I am delighted today to be sharing news of the very recent publication of The Shadow Network, the new book from DEBORAH SWIFT in her WW2 Secret Agent series.
You can read more about The Shadow Network below. Deborah has also written a fascinating article about the Rushen Internment Camp for women, which was located on the Isle of Man, and housed thousands of “enemy aliens” during WW2, like Deborah’s fictional character, Lilli.
What is the book about?
One woman must sacrifice everything to uncover the truth in this enthralling historical novel, inspired by the true World War Two campaign Radio Aspidistra…
England, 1942: Having fled Germany after her father was captured by the Nazis, Lilli Bergen is desperate to do something pro-active for the Allies. So when she’s approached by the Political Warfare Executive, Lilli jumps at the chance. She’s recruited as a singer for a radio station broadcasting propaganda to German soldiers – a shadow network.
But Lilli’s world is flipped upside down when her ex-boyfriend, Bren Murphy, appears at her workplace; the very man she thinks betrayed her father to the Nazis. Lilli always thought Bren was a Nazi sympathiser – so what is he doing in England supposedly working against the Germans?
Lilli knows Bren is up to something, and must put aside a blossoming new relationship in order to discover the truth. Can Lilli expose him, before it’s too late?
Set in the fascinating world of wartime radio, don’t miss The Shadow Network, a heart-stopping novel of betrayal, treachery, and courage against the odds.
The Rushen Women’s Internment Camp
By Deborah Swift
In my novel The Shadow Network, Lilliana Bergen is fictional, but many women like her were interned as enemy aliens in Rushen Camp on the Isle of Man. These internments were of people who had lived all their lives in Britain, although of a foreign nationality, and also refugees fleeing Hitler from all over Europe. What happened to these people was that they were victims of propaganda. The use of media manipulation, fake news and propaganda is a big theme of The Shadow Network.
There is little information available about these internments, but I did find an excellent book – The Island of Extraordinary Captives – which details mainly the men’s experiences of being arrested and detained.
Before May 1940, not a single person interviewed by the polling group Mass Observation suspected refugees to Britain of espionage, or suggested that they should be interned.
But in April 1940, after the German occupation of Norway made the invasion of Britain seem more likely, Colonel Henry Burton persuaded members of the House of Commons worried about what he termed ‘enemy aliens’, that it would be ‘far better to intern all the lot’. Soon this view began to prevail, based on little evidence – for most Germans in the country were refugees, fleeing Nazi oppression.
Act! Act! Act! Do It Now! was the headline of a newspaper article by G. Ward Price, on 24 May. ‘All refugees . . . should be drafted without delay to a remote part of the country and kept under strict supervision.’
‘You fail to realise,’ Price wrote, ‘that every German is an agent.’ This of course could not possibly be true, as many had fled the Nazi regime, but it is a good example of propaganda in action.
These unfortunate people, many bewildered and innocent of any crime, were rounded up without warning and sent to various transit camps, or to prison cells to await dispatch to more permanent accommodation. Women and children were sent to the south of the Isle of Man. At one point this end of the island was cut off from the rest of it by a barbed-wire fence. Men were held on the other side, and their camps were enormous, housing about 26,000 prisoners, increasing the ordinary population of the island by a third. All these ‘enemy aliens’ were civilians and many of them had been in England since early childhood, or had come to England more than a generation before.
The Rushen Women’s Camp held 3,500 internees, housed with landladies of seaside boarding houses, or families with spare rooms who were paid a guinea a week for taking in their ‘guests’. The women of Rushen Camp were a mixed bunch, as not only did it accommodate Jewish and political refugees, but also economic migrants who had come to Britain in the 1930s, and a few others who were pro-Nazi sympathisers.
Within the camp, the women organised themselves to stay busy – there were classes for painting, dressmaking, and typing, as well as languages, and they even spent time on the beach. This did not mean life in internment was easy, as the strict rules and regulations, plus the loss of freedom to travel, or see relatives or husbands on the other side of the wire, were difficult to bear.
Unlike my character Lilli, who was able to escape these privations, the last remaining internees left the Isle of Man in September 1945. Many women however had befriended their hosts and some stayed on as part of the Manx population.
More information about the camp can be found here: https://rushenheritage.org/library
Book details
The Shadow Network was published on 13th February 2024 by HQ Digital, and is available as an eBook, in paperback and as an audiobook.
The Shadow Network is the second in Deborah’s WW2 Secret Agent series, but can be read as a standalone.
Buy links
About the author
Deborah Swift
Deborah Swift is the English author of eighteen historical novels, including Millennium Award winner Past Encounters, and The Lady’s Slipper, shortlisted for the Impress Prize.
Her most recent books are the Renaissance trilogy based around the life of the poisoner Giulia Tofana, The Poison Keeper and its sequels, one of which won the Coffee Pot Book Club Gold Medal. Recently she has completed a secret agent series set in WW2, the first in the series being The Silk Code.
Deborah used to work as a set and costume designer for theatre and TV and enjoys the research aspect of creating historical fiction, something she loved doing as a scenographer. She likes to write about extraordinary characters set against the background of real historical events. Deborah lives in North Lancashire on the edge of the Lake District, an area made famous by the Romantic Poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge.
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Thank you for hosting Deborah Swift today, with such an interesting post.
Take care,
Cathie xx
The Coffee Pot Book Club