The Visitors' Hostel, Havre

     The Hostel was opened on January 21st 1918 at No.11 Rue de Normandie with a V.A.D. Staff consisting of a Superintendent, three house members and a Red Cross Orderly. The first V.A.D. Area Commandant for the Havre area took up her residence there. Later on, another V.A.D. was added to the staff and at the time of closing the Hostel, the Area Commandant had an office staff, which included an Assistant Commandant, two secretaries and a motor driver.
The house was very well situated for a traveller’s hostel, being on the tram line both for station and boat – the little garden was a great addition to the house and also very useful when there were forty people to entertain in a dining-room which only held twenty-eight – the house very often proving itself quite too small for the visitors to it.

     The Hostel answered many purposes. It was Headquarters for all the V.A.D.s in the Havre and Trouville area, and those passing through to other areas. It took in any relatives of wounded coming to visit in Havre, provided meals and also accommodation for the night for almost any kind of worker passing through Havre. The V.A.D. drivers from Etretat and Trouville also used it constantly as a resting-place. Workers under the French Red Cross, Scottish Women’s Hospitals, Serbian Relief Fund, French Army, Royal Australian Navy and American Red Cross and many other societies from Salonika, Italy, Egypt, Malta, North Africa and Corsica etc., all passed through the Hostel, the arrangement being that other than B.R.C.S. personnel should contribute to the donation box. This also applied to such travellers as a party of nineteen Russian doctors and nurses en route from Paris to Moscow via America, interned prisoners of war, men and women, returning from Austria and Switzerland, and Serbian children going to be educated in England. In the early summer of 1918, parties of relations going to visit the interned prisoners of war in Switzerland used to pass through till this was discontinued.

     The Hostel, it was hoped, fulfilled a great want in taking in travellers when the boat did not leave for England, or when it suddenly left earlier, before the boat train arrived. To take one evening as an instance – eighteen travellers were held up for all of whom the Hostel found billets. They consisted of six V.A.D.s from Salonica, one relative of wounded, three members of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, five French Red Cross workers, two Church Army workers, one Serbian Relief Fund worker and one Scottish Women’s Hospital worker. A mattress on the floor was most thankfully received as the Hostels were full to overflowing.

     The highest number of meals given in a week to visitors was 590, from a beginning of 93 in the second week of the Hostel’s life. In April 1918 the Hostel had one of its busiest times, sixty-five General Service members arriving at 3 a.m. one night, followed by nearly fifty more in two days. In the early Spring of 1919, the Canadian authorities in Havre asked the Red Cross if use could be made of the Hostel by the French or Belgian wives of the Canadian soldiers passing through en route for Canada. This was accordingly arranged, and between March 10th and May 10th, the day the Hostel shut its doors, nearly 200 women passed through. The Red Cross suffered no expense as transport was arranged for, and very good rations were allowed for by the Canadians. The ‘wives’ were a very pleasant set of visitors, always willing to help with the work of the house, and very grateful for all that was done for them.

     In September 1918, billets were found for several of the staff in a neighbouring house, which was a great relief to the Hostel, as the sitting rooms had constantly to be used for putting up people at night – the Hostel’s aim and object being if possible never to refuse or turn away anyone. The presence of the V.A.D. Area Commandant in the Hostel was a great boon, as her help and advice added greatly to the right working of it. It is hoped the Hostel proved to be to the travellers what was once suggested as a name for it – The Traveller’s Joy.