When the island was a penal colony

Le Devoir’s Jean-François Nadeau tells how St Helen’s Island and the old military fort there became a penal colony during World War II, when Britain sent a group of men of Italian citizenship (or even recent Italian ancestry) here as prisoners. The fort later became the Stewart Museum, which is doing a tour there on the topic, covered in a brief video from CBC.

(Second item today linked with World War II. Odd.)

Shoe drops: This story isn’t news, although I don’t think I quite understood before that the internees were sent by the British. But it just crossed my mind to wonder: where were the women? As many women of Italian birth or parentage as men must have been living in the UK at the time, so were they not considered a risk, or were they sent somewhere else?