Letters & Diaries

Extracts from old letters

22nd May 2019
The Bell Savage Inn, from the British Museum
Affecting 18th and early 19th century letters, from the Carey family, transcribed from a notebook of Edith Carey, Guernsey miscellanea. The image is of the famous Bell Savage Inn, on Ludgate Hill, London, where Catherine Baldock nee Carey reluctantly stayed in 1790 (see letter below), and is from the British Museum, Museum number 1880.1113.3266. 

Lost things: La Brasserie. The Balsam of Peru, 1734

22nd July 2016
From Harvard University Library.
Pierre Carey sends a specimen of an unusual tree from Guernsey to Sir Hans Sloane in London, in the hope of advancing medicine. His house, La Brasserie, or the Brewhouse (Carey was head of a very successful enterprise) was finally demolished in 1968. During Carey's lifetime La Brasserie had been home to the most spledid gardens in Guernsey.

Etienne Gibert to Nicolas Rabey, 1800

28th January 2016
Etienne Gibert from Finucane Market Place 1809
By George Rabey, in The Guernsey Free Churchman, Vol. VI (3) March, p. 27. 'A good 126 years ago now ...' The detail is of Etienne Gibert (1736-1817) amongst the crowd in Matthias Finucane's Market-Place, Guernsey, 1809. He is here aged about 73. For a somewhat less quirky portrait of him see Nicolas De Garis, conscientious objector; there is a third portrait of him, exhibiting considerably more dignitas, in the Library collection.

To Madame Andros from Peter de Jerzey, 1662

19th October 2015
A letter transcribed in Andros correspondence, a 19th-century notebook which belonged to Charles Andros. To Madame Andros, en la Court de sa Majesté de la Grand Bretaigne. Peter de Jersey was the minister of the Town Church from 1659 through the Restoration until the turmoil of 1662, when he was replaced by Huguenot refugee Pierre Jannon. Mme Andros was the wife of the prominent royalist Amias Andros. She was Elizabeth Stone; her brother Sir Robert Stone was cupbearer to the Queen of Bohemia and captain of a cavalry troop in Holland. In the early years of the war she left the island for St Malo, but on the way was captured by the parliamentary forces and returned to her enemies in Guernsey. In 1645 she managed to escape from the beseiged Castle Cornet to Jersey, leaving her husband behind; they did not see each other again for nine years.

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