Isle of Man Part 1

I've just returned from a lovely holiday on the Isle of Man with my daughter Kay.  Her husband Darcy had a very important (expensive and stressful) exam to do as part of his career, so Kay thought it best to leave him for a week to his concentrated arduous revision and offered to go away somewhere with me. 

Why did I choose the Isle of Man? It's always been on my list of places to go for a very good reason. My father was a refugee from Germany and arrived here in March 1939 with his brother (my uncle). His parents (my grandparents) arrived a few months after. My grandmother came from Jewish lineage and so the family were in danger of their lives, even though she had married a Christian and her sons had been raised as Lutherans (the German equivalent of Church of England).  All of them escaped here thankfully in the nick of time before war broke out and therefore were spared the threat of being repatriated. However, once war was declared, all Germans living in the UK were considered a potential threat to security and were rounded up and interned on the Isle of Man to establish whether they were spies or Nazi sympathisers. My father often spoke about the six months he was interned there and I therefore always had a hankering interest to see the place in the capital Douglas where he was interned.

Our holiday lasted six days, two of them being the flight there and back, so four full days to explore. I had done some research about the island and also about the internees so was fairly equipped to make the most of the stay. We booked into our hotel on the Douglas seafront and planned our days out. We decided to buy a Go pass. The island has a very good transport system - be it buses, electric trains, horse-drawn trams or a steam train. The Go pass will cover all of these for a choice of 1,3,5 or 7 days and there is even a pass which will include limitless travel on all those modes of transport and let you in free to all the heritage sites and museums as well for 5 days for £77. We went for the latter and found it extremely good value. We discovered you can set your watch to the bus times - they're so  punctual and not at all like the delays we experience in London. We decided not to take the horse-drawn trams as we felt sorry for the poor horses that were pulling their human cargo and heavy trams along in the heat, but here is a picture for you to get the idea.

We spent the remainder of the first arrival day getting our whereabouts in Douglas, the capital on the east coast. Douglas is a spawling town with a row of grand Edwardian hotels all along the curved seafront. Back in the day, they must have been heaving with tourists, as there are so many of them.  There is a small high street packed with numerous shops (a few of them chains of the mainland shops) and smaller local ones. Round the corner by the quayside there are a few restaurants and bars where you can sit out and watch the boats moored in the harbour. There are not that many independent restaurants in the town, we discovered, considering it is so large and the capital. The Isle of Man has always been mainly reliant on farming, fishing and tourism. Tourism dropped drastically during the last world war and, with the advent of foreign travel since, it has probably not recovered enough to change its ways. Most of the Edwardian hotels along the seafront have a themed restaurant but are open to non-hotel residents too, but we did stumble upon a tapas/cocktail bar and had supper there, before walking the length of the mile-long promenade back to our hotel, passing the statue of the Bee Gees who were born on the island.

Statue of the Bee Gees

We decided to take the bus and spend our first full day day in Peel on the west coast.  It was a lovely fishing village dominated by a huge castle which was once the fort of a Viking king. It is a vast site which took several hours to wander around. 

It is largely ruins so after three hours wandering around in the open air, I had caught the sun and my nose made me resemble Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer! We grabbed some of the local dairy's ice cream and sat on a bench high up surveying the village. 

Peel as seen high up on the castle site

We finished off the day eating supper at The Boatyard - a lovely restaurant specialising in fish. I chose  the special - my favourite of skate wing with a lemon and caper sauce - which was delicious. The bus home took us through the Manx countryside with a sun setting over fields of sheep and sleepy villages.

The second full day was spent in Douglas, visiting the Manx Museum and archives - the main reason for being on the island in the first place. We started in the Archives section and met a very useful and kind librarian who pointed us in the right direction on the computer and provided several books on the island's internment. I was able to find out a lot about my my family's internment on the island with details of Home Office reference numbers, dates of release back into the community etc. Unfortunately a lot of records were apparently burned after the war, so it was not possible to delve too deeply, but enough to raise more questions in my mind and solve others. 

One interesting fact is that my uncle was put on board a ship bound for Australia. 

At the time the authorities were overwhelmed with internees and passing them on to allied Australia or Canada was a solution. The ship my uncle was on (the Dunera) sounds a horrendous trip after the stress of reaching England from Germany in the first place. I googled the story which you can read here. No wonder he suffered some sort of PTSD in later life.

We went around the Manx museum after lunch and saw many interesting exhibits from Viking times through to the modern age. It was well worth spending the day there and we came away much the wiser. We ended up in one of the large Edwardian hotels, called The Sefton,  which offered non-hotel and hotel guests alike a pan-asian supper. Another wander along the seafront took us back to our hotel.

The Sefton hotel, one of many grand Edwardian hotels along the seafront

I expect this post is far too long already so will stop there. Part 2 will follow soon.