Newbattle Miners’ Hostel

Before the miners: a military estate

The estate had already undergone a dramatic change during the war. Newbattle Abbey College became a training base for the Auxiliary Territorial Service—the women’s army—and the Royal Army Medical Corps. Recruits stayed for three to six weeks, and huts spread through the grounds to accommodate up to 2,000 trainees.

After 1945, an army education programme offered returning service personnel classes ranging from mathematics and commerce to crafts and domestic science. These military and educational uses preceded the miners’ hostel; the wartime capacity describes trainees, not Ukrainian residents.

The shape of the camp

The national record of the historic environment carries the site as Newbattle Abbey Hostel, Military Camp, at NT 3335 6628 in the parish of Newbattle. Vertical air photographs flown on 15 April 1946 show the camp at its full extent, occupying about nineteen hectares of parkland within the Newbattle estate and running from a point just south-west of the Maiden Bridge to ground later covered by the housing at Kirk Bank, north of Barondale House.

The photographs show about eighty-four huts north-east of the Newbattle Road and a further fifty-six to the south-west, many of them with camouflaged roofs, together with a sewage filtration plant and a long practice trench. When the record was compiled in 2007 about twenty-three of the wartime huts survived and were in use as part of the Newbattle hostel, in an area north of Newbattle Abbey House; the ground to the south-west had by then been built over with new housing.

The hostel system

Newbattle belonged to a national network. Almost all of the 21,000 Ukrainian European Volunteer Workers and their 860 dependants brought to Britain between 1947 and 1950 lived in hostels: former military and prisoner-of-war camps, wartime industrial and agricultural hostels, and buildings converted after the war. They were run by bodies such as the National Service Hostels Corporation, the Ministry of Agriculture, the National Coal Board, the YMCA, local authorities and private firms. Hostels usually held workers of more than one nationality, though many had sizeable Ukrainian groups.

Men and women were housed separately at first, and married couples were only later able to live together or nearby. Most residents could leave a hostel only after the beginning of 1951, when employment restrictions began to be lifted from those who had been in the country three years; by the mid-1950s most of the hostels had closed. Outside working hours the Ukrainians ran English classes and lectures, kept libraries and reading rooms, produced news sheets, formed choirs, dance, drama and instrumental groups, and played football, volleyball, table tennis and chess, competing with other hostels and in local leagues. Representatives of the Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain visited, bringing books and newspapers and arranging for Ukrainian priests to hold services.

Ukrainians were already in the district before the hostel took its later name. When the 8,500 former soldiers of the Galicia Division were moved to Britain from Italy in May and June 1947 they were held in prisoner-of-war camps, chiefly in eastern England and southern Scotland. A count of July 1948 puts 958 of them in camps at or near Dalkeith, the fifth largest such concentration in the country. After their release from prisoner-of-war status between August and October 1948 the camps holding them passed to civilian authorities and were redesignated hostels.

A home near the coalfield

Newbattle appears in Peter Kormylo’s directory of camps and hostels used by Ukrainians in Scotland, as entry 40, Newbattle Miners’ Hostel, Dalkeith, Midlothian. The name also appears independently in contemporary public records, which call it both Newbattle Miners’ Hostel and the Miners’ Hostel at Newbattle Abbey. Together, these sources establish the hostel’s place in the postwar settlement landscape.

The earliest of those references is from May 1948, when a witness to a Scottish legal document gave his address as Newbattle Miners’ Hostel, Dalkeith. The name was therefore in ordinary use within a year of the first European Volunteer Workers reaching Britain.

The published addresses connect accommodation directly with employment. Residents included coal miners, a colliery haulageman and an electrician. The notices record Poland as the former nationality of most of them and Lithuania in one case; they do not establish the men’s ethnic identities. Their inclusion here describes the wider hostel community alongside its documented Ukrainian connection.

Residents recorded by name

Naturalisation notices preserve useful details for family research: an original surname, sometimes an adopted name, an occupation and an address at a particular point in time. Six notices between 1949 and 1953 identify residents at Newbattle. Michael Wollanski, for example, is also recorded as Michael Wilson—a valuable link when following a family through later records.

A change of name could be announced separately and years before naturalisation. In June 1953 Pranas Pukinskas, a miner living at Newbattle Miners’ Hostel, gave public notice that he intended to assume a new name; when he was naturalised in October 1957, by then living in Edinburgh, the register entered him as Pukinskas, Pranas, known as Frank Paterson, a coal miner of Lithuanian former nationality. The pairing shows how a Newbattle address can be the link between an original name and the anglicised one a family later used.

The dates below are the dates attached to naturalisation entries and to the name-change notice. They establish documented residence around that process, rather than arrival dates or the length of each person’s stay.

Work did not immediately mean a family home

The hostel also enters a parliamentary debate about housing in the Scottish coalfields. On 24 May 1949, local MP David Pryde described Douglas Forrest, a skilled mining machine operator, living in lodgings while his wife worked at Newbattle Hostel. His account shows how employment and the shortage of suitable homes could keep a couple’s daily lives divided.

In the same debate, the government explained plans to move miners from declining Lanarkshire pits into developing coalfields, including the Lothians. Newbattle’s story therefore sits within two overlapping movements: migration into Britain and the relocation of workers within Scotland.

The huts that remain

Parts of the wartime hut complex have survived through new uses. Archaeology Scotland identifies huts incorporated into Newbattle Business Park. Another timber building was restored by Newbattle Beekeepers Association as its Bee Academy, preserving a piece of the estate’s military fabric for community learning.

The beekeepers’ project began fundraising in July 2017 and had raised more than £30,600 by mid-May 2018. Its photographs document the wooden buildings before refurbishment. They show the wider Newbattle camp landscape; an individual hut’s use as Ukrainian sleeping accommodation is not established.