Thorncroft Hostel

Settlement in the Borders

The surrounding textile economy shaped Ukrainian settlement in Selkirk and Galashiels. A family interviewed by Peter Kormylo remembered a mother’s work as a weaver and connections with other Ukrainians who had known one another in a German displaced-persons camp. This account describes the regional community rather than identifying a Thorncroft resident.

Kormylo adds two details about how the Borders came to have Ukrainian residents at all. Most of the Ukrainian women who arrived as European Voluntary Workers chose textile work in the mills of England, and only a few opted for Dundee or Galashiels, so the Borders group was always small. In the early 1950s, as the displaced-persons and prisoner-of-war camps closed, Ukrainians were drawn to employment in towns including Galashiels, which lies a few miles from Selkirk. Neither passage names Thorncroft, but together they describe the pull of the tweed mills that gave a Selkirk hostel its purpose.

The mills were the reason for the town’s size. Selkirk’s woollen works stood in a line along the riverside beside the railway to Galashiels, which carried the yarn and tweed away; tartans and tweeds went abroad from them, and mile upon mile of uniform cloth made in Selkirk went to the troops in both world wars. It was that industry, needing hands, that a hostel in the town would have served.

A home near work

Britain’s EVW programme linked recruitment to employment and communal accommodation. In June 1947 the Ministry of Labour reported that the new scheme had begun towards the end of April. About 11,500 workers had entered Britain by 21 June, with around 3,900 already in jobs; public funds paid for holding-camp accommodation while placements were arranged. These national totals explain the scale of the movement, not Thorncroft’s population.

A fortnight later the Minister of Labour gave figures for placements by industry. Of 6,330 European Voluntary Workers placed in employment between January and the end of June 1947, 564 had gone into textiles, 2,268 into agriculture and 1,836 into hospital work. He added that a major problem was the making of camps available from which workers could get to and from work in a reasonable way. A hostel in a mill town such as Selkirk answered exactly that problem.

The flow was still heavy the following year. About 15,000 European Volunteer Workers arrived in the first quarter of 1948 and 6,300 of them went into agriculture; asked whether he was satisfied with the scheme’s progress, the Parliamentary Secretary answered that they were getting all the people for whom accommodation could be provided. Of more than 50,000 workers brought to Britain by that April, twenty-three had been sent back to a displaced persons’ camp on the Continent as unsatisfactory.

How such hostels were run

The hostels that housed Ukrainian EVWs were of several kinds: former military and prisoner-of-war camps, wartime industrial and agricultural hostels, and buildings converted or newly built after the war. They were administered by bodies including the National Service Hostels Corporation, the Ministry of Agriculture, the National Coal Board, the YMCA, local authorities and private firms. Men and women were at first housed separately, and married couples were later allowed to live together or as near to each other as possible.

The paperwork of that system survives at Kew even where the individual hostels do not. The Ministry of Labour’s welfare department kept a file on the procedure for setting up hostels for civilian Poles and European volunteer workers in industrial employment, running from 1946 to 1948, and another, of 1947 and 1948, on criticisms of the standards obtaining in hostels and camps for Poles, European volunteer workers and their dependants. The National Service Hostels Corporation’s own papers — its certificates of incorporation, its registers of members, the minutes of its board and specimen administrative papers from selected hostels — cover 1941 to 1958.

Most residents could leave only after the beginning of 1951, when employment restrictions began to be lifted from those who had lived in Britain for at least three years, and by the mid-1950s most of the hostels had closed.

What hostel life cost and required

Residents paid for their board. By the summer of 1949 the charge at an industrial hostel was 35 shillings a week, five shillings more than it had been; the Parliamentary Secretary defended the rise on the ground that the state should not go on subsidising these workers at £1,800,000 a year and that 35 shillings was less than the same facilities would cost in a private home. Hostels classed as sub-standard, most of them in agricultural districts, charged less. Members complained in the same exchange that residents got two meals a day and three on Sundays and had to buy the rest outside. Arrears were not a small matter: the Home Office kept a file of 1948 and 1949 on European Volunteer Workers’ arrears of hostel charges, in which the worst cases were deported.

The terms of stay bore on the hostel as much as on the job. There was no time limit on a European Volunteer Worker’s stay in the United Kingdom, but he had to enter the employment the Ministry of Labour specified and could not change it without the Ministry’s approval; if he was no longer needed where he had been sent, he was found other work in an undermanned industry, and anyone who persistently refused the conditions on which he had been brought over was liable to deportation. Because the work was directed, so in effect was the address.

The buildings themselves were whatever could be had: former prisoner-of-war and Royal Air Force camps, large country houses, and disused textile mills and weaving sheds. Women were rehoused into private billets or houses as a priority, so men tended to stay longest in the larger hostels, and although some held a single nationality many held a mixture.

Two spellings, one town

The map places the hostel in the Border Counties group with Galashiels, Peebles and Kelso.

What the two records give is a place and a population, and no more: no street, no operator, no opening or closing date. The town, the trade and the year of the scheme are the frame around them.