One of the great pleasures of wasting an idle hour looking at archive film is the electric jolt of surprise that causes you to fall off your chair.
In my case it was this clip of around 100 female Polish soldiers drilling somewhere in Scotland in 1943. It is silent, black and white, a bit long for a short at 11 minutes, and nothing to tell you where or why someone bothered to film them in the first place.
The first clue was in the name “Marine Hotel” at the side of the building where the women flock to at the end of the parade. Beryl Robinson’s very good history of the building shows that it is now the Scottish Fire Services College and is pinpointed here by the Britain from Above project.
The Marine was requisitioned at the start of the war as was Greywalls Hotel and Archerfield House, either of which could have been the starting point for the march.
They then move to the sand dunes and the beach via the same route we use today. It looks better in colour and should be familiar to those who saw all the aerial shots of this year’s British Open at Muirfield. There is much more buckthorn now.
The film is unusual in that it shows women soldiers. It is extraordinary because it shows them as individuals in detailed close up. It seems likely they were PWSK support troops gaining basic combat training.
They look like they’re having fun playing soldiers in the sand dunes. No live firing apart from the occasional smoke bomb. But it might well have been for real. Polish troops were deployed en masse in Scotland for a reason. If a Nazi invasion had materialised, much of the blood spilled to defend Scotland would have been Polish blood. This contribution is recognised in the Great Scottish Tapestry:
Three Polish airmen were killed fighting fires during the Clydebank blitz in 1941 when the sailors on the Polish destroyer Piorun delivered constant barrages of anti-aircraft fire.
As the war progressed, Polish troops trained in Scotland formed the armoured spearhead which routed German tank formations at Falaise, the key battle of Normandy. Sosabowski’s parachute brigade played a prominent role in the ill-fated assault on Arnhem.
In later years the relationship soured. Stalin continued to deny the horrendous Soviet massacre of Poland’s military and civilian élite at Katyn and he resisted British offers of help to relieve the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. This was crowned by the biggest betrayal in the eyes of many Poles – Churchill’s ceding of Poland to Soviet influence at the Yalta conference.
So this drill and day out at seaside marks the end of an era of innocence. Curiously, Gullane beach also had another reminder from October 1939 when chivalry was still alive. Spitfires from nearby Drem and Turnhouse shot down the first German raiders over British airspace. The sailors and airmen from both sides were buried with full military honours as British Pathé recorded.
The wreckage from one of the Luftwaffe aircraft was buried in the Gullane dunes and lay there for nearly 60 years before being recovered.
A fishing boat rescued the survivors including Uberleutnant Sigmund Storp who gave the skipper his gold ring for saving his life. Their families later became friends. British Pathé and other newsreels recreated this a few days later, wrongly moving the site of the ditching westwards from Gullane to Port Seton.
Most of the Polish troops in Britain were of course men. Another Pathé film, more typical of the propaganda effort to boost morale, shows them in dancing mode.
This account of the Polish women soldiers in Gullane is necessarily incomplete so please leave a comment below if you can shed further light. There will be many mothers and grannies within its frames……
Update
Hooray! Many thanks to filmmaker and historian Marianna Bukowski for identifying the actual film made from the Gullane footage. Stirring martial music encourages women to join up. It is much shorter for the edit – out goes the Marine Hotel but one of the cameramen (there must have been two) stays in. From his uniform, he might be American. By 1943 the USA was the lead player in Allied propaganda films with plenty of ideas, people and equipment.
It is on the VWojtekSolidierBear YouTube channel which has a great range of similar clips, including some of Polish WAAFs, and Polish soldiers at a camp in Scotland in 1940 in which the commentator places Glasgow in England!
The film has now also received some coverage on the BBC.
Further reading
From Golfers to Firefighters…where hope is unbroken: the story of Gullane’s Marine Hotel transformed to the Scottish Fire Services College by Beryl Robinson, Gullane and Dirleton History Society, 2005. The Fire College is now facing closure.
For more falling-off-the-chair moments, please see my post on the British Pathé blog
Time for scran in the Marine Hotel
Categories: digital history, gems from the archive, history on the web
The History Company 
Great piece!
Interesting piece on Polish women soldiers in Scotland. The pictures are worth a thousand words and encourage further study into that period and place!
J. J. Styles
It’s great when I find pieces about Polish soldiers during World War II outside of Poland, especially if they’re about women soldiers (it’s sadly a widely overlooked and underappreciated part of history).
But, I just wanted to ask what you meant exactly when you wrote “They look like they’re having fun playing soldiers in the sand dunes.”? The training undergone by the volunteer women of the PSK was quite real. Although they were a non-combat auxiliary service (as nearly all women’s military services were during that time), they were still expected to know how to use basic weapons (mostly rifles and light machine guns, grenades, smoke grenades, etc), trained in basic maneuvers and drilled just like any other soldier. The film depicts something that was very far from just “playing war”.
Thank you, Oliwia
You make a fair point. The reality of war is always grim. Soldiers tend to make whatever they can of rare opportunities for a bit of humour or fun.
It is abundantly clear that these PSK soldiers enjoyed this training exercise and being filmed. That is what makes this footage so extraordinary. Who knows what they faced the next day or in the future…..
My Dad never forgave Churchill for what he saw as a betrayal of the Polish to the Russians. My Dad never returned to Poland but remained free and became a Naturalised British Citizen. He died before the end of the Cold War. He served with the Polish Commandos during the War and fought alongside Allied Forces at Anzio and Monte Cassino amongst other places
Fascinating, we had two thousand of these troops plus Wojtek on our farm in Berwickshire until 1947.
Thanks, Aileen – must have been a busy farm then!
It was commandeered as DP camp, but it was formally RAF station for Winfield Aerodrome, then returned to farm in 1948.
Didn’t know anything about this despite living just down the road from here from 1955 until 1960,(dragged kicking and screaming off to Edinburgh to live). My dad trained at the fire school after he came out of the navy.
So good to see the beach as I remember it. I used to have a .303 bullet so someone had live ammunition down there.
Thanks for posting this.
Thanks, Dave. Glad you liked it.
Reblogged this on recherchenorthcote and commented:
Fascinating , thank you
Excellent work!
I am about to embark on producing a website with before and after photos of polish troops in notable locations in scotland and invite anyone with photos to pass them to me for inclusion. josephwsmith@hotmail.com
We have a lot of Thanks to many Polish people who made sacrifices that helped gain our freedom, Black Barony Eddleston, in 1942 became a headquarters for Polish Higher Military and was used for staff officer training to help the British-Polish Army, from this base General Stanislaw Maczek helped to train and organize a Polish Tank division they where “instrumental in the Allied liberation of France, closing the Falaise pocket, resulting in the destruction of 14 German Wehrmacht and SS divisions” 2018 A remembrance statue honoring the Polish war hero was erected outside the City Chambers in the Royal Mile.
After the war years Maczek lived in Edinburgh, and to pay the bills he was employed as a humble Barman at the Learmonth Hotel, on his time off he with his family would often take a trip down to Eddleston and stay at the Black Barony, where he was guest of honor to Black Barony’s Polish owner Jan Tomasik, a sergeant in the 1st Armoured Division, Tomasik himself often worked behind the Bar & was instantly recognizable with a black patch over his eye, during his time at the Barony Jan helped create The Great Polish Map of Scotland and can be found today in the gardens of Barony hotel, having fallen into a state, money was raised to help give the map a new life, the Map is a large 50 m x 40 m three-dimensional, outdoor concrete scale model of Scotland. Douglas in Lanarkshire has a similar feature of a Map of Poland, created by Polish soldiers when stationed there.
One last twist to this remarkable tale is the name Maczek, which in Polish itself means Poppy/Poppy Seed……a subtle nudge and wink to us All.
Thanks for this. I have a confession. Some 30 years ago as a Herald reporter, I was sent to inform General Maczek that the Warsaw Government had belatedly offered him a public apology. I knocked on his door with no response but he apparently mistook me for a an unwelcome Polish official. A great pity… I would love to have interviewed him.
Fascinating piece of local WW11 history.
Archerfield House and Greywalls are mentioned, as well as Gullane‘s Marine Hotel, but not the Queens Hotel in Gullane. I understood that it served as accommodation for Polish pilots stationed at Drem. Does anyone have any information on this.