Britain’s first concentration camp for political prisoners
Seventeen years before the Nazis opened their first concentration camp at Dachau, Britain had provided the pattern for such an establishment at a remote location in Wales
On 21 March 1933 the Chief of Police in the German city of Munich, one Heinrich Himmler, released a statement to the press in which he announced the opening of the first concentration camp in the country. Himmler’s problem was that scattered throughout the Bavarian prison system were hundreds of political opponents of the government; men who were regarded by the National Socialists as representing a danger to the security of the state. It was difficult to keep track of these people when they were held in so many different places, therefore Himmler wished to see them ‘concentrated’ together in one location. The new camp had been established in and around a disused factory near the town of Dachau; 10 miles North West of Munich.
Seventeen years before the opening of Dachau, there was an eerie foreshadowing of Himmler’s prototypical concentration camp. In precisely the same way as in 1930s Germany, the prisons of a European country had become clogged up with political cases; hundreds of men being held without charge, who were believed to pose a threat to the nation’s stability. Just as with Dachau, the idea was hit upon to concentrate these political prisoners in a special camp, situated in an out of the way location. Like Dachau, the camp was centred around a derelict factory; only this camp, rather than being in Bavaria, was to be found in the heart of the Welsh countryside.
We should pause for a moment and consider that concentration camps of this sort, where political prisoners are being held, are a very different thing from extermination camps such as Auschwitz or Treblinka. Concentration camps, as they were operated in Britain during the First World War and later in Germany during the 1930s, are simply places which hold civilian prisoners indefinitely and without any charges being brought against them. The prisoners have no prospect of being brought to trial and are held for who they are, rather than for what they have done. They may be Jews, communists, republicans or Jehovah’s Witnesses, and that is why they are being locked up. In the case both of Dachau and also Frongoch, the Welsh concentration camp, the idea was to avoid cluttering up one’s prison system with too many political cases. It must also be remembered that the expression ‘concentration camp’ had not yet acquired the hideous overtones of genocide and mass murder. British newspapers referred openly during World War I to concentration camps being operated in the United Kingdom.
In 1889, an Englishman called Edward Nicholls purchased some land in Merionethshire, North Wales, with the aim of building a distillery near the hamlet of Frongoch. The site was chosen because of the purity of the Tryweryn river which ran through the area and the Welsh Whiskey Distillery Ltd operated there until 1900. Substantial stone buildings were erected and the enterprise provided employment to local men and women. It was not however a commercial success and in 1900, the undertaking was acquired by William Owen of the White Lion Hotel in Bala. He paid £5000 for the business and launched a new brand of whiskey produced at Frongoch, which he named ‘Royal Welsh Whisky’.
By 1910, William Owen too had found that the manufacture of Welsh whisky was not a profitable enterprise and so the distillery closed. For the next four years, the buildings at Frongoch were abandoned and became semi-derelict.
When war broke out in 1914, the owner of the abandoned distillery saw an opportunity to recoup some of the money lost in the abortive whisky business. He leased the factory and surrounding land to the British government for use as a prisoner of war camp. During 1915 and 1916, Frongoch camp contained German prisoners, who were discouraged from escaping by the fact that they were being held in an exceedingly remote area.
On Monday, 24 April 1916, which happened to be Easter Monday that year, a body of Irish volunteers seized various buildings in the centre of Dublin. These included the General Post Office. In the following days, the British army suppressed what later became known as the Easter Rising with great ferocity; using heavy artillery to shell the city. Within less than a week, it was all over and the majority of the 1,200 or so men and handful of women who had taken part in the insurrection, along with many others who just happened to be on the streets at the wrong time, were prisoners of the army.
Coming, as it did, at the height of the war, this attempt at revolution was seen by most people in both Britain and Ireland as an act of treachery. The prisoners were jeered and spat at by the citizens of Dublin when they were marched through the streets and the soldiers guarding them were forced to protect their charges from lynch mobs of angry Irishmen. In the aftermath of the Rising, a number of the leaders were executed by firing squads after summary courts martial and the remainder deported to the British mainland. Once there, these men, none of whom had been charged with any offence, were distributed throughout the prison system. They were held in both civilian prisons such as Glasgow, Perth and Reading, and also in military detention centres such as that at Stafford in the Midlands.
During the Easter Rising and in the days following the defeat of the Irish bid for independence, the British army seized thousands of men and kept them prisoner without charge. Some were released, but over 2,500 were shipped across the Irish Sea and placed in English and Scottish prisons while the government considered what to do with them. For a month, the prisons of Britain were crowded with men who had been charged with nothing, many of whom were almost certainly guilty of nothing; having been unlucky enough to have lived or worked near districts where the rebels were fighting. To release them was unthinkable, but their continued detention, scattered as they were throughout the whole country, meant that it was hard to keep track of them all. Far better, thought ministers in London, if they could all be concentrated together in one spot. At least then, the authorities would know where they were and what they were up to.
Throughout May 1916, the German prisoners of war at Frongoch Camp were dispersed to other locations, until by the end of the month, the camp was empty. Then, on 9 June, Irish prisoners began arriving there. There was no attempt to disguise the fact that this was a concentration camp. A sign at the main gate announced that this was ‘Frongoch Concentration Camp’. Almost unbelievably, postcards were produced of the place, one of which may be seen above. At its peak, Frongach contained over 2000 prisoners, or detainees as they were more correctly known. After all, they had not been charged with, let alone convicted of, anything at all. Their legal position was vague. They themselves claimed to be prisoners of war, but the British rejected this idea, only to accept it later when it suited their purposes. The men at Frongoch were served with notices stating that they were being interned under the Defence of the Realm Regulations. The reason given was that they had been members of organisations called either the Irish Volunteers or the Citizen Army; organisations which had promoted armed insurrection against His Majesty King George V.
Frongoch was soon renamed by the inmates as Francach; a word which literally means a Frenchman, but is used colloquially in Gaelic to refer to a rat. The camp was divided in two. The original buildings of the distillery formed South Camp, while North Camp consisted of wooden huts. Both camps were surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by soldiers. From the start, there was friction between those who had been legitimately arrested after taking part in armed action in Dublin over Easter Week and innocent passers-by who had simply been caught in the military sweeps which followed the Rising. According to one of the more well-known detainees, Michael Collins, about a quarter of the inmates of the North Camp had not been involved in any way with the abortive revolution. They not unnaturally felt aggrieved by their position.
None of those brought to Frongoch had the slightest idea how long they would be held in the newly established concentration camp, nor what was likely to be their eventual fate. There were rumours that there might be further courts martial and perhaps even more executions. In the event, the worst thing that happened was that some high ranking leaders of the Rising were tried and sent to civilian prisons to serve their sentences. Some of the leaders of the revolt who had not been shot were already serving sentences of life imprisonment in English prisons. It was an alarming prospect for the men at Frongoch, that they too might end up being imprisoned for life in an English gaol.
The authorities were in no hurry to decide anything about the final disposition of these men and so as the summer drew on, they languished in the camp. It was not even possible for them to be certain about their status. Attempts were made in the House of Commons to establish the position of the men at Frongoch, but the government remained strangely coy about them.
On 6 July 1916, a month or so after the prisoners had arrived at Frongoch, Major Newman, the Member of Parliament for Enfield, asked ‘Are those who fought for the Republic of Ireland now recognised as prisoners of war?’ The Speaker responded coldly ‘That question does not arise. It is only put to irritate.’ Before the year was out though, fifteen of the men being held at Frongoch would be facing a military court, charged with offences against the discipline of prisoners of war.
Despite the short and chilly responses given in the House of Commons by government spokesmen, when asked about the Frongoch camp, questions continued throughout the time of the camp’s existence. These questions were really designed to draw the attention of the public to the fact that citizens of the United Kingdom were being held without trial in a concentration camp. On 4 July, for example, Mr Alfred Byrne, a Dublin MP, asked the Under-Secretary for War if it would be possible for prisoners at Frongoch to receive visits on Sundays. On being told that there were not enough staff at the camp to allow for this, another MP, Edward Graham, chipped and told the House that he was very disturbed at the isolation in which the prisoners at Frongoch were being held. He pointed out that it took six hours to reach the camp from London, by railway, and that when MPs visited prisoners there; they were allowed only a quarter of an hour with those they had come to see.
What was it really like in the camp? The best way to get an idea of what conditions were like at Frongoch Concentration Camp, is to listen to the accounts of those who were detained there. One of the most famous prisoners held in the camp was Michael Collins, who had played an active role in the Easter Rising. When Ireland had gained independence, Collins became both Minister of Finance and Director of Intelligence; virtually running the first republican government before he was assassinated during the civil war which followed. In early July 1916 Michael Collins, who was being held at the military detention barracks in Stafford, was transferred to the camp at Frongoch.
When Collins arrived at Frongoch, there had been rain for several days and the entire camp was a mass of slippery mud. He was housed in one of the wooden huts of the North Camp, which were more comfortable than the buildings which made up the old distillery. It didn’t take him long to discover that a lot of the men being held at the concentration camp were guilty of nothing more than having been in Dublin during the Easter Rising. He wrote to a friend;
by my own count, at least a quarter of the men in the North camp know
very little about the Rising. One man, a former labourer of my
acquaintance, said that he was just forced off the street in a round-up.
His only crime appears to be that he was walking the streets.
As a senior member of the volunteers who took part in the Rising, Michael Collins found himself placed in charge of one of the huts. The overall head of the prisoners was a man called O’Reilly, who had been Vice-Commandant of the Dublin Brigade. This man tried to force the British to acknowledge the men being held at Frongoch as prisoners of war and to be accorded the treatment to which they would then be entitled under the Geneva Convention. The army officer in charge of the camp ignored all such requests.
It has to be said that for a concentration camp, conditions at Frongoch were not too bad. There was adequate food, the prisoners were allowed to organise themselves and, so long as there was no trouble, the soldiers guarding them left them largely to their own devices. It was this which led to the camp being later referred to as the Republican University. Those who had taken part in the Rising analysed the reasons for its failure and arranged discussion groups about various topics. Some studied Gaelic, others politics. The commandant of the camp, Colonel Heygate-Lambert, made no effort to interfere with what the prisoners did, always providing that Frongoch ran smoothly.
Over the summer, the numbers held at the concentration camp fell, as the results of the work of a body set up in London and called the Advisory Committee on the Internment of Rebels. Prisoners were taken to London in in batches to be screened by this committee. Their aim was twofold. First, they wished to see if it might be possible to court-martial any of the men being held. Secondly, it was known by the authorities, as well as the prisoners themselves, that many completely innocent people were being detained. The Advisory Committee tried to winnow out these men and see that they were released and sent home to Ireland. By the end of August, the 2000 prisoners had fallen to about 650. Almost all the others had been quietly sent home.
The truth of the matter was that the camp at Frongoch was something of an embarrassment to the government. It was one thing to hold Germans in such camps, but these men were citizens of the United Kingdom and had not even been charged, let alone convicted, with any offence. Their continued detention was doing the reputation of the English government no good in Ireland, or anywhere else for that matter. Here were citizens who were denied any recourse to the courts and were unable to mount any legal challenge to their continued imprisonment. The wholesale shooting of the leaders of the Easter Rising had created a good deal of sympathy for the rebels’ cause in Ireland itself; arresting thousands of men, many of them quite blameless, was also helping to create martyrs.
Attempts were constantly being made by Irish Members of Parliament to involve other countries in their complaints. On 7 December, Alfred Byrne asked the Home Secretary, whether, ‘it is proposed to allow representatives of the American Embassy to visit Frongoch Camp?’ This was hugely embarrassing to the government as they were assiduously courting the Americans, with a view to persuading them to enter the war on Britain’s side.
Now that the population of the camp had dropped by two thirds, there was room for all the prisoners in the more comfortable North Camp. The South Camp, the old buildings of the former distillery, were used as a punishment block. For instance at one point, the military administration of the camp ordered the prisoners to start emptying the rubbish bins around the soldiers’ barracks. Those who refused to have anything to do with this menial and unpaid work were promptly transferred to the cold and draughty accommodation of the disused factory. An even greater cause of contention was the attempt to get the prisoners to clean the soldiers’ latrines; a task which every single prisoner refused to undertake. At one point, over a hundred prisoners who would not clean the latrines were confined to the unpleasant conditions of the South Camp.
In October, the inmates of Frongoch organised a sports day. This was mentioned during a debate in parliament as evidence that things could not be too bad for the prisoners. Just imagine, a concentration camp where those held are allowed to arrange their own sports! One MP suggested that the complaints about food at the camp should not be taken too seriously if the 100 yard race could be won by a prisoner in a little under 11 seconds. This irritated Michael Collins, who pointed out that he and the other men were heavily dependent on food parcels and that if it were not for these, then their physical condition would have been pretty poor. These athletic contests were held in October 1916, but in the background there were more sinister developments; plans were afoot which could have jeopardised the very lives of the men in Frongoch.
On 2 March 1916, the Military Service Act came into force in Britain. Until then, the British army had relied upon volunteers; as had been the case throughout the whole of the country’s history. In March 1916 though, single men aged between 18 and 41 years of age no longer had any choice in the matter. They were to be conscripted into the forces against their will. In May, another act broadened the scope of those being conscripted to include married men, as well as bachelors. The Military Service Act covered only men living on the British mainland; England, Scotland and Wales. It did not apply to Ireland. However, Irishmen living in Britain would be liable for conscription.
Some time over the summer of 1916, somebody in Whitehall came up with the idea of dealing with the problem of the hundreds of men being held in the Frongoch camp by conscripting them into the army. It was a brilliant scheme. After all, although Irish, all these men were certainly now resident in Britain and therefore theoretically eligible to be drafted into the armed forces. The only difficulty in implementing this plan was that the men at Frongoch somehow got wind of it. Michael Collins reacted angrily and came up with a perfect riposte. From the end of October onwards, he and the other hut leaders ordered that nobody was to answer to his name when addressed by soldiers, or acknowledge his identity in any way to the military authorities of the camp. This would, he thought, prevent any call-up papers being served on prisoners.
It has to be said that the idea of conscripting these men into the army was a peculiarly vindictive one. Once enlisted, they would have a choice. On the one hand, they could refuse to obey orders, when once they had been shipped across to the Western Front in France; in which case they would face court martial and execution. Alternatively, they could stay on the front line and face the likelihood of being killed by the Germans. In either case, they would cease to be a vexatious problem for the British government.
Matters came to a head on 2 November 1916. As a trial run, the army had taken from the camp a man whom they claimed was called Michael Murphy. There was some dispute about the situation; whether Murphy was being called up or if it was being claimed that he was in fact a deserter from the army. Whatever the situation, the army took the wrong man from the camp. When the mistake was discovered, Colonel Heygate-Lambert decided to hold a roll call at Frongoch; the first time that this had been done. On 2 November, he assembled the men and his adjutant called out names, expecting the prisoners to answer and thus identify themselves. Not one did so. This was partly because Michael Murphy, the man wanted by the military, was still in the camp and nobody wished to see him identified. Five days later, on 7 November, another roll call was held, with the same result. Following this, the fifteen hut leaders were charged with a military offence concerning, ‘maintaining discipline among prisoners of war’. It had apparently finally been decided that this was the status of the men at Frongoch. They were, after much hedging, admitted to be prisoners of war.
There can be little doubt that the Camp Commandant handled the confrontation very badly. After the abortive roll calls, some of the prisoners went on hunger strike. Another had a nervous breakdown, brought on by his fear of being sent to France as a soldier. After five months in captivity, a number of other men were suffering the consequences of imprisonment and the general health of many was not good. It was now that Colonel Heygate-Lambert played another card. He ruled that the camp doctor, a man called Peters, was not to treat any of the inmates for any condition, until they had correctly identified themselves to him. This meant that none of the men were to receive medical treatment from then on.
Caught between the demands of his conscience and the orders of the Camp Commandant, Dr Peters was in an unenviable position. Some men were on hunger strike and in urgent need of care and attention, but he was forbidden to tend to them until they answered to their names. Dr Peters had already had a run-in with the Camp Commandant about the quality of the food being provided. One consignment of meat was in such an advanced state of decomposition, that the very smell of it made soldiers retch. Never the less, Colonel Heygate-Lambert insisted that it be washed with vinegar to remove the smell and then served to the prisoners. The doctor examined this meat for himself and ruled that it was unfit for human consumption.
After various other problems and finding that he was unable to adhere both to his code of ethics and the requirements of the job, Dr Peters wrote out his resignation, but was asked by the Home Office to stay on until some matters had been attended to. He became so distressed about matters that he vanished one day and was later found floating face down in the Tryweryn river, which flowed past the camp. An inquest held in Merioneth found that Dr Peters had committed suicide.
Shortly after the fifteen men were charged and told that they would stand trial before a military court for their refusal to answer to their names, Michael Collins managed to smuggle out an account of the situation in Frongoch. This was passed to a newspaper in Ireland and on 11 November the Cork Free Press published details of what was going on at the camp. The story was picked up by the Manchester Guardian, who found that legally, reporters were entitled to be present at the trial of the fifteen prisoners. This was the last thing that the government wanted and orders were issued that journalists were to be excluded from the proceedings; an act which would have been quite illegal.
On Saturday 25 November 1916, a military court was convened at Frongoch camp under the authority of a Royal Warrant of 3 August 1914. This allowed the army to impose discipline upon prisoners of war; although its legality when used against the citizens of this country was open to question. The wording of the warrant, which was for, ’the Maintenance of Discipline among Prisoners of War’, was as follows:
Whereas We deem it expedient to make regulations for the custody of
and maintenance of discipline among prisoners of war interned in the
United Kingdom or elsewhere; Our Will and Pleasure is that the custody
of and maintenance of discipline among prisoners of war interned in the
United Kingdom and elsewhere shall be governed by the laws and
customs of war and the regulations attached to this Our Warrant, which
regulations shall be the sole authority on the matters therein treated of
The charges against the prisoners at Frongoch were based upon the regulations cited in the Royal Warrant, namely that;
any such charge or charges as may be preferred against them for any
offence which, if committed in England, would be triable before a Civil
Court of Criminal Jurisdiction or for any offence the commission of which
shall be held prejudicial to the safety of or well-being of His Majesty’s
Dominions, armed forces or subjects or to the safe custody, control or
well-being of any prisoner of war.
Major E.E. Husey of the Cheshire Regiment was President of the court and the other members were Captain F. Fanning Evans and Captain C.C. Doran. Present as Judge-Advocate was Lieutenant Colonel Ivor Bowen.
The court assembled at a building inside Frongoch Camp and this at once caused a problem. Appendix C of the Royal Warrant under which the trial was being held, specifically stated that, ‘all the proceedings shall be in open court and in the presence of the accused’. This was quite unambiguous and a reporter from the Manchester Guardian and a journalist from another newspaper arrived in Wales to cover the proceedings. They were stopped at the gates of the camp by armed soldiers, who told them that they would only be admitted if they had a pass from the Commandant, Colonel Heygate-Lambert. He refused permission for anybody to enter the camp without permission from the Home Office. It is entirely possible that the colonel was acting on instructions from the government in taking this stance and it was hoped to avoid any publicity for the trial by this means. If so, the strategy backfired.
George Duffy, the defence counsel for the accused men, drew the court’s attention to what was happening and asserted, quite correctly, that unless the trial was held in public, then the court would have no legal standing. The Judge-Advocate agreed with this point and advised the President that the press must be admitted. A sergeant was despatched to the Commandant’s office to instruct him to let the reporters in. He refused, saying that he had orders from the Home Office. None of this was making a very good impression on the two journalists, who were preparing to write an account of how prisoners held at Frongoch were being denied a fair and open trial. The impasse was resolved by the court removing itself to a building which lay outside the barbed wire fence of the camp itself.
The same charge was faced by all fifteen of the men; namely that after being warned by the Commandant, they failed to answer their names during a roll call. None of those being tried for this offence denied that they had failed to answer to their names, but gave as their defence that they suspected that the roll call, the first held in the camp, was intended to identify men who might be called up for military service. Colonel Heygate-Lambert do not come out very well as the evidence was given. Even the soldiers serving under him testified that he had said and done some exceedingly callous things. Sergeant-Major Newstead testified that the Commandant had said to the prisoners that if he had nothing but dead bodies in the camp, he would have discipline.
There was no doubt that, technically at least, the accused men were guilty of the offence with which they were charged. George Duffy, for the defence, challenged the validity of the trial on various grounds; none of which were accepted by the court. The chief point made on behalf of the defence was that none of the actions of which the fifteen men were accused were illegal under either statute or common law. In short; they had not really committed an offence at all. The idea that laws could be passed in this way, merely by the King’s signing a warrant set a dangerous precedent. Parliament had been completely bypassed. Never the less, the court refused to accept such arguments and that being so, the case was proved.
The climax of the trial was bathetic in the extreme. The men were all convicted of the charge and it remained only to decide on their punishment. This was solemnly declared to be a month’s imprisonment. Since they were already prisoners, it is debateable how much this penalty affected them.
The staff of the Manchester Guardian revenged themselves on Colonel Heygate-Lambert for his trying to prevent them from reporting the trial by running several articles which drew attention to Frongoch; the last thing the government wished to see. Throughout late November and the first half of December, more and more questions were being asked in parliament about the conditions at Frongoch and the ultimate fate of the men held there. On 4 December 1916, for instance, questioning from Irish MPs forced the government to admit that efforts had indeed been made to draft some of the prisoners at Frongoch into the army.
By the middle of December, there could be nobody in the British government who did not simply wish to be rid of the men being detained at the camp in Wales. Other political developments were at work; things that had nothing to do with the Irish prisoners and their circumstances as such, but would ultimately bring about a neat and satisfactory resolution of the awkward situation which the British had inadvertently created for themselves. On 7 December 1916, Herbert Asquith, the Prime Minister, was replaced by David Lloyd George. Asquith was a somewhat stuffy and inflexible politician, who had a reputation for standing fast and refusing to compromise. Having already, as he saw it, faced down the suffragettes in the years before the outbreak of war in 1914, he evidently felt that the same strategy might work against the Irish nationalists. This was a disastrous miscalculation and as soon as Asquith was safely out of the saddle, Lloyd George lost no time in reaching a compromise about Frongoch Camp. Perhaps compromise is the wrong way of stating the case; it was more a complete capitulation.
On 21 December 1916, the Secretary of State for Ireland announced that the camp at Frongoch was to be dismantled and all prisoners to be released without charge and sent back to Ireland as free men. The following evening, the camp adjutant at Frongoch, presumably the Commandant himself could not bring himself to admit publicly that his rule was being ignominiously ended, announced to the assembled prisoners that they were all to be released. Astonishingly, most were to be set free that very night. Those who lived in the north, south and west of Ireland would be taken from the camp at once and put on ships bound for Ireland. It was not to be expected that after the history of bitter confrontation which had marked relations in Frongoch between the Irish prisoners and those guarding them, things should now have gone smoothly.
The adjutant asked for the names, addresses and home railway stations of the first few batches of prisoners to be freed and at once, there was an objection from Michael Collins. How did they know, he asked, that this was not some new trap and a way for the army to acquire the information about the identity of the men being held at Frongoch which they had been seeking in vain for the last two months? A tense standoff was averted when the adjutant suggested that the men compile the lists themselves. An hour later, lorries entered the camp and the first group of prisoners was loaded onto them and driven to the port at Holyhead on the Isle of Anglesey. There, they were put on board the overnight ferry to Ireland.
The following day, more prisoners were taken from Frongoch and sent home. According to one, when they changed trains at Chester, the men amused themselves by marching along the platform singing Deutschland uber Alles. To the very last, they were determined to be an irritation to the English authorities. The last of the detainees were freed from the camp on the night of Christmas Eve. Michael Collins was one of these; arriving in Dublin early on the morning of Christmas Day.
Thus ended Britain’s first experiment with the detention of political prisoners. It had been a largely unedifying spectacle and few in government had any wish to repeat it. The idea of holding one’s own citizens in concentration camps in this way had not proved a success and although this method of combating a domestic insurgency was to be used again from time to time over the next sixty years, it was never to become widespread or popular. The same could not be said for locking up foreigners and members of ethnic minorities. Here, the sensibilities of the British were not so easily offended and it was to be many years before rounding up people of particular religions or nationalities was to become seen as unacceptable. Indeed, during the First World War, thousands of foreigners were kept behind barbed wire for no other reason than that they had been born abroad. This kind of thing began soon after the outbreak of war in the summer of 1914.
Now THAT was interesting. A couple of comments: you refer to the English Government at one point. I don't think there has been an English Government for at least three hundred years. And "Alternatively, they could stay on the front line and face the likelihood of being killed by the Germans." Well, the possibility rather than likelihood. And they could have ended up in a real PoW camp in Germany which would have made Frongach seem like a holiday camp. One of my grandfathers was called up at the age of 40 years and 7 months - a married man with four young children - and was to be captured and spend over 18 months in a camp. The German guards used to spit in their bowls of whatever watery concoction they were given as food. Ireland was a part of the UK at this time and they had representation in Parliament so the Irish were damned lucky to be excused the conscription which was imposed on everyone else.
Also, a few of your sources would be useful.
Simon, it is the Monday of a short week before Easter and I should be working on a dozen half-completed tasks. Please stop distracting me with these concise, fact-filled and illuminating little histories! I really do not know how you manage your prodigious output. Yet, of course, thank you again.
From this essay, and others recently, I notice that Western powers rarely label captives prisoners of war, only here, as you write, when it suited the victor's purposes. 'Enemy combatants' I think was the chosen label for those taken alive by US forces in the 1980s and onwards. Come to that, when was the last time we heard a head of state declare war in those words. Neville Chamberlain famously said '... a state of war now exists with Germany.' And FDR said something more. Yet few countries want to declare war, even though that is what they have done, even when defensively. I suspect the reason is that they are acting on lawyers' advice. Never commit irreducibly to any position. It could be costly.