Brackla Hostel

The airfield that built the huts

The huts existed because of an aerodrome. The Airfields of Britain Conservation Trust dates RAF Brackla from July 1941 to 29 December 1947 and records it under several names, including Brackla Aerodrome, No 102 Storage Sub-Site and the unofficial local name Cawdor. Its landing surface was unpaved and later metal, and its roles were listed as trainer and aircraft preparation or storage.

Brackla served other stations rather than holding a squadron of its own. It was a satellite of No 2 Central Flying School from November 1941 to January 1942 and of No 19 Operational Training Unit from January 1942 to April 1944, a relief landing ground for No 19 and then No 14 Pilots Advanced Flying Units, a relief landing ground for No 2 Air Gunners School in 1944 and 1945, and a satellite of No 45 Maintenance Unit from February 1944 to September 1947. The Air Crew Allocation Centre that Gerhard Heilig joined in January 1945 belongs to the end of that sequence.

A maintenance unit satellite meant aircraft in and aircraft out. An enthusiast airfield compilation states that from about early 1945 Brackla was designated a major scrapheap and claims that hundreds of surplus aircraft were sent there, including around 130 Handley Page Halifax bombers, some straight from the factory. That compilation hedges its own wording and gives the airfield’s life as 1941 to 1946, which does not match the conservation trust’s closing date, so the scrapping figure is repeated here as a claim rather than a count.

An airman at Brackla

Gerhard Heilig arrived at Brackla at the beginning of January 1945. He described an Air Crew Allocation Centre where men who had finished operational tours underwent tests and interviews before reassignment. Between appointments, he met former squadron colleagues and spent weekends in Inverness.

At his final interview, Heilig was offered a list of ground appointments. He instead requested pilot training, Transport Command or work as a Link Trainer instructor. His account ends with his departure on indefinite leave. These were RAF personnel awaiting reassignment, a different population from the later displaced workers.

Heilig also supplied a group photograph captioned Brackla, January 1945. Eight named members of 214 Squadron sit and stand together. The image records individuals at the wartime camp rather than illustrating the Ukrainian hostel population.

The dispersed accommodation

RAF aerial photographs taken on 9 October 1946 recorded five groups of huts associated with Brackla airfield. The archaeological description identifies mainly Nissen huts, alongside larger wooden buildings. The principal group straddled the road through Piperhill; four other groups lay nearby.

Later recording found that much of the accommodation area had become housing or cultivated fields. The surveyed complex was dispersed across the landscape, so a single surviving building or airfield photograph cannot represent the entire former accommodation estate.

A second heritage record covers an adjoining camp at Blairmore Cottages, read from the same sortie of 9 October 1946. It describes two groups of buildings around the Blairmore farmsteading: extended Nissen huts set in threes, several large wooden huts thought to have been messes, and at least sixteen surface emergency air-raid shelters between them. One building, possibly the stand-by set house, survived in good condition at NH 86961 51572 when surveyors walked the route of the Nairn to Clunas water main in 2005.

Both records sit in the civil parish of Cawdor, which is the parish named in the county council’s file on emergency housing at Brackla Camp. That is the closest the surviving descriptions come to tying the archaeology to the postwar housing. Neither record names a hostel, and neither identifies which huts Ukrainian residents occupied.

Postwar accommodation

Kormylo’s directory provides the explicit Ukrainian hostel connection. Separately, the Nairn County Council archive lists a file concerning emergency housing at Brackla Camp, Cawdor, with records spanning 1946–1959. That file demonstrates a postwar civilian housing concern at the camp; its catalogue does not identify the occupants as Ukrainians or give the Ukrainian hostel’s closure date.

The sequence at Brackla was a handover rather than a clean closure. The RAF gave up the site at the end of December 1947, the council file on emergency housing at Brackla Camp opens in 1946 and runs to 1959, and the Ukrainian hostel entry falls somewhere inside that span. Whether Ukrainian residents arrived while the airfield was still open, and whether they left before or after the council took the huts on for housing, is not established by any record read here.

People in the January 1945 photograph

The printed photograph caption names Peter Ives, Len Carter, Eric Christie, Jimmy Southgate, Joe Charron, Fred Bailey, Taffy Williams and David Edwards. Keeping those names with the image preserves a specific connection between people, place and date.