Published in 1950, this book 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.
Jersey Our Island - Travelling Blind Part 4
by Sidney Bisson
Oyster fishing was another of Jersey's maritime ventures that remains only as a memory. Discovered in 1797, the Gorey oyster beds were soon being dredged by a fleet of three or four hundred small vessels, bringing employment not only to fishermen but to hundreds of women and children who sorted the catches as they were brought in and prepared them for export to Britain.
For a few years the trade prospered, enlivened by riots and clashes with French fishermen who were accused of poaching. British and French gunboats took a hand, and to quell the most serious of the riots the 60th Regiment, then stationed in Jersey, was called out.
The Lieutenant-Governor, Major-General Archibald Campbell, directed the operation in person, caught a chill, and died - the only casualty in the Battle of the Oyster Shells as it came to be called locally. The cause of the battle was the delay in opening new oyster beds, which had been laid down to replace those which the turbulent fishermen had dragged bare. In spite of regulations to protect the new beds, the industry gradually declined. By 1850 it was practically dead.
Gorey relapsed into a long sleep, from which it has never properly awakened. Its sloping cotils are more suitable for growing potatoes than for building houses, so that it has fortunately escaped the rash that has permanently disfigured so much of the south and east coast. Its few hotels and boarding houses seem to have a special attraction for artists and `intellectuals.'
Perhaps George Eliot started a fashion when she stayed here in 1857. Anyway you can hardly walk to the neighbouring baylet of Anne Port without your meditations being disturbed by a couple of bearded young males in vivid coloured trousers declaiming their equally vivid views on Auden and MacNeice in high-pitched voices.
Or yourself disturbing a tweed-skirted eton-cropped female of the species perched insecurely on a canvas stool many sizes too small for her broad posterior and dabbing bright green seagulls on a gory canvas.
Aloof, squatting over two and a half acres of the little promontory that juts into the sea, the mediaeval castle of Mont Orgueil dominates the scene. We may forgive Mont Orgueil for not taking an interest in modern verse. When it was young the fashionable poets were Master Wace of Jersey, who had turned the stories of King Arthur into verse (and who, incidentally, was the first to mention the round table), and the priest Layamon of Ernley, who shamelessly borrowed from Wace to give the English language its first great poem.
The castle was two hundred years old, and had been pulled about, repaired, and added to, when Chaucer was writing his Canterbury Tales. It had also been several times besieged, but no one had succeeded in fighting their way into its keep not even the redoubtable Bertrand du Guesclin, Constable of France.
And no wonder, when you consider the strength and intricacy of its defences. Not everything you see now existed then the Harliston Tower is a fifteenth, the Somerset Tower a sixteenth century addition but the general plan remains unchanged. As you wander through gate after gate, round corner after corner, up step after step, until you reach the entrance of the massive keep, you can understand how a handful of men, provided they were adequately provisioned and armed, could laugh defiance at an army of Frenchmen encamped outside the gates.
It was in 1461 that an invader first succeeded in capturing this stronghold. On the accession of Edward IV, Margaret of Anjou, wife of the imprisoned Henry, took refuge in France. Amongst those from whom she sought assistance was the Comte de Maulevrier, to whom in return she offered the Channel Islands. Maulevrier sent an expedition to Jersey which captured the castle without a struggle.
Jersey Our Island - Travelling Blind Part 4
by Sidney Bisson
Oyster fishing was another of Jersey's maritime ventures that remains only as a memory. Discovered in 1797, the Gorey oyster beds were soon being dredged by a fleet of three or four hundred small vessels, bringing employment not only to fishermen but to hundreds of women and children who sorted the catches as they were brought in and prepared them for export to Britain.
For a few years the trade prospered, enlivened by riots and clashes with French fishermen who were accused of poaching. British and French gunboats took a hand, and to quell the most serious of the riots the 60th Regiment, then stationed in Jersey, was called out.
The Lieutenant-Governor, Major-General Archibald Campbell, directed the operation in person, caught a chill, and died - the only casualty in the Battle of the Oyster Shells as it came to be called locally. The cause of the battle was the delay in opening new oyster beds, which had been laid down to replace those which the turbulent fishermen had dragged bare. In spite of regulations to protect the new beds, the industry gradually declined. By 1850 it was practically dead.
Gorey relapsed into a long sleep, from which it has never properly awakened. Its sloping cotils are more suitable for growing potatoes than for building houses, so that it has fortunately escaped the rash that has permanently disfigured so much of the south and east coast. Its few hotels and boarding houses seem to have a special attraction for artists and `intellectuals.'
Perhaps George Eliot started a fashion when she stayed here in 1857. Anyway you can hardly walk to the neighbouring baylet of Anne Port without your meditations being disturbed by a couple of bearded young males in vivid coloured trousers declaiming their equally vivid views on Auden and MacNeice in high-pitched voices.
Or yourself disturbing a tweed-skirted eton-cropped female of the species perched insecurely on a canvas stool many sizes too small for her broad posterior and dabbing bright green seagulls on a gory canvas.
Aloof, squatting over two and a half acres of the little promontory that juts into the sea, the mediaeval castle of Mont Orgueil dominates the scene. We may forgive Mont Orgueil for not taking an interest in modern verse. When it was young the fashionable poets were Master Wace of Jersey, who had turned the stories of King Arthur into verse (and who, incidentally, was the first to mention the round table), and the priest Layamon of Ernley, who shamelessly borrowed from Wace to give the English language its first great poem.
The castle was two hundred years old, and had been pulled about, repaired, and added to, when Chaucer was writing his Canterbury Tales. It had also been several times besieged, but no one had succeeded in fighting their way into its keep not even the redoubtable Bertrand du Guesclin, Constable of France.
And no wonder, when you consider the strength and intricacy of its defences. Not everything you see now existed then the Harliston Tower is a fifteenth, the Somerset Tower a sixteenth century addition but the general plan remains unchanged. As you wander through gate after gate, round corner after corner, up step after step, until you reach the entrance of the massive keep, you can understand how a handful of men, provided they were adequately provisioned and armed, could laugh defiance at an army of Frenchmen encamped outside the gates.
It was in 1461 that an invader first succeeded in capturing this stronghold. On the accession of Edward IV, Margaret of Anjou, wife of the imprisoned Henry, took refuge in France. Amongst those from whom she sought assistance was the Comte de Maulevrier, to whom in return she offered the Channel Islands. Maulevrier sent an expedition to Jersey which captured the castle without a struggle.
There can be little doubt that it was treacherously surrendered. The Keeper, John Nanfan, was a Lancastrian who had been appointed by Henry VI and never replaced ! Maulevrier, and after his death his son, ruled the island until 1468, when Edward IV sent Sir Richard Harliston to recapture it for England.
After a five months' siege Mont Orgueil again surrendered, only to be besieged again after another interval of seven years when Sir Richard, who had been appointed Governor, refused to give it up on the accession of Henry VII.
In the next century strenuous efforts were made to adapt the mediaeval fortress to the use of cannon, including the construction of a massive rampart or `Grand Rampire.' But improvements in artillery made it vulnerable from the west, where it was overlooked by the inland heights. The proud mount had to give place to Elizabeth Castle, and served chiefly as the Governor's residence and island prison, though it continued to be garrisoned until the time of Waterloo.
Occasionally state prisoners were confined within its walls, most famous being William Prynne, who beguiled his leisure, when he was not playing cards with the governor's wife and daughters, writing his `Divine and Profitable Meditations raised from the Contemplation of these three Leaves of Nature's Volume: i, Rockes; a, Seas; 3, Gardens; digested into three Distinct Poems.'
Prynne was a better Puritan than poet. The best he could do was :
`The Castle's ample, airy, healthy and
The Prospect pleasant, both by Sea and Land.'
which Abraham Cowley, who had followed Prince Charles to Jersey, parodied with:
`Written by William Prynne, Esquire, the
Year of our Lord six hundred thirty-three.'
As I sit quietly on the Castle Green contemplating Prynne's three leaves of nature, the voices of my two young intellectuals are wafted to me on the breeze even before they turn the corner. They have had their cerebral cocktail and are returning to their hotel for dinner. I hope it makes them sick. The cocktail, I mean; not the dinner. I don't wish them bodily harm, but it would do them good to vomit a stomachful of censorious bile. I have a mind to get up and go to them.
`Sirs,' I will say, `when you are as old as I am ' (fortunately I look a good deal older than I am) '-you will know that criticism untempered with experience is about as valueless as ' `When you are as old as I am,' says a quiet voice at my elbow.
After a five months' siege Mont Orgueil again surrendered, only to be besieged again after another interval of seven years when Sir Richard, who had been appointed Governor, refused to give it up on the accession of Henry VII.
In the next century strenuous efforts were made to adapt the mediaeval fortress to the use of cannon, including the construction of a massive rampart or `Grand Rampire.' But improvements in artillery made it vulnerable from the west, where it was overlooked by the inland heights. The proud mount had to give place to Elizabeth Castle, and served chiefly as the Governor's residence and island prison, though it continued to be garrisoned until the time of Waterloo.
Occasionally state prisoners were confined within its walls, most famous being William Prynne, who beguiled his leisure, when he was not playing cards with the governor's wife and daughters, writing his `Divine and Profitable Meditations raised from the Contemplation of these three Leaves of Nature's Volume: i, Rockes; a, Seas; 3, Gardens; digested into three Distinct Poems.'
Prynne was a better Puritan than poet. The best he could do was :
`The Castle's ample, airy, healthy and
The Prospect pleasant, both by Sea and Land.'
which Abraham Cowley, who had followed Prince Charles to Jersey, parodied with:
`Written by William Prynne, Esquire, the
Year of our Lord six hundred thirty-three.'
As I sit quietly on the Castle Green contemplating Prynne's three leaves of nature, the voices of my two young intellectuals are wafted to me on the breeze even before they turn the corner. They have had their cerebral cocktail and are returning to their hotel for dinner. I hope it makes them sick. The cocktail, I mean; not the dinner. I don't wish them bodily harm, but it would do them good to vomit a stomachful of censorious bile. I have a mind to get up and go to them.
`Sirs,' I will say, `when you are as old as I am ' (fortunately I look a good deal older than I am) '-you will know that criticism untempered with experience is about as valueless as ' `When you are as old as I am,' says a quiet voice at my elbow.
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