CHANNEL ISLANDS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 20 October 1942, Page 4

CHANNEL ISLANDS

ASSOCIATION WITH LONDON

RIVER

MANY CENTURIES OLD.

SETTLEMENT AT WAPPING. It was a strange irony of fate that the only part of British European dominions to fall to the enemy should be the oldest: those Channel Islands which are the only fragment of William the Conqueror's heritage that still belong to the Crown of England, writes J. Le Pelley in the “Port of London Authority.”

It is two years since the great Nazi tidal wave swept across France and engulfed these little communities; two years since convoys of little children, and harassed women were swept back to our ports. Then came the news of the Savage machine-gunning of the crowded Guernsey pier; and since then the rocky archipelago has disappeared into a mist as thick as the Atlantic fogs.

The story of the surrender of those islands has still to be written; and wherever two or three island refugees gather together, the bitterness, the confusion, and the inevitability, too, of that surrender wells up once more. But what else could England do after Dunkirk, when even Narvik, which now would be so precious, had to be abandoned? There are around 30,000 islanders here now, mostly women, children and fighting men of the Militias, with little or no news of their folk over there; all of them, from Lord Portsea, their champion, to the youngest baby just waiting for the day of liberation.

The Port of London has been associated with the islands for many centuries. Their merchants here were important men when the islands were the halfway house between the King’s dominions of England and his lands of Acquitaine; and in the last century the very roads to the London docks were made with blue Guernsey granite, the toughest stone that can be found. The steps of St. Paul’s and those of Waterloo Place might well become a place of pilgrimage for the exiles, for they, too, are island rock. Sir George Carteret, Sam Pepys’s friend and patron, Sir Henry de Vic, the friend of Evelyn, Sir Edmund Andros, the only Governor of all New England, and two Lord Mayors were all islanders to whom the streets of London were as familiar as the heather and golden cliffs of home.

The Islanders have always been good sailors; they had to be to survive amid those rocks among the highest tides and fastest currants. Edmund Burke once described their fleet of privateers as one of the great naval Powers of Europe; and whenever His Majesty’s ships came up Thames, among the King s tarry-breeks were short, dark, quiet men who headed for the steps at Wapping, talking among themselves in the French the Saxons heard at Senlac. Handy men they were, both as pilots in those endless blockades off the Breton coast ,or to land at nights for secret service on the enemy shores where they might pass as natives. That game isn t over yet.

’ Even in the Bounty at the time of the mutiny there was one of them: “black hair, slender make, has a scar on the back part of his head, is tattooed and a native of Guernsey, speaks French. At Wapping they had a settlement, and we hear of them in a humble petition of the Minister and Churchwardens of the French Church of St. John in Wapping in 1705. The congregation was for the most part ‘ Jersey and Guernsey men, your Majesty’s subjects, whereof most of them serve on board your Majesty’s Fleet.” Eighty families they were besides four “other French,” and the attendance “when the seamen are at home” was about 140. The house in which they worshipped had been hired by their minister and furnished as a chapel by themselves. The Commandments tos them not to covet their neighbour's vineyard, nor his ox, nor his ass; but fortunately they did not say anything of that likely bit of timber in the boatswain’s stores! Be that as it may, the landlord seized their precious furnishings when they could not pay the rent of £lO a year, and Mr Russel, the “English minister/’ the Vicar of St. John’s, had to intervene to keep the chapel open. Hence the petition for Royal bounty by our Anglo-Norman tarpaulins, “who be-ing unacquainted, with the English language and living at great distance from any French church have no convenience for the restoring to the publick worship of God.” Many things have changed smee then; the sea-dogs (“red cap, shaggy pea-green jacket, down to his knees, and tarpaulin trowsers”) have shed their picturesque dress and dialect, and become the most efficient glasshouse farmers; their romantic islands a paradise for trippers. One thing remains —their devotion to the Crown which they have served in every battle since Hastings. It is fitting that, in this second year of their captivity under the Swastika, they should be remembered in these pages.

In happier times the traffic between the Channel Islands and the Port of London would at this season be at its peak. Generous supplies of vitaminvaluable tomatoes from the hothouses of Guernsey would already have been succeeded in English homes by Jerseycultivated new potatoes. Then would have followed the Islanders’ out-door tomato crop. These seasonal and always welcome cargoes—heralding tne English summer and later home-grown vegetables—were a regular feature at the London Dock, where methods of rapid handling and distribution, had been developed to a fine art. Cut flowers from the Islands also always found a ready sale in the London markets. An all-the-year-round freight was granite from the Islands’ quarries. Outward cargoes consisted of general supplies, household requirements and equipment, and motor cars very frequently provided deck cargoes. The London and Channel Islands Steamship Co., Ltd., were foremost in this London trade. Their vessels —Island Queen, Foam Queen, London Queen, etc.—were handy little vessels specially suitable for the short sea passage and for the quick handling of perishable cargoes and also for bulk granite shipments. In a number of years after the last war the company carried as much as 80,000 tons of broken granite annually. A unique and little known business of the Islanders was their tea trade. Supplies were shipped there from the Port of London where they were blended and nacked into small packages with attractive wrappings. These weer then reshipped to London for transhipment in ocean-going vessels to South America in particular, where the Islanders enjoyed a popular market.