Macmerry Hostel

The airfield before the hostel

The hostel occupied part of an airfield. The site north-east of Macmerry village is recorded as Macmerry Airfield, also known as Penston Aerodrome, at NT 4374 7345 in the parish of Gladsmuir. Work was carried out at Penston Aerodrome during the First World War, and East Lothian Council’s heritage service places it, with Drem and East Fortune, among the airfields that defended the county’s coastline in that war.

The Second World War station left a scatter of buildings across the fields: pillboxes, dispersal bays, a fuel depot and, at the accommodation camp south of the runway, a cinema, a chapel and a gymnasium. It was this accommodation camp, rather than the flying field, that could be turned over to housing agricultural workers once the aircraft had gone.

A hostel with two administrations

The hostel came under the Ministry of Agriculture for Scotland. From 1947 responsibility for the wartime camps was passing from the War Office to civilian bodies, and the Ministry of Agriculture was among the organisations that took hostels over. Popadynets describes two parallel teams at Macmerry: Scottish officials handling the camp’s management and Ukrainian residents taking responsibility for employment administration, welfare, finance, education and the kitchen.

He names the commandant as Erick MacDonald, whom the account calls a former colonel of the British air force. F. Mactaggert represented the agricultural ministry, assisted by A. Maclean; an official named Ramsey dealt with food. Within the Ukrainian team, Popadynets served as camp leader and Ostap Sokolskyi ran the employment office. Levko Babii, given as Lev Babii in the source's photograph caption, assisted the camp doctor, Yaroslav Pelekh handled finance and cultural education, and Petro Krainyk supervised the kitchen.

The London Gazette gives the hostel’s official style. In its naturalisation list of 20 May 1949 a Polish agricultural worker, Antoni George Stanislawski, is recorded at ‘Macmerry Hostel, Tranent, East Lothian’, with 29 March 1949 as the date of his certificate. The entry shows both the address by which the hostel was known to government and that its residents were not all Ukrainians.

Agricultural work and education

Most residents worked on farms. Popadynets gives their weekly pay as £3.50, expressed that way in his retrospective account. Ministry visitors from Edinburgh took an interest in both employment and the hostel’s cultural activities, and were sometimes guests at its celebrations and services.

Two courses met at the hostel. Popadynets taught residents with limited literacy, while Sokolskyi and Ivan Demchyshyn led English classes. The English course also attracted people from outside the camp. The cost of the courses and of the cultural and educational work was met by the agricultural officer in Edinburgh, and Popadynets credits the commandant with helping to secure that public funding.

The reading room and social life

A large communal room, known to the residents as the reading room, provided space for meetings, commemorative gatherings and dances. Dances took place almost every other Saturday, bringing Ukrainian women from nearby camps together with local Scottish women. Popadynets remembered that more than half the men married Scotswomen, and that some of their wives came to speak Ukrainian well.

The room also held a library of 260 books, together with magazines and newspapers received from Europe, Canada and America. Visitors included Bohdan Panchuk, a captain in the Canadian air force, the engineer Dmytro Andriievskyi, professors Hryhorii Vashkovych and Volodymyr Yaniv, and Dr Vasyl Kushnir from Canada. These visits connected the hostel with Ukrainian cultural and organisational life abroad.

Officers of General Anders’s Second Polish Corps living in Edinburgh and the surrounding district also came. Popadynets names Colonel Volodymyr Yankovskyi, from Stanyslaviv, who spoke Ukrainian; Lieutenant-Colonel Janusz Wierzbicki from Kalush; Captain Vasyl Ziemba, an airman from Lviv; and a nursing lieutenant, Nataliia Obukh, a Ukrainian from Sniatyn.

The 1949 lecture photograph shows a crowded interior with men and women seated in rows and others standing behind them. Its caption identifies the gathering as Ukrainian European Voluntary Workers at Macmerry Hostel.

Worship and remembrance

The communal room contained a chapel where services were held every two weeks. Father Oleksander Babii travelled from Edinburgh as the principal visiting priest; other clergy also came from London and elsewhere.

In the middle of the camp the residents put up a tall cross with a trident. In summer, memorial services for fallen soldiers were held beside it. Ministry visitors and the commandant sometimes attended celebrations and religious services, according to Popadynets.

Building a community beyond the hostel

Macmerry residents helped finance a Ukrainian church house on Mansion House Road in Edinburgh. A first-generation respondent interviewed by Peter Kormylo recalled that the men at Macmerry Camp gave a shilling a week from their wages towards the purchase. The house became a community centre with a small chapel inside it, and a second-generation respondent remembered travelling from Tranent to reach that chapel.

The scale of the wider community can be measured against those contributions. The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church registered 900 families in Scotland in 1949, and at the Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain’s annual general meeting in Edinburgh in April 1952 some 1,200 Ukrainians were identified as resident in Scotland. The hostel’s visitors, dances, classes and church contributions show how a residential workforce became part of that network.

Closure and afterwards

Popadynets dates the dissolution of the camp to May 1951. His recollections emphasise the relationships formed during the hostel years, and the marriages to Scottish women that outlasted it.

Some of the men stayed in the parish. In June 1959 Omelan Hajduk, by then a British subject living at 9 Merryfield Avenue in Macmerry, advertised in the Edinburgh Gazette that he would take the name Philip Morrison. Kormylo counts Tranent among the places where a Ukrainian community settled in Scotland.

The airfield buildings had a longer afterlife than the hostel. Many of the perimeter structures and dispersal bays were demolished when the new dual carriageway of the A1 was cut across the site, but a number survive between the A1 and the A199, and the accommodation camp itself now lies within the Macmerry Industrial Estate, where many of its original buildings still stand.