Castle Rankine

The earlier camp

The site began with Italian civilian internees in 1940, later housed Italian prisoners of war and received German POWs in 1946. This succession explains its familiar name, Camp 64; a published camp list dates the numbered prisoner-of-war camp from 1942 to 1947 and records it as also known as Denny, with associated hostels. The barracks stood near Castlerankine Farm about 1.7 kilometres south-west of Denny; the medieval castle was a separate location. Samuel Lewis’s topographical dictionary of 1846 names Castle-Rankine as a glen in Denny. G. B. Bailey’s history describes an exposed site that began as wooden ablution blocks and army tents and grew into more than forty prefabricated huts of concrete frames and panels with brick infill, set on concrete bases and arranged on terraces.

Aerial photographs flown on 15 April 1946 recorded the camp for the national record, which places it at NS 7930 8190 and counts at least 39 huts inside the fenced prison enclosure with a further 24 in the staff camp to the south-west. The German prisoners rebuilt the concert hall near the entrance from two army huts, giving it a stage, a capacity of about 800 and seating for 600.

The prisoners’ work also reached beyond the wire. G. B. Bailey records that in June 1946 German prisoners of war from the Castle Rankine camp erected a dais at Herbertshire Castle Park for the crowning of Elizabeth Sneddon as Denny’s Victory Queen.

Arrival and agricultural work

The Falkirk Herald of 25 February 1948, reproduced by Bailey, described 175 European displaced persons, among them Ukrainians, Yugoslavs and Poles, arriving at Denny station, which had been closed to passengers for more than twelve years. They had come from the south of England after a few days in camp for examination and formalities. Ministry of Agriculture and Ministry of Labour officials met the train; six Ministry of Agriculture trucks carried people and luggage to Castle Rankine, where a hot meal awaited them. The YMCA organised welfare. The newcomers had volunteered for farm work, were to be sent out in batches daily to surrounding farms, and were to receive civilian privileges and customary British rates of pay. A Glasgow Herald report of 24 February 1948, quoted in a University of Glasgow thesis, recorded the same movement in national terms: “Parties of mostly Ukrainian, Polish, and Yugoslav workers arrived yesterday in special trains at Dingwall and Denny for farm work under the European Volunteer Workers’ scheme.”

The camp passed to the Ministry of Agriculture under a new commandant, Major Alfred Currie, and was soon being called an EVW camp rather than a prisoner-of-war camp. Work beyond the farms was hard to find: Bailey records that strong trade unions kept the residents out of better paid work and that they were often regarded as a cheap source of manual labour. In June 1948 Denny Town Council discussed building a swimming pool at Carron Glen with their help.

A civilian community

The camp was no longer military. There were no guards, only administrative staff, and families lived together. Bailey describes concerts and visits continuing, and in May 1950 the orchestra of A. Siddal of Falkirk played in the concert hall. His account of a January 1949 visit by the Secretary of State for Scotland, Arthur Woodburn, gives about 200 European residents, including about 50 Poles, with Ukrainians and Yugoslavs making up the remainder. These are mixed-community figures.

Religious and national observance was shared with the town and shaped by the mixture of nationalities. In April 1948 forty of the residents attended evening service at Denny Old Parish Church with translation provided in Yugoslav. In July 1948 about 200 of the Yugoslavs held a tribute to General Mihailović, conducted by the Reverend R. G. Lawrie. Residents of the Orthodox calendar marked Christmas at the beginning of January by burning parts of an oak tree and sharing salt and bread, and it was to this that Woodburn was invited; his remarks were translated by the camp leader, R. Neuwersch, a former officer in the Yugoslav Fleet Air Arm. No separate account of Ukrainian church services, a choir or a school at Castle Rankine has been traced.

Settlement was uneven. One Latvian resident, E. C. Rullis, joined Boy Scout meetings and became a leader in the organisation and well known locally. Others did not manage; Bailey records that one young resident took his own life within months of arriving. Misunderstanding of British regulations also brought residents before the courts, as when a resident was prosecuted in November 1948 for buying ration coupons.

Residents speaking for themselves

Throughout 1950 Alfred Currie gave talks to local societies about the work at Castle Rankine, joined by four residents who each spoke English fluently: Rudolf Neuwersch, spelled Neuwesch in this passage of the source, a Yugoslav; Eric Rullis, a Latvian; Iwan Skalskyj, a Ukrainian; and George Hebda, a Pole. They explained how the war and communist control had changed their lives, giving neighbours an opportunity to hear directly from the people living at the hostel.

After the hostel

In 1953 the term European Voluntary Worker was replaced by the plainer Foreign Workers, and Bailey dates the camp’s gradual closure to about that year. The buildings were left standing and were taken over by a pig farmer, whose co-worker and heir to the site, Gunter Ilgner, had himself been at the camp in 1947. The national record knows the place as Castlerankine Pig Farm.

Photographs record demolition in 1990 and one surviving hut in 2010; a 1963 Ordnance Survey map shows the former camp’s layout during its agricultural afterlife. During the 1990 clearance a local councillor, Billy Buchanan, rescued the painted wall panels made by a German prisoner, Otto Laub, and they are now held by the Smith Institute in Stirling.