THE publication of a detailed study of British internees during the first World War would normally be of little concern to Irish readers. However, Matthew Stibbe's book British Civilian Internees in Germany: The Ruhleben Camp, 1914-1918(Manchester University Press, 2008) makes fascinating reading. Sadly, however, very little mention is made in its pages of one of the camp's famous members.
Robert Máire Smyllie was born in Glasgow in 1894, the eldest son of a Scottish journalist. The family soon moved to Sligo, where his father became editor of the Sligo Times. Young Robert was educated locally and left to pursue further studies at Trinity College Dublin in 1912. The sudden outbreak of war in the summer of 1914 – when he was visiting the Continent as tutor to the son of a wealthy American – resulted in him being interned by the Germans later that year at Ruhleben until the war ended.
It was here that he first became acquainted with journalism through his work on the pages of the camp's fortnightly magazine. Indeed, the very first issue of In Ruhleben Camp, dated June 8th, 1915 contains a surprising account of his exploits on the camp sports field. Smyllie, the writer noted, "being somewhat stockily built is to be excused for not getting off the mark with all celerity possible. The main fault of his running seems to lie in the fact that he gets too much down on the flat of his foot, thus missing a lot of spring and shortening his stride."
Readers of this newspaper first learned about the existence of Ruhleben camp in November 1914 when they read that several thousand British nationals had been arrested and sent to a converted racecourse near Berlin. Later that month, a copy of a letter written by the famous cellist Carl Fuchs was posted to the paper. Fuchs had been due to give a recital to the Royal Dublin Society that December but, owing to his status as a British subject, he was sent to the camp, where he “recognised a Dublin man by his accent, and he told me he hails from Sandymount”.
In January 1915, an account of camp conditions came via an internee released due to ill health: “Twelve sets of stables are here more or less prepared for human habitation and called barracks. The horse boxes below contain each six or seven berths. The lofts above have straw mattresses ranged along the walls and across the centre, packed together as tightly as possible. There were, when I left, perhaps 180 men sleeping in the loft of No 10 barrack. . .The food consists of coffee or tea in the morning, soup at midday, and tea or cocoa in the evening. A loaf of bread is provided for every two days. A lump of sausage is occasionally thrown in.”
A British doctor named Hugh Cimino published a detailed account of the time he spent at Ruhleben and other detention centres shortly after his happy release. One wonders whether a reviewer in this paper in June 1915 was alluding to a future editor when he wrote as follows: "Even under such trying conditions the buoyant Irish spirit flourished, and we read with pleasure of the indefatigable efforts of 'Sm', the Irish boy, to help the luckless and to keep up the spirits of all." In any event, Smyllie was a member of the Irish Players at the camp. It is worth noting that WB Yeats and Lady Gregory agreed to send on a set of costumes used in The Playboy of the Western World. AG Wilson gratefully replied in December 1915 to the secretary of the Abbey Theatre: "I want you to be very pleased with yourself, for not only helping us to represent Ireland in a favourable and amusing light, but also for helping the whole camp to forget their position."
Bishop Bury of North and Central Europe visited the camp in November 1916. A year later, a book entitled My Visit to Ruhleben was greeted with strong disapproval by many internees for underplaying their psychological and material deprivation.
Indeed, the camp magazine featured a “Ruhlimerick” in June 1917:
I could really be very
sarcastic,
If I spoke of an ecclesiastic,
Whose tales when in here
Were undoubtedly queer,
But when he got home were
fantastic.
Following his release from Ruhleben in November 1918, Smyllie had a funny encounter with a fellow internee and future film and TV actor named George Merritt, which he later wrote about in his famous Irishman’s Diary column. It seems that Merritt had managed to clothe himself well in exchange for food rations taken from the camp, and both he and Smyllie dined and drank well also on this basis at a plush Berlin hotel. Other notable internees whom he knew included the internationally renowned conductor and composer Sir Ernest MacMillan and the physicist Sir James Chadwick, who discovered the neutron.
Ruhleben was never far from Smyllie’s thoughts, as one can see from a perusal of Irishman’s Diary columns from the 1920s until his untimely death in 1954; many of them detail the notable achievements of some of his fellow Ruhlebenities. In a 1943 column he revealed that he “played the viola in the [camp] orchestra, which consisted of some sixty-five players”. A year later, Smyllie admitted to being a member of the camp police “until I disgraced myself by an idiotically inefficient effort to escape”.
Another revelation worth quoting is that, on returning to the reopened Ruhleben racecourse after the first World War, Smyllie “made some money by backing the animal that bore the number of the barrack in which I used to live”.
Even Myles na gCopaleen got in on the act in May 1945, when he declared that he “formed the impression, many years ago in Ruhleben, that German persons are as intelligent as the next”. Interestingly, Smyllie finally disclosed in 1949 that a Lithuanian Jew whom he had befriended in Ruhleben gave him the idea for the pen-name “Nichevo”, which he began to use as early as 1921.