Douglas was the centre of the internment camps on the Isle of Man, and of them only the Hutchinson Camp was away from the sea front. The large Onchan Camp was just outside the town boundary.
Much has been lost of the great mass of paperwork that a World War must have left behind in the Isle of Man. Demolition and rebuilding saw the shredding or disposal of many files, and Manx lore insists that much of the island’s modern social history lies at the bottom of a disused mine working, where local officialdom tended years ago to dump its papers. Since then order has been restored.
However, the archives in the library of the Manx Museum, and to a lesser extent in the attics of Douglas, still make possible a reconstruction of life on the island as it was affected by the internment camps that mushroomed up in 1940; to do this the writer has been given access to old papers of a general nature for which he is indebted to Peter Hulme, the Manx Government Secretary, and to Frank Weedon, Chief Constable. Thanks are also due to A. Marshall Cubbon, Director of the Manx Museum, and to invaluable help from Ann Harrison, Archivist and Librarian of the Museum Library.
Alan Killip, now Superintendent and Deputy Chief Constable was a police cadet at the time and gave the writer valuable help, as did R. L. Lamming FRCS and Dr Alexander McPherson; Major Edward Brownsdon, and Sydney Shimmin, respectively Life President and Managing Director of the Isle of Man Steam Packet, who enabled a search to be made of the line’s sailing-sheets; Barnet Fingerhut, who helped compile details of the Jewish internees who died on the island during the war; Rev. Denis Baggaley; J. A. Bregazzi; Mrs Millicent Faragher; Harvey Briggs; M. Moore and Mrs K. McNeil, among others.
Executives of specialized organizations who dealt with wartime internment and who contributed advice or gave material that was used in compiling the book, included David Massel, Executive Director of The Board of Deputies of British Jews; Dr Werner Rosenstock, Association of Jewish Refugees in Great Britain; Joan Stiebel, Jewish Refugees Committee; Miss M. N. Slade, Archivist, British Red Cross Society; Major E. R. Elliott, Corps Secretary, The Royal Pioneer Corps; J.-J. Indermühle, Cultural Counsellor, Swiss Embassy, London; Library of the Religious Society of Friends, London; Library of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, London; and Library of the Ministry of Defence, London.
Local people on the Isle of Man to whom thanks are due include Mrs E. W. H. Kellett; R. J. Kermeen; the late Alec Clague; Mrs Joan Herring; Walter Kennedy; Mrs E. McGhee; Ken Powell; W. E. Curphey; Leonard Fletcher; D. F. Goodyear; A, Fehle; R. D. Quine; Maurice and Mrs Scales; Egerton Cregeen and the late Mrs Cregeen; Albert Lowe; W. E. Cowley; E. Corteen; and J. G. Bell.
Italians who either had direct personal knowledge of the internment camps themselves or helped in tracing men who had been on the island include Rev. Roberto Russo of St Peter’s Italian Church, London; Caval. P. Pini; A. Cavalli; L. Demascio; Pietro Zinelli; Giuseppe Servini; and, of course, G. Maneta. Mrs J. Encke of Heidelberg was also helpful, as was Dr Hermann Scholz of Berlin.
Dr John Milner, of the Department of Fine Art, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, gave details of the portrait painted by Karl Schwitters of his fellow artist Fred Uhlman during their internment in Hutchinson Camp, and sanctioned its reproduction. Mr Uhlman gave permission for an extract from his book The Making of an Englishman. Alick J. Leggat, the art collector, researched the records of the German artists interned in Onchan Camp, and Gracia Cullen helped to trace the careers of a number of musicians interned on the island. Specialized information on camp ‘money’ was supplied by Hilary Guard and E. Quarmby.
A number of books have been written on the general subject of the internment of aliens during the Second World War. The first of them was The Internment of Aliens by F. Lafitte, published by Penguin back in 1940/41. Two others on the subject are Collar the Lot by Peter and Leni Gillman (Quartet Books) and A Bespattered Page by Ronald Stent (Deutsch). These deal with the political and ethical aspects of internment as a whole. Mr Stent, an academic who was interned in Hutchinson Camp and was then released to join the Pioneer Corps, ended the war as a Major on the General Staff at Delhi. A detailed profile of Peter Schidlof, the instrumentalist, written by Margaret Campbell, appeared in The Strad magazine of August 1983.
A book written after his retirement by B. E. Sargeaunt, The Military History of the Isle of Man (Buncle, Arbroath, 1947), deals with the Knockaloe Camp on the island in the First World War, with the internment camps of 1940 and with the Manx military effort generally.
The Manx are ardent newspaper-readers and have remained so for the best part of two centuries. The newspaper, printed, photographic and manuscript collections in the Museum at Douglas go back to the Manx Mercury in 1798. A century later, a small island with a population of little more than 40,000 at the time, was producing seven local newspapers, one of which was for some years a daily. At the start of World War II the local newspapers included the Mona’s Herald, the Isle of Man Times, the Isle of Man Examiner, the Ramsey Courier and the Peel City Guardian, all of which are in the Museum archives, the Mona’s Herald being on microfilm.
A less detailed and more recent collection of Manx source material is in the Tynwald Library, in the Government Buildings, in Douglas. This deals primarily with Manx Government publications. Collections of Manx official Standing Orders are to be found in full in the Museum and Tynwald Libraries.
Two major acknowledgements remain. The first is to Arthur Hawkey, for years Lobby Correspondent of the London Standard, who gave up much time for nothing more than friendship, checking dates and facts and supplying useful background material.
Lastly, the writer records the great help of his wife Joan, who played a major part in a research lasting some months and who took tireless notes of literally dozens of interviews. Without her the book would not and could not have been written.
Douglas was the centre of the internment camps on the Isle of Man, and of them only the Hutchinson Camp was away from the sea front. The large Onchan Camp was just outside the town boundary.
Sketch map by P. D. Lloyd-Davies