The first Balt Cygnet party, Lübeck to Tilbury, October 1946

Lübeck displaced persons camp → Tilbury

Britain introduced the Balt Cygnet labour scheme for Baltic women in the German camps in the autumn of 1946. The first party of a hundred women left the Lübeck displaced persons camp by sea on 16 October 1946 and reached Tilbury a few days later. Recruits were engaged as cleaners, ward maids, kitchen hands and laundry workers in hospitals and tuberculosis sanatoria, at the same wages as British women in the same jobs. Eligibility widened during 1947 to women up to fifty, to nurse and midwife training and to the American zone, and by May 1947 almost 2,500 Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian and Ukrainian women had arrived in twenty-three parties of about a hundred. No Ukrainian subtotal was recorded.