Reves House

The surviving address

The published entry reads “Reves House, 71 Broughty Ferry, Dundee”. No street is attached to the number 71. Reves is retained here as printed. Two listed buildings in Broughty Ferry carry the similar name Reres, and one of them stands at number 71.

Reres House and Reres Lodge

Reres House, on Reres Road, is a picturesque villa of 1849, two storeys over a basement, listed at Category B. A merchant, shipowner and insurance agent is recorded there from 1858, and the BBC filmed scenes for Christabel in the house in 1988. A Dundee newspaper feature describes it as probably Broughty Ferry’s first jute mansion, built in fields on the hill above the fishing town, and notes that it was divided into four flats in the early 1990s.

Reres Lodge, at 71 Monifieth Road, was the lodge to Reres House. Built about 1849, it is a single-storey L-plan building of snecked rubble with a crenellated octagonal entrance tower carrying the heraldic motto Fidelis et Paratus, and it is listed at Category C. Both buildings were listed on 20 August 1984.

The directory’s Reves House, 71 Broughty Ferry shares a near-identical name and the number 71 with Reres Lodge, 71 Monifieth Road, Broughty Ferry. A typing or typesetting slip turning Reres into Reves is easy to imagine, and a shortened address could have dropped the street. That makes the lodge the strongest candidate found so far. Against it, the lodge is a small single-storey building rather than a hostel of any size, and neither listing record mentions hostel, refugee or Ukrainian use. The identification is a hypothesis to test against valuation rolls and Dundee archives, not a finding.

Another Broughty Ferry name

Kormylo’s map lists a second Broughty Ferry site under Angus, The Bughties, which does not appear in the printed directory. The Bughties is a large half-timbered villa at 76 Camphill Road, built for a Dundee works owner and listed at Category B. It is a different building from Reres House and Reres Lodge, and the two Broughty Ferry names are kept apart here.

A Ukrainian community in Dundee

Dundee’s wider Ukrainian community has a history reaching back to 1947. At the Scottish Parliament’s Cross Party Group on Ukraine in December 2023, community representative Maria Jemicz described a club founded that year by Ukrainian agricultural volunteers. It combined participation in Scottish life with the preservation of Ukrainian culture.

Dundee was one of three Scottish communities, with Edinburgh and Galashiels, that had its own building between the 1950s and 1970s, although most Ukrainians who had lived in Scotland in the 1940s later moved to England and probably fewer than a thousand remained. By the time of Kormylo’s research there was no longer a community-owned building in Dundee. A Ukrainian Catholic schematism of 1988 lists the Lady Chapel of Dundee’s cathedral among the places where Ukrainian Catholic services were held.

A new Dundee branch of the Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain held its inaugural meeting on 16 March 2023. These accounts trace the city’s continuing community life, although none identifies individual residents of Reves House.