Hutchinson Internment Camp
The camp consisted of 39 houses around Hutchinson Square close to Broadway in Douglas on the Isle of Man.
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.
[1] After an initial period of official mistrust at the beginning of the war, internees were permitted to apply to work outside of the camp, predominantly on local farms.
Besides the professions such as tailors and barbers, a notable case was of a Viennese baker who made cakes to be sold in the "artists' cafe" set up in a laundry room of one of the houses.
There was an inter-camp football league in which Hutchinson competed, though their games were generally played at Onchan Camp, which had a pitch inside the grounds.
On such trips the guard gave special attention to one of the few British-born Italian internees, who had competed in the 1936 Berlin Olympics for Britain.
[13] The internees gave a strong appearance of making the most of and even enjoying their internment in Hutchinson Camp.
Indeed, his mental state even brought out an epileptic condition which had not surfaced since his childhood:[15] For the outside world he always tried to put up a good show, but in the quietness of the room I shared with him [...], his painful disillusion was clearly revealed to me.
To this list of the more formal lecturers can be added some other more unusual characters, such as:[1] a lion tamer who was unlucky to be born in Germany while the circus was over in that country.
The positive spirit of learning is well described by Fred Uhlman in his memoir:[16] Every evening one could see the same procession of hundreds of internees, each carrying his chair to one of the lectures, and the memory of all these men in pursuit of knowledge is one of the most moving and encouraging that I brought back from the strange microcosm in which I lived for so many months.
One example of this was Kurt Schwitters' short story, "The Flat and the Round Painter", which was published and distributed in an English translation made by a fellow internee within the camp.
[19] The success of this led to a second exhibition taking place in November 1940, in which artists such as Kurt Schwitters displayed their work, often in the hope of them being sold for a relatively modest fee to other internees.
[6] Kurt Schwitters, perhaps the most significant artist in the camp, produced over 200 works during his 16 months of internment, including more portraits than at any other time in his career.
This led to much resourcefulness, such as: mixing brick dust with the oil from sardine cans in order to make paint, digging up clay when out on walks for sculpture, and ripping up the lino floors to make cuttings which they then pressed through the clothes mangle to create linocut prints.
The porridge had developed mildew and the statues were covered with greenish hair and bluish excrements of an unknown type of bacteria.
Daniel, who obtained a supply of materials for the internees as well as allocating some studio space to individuals such as Kurt Schwitters and Paul Harmann.
By 24 November, the tenants and owners of the houses in Hutchinson, Onchan and Mooragh camps had received notice that their property had been de-requisitioned and they were free to move back in.
[7] A lightly fictionalised version of Hutchinson features in the Scottish author Ali Smith's 2020 novel Summer, published by Penguin.
[26] Hutchinson is the subject of the non-fiction book The Island of Extraordinary Captives by the British writer and journalist Simon Parkin.
