ICI Hostel, St Boswells

The surrounding industrial landscape

St Boswells had a substantial wartime industrial presence. Archaeologist John Dent records that the ICI factory at Charlesfield produced incendiary bombs from January 1943 to May 1945. When he began investigating in 1990, former workers were still available to explain their jobs and the surviving buildings.

The factory was a wartime creation. Government opened it in 1942, with ICI (through its Nobel explosives business) as operator under the Ministry of Aircraft Production, and it was one of only two plants making the 4 lb thermite incendiary bomb; the other was at Bowhouse near Kilmarnock. A freight siding came in from the Kelso branch to the east and a wooden passenger halt for workers was opened on the Waverley route a quarter of a mile to the west. About 1,300 people worked there at the peak. Three figures are given for what it made, and they measure different things. Dent’s total for the whole production run, from January 1943 to May 1945, is 25,754,529 bombs, which over about twenty-nine months averages some 890,000 a month. A planning history of the county puts peak output at over a million bombs a month, which is what an average of that size implies. The rate of 100,000 a week is Dent’s caption to a 1945 photograph of “men and women of a Bomb Assembly shift”, and describes the output of the shift in the picture rather than of a factory that worked three shifts round the clock.

Dent organised an exhibition and reunion in May 1995. His archive brought together photographs, workers’ accounts and building records, preserving the industrial community around St Boswells. This factory history provides local context; the hostel directory does not establish which Charlesfield building, if any, accommodated its Ukrainian residents.

Working at Charlesfield in wartime

An oral history recorded for St Boswells Village Hall in May 2000 gives the texture of factory life. The interviewee, a St Boswells woman who served as an Aeronautical Inspection Directorate inspector checking ICI’s output shed by shed, described three shifts, six to two, two to ten and ten to six, with about two hundred people on each. Police at the gate checked that nobody carried matches. Inspectors wore white coats and turbans; ICI workers wore close-fitting boiler suits and were on piece work. The AID and ICI had separate canteens serving meals through the night, and the whole site was camouflaged and unlit, so that on night shift you found your way to the canteen by moonlight.

She remembered workers coming from all over, from Stornoway in the Outer Hebrides and from Newcastle and other places over the Border, with ICI staff from Ardeer sent to train the new hands. After a night shift the first stop was the bakers in the village for hot rolls and milk. There was a fire in one of the sheds, and one foggy blackout morning the workers’ bus went over the parapet at Mertoun bridge and two people were killed. Lighter memories were of Workers’ Playtime broadcasts and dances in ICI’s huge mess room, a visit by Lord Beaverbrook, and film shows after the factory had finished.

This is the wartime factory, not the Ukrainian hostel.

After production ended

The archaeological record describes a change of function after 1945: part of the former production site became a Royal Navy store for small arms and guns. Later uses included farming storage and light industry. These changes belong to the Charlesfield complex and do not supply an opening or closure date for the Ukrainian hostel.

Local planning history fills in the years that matter for the hostel. Sir Frank Mears’s 1946 regional survey suggested the munitions depot as a possible assembly plant for prefabricated houses. Production had ceased in 1945 and the site became a Royal Navy Armaments Depot for small arms and guns, known as RNAD Charlesfield from 1948 until 1963. In 1947 it still employed over 170 male workers, and the Hawick and Galashiels Trades Councils campaigned to secure it as an industrial site. It continued as an Admiralty storage, maintenance and repair facility, employing about a hundred men and women, into the 1960s.

The rail siding was disconnected shortly after the war; the halt was last used in late 1959 and closed officially in 1961, and the depot’s military use ended in 1963. After some years of agricultural storage the site became an industrial estate in the 1970s, which the 1968 Central Borders Plan had already marked for new industry in the longer term. None of these dates is a date for the hostel.

Where the Ukrainian hostel fits

Kormylo’s directory lists the ICI Hostel at St Boswells among Scottish hostels that held significant numbers of ethnic Ukrainians, and the name is the only firm clue to its origin. The national pattern makes an industrial hostel plausible: the encyclopaedia of Ukrainians in the United Kingdom records that EVW hostels included wartime industrial and agricultural hostels as well as former camps, run by bodies from the National Service Hostels Corporation to private firms, and that most residents could leave only after employment restrictions were lifted from the beginning of 1951, with most hostels closed by the mid-1950s.

The factory, the naval depot and the Ukrainian hostel are therefore treated as three phases that shared a name and a place, not as one institution.

The hostel record

The hostel’s individual directory entry distinguishes it from nearby accommodation at Kelso and Selkirk. Retaining its recorded industrial name allows references to ICI Hostel in family papers to be recognised without replacing that name with an unproven building identification.