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3 The camp system Wakefield was an extremely orderly place, as orderly, monotonous and drab as a lower middle-class suburb, but it was a suburb without a city, and its inhabitants suburbanites out of work. Everything was organized, everything ordered. The huts had captains, the captains a chief-captain and he an adjutant with so little sense of humour that he actually signed himself Adjutant L. and wished to be addressed by his ridiculous title. There were committees for everything, and nearly everyone was a member of one or the other or had some sort of post
Conclusion – Understanding work camps Memory and context For some sixty years, work camp movements flourished in Britain. But Britain’s work camps were far from unique. We have already seen the international nature of the labour colony movement, but there were similar debates and exchanges, on an even larger scale, between the wards. In 1935 the International Labour Organisation’s officers detailed camp systems in Austria, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Finland, Germany, Poland and South Africa; in the following year, they added Estonia, France, Japan and Switzerland to
5 Prison camp societies As the months lengthened into years the prisoners sorted out their own civilization: there were theatres, there were camp orchestras with players whose names had been well-known in pre-War London, there were football leagues and tennis matches, there were classes of every description from art to political economy.1 Introduction Although German internees in Britain faced problems of separation and isolation from families, which led some of them into bouts of depression, their experience away from the trenches and zones of direct conflict
usually end up in refugee camps in a distant local (if not as asylum seekers in hosted suspension), to be ‘managed as undesirables’ (Agier, 2011 ) with their stop-motions discursively isolated as dis(placements). Yet, wherever they are situated, refugee camps are still treated as local places of ‘bare life’ in a parochial ‘state of exception’ (Agamben, 1998 ), even though refugees have been recognised with agency ‘negotiating’ (Pasquetti, 2015 ) and circumventing external impositions of control (Kibreab, 1993 ). Meanwhile, as the local seems to
The Hola camp affair has at least highlighted the tremendous amount of good rehabilitation work being done in Kenya. (Colonial Secretary Alan Lennox-Boyd, interview published in The Daily Mail , 27 July 1959) The ‘Hola Camp massacre’, which took place in Kenya
10 ‘Down with the concentration camps!’ Opposition and protest If they thought at all about work camps, the comfortably paid and regularly employed probably saw them as a rather jolly time under canvas, jollier perhaps than the unemployed deserved. One young woman student from Edinburgh University told Jack Hoyland that unemployed ‘lads’ thought of work as ‘a holiday’, offering ‘friendship, freedom, health and discipline’.1 Others took a very different view; this chapter considers those inside the camps who organised and participated in protests of different
9 Camps as social service and social movement An extraordinary variety of private and voluntary work camp movements flourished in the interwar years. Many young men and women from the middle and upper classes left their comfortable homes to live among the poor, labouring through their long vacations to build playgrounds, swimming pools and libraries.1 Others created or joined work camps to prepare for a new life, whether as Jewish settlers, Nordic patriots or English communitarians. Some had more self-serving motives: in Sussex, a Commander Lacy helped to found
3 Camps as crucibles of transnational resistance Robert Gildea with Jorge Marco, Diego Gaspar Celaya, Milovan Pisarri, Enrico Acciai, Bojan Aleksov and Yaacov Falkov In 1974 Franz Dahlem, a communist Reichstag deputy and former veteran of the International Brigades, interned in the high-security French camp of Le Vernet in the Pyrenees, reflected that The French government made the mistake of concentrating the cadres of the International Brigades and the apparatchiks of central committees of communist parties in countries with fascist regimes or occupied by the
1 The Emperor’s new camp (1857–70) In 1857 Emperor Napoleon III invited celebrated photographer Gustave Le Gray to visit the newly established Châlons Camp to record its imperial glory. Sprawling over 12,000 ha of the Champagne countryside, the camp took its name from the town of Châlons-sur-Marne, although it was actually much closer to the villages of Mourmelon-le-Grand and Mourmelon-le-Petit.1 Le Gray’s photographs, which were collated in albums and presented by Napoleon to his officers, capture the camp’s grandiose Imperial Quarter and its ‘exotic’ North
With contributions from Janos Kerti Shortly after the arrival of the British military at Alderney on 16 May 1945, a team tasked with investigating the German occupation encountered the remains of Sylt concentration camp. 1 What they observed was a partially demolished complex of buildings – the materials from which had supposedly been reused for ‘constructional purposes’. 2 Here, witnesses confirmed terrible brutality had been levied against the inmates. 3 Under the leadership of