Balt Cygnet

Origins and purpose

Two pressures produced the scheme. British hospitals and tuberculosis sanatoria could not fill domestic posts that local applicants found unattractive, and the occupying powers were carrying a heavy cost for camps in Germany whose populations would not be repatriated. Recruiting camp residents into unfilled British jobs answered both problems at once.1

The choice of Baltic women was deliberate and was defended in terms that later readers find uncomfortable. British officials described them as scrupulously clean in their persons and habits and as the spirit and stuff of which Britons could be made; official papers rated them above rural Polish women and treated marriage to British men as a benefit. Balts were the most favoured category of displaced person in British policy, and Ukrainians stood well below them.23

A study of National Health Service staffing records the Attlee administration authorising the recruitment of 5,000 women from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in 1946, mostly to work in understaffed tuberculosis sanatoria. A French account of the Baltic displaced adds that the women were chosen on the basis of their moral values and because, in the eyes of the project's supporters, they could not be suspected of war crimes.1011

How it worked in practice

Ministry of Labour officials visited the camps with leaflets setting out the terms. The first phase sought unmarried women aged eighteen to forty who were in good health, not pregnant and free of dependants, for work as cleaners, ward maids, kitchen hands and laundry workers. Applicants with nursing experience could ask to be trained as nurses, but no request was guaranteed. Placement in a sanatorium or a mental hospital required the worker's explicit consent.51

The contract fixed the worker to a designated employer. Wages matched those of British women doing the same work, and board and lodging came with the post, along with an identity card, a ration card and a clothing coupon allowance. Sickness pay was available for temporary illness only; repeated or prolonged sickness meant return to a camp in Germany. Recruits could not change employment or residence without Ministry of Labour approval, and as aliens they had to register with the police whenever they changed job or address.52

Transport went by sea across the North Sea. The first party of a hundred women left Lubeck on 16 October 1946 and reached Tilbury a few days later. Reception was organised: members of the Women's Royal Voluntary Service met the parties with tea and a hot meal, and the women went on to registration centres for further medical checks, money, clothing and their placement instructions before travelling singly, in pairs or in small groups to hospitals across the country. Accommodation was in the hospital grounds or in nearby lodgings, which often left a recruit isolated from other camp companions.15

The scheme widened as it went on. Nurse and midwife training was opened up, the upper age limit was raised to fifty, and recruitment was extended beyond the British zone into the American zone. A Conditions of Service document for the extension to women aged forty to fifty survives in a British archive file cited by researchers as HO 1052/445, item 169.14

Recruits knew their jobs before they travelled. A doctoral study of the Estonian community in Scotland contrasts Balt Cygnet, under which people were recruited for particular jobs known before they entered the United Kingdom, with the later Westward Ho, which was freer to redistribute workers as shortages moved; one Estonian recruit interviewed for that study remembered going from Lubeck by ship to Tilbury knowing throughout that she was bound for Scotland rather than England. The same study records that the Baltic Cygnets who ended up in Scotland received a great deal of extra help from the head of the Scottish League for European Freedom, John F. Stewart, who offered language tuition and helped them to get their previous education acknowledged.9

How Ukrainians related to the scheme

Balt Cygnet began as a Baltic scheme and the name says so. Ukrainian women were admitted later, during the widening of eligibility, and the Latvian national archives account of the scheme records that by May 1947 almost 2,500 Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian and Ukrainian women had arrived in Britain under it, sent in twenty-three parties of about a hundred each. No separate Ukrainian subtotal for Balt Cygnet has been traced, and the encyclopaedia of the Ukrainian community in Britain, which gives 20,912 Ukrainian European Voluntary Workers in all, does not name the scheme.16

Where Ukrainian women were taken into hospital work, they were not treated on the same footing as Baltic recruits. The nursing training route opened for Baltic workers was not available to them, and they were used in the less regarded posts, as cleaners and kitchen hands. The general policy ranking that placed Balts first and Ukrainians well behind them ran through the placements as well as the recruitment.52

For Ukrainians the significant scheme was the one that followed. Westward Ho opened in the spring of 1947 with Ukrainians among the first nationalities sought, and it carried the great majority of Ukrainian arrivals in Britain. Balt Cygnet matters to the Ukrainian story chiefly because it established the machinery Westward Ho used: recruitment inside the camps, medical selection, the undertaking to work as directed, and reception and placement on arrival.61

What happened afterwards

Balt Cygnet closed as Westward Ho opened. The first Westward Ho recruits reached Britain at the end of April 1947 through Tilbury and Hull, over a thousand in a single week, and by the end of May nearly 10,000 displaced persons had come under the new scheme, 42 per cent of them women. Women continued to be recruited for hospitals as well as for the textile industry, so the demand Balt Cygnet had been created to meet was simply absorbed into the bigger operation.1

The Baltic recruitment as a whole was substantial. Almost 30,000 Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians entered Britain under the two schemes together, and by December 1950 Latvian arrivals under both numbered 12,919 with 1,322 dependants. The women who stayed remained bound by the employment restriction until the general relaxation from 1 January 1951, and many of those who had arrived as young single workers spent the rest of their lives in Britain in communities that continued to organise around a homeland they could not return to.31

A study of migration to Scotland dates the merger to May 1947 and records that it led to recruitment being extended to women of other nationalities, most notably Ukrainians. The doctoral study of the Estonian community puts the scheme's recruitment at around 2,500 women, among them 700 Estonians.89