Discovering Cliffe’s Defences
Bill Simmons recording a Type 24 pillbox at Cliffe, August 2011
Local historian Bill Simmons is a man with a mission. He wants to discover how the Cliffe area near Rochester was to be defended against a feared German invasion during the Second World War.
Over the years he has become familiar with the numerous pillboxes to be seen in his area. Documentary research has shown these to have been part of the national and strategic GHQ defence line. This epic undertaking crossed the country from the Bristol Channel to the River Medway, then turned to join the south bank of the Thames near Higham Creek, resuming on the Essex shore north to shield the industrial Midlands. Yet these defences were much more than the pillboxes which remain today as the visible and iconic symbols of the preparations to defeat invasion. They included rifle pits and more extensive entrenched positions, mines and barbed wire entanglements, anti-tank ditches - such as the one that etched itself across the Hoo Peninsula against a possible landing on its shore - concrete obstacles and flame defences, with more besides.
Traces may remain as buried archaeology or as hidden structures in hedgerows and undergrowth. Bill Simmons is determined to find them all.
There are many clues to locations to be found in documents in the National Archives, from a study of aerial photographs, field survey and not least from the recollections of local people. From all this it should be possible to synthesise and better understand the anatomy, organisation and manning of the anti-invasion defences in the Cliffe area and beyond and to place them in their wider context.
Living in Cliffe, Bill Simmons has built up many contacts in the local community over the years, including landowners with defences on their property and he tells me that they are enthused about this impending project.
Bill Simmons does not want the results of his survey just to reside in an archive for other specialist researchers. He will seek ways to share them with everyone, through a website, an historical booklet, a military heritage trail and through engagement with schools. He is also working towards the selection of a ‘show pillbox’ that can be used during occasional open days as a backdrop to present and interpret the local anti-invasion defences, possibly including some uniformed enactment.
This project is most welcome for its potential to discover and add important knowledge. It is also timely given the recent publication of the Medway overview of Kent County Council’s Defence of Kent Project (Archaeologia Cantiana, Vol. CXXXI (2011) ) and with English Heritage’s Hoo Peninsula project in progress.
I am sure that we shall learn more of the progress of this worthwhile project in the years ahead, probably in the pages of this newsletter. So watch this space!
Editor’s note
Bill Simmons would welcome contacts from those with information of potential value to the project and from those who wish to become part of the research team he is assembling. Replies in the first instance to newsletter@kentarchaeology.org.uk.