Human Cargoes
The Isle of Man sent the best of its ships to the Dunkirk evacuation, bringing out 24,669 troops and losing three ships in the process. So one man in every fourteen who escaped from Dunkirk reached England in a Manx boat.
On the civilian front the frantic effort continued to equip the island for a chain of internment camps. The peacetime airfield was already being converted into a training base for the air arm of the Royal Navy, and two RAF stations were being built in the north of the island. The barbed wire slowly became the symbol of war from the Ayres in the north down to Port St Mary in the south-west.
All through the final days of May the daily sailings from Liverpool brought more and more German women to the island, laconically listed as ‘females’ in the sailing-sheets of the Steam Packet Company. Then, on the following Tuesday, 4 June, the old Victoria sailed out from Liverpool, put in to Douglas and then went on to Ramsey, where it discharged its cargo of 401 internees; more men for Mooragh.
Three days later nearly 300 more German and Austrian women were brought over by the Snaefell to be entrained to Port Erin and Port St Mary, known in the records as Rushen Camp, that being the name of the sheading or district in which the two villages were situated.
Within days two more camps for men were opened in Douglas. The Rushen Castle brought 1,003 internees on Tuesday, 11 June, the Victoria 200 men on the Thursday and 302 more on the Saturday. The Rushen Castle came from Liverpool on Friday with 1,010 men, turned round in the night, went back to the Mersey and reached Douglas once more on the Saturday afternoon with another 1,009. The men from these ships were drafted into the Onchan and Central camps, 1,200 in Onchan and nearly 1,000 in Central.
Onchan was the first camp in the Douglas area, and it had a sharp identity of its own. Its character was to change as the war developed but its basic structure remained unaltered, until it closed for the second and final time in November 1944. It consisted of sixty houses on a headland overlooking the sea, immediately beyond the northern end of the Douglas promenade. The site dominated the small electric railway terminal at sea-level below it, and looked down over Derby Castle. The wire enclosed parts of four roads, some of them with magnificent views of Douglas Bay. Eight houses in one road had four or five bedrooms, but most of the remainder had nine and two had sixteen; one even had thirty-two. It was boarding-house property of a superior Edwardian or late-Victorian type, and in view of its size and the fact that it had taken in land which included a football pitch and tennis courts, Onchan could reasonably have been regarded as the ‘best’ male internment camp on the island.
Central, which was opened within a few days of Onchan, was a much smaller and more concentrated unit, situated in thirty-four houses directly behind the Central Promenade roughly in the middle of the indented crescent of the bay. It held 2,000 men by the end of June, but inside ten months it had been emptied, and afterwards became an RAF station.
Within days in mid-June the number of male internees in the island virtually doubled, from 3,403 to 6,091. On Saturday, 22 June, the Victoria arrived from Liverpool with 193 men, and the Rushen Castle came in with 1,197 aliens, guarded by two officers and 75 other ranks. These men went quickly through the short police precautions required by the Manx authorities and were transferred at once to the new Palace Camp, which by the following week had become the most crowded of them all. This was situated in a prime position on the terrace over the main seafront; the small cliff that climbed behind it in picturesque fashion led up to the area known as Little Switzerland. Above was the Falcon Cliff Hotel, overlooking much of the town; it was to play an important part in the life of the island’s internees, for it was soon turned into their main hospital.
The camp consisted of twenty-eight houses above the front; they were sizeable private hotels or large boarding-houses, and by the end of June their number of internees had risen to 2,906, a figure from which it declined week by week. At the end of that month, too, the number of men held in the various Manx camps was more than 7,500.
Steadily the island’s complex population mounted. Every incoming sailing brought with it servicemen, of whom a small number were for camp duties, but many more were for training; some were attached to administration departments now being transferred from the mainland; a few were on light duties after the rigours of the retreat in France. Naval personnel ranged from boy trainees and bandsmen to specialists undergoing secret training in new weaponry. Officers and other ranks of the RAF arrived to man and guard the two new flying-stations.
Most ships now brought in more and yet more internees. The Metropole Camp, mainly for Italians, opened in the first week of July, followed by Hutchinson. Both these were to stay open until 1944. Metropole, like Central and Palace, was on the front at Douglas, on the northern end of the promenade. It opened with 743 inmates, the number rising for a few months and dropping to below 650 by the end of the year.
The crew of the SS Marzocco were perhaps lucky. Had they reached the Isle of Man in the last hectic fortnight of June 1940, they would have been sent to Central or Palace Camp, which were both overcrowded. Mooragh and Onchan, the only other male camps open, were for Germans. But the crew came to Douglas in the first draft for the Metropole.
The men were still able to establish themselves as a unit. They were posted to the same house: Captain Marini was automatically appointed their house leader.
Giovanni Moneta took on the job of the daily food collection, drawing the rations from the camp’s stores and sometimes cooking the meals. The men soon felt the absence of the pasta that they normally ate daily, but they were allowed to draw the flour and cook their own, so it soon appeared on the menu, and the crew were, if not happy, at least reasonably fed. The sea was right at the other side of the wire, the wind had a tang in it, and this was a very different life from Peterhead or Edinburgh Castle.
Dr Hermann Scholz was not so lucky; he was still at Huyton, a raucous community with a vehement Nazi element and a lot of internal bullying, a camp in which German seamen set up a system of discipline with which they dominated minority sections of the camp. The young doctor paid little attention. He shared a tent for two with three other inmates and did what he could to help the meagre medical service.
He was on the way to the Isle of Man. But as the weeks drifted into months and he still remained in the camp, with its unmade roads and its autumnal puddles, he realized that for him Huyton was not just a transit camp.
Hutchinson, where Scholz was eventually to languish, was behind the front promenade and took its name from a square of houses off Broadway, a road that wound upwards from the seafront to the back of the town. It opened in the second week of July with 415 internees, almost all German or Austrian. The figure jumped to 1,205 by the end of the month.
There was one more major camp to be opened. Peel was in many ways the most interesting of all, for it was eventually to contain the detainees, the men who ranked as a real danger. Many would come not from transit camps on the mainland but from prisons such as Brixton in London and Walton in Liverpool, in which some of them had been placed from the start for security reasons. Peel inmates would be the men who would be most likely to give any trouble. The camp started quietly enough, with ordinary internees, and at first it attracted little attention. It was not until months later that the Fascists and the trouble-makers were sent over from England.
The Manx newspapers were normally very free with their news about the island, and they did not hesitate to report on the camps. But the start at Peel, which was later to occupy so many sensational columns, went largely unrecorded. The island already had six camps, or seven counting the women in Rushen, so what appeared to be a rather small one over in Peel was hardly news. The first reference to the new camp was an entry, on 1 August, 1940, in the sailing-sheet of the Steam Packet Company. Against the Ben-my-Chree were the words: ‘L to D 2.30 p.m. Internees: 520 for Peel.’ But the sailing-sheet was circulated privately.
This brought the number of male internees in the Manx camps at the start of August to approximately 9,700.
The figure was to be exceeded on 8 August, when it was 10,024, the highest total it ever reached. This, with the camp at Port Erin where there were approaching 4,000 women and children, gives a maximum total of about 14,000.
The figure of 10,024 may be taken as accurate; it comes from the surviving records in the Manx Museum of the Internment Camps Division of the local government offices. The men’s total had been 9,761 on 3 August and 9,988 on 10 August, after which it declined steadily. The estimate of the maximum number of women in the south of the island is approximate. On the last day of 1940 local records showed 3,134 along with four males in the Rushen area and added that 849 had already been released. This makes it reasonable to put the maximum all-island figure at any one time as no higher than 14,000. Larger figures have been suggested; Manx records do not support them.
It was by no means a one-way traffic. A trickle of releases had started from the very beginning as individual cases were examined, and men—usually wanted on important war work—were sent back to the mainland. Sometimes internees were released by transfer; the day before the Ben-my-Chree brought the first arrivals for Peel, the same ship returned 250 aliens on its outward voyage to Liverpool. A month earlier the Tynwald, back temporarily from outstanding war service at Dunkirk, had left Douglas for Glasgow carrying 1,200 internees, presumably to be trans-shipped to one of the Dominions, where many of them spent the war. Some were known to be on the Arandora Star and were lost.
Other camps were planned for men on the island, but they were short-lived. The Granville and the Regent were on the Douglas front, at the southern end near the harbour. They were eventually taken over by the Royal Navy and became HMS Valkyrie, a shore training establishment. Granville lasted a year from October 1940. It had an establishment for 750 inmates but only briefly approached that figure. Regent had an allocation for 700 internees; it appears never to have had any at all. Falcon Camp, above Palace Camp, was also surplus to requirements. It is likely that Regent and Falcon were groups of properties commandeered in the emergency before the internment policy was modified in July. The Sefton was a camp for only a few months; it was created late in 1940 and had vanished from the list by March 1941. It was a prime site, surrounding an hotel on the front.
Ignoring Regent and Falcon, there were in all nine camps for men on the Isle of Man: Mooragh at Ramsey, Peveril at Peel, Onchan just outside the town boundary of Douglas, and six in Douglas itself, of which Central, Palace, Metropole and Hutchinson were the largest, with Granville and Sefton the smallest. To these must be added Rushen, the sheading in which Port St Mary and Port Erin are situated. Here were the women’s and later the married camps which for administration purposes ranked as one, making ten units in all.