Barry Leighton uncovers the village they will never let die

But as it drew closer it became apparent that its destination was far from ordinary. There wasn’t a bird or a villager or even the distant din of agricultural machinery to be heard.

The unearthly silence was broken only by the monotonous hum of motor engines. The houses, too, weren’t really houses, just empty shells. Most of them looked like breeze block monstrosities from a post-war Soviet estate.

Veering off the main road they came to a halt near the village’s only inhabited structure. Or at least, there were some people in it that day, getting things ready.

Once every winter for the past few years, 13th Century St Giles Church is packed to the rafters – the 250 tickets are snapped up weeks in advance – as it echoes to the merry strain of carols.

The location on the Saturday before Christmas 2015 was of course Imber – “the village that was murdered,” as some have suggested.

Or – as a 1948 Pathe News bulletin more conservatively put it: “The village without villagers”.

In typically clipped upper class English tones, the presumably Brylcreemed Pathe announcer declared: “In the midst of Salisbury Plain, isolated from civilisation by acres of Wiltshire downland lies the village of Imber.”

The village, he went on, had been the Army’s battle school since early in the war but now it has received a “final death sentence.”

Pre-Doomsday Imber, it had been decreed, will remain a “permanent battlefield” as the military wants to keep it for training purposes.

Hastily evacuated five years earlier in 1943, its 110 inhabitants (or 140 depending who you believe) would not be allowed back into their homes.

“The Norman church will never again see its parishioners” he added because “many of the houses have fallen to bits and will cost thousands to put up again.”

The newsreel ended on a relatively upbeat note for ex-Imber villagers with “Champion of the Dispossessed” Lord Long proclaiming: “I consider that the people of Imber have had a raw deal... and I intend to raise the matter again in the House of Lords.”

Raise it he may have done but it didn’t work. Seventy two years after its inhabitants packed their bags, Imber remains Wiltshire’s ghost village.

Anyone who has ever visited – legally it is now open 50 days-a-year – will be aware of its brooding, eerie vibe.

Hard to imagine, really, that it was once a thriving, close-knit village, complete with pub – The Bell – school, manor house and smithy.

It could even muster a cricket team (Buffy ‘Slogger’ Meadow being the star batsman during the 1920s.) A century old photo exists of some Imber men proudly posing with a fearsome looking threshing machine – tough, weather-hardened men-of-the-land... all unaware of the ill that would befall their community three decades hence.

Located in the heart of Salisbury Plain, it was Imber’s isolation on the road to nowhere (as David Byrne later sang) seven miles from the nearest habitation that spelled its fate.

During the early 20th Century the War Department bought 25,000 acres of Salisbury Plain for military training – with Imber bang (if you’ll excuse the pun) in the middle.

When war broke out a 1,000 yard safety zone was created around Imber. But with the nation’s needs increasingly pressing, villagers were in 1943 summoned to the schoolhouse and given 47 days’ notice to clear out.

Just imagine the scenes at The Bell – raw emotion fired with alcohol – when last orders were called for a final time on that wintry night in ’43.

Imber’s rural lanes were supposed to double for Somewhere In Normandy so American troops could practice in preparation for the Invasion.

But it never happened and the GIs simply occupied the village’s thatched cottages.

Amid praise from the Government for their sacrifice, ‘Imberians’ were – and this has always rankled – assured they would be allowed to return after the war.

But as Pathe News announced with its 1948 ‘Imber Stays Khaki’ bulletin the village, it had been decided, would remain in military hands.

Did those hardy country folk take it lying down? Were they prepared to quietly sit on their hands and allow a settlement dating to Saxon times be written out of history?

Don’t be daft. They kicked up a hell of a fuss. For years, as war games raged noisily around it and while its buildings were battered and bloodied by shell-fire, Imber became a battleground of a different kind.

The Association For the Restoration of Imber (see panel) loudly called for roads closed by Defence Regulations to be re-opened and for Imber to be re-established as a farming community and village.

The Imber Shall Live campaign culminated in 1961 with another invasion when 2,000 people ignored ‘keep out’ warnings to stage a protest rally in the village (see panel).

But with the Defence of the Realm at stake, pro-Imber campaigners never stood a chance.

A public inquiry found in favour of the military while a Seventies campaign floundered with an abrupt “no” from the Defence Lands Committee.

Evidence of the Government’s 1943 Return to Imber promise was swept aside.

There was even talk of dismantling St Giles to re-build elsewhere as a Salisbury Plain Army church.

But it was later determined that it should be maintained and for decades a service has been held there on the closest Saturday to St Giles Day every September – which for many years was the only day anyone could visit Imber.

The carol service is a relatively recent innovation after more open days were granted.

Over the years Imber’s once picturesquely rustic but increasingly blasted buildings slowly vanished to be replaced in the Seventies with faceless structures bearing signs such as Jim’s Café, Shop, Post Office – initially to replicate a Belfast street scene for the Army to practice during The Troubles.

A few still remain including, it is nice to report, The Bell.

Despite it all – barbed wire fences, ‘unexploded military debris’ notices, and adjoining former village farmland scarred by bomb craters and Challenger tank ruts – the Spirit of Imber remains, courtesy of ongoing pilgrimages from the descendants of villagers who refuse to let its name die.

• IT was a protest unique in the county of Wiltshire when on January 22, 1961, 2,000 people in 700 vehicles brushed aside military ‘keep out’ notices to stage an Imber Shall Live Protest.

  Wiltshire schoolteacher and local councillor Austin Underwood, who organised it, was just as stunned as the War Office at the response.

  Enraged War Minister John Profumo – the one later enmeshed in the Christine Keeler sex scandal – huffily wrote to Prime Minister Harold Macmillan branding Underwood “a bad man, very left wing... but he has managed to rally a good deal of support.”

  Underwood likened the treatment of “villagers carted off by the Army,” farmers turned out of their farms and the church imprisoned behind a 6ft high barbed wire fence to “some Polish village under the Nazi heel.”

• NO-ONE quite felt the devastation of Imber’s imminent evacuation quite as much as Albert ‘Albie’ Nash, its blacksmith for 44 years.

  A few days after the community was given less than two months to quit in November, 1943 Albert was found by his wife slumped over his anvil “crying like a baby”.

  Within weeks of being despatched to a new home Albert, in his late 60s, died and became the first Imber evacuee to be buried at St Giles.

  Albert’s grandson Ken Mitchell, who was 16 when he left, returned for many years on the annual day of the “ceasefire” to tend the graves of his parents and grandparents.

  In 1989, when he was 63, Ken recalled: “I was young and did not have any responsibilities so I wasn’t as upset to leave as the older people. It was a terrific blow to them.”

  He was always in favour of a return to Imber but after so many years fellow villager Mollie Archer-Smith, who was 28 when left, felt that there were so few of them still alive that it wasn’t worth it anymore.

  Speaking in 1993 when she was 79, she remembered: “It hurt us very much when we were told to leave. But it was a small sacrifice. Boys were giving their lives and it was all for the war effort.”

  She added: “The old houses and old people made Imber – they’re all gone now and I don’t think it should ever become a village again. There is only the shell of a village left now.”