‘You had better stop complaining if you know what’s good for you,’ announced Smith sardonically. ‘You have every reason to be satisfied. If you were locked up in a Nazi concentration camp in your own country, you’d not be complaining. You’d be dead.’ All this was said in German in case we forgot who we were, and Dunne was standing by, loving it.
This time I got good and angry. A couple of days later we were given the special notepaper we were to use for letters, and I sat down and wrote to a Member of Parliament whom I knew, Sir Thomas Moore.
‘Is it necessary,’ I wrote, ‘that, because of the short-sightedness and ignorance of some officers, people in this camp, men who are genuine enemies and victims of the Nazi regime and true friends of this country, should be turned into embittered men and made to feel that Britain’s cause is no longer theirs?’ I then elaborated on the particular complaints we had.
Less than twenty-four hours later a sergeant burst into my hut. ‘Frank,’ he roared, ‘get outside the Commandant wants to see you.’ I got outside with a soldier with fixed bayonet either side of me. ‘Quick march,’ commanded the sergeant. I was careful not to be out of step. We went out of the gate and up to Sir Harry Lauder’s family seat, Dunne was seated behind a desk.
‘Are you internee number 12345, Frank?’
‘Mhm,’ I went.
Did you write this letter?’ and he read out all of it in a voice which was growing louder.
‘Definitely,’ I said.
‘Why do you make yourself the spokesman of a bunch of whining, complaining idiots who don’t know how well-off they are?’
No answer. I stared at him.
He put down the letter and leaned forward on his desk: ‘If I had my way I’d put the lot of you against the wall. You, Frank, belong in solitary confinement. What do you have to say?’
No answer. I stared at him.
‘I’ll tell you something Frank. I saw this letter when I censored it. You can insist on it being sent to the addressee. If you do, a copy will be sent to the War Office with my report that will show that you are a troublemaker, an anarchist. What’s your decision?’
I thought things over.
I knew that my goose would be cooked if Dunne wrote such a report. It would be his word against mine and if Sir Thomas decided to act on my letter, he would draw a blank.
I picked up the letter and tore it up.
‘Take him away,’ ordered Dunne, looking extremely satisfied.
I returned to my hut and copied the letter (I had kept a duplicate, of course) this time onto ordinary stationery. Another inmate of the hut removed the heel from his shoe and produced a stamp and a ten-shilling note.
Late that night, I crawled up to the barbed wire. I picked a little Scotsman who was doing guard. ‘Hey, Jock,’ I whispered, hoping that he wouldn’t shoot me immediately. Jock was a lousy soldier – he didn’t shoot.
‘Aye,’ he said and ambled over to me.
‘Listen, Jock, we’re having trouble with the Commandant. Will you help us?’
‘Sure,’ said Jock, ‘anything to get that bastard into trouble. We hate him just as much as you chaps,’ and he agreed to post that letter (and to buy himself a drink with the ten shilling note).
A week later, we observed unusual goings on at the house. A number of staff cars arrived and some officers got out. Luggage was unloaded. An hour later, luggage was put into the staff cars, followed by Dunne and his staff. They didn’t say goodbye!
A sergeant arrived and asked the internees to meet the new Commandant in the dining hut. He made a speech. There had been some misconception with regard to our status. We were being addressed as ‘Gentlemen’ and told that, due to a misinterpretation of the rules, our mail had been withheld and had accumulated in the office. It would be submitted to only the most cursory censorship before reaching us. And could we not arrange for a ‘social evening’, a friendly get-together that evening, to meet the new officers? We were delighted to do so.
That afternoon, our mail came down – hundreds of letters, masses of parcels, plus telegrams, announcing the births of children and the deaths of relatives. Whether or not this radical change of our treatment was due to the good offices of Sir Thomas Moore I have never been able to ascertain.
Then, once again, we were to be transferred to another camp and the circumstances were somewhat hilarious. We boarded some buses and travelled about fifty miles. The buses were late picking us up and we lost more time through breakdowns. We missed the train to Liverpool so special coaches were laid on to transport us and were parked inside the station while the officer in charge went to get new orders. It was stifling hot. We stood in that station for four hours, until 23.00 hours, when it was finally decided that we were to return to the camp. Meanwhile, the guards had been given permission to go off, in relays, for refreshments. When we finally departed most of the officers, who had been marooned for weeks in that remote camp, had made up for lost time and had got nicely stewed, including the young Scotsman in charge of the transport. We reached Glenbranter camp at 03.00 hours and a roll call was ordered. During my internment I had already noticed that very few NCOs in the British Army seemed to be able to count, however that morning’s roll call beat anything I had known. There appeared to be three internees too many, and one guard was missing.
The puzzle was solved later in the day.
Whilst we were parked in the station, a policeman had approached the conducting office. He explained that they had arrested three young Italians that morning who had to be interned. The police wanted to get rid of them. Would it be possible to attach them to our group?
‘Shertainly,’ the officer had said, (he was fairly carefree by this time) ‘the more the merrier’. He had stuffed the newcomers’ documents into his briefcase and promptly forgotten the matter. The Italians, rather enjoying the whole thing, had kept silent and were, in any case, too tired to notice or care. The missing soldier had got very drunk and gone AWOL. I am glad to say that it was not Jock spending our ten-shilling note.
The next day we made the journey to Glasgow once again, this time without a hitch. At Liverpool we embarked for the Isle of Man, landed at Douglas and were taken by train to Peel on the west coast of the island.
By now – September 1940 – conditions had begun to improve. The Home Office had taken control of the internee administration away from the Army which remained however responsible for running and guarding the camps. Many of the Isle of Man’s seaside resorts had been turned into internment camps including Douglas, Onchan, Ramsey and Peel.
Requisitioned groups of boarding houses, surrounded by barbed wire fences, were our accommodation. We were given a completely free hand in making our own arrangements inside them and we started running canteens, cafes and schools. We were even allowed to go swimming under guard and for those who wanted a job, there was agricultural work at the fabulous salary of one shilling per day.
19. JOINING THE BRITISH ARMY
THE OFFICERS AT PEEL CAMP,[1] headed by Commandant Major Hawkey-Shepherd, included Captain Eden, the brother of Anthony Eden,[2] and they were all very good to us. I shared a room with Dr Otto Seifferta, former Austrian newspaper editor and Schuschnigg’s[3] press officer. Fritz von Tschirschky, von Papen’s[4] former adjutant, was our neighbour. Their conversations, or rather arguments, were on a fascinating level and I learned a great deal. Unfortunately, none of this compensated for my loss of freedom.
1
Several alien civilian internment camps were set up on the Isle of Man during the First World War and they were used for that purpose again during the Second World War. The one at Knockaloe, near Peel, was a small, self-contained, township that accommodated male internees only.
2
Robert Anthony Eden, 1st Earl of Avon, was an MP and pre-war member of the Cabinet. During the war he held the rank of major and was appointed secretary of several Government departments, then Foreign Secretary and Leader of the House of Commons. In 1955 he succeeded Winston Churchill as Prime Minister. Eden was in fact Secretary of State for War from May to December 1940 – the period his brother, Sir Timothy Calvert Eden (attached to the War Office) was an officer and Wolfe Frank was an internee at Peel Camp – and it was during that period that new regulations were brought in granting some aliens their freedom and their right to join the British Army. (Editor: Is it possible therefore that Wolfe Frank’s continual representations as Camp Leader at Peel – which demanded the above rights – somehow reached the notice of the Secretary of State for War via his brother and that those representations came into Anthony Eden’s thinking when he was considering changing the Government’s position on aliens?).
4
Franz von Papen was Chancellor of Germany in 1932 and Vice-Chancellor under Hitler from 1933-1934. He was one of the defendants at Nuremberg who Wolfe Frank later interrogated and for whom he interpreted.