Springwood Park

A Ukrainian community in Kelso

Peter Kormylo includes Springwood Park Hostel on his map of Ukrainian camps and hostels in Scotland during 1946 to 1951. His accompanying directory calls it Springwood Hostel, Kelso, Roxburghshire, among facilities with significant numbers of ethnic Ukrainians. The map draws on lists held by the Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain and the Ukrainian Catholic Church in Scotland. Nearby entries include hostels at Galashiels, Selkirk, St Boswells and Peebles, placing Kelso within a dispersed Borders network.

That network took its shape from a national change of administration. From 1947 responsibility for the camps began to pass from the War Office to the National Assistance Board, the National Service Hostels Corporation and other civilian bodies, and they were officially redesignated as hostels; most of their residents could only leave from the beginning of 1951, when employment restrictions started to be lifted, and by the mid-1950s most of the hostels had closed.

A name and an address in 1953

Milan Vukmirovic’s naturalisation entry gives Springwood Park Hostel, Kelso, Roxburghshire, as his address and caretaker as his occupation. It identifies his country as Yugoslavia and dates his naturalisation to 19 August 1953. Published on 16 October, the notice supplies a contemporary personal connection with the hostel beyond the period covered by Kormylo’s map. It does not identify Vukmirovic as Ukrainian. The same notice was printed in the London Gazette three days earlier and is not an independent second witness.

Springwood during the war

Local historian Roger Owen suggests that Polish soldiers and some prisoners of war were billeted at Springwood Park, within the wider wartime accommodation network administered from Sunlaws House. His account places the headquarters at Sunlaws and treats Springwood as a separate billeting location. This earlier military use precedes the postwar Ukrainian hostel recorded by Kormylo.

The Sunlaws organisation was substantial. Owen records that Sunlaws House was first the headquarters of locally based Polish Army units from 1942 to 1945, then used to organise the placement of Italian prisoners from 1943 and German prisoners from 1945 until 1947, and he quotes a former German prisoner describing Sunlaws as a big camp of twenty-two hostels spread over Roxburghshire and Selkirkshire. The house and grounds were requisitioned early in the war and derequisitioned in 1948. Those figures and dates belong to Sunlaws itself rather than to Springwood.

The park around the hostel

The council’s designed-landscape survey traces the estate back to Roy’s mid-eighteenth-century map, where an avenue and tree-lined parks appear under the names St Olaus and Chapelfarm. Later landscaping softened this formal arrangement. The grounds extend around two river meanders south of Kelso; the eastern Bridge-end Haugh became the showground, while other estate land developed as a caravan and holiday park. The monumental entrance at Kelso Lodge and surviving tree belts preserve parts of the older landscape. These are features of the estate rather than identified hostel buildings.

The national record of the historic environment describes Springwood House as an eighteenth-century country house, also known as Springwood Park Estate and Springwood Caravan Park, at NT 71661 33474 in Kelso parish. It numbers the estate structures separately: a mausoleum, home farm, walled garden, Teviot Lodge, Kelso Lodge, Springwood Cottage and the gateway and gates, with work by James Gillespie Graham about 1820 and by Brown and Wardrop between 1850 and 1865. The Scottish National Buildings Record photographed the interior of the house in 1954, so it was standing a year after the caretaker’s notice; the record now marks it demolished. None of the numbered structures can be identified as the hostel, and the record makes no mention of requisition, camp or hostel use.