The First Manx Camps
First official news that an internment camp would be created in the Isle of Man had been given the Manx in the local newspapers back in mid-May 1940. It was to be formed immediately, based on the Mooragh Promenade in Ramsey.
It would not be of huts as was Knockaloe in the 1914 war. In all, thirty houses were requisitioned and the occupants were ordered to get out by the end of the week. A promenade of small hotels and boarding-houses, ending with a miniature golf course, was to be enclosed by two rings of barbed wire fencing. Householders must leave their furniture but take personal belongings.
One of the island’s leading newspapers, the Mona’s Herald, greeted the internment scheme: it was a ‘welcome indication’ that at long last a move was being made towards replacing ‘something of the losses entailed in the cessation of the visiting industry’. The tourists, it seemed, had disappeared; long live the replacements. The writer also pointed out that the island had a ‘superfluity of milk and soon home-grown potatoes would be on the market’.
Things were on the move at last. The island people were having a thin time, a result of their semi-isolation. They manned no heavy industry, they made no munitions; they worked production lines that ended up as potatoes, not aircraft. Internment camps would mean some sort of work for many islanders.
And so it was. The Government Secretary advertised for chief storekeepers, chief clerks and male clerk-typists. All candidates had to be more than forty-one years old unless they had been rejected for military service.
Tenders were invited for a daily delivery of 500 pounds of bread, 240 pounds of meat on each of five days a week, 40 gallons of milk a day, and further tenders for potatoes, jam and sugar. Condiments and such items were required in lots of five hundredweights. All this for the Mooragh Camp.
On 21 May it was reported that the occupants along the promenade had now vacated the premises; they boarded themselves with the relatives and friends who were so numerous amongst the extended families on the Island. The furniture left had been valued, and pieces of rare or sentimental value had been removed by official permission. Beds used personally could be taken and second-hand ones substituted. Such was the local demand for used beds that they suddenly became almost unobtainable.
The activity at the northern extremity of Ramsey was intense; the hammering of pneumatic drills, a rare sound in those parts, disturbed the peace and brought sightseers to the town.
Hundreds of miles away at Dunkirk there was a hammering of a far more deadly sort. The Manx, in common with the rest of the King’s subjects, listened with foreboding to the news. They were suddenly urged to carry their identity cards at all times.
The first sign of things to come was the arrival in Ramsey of the Steam Packet’s ship Rushen Castle, with 150 troops and ten officers of the Royal Welch Fusiliers. They were the advance party, the men who were to be the military guard at the camp.
The first contingent of internees arrived the next day, on Monday evening, 27 May. They landed at Ramsey from the Belgian cross-Channel vessel the Princess Josephine Charlotte, a steamer of 1,140 tons, Master H. Aspislorch, which had brought them from Liverpool. The ship had been in Ostend harbour when the Low Countries were being overrun, and the collapsing regime in Brussels had ordered her to load with refugees and steam to Britain. This she did, arriving at Dover. There most of her crew and passengers were taken for investigation while the ship was ordered to Liverpool. She made several trips taking parties of aliens to internment.
Those were desperate days. The British authorities were taking no chances. Nothing could be taken at face value; an enemy alien could be a fifth columnist, an enemy agent or a saboteur. Equally, he could be a peaceful citizen, and most likely was. But the extremity of events justified drastic precautions; so said most official opinion.
In all 823 men reached the Isle of Man on that pleasant late spring evening. The youngest were schoolboys in shorts; only a few appeared to be anywhere near the age limit of sixty. The twenty-five to thirty-five age group predominated. As they came ashore on Ramsey’s iron pier, they carried suitcases, small hand-luggage, parcels or even bundles on their backs. Once off the ship they were allowed to put heavier baggage on trolleys, and a number of men pushed the loads to the end of the pier. One internee was holding his portable typewriter while another carried his fishing-rod.
They were a mixed lot; some were poorly dressed and wore canvas shoes; others were well dressed and confident. One was leading his dog. They had been brought across under an armed guard, who disembarked first and were posted at intervals along the pier. It took an hour to complete the disembarkation, watched by a silent crowd who were kept at a distance by the police.
The onlookers noticed with interest that almost all the internees carried gas masks. These had not been generally issued on the island.
The Ramsey Courier reported that after ‘a lengthy period of waiting’ an officer appeared and called out: ‘Can anyone speak English?’ There was a general chorus that they could. The men were then ordered to march slowly to the camp and keep in a compact body. Accompanied by the armed guard, they were then taken along the promenade to the quay and over the swing bridge to the Mooragh.
The column, many whistling, made the short march or walk to the camp, where they were allotted to the various houses and given food. The military guard was already mounted. The sentries patrolled the boundaries of the compound. The gates closed; the camp itself was not to close until the summer of 1945, after the war in Europe had ended.
The Ramsey sightseers slowly dispersed, having watched the first aliens arrive. They were not allowed to loiter near the camp in the years ahead.
Only officials who met the ship would have been near enough to the pierhead to have heard what was surely one of the strangest orders ever issued by a British infantry officer. His rank and identity are not known. With troops he would have been at his ease, knowing precisely what to order and how to order it. Such was his training. But a large assortment of civilians, the fit and the frail, the middle-aged and the young, the rich and the poor, was different. They needed to be sorted out into some semblance of order, as required by the military mind.
The local paper later assured its readers that the officer carried out his work in a business-like manner and that his ‘frequently repeated exhortation had the desired effect’.
He did not order ‘Quick march,’ nor did he yell out ‘Get a move on.
According to the report, his command was perhaps unique in the modern history of the British Army:
‘Now, please get going.’
By the time Mooragh opened, authority was working at speed, not only on the mainland but on the island. Even as the first internees to be sent over—mainly B-category men recently collected—were looking around bewildered at Ramsey, it became known that another camp was being created on and behind the Central Promenade in Douglas. It would comprise forty or more houses, and the occupiers were to be out by 4 June.
The orders to householders were abrupt. They had to quit by 31 May. The arrangements were the same as had applied in Ramsey—the Manx Government would pay the rent and rates and make good any damage. The question of compensation would be considered later.
Suddenly it became known that 3,500 women were to be interned on the island and that the whole of Port Erin, a residential and holiday village on the west coast, had been taken over, along with its smaller neighbour Port St Mary. It was expected that the first batch would arrive that week.
The Manx Government Office said the women would not be restricted behind barbed wire, as in the male camps. Nor would boarding-house keepers and householders have to leave home; the arrivals would be billetees and would be catered for in the manner of ordinary holiday-makers but on a more modest scale. Such women would be able to keep their children with them.
A barrier was to be run up around the whole district, taking in a golf course, tennis courts and swimming-pool. Special precautions would make sure that the internees did not leave the confined area, and the village could only be entered by people on business or those with permission; residents would need passes to move in and out.
The Manx Government, it was revealed, had been left to organize the camp. It was a rushed job and it was decided that, until the barrier around Port Erin could be built, the roads into the village would be closed and guarded.
Meanwhile the landladies who were to billet the women would receive an allowance of £1. 1s. (£1. 5p.) a week. In modern coinage it seems derisory. Even allowing for metrication, inflation and the difference in the value of money in those days, and then granting the notorious meanness of officialdom, it seems very little. But to a seaside landlady with a house full of empty rooms it was very welcome.
The first women arrived overnight on 29 May and disembarked at Douglas from the Princess Josephine Charlotte. They started to come ashore at seven in the morning and were sent on by train across the island to Port Erin. Meanwhile the Belgian ship turned round, returned to Liverpool, picked up more women and was back again the following morning. She made one more round trip to the island by the week-end and was never again entered in the sailing-sheets of the Steam Packet Company.