Hutchinson Internment Camp

A World War II internment camp in Douglas, Isle of Man, particularly noted as “the artists’ camp” due to the thriving artistic and intellectual life of its internees.

The camp consisted of 33 houses around Hutchinson Square close to Broadway in Douglas on the Isle of Man. Because of the large number of people interned in the relatively small number of houses, internees were required to share beds. One of these houses, Arrandale, came to be used as the camp’s sick bay. Major H. O. Daniel was in command of the camp until he was promoted elsewhere. He was a popular leader and was responsible for enabling much of the creative activities of the camp.

Following the compulsory evictions of tenants in the properties and the erection of two barbed wire fences around the perimeter (in the manner of Mooragh Camp in Ramsey, opened in May), Hutchinson Camp opened in the second week of July 1940. It initially had only 415 internees but by the end of July this figure had risen to 1,205 internees, almost all of whom were German and Austrian.

Numbers fell from September 1940 when the internees who posed no threat to Britain began to be released. This was particularly marked in Hutchinson Camp, where there was an unusually high proportion of Jewish and anti-Nazi internees.

The camp closed during March 1944, when its 228 inmates transferred to Peveril Camp in Peel in order to clear Hutchinson Camp ready for use as a prisoner of war camp.

A collection of 150+ photos, taken c. 1940/1 mostly by Major H. O. Daniel, preserved by Klaus Hinrichsen and now freely accessible in the Tate Archive, gives a vivid impression of the Camp facilities, Camp life and art, and of individual internees.

The houses of the camp formed separate administrative units, wherein the internees took up positions such as of leader, kitchen staff, cleaners, orderlies and cooks. Although these positions were created along military lines by the British guard in charge, Hutchinson Camp was unique on the island in rejecting the military association by replacing the proposed “Camp Captain” title with that of “Camp Leader” or “Camp Father”. The role of cook was sometimes taken up by professional chefs within the camp, when available. It was then the role of the other internees only to prepare the fresh local produce ready for cooking. It was through the locally sourced produce that the internees came to enjoy the local Manx speciality of kippers, which were known by some within the camp as “Yom Kippur.”

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Wikipedia