Wilton Hostel, Hawick

The camp above Wilton Hill

Aerial photographs taken by the RAF on 9 July 1947 show at least 44 Nissen huts and two other buildings on the slopes above Wilton Hill road. Historic Environment Scotland classifies the site as a twentieth-century military camp, records it as NT51NW 102 centred NT 5055 1560, also known as Silverbuthall, notes that the purpose of the camp was not known to its compiler, and identifies its later setting as the Police Station, Howdenbank and Harden Place.

Scott places the camp in a couple of fields between Wilton Manse and the main A7, and says it may also have been referred to as Wilton Hill Camp. His account dates British military occupation to about 1939, with conversion to prisoner accommodation within a year. The archaeological record documents the buildings but does not itself identify their occupants.

Prisoners and local connections

Scott describes an open camp, with most of the prisoners leaving during the day to work on local farms and Captain Sewell originally placed in charge. He records around 200 German prisoners in 1946, alongside Italians and others, and perhaps as many as 600 occupants at the maximum. These are prisoner-phase approximations, not a Ukrainian hostel census.

The Reverend Walter Macfarlane Calderwood, born in Edinburgh in 1908, ordained minister of St Mary’s Kirk in Hawick from 1934 to 1954 and later minister at the Foreman Church in Leven, served as pastor to the prisoners of war in Wilton Camp. That pastoral connection belongs to the prisoner phase; it does not establish the form of worship in the later Ukrainian hostel.

From prisoners to displaced workers

According to Scott, most prisoners departed in 1948, while some remained locally and a few stayed to help build the town’s prefabricated houses. The camp was then used to house people displaced by the war and European Voluntary Workers. Kormylo’s directory supplies the specifically Ukrainian connection within that postwar accommodation history.

What being a European Voluntary Worker meant

The scheme that brought Ukrainians to hostels like Wilton was Westward Ho!, launched by the British government in 1946 and the largest of its recruitment programmes. Recruitment in the camps of Germany and Austria began in the spring of 1947, and Ukrainians were among the first nationalities sought. In all 20,912 Ukrainians came to the United Kingdom as European Voluntary Workers — 16,194 men and 4,718 women — together with 411 adult dependants and 451 children, most of them arriving between the middle of 1947 and the middle of 1948, with the last in 1949.

Recruits were interviewed and medically inspected, and signed an undertaking to work only as the Ministry of Labour directed and not to change employer without permission. They were paid the same wages as British workers and employed on the same terms, but the direction of labour was real: the men went principally into agriculture, which took 52 per cent of them, coal mining, which took 19 per cent, and domestic service, while the women went into cotton mills, domestic service and woollen mills. Only from 1 January 1951 could an EVW who had been in the country three years apply to be released from the restriction on choosing an employer.

Hostels were sited near the work, and Hawick is a woollen and knitwear town. In the autumn of 1948 the number of Ukrainian EVWs grew again when most of the 8,500 former soldiers of the Galicia Division brought to Britain in 1947 were released from prisoner-of-war status and taken into the scheme, so that a hostel might hold both civilian recruits and former prisoners. Camps and hostels passed from the War Office to civilian bodies — the National Assistance Board, the National Service Hostels Corporation, the Ministry of Agriculture and local authorities — and most had closed by the middle of the 1950s.

The Borders cluster

Wilton was not isolated. Kormylo’s directory places seven hostels in the Borders and just over the line: Victoria Park at Peebles, Thorneycroft at Selkirk, Burnbrae at Galashiels, the ICI hostel at St Boswells, Springwood at Kelso, Winfield Camp at Berwick-upon-Tweed and Wilton at Hawick. They stood in and around the towns of the woollen trade.

What that meant for the people in them can be heard in one of Kormylo’s interviews, describing the family’s arrival at Galashiels: it was to do with the textile industry, it was all woollen mills, the mother was a weaver, Selkirk and Galashiels were all tweed and cloth weaving, and most of the Ukrainians in Galashiels also worked in those mills — some of them known to the father from the camp in Germany.

Dispersal, and Howdenbank after the camp

When the labour contracts had run their course the Ukrainians moved on. Kormylo describes the closure of the Scottish camps and hostels in the early 1950s, with chain migration to the textile towns of England, further contracts elsewhere in Scotland, and onward emigration to North America. The vellum presented to Archbishop Gordon Gray on 14 August 1960, which records the formal Ukrainian township communities then existing in Scotland, names Grangemouth, Galashiels, Annan, Dumfries, Haddington, Perth, Easthouses, Edinburgh, Dundee, Dalkeith, Glasgow, Lockerbie, Carlisle, Tranent and Dunbar. In the Borders the community that lasted was at Galashiels.

The land at Howdenbank was afterwards used for allotments before the police station was built in 1964. Scott also locates the later fire station within the former camp setting, and records that the site of the Katharine Elliot Centre, built by Borders Regional Council in 1973 and named after Dame Katharine Elliot of Harwood, had been allotments and before that the site of Nissen huts housing prisoners of war. The street named Howdenbank was built in 1965 as the eastern addition to the Silverbuthall housing scheme, and Harden Place followed in 1967.

Walter Baxter’s photograph of 5 April 2008 shows the fire station opposite the police headquarters. It illustrates redevelopment of the area, rather than a surviving camp hut. The original aerial photographs remain the more direct record of the vanished accommodation.