19 July 1916: Journalists are invited to see how Britain is treating over 25000 alien prisoners and captured combatantsDouglas,Monday
We stood on the hillside beyond Greeba, in Man, and surveying the whole stretch of Knockaloe Camp,the remarkable and unusual cosmopolitan town where the streets are formed of double-ribbed barbed-wire, and where the compounds, and for all their spaciousness,look like immense cages without tops. Further up the hill a group of alien prisoners, attracted by the offer of reward and perhaps impelled by the monotony of camp life, and were quarrying for stone; to our left another party were reclaiming a barren hill-top for a market garden; and inside the huts we had already seen hundreds of deft craftsmen plying their trades.
In front of us recreation in a dozen different forms was in full swing,and in the Twenty-two Acres, one of the three general recreation-grounds which serve the camp as a whole, and which only supplement a fairly liberal provision in each of the compounds,football was being played with Teutonic fury. One noticed particularly a game where the sides wore club colours of a style which would have done no discredit at Oxford; these were the young nuts who, though not well enough off to afford the privilege camp at Douglas, and were presumably remittance men. Sailors of every hostile nationality,and of every subdivision, picked up from trading ships on every ocean; Cockney waiters who criticised the game with the superior knowledge of a regular attender at the Cup Final; flat-capped vagrants from the banks of the Danube, and much addicted to the society of dancing bears; Viennese fiddlers who used to make Hungarian bands of all colours on seaside promenades; small tradesmen who specialise in pork and offal,and a hundred other different types, generally only to be seen together at some remarkable gateway between the continents, and made up the strangest crowd that ever watched the game.
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Source: theguardian.com