Turn of the Soil
At least a year before the main repatriation of so many women internees in August 1944, the Isle of Man had become aware of a changing pattern to its life. The seaside landladies realized that a holiday season was at last developing, after so many lean years.
It was a real holiday rush, although but a miniature of the splendid days before the war when more than 700,000 visitors a year would cross to the island of seafood and escallonia. Once more there were reports of how upwards of a thousand people were left behind on the quayside at Fleetwood. By the first week in August people were spending two or even three nights in queues in the streets around the docks, and at the request of the Steam Packet Company the London Midland and Scottish Railway put up posters in its stations warning intending travellers of the difficulties of getting to the island. Servicemen and officials were priority passengers.
The busiest week-end followed what would normally have been the August bank holiday. People were stranded at both ends of the journey; returning holiday-makers could not get back, intending arrivals could not get across. VIPs, of course, had no difficulty. Herbert Morrison, the Home Secretary, made another of his frequent visits to the island, staying at Government House. He made it his business to visit various internment camps.
Another visitor from the headlines was Lady Maud Montgomery, mother of the General who was leading the Eighth Army in a sandstorm of victory. She took back with her a Manx kitten for herself and a Manx travelling-rug for her son.
November 1943 had produced a significant insight into the mind of the detainee and the more hardened internee. The Board of Agriculture’s annual report stated that the number of male workers in the Manx farming industry had gone down from nearly 1,800 at the outbreak of war to 1,027 on 4 June 1943. So many men had been called up. Regular women workers had gone up from 93 to 167, a number of whom were Land Army volunteers. The report said, however, that internee and detainee labour could not always be relied on as strikes and passive resistance occurred at important seasons. To the pro-Nazi the harvest aided the British war effort and as such was verboten.
Relations between the Manx farmers and the internees were in the main very good indeed. The Italians were generally preferred to the Germans for they were considered willing and cheerful workers, whereas the Germans could be strictly correct. The normal routine had been for the men to be driven out under escort to the farms where they worked for the day. They took their midday meal with them, and every week the farmer paid the cost of their labour direct to the camp authorities. Men were not allowed to have real money, and it was an offence for it to be given or received, which does not mean that it did not change hands.
As the war developed, fewer guards were felt to be needed on the work parties. Sometimes the men were taken from camp to a bus stop and seen off on their journey. Some farmers, living in isolated areas, even arranged to drive up at a camp at eight every morning, collect their men and return them at five in the afternoon. They would be given petrol coupons to cover the journeys, the cost of the petrol to be paid by the farmer. It was a common sight to see cars from outlying farms waiting outside the front gate at some of the Douglas camps, with the farmer, frequently a woman, going into the guardroom and paying her dues once a week.
One woman, whose husband was a distinguished English lawyer, remembers how she collected her Italians from Central every morning and drove them north to Maughold. They were no trouble, and most of them spoke English. One had had a grocery business in Glasgow and spoke with a rich Scottish accent. Their first job had been to clear away gorse on some steep marginal land. For all such work the man received part of his earnings back from the camp in token money that he could spend inside the wire, and the rest went to his credit.
Years later, when so many of the Italians had been released back to civilian life in Britain, the Germans provided most of the available farm labour.
According to their performance, the men on the farms found themselves collecting that little bit extra that meant so much to an internee. Several picked up in escape attempts had British money on them. It had been given them by farmers in exchange for extra work. It was all against the rules but it went on. So was the feeding of the internees, who would arrive with two thick slices of bread and a piece of cheese and were at first not supposed to receive anything except a hot drink from the farm. However, it became commonplace for men to take their main daily meal alongside the local farm workers. Since soldiers from the camp carried out periodic checks, the internees would be given a meal to themselves in some barn or outhouse where they could be warned if trouble had arrived in the shape of a guard.
One farmer reported that he remembered the Germans as excellent workers but aloof men who brought no enthusiasm to their task. On the other hand, the Italians often had skills they were only too willing to use, especially if cash resulted. At least one Manx farmhouse had a mosaic of local chippings laid down on its kitchen floor by Italian craftsmen. In another case the Italians linked a fresh-water spring into a man-made reservoir and piped first-class water into a house that otherwise had none. It was for work like this that the hireling was worth rather more than his token money, and received it under the farm table.
The Douglas borough cemetery is situated almost directly opposite the grandstand that marks the start and finishing lines of the annual motor-cycle road races. Some years before the Second World War, the island’s small Jewish community bought an area of what had once been a field there and made it the Jewish burial ground. Today it is one of the most concentrated reminders of wartime internment, for eighteen Jews are buried there, each grave neatly marked and maintained. The total of eighteen does not necessarily represent the full number of Jews who died in the island camps between 1940 and 1944, for it is noticeable that none of the dead came from Mooragh in Ramsey. They did, however, come from Peveril in Peel, from Onchan, from the women’s camp across in Port Erin and from Central and Palace Camps in Douglas. Their recorded ages were significant and justified the early criticism that men were often interned indiscriminately in the great crisis of 1940 and that they could be well over sixty years of age.
The first Jew to die behind the wire was a man of forty-nine, who was buried in early September 1940, after dying in Hutchinson. Three more deaths followed before the year was out. A female infant died in the Camp Hospital at Port Erin on Armistice Day, 11 November, at the age of one day. Arthur Paunzen, the artist, died in Central on a 1940 date that appears to be unrecorded, and a man of sixty-three died in Oncham Camp on the last day but one of December.
The following year saw the death of an internee of seventy-nine. His age is on his tombstone, and his date of death is given as 4 April 1941. He was a German Jew from Onchan Camp, in normal life a book-keeper from Stoke Newington in North London. He died in the Falcon Cliff Hospital and had been suffering from hyper-tension.
There is a striking conflict of evidence about his age. The records of the Jewish burial ground unmistakably give him as seventy-nine at death. The official certificate gave the cause certified by a leading doctor in practice in Douglas; on record in the General Registry in Douglas it gives him as sixty, which, during the critical weeks of 1940, was considered the upward limit for internment. Extreme urgency sometimes explained the rules being broken.
The next man whose age was given as over seventy died one year later and was buried in April 1942. He too died in the Falcon Cliff Hospital, and he too had come from North London, where he had been described as a merchant. His age was given on his grave as seventy-three, the same as was entered in the Manx files. If there had been some sort of cover-up attempt on the age of the first man, there was none in the registration of the death of the second; seventy-three was indeed a remarkable age for an internee to die at after what was very obviously less than two years behind the barbed wire.
Three other Jewish internees, one of them a woman, were more than sixty years of age when they died in the island camps.