Remembrance Sunday evokes memories of Isle of Man's war years

They were two conflicts that changed the world forever, sending ripples of repurcussions down the decades - but how exactly was the Isle of Man affected?

In the space of just a generation, the island went from a busy holiday destination to "an armed camp", leaving "no family unscathed", said Manx military historian Matthew Richardson, speaking as the island marks Remembrance Sunday.

During World War One, more than 8,000 men enlisted - some 82.3% of the eligible population - and 1,165 never came home.

When the second conflict began, the island's ferries, which were used to ship hundreds of thousands of tourists a year to the island, responded to the call to action for the mass evacuations from Dunkirk.

Meanwhile, the island's seafront hotels were fenced off as internment camps housing suspected enemies, and Douglas Head was home to a base for trainee codebreakers sworn to secrecy.

Before World War One, about 600,000 holidaymakers came to the island each year, with up to seven sailings a day from Liverpool in summer.

Between the two conflicts, the island remained a popular holiday destination.

But when the the war against the Nazis began, the Royal Navy took over most of the Steam Packet's fleet.

On 29 May 1940 during the Dunkirk evacuations, one of them, the Mona's Queen, struck a mine off Dunkirk and sank, with the loss of 24 men - 17 of them Manx.

Two more Steam Packet ships were lost the same day with many of the ships still sailed by civilian crews - ferrymen who had never trained for war.

"Some of these guys went through hell," said Richardson, who is curator of art and social history at Manx National Heritage.

"They weren't trained sailors or soldiers, and yet they were being bombed and shot at."

Overall, Steam Packet ships carried about one in every 14 of the 338,000 soldiers rescued from the emergency in France.

"During the second world war, the island itself became basically a large armed camp," Richardson continued.

More than 30,000 Royal Navy recruits learned radar skills at the HMS Valkyrie shore-based training school at Douglas Head.

"It's one of the key places where they trained people to decrypt German code, lots of this history has been lost because most had signed the Official Secrets Act," Richardson said.

"Many of these people were sworn to secrecy and went to their graves not talking about what had happened."

World War One hit life at home hard, as tourism collapsed almost overnight.

Richardson said about 80% of the population relied on summer earnings from tourism to get them through the winter.

Anger grew at Lieutenant Governor Lord Raglan, who refused to ease taxes during the period, and on Tynwald Day in 1916 someone went as far as to throw a clod of earth at him.

In July 1918, Lord Raglan removed a subsidy that kept the price of bread down, sparking a general strike that brought the island to a halt.

The government eventually backed down, and he resigned that December.

Unlike Liverpool or Belfast, the Isle of Man was never a deliberate target for German air raids.

But the island lay under the flight path of bombers heading for those cities and was used as a "signpost" in the Irish Sea, so blackouts were strictly enforced.

Occasionally, damaged German planes dropped their bombs over the island to lighten their load.

In 1940, an incendiary bomb fell near Cregneash, and the next day a small frog was found burned to death in the heather - in an episode that has become a piece of modern Manx folklore.

The unfortunate amphibian was put on display at the Manx Museum, labelled "the first victim of the Luftwaffe", although it would come to be known as the only ever life to have to been lost to Hitler's bombs.

Islanders also raised money for the war effort.

A newspaper appeal to buy a Spitfire raised more than £10,000 in three weeks - twice its target - and paid for two of the fighter planes to help bolster the war effort.

In both world wars, fears of enemy spies led the UK government to detain thousands of "enemy aliens", the legal term for anyone living in Britain who was a citizen of a country it was at war with.

Many were sent to the Isle of Man.

In the First World War, the camp at Knockaloe near Patrick held about 23,000 men at its peak, almost half the size of the island's population at the time.

In 1940, seafront hotels were wrapped in barbed wire, holding German, Austrian and Italian men and women, many of whom had lived in Britain for years.

Behind the wire, internees staged concerts, lectures and art classes.

Richardson reiterated the debt owed by the modern world to those who laid down their lives in the name of freedom.

"If these people hadn't made this sacrifice, then the freedoms that we enjoy today as a country, we probably wouldn't be free to experience them," he said.

"So we owe those people a lot, even today."

But he added that continuing education was needed to keep their stories alive.

"We can't rely on people who were there now. Those people have sadly all passed away," he said.

"Education is the answer."

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