Westward Ho

Origins and policy

The scheme grew out of a Cabinet committee. The newly elected Labour government's Foreign Labour Committee met for the first time on 14 March 1946 and favoured bringing in workers from Europe to relieve shortages in industries that could not fill their vacancies from the British labour market. Britain faced shortages in coal mining, agriculture and domestic work at the same time as skilled labour was leaving for the older Commonwealth countries, and the displaced persons held in camps in the British zones were identified as a reserve that could be drawn on.2510

The first experiment was cautious. Balt Cygnet began in October 1946 with the recruitment of women from Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia for residential domestic work in tuberculosis sanatoria, an initial target of 1,000 later raised to 5,000 for general hospitals. The first party of 100 women left the Lübeck camp on 16 October 1946 and crossed the North Sea to Tilbury. The scheme ended in early 1947 with 2,575 women recruited, and in May 1947 it was merged into Westward Ho, which extended hospital recruitment to women of other nationalities, Ukrainians most notably.2410

Westward Ho was designed for every sector that Balt Cygnet did not cover. It was intended to bring displaced persons into agriculture, forestry, coal mining and cotton textiles, with steel, transport, energy and other trades added later, and it took men and women alike. The target was ambitious: a parliamentary question of June 1947 described it as the Ministry of Labour's scheme for the employment of at least 100,000 displaced persons in industry by the end of that year, and in April 1948 Ness Edwards said it was hoped to bring about 100,000 workers during 1948, some 35,000 for agriculture, about 30,000 for coal and at least 20,000 for textiles.581914

The political argument was frankly economic, and it was not applied evenly. Officials graded the displaced persons they were recruiting: Balts were treated as highly desirable, Ukrainians much less so, and European Jews were not eligible at all. In private discussion inside the Ministry of Labour, Ukrainians were described as essentially peasant and therefore thought less suited to settling in Britain than the preferred Balts.523

Costs were reported to Parliament at intervals and rose steeply. Administering Westward Ho had cost about £780,000 to the end of October 1947, roughly £29 a head, covering selection in Germany and Austria, transport from the German frontier and maintenance until placement; the figure excluded camp maintenance on the continent, borne by the Preparatory Commission of the International Refugee Organisation. The running total stood at £1,290,000 to the end of February 1948 and at £2,750,000 by the end of October 1948.31223

Eligibility and exclusion

Selection was a filter, and it was designed to be one. Every applicant completed a medical form before the examination. It required a statement that the applicant had never had epilepsy, mental illness or a breakdown and was fit to live communally, and it listed the conditions that made a person unsuitable: mental disease, chronic alcoholism, deafness that made communication difficult, disease of the lungs, heart or abdomen liable to cause frequent incapacity, loss of a substantial part of a limb, incontinence and evident pregnancy.823

Age limits were set at 50 for men and 40 for women, and women were not normally selected for the textile industry if they were over 35. The limits were not always kept to, and some workers over 50 were admitted. Tuberculosis, venereal disease and pregnancy were the main worries about physical health, and interviewers were also asked to look for signs of good character, since those thought to be bad types were regarded as undesirable long-term settlers.2312

Preference went to applicants willing to take unskilled manual work, to those with experience of certain skilled trades or the aptitude to be trained, and to those who had no dependants with them in the camps or were willing to leave them behind. The preference hardened into a rule. Dependants were admitted during the first six months, about 1,500 people, but from 1 July 1947 recruitment was confined to single persons and recruits had to sign a declaration that they had no dependent relatives.123

Marriage was not an absolute bar, and the figures show how many married people came all the same. Some 7,500 married men and women arrived during 1947. About 1,500 of them had non-working dependants who were to follow later as accommodation became available, and some 600 of the children under 16 among those dependants had arrived by March 1948, their average age six and a half. From July 1947 married couples had to sign an undertaking to live apart if work could not be found for both of them in the same area.1223

Two groups were shut out for reasons of policy rather than health. European Jews were not eligible under the schemes. Poles were at first not recruited either, because the government wished to settle the large numbers already in the Polish Resettlement Corps before taking more, and they became eligible for European Voluntary Worker status only as the demand for labour went on outrunning the supply.523

Recruitment in the zones

Recruitment was restricted at the start by both nationality and zone. A study of migration to Scotland records that only men and women of Baltic and Ukrainian nationality were sought, and only from the displaced persons camps inside the British zones of Germany and Austria. The scheme was later extended to displaced persons of all nationalities and to all three western zones, and Poles came in large numbers once the bar on them was lifted.1023

Selection teams worked inside the camps. Ministry of Labour officials distributed leaflets, printed in English and in German, which described the work on offer and the conditions attached to it, then interviewed applicants and put them through the medical inspection. The opening paragraph of the recruitment document was blunt about what was wanted: men mainly for manual work in agriculture, coal mining and the iron and steel industries, women for the cotton, wool and rayon industries and also for laundries, certain kinds of domestic work and nursing. Those selected were to be transferred free of charge and given free meals, accommodation and pocket money of five shillings a week until employment was found.822

A Ministry of Labour report on Operation Westward Ho of 6 April 1948 shows how far the search had spread by the second year. The demands for Great Britain for 1948 included 20,000 men for agriculture to replace German prisoners of war and some 30,000 men for the mines, while the textile industry needed 20,000 women and hospitals and other institutions were still short of domestic staff. Recruitment was still confined to single men and women because of the difficulty of accommodating married couples in England, the field was being widened to roughly 180,000 Volksdeutsche in Austria, a new zonal office had been opened in Vienna, and the possibilities of recruiting displaced persons in Italy were being explored.9

The same report goes through the zones one by one. In the British zone the recruitment of single Polish and Yugoslav men and women continued to be successful, helped by a Polish interpreter sent from England who held meetings in the Hannover region, while other nationalities came forward slowly because of borderline or previously rejected cases. In the French zone over 1,000 men and about 200 more women had volunteered since recruitment started at the end of 1947, and the operation was to close there at the beginning of May 1948. In the American zone 5,662 men and 1,837 women had been entrained by 13 March 1948, the peak was judged to have passed, and the Canadian scheme was competing hard for the same people.9

Recruitment reached beyond the occupation zones. From Denmark, where many displaced persons were already in reasonable employment and reluctant to move, 129 men and 17 women had been entrained for England by early April 1948. The competition for the fit and the young was by then general across every resettlement scheme operating in the camps, and letters home from those already in England were used deliberately as publicity.9

The crossing and the holding camps

The first men arrived in the spring of 1947. A batch of 63 male European Voluntary Workers reached Britain on 21 April 1947, roughly half of them Ukrainian, and much larger parties followed: 1,440 Ukrainians arrived on 27 May 1947. By 3 June 1947 Ness Edwards was able to tell the Commons that approximately 10,000 European volunteer workers had arrived, consisting almost entirely of Balts and Ukrainians.23

The North Sea crossings ran to two ports. The Latvian national archives record that the first Westward Ho recruits reached Britain at the end of April 1947, that over 1,000 came in a single week through Tilbury in the south and Hull in the north east, and that by the end of May nearly 10,000 displaced persons had been brought over under the scheme, 42 per cent of them women recruited for hospitals and for the textile industry. From the end of 1947 dependants of recruits were allowed to follow them.24

Arrivals went first into holding camps. By late July 1947 nine holding camps had been set up in Britain with room for approximately 10,000 people, and 9,500 European volunteer workers had by then been placed in employment. The largest was at Full Sutton near York, which accommodated about 1,000 people and from which workers could be moved to jobs anywhere in Yorkshire; elsewhere the Ministry of Labour had to rely on lodgings and vacancies in existing hostels.1319

English teaching began in the holding camps and was never as thorough as the leaflets implied. Classes and social activities were organised by the workers themselves with the help of resident welfare officers and local volunteers, and in July 1947 the Minister of Education asked local education authorities to arrange systematic instruction in English in all holding hostels at the Ministry of Labour's expense. Practice could fall well short. One Ukrainian recruit from Camp Ohio near Burgdorf, who signed his contract expecting four to eight weeks at an English training centre before going to a mining training centre, crossed in April 1948 and was sent instead to Scotland to lift potatoes; he never received the language training.1326

The numbers, year by year

For 1947 the figure was given to Parliament directly. Asked how many European voluntary workers had been permitted to enter the United Kingdom in 1947, Ness Edwards replied that 34,688 had been brought to the country under the Westward Ho scheme, 25,115 men and 9,573 women, and that in the earlier part of the year a further 1,800 women had come under the earlier Balt Cygnet scheme for essential domestic work. The figure excluded people who came on an individual permit.11

The peak came in 1948. About 15,000 European volunteer workers arrived in the first quarter alone, of whom 6,300 were placed in agriculture, and by 20 April 1948 more than 50,000 had been brought to Britain. On 18 November 1948 George Isaacs told the Commons that approximately 75,000 had been placed in employment in Great Britain. By then the intake was falling sharply: during October 1948, 630 men and 900 women were brought over, about half of the monthly intake of men went into agriculture, and the coal mining industry was not recruiting European Voluntary Workers at all.415

Recruitment closed during 1949. The Ministry of Labour table compiled to 31 July 1949 gives the scheme's yield as 72,797 people, and the last Ukrainian arrivals came that year. Counting the whole European Voluntary Worker scheme rather than Westward Ho alone, and running from October 1946 to December 1949, Tannahill's figure of about 85,000 arrivals is the one most often quoted in the later literature.221

The totals in circulation differ, and the differences are worth stating plainly. A study of migration to Scotland, following Isaac and Tannahill, gives the Westward Ho yield as 57,104 men and 17,308 women. The Ministry of Labour table to 31 July 1949 gives 57,036 men and 15,761 women. Kay and Miles's table of arrivals at 31 December 1950 gives 57,104 men and 19,883 women, 76,987 in all, of whom 3,322 had returned to Europe by that date. The closing dates differ, and so does the treatment of the women recruited for hospitals under Balt Cygnet.1022255

Nationalities and the Ukrainian share

The Ministry of Labour kept a running count by nationality. Its table for Westward Ho recruitment to 31 July 1949 puts Ukrainians first with 21,991 people, 17,143 men and 4,848 women. Poles follow with 13,541, Latvians with 11,777, Yugoslavs with 10,123, Lithuanians with 5,737, Estonians with 4,130, Hungarians with 2,589 and Czechs and Slovaks with 1,373. The tail of the table is a reminder that the scheme drew on whoever was in the camps: Sudeten Germans appear as 313 women and no men at all, and below the stateless categories the entries fall to single figures.22

Kay and Miles's table of European Voluntary Workers at 31 December 1950 counts a slightly different population and divides the Ukrainians in two: 12,893 people as Polish-Ukrainians, 10,131 men and 2,762 women, and a further 8,019 as Ukrainians, 6,063 men and 1,956 women, the second group being mainly the former prisoners of war. Latvians appear as 12,919, Poles as 13,632, Yugoslavs as 9,626 and Lithuanians as 6,186. The two tables are not interchangeable, since one counts recruitment under Westward Ho to the middle of 1949 and the other counts workers present or arrived by the end of 1950, folding in former prisoners of war who were never recruited in a camp at all.2522

The Ukrainian total most often cited comes from the official statistics: 20,912 Ukrainians came to the United Kingdom as European Voluntary Workers, 16,194 men and 4,718 women. A number of their dependants were admitted as well, 411 adults, 36 men and 375 women, and 451 children, 260 boys and 191 girls. Shortly after arriving, about 700 Ukrainian workers, mainly men, chose to return or were deported to the countries from which they had been admitted.1

That total can be reconciled line by line with the Kay and Miles table. The 12,893 Polish-Ukrainians and the 8,019 Ukrainians sum to 20,912; the men, 10,131 and 6,063, sum to 16,194; the women, 2,762 and 1,956, sum to 4,718. The dependants recorded against the two Ukrainian rows, 474 and 389, come to 863, against the 862 adults and children counted in the Ukrainian statistics and the round figure of 860 dependants given in the account of the camps and hostels.1252

Set against the whole, the Ukrainian share was between a quarter and a third. Ukrainians were 21,991 of the 72,797 people in the Ministry of Labour's Westward Ho table, about 30 per cent; approximately 21,000 of the roughly 85,000 who arrived under the European Voluntary Worker scheme between October 1946 and December 1949, about a quarter; and 20,912 of the more than 80,000 European Voluntary Workers that the summary literature counts. Most Ukrainian workers came in the second half of 1947 and the first half of 1948, and the final arrivals were in 1949.2251

Being the largest group did not mean being the favoured one. The Ministry of Labour's private grading placed Ukrainians below the Balts, and the difference showed in the work they were offered: Ukrainian women recruited for hospitals were given the less prestigious posts, mainly as cleaners and kitchen hands, and were refused the chance to take nurse training that Baltic women were allowed.238

The hostel system

Accommodation, not recruitment, was the binding constraint on the whole scheme. The Ministry of Labour set up the National Service Hostels Corporation to organise hostel accommodation near the workplace for migrant workers, and the Corporation administered hostels on the Ministry's behalf; a list it provided in 1950 ran to 97 hostels across the country. Asked in April 1948 whether he was satisfied with progress, Ness Edwards replied that he was getting all the people for whom accommodation could be provided.214

Responsibility was shared out among several bodies. From 1947 the administration of the camps began to pass from the War Office to the National Assistance Board, the National Service Hostels Corporation and other civilian bodies, and the camps were officially redesignated as hostels. The hostels themselves were run by the National Service Hostels Corporation, the Ministry of Agriculture, the National Coal Board, the YMCA, local authorities and private industrial firms. They were of every kind: former military and prisoner of war camps, wartime industrial and agricultural hostels, and buildings converted or newly put up after the war.2

Most were reused prisoner of war camps, many of them cleared of prisoners only shortly before the displaced persons moved in, and the wartime lists of those camps show the range of buildings involved, from former Royal Air Force stations to large country houses and old textile mills and weaving sheds. Since the government tried to move women into private billets as a priority, it was usually the men who spent long periods in the larger rural camps. Men and women lived in separate hostels at first; married couples were later able to live together, or as near to each other as could be managed.282

Welfare was organised from above and from within. Doctors appointed by the National Service Hostels Corporation looked after the health of residents in its hostels and supervised camp hygiene, and sports and concerts were arranged to relieve the boredom of a life that many workers led for years. Residents ran their own English classes, lectures and entertainments. Officials were uneasy about the result: Kay and Miles record official concern at the tendency of some hostels to become self-contained communities with little contact with the surrounding population, and Home Office wariness about independent communities speaking a foreign language.231322

Scotland shows how tight the accommodation bottleneck was. Only 150 European volunteer workers were employed in Scottish agriculture by late September 1947, and 785 by the end of that year. It was not until hostels vacated by German prisoners of war became available in early 1948 that the numbers moved: by late February 1948 some 2,000 workers were housed in 26 hostels across Scotland, accommodation was ready for only 2,500 of the 3,000 wanted for agriculture in March, and the number of hostels was expected to rise from just over 30 to 90 by June. By mid-June there were 3,858 workers in Scottish agriculture, and about 4,500 by the end of November.10

Hostels and camps in Britain

The hostels can be named because the Ukrainians who lived in them left records of their own. An appendix to a study of the Ukrainian community in Scotland lists 41 Scottish and northern English hostels which held significant numbers of ethnic Ukrainians, compiled from the membership database of the Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain and from the daybook of an itinerant Ukrainian Greek Catholic priest, Father Alexander Babij, who travelled to 44 camps and hostels collecting subscriptions towards a church house in Edinburgh. Across Britain the association's records show 284 formal camp and hostel sub-groups, of which 43 were in Scotland.22

The densest cluster lay around Edinburgh and the Lothians. Amisfield Park at Haddington, East Fortune, the Ukrainian hostel at Macmerry near Tranent, Mortonhall in Edinburgh and Deer Park at Dalkeith all appear on the list, together with the Newbattle Miners' Hostel, also at Dalkeith, and the Miners' Hostel at Armadale in West Lothian. Fife is represented by Annsmuir at Ladybank and Perthshire by Ballado near Kinross, the hostel at Crieff, Dunning and Balhary near Alyth.22

A second group followed the woollen towns and the farms of the Borders and Dumfriesshire. Victoria Park at Peebles, Thorncroft at Selkirk, Burnbrae at Galashiels, the Wilton hostel at Hawick, Springwood Park at Kelso and the ICI hostel at St Boswells stand within reach of the tweed and hosiery mills, while Winfield Camp near Berwick, Barony at Parkgate, Hallmuir near Lockerbie, the RAOC camp at Kirtlebridge and Creca near Annan served the surrounding farmland. One first generation Ukrainian remembered that the Galashiels and Selkirk hostels existed because of the textile industry, and that his mother was a weaver.22

Westward Ho reached the west and the north east of Scotland as well. In Ayrshire there was a hostel near Girvan, Kingencleugh at Mauchline and an industrial hostel at Beith that was a Ukrainian women's hostel. Castle Rankine at Denny stood in Stirlingshire, North Hill Camp at Laurencekirk in Kincardineshire, the YMCA hostel at Tannadice near Forfar in Angus, and further north the YMCA hostel at Sandyhillock near Craigellachie in Banffshire, Brackla near Nairn, the hostel at Monymusk in Aberdeenshire, Munlochy in Ross-shire and the YMCA hostel at Kildary. Reves House at Broughty Ferry served Dundee, and a hostel at Inverlochy stood beside the aluminium works at Fort William.22

Five of the hostels on the list lie in the north of England. YMCA Hostel No. 2 at Ponteland in Northumberland and the YMCA hostel at Raylees near Elsdon stood on the Northumberland moors, the Ryton Miners' Hostel at Ryton-on-Tyne housed a coalfield workforce, the YMCA hostel at Windlestone near Ferryhill occupied an Eden family mansion in County Durham, and the YMCA hostel at Bela River near Milnthorpe in Westmorland took agricultural workers. The compiler notes that the list may not be complete and that other camps may have existed outside it.22

Life in these places has left small, specific traces. Creca, near Annan, was Hostel 83, a former wartime training camp whose barracks were better built than most, and about 150 Ukrainians were still living there in its closing years under a warden appointed to wind it up. In 1949 some 60 of the Ukrainian residents of Hallmuir were moved just over the border to Smalmstown near Longtown in Cumberland, where they stayed until 1956. The men at Macmerry gave a shilling a week out of their wages towards the purchase of the church house at Mansionhouse Road in Edinburgh. The hostel at Mortonhall is remembered in Scotland for its protest against government plans to send those unfit for work back to Germany.22

Employment and sectors

The industries the scheme served were set out on the recruitment form itself, and the division of labour was drawn along lines of sex. Men were wanted mainly for manual work in agriculture, coal mining and the iron and steel industries; women for the cotton, wool and rayon industries, and also for laundries, certain kinds of domestic work and for nursing. In some occupations workers would not be accepted unless they were willing to join a trade union, and those transferred for anything other than residential employment would normally be housed communally in a hostel or camp.22

A Ministry of Labour return of first placings of foreign workers brought in under the official recruitment schemes, drawn up at 5 February 1949, gives the balance in detail. Of 77,652 first placings, 56,218 men and 21,434 women, agriculture took 29,363, domestic work 11,824, coal mining 10,967, cotton spinning, doubling and weaving 7,793, the woollen industry 4,297, the brick and allied industries 2,504 and the National Service Hostels Corporation itself 2,372.25

Below those came a long list of smaller trades. Army and Air Force depots took 1,435, rayon 1,417, iron and steel 1,307, quarrying 685, nursing 627, laundries 391, hosiery 299, cement 259, the Scottish hydro-electric schemes 250, jute 191 and pottery 167, with gypsum mining, clay pits, flax spinning and the gas industry accounting for the rest. The hydro-electric work was dangerous: one Ukrainian worker interviewed many years later had lost a leg while boring tunnels for the Highland dams.2522

Official statistics on the initial placements of workers of all nationalities recruited from Germany and Austria give the same picture in percentages. Men worked mainly in agriculture, 52 per cent, coal mining, 19 per cent, and domestic service in hostels, hospitals and other premises, 9 per cent; women were employed mainly in cotton mills, 38 per cent, domestic service, 34 per cent, and woollen mills, 16 per cent. Agriculture stayed the largest single destination to the end: in November 1948 about half the monthly intake of men was still being placed on the land.115

The textile mills absorbed workers slowly, and the reason was accommodation. Approximately 3,500 workers had been placed in textile work in Lancashire by March 1948, probably fewer than five per cent of them with any previous experience; training on the spinning side took twelve to fifteen weeks and the introduction of foreign workers into weaving was only just beginning. Of the 6,330 workers placed in employment in the first half of 1947, 564 went into textiles, 2,268 into agriculture and 1,836 into hospital work; of the 5,283 women brought over by late July 1947, 2,694 had been placed in hospitals and sanatoria.1213

Coal was the sector that failed. A national agreement between the National Union of Mineworkers and the National Coal Board in January 1947 opened the pits to Polish ex-servicemen, but local resistance meant that by the end of May 1947 there were trained Poles and no collieries willing to take them. A scheme to recruit other eastern European displaced persons began in September 1947 and met fierce opposition from local union branches, so that recruitment into coalmining had to be suspended in July 1948 and no worker at all was placed there during October of that year. By 1951 only 10,000 of the 18,000 foreign workers taken on remained in the mines.62315

Conditions of service

The contract was the heart of the scheme. Every applicant signed an undertaking to work only as directed by the Ministry of Labour and not to change that employment without approval, and entry for an initial period of twelve months was subject to good behaviour. As aliens the workers had to register with the police whenever they changed job or address. They were recorded on arrival as being of uncertain nationality and issued with registration booklets whose inner pages had to be stamped at local police stations if they made long journeys.110522

Pay was deliberately kept level with British rates. Ministers repeated in the Commons that the workers were employed at the same rate of wages and under the same conditions as comparable British workers, and accommodation was supplied through the National Service Hostels Corporation in camps or hostels for a small charge. The terms had been negotiated with the Trades Union Congress and then with the individual unions, and the usual provisions were three: that workers would be placed only where no suitable British labour was available; that they would be the first to be dismissed in a redundancy; and that their wages and conditions would follow the existing agreements covering British workers. Men placed in jobs usually done by women were to be paid the higher male rate.152310

There was no time limit on the stay, and no right to leave the job either. In May 1949 the Home Secretary told the Commons that no time limit was imposed on the stay of European Volunteer Workers, that they were required to enter employment specified by the Ministry of Labour and not to change it without approval, that those unwilling to continue were free to leave the country, and that a worker who persistently refused to comply was liable to be deported. A Colonial Office working party put it more bluntly in 1949: European Voluntary Workers were subject to stringent labour control and could be prosecuted or in serious cases deported if they left their employment without permission, whereas colonial workers, being British subjects, were free of that control.1620

Removal was used sparingly but it was used. In April 1948 the Commons was told that there had been only 23 cases in which a worker's return to a displaced persons camp on the continent had been arranged, out of over 50,000 brought to the country. The other end of the system was the holding camp for those who could not be placed. Full Sutton became, in the Parliamentary Secretary's own words, a holding camp for misfit, sick, disabled, unemployed and other workers who had failed to make the grade: it held 776 people in November 1949, 244 of whom had refused agricultural work during the previous three months, the reasons being judged unacceptable in 175 cases.417

Family separation was written into the design. Dependants could not at first join their relatives in Britain, and communication was left to the post; the restriction to single people from July 1947 followed from the shortage of accommodation and transport. Kay and Miles record 3,724 dependants admitted during an early phase of the scheme. Sickness was treated by the same logic: those who were ill or pregnant before arrival were returned to Germany, except for pregnant women whose husbands were already in Britain, while those who fell ill afterwards were cared for and maintained until they qualified for benefit.81023

Criticism, the press and screening

Organised labour was consulted first, and agreed at the top. The government negotiated the terms of employment with the Trades Union Congress, the British Employers' Confederation and the individual unions, and there was little opposition among the TUC leadership to the general use of volunteer labour from the camps. Objections came from below. A study of contemporary trade union periodicals found the National Union of Mineworkers and the Amalgamated Engineering Union the two most openly hostile to the admission of foreign labour, and the most outspoken journal on the subject was The Land Worker of the National Union of Agricultural Workers.23

The agricultural unions objected less to the workers than to the way they were used. They opposed the gang labour administered by the county agricultural executive committees, which they said undermined the wages and conditions regular farm workers were fighting for. The committees gave way to that view in the autumn of 1949, and a high proportion of the workers made unemployed in the process were European Voluntary Workers. In Scotland the Department of Agriculture had been discharging workers routinely from at least April 1948, and Tannahill used Scotland to illustrate a tendency to dismiss them on trivial grounds without giving them another chance in the industry.2310

Press comment could be brutal, and it fell hardest on Ukrainians. The New Statesman called for rigid selection of Ukrainians in order to exclude the illiterate, the mentally deficient, the sick, the aged, the politically suspect and the behaviourally disruptive, and urged that the rubbish among those who had already come should be cleared out. Resentment at foreign workers taking British jobs surfaced in Parliament as well; in March 1952 Cyril Osborne warned the Commons that there was already fear of redundancy in many industries.523

Parliamentary criticism also fastened on the hostels. In November 1949 Mr Odey asked the Minister of Labour to consider closing Full Sutton, citing its record and widespread damage being done to adjacent farms by the workers in their leisure hours. Ness Edwards resisted the inference, pointing out that the camp held 776 of the 180,000 foreign workers recruited for British industry and saying that he hoped no smear would be cast on the vast body of foreign workers who were doing an excellent job. A Colonial Office working party broke that 180,000 down as 80,000 European Voluntary Workers, 80,000 former members of the Polish Resettlement Corps, 15,000 German former prisoners of war and 8,000 Ukrainian former prisoners of war.1720

Hostel life produced its own conflicts. In April 1949 Polish residents of the Ministry of Labour hostel at Causeway Green near Oldbury attacked the quarters of the 65 Jamaicans living there; about 50 police were sent to quell the disturbance, three Poles and a Jamaican were hurt, and the Ministry of Labour, the National Service Hostels Corporation and the police met the next day and decided to disperse some of the men.21

Screening was the criticism that outlasted all the others. The government held that the political screening carried out in the camps by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration was sufficient, but those interviews were often conducted without a competent translator, sometimes using displaced persons who gave translations favourable to fellow refugees, and effective screening was in practice sacrificed to the speed with which labour was wanted. Men rejected by National Coal Board doctors because tattoos identifying them as former Waffen SS members would be visible in the pit-head showers were allowed into other industries. Questions were still being asked in April 1950, and the issue returned in the 1980s with the war crimes inquiry conducted by Thomas Hetherington and William Chalmers.23

The Galicia Division and the hostels of eastern England

In the autumn of 1948 the scheme absorbed a second Ukrainian group who had reached Britain by a different road. The British Cabinet decided on 1 April 1947 to transfer to the United Kingdom the former soldiers of the Galicia Division who had surrendered to the British near Spittal in May 1945 and had since been interned in Italy, first near Bellaria and then near Rimini. During May and June 1947, 8,570 Ukrainians were shipped from Venice to Britain, reclassified from surrendered enemy personnel to prisoners of war, and set mostly to agricultural labour.29

Their prisoner of war camps were in the farming districts. A Ukrainian return of July 1948 counted the men in camps at or near Hempton in Norfolk, 1,682; Mildenhall in Suffolk, 1,401; Allington in Lincolnshire, 1,319; Moorby in Lincolnshire, 1,264; Botesdale in Suffolk, 1,010; Dalkeith in Scotland, 958; Lockerbie in Scotland, 463; and 300 in other locations, including hospitals where invalids were held.2

Their transfer into the scheme was decided by the demand for labour. In November 1947 the Ministry of Agriculture began to consider including some of the former soldiers in the European Voluntary Worker scheme and was at first prepared to take 4,700, the remainder, including those in poor health or disabled, to be sent to the British zone of Germany. The Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain and several British charities protested, and as the demand for labour rose it was decided that almost all of them would be released from prisoner of war status. The process was carried out between August and October 1948, and 8,128 men passed into the scheme, continuing mainly in agriculture. Their camps were taken over by civilian authorities and redesignated hostels.2912

One threat of removal remained, and it produced a general strike. In December 1948 a decision was taken to deport about 300 former members of the division to Germany at the end of the month. In protest, a general strike of Ukrainian European Voluntary Workers took place on 28 December 1948. Two days later the Home Office announced that only 81 persons would leave, 45 who chose to go, mainly to rejoin relatives, and 36 with records of unsatisfactory behaviour as prisoners of war, so that over 8,000 former soldiers stayed in Britain as workers under the scheme.29

Release and dispersal

The prospect of permanent settlement was not made officially explicit until a government announcement in the House of Commons on 11 November 1948. There was at first no limit on the time for which workers were obliged to work as directed. In July 1950 the Ministry of Labour decided that from 1 January 1951 those who had lived in the United Kingdom for at least three years could apply to be released from the restriction on choice of employment. Release was by application rather than automatic, and it applied to the former Galicia Division personnel as well.1012

Most residents could leave the hostels only after that date. The Scottish camps and hostels closed in the early 1950s and by the middle of the decade most hostels in Britain had closed. The dispersal almost emptied the Scottish camps: chain migration carried Ukrainians to the textile towns and cities of England, above all to Manchester and Bradford, while others moved within Scotland in search of further contracts and others again emigrated to Canada, the United States and Australia.222

Not everyone left. Some residents were content enough in these small communities to stay on in the barracks and Nissen huts for decades, which was not what a government hoping for rapid assimilation had wanted. Elsewhere the men moved into private lodgings as soon as they could, and groups of friends clubbed together to buy a house for joint occupation; multiple occupation declined from the mid-1950s as more of them saved a deposit of their own. In rural districts, where private accommodation was scarce, the prospect of another long stay in a hostel was itself a reason to leave the land.2223

The shape of the settlement that resulted can be reconstructed from the community's own membership records. About 45 per cent of the Ukrainians in England settled in the north, particularly in Lancashire and Yorkshire with their cotton and wool mills, some 30 per cent in the Midlands, where the largest community was at Nottingham, and about 25 per cent in the south and east, the largest of these being London. Probably fewer than 1,000 remained in Scotland; several hundred settled in Wales, mainly in the south; and only an insignificant number settled in Northern Ireland.27

Legacy and historiography

The institutions were built in the hostels before they were built in the towns. Residents ran English classes, lectures on Ukrainian history and current affairs, libraries and reading rooms, news sheets, choirs, folk dance, drama and instrumental groups, embroidery and wood carving, and sport. By the end of 1949 there were 242 branches of the Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain, each of twelve or more members, and a further 116 smaller groups. At the end of the 1940s there were approximately 350 organised Ukrainian communities in Britain.227

The association had been formed in January 1946, before most of its future members arrived, and it took on Saturday schools, grants for Ukrainian students, welfare advice and free legal advice, paid for by voluntary contributions and available to Ukrainians whether or not they were members. By 1 January 1951 it had 201 branches and 84 groups, and returns for 1953 show 18,720 active members. A Federation of Ukrainians in Great Britain was formed in 1948 for the Orthodox, an Association of Ukrainian Women had sixteen branches by 1954, and an Association of Ukrainian Former Combatants formed in September 1949 had 2,833 members in 89 branches by 1954.23

Religion divided the community and also held it together. Ukrainians from the west were mainly Greek Catholic and those from the east Orthodox, in a proportion estimated at about 65 per cent to 35 per cent, and by 1952 fourteen Ukrainian Catholic priests were serving the community in Britain. Until parishes could buy their own churches the Greek Catholics borrowed local Roman Catholic churches and the Orthodox borrowed Anglican ones. The house at Mansionhouse Road in Edinburgh, bought with subscriptions collected hostel by hostel, gave the Scottish community a base, a manse for the priest and a small chapel furnished in the byzantine rite.2322

The numbers who stayed were smaller than the numbers who came. About 8,000 to 10,000 of the postwar Ukrainian immigrants moved on from the United Kingdom to other countries, mainly in the first half of the 1950s, leaving between 22,000 and 27,000 in Britain, and the number of places with an organised Ukrainian community fell from about 350 at the end of the 1940s to about 100 by the late 1950s. In 1954 the Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain described its purpose as the material, cultural, moral and spiritual welfare of the 30,000 Ukrainians in this country.2723

The scheme has been written about almost since it ended. The contemporary studies are Stadulis's article on the resettlement of displaced persons in the United Kingdom, published in Population Studies in 1952; Maud Bulbring's report on postwar refugees for the British Council for Aid to Refugees in 1954, based on visits to the camps and hostels; Isaac's British Post-War Migration of 1954; and, above all, European Volunteer Workers in Britain, published in 1958 by J. A. Tannahill, a Ministry of Labour civil servant. The standard modern account is Kay and Miles's Refugees or Migrant Workers? of 1992, whose tables are the ones most often reproduced.221

The administrative record survives in the archives. The National Archives at Kew holds LAB 9/191, European Volunteer Workers: Westward Ho scheme, covering 1946 to 1948, and HO 213/1005, covering 1948; the Ministry of Labour statistics of recruitment by nationality come from HO 213/1001, and the Ministry of Labour report on Operation Westward Ho of 6 April 1948 is FO 1052/487. There are no known surviving registers of the Ukrainian occupants of the Scottish camps in any archive in Scotland.7229