News from the Library

Sale of Saumarez Estates, 1930 and 1937. Please contact the Library for further information.

'A visit to the Tennysons in 1839,' Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, (CLV) May 1894, with many Guernsey connections (Lane, Hoskins, MacCulloch, Maingay, Luce &c.); Pickford, Nigel, Lost Treasure Ships of the Northern Seas; J C Melvill, Miscellanea Botanica 1875-1910. 

The Library's archive of photographs from the German Occupation of the Guernsey 1940-45 is now available online.

The Priaulx Library's St Aubyn room, where we keep our art, social and ancient history and Guernsey French collections, has always been a sunny and peaceful place to settle down to reading or research. It is even more lovely now, however, as it is flooded with colour from a beautiful stained glass window that has been transferred here from its original home at Kinloss Barracks in Scotland. The window was commissioned in 1984 to commemorate the founding of 'Guernsey's Own' 201 Squadron RAF in 1914.

The Library recently received a superb donation of family and business papers, photographs and newspapers from the Lovell family of Guernsey, a fine addition to our steadily accumulating collection of old Guernsey family business documentation. This extremely varied material, featuring early and occupation newspapers, commemorative programmes, magazines and ephemera as well as some fascinating…

These letters form the basis of two very interesting articles by André Métayer of the Société Philatélique de Rennes. Charles (1786-1844), Captain in the 20th Regiment of Foot, was captured by the French at Capri in late 1808, and was unfortunate not to be ransomed or swapped. He remained in that miserable limbo, 'the Siberia of France,' as he called it, that was the lot of an officer POW;…

The island was honoured in November 2009 by being the site of the first anniversary lecture under the Society's auspices.The lecturewas One shilling weekly: 350 years of the Royal Society, and was given by Keith Moore, Chief Librarian and Archivist, Royal Society, at the Frossard Centre in Candie Gardens, who informed the slightly bemused local audience that a former Guernsey Fellow had submitted a recipe for cooking cormorant to the Society. They were relieved to discover that this was not a recent event.

The church registers of Sark are notoriously chaotic and can be hard work for researchers, so we were delighted and very grateful to receive an index to them, long lacking, compiled by Alfred Ewen and A. R. de Carteret, and donated by the Société Sercquaise. The Index was originally presented to the Société Sercquaise by Mrs Allan R. de Carteret in memory of her husband. The index is bound…

The Imperial War Museum have some interesting watercolours and photographs available online . These complement the Priaulx Library's own extensive collection of photographs and ephemera from the period of the Occupation and Liberation of Guernsey 1940-1945.

The Library is sometimes called on to help out with popular television programmes with a Guernsey connection.