbridge Deverill archives in the Wiltshire And Swindon Record Office, there is a scrap of paper featuring a handwritten list of ‘The Divisions Which Occupied Sandhill Camp During The Great War.’ The list is as follows:
June 1915. 26th Division.
Oct 1915. 34th Division.
March 1916. 60th Division.
Sept 1916. R.A.M.C.
Nov 1916. 58th Division.
June 1917. Training RW Brigade.
Oct 1917 to Aug 1919. Australian Imperial Forces.
This tells us nothing really of the activity and events that must have been witnessed by Longbridge Deverill villagers during the First World War years. We now know that 5,000 men, serving King and Country, were stationed (though not all at the same time), at Sandhill Camp.
Finding out more about the camp and what went on there is not easy. As Terry Crawford says in his book, Wiltshire And The Great War, published by DPF in 1999, “Frustratingly the Warminster Journal, having regularly featured the tented camps established in the Wylye Valley within weeks of the war’s beginning, barely mentions the hutted one at Sand Hill. By the time construction had started, press censorship was restricting references to military works and activities.â€
Mrs B. M. White in A History Of Longbridge Deverill, Hill Deverill And Crockerton 914 – 1960, written in 1960, refers to a farmyard called Cowley’s, in Sand Street, Longbridge Deverill, which she could remember seeing when she was a child. She says “It was quite a picturesque farmyard, filled entirely with thatched buildings. In 1914 most of these buildings were pulled down to make room for a big Military Post Office, for the use of the military who had built a large camp to accommodate about 5000 men at Sandhill.â€