Burnbrae Hostel

A town of textile workers

A 1949 photograph shows women employed as European Voluntary Workers in Galashiels textiles. Interviewed about the picture, a worker’s child identified her mother and explained that the group included Ukrainian, Polish and German women. The photograph records the town’s working community; it does not identify the women’s hostel.

Another family account describes a mother working as a weaver and friendships carried over from a displaced-persons camp in Germany. It connects the Borders textile towns with the continental camps from which people had come.

Kormylo also records that most Ukrainian women who came as EVWs chose textile work in England, and that only a few opted for Dundee or Galashiels. The Galashiels group was therefore small from the start, which makes the 1949 photograph and the family accounts unusually valuable as records of the town’s Ukrainian workers.

Galashiels was a town of mills, and the Gazette’s own notices of the period name them: Comelybank Mill, Gala Mills, Buckholm Mill, and the tweed firms of King Street. These were the works into which the hostels fed labour, and the reason the Ministry of Labour placed continental workers in the Borders at all.

Why hostels mattered

Accommodation was central to the national recruitment programme. On 8 July 1947, the Minister of Labour reported 564 EVWs placed in textiles by the end of June. He explained that workers needed training and camps close enough for travel to work. These are national figures, showing the employment setting behind local hostel accommodation.

The hostels that resulted were of several kinds, from former military camps to wartime industrial hostels and newly converted buildings, and they were run by bodies including the National Service Hostels Corporation, the Ministry of Agriculture, the YMCA, local authorities and private firms. Most residents could leave only after the beginning of 1951, when employment restrictions were lifted from those with three years in Britain, and most hostels had closed by the mid-1950s.

From hostel to community

When the camps and hostels closed in the early 1950s, Kormylo writes, Ukrainians were drawn to employment in the cities and in towns including Galashiels. A second-generation interviewee remembered that in the early days there was no club: a Ukrainian Catholic priest, Fr Matyczak, came once a month to say Mass at the Catholic church in Galashiels between the two Roman Catholic Masses, and gave out the community’s announcements outside, round the back of the church, whatever the weather. That was how news travelled.

The naturalisation lists printed in the London and Edinburgh Gazettes show how quickly people moved from communal accommodation into the streets of the town, and what work they found there. Ignacy Hoffman, a labourer in a skinner’s yard, was naturalised in January 1949 from 260 Halliburton Place. Jozef Surmacewicz, a carding machine attendant, gave 3 Woodside Place in January 1950. Zbigniew Chelminski, a textile designer, and Jadwiga Chelminska were naturalised together from 5 Meigle Street in November 1950. Aleksander Kreiza, a tentering machine attendant, gave 55 Galapark Road in December 1955. Each entry records the former nationality as Poland, the category under which most people from the pre-war Polish territories, Ukrainians among them, were registered.

A photograph reproduced by Kormylo shows a Ukrainian Christmas Eve gathering in Galashiels in January 1954, and he lists a Galashiels community among the Scottish hromady whose choirs and dance groups competed at regional Ukrainian festivals. The online encyclopaedia of Ukrainians in the United Kingdom likewise names Galashiels among the few Scottish places, with Dundee, Edinburgh, Annan, Falkirk, Glasgow and Lockerbie, where organised communities were established, while noting that most Ukrainians who had lived in Scotland in the 1940s later moved to England and that probably fewer than a thousand remained.

The community did not keep a building of its own. Kormylo notes that by the time of his research there was no longer a community-owned premises in Galashiels, as in Dundee, Glasgow, Lockerbie and Annan, in contrast to Edinburgh. His interviews with members of the Galashiels community were recorded in 2016.

The name preserved

The directory preserves Burnbrae as an individual hostel within Galashiels, distinct from the entries for Selkirk, Kelso and Peebles. Its recorded town and name give the starting point for connecting family addresses with the wider Borders settlement story.

One later record carries the same name. A notice in the Edinburgh Gazette of 20 April 1990 gives the office of the Tweed River Purification Board as Burnbrae, Mossilee Road, Galashiels, on the western edge of the town at the foot of Meigle Hill, where post-war prefabs once stood along one side of the road.

Mossilee sits on the western edge of Galashiels below Meigle Hill. Historic Environment Scotland records a farmstead of that name at NT 47993 35891 in Galashiels parish, photographed from the air by Aerofilms in 1951 and again by the Royal Commission in 2009, and records the road itself separately as a post-medieval route. The 1951 aerial view is the earliest picture of the ground held in the national collection.