Hothfield Common and the Nissen Huts
Just after the Second World War Ronald Peter Chapman with his wife Bridget and their first son Peter were living on Hothfield Common near Ashford in Kent. They were there, in hut 926, from April 1949 until September 1950.
The site had previously been used to house troops, post war it was home to gypsies and the homeless.
The Chapmans lived in a Nissen hut, a prefabricated structure made from sheets of corrugated metal bent into a half barrel shaped semi circle. Sewage services were external to the hut. Heating & cooking was provided by a coal or wood fired stove. Some newspaper reports described life there in idyllic terms but others present a tale of some hardship; extensive condensation and the inhabitants sharing their living space with amphibians.
Ronald Peter Chapman's sister Betty lived on the same site with her husband Len and spoke fondly of her time there. "We moved straight in after our wedding in 1949 and thought ourselves very lucky to have a place of our own. We had three rooms, kitchen with range and tap, living room and bedroom. The loo was an Elsan outside. The rent was ten shillings a week. We always had plenty of logs, a man used to come round selling them, it was always nice and cosy, lovely in the summer."
Others reported a grim tale, "The first night we spent there, fleas came out of the walls and all over us. We had to stay out of the hut all next day while the Council fumigated it. The hut was very damp in winter, your clothes and shoes and everything were spoilt. We had to call the doctor to see our daughter and he wanted to know what we were doing living in a place like this. We told him that this was all they could give the servicemen after five years of the war with one child. The cooking arrangements consisted of a Valor oven. No hot water other than boiling it on the stove. Electricity consisted of a light at either end of the hut. Heating was by a stove in the middle of the hut. Later we moved to hut 610 camp 4 and this was much better with three rooms and a toilet outside. Cooking consisted of a coal burning stove".
The local MP, Bill Deedes, campaigned for the Nissen hut camp to be demolished as a health hazard
Hansard reports Deedes as follows....
Mr. W. F. Deedes (Ashford) I am sorry that it has become necessary for me to raise again tonight one aspect of our housing problem, not, I think, peculiar to my division, but of which my division, near Ashford, has a particularly grievous example. I refer to hutted camps formerly built by and occupied by the Army, and which are still being used as dwelling houses......... ........ I will only say that I have never seen, in a fairly extensive acquaintance with slums, conditions more damaging to health, particularly the health of young children, than I saw a month ago. ............ Most of them are excellent tenants whose only failing is their homelessness, and most of them have succeeded in making the best of very bad circumstances. Their enemy, as hon. Gentlemen who may have seen these camps know, is dampness. In the winter months these areas are saturated. There is no real water drainage from Army Nissen huts. The warmth of the huts draws the moisture, and when the temperature falls at night a kind of vicious dew forms inside the huts soaking carpets, cupboards and furniture and, worst of all, beds and bedding, which is testing for the best of housewives, and it says much for their morale that it is not lower than it is.
Eventually, in 1955, the final occupants were re-housed.