Beith Industrial Hostel

The hostel record

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

Women in the European Voluntary Workers scheme

The Westward Ho recruitment terms that Kormylo reproduces told displaced persons that women were required for the cotton, wool and rayon industries, for laundries, certain kinds of domestic work and nursing, and that workers would normally be housed on a communal basis in a hostel or camp. In Scotland, he writes, EVW women were mostly directed to the textile mills or to tuberculosis sanatoria, while men were restricted to forestry, farming or mining.

Of the 20,912 Ukrainians who came to Britain as EVWs, 4,718 were women. Nationally their main employments were cotton mills, domestic service and woollen mills. They lived in hostels close to their place of work and, like the men, signed an undertaking to work only as directed by the Ministry of Labour until release became possible from 1 January 1951.

The National Service Hostels Corporation, set up in 1941 to run hostels for war workers, had its powers extended in 1946 to include accommodation for European Voluntary Workers.

Beith in the 1940s

A large wartime employer lay just to the south. The Royal Naval Armaments Depot at Beith opened in 1943 on farmland bisected by the Bombo Burn, its buildings spaced out and embanked against explosion. In January 1947 the Admiralty listed the depot, with a sub-depot at Auchenmade Quarry, among the naval establishments still in use in Scotland at the end of 1946.

Historic Environment Scotland records the depot as site NS35SE 40, centred at NS 3500 5150 in the parish of Beith, and holds twelve oblique aerial views of it photographed by the Royal Commission in 2008, together with a note of colour photography taken for the Property Services Agency in 1986. The dispersed pattern of the magazines is plain in those views.

A written answer in December 1953 shows that some of the men employed at the depot had drawn lodging allowances since August 1943, an indication that the depot drew workers who lived away from their families. These records describe the setting of the hostel’s town. They do not mention the industrial hostel, and no evidence read here connects its residents to the depot. The association is a question for the archives, not a finding.

Searching for a brother

On 22 May 1948, the Lithuanian newspaper Žiburiai printed a request from Bronė Krunytė, giving Beith Industrial Hostel as her address. She was seeking her brother Juozas, born in 1922 in Vainutas parish, Tauragė district.

The notice travelled through a newspaper published in Augsburg-Hochfeld’s Baltic displaced-persons camp. It linked a Scottish hostel address with readers still in Germany, illustrating how the displaced continued searching for relatives after resettlement. The notice itself does not identify Krunytė as Ukrainian, and it shows that the hostel’s population was not exclusively Ukrainian.

A Ukrainian pastoral visit

Later in 1948, a bilingual church notice thanked the managers and wardens of hostels recently visited by Ihor Hubarzhevsky, head of the General Council of the Ukrainian Autocephalic Orthodox Church in Great Britain. Beith appears alongside Doonfoot, Maidens and Kingencleugh, connecting it with a wider circuit of Ukrainian pastoral care.

The message thanked staff for their care of Ukrainian refugees. It records a visit rather than the founding of a permanent parish, and gives no separate service date for Beith. The same page urged Orthodox residents of every hostel to elect a parish council where more than fifteen believers lived, or a representative where there were fewer; this was a national appeal and says nothing about numbers at Beith.

Beith was an industrial hostel rather than a camp, which in the language of the scheme meant accommodation attached to a place of work rather than to the land. Nationally the hostels of this type were administered by the National Service Hostels Corporation, by local authorities or by the firms themselves, and men and women were at first housed separately, married couples being allowed to live together only later.

The Ayrshire hostels

Beith did not stand alone. The directory and Kormylo’s map place four Ayrshire hostels together: the agricultural hostel at Kingencleugh near Mauchline, the YMCA hostel at Doonfoot outside Ayr, the EVW hostel at Maidens on the Carrick coast, and the industrial hostel at Beith in the north of the county. The names run from farm work in the Ayr valley to the coast and to the industrial north, and they mark out the range of employment into which Ayrshire’s European Voluntary Workers were directed.

The same four names appear together in the 1948 notice of the Ukrainian Autocephalic Orthodox Church, which suggests that a visiting priest covered them as one round. For a hostel of Ukrainian women in a small Ayrshire town, that monthly or occasional visit was the only organised Ukrainian life within reach.