The old hotels on Mooragh Promenade in Ramsey were once the site of a World War 2 Internment Camp, you can still see the concrete squares in the foreground of the image that used to hold the upright posts of the barbed wire fences.
The image was captured on my Sony HX20V camera, resized and cropped in Adobe Photoshop CS6.
Feel free to make any comments either on this website by clicking the “Write comment” below or by logging onto my Facebook Page enjoy – Click on the image for a larger view.
My father returned to Ramsey with his mother in 1941 after the tragic loss of his father, Christmas 1940 during the ‘blackout’ period, (a chief air warden and St John’s Ambulance volunteer in Rochdale), to live with his grandmother Essie, (affectionately known as ‘The Old Hen’) and grandfather, Toby. ‘The Old Hen’ ran a boarding house, but not one as pictured right on the front and during the war her guests were service personnel. My father remained on the island during the remainder of the war, from age 8, until he was 13. It was along this promenade that he used to meet his then future step father, Charlie, then a sentry posted to guard the camp and on occasion he would be allowed to carry Charlie’s rifle back home to Essie’s, quite a treat and something that would horrify today lol! Despite losing his father prematurely, my father spent some of the happiest days of his life in Ramsey, never wanted for food, had beaches and countryside in which to play, the island offered sanctuary and a paradise for a wartime child. However, at the end of the war his mother married Charlie and they returned to ‘the mainland’, Bradford and here another entirely different chapter in their lives unveiled itself.