Annsmuir Hostel

A camp within a larger complex

RAF aerial photographs taken on 9 April 1946 show a square fenced compound surrounded by further buildings. The national heritage record identifies at least 37 huts inside the enclosure and about 33 outside it. A sports field and sewage works lay to the north. The distinction between buildings inside and outside the fence reveals a complex extending beyond the prisoners’ enclosure.

The heritage record identifies this as Camp 77, a German working camp, at grid reference NO 3108111554. The Foreign Office list of camps gives its full address as Annsmuir Camp, Ladybank, Fife, in Scottish Command, with the telegraphic address Priswar, Ladybank, the telephone number Ladybank 92 and Lieutenant Colonel D. H. G. McCririck as commandant. The Annsmuir Caravan Park later occupied the site.

Camp 77 and its closure

The camp opened during the war. When James Grant visited on 14 and 15 August 1945 he called it “a rather new camp” with no library, gramophone records or films, but found the atmosphere very good and the commandant, Lieutenant Colonel McCrerick, proud of what had been achieved. English instruction had already begun, and courses in Russian, mathematics, German and history were under way without books. One of the three named teachers was also the choirmaster, and a Lutheran clergyman ran a Bible class in the camp.

By the time S. Denham Jacobs made his fourth visit, from 2 to 6 February 1948, the camp held 767 men under Lieutenant Colonel Fleming, with 429 at headquarters and the rest at hostels at Beeches, Dunino, Dunning and Belgowan or in billets. The report opens with the decisive sentence: “This camp is due to close down during February and will be taken over as a group of hostels by 63 Camp.” A hundred and twenty-eight prisoners were being civilianised for the former hostels at Auchtermuchty, Dunning and Lathockar. The inspector also noted how relations stood outside the wire: contacts in Perth and Dunfermline had ceased, those that remained ran mainly to St Andrews, and both Ladybank and Cupar were “inclined to be hostile”.

The Gazetteer for Scotland records an earlier use of the ground. It states that the site began as a Territorial Army training camp in 1939, that during the Second World War it became prisoner-of-war camp No. 77, that the camp housed German and Italian prisoners between 1945 and 1948, and that it was afterwards described as an agricultural hostel. A geocaching listing describing the site records the camp as completed in December 1942, a square formation of wooden huts with lookout towers on each corner, surrounded by barbed wire and bounded on one side by an anti-tank ditch that formed part of the Fife Stop Line.

European volunteer workers and the Ukrainian hostel

Within months the camp had a new population. On 23 November 1948 the member for East Fife, James Henderson-Stewart, asked the Secretary of State for Scotland about rations and wages for displaced persons in the camp near Ladybank. Arthur Woodburn replied that the European volunteer workers employed in agriculture and resident in Annsmuir Camp received rations on the scale allowed to Category A Industrial Group establishments, and that the agricultural workers and the domestic staff were paid at the minimum and overtime rates set by the Scottish Agricultural Wages Board and the Industrial and Staff Canteen Undertakings Wages Board respectively. The exchange fixes the character of the place: a working agricultural hostel, with its own kitchen staff, paid at statutory rates.

Kormylo’s original directory names Ansmuir Hostel at Ladybank among establishments that housed ethnic Ukrainians. This establishes the Ukrainian connection to the postwar hostel, while the earlier military designation describes another phase of its use. No source found gives the number of Ukrainians at Annsmuir, the name of the body that ran the hostel or the date it closed. The general pattern, set out in the Ukrainians in the United Kingdom encyclopaedia, was that former prisoner-of-war camps were taken over by civilian authorities and redesignated as hostels, that hostels usually held workers of more than one nationality, and that most had closed by the mid-1950s.

Sunday Mass in 1953

The Scottish Catholic Directory for 1953 lists Sunday Mass at 10 a.m. in Ansmuir Camp, Ladybank. The service appears under St Columba’s, Cupar, whose priest-in-charge was the Reverend Thomas Leo McCabe, O.S.A. St Columba’s was served from SS. Peter and Paul in Dundee.

The entry places camp worship within the surrounding Catholic parish network. It records a Roman Catholic service; it does not identify a separate Ukrainian-rite congregation or assign the parish’s other services to the hostel. It was also not a permanent fixture. The Cupar entry in the directory for 1950 itemised no services at all and named no camp, and by 1956 the entry listed its outlying duties in detail, naming Stratheden Hospital, the Adamson Hospital and Hill Tarvit Home, with no camp among them. Neither of those volumes contains the name in any spelling.

Buildings after camp life

By the 2005 heritage record, the site was occupied by Annsmuir Caravan Park. During an August 2019 photographic journey, Syston Images documented a surviving Camp 77 building. The photograph shows a low structure with panelled walls, a brick chimney, broken windows and vegetation spreading across its roof.

The Repatriated Landscape project, which visited in the same month, describes what became of the rest: most of the ground turned into a holiday and residential caravan site, now Annsmuir Park and Holiday Homes, while a former farm at the back retained huts adapted for pigs by cutting flaps in their bases. Former prisoners returned over the years with family and friends, and a memorial stone at the entrance, inscribed in German and English, commemorates their reunions. The surviving hut and the 1953 service entry preserve different aspects of the same place: its physical accommodation and the continuing use of a camp as a centre of everyday religious life after the war.