Munlochy Hostel

Beside the church

The 2014 Knockbain heritage project located the camp around grid reference NH 64698 53094. Contributors remembered Italian prisoners followed by Germans, with men working on neighbouring farms. German prisoners made toys for children; raffia and felt shoes were also remembered.

The project’s walking leaflet locates the former camp beside the church, south of the main village centre. It distinguishes that site from the village hall and the former Young Men’s Club near the station.

A recent parish history states that the ground taken was Munlochy’s church glebe, requisitioned during the Second World War for a prisoner-of-war camp holding Italians and then Germans, and used immediately after the war for eastern European refugees. That account rests on the same 2014 community report, but it identifies the land as glebe rather than ordinary farmland. The Highland Historic Environment Record holds no monument entry for the camp, and the 2014 report itself left the record-number columns for it blank.

Adapting the huts for EVWs

The February 1948 drawing was prepared by “LM” at the Ministry of Works office in Union Street, Aberdeen. The National Records of Scotland describes a layout and location plan, with extra hutting and changes to existing huts marked in pencil and red ink. This records planned adaptation, rather than proving when every alteration was finished.

The archive file also contains a Church of Scotland gallery-partition drawing dated 28 April 1939.

Those two drawings appear to be all that survives in the national catalogues under the hostel’s name. A search of the National Records of Scotland for Munlochy returns sixty-two records, of which the only hostel or camp items are RHP140447 and its two parts. The National Archives at Kew returns fifteen, all personal, naval or hydrographic, with no camp file and no prisoner-of-war camp number.

Displaced people and village life

Residents recalled displaced people using the camp after the war, including Poles and others from eastern Europe. Kormylo’s directory supplies the explicit Ukrainian connection. The local account also remembers dances at the camp, and that when the police were called the trouble usually came from visitors rather than from the residents.

Wartime contact extended into the village: prisoners helped clear the school garden, while a local garage supplied vehicles transporting POWs. These recollections concern the prisoner phase, separately from the later EVW accommodation.

Nothing has been found that describes Ukrainian life inside the hostel itself: no choir, chapel, school or branch report has been traced for it. Kormylo notes that no registers or lists of Ukrainian occupants of these camps are known to survive in any archive in Scotland, and that the Scottish list rests on the 1949 daybook of Fr Alexandr Babij, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic priest whose parish covered the whole country and who visited all forty-four camps and hostels where Ukrainians were living, collecting donations towards the community house at 6 Mansionhouse Road in Edinburgh. No contemporary newspaper report of the hostel has yet been recovered, and the Ukrainian Weekly archive returns nothing for Munlochy.

Munlochy was one of hundreds of such places. Almost all of the 21,000 Ukrainian European Voluntary Workers brought to Britain between 1947 and 1950 lived in hostels run by bodies including the National Service Hostels Corporation, the Ministry of Agriculture and the YMCA. Residence restrictions were lifted from 1951, and most of those placed in farming districts moved to industrial towns and cities.

Other Ross-shire camps

Munlochy should not be confused with the other Ross-shire places on the same Ukrainian lists, which also include Evanton and Kildary. Brahan, in a home farm field about two miles from Maryburgh, was leased by the Ministry of Works from 1944 to 1957, held German and Italian prisoners, then housed displaced persons employed in agriculture, among them Polish, Hungarian and Ukrainian people, and was later used for schoolchildren brought north for the potato harvest. That sequence closely resembles the one remembered at Munlochy, which makes careful separation of the two sites necessary.

Harvest workers and the cleared site

The camp subsequently housed boys from Glasgow during the 1950s potato harvest. The walking leaflet recalls nightly films during that use. Recruiting children for the harvest had begun in earnest by 1948, with recruitment centres in Glasgow and Edinburgh and a minimum of a shilling an hour for those who stayed in hostels. No document has been found placing Munlochy formally within that scheme, so the connection rests on local memory.

By the 1990s, contributors remembered only the foundations of about three huts and rubble still lying in 1994. A footbridge across the burn behind the camp had also gone, perhaps when Munlochy flooded in the 1960s or 1970s.