1914-1918
England, Scotland and Wales: Three Different Kinds of Concentration Camps of the First World War
1. Frongoch: The Republican University
On 21 March 1933 the Chief of Police in the German city of Munich, one Heinrich Himmler, released a statement to the press in which he announced the opening of the first concentration camp in the country. Himmler’s problem was that scattered throughout the Bavarian prison system were hundreds of political opponents of the government; men who were regarded by the National Socialists as representing a danger to the security of the state. It was difficult to keep track of these people when they were held in so many different places, therefore Himmler wished to see them ‘concentrated’ together in one location. The new camp had been established in and around a disused factory near the town of Dachau; ten miles North West of Munich.
Seventeen years before the opening of Dachau, there was an eerie foreshadowing of Himmler’s prototypical concentration camp. In precisely the same way as in 1930s Germany, the prisons of a European country had become clogged up with political cases; hundreds of men being held without charge, who were believed to pose a threat to the nation’s stability. Just as with Dachau, the idea was hit upon to concentrate these political prisoners in a special camp, situated in an out of the way location. Like Dachau, the camp was centred around a derelict factory; only this camp, rather than being in Bavaria, was to be found in the heart of the Welsh countryside.
We should pause for a moment and consider that concentration camps of this sort, where political prisoners are being held, are rather different from those at which we have so far been looking. In Cuba and South Africa, the aim was to ‘concentrate’ entire populations, who might be opposed to those ruling the country, in one place; thus depriving guerrilla fighters of their support base. Depopulating an area of open country makes it far easier to track down and eliminate any irregular forces who might be operating in the area. In the case both of Dachau and also Frongoch, the Welsh concentration camp, the idea was to avoid cluttering up one’s prison system with too many political cases. It must also be remembered that the expression ‘concentration camp’ had not yet acquired the hideous overtones of genocide and mass murder. British newspapers referred openly during the First World War to concentration camps being operated in the United Kingdom.
In 1889, an Englishman called Edward Nicholls purchased some land in Merionethshire, North Wales, with the aim of building a distillery near the hamlet of Frongoch. The site was chosen because of the purity of the Tryweryn river which ran through the area and the Welsh Whiskey Distillery Ltd operated there until 1900. Substantial stone buildings were erected and the enterprise provided employment to local men and women. It was not however a commercial success and in 1900 the undertaking was acquired by William Owen of the White Lion Hotel in Bala. He paid £5,000 for the business and launched a new brand of whiskey produced at Frongoch, which he named ‘Royal Welsh Whisky’.
By 1910, William Owen too had found that the manufacture of Welsh whisky was not a profitable enterprise and so the distillery closed. For the next four years, the buildings at Frongoch were abandoned and became semi-derelict.
When war broke out in 1914, the owner of the abandoned distillery saw an opportunity to recoup some of the money lost in the abortive whisky business. He leased the factory and surrounding land to the British government for use as a prisoner of war camp. During 1915 and 1916, Frongoch camp contained German prisoners, who were discouraged from escaping by the fact that they were being held in an exceedingly remote area.
On Monday, 24 April 1916, which happened to be Easter Monday that year, a body of Irish volunteers seized various buildings in the centre of Dublin. These included the General Post Office. In the following days, the British army suppressed what later became known as the Easter Rising with great ferocity; using heavy artillery to shell the city. Within less than a week, it was all over and the majority of the 1,200 or so men and handful of women who had taken part in the insurrection, along with many others who just happened to be on the streets at the wrong time, were prisoners of the army.
Coming, as it did, at the height of the war, this attempt at revolution was seen by most people in both Britain and Ireland as an act of treachery. The prisoners were jeered and spat at by the citizens of Dublin when they were marched through the streets and the soldiers guarding them were forced to protect their charges from lynch mobs of angry Irishmen. In the aftermath of the Rising, a number of the leaders were executed by firing squads after summary courts martial and the remainder deported to the British mainland. Once there, these men, none of whom had been charged with any offence, were distributed throughout the prison system. They were held in both civilian prisons such as Glasgow, Perth and Reading, and also in military detention centres such as that at Stafford in the Midlands.
During the Easter Rising and in the days following the defeat of the Irish bid for independence, the British army seized thousands of men and kept them prisoner without charge. Some were released, but over 2,500 were shipped across the Irish Sea and placed in English and Scottish prisons while the government considered what to do with them. For a month, the prisons of Britain were crowded with men who had been charged with nothing, many of whom were almost certainly guilty of nothing; having been unlucky enough to have lived or worked near districts where the rebels were fighting. To release them was unthinkable, but their continued detention, scattered as they were throughout the whole country, meant that it was hard to keep track of them all. Far better, thought ministers in London, if they could all be concentrated together in one spot. At least then, the authorities would know where they were and what they were up to.
Throughout May 1916, the German prisoners of war at Frongoch Camp were dispersed to other locations, until by the end of the month, the camp was empty. Then, on 9 June, Irish prisoners began arriving there. At its peak, Frongach contained over 2,000 prisoners, or ‘detainees’ as they were more correctly known. After all, they had not been charged with, let alone convicted of, anything at all. Their legal position was vague. They themselves claimed to be prisoners of war, but the British rejected this idea, only to accept it later when it suited their purposes. The men at Frongoch were served with notices stating that they were being interned under the Defence of the Realm Regulations. The reason given was that they had been members of organisations called either the Irish Volunteers or the Citizen Army; organisations which had promoted armed insurrection against His Majesty King George V.
Frongoch was soon renamed by the inmates as Francach; a word which literally means a Frenchman, but is used colloquially in Gaelic to refer to a rat. The camp was divided in two. The original buildings of the distillery formed South Camp, while North Camp consisted of wooden huts. Both camps were surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by soldiers. From the start, there was friction between those who had been legitimately arrested after taking part in armed action in Dublin over Easter Week and innocent passers-by who had simply been caught in the military sweeps which followed the Rising. According to one of the more well-known detainees, Michael Collins, about a quarter of the inmates of the North Camp had not been involved in any way with the abortive revolution. They not unnaturally felt aggrieved by their position.
None of those brought to Frongoch had the slightest idea how long they would be held in the newly established concentration camp, nor what was likely to be their eventual fate. There were rumours that there might be further courts martial and perhaps even more executions. In the event, the worst thing that happened was that some high-ranking leaders of the Rising were tried and sent to civilian prisons to serve their sentences. Some of the leaders of the revolt who had not been shot were already serving sentences of life imprisonment in English prisons. It was an alarming prospect for the men at Frongoch, that they too might end up being imprisoned for life in an English gaol.
The authorities were in no hurry to decide anything about the final disposition of these men and so as the summer drew on, they languished in the camp. It was not even possible for them to be certain about their status. Attempts were made in the House of Commons to establish the position of the men at Frongoch, but the government remained strangely coy about them.
On 6 July 1916, a month or so after the prisoners had arrived at Frongoch, Major Newman, the Member of Parliament for Enfield, asked ‘Are those who fought for the Republic of Ireland now recognised as prisoners of war?’ The Speaker responded coldly ‘That question does not arise. It is only put to irritate.’ Before the year was out though, fifteen of the men being held at Frongoch would be facing a military court, charged with offences against the discipline of prisoners of war.
Despite the short and chilly responses given in the House of Commons by government spokesmen, when asked about the Frongoch camp, questions continued throughout the time of the camp’s existence. These questions were really designed to draw the attention of the public to the fact that citizens of the United Kingdom were being held without trial in a concentration camp. On 4 July, for example, Mr Alfred Byrne, a Dublin MP, asked the Under-Secretary for War if it would be possible for prisoners at Frongoch to receive visits on Sundays. On being told that there were not enough staff at the camp to allow for this, another MP, Edward Graham, chipped and told the House that he was very disturbed at the isolation in which the prisoners at Frongoch were being held. He pointed out that it took six hours to reach the camp from London, by railway, and that when MPs visited prisoners there; they were allowed only a quarter of an hour with those they had come to see.
What was it really like in the camp? The best way to get an idea of what conditions were like at Frongoch Concentration Camp, is to listen to the accounts of those who were detained there. One of the most famous prisoners held in the camp was Michael Collins, who had played an active role in the Easter Rising. When Ireland had gained independence, Collins became both Minister of Finance and Director of Intelligence; virtually running the first republican government before he was assassinated during the civil war which followed. In early July 1916 Michael Collins, who was being held at the military detention barracks in Stafford, was transferred to the camp at Frongoch.
When Collins arrived at Frongoch, there had been rain for several days and the entire camp was a mass of slippery mud. He was housed in one of the wooden huts of the North Camp, which were more comfortable than the buildings which made up the old distillery. It didn’t take him long to discover that a lot of the men being held at the concentration camp were guilty of nothing more than having been in Dublin during the Easter Rising. He wrote to a friend:
… by my own count, at least a quarter of the men in the North camp know very little about the Rising. One man, a former labourer of my acquaintance, said that he was just forced off the street in a round-up. His only crime appears to be that he was walking the streets.
As a senior member of the volunteers who took part in the Rising, Michael Collins found himself placed in charge of one of the huts. The overall head of the prisoners was a man called O’Reilly, who had been Vice-Commandant of the Dublin Brigade. This man tried to force the British to acknowledge the men being held at Frongoch as prisoners of war and to be accorded the treatment to which they would then be entitled under the Geneva Convention. The army officer in charge of the camp ignored all such requests.
It has to be said that for a concentration camp, conditions at Frongoch were not too bad. There was adequate food, the prisoners were allowed to organise themselves and, so long as there was no trouble, the soldiers guarding them left them largely to their own devices. It was this which led to the camp being later referred to as the Republican University. Those who had taken part in the Rising analysed the reasons for its failure and arranged discussion groups about various topics. Some studied Gaelic, others politics. The commandant of the camp, Colonel Heygate-Lambert, made no effort to interfere with what the prisoners did, always providing that Frongoch ran smoothly.
Over the summer, the numbers held at the concentration camp fell, as the results of the work of a body set up in London and called the Advisory Committee on the Internment of Rebels. Prisoners were taken to London in batches to be screened by this committee. Their aim was twofold. First, they wished to see if it might be possible to court-martial any of the men being held. Secondly, it was known by the authorities, as well as the prisoners themselves, that many completely innocent people were being detained. The Advisory Committee tried to winnow out these men and see that they were released and sent home to Ireland. By the end of August, the 2,000 prisoners had fallen to about 650. Almost all the others had been quietly sent home.
The truth of the matter was that the camp at Frongoch was something of an embarrassment to the government. It was one thing to hold Germans in such camps, but these men were citizens of the United Kingdom and had not even been charged, let alone convicted, with any offence. Their continued detention was doing the reputation of the English government no good in Ireland, or anywhere else for that matter. Here were citizens who were denied any recourse to the courts and were unable to mount any legal challenge to their continued imprisonment. The wholesale shooting of the leaders of the Easter Rising had created a good deal of sympathy for the rebels’s cause in Ireland itself; arresting thousands of men, many of them quite blameless, was also helping to create martyrs.
Attempts were constantly being made by Irish Members of Parliament to involve other countries in their complaints. On 7 December, Alfred Byrne asked the Home Secretary, whether, ‘it is proposed to allow representatives of the American Embassy to visit Frongoch Camp?’ This was hugely embarrassing to the government as they were assiduously courting the Americans, with a view to persuading them to enter the war on Britain’s side.
Now that the population of the camp had dropped by two thirds, there was room for all the prisoners in the more comfortable North Camp. The South Camp, the old buildings of the former distillery, were used as a punishment block. For instance at one point, the military administration of the camp ordered the prisoners to start emptying the rubbish bins around the soldiers’ barracks. Those who refused to have anything to do with this menial and unpaid work were promptly transferred to the cold and draughty accommodation of the disused factory. An even greater cause of contention was the attempt to get the prisoners to clean the soldiers’ latrines; a task which every single prisoner refused to undertake. At one point, over a hundred prisoners who would not clean the latrines were confined to the unpleasant conditions of the South Camp.
In October, the inmates of Frongoch organised a sports day. This was mentioned during a debate in parliament as evidence that things could not be too bad for the prisoners. Just imagine, a concentration camp where those held are allowed to arrange their own sports! One MP suggested that the complaints about food at the camp should not be taken too seriously if the 100-yard race could be won by a prisoner in a little under eleven seconds. This irritated Michael Collins, who pointed out that he and the other men were heavily dependent on food parcels and that if it were not for these, then their physical condition would have been pretty poor. These athletic contests were held in October 1916, but in the background there were more sinister developments; plans were afoot which could have jeopardised the very lives of the men in Frongoch.
On 2 March 1916, the Military Service Act came into force in Britain. Until then, the British army had relied upon volunteers; as had been the case throughout the whole of the country’s history. In March 1916 though, single men aged between 18 and 41 years of age no longer had any choice in the matter. They were to be conscripted into the forces against their will. In May, another act broadened the scope of those being conscripted to include married men, as well as bachelors. The Military Service Act covered only men living on the British mainland; England, Scotland and Wales. It did not apply to Ireland. However, Irishmen living in Britain would be liable for conscription.
Some time over the summer of 1916, somebody in Whitehall came up with the idea of dealing with the problem of the hundreds of men being held in the Frongoch camp by conscripting them into the army. It was a brilliant scheme. After all, although Irish, all these men were certainly now resident in Britain and therefore theoretically eligible to be drafted into the armed forces. The only difficulty in implementing this plan was that the men at Frongoch somehow got wind of it. Michael Collins reacted angrily and came up with a perfect riposte. From the end of October onwards, he and the other hut leaders ordered that nobody was to answer to his name when addressed by soldiers, or acknowledge his identity in any way to the military authorities of the camp. This would, he thought, prevent any call-up papers being served on prisoners.
It has to be said that the idea of conscripting these men into the army was a peculiarly vindictive one. Once enlisted, they would have a choice. On the one hand, they could refuse to obey orders, when once they had been shipped across to the Western Front in France; in which case they would face court martial and execution. Alternatively, they could stay on the front line and face the likelihood of being killed by the Germans. In either case, they would cease to be a vexatious problem for the British government.
Matters came to a head on 2 November 1916. As a trial run, the army had taken from the camp a man whom they claimed was called Michael Murphy. There was some dispute about the situation; whether Murphy was being called up or if it was being claimed that he was in fact a deserter from the army. Whatever the situation, the army took the wrong man from the camp. When the mistake was discovered, Colonel Heygate-Lambert decided to hold a roll call at Frongoch; the first time that this had been done. On 2 November, he assembled the men and his adjutant called out names, expecting the prisoners to answer and thus identify themselves. Not one did so. This was partly because Michael Murphy, the man wanted by the military, was still in the camp and nobody wished to see him identified. Five days later, on 7 November, another roll call was held, with the same result. Following this, the fifteen hut leaders were charged with a military offence concerning, ‘maintaining discipline among prisoners of war’. It had apparently finally been decided that this was the status of the men at Frongoch. They were, after much hedging, admitted to be prisoners of war.
There can be little doubt that the Camp Commandant handled the confrontation very badly. After the abortive roll calls, some of the prisoners went on hunger strike. Another had a nervous breakdown, brought on by his fear of being sent to France as a soldier. After five months in captivity, a number of other men were suffering the consequences of imprisonment and the general health of many was not good. It was now that Colonel Heygate-Lambert played another card. He ruled that the camp doctor, a man called Peters, was not to treat any of the inmates for any condition, until they had correctly identified themselves to him. This meant that none of the men were to receive medical treatment from then on.
Caught between the demands of his conscience and the orders of the Camp Commandant, Dr Peters was in an unenviable position. Some men were on hunger strike and in urgent need of care and attention, but he was forbidden to tend to them until they answered to their names. Dr Peters had already had a run-in with the Camp Commandant about the quality of the food being provided. One consignment of meat was in such an advanced state of decomposition, that the very smell of it made soldiers retch. Nevertheless, Colonel Heygate-Lambert insisted that it be washed with vinegar to remove the smell and then served to the prisoners. The doctor examined this meat for himself and ruled that it was unfit for human consumption.
After various other problems and finding that he was unable to adhere both to his code of ethics and the requirements of the job, Dr Peters wrote out his resignation, but was asked by the Home Office to stay on until some matters had been attended to. He became so distressed about matters that he vanished one day and was later found floating face down in the Tryweryn river, which flowed past the camp. An inquest held in Merioneth found that Dr Peters had committed suicide.
Shortly after the fifteen men were charged and told that they would stand trial before a military court for their refusal to answer to their names, Michael Collins managed to smuggle out an account of the situation in Frongoch. This was passed to a newspaper in Ireland and on 11 November the Cork Free Press published details of what was going on at the camp. The story was picked up by the Manchester Guardian, who found that legally, reporters were entitled to be present at the trial of the fifteen prisoners. This was the last thing that the government wanted and orders were issued that journalists were to be excluded from the proceedings; an act which would have been quite illegal.
On Saturday 25 November 1916, a military court was convened at Frongoch camp under the authority of a Royal Warrant of 3 August 1914. This allowed the army to impose discipline upon prisoners of war; although its legality when used against the citizens of this country was open to question. The wording of the warrant, which was for, ‘the Maintenance of Discipline among Prisoners of War’, was as follows:
Whereas We deem it expedient to make regulations for the custody of and maintenance of discipline among prisoners of war interned in the United Kingdom or elsewhere; Our Will and Pleasure is that the custody of and maintenance of discipline among prisoners of war interned in the United Kingdom and elsewhere shall be governed by the laws and customs of war and the regulations attached to this Our Warrant, which regulations shall be the sole authority on the matters therein treated of…
The charges against the prisoners at Frongoch were based upon the regulations cited in the Royal Warrant, namely that:
… any such charge or charges as may be preferred against them for any offence which, if committed in England, would be triable before a Civil Court of Criminal Jurisdiction or for any offence the commission of which shall be held prejudicial to the safety of or well-being of His Majesty’s Dominions, armed forces or subjects or to the safe custody, control or well-being of any prisoner of war.
Major E.E. Husey of the Cheshire Regiment was President of the court and the other members were Captain F. Fanning Evans and Captain C.C. Doran. Present as Judge-Advocate was Lieutenant Colonel Ivor Bowen.
The court assembled at a building inside Frongoch Camp and this at once caused a problem. Appendix C of the Royal Warrant under which the trial was being held, specifically stated that, ‘all the proceedings shall be in open court and in the presence of the accused’. This was quite unambiguous and a reporter from the Manchester Guardian and a journalist from another newspaper arrived in Wales to cover the proceedings. They were stopped at the gates of the camp by armed soldiers, who told them that they would only be admitted if they had a pass from the Commandant, Colonel Heygate-Lambert. He refused permission for anybody to enter the camp without permission from the Home Office. It is entirely possible that the colonel was acting on instructions from the government in taking this stance and it was hoped to avoid any publicity for the trial by this means. If so, the strategy backfired.
George Duffy, the defence counsel for the accused men, drew the court’s attention to what was happening and asserted, quite correctly, that unless the trial was held in public, then the court would have no legal standing. The Judge-Advocate agreed with this point and advised the President that the press must be admitted. A sergeant was despatched to the Commandant’s office to instruct him to let the reporters in. He refused, saying that he had orders from the Home Office. None of this was making a very good impression on the two journalists, who were preparing to write an account of how prisoners held at Frongoch were being denied a fair and open trial. The impasse was resolved by the court removing itself to a building which lay outside the barbed wire fence of the camp itself.
The same charge was faced by all fifteen of the men; namely that after being warned by the Commandant, they failed to answer their names during a roll call. None of those being tried for this offence denied that they had failed to answer to their names, but gave as their defence that they suspected that the roll call, the first held in the camp, was intended to identify men who might be called up for military service. Colonel Heygate-Lambert did not come out very well as the evidence was given. Even the soldiers serving under him testified that he had said and done some exceedingly callous things. Sergeant-Major Newstead testified that the Commandant had said to the prisoners that if he had nothing but dead bodies in the camp, he would have discipline.
There was no doubt that, technically at least, the accused men were guilty of the offence with which they were charged. George Duffy, for the defence, challenged the validity of the trial on various grounds; none of which were accepted by the court. The chief point made on behalf of the defence was that none of the actions of which the fifteen men were accused were illegal under either statute or common law. In short, they had not really committed an offence at all. The idea that laws could be passed in this way, merely by the King’s signing a warrant set a dangerous precedent. Parliament had been completely bypassed. Nevertheless, the court refused to accept such arguments and that being so, the case was proved.
The climax of the trial was bathetic in the extreme. The men were all convicted of the charge and it remained only to decide on their punishment. This was solemnly declared to be a month’s imprisonment. Since they were already prisoners, it is debatable how much this penalty affected them.
The staff of the Manchester Guardian revenged themselves on Colonel Heygate-Lambert for his trying to prevent them from reporting the trial by running several articles which drew attention to Frongoch; the last thing the government wished to see. Throughout late November and the first half of December, more and more questions were being asked in parliament about the conditions at Frongoch and the ultimate fate of the men held there. On 4 December 1916, for instance, questioning from Irish MPs forced the government to admit that efforts had indeed been made to draft some of the prisoners at Frongoch into the army.
By the middle of December, there could be nobody in the British government who did not simply wish to be rid of the men being detained at the camp in Wales. Other political developments were at work; things that had nothing to do with the Irish prisoners and their circumstances as such, but would ultimately bring about a neat and satisfactory resolution of the awkward situation which the British had inadvertently created for themselves. On 7 December 1916, Herbert Asquith, the Prime Minister, was replaced by David Lloyd George. Asquith was a somewhat stuffy and inflexible politician, who had a reputation for standing fast and refusing to compromise. Having already, as he saw it, faced down the suffragettes in the years before the outbreak of war in 1914, he evidently felt that the same strategy might work against the Irish nationalists. This was a disastrous miscalculation and as soon as Asquith was safely out of the saddle, Lloyd George lost no time in reaching a compromise about Frongoch Camp. Perhaps compromise is the wrong way of stating the case; it was more a complete capitulation.
On 21 December 1916, the Secretary of State for Ireland announced that the camp at Frongoch was to be dismantled and all prisoners to be released without charge and sent back to Ireland as free men. The following evening, the camp adjutant at Frongoch, presumably the Commandant himself could not bring himself to admit publicly that his rule was being ignominiously ended, announced to the assembled prisoners that they were all to be released. Astonishingly, most were to be set free that very night. Those who lived in the north, south and west of Ireland would be taken from the camp at once and put on ships bound for Ireland. It was not to be expected that after the history of bitter confrontation which had marked relations in Frongoch between the Irish prisoners and those guarding them, things should now have gone smoothly.
The adjutant asked for the names, addresses and home railway stations of the first few batches of prisoners to be freed and at once, there was an objection from Michael Collins. How did they know, he asked, that this was not some new trap and a way for the army to acquire the information about the identity of the men being held at Frongoch which they had been seeking in vain for the last two months? A tense standoff was averted when the adjutant suggested that the men compile the lists themselves. An hour later, lorries entered the camp and the first group of prisoners was loaded onto them and driven to the port at Holyhead on the Isle of Anglesey. There, they were put on board the overnight ferry to Ireland.
The following day, more prisoners were taken from Frongoch and sent home. According to one, when they changed trains at Chester, the men amused themselves by marching along the platform singing Deutschland uber Alles. To the very last, they were determined to be an irritation to the English authorities. The last of the detainees were freed from the camp on the night of Christmas Eve. Michael Collins was one of these; arriving in Dublin early on the morning of Christmas Day.
Thus ended Britain’s first experiment with the detention of political prisoners. It had been a largely unedifying spectacle and few in government had any wish to repeat it. The idea of holding one’s own citizens in concentration camps in this way had not proved a success and although this method of combating a domestic insurgency was to be used again from time to time over the next sixty years, it was never to become widespread or popular. The same could not be said for locking up foreigners and members of ethnic minorities. Here, the sensibilities of the British were not so easily offended and it was to be many years before rounding up people of particular religions or nationalities was to become seen as unacceptable. Indeed, during the First World War, thousands of foreigners were kept behind barbed wire for no other reason than that they had been born abroad. This kind of thing began soon after the outbreak of war in the summer of 1914.
2. The Concentration Camps for ‘Aliens’
On 9 November 1938, mobs in Germany attacked shops and other premises owned by Jews. In a number of cities, synagogues were also burned. The response of the authorities was not to punish the perpetrators, but rather to arrest their victims and march them off to ‘protective custody’ in concentration camps. Krystalnacht, also known as ‘The Night of Broken Glass’ attracted worldwide condemnation. As with other aspects of the German experience with concentration camps, the British had already been there and in this case watched a version of ‘The Night of Broken Glass’ unfold in their own cities twenty-three years earlier.
In Liverpool on 10 May 1915, angry crowds attacked shops belonging to people with German names. Some of the owners of these shops had been living in Britain for fifty years and had sons serving in the British army, but it made no difference to the furious mobs. Houses were looted and what could not be carried away was thrown into the street and set on fire. Similar scenes took place across the country; from London to Salford. The reaction of the authorities was revealing. As the Manchester Guardian reported on 11 May, apropos of the rioting in Liverpool:
A great many Austrians and Germans in the city who have hitherto been allowed their liberty are now, it is stated, to be interned in order that they may be preserved from mob violence.
A few days later, columns of civilians were being marched out of the city under military escort. Their destination? A concentration camp.
Two days after the rioting, the Chief Constable of Manchester ordered the arrest of every German shopkeeper in the city. Similar actions were taken elsewhere. The pretext for the rounding up of harmless butchers and tobacconists was precisely the same as that used by the Germans in the aftermath of Krystalnacht; the men were being taken into protective custody to save them from harm. Just as in 1938, few people, even in Germany itself, had believed that this was the true reason that the men were being arrested; neither did they in England in May, 1915. It was widely known that the arrests were really reprisals for the sinking of the passenger line Lusitania; the event which had triggered the rioting in the first place.
The expression, ‘concentration camp’ really only acquired negative connotations during and after the Second World War. British newspapers in 1914 and 1915 did not hesitate to talk of the concentration camps which were being set up throughout the country. The purpose of these camps was, more often than not, to concentrate in one place foreigners who might not be fully supportive of the British war effort. These men were almost exclusively German and Austrian, although there was also a leavening of Turks and Bulgarians. Many had lived in Britain for years; sometimes for many decades. There was no suggestion that they really posed any threat to British interests; it was enough that they had been born in an enemy country.
The Defence of the Realm regulations provided the legal framework for interning civilians from enemy countries, but it is likely that the government was not, at least at first, especially keen to implement such measures. Some Germans living in this country were young men of military age who might conceivably have wished to return to their own country at the outbreak of war to enlist in the German army and fight against the British. Most though had lived in Britain for years; often they were married to English women and in some cases had become naturalised British citizens. They were pork butchers, waiters, bakers and jewellers who had no more desire to see a German victory than anybody else living in the United Kingdom. Such was the popular feeling and almost hysterical fear of spies and saboteurs, that the authorities thought it prudent to cater for the ordinary person’s prejudices and arrest some of these innocent men; sending them to concentration camps.
At the outbreak of war in 1914, an old factory stood derelict in East London. William Ritchie and Sons had run a jute factory in Carpenter’s Road in Stratford; not far from where the Olympic stadium now stands. There was a fairly substantial community of Germans in East London at this time. They tended to be shopkeepers and there were so many of them in Stratford that it was known sometimes as Little Germany. The Germans had integrated well into the area and it was not until the war began that any sort of friction had been known in Stratford between the English and Germans. However, one way of demonstrating patriotism in the opening months of the war was by boycotting any business which was supposedly run by or owned by Germans. Rumours spread about anybody with a foreign-sounding name that they were secretly Germans. So bad did the situation become that some traders began to take out advertisements in local newspapers, declaring that they were British. Staddon and Sons, who ran drapers’ shops in Plaistow and Barking, had a large advertisement published, in which they detailed their ancestry, pointing out that:
I should have supposed that there was no British who could not see with half an eye that the name STADDON was essentially English. ‘English of the English’. As matter of fact, I was born in ‘Glorious Devon’, where my parents and forefathers had farmed for generations and with the single exception of a day trip to Cherbourg in a Channel Steamer, which I once took during a summer visit to the seaside, there is NO RECORD OF ONE OF US EVER HAVING BEEN OUT OF COUNTRY.
There were however other shopkeepers in East London whose antecedents were not so conspicuously British and on 15 December, a large number of these men were arrested by the police and marched to the disused jute factory in Carpenter’s Road.
The Stratford Concentration Camp, for such was its official title, had a bad reputation among those interned during the First World War. Surrounded with barbed wire and with mounted machine guns pointing down at the prisoners, it was a grim place to spend the three years that it was in existence. Writing of it in his autobiography, The London Years, Rudolf Rocker wrote that:
The Stratford Camp and its Commandant had a dreadful reputation among the internees. News had spread of terrible things happening there. It was not always the fault of the British military administration. The German internal administration was as much to blame, particularly for a great deal of corruption which existed there. The head of the internal administration was man named Weber, who seemed by all accounts to be a sadist and did his best to make life in the camp impossible. We were told about a Sergeant Trinneman at Stratford, who was the Commandant’s right-hand man and practically ran the camp. He was said to be a brute.
Those who are familiar with accounts of the concentration camps of the Third Reich will find descriptions such as the one above, eerily familiar. The kapos, prisoners in positions of trust and authority in Nazi camps, were often said to be even more cruel and sadistic than their German masters. So it was at the British concentration camps during the First World War. The commandants would choose prisoners and place them in authority over the others. This power often went to the men’s heads.
There was certainly casual brutality at the Stratford Camp. One hundred and forty prisoners there signed a complaint against the Commandant, a career soldier. One man to whom he was speaking refused to address the commandant as ‘Sir’, for which impudence he was struck in the face by the commandant.
It is strange that the memory of these concentration camps, established not in remote rural areas, but in the very heart of the British capital, should have faded so completely. You would be hard-pressed to find a local resident in that part of London who has even the vaguest idea that a concentration camp was once operating only a few streets from where they live. An even more extraordinary example of such convenient amnesia concerns the concentration camp which was set up at a major London landmark.
Alexandra Palace is an entertainment venue in North London. Opened in 1873 as a centre for entertainment and education, it lies between the suburbs of Muswell Hill and Wood Green. Alexandra Palace is famous as being the site of the world’s first ‘high definition’ television broadcasts, which the BBC began in 1936. ‘Ally Pally’, as it is known affectionately to the locals, was perfect for broadcasting, being situated on a tall hill, with a commanding view across the whole of London. BBC news broadcasts continued from Alexandra Palace until 1969 and Open University programmes went out from there until the 1980s.
Ask anybody living in and around the area about the history of Alexandra Palace and you will be sure to pick up snippets of history of this sort. You will also be told of the two huge fires which almost destroyed the place; once in 1875 and again in 1980. You might even hear of the supposed ‘gypsy’s curse’ legend associated with these fires. Some know that there was once a racecourse there. One thing you will not be told, because it has been entirely lost to memory, is that a century ago, Alexandra Palace was the site of one of the largest concentration camps which this country has ever known; holding over 3,000 prisoners.
At the outbreak of war in 1914, Alexandra Palace was commandeered by the military and used as the headquarters for King Edward’s Horse. The horses were kept at times in the tennis courts. Later, it was used to house refugees from Belgium. In March 1915, a concentration camp was established at Alexandra Palace for so-called ‘enemy aliens’. These were Austrians and Germans who had been living in the United Kingdom when the war began. Many of them had been living in the country for years; some had arrived as babes in arms and knew no other home. Nevertheless, such men were technically German or Austrian, even if they could not speak a single word of German.
Sensitive to complaints of ill treatment, the British allowed both newspaper reporters and also representatives of the American embassy to visit Alexandra Palace and see for themselves the conditions that prevailed in the camp. On 21 May 1915, officials from the US embassy recorded that there were 1,286 German prisoners and another 100 from Austria. The Camp Commandant was Lieutenant-Colonel R.S.F. Walker.
Despite the fact that Germany was accusing the British of mistreating the prisoners at Alexandra Palace, there was little evidence of this, either in the accounts of the prisoners themselves or those who visited the camp to check on the conditions there. It was certainly no holiday camp; as new prisoners swelled the ranks, the place became horribly overcrowded. The 3,000 men slept on plank beds in the great hall and on one occasion when the weather was foggy, the windows and doors remained closed for four days. The stench of so many human bodies crammed together was said to be abominable. The advantage of so many men in such close proximity was that despite the poor ventilation, the hall in which they all slept was never cold. Even in the middle of winter, it was generally as warm as anybody could wish.
Staff from the American embassy made several visits to the concentration camp at Alexandra Palace, to keep an eye on how things were developing there. In November 1916, the German leader of the camp told embassy officials that he and his fellow prisoners were quite satisfied with their treatment, food and accommodation and had no complaints to make. Others were not so completely content with the circumstances which they were forced to endure in the camp. Food was a particular source of anger among some men. The same buckets which were used for mopping the floor were used at mealtimes for serving up soup; a fact which made some prisoners unable to stomach the meal. In the later years of the war, horse meat was substituted for beef and the daily calorie intake for each man was estimated to have fallen to 1,489. The average man needs 2,500 calories a day simply to maintain his weight and health. These figures suggest that the prisoners at Alexandra Palace were, at least by 1918, on a starvation diet.
To get some idea of the kind of people who were caught up in the mania to intern anybody of German ancestry, we might look at father and son: Georg and Rudolf Sauter. Georg Sauter was a young Bavarian artist who came to London in 1889, at the age of 23. He spent a lot of time in the National Gallery, where he one day met Lilian Galsworthy; sister of the Nobel Prize winning author of The Forsythe Saga. Sauter married Galsworthy’s sister and they soon had a son, whom they name Rudolf. When the First World War began, Georg Sauter had been living in England for twenty-five years and also had a 20-year-old son with very little experience of Germany, other than visiting the country on holidays. In all that time, Georg Sauter had never quite got round to becoming a naturalised British citizen. It was a lapse that was to cost him and his family dear, for both father and son were arrested and sent to the camp at Alexandra Palace. It was a terrible injustice which rankled in Georg Sauter’s heart. When the war ended, he returned to Germany and remained there for the rest of his life.
The men who were detained at Alexandra Palace might have faced a meagre and unappetising diet, but at some concentration camps, they were being killed by rifle fire. The Isle of Man was thought to be the ideal location for keeping large numbers of prisoners, because of course anybody escaping would still find himself trapped on the island. Thousands of prisoners of war and civilian internees were held in camps on the island. On 19 November, there was a serious incident at the Douglas Alien Concentration Camp, as a result of which six men died.
There had been a number of complaints from the civilians who had been transferred to the concentration camp at Douglas from the mainland. These men were waiters, shopkeepers and so on and the only reason that they had been arrested was that they might be tempted at some point either to spy for their country of birth or to return to Germany to serve in that country’s armed forces. The accommodation at Douglas was in tents and as winter approached, the prisoners felt these to be wholly inadequate for their needs. The food too left something to be desired.
On 5 November 1914, the weather in the Isle of Man was extremely wet and windy and the prisoners protested that they could not possibly be expected to stay in tents at such a time. After they had refused to enter their tents that night, there was a confrontation, which was resolved by the Commandant of the camp allowing some of them to sleep in the dining room; inside a brick building.
Dissatisfaction about the food provided grew stronger as November passed and on 19 November, the prisoners decided to stage a protest in the dining hall. After they had finished their midday meal, the men began to smash the crockery and overturn tables; jeering and booing at the kitchen staff. Guards were called and when they entered the dining hall, intending to disperse the protesting prisoners, they were met with a hail of food, pieces of broken crockery and the occasional chair. The situation at this point was rowdy and disorderly, rather than dangerous. If the guards had simply withdrawn and waited for the men to cool down, matters would most likely have passed without violence. In the event, they loaded their rifles and began firing into the dining hall.
That the guards at the Douglas Concentration Camp were intent upon carrying out a massacre seems beyond all reasonable doubt. Counting the remaining ammunition after the firing had ended and the dead and wounded removed from the scene, revealed that a total of thirty-four shots had been fired into the packed dining hall. Not one of the soldiers who began shooting in this disorganised fashion was later able to say who had given the order to open fire. A number of those who gave evidence at the subsequent inquest though were sure that somebody had told them to begin shooting into the packed dining hall.
Five men were killed immediately by the volleys of fire that day and another died later of his wounds. Many suffered bullet wounds and given the circumstances, it is a miracle that more did not died. The inquest, which was held the following month, found that the dead men were the victims of justifiable homicide, the protest in the dining hall having by that time been described in British newspapers as a, ‘riot’.
This was not the only instance of a prisoner in a concentration camp being shot dead by guards. A few days before the shooting on the Isle of Man, there had been another incident, a little closer to London. One of the earliest camps to be set up for the internment of Germans and Austrians was at Camberley in Surrey. There were already 8,000 inmates on the middle of November 1914, when there was some sort of disturbance one night.
At about midnight, one of the guards at Camberley heard the sound of running feet and then some scuffling. When a light was turned onto the source of the sound, it became apparent that a group of prisoners were making towards one of the gates. After shouting a warning, the guards opened fire, killing one man and wounding another. It turned out that this was nothing more sinister than a few men brawling, after an argument got out of hand. It was not the concerted effort to rush the gates and overpower the sentries, that had been feared.
The mania for internment of enemy aliens went through waves. In between these crazes for persecuting harmless shopkeepers and artists, the authorities would sometimes release prisoners or deport them to neutral countries such as Holland. However, there were times when public opinion became so inflamed on this subject that it was necessary for the government to act to placate the demands of the public. This happened in the early summer of 1915, when the first phase of the enthusiasm for internment had died down.
By the early summer of 1915, many of those who had been rounded up at the start of the war had been quietly released. It was perfectly clear to anybody but a complete fool that German-born pork butchers from London’s East End or waiters from seaside hotels really posed no sort of threat to the British nation. Although some younger men of military age were still detained, the rush to round up ‘aliens’ had largely subsided by the middle of 1915. This changed abruptly on the afternoon of 7 May 1915.
The world’s largest and fastest passenger liner at that time, RMS Lusitania, was a British merchant ship. On Saturday 1 May, it had sailed from New York, heading for Liverpool. On board were 1,257 passenger and a 702-strong crew. Nobody seriously expected the Germans to attack merchant shipping; even if, as in this case, the ship was sailing under the British flag. The Lusitania was just ten miles from the Irish coast and almost at its destination when Kapitanleutnant Walter Schieger, the commander of the German submarine U-20, ordered the firing of a single torpedo at the mighty vessel. The Lusitania sank just 18 minutes later with the loss of almost 1,200 lives.
The response to the sinking of the Lusitania was swift and violent. The first rioting broke out in Liverpool; the home town of many of the liner’s crew. The Manchester Guardian gave an account of the disturbances in its edition of Tuesday, 11 May 1915. The article began:
The rage and grief occasioned in Liverpool by the destruction of the Lusitania led to serious rioting in that city on Saturday, Sunday and yesterday. The premises of German tradesmen were attacked by large and angry crowds of men, women and children and the police had the greatest difficulty in coping with the outbreak. Indeed, in several instances, they were quite unable to disperse the crowds until serious damage had been done. A great many Germans and Austrians in the city who have hitherto been allowed their liberty are now, it is stated, to be interned so that they may be preserved from mob violence.
Shops were looted and the belongings of the owners burned, windows smashed and anybody of German origin assaulted. The police could not cope with the rioting and it was rumoured that the army would be called in to tackle the situation, if it deteriorated further.
The next day, rioting spread to the south of England, with over 100 shops and houses in East London being attacked, looted and sometimes burned. A footnote in the newspapers informed readers that all German shopkeepers in Manchester had now been arrested and taken to concentration camps for their own safety. Writing of the aftermath of the riots in Liverpool, the Manchester Guardian had this to say:
Hundreds of Germans have been lodged in the main bridewell and there is scarcely an alien enemy at large in the city. The bridewell, large as it is, has been found inadequate to accommodate all the aliens, and removals are being made to concentration camps at Hawick and elsewhere.
There is a modern expression for developments of this kind, where a specific ethnic or national minority is driven from cities, locked in concentration camps and then later deported from the country. It is ethnic cleansing. This may sound like something of an exaggeration, until we look at the figures involved. In the 1911 census, 31,254 German-born residents had been recorded in the County of London; that part of the city excluding the outer suburbs. By 1921, this figure had fallen to 9,083. In 1911, there had been 8,869 Austrian born people in the same district; by 1921, there were only 1,552.
The calls for the internment of ‘enemy aliens’ in concentration camps continued on and off for the whole of the war. There were renewed demands in 1918, following the bombing of London by German air raids and reverses in the field on the Western Front. In the summer of 1918, the very year that the war ended, there were mass rallies in London, calling for any Germans still at liberty to be arrested and sent to concentration camps. On 13 July 1918, an enormous rally was held in London’s Trafalgar Square. It was said to be the biggest meeting held there since the war had begun. Messages were read out from people as varied and disparate as music hall star Harry Lauder and Rudyard Kipling, author of The Jungle Book. All called for the immediate internment of all Germans, men and women; whether they were naturalised British citizens or not.
Next month, a parade took place from Hyde Park to Downing Street, for the purpose of delivering a petition containing over a million signatures calling for the internment of all Germans and Austrians. The government, mindful of the fact that as soon as the war had ended, there would be a general election, conceded to these demands; setting up a new Enemy Aliens Advisory Committee. The task of this body was to examine all those of German and Austrian origin who had so far been given exemption from internment. In addition to revoking the naturalisation of some Germans who had become British citizens, deportations to Holland were stepped up. In September 1918, over 200 men a week were being taken from the concentration camps, shipped across the channel and dumped, penniless, in Holland.
We have looked at concentration camps operating in England and Wales during the Great War. It is now time to examine the situation in Scotland and to look at altogether different sorts of camp which were being run in that country from 1916 onwards.
3. The Home Office Work Camps
After the dissolution of the camp at Frongoch, it might have been assumed that there was no further appetite in Britain for the detention of its own citizens for political reasons. In general this was true and is still so; very few people in this country today would be in favour of indefinite detention without trial for purely political offences. There was in the middle of the First World War though an exception to this rule. This concerned a class of men who were so depraved and unnatural that nothing was thought too bad for them. These individuals deserved the strongest condemnation and harshest treatment and hardly anybody, other than a handful of cranks such as the philosopher Bertrand Russell, had a good word to say for them. Sending these men to concentration camps and forcing them to undertake backbreaking labour was thought to be almost too good for them.
Traditionally, the British army and navy had been composed entirely of volunteers. With the exception of the occasional aberration such as the press gangs which operated in some ports in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the only men serving in the British forces were those who chose to do so. All this changed during the war which began in 1914. So horrific were the losses on the Western Front that the supply of volunteers was not sufficient to replenish the heavily depleted units struggling to hold the line against Germany. At first, it was hoped to avoid compulsion by means of what became known as the Derby Scheme. This was devised by Lord Derby and implemented in October 1915. Those men who were willing to serve at some future time of need could register with the military authorities and attest to their willingness to be called up. They would then return to their ordinary work and wait to see if they were needed. Neither this nor the periodic recruiting drives, featuring a man at whose activities we have already looked, the new Minister for War, Lord Kitchener, were sufficient to raise the enormous numbers of men needed if Britain was to prevail against Germany and the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires. After all, by 1916, British casualties were running at around half a million.
The wartime coalition government contained many Liberals who were appalled at the idea of compulsory military service, but despite this, the Military Service Act became law in 1916 and required all single men resident in Britain and between the ages of 18 and 41, to join the army. Later that same year, the act was extended to include married men. In this way, a total of five million men were conscripted into the armed forces. It must be remembered that there was no necessity for a man to receive his call-up papers or report to some base in order to be considered an enlisted soldier. On the day that the Military Service Act came into force, which was Thursday, 2 March 1916, every man living in Britain who was unmarried and between the ages of 18 and 41 was automatically enlisted into the armed forces and so subject to military law.
Such was the popular enthusiasm for the war, that hardly any of those called up raised any objection. Legal considerations apart, social disapproval of such objectors was powerful and those hesitating to serve their country in this was were castigated as ‘slackers’ and ‘shirkers’.
Some men however had deep-seated and indeed overwhelming reasons for refusing to be drafted into the army. These men were the conscientious objectors and they were almost universally reviled. While everybody else’s husbands, brothers and sons were doing their bit and risking their lives, these cowards simply said that they did not wish to go to war and preferred to stay safely at home. It is hard now to realise just how strong was the popular feeling against such men.
Despite the enormous unpopularity of those who wished to ‘dodge the column’, as the saying was at that time, the government had made provision for men who really had religious, ethical or philosophical objections to being in the army. It was possible to apply for a certificate of exemption if, according to the words of the act, a man had a ‘conscientious objection to the undertaking of combatant service’. This was the only reference to the subject in the act and it was left to the Military Service Tribunals who were responsible for issuing certificates of exemption to decide for themselves how to interpret the law.
Only a tiny number of men registered as having a conscientious objection to fighting. Out of five million who were enlisted, a mere 16,500 applied to Military Service Tribunals for exemption certificates on the basis that they were conscientious objectors. This works out at 0.3 per cent of those called up for military service.
It soon became apparent that the men applying for exemption certificates on the grounds of conscience could be divided into three categories. There were those who were prepared to join the army and wear uniforms, always provided that they were not expected to carry or use weapons. These were the easiest to deal with and a Non-Combatant Corps was set up in the army for them. Some worked as stretcher bearers, others did manual work. All were exposed to the same risk of death as other soldiers and were accorded a certain amount of grudging respect. Then there were the ‘alternativists’, who would perform other work of national importance, as long as it was not under military control. The final group were the most difficult to deal with. These were the ‘absolutists’, who were so bitterly opposed to the war that they would do nothing at all which might aid the war effort.
If a tribunal refused to issue a man with a certificate of exemption, then he was technically enlisted in the army and subject to military law. If he did not report for service, then he could be arrested by the military police and court-martialled. In practice, such men were usually sent to civil prisons to serve any sentence of imprisonment, although there were cases when the army chose to treat them as being mutinous soldiers, rather than misguided civilians. In the most notorious such case, thirty-five conscientious objectors were taken by the army to France and informed that as they were now in the presence of the enemy, any refusal to obey orders would be a capital crime. Because this motley collection of Quakers, Methodists and Jehovah’s Witnesses still would not do as they were told, they were court-martialled and sentenced to be shot at dawn. The sentences were commuted to ten years imprisonment and they were returned to England, where they were sent to ordinary prisons.
The British prison system was becoming clogged up with hundreds and then thousands of men who were not criminals in any real meaning of the word and as the months passed, it became clear that some other system would be needed to deal with such men. A committee was set up under the leadership of William Brace; a Labour MP and Under-Secretary at the Home Office and a scheme devised which, it was thought, might solve the problem. The Brace Committee recommended the setting up of ‘work centres’, where absolutists might be employed in conditions which would be as arduous as those being endured by men at the front. It was guessed, quite rightly, that among the genuine idealists who were ready to suffer imprisonment for their beliefs, there might be others who were simply hoping to wait out the war safely in a prison cell. This was without doubt the view of many members of the public, who were outraged to think that while their relatives were risking death in France, these shirkers were sitting in warm cells; certain to survive the war. A tough regime of hard labour could persuade such men that they might as well be at the front with everybody else.
The Brace Committee came up with the idea of Work Centres and Home Office Camps. These were to be places where conscientious objectors could be sent to, rather than to leave them in prison. Conditions at such centres were meant to be tough and work undertaken was supposed to be gruelling. The first two work centres were set up at Wakefield in Yorkshire and Princetown in Devon. Camps were also set up in Scotland, to which men from England would be sent.
Wakefield and Princetown were of course the locations of prisons which had long been established. The ordinary criminal prisoners were removed and the two gaols prepared for the new influx of men sentenced to two years or more imprisonment for refusing to obey military orders.
Wakefield and Princeton, more commonly known as Dartmoor, were relatively comfortable; at least they were warm and dry. The same could not be said for the camps to which the conscientious objectors were to be sent. Before looking in detail at the conditions in one of those camps in particular, perhaps we should bear in mind that not all those men who were avoiding military service were motivated by high-minded principles. Some at least were simply ordinary men who did not wish to be shipped off to France to become cannon-fodder on the Western Front. It was partly to deter men of this type that conditions were made so harsh in the work camps.
Herbert Watters was a blacksmith whose family lived on the Gower Peninsular of Wales. When he was called up in 1916, he claimed that the two forges that he was running were work of national importance and that he should not therefore be conscripted. The Gower Rural Military Service tribunal rejected this notion and ordered Watters to report for service. He refused and in October 1916, found himself at the Swansea Magistrates’ Court. He was fined £2 and handed over to the military police, who took Herbert Watters to his unit; the 60th Training Reserve Battalion. The idea was that after receiving some initial training, Watters would be sent to France. He however, had other ideas. His military service record was filled out at the camp on 14 October 1916 and two days later he was facing a court martial for refusing to obey orders.
There was never at any time the least suggestion that Herbert Watters was motivated by idealism. He was just a bloody-minded and awkward individual who was determined not to be conscripted into the army and then sent to fight the Germans. He was sentenced at court martial to six months’ imprisonment with hard labour and sent to Wormwood Scrubs Prison to complete his sentence. The army must have decided by now that having such a man in their ranks would be more trouble than it was worth, because on 16 December 1916, Watters was released from prison and transferred to the Army Reserve so that he could, ‘undertake work of national importance under the direction of the Brace Committee’. In effect, Herbert Watters had won. He would not be sent to France and was merely to spend the war doing manual labour.
After being sent to a road-work camp in Argyleshire in Scotland, Watters found to his surprise that he was given command of a forge and expected to resume his work as a blacksmith, repairing the tools of those building the road. Later, he was sent to Glencoe and then Wakefield Prison. It was because it was very well known that among those refusing to be conscripted were men like this, that conditions at the Home Office work camps were sometimes made as harsh as possible. It was felt that if things were bad enough, then such men would give up and agree to serve in the army.
A notoriously bad camp established by the Brace Committee was operating on the outskirts of Aberdeen from August to October 1916. There was a granite quarry at Dyce and the intention was that men at the camp would labour there; breaking stones to be used in road building. From late August onwards, men began to arrive at Dyce Camp from the prisons where they had been held. Eventually, 250 men were living at Dyce; the majority accommodated in leaky, draughty tents dating from the Boer War. The camp was set up on sloping ground, which meant that when it rained, water ran down the hillside and into the tents. Whether this was accidental or planned in order to make conditions even more unpleasant for the inmates of the camp, considerable discomfort was caused by the damp which pervaded the tents. They slept on straw mattresses which were placed directly on the wet ground.
Most of these men were objecting to war on religious grounds or because they were pacifists. They were in civilian life teachers, clerks and white-collar workers, wholly unused to labouring, and yet were now expected to work hard for ten hours a day in a quarry. This, combined with the draughty tents and damp conditions, had an exceedingly poor effect upon the health of some. This was neatly illustrated soon after the camp was set up, when on 8 September, a 20-year-old man called Walter Roberts died of pneumonia. It was claimed that the Dyce Work Camp was being run in a punitive fashion which was likely to lead to further deaths. Letters from inmates alleged that many more men were falling ill and that it was a matter of time before others died of pneumonia.
Ramsay McDonald, the Scottish-born leader of the Labour Party visited Dyce in October 1916 and was shocked at what he saw there. In a speech to the House of Commons on 19 October, he described the terrible living conditions at the camp and the high levels of illness. The Home Office was not happy to have attention drawn to their camps in this way and Dyce was quietly closed down that same month.
After the scandal at Dyce Camp was revealed, the government quietly made the remaining Home Office Camps a little less harsh. They had already received enough bad publicity from the concentration camps that they had been running in England and Wales and with all sides in the First World War eagerly spreading atrocity stories, it was perhaps felt that there was no point courting any further bad publicity in this way. Rumours were spreading about the work-camps, which were being described in some quarters as concentration camps. The stories, circulating by word of mouth, hinted that dogs were being used to guard the prisoners at such camps and that conditions at some were even worse than they were at Dyce.
Conscientious objectors may have been the least popular and most reviled group of men in the country, but there were limits to how ordinary people felt that they should be treated. With the increasing awareness of places such as Frongoch and Dyce, the feeling began to grow that it was a bit much to confine British citizens in such places. There was no objection to keeping thousands of men of German and Austrian ancestry in concentration camps, but it was not really the thing for our own people.