Belgians In Birtley.

A Memory of Birtley.

Few people are aware of the part Birtley, Tyne Wear, (part of County Durham in those days ) played in the Great War of 1914 - 1918.
Belgium in 1914 was occupied by the German Army, and thousands of refugees fled to Britain where they settled until the end of the war. This posed problems for the authorities as to where to house them and how to employ them.
In 1915 the British Army was suffering a severe shell shortage, so it was decided to set up new factories for the manufacture of munitions.
Two factories - one to produce shells and the other to make brass cartridge cases - were set up in Birtley by Armstrong Whitworth. They were to be manned by 4000 Belgian workers.
Accommodation for these workers was to be provided by building a township alongside these factories in 1915/16. It was called Elisabethville after the Belgian Queen, and covered 95 acres.
Elisabethville consisted of 667 two and three bedroom wooden cottages laid out in streets as well as a number of larger dormitory huts for single men.
The houses and streets were originally numbered - e.g. C47 - before being given names such as Rue de Bruxelles, Boulevard Reine Elizabeth, etc..
The "Huts" as they came to be known, were extremely well appointed with gardens front and rear, electricity, flushing toilets, etc., - far better than the majority of homes in Birtley at that time.
Elisabethville was totally self contained with an iron fence surrounding it and with guarded gates. It had its own Police Force and jail, a school for 600 children, Post Ofice, Catholic Church and Nuns home, a cemetery, fire station, hospital, public laundries shops and a market.
The Police were Belgian Gendarmes, the school had Belgian teachers, and the doctors, nurses and clergy were all Belgian
476 civilian refugees were employed at the factories, but a much larger skilled workforce was required, so soldiers were released from the Belgian army - more than 1,100 from the Front, and almost 2,500 reformes - men wounded in battle and considered unfit to serve in the frontline.
Later families arrived to swell the population, which rose to about 6,000.
Relations with the population of Birtley were very good. The only bone of contention was that while the Belgians were allowed to leave Elisabethville to visit the Birtley shops and public houses, or to travel to Newcastle (albeit with a pass), the locals were not allowed into Elisabethville.
The war ended in November 1918 and within three weeks the Belgians began to return to their homeland, although a number remained behind and married into the local community where their descendants can still be found.
The huts were then used as accommodation for British ex servicemen who were being retrained at the Factories, and gradually the huts were used to house the growing population of Birtley.
My grandparents, father and assorted great-aunts and uncles lived there in the 1920's, and all spoke of the Huts with affection. Very little of the township now remains.
Most of the structures were demolished in the 1930's, although the Church became the Salvation Army Hall for many years. I can remember the ruins of the hospital in the late 1940's, and the school - originally intended to last for 10 years was still in use as a junior school well into the 1970's.
Today there are still a few yards of the original iron fencing, a part of the original Co-op store now used as a tyre dealer and garage and of course the Cemetery. The cemetery originally contained the graves of 13 Belgian soldiers who succumbed to their wounds while in Birtley, each with an enamelled photograph of the deceased person on it.
Many of the bodies were however exhumed in 1926 and interred in War Cemeteries in Belgium.
It also remains the last resting place of a number of Belgian civilians - adults and children - who will always bear witness to the days of Elisabethville and the Birtley Belgians.
R A Norwood.