Clipstone Camp

View of Clipstone Camp showing Accommodation Huts and Ablutions Blocks

Clipstone Camp was located near Mansfield, in Nottinghamshire. It was a vast wooden hutted military camp established to train the men of Kitchener’s New Army. Opened in May 1915, it housed upwards of twenty to thirty thousand soldiers at any one time. Some soldiers even wrote home saying there were 50,000 or 60,000 stationed there. There are no official records to quantify this.

Pauline helping to record the Bingham WI Hut

Pauline Marples, a Forest Town historian, has produced a new book detailing the Clipstone Camp and the impact it had on the Mansfield area.

Pauline kindly gave us an excellent and inspiring whistle stop tour of Clipstone Camp at the CBA East Midlands day school. Her slides and notes are reproduced with her permission below.

CLIPSTONE CAMP Then & Now presentation

Clipstone Camp Then & Now notes

A video about Clipstone Camp is available on the BBC World War One at Home website.

Copies of Pauline’s book are available from Nottingham Books

The Bingham WI Hut is likely to have once been part of Clipstone Camp and has now been recorded using the Home Front legacy app. The record is available to view on our ‘Map of Sites’.

Many thanks to Pauline for providing us with the presentation and notes.