Internment on the Isle of Man
Across two world wars the Island held tens of thousands of civilian internees behind barbed wire. It was chosen for the same reason it had always stood apart: it was separate, and it was hard to leave.
An island set apart
Twice in the twentieth century the British Government turned the Isle of Man into a place of mass internment. These were not prisoners of war. They were civilians, most of them ordinary men caught on the wrong side of a border when war broke out, later joined by refugees who had fled the very regime they were now imprisoned for resembling.
In the First World War the Island held the largest internment camp in the British Isles at Knockaloe. In the Second, the Government requisitioned whole terraces of boarding houses and ran a scatter of smaller camps the length of the Island. Both stories are gathered here.
Knockaloe
Knockaloe camp near Patrick held more than 23,000 civilian men at its peak, behind roughly 695 miles of wire, in four sub-camps each with its own hospital. It was run by the British Government, and its records went to London.
Two of its internees are remembered here for reasons the camp itself never recorded. Joseph Pilates left Knockaloe with the beginnings of the exercise method that carries his name, though much of that story is legend rather than record. Archibald Knox, the Island's great designer, worked at the camp on the other side of the wire, as a civilian censor reading internees' letters.
Requisition and the camps
The second time round there was no purpose-built camp. The Government requisitioned existing property, fenced off streets and seafront terraces, and interned people inside them. The camps were scattered: Mooragh at Ramsey, Hutchinson Square in Douglas, Rushen at Port Erin and Port St Mary, Onchan, and Peveril at Peel.
Many internees were refugees from Nazi persecution, imprisoned as enemy aliens on the basis of nationality alone. Among them were the artist Kurt Schwitters and the archaeologist Gerhard Bersu, whose work on the Island outlasted their confinement.
Art and culture behind the wire
Both wars turned confinement into an unlikely engine of creativity. At Knockaloe the men carved beef bone and built workshops with the help of a Quaker craftsman. At Hutchinson in the Second World War the internees ran what became known as the artists' camp, and a Dadaist made sculptures out of leftover porridge. The work that survives, and the strain it often masked, has a page of its own.