‘A wonderful day and a wonderful crossing!’: Internment (im)mobilities, ambivalence, and the residual tourist gaze in Second World War Britain

Abstract 1940 saw the mass internment of so‐called ‘enemy aliens’ within Britain as a response to the rapid advance of Nazi forces on the continent; this meant that innocent civilians—including many who were already refugees from Nazism—were incarcerated in camps across the country, particularly within the tourist spaces of the Isle of Man. We do not seek to argue that internees simply experienced internment as being akin to a holiday, or that the overarching internment process itself shared any similarity with leisure time per se. Nonetheless, the appropriation of tourist infrastructures for use within the internment process contributed towards the presence of a lingering tourist gaze in a situation to which it should not, ostensibly pertain. A state of ambivalence may not accurately capture internment's effects—exclusion and imprisonment—but it certainly captured the dissonances experienced, how it was remembered (particularly with the passage of time), and how the internment camp's exceptional level of control was rendered much more fragile and complex (Katz 2015, p. 49, 84). We interrogate how residual touristic ways of seeing, infrastructures, practices and sensibilities, are evident in a variety of archival source material, contemporaneous newspaper articles, and eyewitness accounts, and consider the rhythms and practices of camp life, deportations abroad on ships such as the SS Arandora Star and the HMT Dunera , and the gaze of locals and the press. The holiday—as a geography of ideas, spaces, practices, movements and sensibilities—became a frame of reference, both by those in charge of the process, and the internees who had to make sense of it. We proffer an exploration of internment and ‘the holiday’ to the burgeoning geographies of camp and detainment spaces, (im)mobilities and their politics.