A town behind wire

Knockaloe Farm, near Patrick and close to Peel, became the largest civilian internment camp in the British Isles. Internees began arriving on 17 November 1914, and at its peak the camp held more than 23,000 men, most of them German, with some Austro-Hungarian and others. It was three miles around, ringed by roughly 695 miles of barbed wire, and guarded by several thousand men.

It was divided into four sub-camps, each with its own hospital. Only civilian men were held there, no soldiers. The camp was run under British Government control, and its administrative records went to London rather than staying on the Island, which is one reason so much of what individual internees did there is now hard to trace.

Joseph Pilates

Joseph Pilates is the most famous man to have passed through Knockaloe, and his story is also the most embellished. It is worth separating what the record shows from what has grown up around it.

The record is slight. He was transferred from Lancaster to Knockaloe on 12 September 1915 and is believed to have been held in Camp 4. The one firm trace of him in the camp's own papers is the Camp 4 newspaper, the Lager Zeitung of 25 January 1917, which names him as referee at a boxing match, where he disqualified a contestant for ignoring his instructions. He was repatriated to Germany in March 1919. Beyond that, the account of his years there rests largely on his own later recollections.

The legend is larger. The familiar story that he worked as a hospital orderly and built the first version of his exercise equipment from the springs of internees' beds is unproven: the Knockaloe Charitable Trust finds no evidence of hospital work, and his biographer Javier Perez Pont found no such springs on the camp beds. The story that he took inspiration from watching cats comes from his own interview with the journalist Robert Wernick, published in Sports Illustrated in February 1962, which sets the cats at the camp. That some of those cats would have been Manx is a fair inference. But the sources say only "cats", never "Manx cats", and the popular claim that he copied his movements from the tailless cats of the Island goes further than anything the record will carry.

Pilates

The method that carries his name grew out of ideas Joseph Pilates developed during and after his years behind the wire. He called it Contrology: a system built on the belief that slow, controlled, precise movement, coordinated with the breath and worked from the muscles of the trunk, could bring body and mind into balance. Its familiar principles are concentration, control, centring, flow, precision, and breathing.

After his repatriation he emigrated to the United States in 1926, meeting his future wife Clara on the crossing. They opened a studio in New York beside a cluster of dance rehearsal rooms, and the method was taken up by dancers and choreographers, among them Martha Graham and George Balanchine, who sent their performers to train and to recover from injury. He set out his thinking in two books, Your Health in 1934 and Return to Life Through Contrology in 1945, and patented a series of spring-loaded machines, including the apparatus now known as the Reformer.

Joseph Pilates died in New York in 1967. Only afterwards did the method spread widely under his surname, and it is now practised by many millions of people around the world.

Archibald Knox

Archibald Knox is remembered as the Island's finest designer, the man behind Liberty of London's Celtic silver and pewter. He was also, during the war, an employee of Knockaloe.

Knox worked at the camp as a civilian censor, one of the so-called blue guards who read the internees' letters. He was not a military guard, a distinction the surviving accounts sometimes blur. He had been among the first pupils at the Douglas School of Art, which Manx people had funded themselves, and he later taught there. His censor's work at Knockaloe is confirmed by Manx National Heritage and the Archibald Knox Forum, and yet it goes unmentioned in the Manx Museum's exhibition of his work.

A partner in remembering

The Knockaloe Charitable Trust runs the visitor centre at the camp site and is documenting the internees and their families. Its work is the natural companion to these pages.