The Ladies of Laxey
By the end of 1941 and the early days of the following year the internment camps on the Isle of Man had been steadily thinned out and their composition had changed. Away in Rushen there were now barely a thousand internees divided between the main women’s camp in Port Erin and the married camp in Port St Mary, and one in every four of them was to be released by the end of 1942.
The alteration in the make-up of the men’s camps occurred in the last weeks of the year, actually increasing their population for a brief time. This was due to the spread of war and to the number of countries that had been persuaded or bullied into signing with the Axis. Thus in the middle of December 1941 400 nationals of such countries were brought over to the island; they included Japanese, Hungarians, Romanians and a disproportionate number of Finns, most of whom were merchant seamen.
They were housed in Palace, in Douglas, which had previously held Italians and which had been emptied some weeks earlier to prepare for a new and mixed bag of arrivals. The various nationalities were segregated inside the camp, which was sectionalized to keep them apart. By the end of February the number of these nationals was 573, of whom 340 were Finns and 90 Japanese. It was in all a sizeable proportion of the whole number, for on 28 February 1942 the total male internment figure was 3,052, to which must be added the 496 detainees left in Peveril. Exactly a year earlier the total had been 5,690.
The earlier Japanese arrivals—34 of them—were described by a Manx newspaper with something approaching respect. They were by far the most prosperous-looking members of the incoming contingent, many of them ‘having the appearance of well-to-do business men’. The reportage was accurate, for that is precisely what they were. They came from the very small but flourishing Japanese business community in the city of London, and most of them were seniors in the London branch of a Yokohama bank. It was believed that their top director was a member of the Japanese imperial family. Whether that was true or not, he was immediately made leader of the house which had been assigned to the party in the Palace Camp, and no unit in any of the camps was said to approach it for severe cleanliness. The main staircase had been scrubbed white by the first morning after their arrival, and the place was run on strict military lines. The same reporter wrote sniffily that the next consignment of Japs was very different. Yet, even so, the Japanese were the star internees.
In all it had been a strange Christmas on the island. Much fuss was made of a reunion party for blitzed babies from Merseyside which was held at Douglas Town Hall. An Italian internee at Onchan chose the season to leap to death from a top-floor window, having made previous attempts to commit suicide. A party with a visit from Santa Claus was the main feature of improvised jollity in the married camp; but the Manx themselves were not too happy. Turkeys were hard to come by and geese were scarce. The messing officers of the military establishments had been going round with order books at the ready. It was a strange Christmas.
It was symptomatic of the times, too, that the first news of releases among the Japanese internees referred not to the business men but to a few who had arrived in Douglas some weeks later. They were experts at chicken sexing, a craft at which the Japanese were widely thought to have an almost mystical skill. It meant the ability to determine the sex of day-old chicks and in those days was considered to be highly specialized. Strong representations for their release had been made by the remnants of the poultry industry. The skill of these men was needed urgently.
A number of distinguished visitors came to the island during the year. Chief among them was Herbert Morrison, the cheerful Home Secretary, who was no harsh disciplinarian; he came for Tynwald Day, a gesture much appreciated by the Manx, and stayed on to inspect the camps, for which he held the ultimate responsibility. Holiday visitors were a mere trickle compared with normal times. However, the Manx were very pleased by the presence of the police from the blitzed areas of northern England. The first of them had reached the island back in August 1941, some with their wives; their duties were confined to the Peel and Port St Mary areas. To them this was almost a holiday.
The number of police from the blitzed areas of Lancashire was never more than a small token force, and even this produced a mass of paperwork arguing about their messing allowance. The original grant to the individual constable had been 8s. 6d. (42½p.) per day, but soon after New Year’s Day in 1942 London asked if this figure could be reduced. It was; the Manx police had to report that inquiries showed that the landladies at the billets were receiving 6s. 6d. (32½p.) a day, which implied that the visiting constables were making a basic profit. At any rate another inquiry was started in January, and London solemnly decreed that the rate from February onwards would be reduced from 8s. 6d. (42½p.) a day to 7s. (35p.).
Meanwhile the war went on.
In March the Chief Constable continued examining his problems of staff shortage. Police were needed in the south-west of the island, in Port St Mary and Port Erin, where no soldiers guarded the camps and the load on the police was a heavy one. A census revealed that on 20 March there were fifteen male auxiliary constables at Port Erin and fourteen at Port St Mary, all on camp duties. At Peel there were seven. Mainland police, apart from the London men on special duties at Peveril, were down to one sergeant and six constables at Peel, and four constables at Port St Mary. At Port Erin there were six policewomen and one sergeant all from London. Then the call-up bit into the numbers of the regular police all over the realm, and men simply could not be spared to go to the Isle of Man. All this produced an extraordinary battle by typewriter, with the memoranda going backwards and forwards rather in the manner of a ceaseless rally at tennis. The object of the game was for London to ensure that imperial funds were not spent paying for police work that was part of the normal duties of the island force. The return of service, as it were, was to ensure that the island was recompensed where the extra work could not be held to be solely Manx. An example was the payment for the male auxiliary constables—men enlisted in place of constables taken for the fighting forces. Such men were vital for camp duties in Rushen. The question of who finally paid for them was a bureaucratic delight. At one time London seemed to be paying for one-half of a Manx policeman and local government funds for the other.
The problems eased somewhat in August 1942 when Commandant Cuthbert decided to move his married camp from Port St Mary to the northern end of Port Erin, known locally as Spaldrick. This was made possible by the steadily declining number of women in the main camp; by rearranging accommodation, the small Spaldrick area could be released for the marrieds, moving the women who were still there to houses to the south of Port Erin and so freeing the Port St Mary village completely. It would cease to be a restricted area.
The work of moving camp took little more than a day. Husbands worked away at the cheerful job of loading lorries with baggage and unloading it in the new quarters. The pro-Nazi couples were put up mainly at the Towers, and the Italians at the Waverley. Couples of other nationalities and the uncommitted were allocated to the various houses in the small area. The two camps remained in their new form to the end of the war, separated from each other by a wire fence. Even the landladies gave a hand to help the removal operation. But to help the Commandant those landladies were prepared to do most things. To them he was a highly popular figure: he had won them over. Some of them convinced themselves that he had once been an actor. His talks the previous year about the precautions that would be taken before the married camp opened had been very well received. Although he may never have realized it, this peacetime policeman had many friends and supporters: to the internee women he was a fair-minded man who commanded respect. It was a tribute to him that Germans who had first seen him at a tribunal at Bow Street took a similar view.
At about the same time in 1942 preparations of an entirely different sort were taking shape on the opposite side of the island, at Laxey, a hilly village that descended steeply to the sea. It was a place of much charm, except perhaps in the easterlies, when the air bites shrewdly.
Laxey had been selected as the village where the women and children from Madagascar were to be quartered. They were not internees and certainly not to be regarded as such. They were the victims of the sad business between the British and the French that had followed the capitulation of one part of France. The British had made a successful landing on Madagascar, which was French territory controlled across thousands of miles by the authorities in Vichy, which had officially surrendered to the Germans, who could thus use French possessions overseas. The local French forces resisted the British landing: there was fighting; there were casualties; there were losses. The British collected a mixed bag of men, mostly officers, from the garrison and the naval forces and some civilians, and packed them off to Scotland. They were not prisoners of war, but they had to be classified; their position was complex, the result of a complex war scene.
The men, some with wives and families, finally docked at Glasgow. They went on to various camps in the north of England, usually to Grizedale in Westmorland, while they made up their minds whether they wanted to throw in their lot with the Free French, through the de Gaulle headquarters in Carlton House Terrace, London. The women and children were gathered together while plans were made for them to be sent across to Laxey. There they were to await the decision by their husbands to fight with the Allies or not. By early September about sixty women and children had reached the island and were billeted in private guest-houses, almost all of them in Laxey, a few in the even smaller hamlet of Baldrine, which was next to it along the coast road. Sixty-four names had been supplied to the island in advance by the authorities, including that of Madame Lucienne Claerebout, wife of General Claerebout who had so recently commanded the defence of Diego Suarez against the British. The women arrived to be put in the care of Norah J. Banks of the Home Office, who was working in the women’s camp at Port Erin and had been sent across to Laxey in advance to fix billets. At all times the dictum went out: these women are not internees. They were to live in Laxey; they would have as much freedom as any other alien except that there would be a three-mile boundary restriction on their movements. Women must have separate beds in billets, but children could share a double bed where necessary. Landladies would receive a guinea (£1.05p.) a week for each adult billeted on them, and 15s. (75p.) per child. The new arrivals would be subject to curfew.
The women were essentially colonials; they lived wherever their husbands were posted by the force or department to which they were attached. Many of them had forgotten what it meant to have a permanent home; they were used to service accommodation and the minor grumbles attached to such postings. And Laxey, as September evenings drew in, hardly rivalled tropical Madagascar. They were lonely, and their feelings were decidedly mixed.
The day after they arrived, they were photographed and issued with official papers establishing their address in Laxey. In all they occupied ten houses, at six or more to a house. An interpreter was provided for them at the local post office. Miss Banks was at the village commissioner’s office to help and handle complaints, if any.
These did not take long to arrive. Reportage on this point differs very sharply. According to Miss Banks, who seems to have been a very thorough and conscientious official, the women were not in the least anti-British, despite what had happened, and many of them professed the friendliest feelings. One or two, she said, were nurses, married to doctors, and both they and their husbands had done fine work for British servicemen wounded in the operations in Madagascar. By the end of the first week in Laxey most of the women were wearing badges bearing the triskele, the Three Legs of Man. These they had bought at the start of their shopping expeditions. They were Roman Catholics, and it was arranged that Mass would be celebrated in the Pavilion of Laxey Glen Gardens, the priest being Father James McGrath, from Onchan. The temperature was the great problem; coming from a hot climate, the women found the Isle of Man decidedly bleak; the painstaking Miss Banks duly asked the landladies to provide good fires when the weather became colder.
So on the surface all was in reasonably good order, but the private eye of military officialdom thought it knew better. The ladies had not been in Laxey for a week before an experienced observer reported back to his chief in Douglas. Of the ten billets in use, he said, four were without bathrooms, and more suitable billets were being found. He obviously thought that Miss Banks, whom he plainly respected, was being optimistic when she said that the Frenchwomen were reasonably satisfied. He went far beyond this and alleged that a well-connected woman from the mainland, a naturalized British subject, who had taken a room in a local hotel, was ‘adopting’ the French women. She had even found what she considered a more suitable place for them in a large hotel north of Ramsey, where she had worked out suitable terms with the owners; it was near a security area, and the Manx authorities would certainly have forbidden any such move on security grounds. The woman had important contacts in London; she seemed determined to come to the aid of the French. However, reported the observer, she was souring the minds of the Frenchwomen against Miss Banks, whom she wanted to get replaced anyway.
Such was the feeling on 9 September 1942, less than a week after the women had arrived in Laxey.
Three days later the visitor was served with a notice signed by the Lieutenant Governor requiring her to leave the area to which the French nationals were restricted. She obeyed, reluctantly.
A number of Frenchmen, mainly serving officers, arrived to join their wives and families; most of them reached Laxey in the middle of November, some arrived on Christmas Eve, and in all there were then approaching a hundred French nationals in the village. Most conspicuous among them all was General Claerebout himself, striding along in the Douglas shopping area with his wife and children in his wake, enjoying the regular shopping expeditions which the Laxey party was given by official permit, usually accompanied by the energetic Miss Banks. Several of the French Army men, having decided on their future allegiance, went off to London and to the Free French forces. Some had been on the island for only a week or two. They were the advance guard. The rest of the Laxey French were to follow them.
The main exodus was on 18 January, when a party of sixty-eight women and children was taken to the mainland under the wing of Miss Banks, who remained with them until they left Britain, mostly for northern Africa and in some cases Zanzibar. Elaborate arrangements had to be made by the Manx Government Office for their trip to the mainland. The departure went off without incident, and two of the French wives were known to inquire later if they could return to Laxey if accommodation could be found for them. Their husbands, who had never been on the island, had joined de Gaulle and were away on service, and the wives found themselves thinking back favourably on the picturesque village on the Manx escarpment.
One French family stayed behind. The wife was expecting her third child. The local authorities gave their permission, and she and her husband moved to Douglas to be near the island’s maternity home; they did not leave until some months later.
With the departure of the party, down came the notices in French that had been posted on the roads leading in and out of Laxey to mark the three-mile limit beyond which the newcomers could not go without a permit. They had been put up at the request of the diligent Miss Banks.
Once the women were outward bound from Britain, most of them heading for Africa and a warmer climate, Miss Banks returned to the island, having seen them off. She was able to write: ‘Laxey seems very lonely now without the chattering French people, who were really sorry to go and have left with nothing but pleasant memories of their treatment in Laxey.’
Norah Banks had been proved right. There had been rumours of spirited slanging matches between landladies and visitors, of complaints on both sides, of attempts to take the dissatisfaction to the higher levels of the Foreign Office and even the floor of the House of Commons. The alarmists were proved wrong. The last word was said by the quiet Miss Banks, believed not to have been a professional civil servant but a schoolteacher doing welfare work as her contribution to the war effort. Her job over, she went back to Port Erin and carried on at her normal post.
If he had not had toothache, Giovanni Moneta would probably have stayed in the Metropole Camp for the rest of the war and then been shipped back to Italy. As a merchant seaman he would not be released until peace arrived. But toothache he had, and with it the pattern of his life changed completely.
He saw the camp dentist and had a normal and purely routine extraction. There was no reason to suspect any real trouble. But Giovanni did not heal; not long after the extraction he had a haemorrhage. Surprised, for such a thing had never happened to him before, he reported to the camp doctor. This was not a case for surgery, nor could he remain a long time in the camp sick-bay. He could have been sent up the hill to Falcon Cliff, or he could be sent to Ballaquane, the small unit that had been organized inside the wire at Peveril across at Peel. He was lucky; he was sent to Ballaquane. He then found himself under the RAMC Commanding Officer, Lieutenant-Colonel R. Flowerdew, who had spent his service with the Indian Army, an internee assistant doctor named Altmann, who came from London, and two women, an English matron and a Manx nursing sister named Margaret Cannell.
Moneta mended slowly. The time came when he would be sent back to Metropole and farm work. But Ballaquane needed another orderly. He volunteered for the job and was very glad to get it. He stayed there for most of his remaining time on the Isle of Man. His main duty was to total up the various food requirements that had been prescribed for the different patients, to get the list signed by the matron and then collect the various rations from the food stores. At different times he found himself dealing with the diet sheets of a Japanese, an Austrian baron, a Spanish toreador, a member of the French Foreign Legion and the occasional European Jew who might require a kosher version of the hospital diet.
Moneta settled to his new life of internment. He was no longer on farm work, although Peel detainees did in some cases go out on farm parties under escort. Instead there were ample walks and plenty of time for hobbies, which the authorities encouraged. He took up art and still has some of his paintings. Other inmates of the small hospital busied themselves with the traditional pastimes of the war prisoner—model ships that could be inserted and positioned in bottles; belts; shopping baskets and the like; woodwork, particularly making chess sets, was also very popular.
Moneta liked his new life and thought it an improvement on Metropole. He also liked Margaret Cannell.