Interned Refugees Well Treated at Isle of Man Camp

Conditions in the women’s internment camp at Port Erin, Isle of Man, are brightly pictured in a report by a special correspondent for the News-Chronicle. The report reveals, however, that one mother attempted to break away during the journey to the camp and throw herself into the water.

There was also, the correspondent reports, “a little misguided stone-throwing by some members of the public during the journey.” In general, however, the report notes that the internees are welcomed by the local population “both out of natural kindness and also as the next best thing to having a normal holiday season.”

Barbed wire surrounding the town is quite unobtrusive, the correspondent states, and the only apparent restriction is 8 o’clock curfew. The internees are well cared for. There are no rations on butter and meat. Lunch is served in a large hotel and consists of beef with two vegetables and apple pudding. A cinema executive from Douglas has visited Port Erin to ascertain the internees’ taste in films.

Commenting on the internment of German-Jewish refugees residing in Huddersfield, the Vicar of Shepley states in a letter to the Huddersfield Examiner: “It may be decided in the public interest to intern many refugees. But they have certainly done Huddersfield this service: Ceaselessly they have warned all who know them what a German win or draw would mean. We should either suffer a similar fate or be forced slavishly to inflict such devilish treatment on others.”

The Church weekly Tribune denounces the “nasty-anti-foreigner and sometimes even anti-Jew campaign” being carried on by certain local papers. Its effects, the Tribune warns, “will not be to strengthen our defenses against Quislings, but to excite mobs against foreigners like the riots which for a short period disgraced us during the last war.” The paper urges the use of refugee scientists, doctors and industrial experts.