Streets behind wire

When mass internment returned in 1940, the Government did not repeat Knockaloe. Instead of building, it requisitioned. Whole terraces of boarding houses and seafront hotels were fenced off, and internees were housed inside them, landladies sometimes staying on to cook and clean.

The result was a set of smaller camps scattered around the Island rather than one enormous compound. Many of those held were refugees from Nazi Germany and Austria, Jewish and anti-fascist, imprisoned as enemy aliens on the basis of their nationality. The irony was not lost on them.

A scattered geography

Mooragh Camp occupied a terrace at Ramsey. Hutchinson Square in Douglas became known as the artists' camp, for the remarkable concentration of painters, writers, and scholars held there. There were others: Onchan, and Peveril Camp at Peel, the last of these later turned over to holding British fascists and other suspected security risks.

Between them these camps held thousands of people, most of whom had done nothing but be born in the wrong country.

Rushen and the fence across the south

The southern camp worked unlike any of the others. Instead of fencing off a street or a square, the authorities drew a single line of barbed wire clean across the base of the southern peninsula, from Fleshwick Bay on the west coast to Gansey on the east. Everything south of that line, the whole of Port Erin and Port St Mary with their shops, schools, beaches and fields, became one enclosed camp.

Rushen Camp opened at the end of May 1940 and was the only camp on the Island, and the only one in Europe, to hold women and children. It was run by the Home Office rather than the military, under a civilian commandant. The women were not put into emptied buildings but billeted in local homes, the boarding-house keepers staying on and being paid a guinea a week for each internee they took in. Residents and internees lived side by side behind the same wire, and for a time women made up more than four fifths of the population of the two towns.

At its height Rushen held around four thousand women, several hundred of them pregnant. Many were refugees from Nazi Germany and Austria, held alongside a minority who remained loyal to the Reich, a mixing that caused real friction inside the wire. As in the men's camps, keeping occupied was the defence against the strain of confinement, and the women turned scarce rationed cloth, along with unrationed Manx wool, into clothing and craftwork sold through a shop the internees ran themselves.

Schwitters and Bersu

Kurt Schwitters, the German artist of Dada and Merz, had already fled the Nazi regime in 1937 before being interned at Hutchinson Square. He went on making art and lecturing to his fellow internees throughout his confinement.

Gerhard Bersu, one of the leading archaeologists of his generation, turned his internment into fieldwork. His excavations of prehistoric round-house sites on the Island reshaped the understanding of its early settlement, a body of work that outlasted the war that put him there.