Monymusk Hostel

The camp beside the River Don

An aerial photograph dated 1948 shows the camp between the River Don and the road towards Pitfichie and Chapel O’ Garioch, its rows of buildings beside cultivated fields with the river curving around the eastern side.

This was Camp 111, a German working camp that had also held Italians. The later refugee hostel occupied the same site; its name should not be confused with Deer Park at Dalkeith, which was Camp 16.

From Italian working camp to German working camp

The camp opened in 1943, and a Red Cross inspection on 28 May 1943 found Italian prisoners and a capacity of 750. War Office lists of 1944 classed it as an Italian labour battalion under Scottish Command and then as an Italian working camp, recording the Italians as non-co-operators. Outlying hostels changed over time: Alford, Ballater and Culter in 1943, and Alford and Insch by September 1945.

By the 1947 camp list the site was 111 (G.W.C.), a German working camp, with the telegraphic address Priswar, Monymusk and Major T. Smith as commandant. On that list the Monymusk entry has been struck through in blue crayon and replaced in handwriting by Harlaw, Inverurie. No trace of a camp at Harlaw has been found, so what the alteration means for Monymusk’s closure is unresolved.

A fatal accident inquiry record at Aberdeen Sheriff Court names Erich Behrendt, a German prisoner at No. 111 camp, who died on 25 August 1947 of injuries received the same day in the railway station yard at Monymusk.

Housing and farm work

The wartime camp had accommodation huts and tents, with separate cooking, washing, medical and storage facilities. Its huts had concrete bases and frames, hollow-brick walls and pitched roofs. Prisoners slept in wooden bunks and warmed the rooms with stoves.

A 1943 plan divides the camp into a prisoners’ section, a guards’ section and a tented area, with workshops for a shoemaker, a tailor and a barber on the prisoners’ side. Huts planned at the back of the compound were never built, and the tents were removed later.

Prisoners travelled by bus to surrounding farms, where they harvested crops, dug ditches and repaired fences. German and Italian prisoners also built the bridge over the River Don by Enzean Farm. These descriptions concern the prison camp: they do not establish the later hostel residents’ employment arrangements.

Learning, sport and a camp magazine

Sport, workshops, concerts and lectures were organised inside the camp, and Mr Whiteley, the dominie of Monymusk School, gave English lessons on Monday evenings. Prisoners who already worked on local farms had picked up Scots words, and the estate account recalls them correcting his English word for potato with “na, na, tatties”.

On 24 August 1946 the prisoners began a magazine called Deer Park Ring. Its first number described vegetable gardens, a sports field, a ping-pong hall, a small theatre room for film and stage plays, a newly formed choir and a small orchestra, and carried a timetable of classes in English, German, mathematics, commercial studies, shorthand, mechanical engineering and book-keeping.

The Wiener Holocaust Library holds number 1, of 24 August 1946: fourteen pages in German and English, handstitched with a sewing machine and illustrated by Toni Loesen. The Imperial War Museums hold the fortnightly issues 11 and 12 of February 1947. Both were German prisoners’ publications and predate the hostel phase.

A chapel made inside a hut

After the war, the camp became accommodation for Polish and other European refugees. Catholic residents converted a hut into a chapel. An unnamed Ukrainian artist painted saints and a version of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper above the altar. The altar incorporated wood, cardboard and tin; biscuit tins became an elaborate chandelier.

The estate account adds that Mrs Whiteley attended the inauguration and said afterwards that she was “moved to see those weather beaten faces with tears on their cheeks”, and that a dinner of borshch followed. The two accounts differ on who built it: the Aberdeenshire record says Catholic refugees, the estate page Catholic prisoners of war. Only a photograph of the altar is said to survive.

The hostel years

The Aberdeenshire record states that the camp became a hostel for Polish and other European refugees at the end of the war, and the WW2 POW Camps in the UK file records the site housing displaced persons under the European Voluntary Worker scheme. Kormylo’s directory confirms the Ukrainian connection. No opening or closing date for the hostel, and no count of its Ukrainian residents, has been found in any source read.

Two surviving views

The 1948 aerial photograph records the whole setting. A second museum-contributed photograph, dated 1949, shows Bill Bremner and Gordon Noble beside a vehicle, with a camp building behind them. Their names belong to the photograph’s caption; it does not identify either man as a Ukrainian resident.

The later site

Vertical air photography flown on 15 October 1953 recorded the camp, and the 1980 Ordnance Survey map marked a disused camp site, but a revision of the record on 1 December 1999 could identify no trace on the ground. The huts were sold off gradually and the camp was demolished in the early 1980s, the estate account linking the clearance to the sale of the land for the St Ninian’s housing estate.

The ground the camp stood on is itself designated. Historic Environment Scotland carries Monymusk on its Inventory of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, and the parkland section of that record states that a prisoner-of-war camp was constructed over the Deer Park during the Second World War and that a housing estate was built following its demolition.