On 1 November 1943, the villagers of Imber on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire gathered together in a school room and awaited an announcement on local military training with some trepidation. The news they were given, even if not unexpected by some, was extreme: all villagers would have to leave Imber by the 17 December that year – only 47 days away. The site was being requisitioned fully by the War Department, and their tenants in this village would have to leave, to sell their livestock and produce, to move any possessions, and to start life elsewhere. Although the settlement had been surrounded by military training areas for many years, this must have come as an almighty shock. Henceforth, Imber was going to be used for urban operations by the British and the American armed forces in preparation for the beach landings and hoped-for liberation of Western Europe that many believed to be coming soon. Many of the villagers, though, were remarkably stoic about being uprooted – this was, after all, ‘total war’, and this would be Imber’s contribution to the war effort. Several members of the community were already away serving in the armed forces, and people were well aware of the sacrifices being made across the nation. Moreover, there were other villages that had suffered the same fate of requisition, with West Tofts in Norfolk and Tyneham in Dorset being well-known examples.
Come the end of the war in 1945, and most of the villagers expected to be able to return to their houses and farms, to begin life once again, and to repair the inevitable damage that the tramping of hundreds of military boots along with heavy machinery and explosives would have caused (protection measures that had put in place on the structures notwithstanding). They believed that the government had given them an assurance that, once everything was over, they could all go home. And yet the authorities insisted that no such statement had been made – that this was all now training land and that it would, in any case, be far too dangerous to return, as tanks, aircraft, explosions, and major exercises would be commonplace in and around the village in perpetuity. So the controversy of Imber was born, and demonstrations about its future and the fate of the villagers of the 1940s continued for decades. Even today, the subject still raises very strong feelings and a sense of injustice, even though almost nobody with a personal memory of the village in its old form survives.
Visiting a ghost village
Nowadays, the prospect of anybody actually living in Imber again seems very far-fetched. Even the most robust of the old village buildings – the Nag’s Head cottages, Seagram’s Farm, the Bell Inn, and Imber Court – are brick shells with corrugated roofs, and this footprint has been in-filled with more modern breeze-block constructions to represent housing from the later part of the 20th century. The church of St Giles alone stands in its own island of historic building conservation, designated as a Grade I-listed structure thanks to an extensive programme of restoration and conservation by its new owners, the Churches Conservation Trust (CCT). This work included the enhancing of wonderful wall paintings depicting church bell-peal changes, soul-weighings, and, rather marvellously, a scene representing the sin of ‘Avarice’ or ‘Greed’, whereby a number of demons (one of whom looks suspiciously like Mickey Mouse) drag a medieval man clutching bags of coins towards the mouth of hell and a grisly eternity within its depths.
The Princess of Khok Phanom Di