A Riot at Peel
The Manx in the small town of Peel had no love for the Peveril Camp in their midst. They called it the Fascist Camp. This it was to a large extent, and it held some highly undesirable characters, but it was not just the presence of Mosleyites that irritated the people of what the Manx call the Sunset City. It was the behaviour of the visiting womenfolk. The islanders were accustomed to the women who secured permits to visit the various camps, and inasmuch as any visitor was welcome, they welcomed them in turn. But the women for the Peel camp were different. They were dubbed arrogant, and many had too much money to spend. They were brash in the way they went round buying up unrationed food and taking it off to the camp. The shopkeepers were unable to tell whether a stranger was a rare holiday visitor or a detainee’s woman. The people of Peel watched the descent on their shops and disliked it thoroughly.
The man who most strongly disliked these visitors was A. E. Ostick, who was, among other things, the owner of the Creg Malin Hotel, down on the Promenade, on the opposite side of the Walpole Road from one of the entrances to the camp. It was a tall, severe-looking building and far from beautiful. The island’s pubs were not objects of architectural admiration, and the Creg Malin was one of the least attractive of them, possibly because of its size. It was built for slaking thirsts, not for elegance. The womenfolk of the detainees used it as their last port of call before it was their turn to go to the huts to meet their men. They would arrive at the pub with their parcels of food and wait their turn. Sometimes a woman left her children in the care of the hotel staff while she went along for the meeting, held in the presence of an intelligence officer. Then, suddenly, Ostick put his foot down: none of these women was to be served in his hotel. Enough was enough.
Complaints about the camp’s visiting womenfolk had been mounting throughout the summer of 1941. The Peel Town Commissioners were assured at their July meeting that the women were pests, creating shortages of supplies in the town. It was alleged that food, not by the pound but by the hundredweight, was getting into the camp. At the same meeting a member complained that, when the detainees were bathing from the shore, local people were directed away from the beach by the military. He considered it grossly unfair.
Such remarks bred rumour. Much conversational play was made of a court case reported in the local newspapers after a Fascist detainee had sneaked away from a farm working party of which he was a member and was found sitting in the corner of a field with his girl friend and sister-in-law. The two women, both British, were charged with acting in a manner likely to prejudice the discipline of internees. It turned out that one woman was in Peel for a visit to her husband and the other to her man friend. The wife had more than £80 on her when arrested, a large amount of cash in the circumstances in those days. Both were fined. It made bad publicity for the Fascist wives.
Then came another 130 detainees, collected from prisons in different parts of Britain. They were mostly foreigners and not British Fascists. There were no incidents when they docked at Douglas and none when they reached Peel. But it was noticed that they brought with them what one newspaper described as an ‘incredible’ amount of baggage. By the time this story had been well and truly circulated, it was a luggage mountain indeed.
Importantly, these men were dangerous, and the senior authorities knew it. The problem was to make them really secure, and to secure the town with them. Much confidential material flowed to high places in London, with recommendations. The Peel camp was a time-bomb, and the risk not inconsiderable. It was sensed that there was mischief brewing. And what was the protection? Guards who were not the best of trained troops and a small island police force stretched to the very limit of its capacity—these things were not reassuring. Feelings improved somewhat with the arrival of Major Dunne, the third commander in a camp that had been in existence for scarcely four months as a centre of detainees and that contained some desperate characters. He came with a reputation for standing no nonsense and with a good record behind him. As it turned out, he had arrived too late.
It was in mid-September when the real trouble started, on the night of Wednesday, 17 September 1941. According to a newspaper report a party of about 200 detainees were at a concert in a small hall a few hundred yards out from the camp. All was normal as the men were marched back to the wire, but in the short march three men had managed to slip away from the party in the dusk. The public reaction was immediate. Such a thing could have happened only because of gross casualness; it raised serious question marks about the whole guard system at Peveril. Report said that the men’s absence was not noticed until nine o’clock the following morning, suggesting that no sort of count had been made when the party returned to camp. That, however, was the orthodox newspaper version of the escape. It is reasonably certain that the Manx police did not believe it.
There was an elaborate plan for handling escapes, and it moved into action as soon as it was established that a man was missing. Internment Camp Headquarters in Douglas was informed at once and the police were warned; the police procedure was to alert all stations on the island, to tell London, to advise the island’s civilian authorities and to contact the naval and military bases and the RAF stations on the Isle of Man. Harbour masters and coastguards were all alerted, and printed descriptions and relevant details of the missing man or men circulated, including clothing—in this case all three men were in brown sports jackets and grey trousers.
A search was launched immediately, and it was soon realized that the men had headed south and gone down to the beach at Glen Maye, a beauty spot about two miles below Peel on the west coast. If they were looking for a boat which they could steal, this was the wrong place. They were later reported at a farm at Ballamoda. There was then a report that a twelve-foot motor fishing-boat, Sunbeam, which belonged to a local man, was missing from its moorings in Castletown Harbour, and almost immediately came a message that a small warehouse in School Lane, Castletown, had been broken into and some equipment stolen.
The Sunbeam was a modest little boat, being subsequently valued at a mere £40, which even in those days was a poor price for a good fishing-boat. But its owner had obeyed the book. Under the wartime regulations it was compulsory for all boats to be immobilized when left moored. Oars and rowlocks had to be stored away from the craft; if power-driven, the engine had to be put out of action. The owner had done the right thing. There were no sparking plugs.
The trio had put to sea with two pairs of stolen oars. Naval patrol vessels, Manx motorboats and an aircraft took part in a sea search, and a special watch was kept on harbours and anchorages around the island’s coast in case the men were forced back. The Irish Sea was no place for a powerless fishing-boat in the last week of September, with the autumnal gales around.
On Saturday afternoon, more than two days after the escape, the men were retaken from their open boat, seven miles off the Calf of Man. They were trying to reach the Irish coast, of whose Mountains of Mourne they would occasionally have had a tantalizing glimpse. They did not know that there had been twenty-four Irish fishing-boats in port at Peel that week: the trio might have had a safer and more comfortable journey that way, for two of them were Irish. They were exhausted and hungry when taken aboard the RN patrol vessel that had first sighted them. They had eaten a bag of apples and nothing else. When searched they were found to be unarmed, with only a trifling sum of money in cash between them. This was sufficiently unexpected to find its way into the records, for detainees were not allowed to have money in camp, although they often obtained it, frequently from local farmers.
The men were given food and drink, landed back at Douglas and were met by a sergeant and a constable of the Manx CID. They were then taken back to the Peveril Camp, arriving at about seven in the evening, guarded by an escort of soldiers and police. All this complied with regulations. If a man gets out; take him back; then charge him later with a common law offence, and take and hold him until the matter is disposed of. But in this case the consequences of the decision to take the men home to Peveril gave the island its most eventful wartime incident to that date.
They were delivered to the camp cells.
On that same week-end Osbert Peake, Member of Parliament and Parliamentary Under Secretary to the Home Office, who had flown over to the Isle of Man, made a tour of inspection of the camps. Peake was a quiet, unobtrusive man, correct in his manner, not unaware of the plight of an internee. In Parliament he had always shown moderation. He represented what might be regarded as the more liberal Home Office attitude to the problem of internment rather than that of the hardliners.
His visit had been arranged earlier; Peveril was merely one of his ports of call. He spent much time in the southern camps; he went on to Peveril on the Saturday afternoon. It was his intention to receive a deputation from the detainees. At least one of the senior authorities in the island had warned against going into the camp. It is thought that Major Dunne, when the Minister arrived, also advised against any such move. But Peake had made up his mind. He was not afraid and the Major went with him. They were greeted with screams of abuse from the British Fascists. They were jostled and had to retreat hurriedly. The noise became such that onlookers gathered in the street, and one said later that the men had appeared to go frantic and ‘behaved like maniacs’. A banner appeared, inscribed ‘Mosley Give Us Justice’. One report, possibly true, said that the foreigners among the detainees looked on but kept aloof.
Peake was representing disciplined authority, and the Fascists hated him for it. There were hysterical shouts of ‘He’s a Jew’ and ‘We want justice’. Obscenities were yelled at him. The Camp Commander was virtually ignored. The Home Office man was the target, and some 200 detainees were said to have been involved.
The mood was sullen and dangerous when the three escapees were brought back to camp from their attempt to get across to Ireland.
Exactly how the riot started is uncertain. The three men who got away were probably heroes to those left behind. After more than two days at liberty, their admirers possibly felt confident that the escape had been successful, and the sight of them returning under guard was a disappointment. The men themselves said later that they were ravenous after their time on the run and that they were refused food on return. This was denied. They could have food, but no hot meal was available.
Soon after their return a substantial number of detainees started a mounting riot. Demonstrators pulled down a stone hedge at the back of the camp, inside the wire. It had been made by building up two lines of any stone or rock available, filling the space between them with earth, thus binding the whole together in a wall high enough to hold sheep or cattle—a typical Manx sod hedge. It was also a useful ammunition dump, quickly torn apart; the pelting of the guard resulted.
By ten at night the riot was in full fury. Every available soldier was called to reinforce the guard on duty. Stones, bottles, plates, lavatory seats, timbers, dustbin lids—anything a man could lay his hands on; the missiles flew over the wire, across Walpole Road, and crashed into the side of the Creg Malin, which because of its sombre size was an easy target. Thirty windows were smashed, and the roadway was littered with rocks and debris. It was a noisy fracas and a strange sight. As darkness fell, the lights surrounding the camp were switched on, lighting up the whole area; a week or two later the local Peel newspaper, whose editor had almost forgotten what illuminations looked like, wrote that the lights had been particularly attractive from the sea. He hoped the town commissioners had taken note and would remember after the war.
The lights and the noise brought out the onlookers. Hundreds of townspeople flocked down to the Promenade to see what was happening. They were held back by a barrier that had been placed hurriedly across the road, so that they could not get too near. What little they could see they heartily disliked. There developed a protest against protests, and loud were the calls for action. Some women in the crowd were evacuees from a bombed town in the north of England, and their opinion of Fascists was loud and lucid.
It was approaching midnight by the time things simmered down. By then some food was said to have been taken from the hotel to the recaptured men, who were in the cells. Meanwhile Lieutenant-Colonel Baggaley, who was Commandant of all the Manx men’s camps, had arrived from the Internment Camps HQ, which was in Douglas at Mereside, a private hotel that had been taken over on Empire Terrace.
Peake was reported as being in the Creg Malin and was said to have received a deputation from the Fascists and listened to their complaints for an hour. It was later alleged that when the men crossed the road back to camp they gave the Fascist salute.
The Under Secretary was certainly nothing if not courteous. What would probably have been the majority point of view was pungently put by A. J. Cummings, whose widely read political column in the News Chronicle was noted for its normally tolerant and liberal views. He described the riot as a ‘scandalous affair’ and demanded to know why Peake had tried to appease the rioters as if they were no worse than an excited group of schoolboys out for a lark. ‘One can imagine what would have happened if the same kind of mutiny had broken out in a prisoner’s camp in Germany,’ he added. Poor Peake; when it came to internment, it seemed he could do no right.
The tumult and the shouting died; the area outside the camp, down at the start of the Promenade, looked a shambles, with windows smashed and slates broken on the opposite side of the road. The Creg Malin had been an Aunt Sally on which frustrated Fascists could vent their feelings. Ostick, the genial local businessman who ran much of the town’s entertainment and was one of the pioneers of motor coach tours on the island, never forgave them. It was the wives who suffered.
Away at the Home Office in London it was stated that a court of inquiry was started immediately.
By Monday morning the debris had already been cleared away by detainees working under guard. Farm work-parties started out from the camp again. By the Wednesday those Fascists who so wished were bathing from the shore, and two brewery lorries were seen delivering the liquid intake to the camp. Coaches left in the afternoon taking detainees to see their wives in Port Erin. It seemed to be business as usual. But soldiers had been stoned in the riot, and the regulations denied them the right to hit back while the trouble was still confined inside the wire. The Manx were angry, very angry.
And unknown to the Manx, and the camp authorities, there was more trouble in store.