Women’s Voices – Mavis Campbell (née Calderwood)

One of five children born to British couple Young Alexander Calderwood and Jessica Maitland-Gibson, Mavis Campbell lived in Hughesovka during her early childhood after being born there in 1910. Her parents moved to the town in 1906 to work for the company and the family stayed until July 1917 when the dangers of the Bolshevik revolution forced them to flee. Upon their first attempt to leave, the town’s police arrived and accused Mr. Calderwood of stealing money from the works. Upon his refusal of the claims, it became clear the town was attempting to stop their chief engineer from leaving. When the family finally did get away, they arrived at the train station only to have find their train was delayed by 24 hours. Upon their eventual departure they spent 9 days in the corridors of a cramped carriage bound for St Petersburg.

They spent 3 weeks in Petrograd confined to two small rooms that were riddled with bugs. Mavis recalled waking one morning to find that she could not open her eyes due to being bitten so intensely during the night by the infestation. Every morning at 6am she and her brother would head to a bakery with their bread tickets in the hopes of getting food for their family. The bakery’s kitchen was unsanitary and during this time their youngest brother Robert became very ill with bronchitis and began to starve to death.

Finally, at 3am one morning the police arrived with their papers, claiming that if they valued their lives they would be on 4am train to Finland. As the families left, “revolutionaries began dragging people out of their homes and killing them in the streets… the streets running with blood”.

The escape route ran through Finland, Sweden and Norway to Bergen and a converted cattle ship “smelling of carbolic” bound for Aberdeen. Two ships sailed; one was sunk by a submarine. In Britain, a family arrived with almost no money; a call to relatives in Ayrshire brought help. Others told similar stories: narrow escapes, scattered possessions and, at the end, the hard work of starting again.