Dunning Hostel

The hostel record

The directory records the accommodation under the following name and locality.

A staffed hostel at the end of 1950

When one member of the hostel staff became a British citizen at the end of 1950, he gave Dunning Hostel, Dunning, Perthshire as his address. The Edinburgh Gazette of 20 March 1951 records his occupation as assistant warden and his previous nationality as Polish, with naturalisation on 30 December 1950. The London Gazette of 16 March 1951 carries the same entry.

The entry shows that Dunning Hostel was an operating institution with a warden’s staff at the end of 1950, and that its staff included people who were themselves recent arrivals from the Continent.

Dunning at war: the army camp

A reminiscence published by the Dunning Parish Historical Society describes an army camp in the village from 1940, when the first troops came to re-muster after Dunkirk. It formed part of the defence of the Strathearn valley, with camps set up along the strath at Auchterarder, Strathallan, Blackford and Crieff. The camp stood in the manse glebe, the area now called The Glebe, and consisted of Nissen huts with one large hutment inside the wall at Auchterarder Road that served as the sergeants’ mess. The present houses follow more or less the layout of the camp.

When a Royal Artillery regiment arrived in March 1944 the camp was well established. Buildings across the village had been requisitioned: the Dunning Hotel was the officers’ mess, Burnbank House held the regimental offices, the Masonic Hall was the quartermaster’s store and several houses served as signal stores. Local women ran a canteen in the village hall, dances were held there twice a week, and the regiment left just after D-Day for the campaign in Holland and Germany.

An evacuee who spent the war years in the village remembered the same camp from the other side of the fence. A troop of Royal Artillery gunners with six anti-tank guns, limbers and vehicles rolled in one Sunday and took up residence in the glebe of the Reverend MacKinnon’s manse. Over the eighteen months or so of their stay they became part of village life, invited into homes and filling the Friday and Saturday concerts in the town hall, where the benches were cleared afterwards and the dancing went on into the small hours to a local band led by the accordionist Bob Malcolm.

The gunners were not the only foreign or military presence within reach of Dunning. The same account describes a large hutted camp at Gask, a few miles to the north west, holding hundreds of Polish soldiers who came over to the dances and concerts in the village hall, and recalls the day General Sikorski flew in on a tour of inspection, an airstrip standing near the camp at the time. Historic Environment Scotland records that airfield at Findo Gask, photographed by the RAF on 9 September 1943, with its accommodation camp spread through Mayfield Wood in three groups of huts; the Ordnance Survey still marked it ‘Camp Site (Disused)’ in 1968.

These accounts end with the war. The wartime camps and the postwar hostel are treated here as separate phases until a record connects them.

Names in the village record

Three further Gazette entries place continental workers at Dunning addresses. In August 1947, before the first Ukrainian European Voluntary Workers reached Perthshire, Samuel Winston, formerly Samuel Goldfein and of former nationality Russia, was naturalised as an agricultural labourer at Thorntree Court in the village. In April 1949 Michal Dudek, a labourer, was naturalised from Perth Road, Dunning. In October 1970 Kazimierz Jan Pobog Lenartowicz, who had taken the name Lenart, gave The Square Inch, Dunning, as his address.

Read with the warden’s entry, these show a small continental presence in the parish running from the last year of the war through the hostel years and on into the 1970s, at ordinary village addresses rather than at the hostel itself. For a family tracing a Dunning connection, the printed lists are often the only place where an individual, a trade and a street appear together.

The EVW scheme and Perthshire

Ukrainians were recruited under the Westward Ho! scheme from displaced persons camps in Germany and Austria from the spring of 1947. Most Ukrainian EVWs came to Britain in the second half of 1947 and the first half of 1948, with the last arrivals in 1949; official figures give 20,912 Ukrainian EVWs in total. They were accommodated in hostels close to their place of work and received the same wages and conditions as British workers, and just over half of the men were first placed in agriculture. In the autumn of 1948 former soldiers of the Galicia Division, released from prisoner of war status, joined the scheme.

These are national figures.

A lead not yet read

The Dunning Parish Historical Society’s magazine index lists an article in newsletter 79 of April 2012, pages 3 to 5, headed Dunning’s Prisoners of War, based on a resident’s memories, with further photographs on page 10. Issues from number 41 onwards are not online and are supplied by the society on request. Whether the article concerns the wartime camp, a prisoner of war presence or the later hostel is unknown until it is read.

The same index lists ‘The Glebe camp’ by Betty Taylor in newsletter 50 of January 2005, page 3. Neither issue is published online, and both are supplied by the society on request.