Deer Park Hostel

The park before the huts

The huts stood in the policies of Dalkeith Palace. The estate has been in Buccleuch hands for more than three centuries; the palace was completed in 1711 for Anna, 1st Duchess of Buccleuch, and the park had been enclosed as early as 1637, when Charles I wanted the estate for its hunting. Veteran oaks survive in what used to be the deer park that gave the ground its name.

The camp was set down on the northern side of that designed landscape, on the haugh by the South Esk, and the national monuments record still files it under the older field names of the ground it took: Cat Haugh and The Kennels.

A camp beside Dalkeith

Kormylo’s map of Ukrainians in displaced persons camps in Scotland names Deer Park Camp, Dalkeith, Midlothian, among the Lothian sites, and his appendix lists “EVW Hostel Deer Park, Dalkeith, Midlothian” fifth among the Scottish and northern English hostels that held significant numbers of ethnic Ukrainians. The list was drawn from Ukrainian community and church archives, and its compiler records that it may not be complete and that other camps may have existed outside it.

Deer Park is not the only Dalkeith entry on that list. Newbattle Miners’ Hostel, also at Dalkeith, stands separately at number 40, and Mortonhall in Edinburgh — one of the two outstations of the prisoner-of-war camp in April 1948 — appears at number 4. Amisfield Park at Haddington, the Ukrainian hostel named in the inspection report itself, heads the same list. The Ukrainian accommodation of the Lothians was a scatter of separate places, not one compound.

A later field survey identifies the former prisoner-of-war site at the northern side of Dalkeith Country Park, where pasture and trees now occupy the landscape. The Ukrainian hostel name and the wartime camp share the Deer Park location; the surviving evidence does not fix the precise extent of each accommodation area.

Three groups of huts

RAF photographs taken on 22 June 1946 show three hut areas between Cat Haugh and The Kennels, east of the South Esk. The largest group contained about forty huts, mainly Nissen huts. Two smaller groups lay north and south of The Kennels; the northern group retained three standing huts with further bases nearby.

The record is precise about how that identification was made. The site is entered as NT36NW 547, centred on NT 3400 6840 with two further centres at NT 3435 6814 and NT 3430 6790, in the parish of Dalkeith. Two German working camps, numbered 1013 and 1024, were noted in R J C Thomas’s 2003 project report on prisoner-of-war camps and then located on the vertical air photographs of sortie 106G/Scot/UK 123, frames 6011 to 6013. Writing in May 2005, the compiler added that it was not known whether any remains of the camps survived.

Lectures during the final prisoner-of-war months

On 10 February 1948, lecturer K. Bloch visited Deer Park. His report records a camp strength of 300 and an audience of 40. Transport difficulties made him about fifteen minutes late, so he began without his usual preliminary conversation with prisoners. He found the response very good and recorded a spokesman’s interest in the United States and American humour. These were German prisoners in an educational programme, before their return home.

A shrinking camp and local friendships

When J. C. Milner inspected the camp on 27–29 April, the headquarters held 94 German prisoners. His administrative total of 117 included another 14 at Gosford and nine at Mortonhall. He described a hospitable atmosphere and a sympathetic commandant, Lieutenant-Colonel Maxwell. The men had considerable freedom, visited Edinburgh, and had developed friendly relations locally. Milner believed their experiences of British people would matter after repatriation.

Newspapers and everyday contact

The shrinking population changed camp life. Milner reported that organised outside activities had declined as numbers fell, while personal friendships continued. The camp magazine, Der Aufbau, was no longer being printed. He considered the remaining facilities satisfactory. These small details describe a community winding down rather than a camp at its busiest: activities disappeared as people left, while individual relationships outlasted the organised programme.

From prisoner-of-war camp to hostel

The change from camp to hostel was a national process rather than a local decision. About 8,500 Ukrainian former soldiers of the Galicia Division were transferred to the United Kingdom from Italy in May and June 1947 and held in prisoner-of-war camps, mainly in the agricultural districts of eastern England and southern Scotland. A return for July 1948 counts 958 of them in camps at or near Dalkeith — after Hempton, Mildenhall, Allington, Moorby and Botesdale, the sixth largest locality total in the country, and much the larger of the two Scottish entries, the other being Lockerbie with 463.

Between August and October 1948 the men were released from prisoner-of-war status and admitted to the European Voluntary Workers scheme. The camps holding them were taken over by civilian authorities and redesignated as hostels, administered by bodies such as the National Service Hostels Corporation, the Ministry of Agriculture, the National Coal Board, the YMCA, local authorities and private industrial firms. Most were able to leave the hostels only after the beginning of 1951, when employment restrictions began to be lifted from those who had lived in the country for at least three years.

The Dalkeith figure is a locality total and cannot be assigned to one compound. Deer Park and Newbattle are separate entries in the Ukrainian directory, and Newbattle was a miners’ hostel in a coalfield that wanted labour, so the men counted at or near Dalkeith in July 1948 were distributed across more than one set of huts.

The Ukrainian hostel and the later landscape

Deer Park’s place in Ukrainian settlement survives through its identification as an EVW hostel in the Scottish Ukrainian directory. This was a different migration experience from that of German prisoners awaiting repatriation, and the names and figures in the 1948 prisoner reports describe that earlier population.

By 1960 Dalkeith appears among the organised Ukrainian communities of Scotland. Kormylo’s map of Ukrainian settlement places it alongside Edinburgh, Easthouses, Haddington, Tranent, Dunbar, Galashiels, Annan, Dumfries, Lockerbie, Perth, Dundee, Grangemouth, Glasgow and Carlisle. His account of a framed vellum presented to Archbishop Gordon Gray on 14 August 1960, now in the Scottish Catholic Archives, records how many formal township groups of Ukrainians existed in Scotland that year, each signed for by its own leaders.

The hostels themselves did not last. The early 1950s saw the Scottish camps and hostels close, with chain migration carrying Ukrainians to the textile towns of England and onward to North America, while those who stayed gathered in the Scottish towns rather than the countryside. By the time of the August 2019 site visit, the photographed field was grazed by cattle, with woodland around its margins: a quiet landscape where the accommodation itself was no longer visible.