Jersey Our Island: Another Glory – Part 1

Published in 1950, this is an interesting snapshot of the Island and its customs as it was in the immediate post-war period, and not without humour. Most guide books of the time give the tourist information, or give the impressions of an outsider to the Island, but this is in "inside view", which is rarer.

Whatever happened to the carnivals he described? I was probably too young in the 1960s, but I certainly don't remember them in the 1970s or 1980s

Jersey Our Island: Another Glory – Part 1

By Sidney Bisson

The carnival season is approaching, which means that my holiday ought to be coming to an end. Unlike the Battle of Flowers, the carnivals are not a modern invention designed for the amusement of visitors. They can be traced back for centuries and form part of the chain of winter amusements of the `good old days,' the only link in the chain which seems to have survived. Because they are held in winter, few visitors have ever seen one.

In modem times they have tended to be confused with celebrations of Guy Fawkes Day, but the carnival idea is older than the Gunpowder Plot. In 1589 the Royal Court made orders prohibiting people from going about in disguise and from `assembling by night to rove around roads and houses on pain of one month's imprisonment in the castle on bread and water.'

Carnivals are always held at night, and within living memory the principal feature was a torchlight procession of masked figures. So there can be little doubt that it was the forerunner of the modern carnivals that the Royal Court tried to sabotage.

To-day loudspeakers and floodlights give the carnivals an artificial and garish atmosphere, and the procession is more like a battle of flowers in miniature than an eerie masquerade. Still they are intimate jolly affairs, run on a parochial not on an island basis, and however much the lordly folk of St. Helier despise then, they give the countryman a considerable amount of fun. It is good to know that he has not yet completely lost the power of providing his own amusement.

Another institution which has managed to survive the competition of wireless and cinemas is the annual festival of music and drama known under the borrowed Welsh name of Eisteddfod. This too is a purely domestic affair held after the visitor season is over, and though the war put a temporary stop to it, it is hoped to get it going again next winter. Before the war it used to attract a formidable number of entries and provided employment for a phenomenal number of teachers of music, dancing, and elocution, whose pupils were all most anxious to carry off the prizes.

These portents of winter remind me that I must not say good-bye to Jersey without roaming a little more about the countryside.

I smiled at the visitors' bay complex before I started my holiday, but I seem to have suffered rather badly from it myself, and there is only just time to make amends. Perhaps one reason why visitors prefer bays is that you can take a bus to them and sit, whilst the exploration of the interior calls for the use of the feet.

A char-a-banc drive is not a very good substitute. The best of the Jersey lanes are the narrower ones which motor traffic usually avoids.

It is true that they are not to everybody's taste. Plees, after praising the variety of the scenery, went on to add: `The only wearisome repetition is that endless succession of narrow roads, overarched with trees, which, however pleasing when graced with the robe of novelty, tire by their uniform similarity, and perplex by their countless sinuosities.'

And one after another English visitors of the nineteenth century who recorded their impressions in books about the island (there are dozens of them) repeat Plees's allegation of monotony. Until one begins to wonder whether they did not merely visit a few of the bays and take his word for the rest.

Perplexing only if you travel without a map, the lanes are certainly far from uniform, unless you keep your eyes on the road. There is even plenty of variety in the treatment of the road-side. In less than a mile it will change from hedge and bank to wall and bank, from hedge without bank to bank without wall, from hedge behind a wall to trees on top of one, from lopped elms to overhanging oaks, not to mention the ferns, fuchsias, hydrangeas, willows, brambles, honeysuckle, bamboos, ten-foot cabbages, and almost anything else you can think of, which crop up in the oddest places every few hundred yards.

But it is variety of views that counts: the sudden glimpse of the sea through an avenue of elms; the unexpected descent into a winding valley; the water that tumbles out of the rock, follows the road a little way, and disappears again; the turning that reveals a farmhouse, older and more dignified than the rest, with a fire of ivy geraniums in its granite courtyard; the ancient dovecote of a manor house; the mass of purple loosestrife by a pond. There is one glory of the bays and another glory of the lanes, and however much they differ from one another, the balance is fairly well divided.

To travel the country lanes is to see the true Jersey, which is not all bays and boarding-houses as some visitors imagine. The first thing that must strike even the most casual observer is the vast number and relatively small size of the farms. Ten acres is about the average, and at least a quarter of the holdings are less than half this size. This sounds startling until you discover that in a good year ten acres of fertile land will produce £1,000 worth of early potatoes with a second crop of tomatoes or roots.

Rotation of crops is unusual. Potatoes and tomatoes are grown year after year in the same fields without deterioration.

Where neither potatoes nor tomatoes will grow, cows are pastured all jerseys. The import of any other variety is forbidden. On some farms the breeding of cattle for export is a sideline, on others a speciality. Few farmers go in for dairy farming exclusively. Many have no cattle at all.

I spoke to a farmer who was preparing, like everybody else, for the visite du branchage, the annual inspection of roads and hedges. Every summer the parish authorities make a tour of their parish to make sure that all hedges have been trimmed and overhanging branches cut back to the proper height ten feet on bye-roads, twelve on main roads. As he slashed away at his hedge he told me about some of the country customs and superstitions of bygone days.

The grand' tchethue or big plough, drawn by a team of six or eight horses, the use of which was an occasion for communal help and festivity. The effect of the moon on the weather and crops. If the new moon is on a Saturday bad weather will surely follow. If the weather changes at new or frill moon, the change will last a fortnight. Green crops do better if sown with a waxing moon; root crops when the moon is on the wane.

A lot of farmers, he assured me, still do their sowing according to the moon, and no farmer's wife will ever transplant parsley, for that brings the worst luck of all.

Beehives are still sometimes draped in black when there is a death in the house; it is unlucky not to put them in mourning.

At midnight on Christmas Eve the cattle kneel in their stalls in adoration of the Saviour, but no one must try and test this superstition, for to look upon the sight means death. Amongst other evil omens, a tap on the window at night or a picture falling from the wall are still popularly believed to foretell a death in the family.

Of all the old customs that have now died out, the pleasantest must have been the veille or winter's evening party, a convivial occasion when farmers invited their friends and relations for an evening of song and story, with a bean feast of roast pork, and dancing to the sound of the hurdy-gurdy.