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.

A network of camps

Knockaloe was the largest civilian internment camp in the British Isles, but it was neither the first nor the only one. The first men interned on the Island, from September 1914, were held at Cunningham's Holiday Camp in Douglas, living in tents left behind at the end of the tourist season. That site was soon overwhelmed, and after overcrowding and a disturbance in which five internees died, the Government pressed ahead with the far larger, purpose-built camp at Knockaloe, which opened on 17 November 1914.

Knockaloe then became the hub of a wider system. Men were moved between camps across Britain, among them Alexandra Palace in London and Stobs in Scotland, and others besides, but the majority passed through Knockaloe at some point in their internment. The camp at Douglas carried on as a second, smaller Island camp alongside it.

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. Sport was one of the organised mainstays of camp life, with boxing and football clubs and gymnastics among the fixtures. The one firm trace of Pilates in the camp's own papers sits squarely within it: 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. During the war he was also an employee of Knockaloe, on the other side of the wire from the men whose story this is.

Knox ran the camp's censorship department from November 1914 until October 1919. He was one of the civilian staff, the blue staff, rather than a military guard, a distinction the surviving accounts sometimes blur. Every letter and parcel going in or out of the camp passed through his office. By his own account the department handled more than 1.2 million parcels over the course of the war, with something like 2,500 arriving from Germany on an average day. He recorded the ingenuity this provoked, including newspapers rolled inside tins labelled as preserved meat, through which news of events such as Lord Kitchener's death and the Battle of Jutland reached the camp within about ten days.

He had been among the first pupils at the Douglas School of Art, which Manx people had funded themselves, and he later taught there. In his own time at Knockaloe he worked on The Deer's Cry, an illuminated manuscript after a hymn attributed to St Patrick. His censorship years are confirmed by Manx National Heritage and the Archibald Knox Forum, and yet they go unmentioned in the Manx Museum's exhibition of his work.

Those who did not go home

Not everyone left Knockaloe alive. More than two hundred and fifty internees died in captivity over the course of the war, of illness and accident and, as the war ended, in the influenza that swept through the camps. They were buried in the churchyard at Patrick, within sight of the wire.

In the early 1960s the German graves were exhumed and the men reburied together at the German war cemetery at Cannock Chase in Staffordshire, and their headstones at Patrick were taken away. A small number of graves stayed behind, among them Turkish and Jewish internees, alongside those of guards who had also died on the Island.

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.