The British pages are hostels rather than camps: European Voluntary Worker hostels, YMCA hostels, miners' and agricultural hostels and reused prisoner of war camps, most of them running from 1947 into the early 1950s and most of them in Scotland. They stood near the work, and the buildings were usually the huts that Italian and then German prisoners had left behind. A Ministry of Works plan of February 1948 for Munlochy records the alterations made to turn one such camp into a hostel.12
Two movements brought Ukrainians. The Westward Ho and European Voluntary Worker schemes recruited in the camps of occupied Germany on terms that tied each worker to an allocated job in agriculture, forestry, mining or textiles, and official statistics give 20,912 Ukrainian European Voluntary Workers. Separately, former soldiers of the Galicia Division were shipped out of Italy in 1947 and released from prisoner of war status into the same scheme in 1948, their camps becoming hostels. Directed employment ended on 1 January 1951.345
Hallmuir near Lockerbie, where a hut became a Ukrainian Greek Catholic chapel that still stands, and Botesdale Camp in Suffolk, where a Ukrainian return counted 1,010 men at or near the camp in July 1948, are the fullest pages. Munlochy Hostel, Winfield Camp and Bela River Hostel show the ordinary pattern of a wartime site passing into civilian hands.678
Many of these places are known chiefly because Peter Kormylo's directory of hostels holding significant numbers of Ukrainians preserves their names. For several, no document read gives a site, an operating date or a population, and the page says so rather than filling the gap.910
Allington Camp, numbered 51, was built for Italian prisoners in 1942 and became the headquarters of a German working-camp network in Lincolnshire, Rutland and Leicestershire. In July 1948 a Ukrainian return recorded 1,319 men in camps at or near Allington, and the site later disappeared under a caravan park and a residential estate.
A camp built in Haddington’s parkland for a thousand German prisoners became, in 1947 and 1948, a hostel for several hundred Ukrainians who worked on East Lothian farms. A Red Cross inspector found it clean but bare, expected it to close within six months, and noted the men’s choir and their wish for an Orthodox priest.
Annsmuir near Ladybank was Camp 77, a German working camp that closed in February 1948 and passed into civilian use. By that November it held European volunteer workers employed in agriculture, a Ukrainian directory names Ansmuir Hostel among Scottish hostels with significant Ukrainian numbers, and a 1953 Catholic directory records Sunday Mass inside the camp.
A miners’ hostel in West Lothian, listed among the Scottish hostels that housed Ukrainian European Voluntary Workers after the war. A 1946 training programme and a 1948 court report confirm the hostel’s existence, its manager, shop and lockers, but its site, operator and closing date remain unidentified.
At Balhary Estate, a hutted camp became the headquarters of a wide network of working-prisoner hostels. Inspection reports describe its classrooms, library, theatre and daily frustrations; the site later appears in the directory of Ukrainian hostels.
A European Voluntary Workers’ hostel near Kinross formed part of the postwar Ukrainian settlement network, and the surviving directory preserves its name as Ballado. The wartime airfield at Balado Bridge and its dispersed camps supply the physical setting, though the hostel’s own buildings remain unidentified.
Barony Camp at Parkgate was German Working Camp No 298 before it appeared in the Ukrainian community’s own list of Scottish accommodation. A handwritten dispersal list reproduced by Peter Kormylo records 462 men against Barony, and his account sends them straight on to Hallmuir near Lockerbie.
A women’s industrial hostel in Ayrshire that the Ukrainian accommodation directory records as a Ukrainian women’s hostel. Two traces from 1948, a family-search notice and a Ukrainian Orthodox pastoral visit, survive, but the building, the employer and the closing date do not.
Camp 104 beside the River Bela at Whassett held Italian and then German prisoners of war until January 1948, after which the site became an agricultural hostel for displaced persons and appears in a Ukrainian directory as YMCA Hostel, Bela River. It later served as an open prison, was sold in 1980 and now carries a residential school.
Camp 56 at Redgrave Park received Ukrainians in 1947 after its earlier use for German and Italian prisoners, and a Ukrainian return counted 1,010 men at or near Botesdale in July 1948. Farm work, life inside the huts and the transition towards civilian employment connect Botesdale with the wider history of resettlement in Britain.
Brackla was an RAF training and storage airfield near Cawdor whose huts were scattered for a mile and more across the farmland around Piperhill. After the flying stopped, those huts became a Ukrainian hostel and then council emergency housing, though no record yet shows which of the five hut groups the Ukrainian residents used.
Burnbrae was part of the hostel network through which Ukrainians began life in the Scottish Borders. Photographs and family testimony place the wider Galashiels community in the town’s textile industry.