The first thirty men left Hutchinson on 30th July 1940, just seventeen days after the camp’s opening, having signed an agreement to be deported.

The offer of chaperoned emigration was extended only to those married men whose wives were also interned at the women’s camp on the island. (Couples had a thirty-minute meeting to decide whether or not to accept the life-changing offer.)

Fifty men left the Isle of Man on 5th August 1940, the first group to be freed without condition. This group included, from Hutchinson, Hans Oppenheim, a conductor for the Glyndebourne opera, and the influential anti-Nazi political writer Rudolf Olden.

The campaigner Tess Simpson secured the release of some of Hutchinson’s dozens of academics in the autumn of 1940. As the British government broadened the categories under which internees could apply for release, others interceded for different groups. The composer Ralph Vaughan Williams applied on behalf of musicians; the artist and writer Helen Roeder campaigned for the artists. The Quaker Bertha Bracey, chairman of the Central Department for Internees, oversaw the cases of the destitute and Stateless (work for which, on 3rd February 1942, she was awarded the O.B.E. by the King)

A trickle of releases became a stream until, by the beginning of 1942, most of the ‘innocents’ had walked free. Thereafter the camp’s intake began to change and the rich cultural life that had defined the camp’s first eighteen months dissipated.

The final 228 inmates left the camp in March 1945 and later that year Hutchinson’s houses returned, finally, to their landladies.