Inverlochy Hostel

The Ukrainian hostel

The directory identifies the facility by type and locality: an EVW hostel at Inverlochy, Fort William, number 32 in a list headed Scottish and northern English hostels which held significant numbers of ethnic Ukrainians. It supplies no individual residents, street address, operator or operating dates, and its compiler notes that the list may not be complete. Inverlochy is not mentioned anywhere else in his thesis.

Its interest is that it puts Ukrainians in Lochaber at all: the Fort William district is a long way from the mill towns and coalfields where most Ukrainian European Volunteer Workers were placed.

How Ukrainians reached hostels of this kind

The Westward Ho! scheme, approved in 1946 and recruiting from displaced persons camps in Germany and Austria from the spring of 1947, was the largest of the European Volunteer Worker programmes. Altogether 20,912 Ukrainians came to Britain under the EVW schemes, 16,194 men and 4,718 women, most of them in the second half of 1947 and the first half of 1948, with a further 411 adult dependants and 451 children. Applicants had to sign an undertaking that they would work only as the Ministry of Labour directed and would not change their place of work without official approval. They were paid the same wages as British workers and housed in hostels close to the work.

Those hostels were of several kinds — former military and prisoner-of-war camps, wartime industrial and agricultural hostels, and buildings converted or newly built after the war — and were run by bodies including the National Service Hostels Corporation, the Ministry of Agriculture, the National Coal Board, the YMCA, local authorities and private firms. Men and women were housed separately at first. From 1 January 1951 those who had been in Britain at least three years could apply to be released from the restriction on their choice of employment, and most of the hostels had closed by the mid-1950s. A hostel in a company village beside a smelter fits that description; which of those bodies ran the one at Inverlochy is not recorded.

The compiler of the directory counted forty-three camps and hostels in Scotland where ethnic Ukrainians, European Volunteer Workers and former prisoners of war alike, were living after arriving from mainland Europe, and summarised their employment as agriculture, forestry, mining and hydroelectricity. Work was generally outside the camp or hostel itself. Women were directed for the most part to textile mills or tuberculosis sanatoria, and some were sent as auxiliaries to nursing homes and sanatoria in the Highlands; men were restricted to forestry, farming or mining. One first-generation Ukrainian he interviewed had lost a leg working as a tunnel tiger on the boring of the tunnels for the Highland hydro-electric dam schemes. A few hostel residents were content enough in these small communities to stay on in the barracks and Nissen huts for decades after the war.

The works and the village

The British Aluminium Company developed Inverlochy in the 1920s to house workers for the Lochaber smelter, at the mouth of the River Lochy on the outskirts of Fort William, and the village grew alongside the hydro-electric scheme which powered the works. The Highland record classes the smelter as a work of 1921 to 1929 in the parish of Kilmallie, begun by the company in 1921, in production from 1929 and at full capacity by 1930, and the national record of the historic environment carries it as an aluminium works of the twentieth century. It was the district’s one large industrial employer, and the reason a village and its lodgings stood there at all.

A later hostel address

An Comunn Gaidhealach’s 1966–1967 annual report lists Miss Buchanan, secretary of its Fort William branch, at the British Aluminium Company Hostel in Inverlochy. The original entry establishes a named company hostel in that later period.

The EVW directory and the Gaelic association’s report preserve two hostel descriptions at Inverlochy. A connection between their buildings or residents has not been established, so the later company address does not determine the Ukrainian hostel’s location or lifespan.