Raylees Hostel

A satellite of Camp 69

Before the Ukrainians arrived the huts belonged to the prisoner-of-war system. The main camps set up in Northumberland and Durham after D-Day spawned satellite work camps or hostels for men engaged mainly in agricultural work. A Northern Command list of July 1946, transcribed in a diocesan history of the German Catholic prisoners, records Camp 69 at Darras Hall, Ponteland, with hostels at Long Horsley, Raylees (Otterburn), Prestwick, Wylam, Colwell, South Gosforth, Meldon, Catton, Kitty Brewster, Seaton Delaval, Bothal Barnes, Eshott and Druridge Bay.

A separate list of Italian prisoner-of-war camps, drawn from Hugh Shankland’s history of Italians in the North East, likewise gives Raylees, near Elsdon, as one of the hostels of Darras Hall camp. Camp 69 itself has a file at The National Archives covering 1945 to 1947. One online overview instead attaches Raylees to Camp 18 at Featherstone Park; it gives no date, and the two attributions have not been reconciled from original records.

The prisoner-of-war phase and the Ukrainian phase are distinct.

Making a home, 1947

The fullest picture comes from T. A. Scott, whose report from Raylees Hostel was reprinted in The Ukrainian Weekly on 27 October 1947 with a credit to the Weekly Chronicle in England. Scott found forty-seven Ukrainians, all volunteer farm workers aged between twenty and forty. They had arrived about a month before his visit and, he wrote, had already transformed the bare accommodation into comfortable billets. Embroidery worked by wives or sweethearts decorated the rooms.

In a little theatre they had made out of a comparative shambles in two days, a small choir was rehearsing national songs under a welfare officer who kept a two-hundred-year-old violin and hoped to gather enough instruments for an orchestra. Two of the choir, in wide red trousers tucked into jackboots and embroidered shirts, danced for the visitor, and a concert was planned. A young silversmith had built a workshop where he set mosaics of coloured toothbrush fragments into rings, brooches and bracelets.

The camp cook was a journalist who still contributed to papers in Germany and America, hoped to bring his wife to England and eventually to go to Canada. He asked Scott not to print his name because he had relatives under Soviet rule. Like many of his companions, Scott wrote, he had known a Nazi concentration camp.

Work and evenings

The men rose early, breakfasted, worked a full day on the farms and came back to dinner. Evenings passed mainly in talk, with an occasional trip to a dance in Otterburn. They were keen to learn English and, with winter coming, urgently needed chess, draughts and darts. Scott found them drawing hope from the work, the food and the kindness of the villagers. Asked what they hated most, they said dictators in every form; asked what they liked most, freedom.

This routine matches the national pattern of the European Voluntary Workers scheme, under which most Ukrainians reached Britain in the second half of 1947 and the first half of 1948 and just over half the men were placed in agriculture. Workers lived in hostels near their work and needed Ministry of Labour approval to change jobs until 1951. Such hostels were run by bodies including the Ministry of Agriculture and the YMCA, often in former prisoner-of-war camps. Raylees is not named in these national accounts, which explain the framework rather than the hostel.

A YMCA address in the Ukrainian press

By the time subscriptions were being sought for 1949, the hostel had a YMCA name. A notice in the satirical magazine Lys Mykyta gave its representative in England the address YMCA Hostel Raylees, Elsdon, Newcastle-on-Tyne, quoted quarterly and half-yearly subscription prices for England, and offered an alternative address through the Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain in London. The notice shows a reader network reaching from a Northumberland hut camp to a magazine produced abroad; it does not show how long the representative lived there.

The same YMCA form of the name, with Elsdon and Newcastle on Tyne as the postal address, survives in the directory compiled from Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain records and a Ukrainian Catholic priest’s daybook. That directory gives no dates. When the hostel closed, and whether the huts were reused or cleared, has not been established.