East Fortune Hostel

A camp at Gilmerton Farm

A 2022 local history of Edinburgh’s Ukrainian church says that many of the Ukrainians who came to Scotland under the EVW scheme found themselves at the EVW hostel at Gilmerton Farm near Athelstaneford, a former wartime military camp serving the East Fortune air base that had been adapted as basic accommodation for agricultural workers, and that the camp was run by the YMCA. The YMCA was one of the bodies that administered EVW hostels nationally, alongside the National Service Hostels Corporation, the Ministry of Agriculture and others.

The same account reproduces a postwar photograph of the camp entrance, credited to East Lothian Museums, in which the gateway sign carries the Scottish lion rampant, the YMCA triangle and the Ukrainian tryzub. Behind it stand a former air-raid shelter and the military huts used as accommodation.

The identification rests on that local history. The settlement directory and the 1952 subscriber list both call the hostel East Fortune; the blog places it at Gilmerton Farm, which lies near Athelstaneford and is a different place from Gilmerton in Edinburgh.

A name and an address

A separate contemporary record preserves a person connected with the hostel. The original subscribers to the 1952 history of the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders include Lieutenant-Colonel A. G. Cochrane, MBE, using the address E.W.V. Hostel, East Fortune, East Lothian.

The entry establishes that the hostel name was used for correspondence when the subscriber list was assembled. It gives Cochrane’s military rank and decoration, but does not describe him as a warden or identify his relationship to the Ukrainian residents.

Accommodation and employment

EVW hostels belonged to the employment stage of displacement: people had reached Britain and needed somewhere to live while entering work. In July 1947 the Minister of Labour explained that finding camps within reasonable travelling distance of jobs was a practical obstacle to placing workers. Agriculture, textiles and hospitals were among the receiving industries.

Workers under the scheme were placed where the Ministry of Labour saw fit and could not choose their own employment. By 1950 the scheme was winding down, and from 1951 those with three years of work could apply to be released from its restrictions; the encyclopaedia of Ukrainians in the United Kingdom records the same threshold and adds that most hostels had closed by the mid-1950s. The local history says the camp at Gilmerton Farm closed and that its former occupants resettled in the Scottish cities, most of them in Edinburgh, the nearest. Its buildings, it adds, are still there among the trees. No source read gives the year the hostel closed.

Contemporary newspaper items quoted in the same account sketch the wider Scottish community the hostel belonged to. A Ukrainian men’s choir advertised a concert of national songs and dances at Edinburgh’s Central Hall in 1949 under the auspices of the Scottish League for European Freedom, and in November 1950 the Scotsman reported 1,500 Ukrainians living in Scotland, chiefly in the Lothians, Dumfriesshire and Ross-shire, about 800 of whom gathered in Edinburgh on 6 November for a memorial service. Kormylo’s figures run the same way: 900 families registered with the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in 1949, and 1,200 individuals identified as resident in Scotland at the AUGB annual meeting in Edinburgh in April 1952.

East Fortune in the settlement record

The Scottish camp map places East Fortune alongside other East Lothian accommodation, including Macmerry and Amisfield Park. These separate entries preserve the local network without turning every institution carrying the East Fortune name into the same hostel.

One institution with the same name must be kept apart. East Fortune Hospital was opened in 1922 as a tuberculosis sanatorium for south-east Scotland in the converted First World War airship station, joined the Board of Management of East Lothian Hospitals in 1948 and closed in 1997.