At the end of the Second World War, there was a national housing shortage, as no new homes had been built for six years and tens of thousands of properties had been destroyed in air raids. Plus there were four million young men and women who were being demobbed needed somewhere to live.
And so, in the summer of 1946, there was a national, and largely spontaneous, squatter movement. People moved en masse into disused military establishments and took up residence.
By October 1946, about 46,000 people were living in 1,811 camps.
In our area, the airfield at Croft to the south of Darlington was suddenly taken over by several hundred squatters. Although the airfield was just a satellite to Middleton St George – now, of course, Teesside airport – it was large enough to have had at least four housing settlements where scores of Canadian airmen lived in concrete prefabs.
Pictures of Croft airfield during the Second World War are very rare. This shows a massive 4,000lb 'Cookie' bomb exploding after the Lancaster bomber that was supposed to drop it on Germany crashed shortly after take-off in 1945. It also shows why the
These settlements were created for safety reasons just beyond the perimeter of the airfield, and the airmen knew them as “Communal Site No 1” etc.
But when civilians squatted in them, they named them after wartime aeroplanes, so there was the “Lancaster site” and also a “Wellington site”.
The newcomers on these sites formed a “squatters committee” to prove they were not lawbreakers. The committee collected £100 so that when the day came for someone in authority to demand rent, they would be able to pay.
In late 1946, Darlington council discovered it had become the relevant authority and, to avoid a scene, it thought £100 would just about cover what it was owed.
Sidecar racing at Croft circuit on August 17, 1964, soon after the airfield was sold. It is now Croft Circuit
Local councils were quite grateful that people were prepared to squat in wartime accommodation rather than join the long queue for social housing.
Therefore, in February 1947, Darlington council spent £4,106 on work to make the sites more permanent and safe for families. However, on June 27, 1948, in Communal Site No 1, eight-year-old Brian Harris drowned in an airfield water tank before it could be filled in.
Slowly during the 1950s, as building materials became available, squatters were able to move out of the wartime units into new council houses. Many from Croft ended up in the new estate on the edge of Barton.
When the remains of the airfield at Croft were auctioned on April 16, 1962, all the squatters had moved on.
One of the farms that was auctioned in 1962 was East Vince Moor. It was apparently bought by a farmer who had a sideline in breeding Border Collie dogs.
It is said that one of his dogs, born on May 1, 1971, was sold to the BBC. This dog was named Shep and became famous as John Noakes’ side kick on Blue Peter.
John Noakes sitting back-to-back with Shep, the Blue Peter dog who may have been born in Croft next to the airfield
Shep was an excitable hound – hence Noakes' catchphrase "Get down, Shep" – and stayed on the show until Noakes left in 1978, although he starred in Go With Noakes until 1980. Shep died in 1987.
Can anyone tell us if this most famous of children's TV animals really was a Croft dog? Please email chris.lloyd@nne.co.uk
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