Ryton Miners’ Hostel

The hostel on Hexham Old Road

The hostel’s postal address is printed in the Estonian weekly published in Britain on 20 August 1948: “Ryton Hostel, Hixham Old Road, Ryton-on-Tyne, Co. Durham”. The street is Hexham Old Road in Ryton, and the spelling is a compositor’s slip. Estonian correspondents writing from the place in 1949 called it plainly the coal miners’ hostel, which matches the name in the Ukrainian directory and the coalfield setting.

Hostels of this kind were administered by bodies such as the National Service Hostels Corporation, the Ministry of Agriculture, the National Coal Board, the YMCA, local authorities and private industrial firms, and most had closed by the middle of the 1950s.

Life across languages

Juri Noot, the son of Estonian displaced people, remembered his stepfather working as an interpreter at Ryton Miners’ Hostel. He spoke and wrote Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian, Russian, German and English. That range of languages reflects the practical work of helping people from different countries communicate in a new setting.

Noot’s account describes Ryton as still partly rural. His family lived outside the hostel, and the shortage of suitable accommodation shaped their movements even while his stepfather’s work stayed in the North East.

The same surname appears in print a year later, when the Estonian weekly gave V. Noot as welfare officer of the coal miners’ hostel at Ryton. Interpreting and welfare were two sides of one job in a hostel where several languages were spoken.

Finding friends after the war

On 26 May 1948, the Estonian newspaper Eesti Teataja published a small tracing notice from Heino Hallik and Ernst Tomsal. They were trying to reconnect with a former school friend and other classmates, and asked for replies to H. Hallik at the Miners’ Hostel in Ryton-on-Tyne.

The notice makes the hostel visible as a postal address in an international network: a few lines in a Swedish-published Estonian newspaper could reach people scattered by war and migration.

Seven young men and a small advertisement

On 20 August 1948 the classified column of the Estonian weekly carried a short advertisement from the hostel. Seven men gave their first names and ages, Harry 21, Udo 22, Ants 22, Heino 23, Fred 20, Pekka 25 and Alex 23, and asked to correspond with respectable Estonian girls aged between eighteen and thirty, adding that if it suited they would stay together for good.

The tone is wry rather than plaintive: the men call themselves seven coal-grey souls sinking into eternity. The same column carried a near identical notice from three men at the YMCA hostel at Woolfox Lodge in Rutland, so the form was familiar across the hostel network.

Sunday worship in Crawcrook

The Lithuanian weekly Britanijos Lietuvis announced confession and Mass for Lithuanians from Ryton Miners’ Hostel and the surrounding area at St Agnes’ Church, Crawcrook, at 11 am on 21 November 1948. The announcement places religious life beyond the hostel itself, in a nearby parish church.

Alongside the Estonian notices and the Ukrainian hostel directory, the announcement shows several distinct national communities using the same local accommodation.

A gathering in Newcastle

On 10 June 1949 the same paper announced summer days for the northern church district, a joint gathering at Newcastle fixed for 9 and 10 July. It would open with a Saturday service at five o’clock and continue with talks, a communal supper and a sociable evening, the music promised by a small orchestra recently formed at the agricultural workers’ camp at Belford. Local arrangements had been taken on by V. Noot, and anyone wanting a supper place or a bed for the night was asked to register with him at Ryton Miners’ Hostel.

A follow-up on 8 July moved the gathering to 16 and 17 July and named the church: St Thomas’s, Haymarket, Newcastle. No room for the social gathering had yet been found. Guides from around Leeds were coming north with songs and recitations, and Colonel A. Rebane was expected to greet old friends.

Moving towards a family home

In July 1948, Noot’s family moved to the Priory Road holding hostel in Hull because their accommodation near Ryton had proved unsuitable. His stepfather continued working as an interpreter. The family left Hull on 21 December after three Estonian families arranged to buy a house together in Newcastle.

For this family a job was only one stage in settling. Their account links a workplace hostel, temporary family accommodation and a shared house, and it distinguishes Ryton’s employment role from the displaced persons camp in Germany where they had lived earlier.

Afterwards

Most hostel residents could move out only after the beginning of 1951, when employment restrictions began to be lifted from those who had been in the United Kingdom three years, and by the mid-1950s most hostels had closed. No closure date for Ryton has been found, and no photograph of the buildings has been traced.

Some of those the hostel brought to Tyneside stayed. A Stockholm Estonian paper recorded in its death notices of 18 December 1992 that Harry Lauffaart, born in Tallinn on 8 October 1927, had died at Ryton-on-Tyne on 29 October. The notice does not place him in the hostel, but he was of the generation it housed and he was still in the village more than forty years later.