About

We first learned of the existence of Stobs Camp as a result of the Study Weekend held in Hawick in 2016. We had lived for a number of years in Germany and Switzerland, developing an interest in German language and culture, and we followed up this interest by formal study after returning to the UK. This study led us to translate the memoirs of a soldier from Alsace in the First World War ¹, published in 2014. We were very pleased when we were given the opportunity to take an active part in the Stobs Camp Project tasked with translating a number of the military editions. Once we became involved with the project we discovered that other archives had copies of the civilian editions as well, and we were able to build up a complete set of thirty-nine editions. The only gap in our collection is the one edition which was not printed because it was censored. At a meeting to launch the Internment Research Centre in Hawick in December 2018 we provided it with a set of all the translations which had been completed by then – twenty of the thirty-nine. It has since been agreed that it would be sensible to make the newspapers and their translations available on the internet, and this website is the result. The task of translation is now complete and the files can also be downloaded to facilitate searching.

Acknowledgements

As already mentioned, the translation of the Stobsiade was part of a larger AHRC-funded project on internment camps in the British Empire during the First World War, led by Professor Stefan Manz of Aston University and Professor Anne Schwan of Napier University in Edinburgh. We are naturally grateful for their past and ongoing support, help and encouragement as indeed we are to our colleagues on the Stobs Project.We would also like to thank Mr Karl-Heinz Wüstner for communicating with us about Karl Karle's diary, and Mrs Doris Schmitz, Karl Karle's daughter for giving us permission to publish it here. Mr Wüstner also kindly assisted us in preparing the German-language feature of the website. We are grateful to the Europeana website for permitting their material to be reused.

The website was developed using HTML 5, ES2015 JavaScript and Foundation 6 from Zurb. Older browsers beware!

We would also like to thank Melissa Atkinson of the Society of Friends Library, London and Jude Dicken of Manx National Heritage for providing the civilian editions of the Stobsiade, and for giving us access to their archives relating to Stobs and Knockaloe.

David and Sheila Sutherland

Links