Articles

Many thanks indeed to all our donors, who have been generous enough to share with us and with our Library users and researchers items that are often very precious to them.

By Victor Coysh

Pus nou vieillit, pus nou pense,/ Au temps pâssaï qui n'est pus. From the Star, 1932, a résumé of an article written in 1842 describing St Peter Port in 1800. 

Guernsey, Channel Islands. (Associated Press in the Lamb County Leader, June 4, 1959.) 'Five years ago a little girl picked a wild primrose—a single primrose that has blossomed in to an amazing organisation called the Love Apple League.It has no membership fee. It has no patrons. No executive committee. There is no membership card.It’s run by children.'

From the Gazette de Guernesey, 2 November 1816. The appearance of wider St Peter Port would be changed by this Order of the Royal Court.

Oldest inhabitant looks back. Just on a century of memories. By A Press Reporter, November 1948. 'We really couldn’t make up our minds whether the tomato was a fruit or a vegetable.’

A newspaper report with travel statistics from September 1948: 'Air Travel Soars'. Photograph of ferry entering St Peter Port Harbour, from the 1952 Tourist Committee Brochure, Guernsey, Channel Isles: 'The Sunshine Isle'

By Herbert Bird Tourtel, from The Coming of Ragnarök, Guernsey, F B Guerin, 1895.

This November it will be 100 years since the first publication of a Rupert Bear story in the Daily Express newspaper. The intrepid little bear made his debut on November 8 1920; not a comic-strip, not a cartoon, but a ‘drawing’. Newsprint was short, and his creators were limited to one frame a day, either one large panel or a row of four small drawings. Occasionally the story was written in prose with a little marginal decoration. Rupert Bear was the invention of Mary Tourtel, a book illustrator, who worked on Rupert until he was handed over to Alfred Bestall in 1935. She was born Mary Caldwell in Canterbury, Kent, in 1874. Her father and brother were celebrated stained-glass artists and stonemasons who were associated with Canterbury Cathedral for many years, while another brother moved to South Africa, where he became a well-known painter of animals. Mary went to art school and became a professional illustrator, producing her first books in 1897. She died in 1948 and is buried with her husband in Canterbury. It is through her husband, Herbert Bird Tourtel, that Rupert Bear comes to be linked to Guernsey.

It took four years and several appearances in Court for Thomas Tramallier (III) to force Pierre Carey to hand over papers concerning Thomas' grandfather, Thomas Tramallier Senior's (I) estate. Carey's wife was Thomas (I)'s cousin, the daughter of his uncle, the late William Tramallier, and an heir to her father's estate. William had been appointed Thomas Tramallier (II)'s guardian, and Carey had come into possession of the relevant papers on William's death. Carey was fined several times for non-appearance in Court; the Court had delayed sittings at his request, and grew noticeably exasperated. Eventually, on the 12 February 1719, Carey produced a set of books and documents before them. Thomas (II) had appointed his son to act for him.  These documents are listed and bound in a ledger entitled Copie de l'Inventaire de partie des Ecrits de la Succession du Sr Thomas Tramalier. 1715. [Note: the surname is written several ways in various documents: Tramallier, Tramailler, Tramaillier, even Tramalier.]

A list of the houses (photographs 1953-1955 from the Guernsey Star) in the cuttings book Guernsey Houses. Please ask a member of staff. 

A rapport from a collection of legal documents with reference to the Hocart family, particularly Samuel Hocart of Les Vardes.