Ballado Hostel

The hostel in the records

The directory retains the spelling Ballado and identifies the accommodation as an EVW hostel. Kormylo’s map also places the name by Kinross. Its role belongs to settlement and employment in Britain after wartime displacement.

Kormylo compiled the list from archives of the Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain and the Ukrainian Catholic Church in Scotland, and describes an AUGB database of the camps and hostels where Ukrainians formed formal branches of the association in the late 1940s; he located 43 such locations in Scotland. Ballado is entry 19 in his appended list.

European Voluntary Workers were recruited to help meet Britain’s labour needs. The National Archives places the principal arrivals in 1947–1949. That national period provides context; it is not a dated opening or closing record for Ballado.

The surrounding military landscape

Balado Bridge airfield lay west of Kinross. Historic Environment Scotland records dispersed wartime accommodation at Turfhills and Braidmyre Wood, as well as the flying field. RAF aerial photographs from September 1943 and September 1947 preserve the layout of this wider complex.

The airfield record and the Ukrainian hostel directory answer different questions: one describes military buildings, the other records a place where Ukrainians lived. The exact building occupied by the EVW hostel remains unidentified.

The airfield and its camps

The airfield was built in 1941 and opened on 20 March 1942 as a satellite of Grangemouth, serving No 58 Operational Training Unit. In October 1943 it became No 2 Tactical Exercise Unit, which the Secret Scotland account calls a Tactical Evaluation Unit, training many Polish pilots on Spitfires and Hurricanes, and it closed as an RAF flying station on 25 June 1944. On 11 November 1944 the site passed to the War Department.

Accommodation for the airfield was provided by several dispersed camps. The largest, at Turfhills to the south east, has been mapped from aerial photographs taken on 9 September 1943 and 2 September 1947. It lay immediately north of the road where it now leaves the motorway at the Kinross junction, and contained a large number of small huts, several of Nissen type and many camouflaged, together with a small shooting range and sports fields. The 1947 photographs show its full extent, including a group of Nissen huts west of the former Kinross junction station and a smaller group south of the road. The camp was larger than the airfield alone required, and the Royal Commission’s note of 2005 records a suggestion that it housed Polish troops during and after the war. A service station was built over the southern half of the site by 1988, though some hut bases were still visible.

The smaller Braidmyre Wood camp to the west comprised some thirty assorted huts. It was used as a piggery in the 1980s, then cleared and developed as a housing estate. The airfield’s control tower and its two conjoined hangars, a B1 repair shed and a Super Robin, also appear on the 1947 photographs; the hangars survived as a grain store.

Polish units at Balado, 1946 to 1948

Between 1946 and 1948, when the Polish Resettlement Corps prepared demobilised Polish servicemen for civilian life in Britain, a list of army units in Corps camps places the 8th and 12th Workshop Companies at Balado Bridge, Kinross, and a signals school at a Polish camp near Kinross. Negatives in the Imperial War Museums’ Prytyś collection record the end of a training course for officer cadets of the Signals School at Kinross and a visit by General Bór-Komorowski to the signals regiment there.

This Polish military phase is distinct from the Ukrainian EVW hostel. The Corps was an army formation for Polish servicemen; the hostel housed civilian workers recruited from displaced persons camps and, from late 1948, released Ukrainian prisoners of war.

The airfield after the war

From 1946 the airfield was used to scrap surplus Fleet Air Arm aircraft, work carried out by a Milnathort firm; aerial photographs flown on 11 October 1946 showed more than two hundred airframes on the site, and the task ended in 1952. Civil flying by light aircraft and gliders continued until 1957. A National Archives file records the investigation of an accident to a glider at Balado Bridge Aerodrome on 27 November 1949.

In 1957 the site returned to military use and later became a NATO satellite communications ground station, known locally as the Golf Ball, which operated from 1985 to 2006. From 1997 to 2014 the former runways hosted the T in the Park music festival.

These airfield dates are not hostel dates. The opening and closing years of the EVW hostel, its capacity, the employers its residents worked for and which of the camps it occupied have not been established.