Kingencleugh Agricultural Hostel

Italians, then Germans

The compiled research file for Camp 112 dates its opening to 1943, when it held Italian prisoners and ran outlying hostels at Dalry, Kilmaurs and Maybole. A War Office list of November 1944 recorded it as an Italian working camp whose prisoners were classed as non-co-operators. On 19 April 1945 the first German prisoners arrived from Happendon, Camp 19, graded politically white or grey rather than committed Nazis, and before September 1945 further hostels for Germans opened at Crosshill and Dailly.

A working camp in rural Ayrshire

A Red Cross inspection dated 30 May 1945 describes Kingencleugh as a former Italian camp that had become a German working camp on 10 April. Major H. F. Leschallas commanded it. The report, available in a modern transcription, recorded 586 German prisoners against a capacity of 600; a further 518 Italian prisoners lived in hostels as far as 25 miles away under the same command. The prisoners worked predominantly in agriculture. These figures describe the wartime organisation before the Ukrainian hostel phase.

Inside the huts

The inspector counted 26 huts, including 16 living huts, two dining huts and separate buildings for a kitchen, theatre, reading room, chapel and infirmary. Concrete paths and roads joined them, with flowerbeds around the buildings. Electric lighting and stove heating were provided. The 1947 aerial photograph places the hutted compound in its agricultural surroundings, behind the Ballochmyle hatchery. Its regular layout is visible beyond the railway line.

Aerofilms photographed the site twice in 1947, and both frames are catalogued as showing Prisoner of War Camp 112, Kingencleugh, behind the Ballochmyle hatchery.

Learning, music and everyday routines

The May 1945 inspection gives an unusually detailed view of life within the German camp. English classes enrolled 164 pupils; smaller groups studied French, Spanish, mathematics, agriculture and rhetoric or literature. A twelve-member theatre group had its own hut. Protestant and Catholic choirs, a piano and an accordion supported musical life. The report also recorded the frustration of waiting for correspondence from home. These activities belong to the prisoners described by the inspector; the later Ukrainian residents brought a separate chapter to the same named camp.

The number moves to Doonfoot

In 1946 the camp number 112 was reallocated to Doonfoot Camp near Ayr, so Kingencleugh either closed as a camp or was reduced to a hostel; the 1947 camp list gives 112 as Doonfoot. Doonfoot was a separate and larger site, and appears in the Ukrainian records under its own name. What happened at Kingencleugh between the prisoners leaving and the hostel opening is not recorded.

Ukrainian residents and an Orthodox visit

By the late 1940s, Kingencleugh was part of the network of hostels used by Ukrainians in Scotland. Peter Kormylo’s map calls it an agricultural hostel. In the August–September 1948 Brotherhood’s Letter, the head of the General Council of the Ukrainian Autocephalic Greek Orthodox Church in Great Britain, Ihor Hubarzhevsky, thanked managers and wardens at hostels he had recently visited. His list includes Kingenclench, the period spelling used here for Kingencleugh, alongside Beith, Maidens and Doonfoot. Addressed to those caring for Ukrainian refugees, the notice records a direct connection between the hostel and an emerging national church network.

The notice names, in order, Moor Camp, Doon Foot, Maidens, Kingenclench and Beith, before hostels elsewhere in Britain, so the four Ayrshire hostels fall together at the head of the list. The same page appealed for parish councils in every hostel, with a council where more than fifteen Orthodox Ukrainians lived and a single representative where there were fewer. Nothing says which side of that threshold Kingencleugh fell on.

From 1947 the camps passed from the War Office to civilian bodies and were redesignated hostels, run by organisations including the National Service Hostels Corporation, the Ministry of Agriculture and the YMCA. Which body ran Kingencleugh has not been established.

A place to live after displacement

Local expectations for the site were different from its eventual postwar use. David McClure’s transcription of the Third Statistical Account records hopes that the former camp might relieve the local housing shortage once the German prisoners returned home. Instead, the 1951 account described it as occupied by displaced people from Central Europe. Read beside the Ukrainian directory and the 1948 pastoral notice, it shows Kingencleugh’s passage from wartime confinement into the accommodation landscape of postwar migration.

That account is the Third Statistical Account of Ayrshire by John Strawhorn and William Boyd, Edinburgh 1951, whose page 699 records that some 500 prisoners, first Italians and later Germans, went out from the camp to labour on farms around. In the same exchange another correspondent recalled the outline of the hut foundations still visible eight to ten years earlier; the dated postings run to 2005. The research file records the site as farmland in 2019.