Camp Newspapers
Nothing revealed the feelings of the internees and the life they shared together more clearly than the newspapers produced in the Manx camps. The first, the most widely circulated and the longest lasting was the Onchan Pioneer.
There were others. Legend indeed maintains that most units had their own papers. This is possible, but highly unlikely, and we know only of two other papers apart from Onchan’s. No trace has been found of the Mooragh Times which was said to have been printed entirely in German and which, if it existed at all, must have related to the early days of internment; nor has a camp newspaper been traced in Peel, which did, however, have a curious publication, the Peveril Guardsman, intended not for the detainees but for the troops who guarded them. Port Erin was said to have had its own paper, the Awful Times. No copy was ever traced, and from the first it seemed very improbable that women whose common language was German would have chosen a sardonic English pun for a title. The belief persisted, but the files show that the Awful Times was a joke perpetrated by an ex-internee in a letter to the Onchan Pioneer some time after her release from the island.
However, in addition to the Onchan Pioneer two other camp papers have survived, the Sefton Review and The Camp, which was published in Hutchinson; they were probably the only three ever produced.
The first issue of the Onchan Pioneer was dated 27 July 1940, when the camp was getting on for two months old. It was almost entirely in German and consisted of six duplicated pages on poor foolscap. The front page started with a welcoming message to the paper and its readers from the Commander, Major C. R. C. Marsh, for whom the internees seem to have developed a considerable respect. A fortnight later the paper announced—in English—that the Major had been promoted and was leaving the camp. The editorial went on to report how he had ‘worked hard to alleviate hardship and improve the conditions of our internment’. It ended in boyish fashion—‘Three cheers for Major Marsh’.
This cheerful fourth-form attitude to life is reflected in issue after issue of the Pioneer, and it set the mood for the few copies remaining of the other camp publications. The Head, the prefects seemed to be saying, is a jolly decent chap. The sceptic could wonder how much of this heartiness was for external consumption, for the Pioneer had enterprise and seems to have built up a small mailing list outside the wire that surrounded it. But the desperate desire to be up and working in the war effort comes through in page after page, issue after issue, second only to the yearning for freedom and vitally linked up with it. Sometimes naïvely expressed through the words of a man who thinks in one language and writes in another, it gives a sad feeling of frustration and emptiness. ‘What is our station, Mr Churchill?’ asked a headline writer. ‘It can’t be the idleness of an internment camp.’
In its next issue the paper asks once more: ‘Has this country in its terrible struggle no use for the strength of our hearts, the ability of our brains, the might of our work?’ The plea went on, month after month, sometimes in English, sometimes in German, the sad rhetoric in which it was phrased detracting nothing from it. Adopting the old formula of the Open Letter, the Pioneer assured the Under Secretary of State for the Home Office that it had noticed with pleasure how he had acknowledged the friendly attitude of the internees in a statement he had made in the House of Commons. ‘We are and remain friends of Britain,’ it assured him, ‘deeply and sincerely attached to her and her people.’
By the end of September, when the Battle of Britain was slashing white lines across the skies of Kent, the editor assured readers, ‘Britain’s cause is our cause.’ A month later the paper was advocating an Aliens’ Labour Corps, a mobile work unit that could build shelters, take on special construction jobs and do similar non-combative work. It would not add to any unemployment problem, and it spoke of the ‘natural reluctance of British war workers to change their place of residence’.
The Pioneer took on a very serious tone in its November issues, for it had much to write about. It moved from making pleas to parading facts, publishing a statistical survey of its own internees. It analysed 803 camp members, ignoring all Onchan internees who had no calling, all students, all those who had enlisted for non-combatant Army work and all who were waiting for emigration to the United States. This exercise showed that the camp consisted of 93 graduate engineers, 347 skilled workers and craftsmen, 270 merchants, and 93 professionals, including physicians, lawyers, artists, writers, clergy and teachers. No mention of musicians, of which Onchan had many.
The categories were broken down. A surprising statement claimed that twelve of Onchan’s men had been in domestic service. No doubt these classifications could be challenged; there seems not to have been a labourer, all workers in the building industry being skilled; fifteen clerical workers were listed, presumably ranking as skilled. As Joad, who was in fashion at the time, would have said: it all depends on what you mean by skilled. However, while there could be quibbles over the categories, the main message was plain: a great deal of potential talent was being wasted. The unnamed writer finished with an urgent plea: interned men could not find employment for themselves; an organization should be set up by the British authorities to include and direct internee abilities into the war effort. ‘Why not enlist our knowledge and abilities?’ he implored.
Early in December the Pioneer summarized the community work that had been done since June. The campaign to relieve monotony started with the opening of a shoemaker’s shop early in July, among many other activities. Two thousand boot repairs had been completed by the middle of November, half of them free. By the end of the year this work would be running at a rate of eighty pairs a day. The Onchan Camp’s Welfare Fund had already received £35 contributed from shoeshop receipts. Walter Mueller, who ran the shop, was already making warm winter slippers from waste.
Other shops had quickly followed. A tailor started up, doing repairs. Then came the dry cleaner’s and the barber’s shop. This last was not unexpectedly a huge success. In their first four weeks the barbers carried out 423 haircuts. Among those pioneering developments was a joiner’s shop; without it there would have been difficulty fitting out the houses where the other craftsmen were installed. Additionally, the joiners were able to build poultry-houses and rabbit-hutches, to make blackboards and stretchers and tables. The work had been started by two experienced joiners who had since taken on two young beginners. At the same time an allotment section was being built up; the gardens were well tended; the rearing of chickens, ducks and turkeys was being started. Allotments were being marked out, cut, dug and prepared for the next season.
‘It is only to be hoped that those who sow shall not harvest,’ wrote the Pioneer in its familiar tone of hopeful melancholy. Meanwhile there were encouraging signs. Men at various levels in the camp were already being released, sometimes causing sudden elections to camp offices as they fell vacant.
The paper did not deal solely with internment and its frustrations. It covered the news from the outside world, interpreting it always as it involved the plight of its own readers. It had been pleased when the Home Office was given the responsibility for managing the camps; it quoted official figures of releases and revealed that the Guardian had reported that Nazis and anti-Nazis had been put together in internment camps in Australia. The same thing, it said, could be applied to conditions at Huyton. The Jewish Chronicle was quoted as saying that 14,250 Jewish internees had been released and 7,000 were still held; this on 25 April 1941. The Pioneer’s editors appeared to be free in their inspection of the more serious, opinion-forming papers, and they made liberal use of them.
The Pioneer then gave details of Onchan’s Popular University, not perhaps as ambitious as that at Hutchinson but impressive considering the conditions. It announced an ‘internee artists’ exhibition’ to which entry would be by programme, priced 1d. It reported the first meeting with wives at Derby Castle Hotel, gave the result of camp sports meetings and reported a grand concert at Derby Castle, organized by musicians from the camp, with proceeds to welfare funds, and with the National Anthem to finish the evening.
When it wished, the Pioneer would turn to welfare matters. It campaigned for improved arrangements for daily walks for those internees who did not go in for organized games; Onchan’s recreational area, although pleasant enough, was wet and unsuitable for walking parties on rain-soaked days; walks should be organized outside the camp. Professor Otto Kestner, one of the few academics in Onchan, was a dietician of repute. He laid down that there was a protein deficiency and a lack of Vitamin A in the food. With scientific detachment he urged readers to concentrate on fish; if meat seemed inadequate, they should take ‘lots’ more bread, although, he added, ‘the bread itself is not palatable to the German taste’. But there was nothing heated about his contribution; he was not arguing that internees were being underfed; he was querying the intake of the right nourishment.
In other issues the paper appealed for books, especially scientific books, for the camp library; later it reported gleefully that the Society of Friends had donated a book-binding kit. This was installed in House 45 and was soon being used to renovate library stock.
Regularly the little journal printed letters it received from outside. Prominent people wrote and thanked the editor for the latest copy of the paper and wished it and its readers well. The occasional pound note would be attached to the letter. The Pioneer always needed money, being produced as it was in a community where a penny was important, and it was not above asking for a small sub from any sympathizer.
It made much of the achievements of its Popular University when that remarkable institute had completed six months of active life. Professor Otto Liebreich of the London School of Economics contributed an appreciation of the work done. It revealed that there were 30 different courses and that 600 students attended daily. In the first half year 4,500 classes had been held, and on average every internee had attended more than 60. Even preparations for Christmas 1940 did not stop the steady flow of learning. But Christmas was an opportunity for the internees to make seasonal contact with the outside world, even if only by post, and to make things that might earn a mite of cash. The camp authorities encouraged the design and production of Christmas cards; these were stencilled, hand coloured and even sold to the Manx public.
For its Christmas issue the Onchan Pioneer started with a seasonal letter from the Reverend John Duffield, the Vicar of Onchan, regarded by internees as the camp’s padre. Onchan was later to change to Italian inmates, whose priests settled in the Park Hotel, which became known locally as the Vatican. Where release was offered, many rabbis and priests among the internees refused it, preferring to remain and help the other inmates. From the start they had held Duffield in very high regard. In an editorial the camp journal wrote of him as a ‘real Christian’ and said that the Jews and Catholics among them could feel the warmth of his simple faith. His Christmas letter began with the words ‘Dear Friends’ and was followed by one in German contributed by an interned rabbi.
The Onchan Pioneer continued until 20 July 1941, when Issue 47 was its last. It had started almost exactly a year earlier, with six pages; it finished with fourteen, including four as a supplement, Onchan Camp Youth, a junior section originally given over to inter-camp sport.
The paper finished because Onchan was closing down for a time and the internees were being transferred to other camps. The last issue was remarkable for its tone; the men had become proud of their handiwork, and they actually resented the closing. ‘The spirit of this camp was probably the best at all possible in an internment camp,’ lamented the last editorial, which went on to say that there had been goodwill on both sides; it once again bestowed much praise on John Duffield. It ended by bemoaning the fact that the victims of Fascism would be turning over the fruits of what they had sown with their own work and money to what would be an Italian Fascist camp. They assumed they would be making way for Italians; the very thought seemed humiliating.
The Pioneer left one lasting memorial behind it: the quality of its drawings. Even after more than forty years it is impossible to look at them without realizing the deep feeling of loneliness behind almost every one of them. They are work of very high quality, from the stencil of a duplicating machine. A succession of artists contributed to the paper; some worked for it for many months. Bertram, whose work was choicely simple, making his point with the minimum of fuss, was sketching away in the Pioneer’s final number, meaning that no release was yet in sight for him. Others were luckier.
In its very last issue the paper carried a short report from London, dealing with the 1941 summer exhibition at the Royal Academy. It claimed proudly that ten ex-internees from Onchan were among the artists on show.
Certainly a number of Onchan men were no strangers to the Academy. None of them had the standing of Kurt Schwitters, who had been in Hutchinson, whose collages gave him an international reputation, and perhaps none of them attracted the respect shown to Fred Uhlman, but many of these refugee Germans whose work appeared in the Pioneer had solid standing as professional artists. Kaufman had exhibited at the Academy; Markiewicz was previously a portrait painter who had exhibited in London; Nonnenmacher made his name mainly as a sculptor, as did Elkan, whose work is in several European and American galleries. Bertram exhibited at a number of Continental galleries, his drawings fetching good prices.
The Germans who were the first internees at Onchan included not only a number of artists but several musicians, some of whom subsequently made considerable reputations for themselves. Curiously, not a single musician is listed in the statistical survey that the Onchan internees conducted among themselves; yet ephemeral papers that have survived from the camp include the programme of a ‘grand concert’, held at the Derby Castle on 8 October 1940, starting at the significantly early hour of 5.30. Among the performers named is Hans Schidlof, who later became one of the leading instrumentalists of the day and is a founder member of the Amadeus Quartet. (His full name is Hans Peter Schidlof but he dropped the Hans early in his career.)
Schidlof is in many ways typical of some thousands of internees. Born in Austria in 1922 of Jewish parents, he was sent to Britain in December 1938 to escape the clutches of Hitler’s rampant anti-Semitism. He was rounded up and interned in London when only seventeen. After a spell at Prees Heath, where he met Norbert Brainin, the Viennese who later became his colleague in the Quartet, he was sent on to Onchan, where he met Siegmund Nissel and many musicians, some already well established and others to make names in the future.
Nissel was the third Viennese in what became the Amadeus Quartet. They met the fourth member, Martin Lovett, when they were later studying under Max Rostal. The man who played the key part in merging the talents of the four musicians was Ferdinand Rauter, the pianist, whom Schidlof had first met in a London police station when both men were taken in during the original round-up. Rauter and Schidlof spent part of their time at Onchan working on sonatas. Years later Schidlof said that while in the camp he took lessons in musical theory and harmony and went to many of the lectures on music, which were of a very high standard. The camp gave the young students the rare opportunity of learning from older men who were already specialized musicians.
Schidlof’s release, in 1941, resulted largely from the testimonials provided by Sir Adrian Boult and Myra Hess. He said much later that he considered Onchan’s studies had ‘finished’ his education as well as giving him his first taste of playing to an audience.
Hutchinson Camp produced a straightforward newspaper called, simply enough, The Camp. It made its first appearance on 21 September 1940 and was issued somewhat irregularly, sometimes but once a month. Yet it put ‘2nd Year’ on its masthead for its issue of 28 July 1941, when the paper was certainly not a year old.
Surviving copies of The Camp are rarities; such specimens as the writer has seen suggest that it had little or no space for illustrators so that it lacked the immediate visual appeal of the Onchan Pioneer. This might be thought curious, for Hutchinson had a number of professional artists among its internees. Kurt Schwitters, the Dadaist who was both poet and artist and who invented the wild art form Merz, adopted England after he was released from internment there and eventually died at Ambleside, where his work can still be seen. While interned in Hutchinson, he painted a most impressive portrait of Fred Uhlman, another internee, who made an international name for himself and became a Royal Academician. It is the only piece of work that has been traced from the Hutchinson camp, apart from some publications of Uhlman’s, yet an exhibition of internee art work had been held there within a month of its opening.
Copies of issues for the end of 1941 still survive. They contain some sophisticated drawings, stencilled in two colours, by Baumgaertel, Dzubas, Harold Mahrenholz and L. Meidner among others. A full-page sketch, very neat and professional, shows that for Christmas anyway the Hutchinson camp would even sanction a genteel pin-up. Two issues earlier, in November 1941, the editor, Hans Schulze, sent good wishes to John Duffield, the Onchan vicar who was leaving the island to rejoin the Army as a chaplain. Hutchinson inmates remembered him with affection from his work at Onchan Camp, where many of them were first interned on their arrival in the island.
Precisely when the paper faded out is not known for certain. The camp itself went through many changes and contained men of several nationalities before it finally closed in the spring of 1944.
Sefton Camp was the shortest lived of them all, and its newspaper, the Sefton Review, was published only from November 1940 to 3 February 1941, during which time it produced seven issues. The men of Sefton were a very different lot from those of Onchan and Hutchinson: they included an unusual percentage of invalids, 42 out of 307 at one time. But the Sefton Review was a bright little newspaper. It had ideas. It published details of its editorial birthpangs; it wrote to the Mayor of Coventry offering a gift of toys to families stricken by the notorious air raid, and it received a kindly reply. In the manner of the Onchan Pioneer, it wrote to leading politicians. It laughed quite often, and frequently at itself. It apparently had no idea that its February issue would be its last. The end of the camp was unexpected, at least to its inmates.
So camps changed their occupants, and thus changed their personality. Peel was no longer an internment camp; it was specially adapted for detainees. Onchan had started with a population of Germans; it had been orderly and properly behaved, its newspaper reflecting its men. Then it was given over to Italians and became noisier and more high-spirited one day, dejected the next. Its character was to change frequently while it served its purpose for most of the war.
There was great excitement in Onchan at the time of Tobruk; a break-out nearly succeeded but was intercepted at the final cutting of the wires. The incident never ranked as an escape; it was all over too quickly. It was known, too, that there was trouble early in 1943, when some Italians made a strenuous effort to get away. One guard, now resident on the island, recalls the incident as a near-riot. Whatever it was, it called for no outside involvement, and no record of it can be traced.
The last provocative incident at Onchan remembered by men who mounted guard there was a fire in the internees’ canteen on a summer night in 1943. Sabotage was suspected but no charge resulted. But, as with the other camps, the Onchan guard remained vigilant, patrolling the wire, usually in pairs. Sentry duties were varied from time to time, in order to inconvenience any internee who was timing the operation with a view to taking advantage of it.
One military duty was occasionally to take internees across to the mainland and guard them down to London, where they were wanted for interrogation. The job was eagerly sought by soldiers who were themselves Londoners or had links with the capital. The routine was to cross over to the mainland on the Monday and arrive in London not later than the next day; this gave the guard the Wednesday off at home or in the town, reporting to Oratory School, which was the collection point, on the Thursday evening. He would then take a party of internees up to Fleetwood on the night train. The general complement of guards was a lance-corporal and three privates to eight internees. In some cases, on arrival down at Euston, they would be met by Metropolitan police, who would then take over. It was all organized, and the soldier had rather more than a day off.
Guards, in the opinion of most internees, were merely civilians doing a dreary job. Relations between them were correct, sometimes cordial; except at the start, there was little or no bullying. One ex-guard vividly recalls an incident in Onchan, when a pair of internees had been sent outside, grass-cutting. They were under guard by a young soldier who suddenly collapsed with what turned out to be appendicitis. The internees returned to camp carrying the soldier between them. His rifle was slung over the shoulder of the internee in the rear.
Providing he obeyed the rules, the life of a long-term internee, like that of a merchant seaman, was nothing if not uneventful. Its greatest curse was that it could become horribly boring; sport, card games and indoor pursuits were all very well, but week after week, month after month, they merely varied a basic monotony.
As far as possible, Giovanni Moneta was reasonably content. He went to English classes and steadily learned the language. He enjoyed his occasional days out on the farm. He was lucky in his living-quarters. The Metropole camp contained two hotels—the Metropole itself and the Alexander, since named the Continental—that were larger than most of those commandeered for the internment camps, so if a man shared a room in either, he had more space around him than if was one of the crowd in a small boarding-house. Moneta was in Metropole itself, sharing with his shipmate Lanzardo Mattio.
Mattio was a deckhand on the SS Marzocco, and the pair of them had been together ever since. Like Giovanni, he came from the Isle of Elba, where his family were the bakers serving the village of Marciana Marina.
Because they were in a large hotel, the Marzocco crew usually ate together in the sizeable dining-room, rather than in small rooms on their own, but they usually made their own food, having drawn their own rations. In this way they continued with an identity of their own: A-class internees, a ship’s crew under their own captain, who presided at table. There was one thing they had completely forgotten about after the outbreak of war: the way they had scuttled their ship and the way they had ended up together in the Metropole. They had forgotten Rotterdam.
It had been the ship’s last port of call on its way to Newcastle, where it loaded coal. The town was a shambles from the devastation of the air raids. But it was the place where the crew picked up their mail from home. It would be waiting, poste restante. This time there had been no mail. It had simply not arrived in time for their departure. In the events that followed it was forgotten. Then, one day near the end of 1942, it turned up at the Metropole, having been 2½ years in transit.
Its contents were long since out of date. Its arrival caused the only real ripple of excitement in months.