Armadale Miners’ Hostel

The hostel record

The directory records the accommodation under the following name and locality.

Coal and the foreign worker schemes

The Westward Ho recruitment terms that displaced persons read in Germany and Austria stated that those selected would be transferred to Great Britain free of charge and given free meals, accommodation and pocket money until employment was found, and that workers transferred for employment other than residential employment would normally be provided with accommodation on a communal basis in a hostel or camp. Kormylo reproduces the document and notes that some Ukrainians found work in the coal mines of central Scotland.

Nationally, about 19 per cent of the 16,194 Ukrainian men who arrived as European Voluntary Workers went into coal mining. They signed an undertaking to work only as directed by the Ministry of Labour and not to change their place of work without approval. From 1 January 1951, those with three years’ residence could apply for release from that restriction.

Scottish miners’ hostels of the period were National Coal Board hostels. When industrial workers lodging at the Cowdenbeath hostel in Fife were given notice in November 1947, the Minister of Labour told the Commons that it was one of the Coal Board’s hostels, run by the National Hostels Corporation on the Board’s behalf, and that the rooms were required for miners with work waiting for them in the pits. The corporation had been set up in 1941 to run hostels for war workers; in 1946 its powers were extended to include accommodation for European Voluntary Workers, and it wound up in 1956.

Training for miners’ welfare

In May 1946, Armadale Miners’ Hostel was the venue for a course on administering and managing a miners’ welfare centre serving a local community. A souvenir programme survives in the Andrew Fraser Collection under reference AFC/14/4.

The programme shows the hostel in use a year before the first Ukrainian EVWs reached Britain, as a place where the coal industry brought people together for training. It is the earliest dated record of the building found so far.

Inside the hostel in 1947

A case decided by the High Court of Justiciary on 19 November 1948, reported as Dow v MacKnight, 1949 J.C. 38, concerned an Armadale publican convicted of receiving stolen cigarettes. The facts admitted in the case give an incidental picture of the hostel. In the early hours of 19 August 1947 two men broke into the shop in the miners’ hostel, Armadale, and hid half of what they took in an empty room in the hostel, where the manager of the hostel found and recovered it.

A second charge recorded that on the night of 30 September 1947 a coal miner who resided at the hostel hid cigarettes in his locker there, and on 2 October borrowed a suitcase at the hostel to carry them into town. The report therefore establishes that by the summer of 1947 the hostel was occupied by working miners, had a resident manager, a shop, individual lockers and spare rooms, and stood within walking distance of the public houses of Armadale. It does not say who ran it or how many people it held.

From the hostel into the town

The hostel was a first address, not a last one. From the end of the 1940s the naturalisation lists printed in the London and Edinburgh Gazettes record continental workers settling into the streets and colliery rows of Armadale, and they give each man’s trade. Stanislaw Smolak, a ward orderly, was naturalised in April 1950 from 36 High Academy Street. Juozas Wosylius, who had taken the name Joseph Smith, was a coal miner at 35 Calder Crescent in February 1951.

The pit rows at Woodend, on the western edge of the burgh, recur in the lists. Wladyslaw Zawadzki, a coal miner, gave 5 East Row, Woodend, in February 1953; Peteris Zeilins, a Latvian coal miner, gave 11 Office Row, Woodend, in February 1954. Others were in the newer streets: Adolf Krausauskis, also from Latvia, at 7 Anderson Avenue in April 1953; Czeslaw Bach, a pipe worker in coal mining, at 119 East Main Street in January 1954.

The trades change as the decade goes on. By February 1957 Michal Prokipczyn, of 30 Avondale Drive, was naturalised as a shale miner, the other mineral industry of West Lothian. The entries record a former nationality of Poland, Latvia or Russia, the categories under which people from the pre-war eastern territories were registered, and they are often the only printed trace of a hostel resident’s working life in the district.