Creca Hostel

The airfield and its domestic site

The airfield at Annan was in use from 3 December 1940 until 1 July 1955, covering almost 155 hectares with two runways at right angles. It trained fighter pilots, first with No. 55 Operational Training Unit and later with tactical exercise units, and the Airfields of Britain Conservation Trust records Creca as an unofficial local name for the station.

The wartime domestic camp lay about 600 metres north-east of the airfield, with buildings dispersed around the road through Creca and the larger part on the south side of it. Historic Environment Scotland identifies at least seventeen buildings and huts and twenty emergency air-raid shelters on aerial photographs flown on 26 September 1942 and 4 May 1946, and notes further groups of huts near Beltedstane and south-east of Creca Hall. A field note reproduced by Kormylo recalls the hostel’s barracks as former WAAF accommodation of comparatively good quality.

A warden named in 1949

The Edinburgh Gazette records Tadeusz Zygmunt Woznicki, also known as Tadeusz Woznicki, as a hostel warden at Creca Hostel, Annan. Published on 20 December 1949, the entry gives Poland as his nationality and records his oath of allegiance on 8 November. It supplies a named administrative link to the hostel during its postwar occupation. A search of the Gazette for Creca between 1946 and 1962 returns no other notice naming the hostel.

A Ukrainian gathering and an association branch

Former Ukrainian combatants organised a gathering to mark the Ukrainian Insurgent Army’s seventh anniversary. The report names M. Burtnyk as the speaker, with recitations by Lytvyn and Yaroslav Wenger. Singing the Ukrainian anthem and collecting money for the UPA concluded the event. The surviving clipping, reproduced in Kormylo’s thesis, connects political commemoration with the hostel’s community life.

Kormylo writes that in every one of the Scottish camps the Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain created a registered branch with a chairperson, secretary, treasurer and a cultural and educational officer responsible for identifying commemoration dates and organising lectures or concerts for them. He states that the original minute books of the Creca and Hallmuir camps, which record those dates, are in his own archive. They have not been published, so the calendar they record cannot be set out here.

Work, departure and the site afterwards

Work was outside the hostel. Kormylo records that Ukrainian European Voluntary Worker men were restricted to forestry, farming or mining and women were directed mainly to textile mills or tuberculosis sanatoria, and that a few residents stayed on in camp barracks and Nissen huts for decades. From 1 January 1951 those who had been in Britain for at least three years could apply to be released from the restriction on their choice of employment.

An unnamed field-note narrator recalls playing at Creca in the early 1950s while a father worked as closing warden. The account remembers 150 Ukrainians during the period of departures. Some sought employment further south in England; others travelled to other continents. For these residents, the hostel was one stage in a longer search for a settled home.

The camp outlasted the airfield on paper. Part of it was still annotated Creca Camp on the Ordnance Survey 1:10,000 map of 1975, and aerial views of April 2010 show only a few huts left, with much of the former camp area given over to small industrial units. Chapelcross nuclear power station was built on part of the airfield and absorbed one of its runways.