Amisfield Park Hostel

From estate parkland to a military camp

The camp occupied a landscape already shaped by farming and the former Amisfield estate of the Earls of Wemyss. Its military use began in the First World War, when the grounds became a training camp for the Lothian and Borders Horse: the house accommodated officers, wooden huts were built in the park, and football fields, parade grounds and a large practice trench system were laid out on the low ground by the river. During the Second World War the park held the Sherwood Foresters and the Polish 10th Mounted Rifles.

A prisoner-of-war camp was established in 1944 at the western end of the park, about 250 metres north-east of the West Lodge, with the guards’ and staff accommodation between the camp gate and the lodge. Its perimeter fence and huts were photographed from the air on 28 March 1946. Built to hold a thousand men, it was renumbered during its life as a prisoner-of-war camp, from No 188 to 16A, a satellite of Gosford Camp 16, and finally to No 243. When the International Red Cross inspected on 8 February 1946 there were 792 prisoners, of whom 381 were German, 409 Czech and Sudeten and two Austrian; the inspector called it a very good camp and passed on a single request, for more books. Many of the German prisoners worked on surrounding farms.

A Ukrainian hostel in April 1948

When J. C. Milner surveyed the Deer Park POW organisation on 27 to 29 April 1948, he listed prisoners at Deer Park, Gosford and Mortonhall, then separately noted a Ukrainian hostel at Amisfield. The distinction locates the Ukrainian accommodation within the region’s changing postwar camp network without treating those prisoners as an Amisfield population.

The Ukrainians had arrived from the Rimini camp in Italy. A handwritten breakdown of the 1947 dispersal of Ukrainian prisoners through Britain, reproduced in Kormylo’s thesis, shows 965 men sent to Haddington, the largest Scottish allocation and more than twice the 462 sent to Dumfriesshire. That is a figure for the locality at the moment of dispersal. The Haddington History Society account records that after the war Amisfield became home to over 400 Ukrainian former prisoners, and that an International Red Cross report set out findings from a visit in September 1948.

The September 1948 inspector described spare conditions. The sanitary arrangements were spotlessly clean but of the most primitive order, the huts were in urgent need of a new coat of paint, and the men had four blankets but no pillow slips, no sheets, no floor mats, no wardrobes and no curtains. He recorded a minimum wage of £4 10s a week for work in the fields on the farms, of which £1 10s went on accommodation and food, and he expected that the hostel would probably be abandoned within the next six months.

Choir, reading room and church

In the August to September 1948 Brotherhood’s Letter, Orthodox church leader Ihor Hubarzhevsky thanked the managers of hostels he had recently visited. Haddington Camp appears among the named stops. His bilingual message praised the care given to displaced Ukrainians. Alongside the precisely named Amisfield record from April, it adds a contemporary view of Ukrainian religious contact in Haddington that year.

The same Red Cross report notes an Amisfield Ukrainian choir, records that the men wanted the services of a Greek Orthodox priest and were free to attend local churches, and mentions English lessons proposed for the winter months. Organised life had begun earlier, in the prisoner-of-war phase: Kormylo describes a Prosvita reading society formed in the Haddington camp in 1947 and 1948, whose surviving membership book lists men from each of the camp’s 56 barracks, paying fourpence a month for use of the reading room library. The barrack count is the clearest surviving measure of the camp’s scale.

The entrance and the years that followed

A photograph reproduced in Peter Kormylo’s thesis shows Amisfield Park Camp’s entrance gate, captioned 1949. Decorative emblem panels stood in a landscaped bed beside the camp road and a hut. The Haddington History Society account gives the camp’s life as a prisoner-of-war camp as 1944 to 1949 and records that Amisfield was the first of the linked Deer Park, Gosford and Amisfield camps to close as a main camp, while the preservation trust’s history dates camp closure to 1948.

These accounts leave the final transition uncertain, but the outcome is clear enough. The trust records that some Ukrainian residents established homes in the surrounding area, and the vellum presented to Archbishop Gordon Gray in August 1960 lists Haddington among the Scottish towns with a formal Ukrainian community. The parkland returned to open ground and is now largely occupied by Haddington golf course.