Kirtlebridge Camp

The camp record

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

The camp’s military name

RAOC stands for Royal Army Ordnance Corps, the British Army organisation responsible for supplying weapons, ammunition and equipment.

The surviving directory retains this military designation when identifying accommodation associated with Ukrainians. It does not assign individual residents an army role or specify their civilian employer.

Annandale and the Solway shore carried a heavy concentration of military stores in the 1940s, and the sidings at Kirtlebridge served an ammunition depot on the closed Solway branch. A camp bearing the corps’ name is what the Ukrainian directory preserves; the depot it served, its establishment date and its garrison are not named in that record.

Kirtlebridge and its railway

Kirtlebridge is a village in Annandale, about eight kilometres north east of Annan and a short distance south of Eaglesfield, at the point where the main west coast railway and the modern motorway cross the Kirtle Water. The village had a station on the main line, and a junction there marked the start of the Solway Junction Railway towards Annan.

Historic Environment Scotland records the settlement as a small nineteenth-century village in the parish of Middlebie, centred at NY 23643 72961, following the assessment made by John Gifford for the Buildings of Scotland. The ground around it had been worked for centuries: a lime works is recorded in the neighbouring parish of Annan at NY 23 72, and the railway crosses the Kirtle Water on a viaduct over the B722 that was photographed for the Scottish Development Department in 1982 and survives as a listed building.

The station opened in 1847 and became a junction station after the Solway line opened in 1869, with three platforms, a locomotive shed and extensive sidings. The branch south of Kirtlebridge closed to passengers in 1931 and to goods after 1939, except for access to the wartime airfield at RAF Annan. On the west side of that branch the Ministry of Defence established Mossfoot Ammunition Depot, served by a complex of sidings, and this section of line survived into the 1960s. The station itself closed in 1960.

The national record places the station at NY 22679 73520 and notes that it is shown on the Ordnance Survey twenty-five-inch map of 1899, Dumfriesshire sheet 58. Eight photographs of it survive in the papers of the railway historian Hubert Denys Eddowes Rokeby, among them a postcard captioned ‘The Station, Kirtlebridge’.

None of those sources, however, states that the Ukrainian RAOC Camp was the depot’s camp. The identification is a reasonable line of enquiry, not an established fact.

Ukrainians in Annandale

Kirtlebridge belongs to a cluster of Dumfriesshire sites in the directory. When 8,500 former soldiers of the Galicia Division were transferred to Britain from Italy in May and June 1947 they were held in prisoner of war camps, mainly in the agricultural areas of eastern England and southern Scotland. In July 1948 the camp at or near Lockerbie held 463 men. After the men were released from prisoner of war status between August and October 1948 and admitted to the European Voluntary Workers scheme, the camps were taken over by civilian authorities and redesignated as hostels.

The Lockerbie figure belongs to Hallmuir, a former prisoner of war camp near the town that housed German and Italian prisoners during the war and, from 1947, more than 400 Ukrainian former soldiers. Kormylo’s account of the 1947 dispersal likewise records 462 men sent to Barony Camp in Dumfriesshire and immediately transferred to Hallmuir. Hallmuir is entry 15 in the directory and Kirtlebridge is entry 16: they are separate places, and Hallmuir’s numbers, chapel and history must not be transferred to Kirtlebridge.

Whether the Kirtlebridge camp held prisoners of war, European Voluntary Workers or both, and in which years, is not stated in the directory, which gives its name and locality and nothing more.

The hostels that succeeded the camps were of several kinds — former military and prisoner of war camps, wartime industrial and agricultural hostels, and buildings converted or built after the war — and they 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. They usually housed workers of more than one nationality, and in some of them the Ukrainian group ran to several hundred people. Most residents stayed only until they could find private lodgings, and the great majority of the hostels had closed by the middle of the 1950s.