9th July 2015
The contents of the Library's Brock family file: includes cuttings, articles, MSS and original documents. There is also a separate collection dedicated to documents concerning Sir Isaac Brock. Please contact the Library for further information.
1st June 2015
'Turner may have been a showman, a lover of publicity and maybe an eccentric in some respects. At the same time he had courage, generosity, a sense of kindness and a remorseless hatred for what he considered to be injustice. He was comparatively wealthy, and much of his riches was spent on the less fortunate. We could do with such a man in Guernsey today.' [Guernsey Evening Press, March 9, 1957.] [By Dinah Bott]
23rd March 2015
The history of the Library's collection of Livres de Perchage, which we hold in hard copy and digital form, by Sue Laker, our Deputy Chief Librarian. 'A book of Perchage is drawn out by the sworn Douzaine of each fee, when called upon by the King's Receiver or Lord of the Manor, for the purpose of ascertaining correctly the admeasurement of the property in the possession of the tenants upon that fee, and is decisive as to the admeasurement and the name of the then possessor—nothing more.' Peter Jeremie, 1824.
23rd March 2015
From Chefs Plaids, Jugements, Ordonnances &c, Staff, in the Library. 'People who can't control themselves may find they are forced to behave.'
12th March 2015
In 1931 Spencer Carey Curtis, acting on a tip-off from a Jersey antiquarian, Major N V L Rybot, visited the British Museum to hunt out one of Joseph Mallord William Turner's sketchbooks, labelled 'Guernsey:'
Laurence Poussin, troublesome priest. From History of the Guernsey Churches, Staff. 'Lord de Saumarez' MSS.'
From the Library's militia collection. A transcript by Edith Carey of a letter in French from a worried Lieutenant-Bailiff, Eléazar Le Marchant, to the absent Lieut.-Governor, Sir Edmund Andros, (here translated), and a contemporary copy of a petition concerning the same mutiny from William De Lisle in the St Peter's militia, to the Privy Council. Complicated family ties and nepotism, and a reflection of the bitter factional resentment felt towards Edmund Andros.
Guille manuscript No. 465, transcribed in Handbook of Guernsey Churches (MSS in the Library.) The petition of the parishioners of the Castel to have Mr Nicolas Nicols as resident Minister, 1654. This demonstrates the continuance of the Colloque as Church leadership, although the minutes for that period no longer exist.
Guernsey did not celebrate November 5th until the 19th century, when the 'Guy Fawkes' Night' festival was introduced, probably by British immigrants, and began to replace the traditional burning or burial of the 'budloe' log on New Year's Eve. Late in the century the celebrations were 'officialised'. The photographs are of the procession of 1900; the one above shows the collectors wearing their placards, and the other the budloe paraded on a stretcher.
An Island Meeting to discuss an application to found a Jesuit seminary in Guernsey. Admiral Sir James Saumarez was in the chair. He was to forward the petition against the school and the meeting's resolutions to Robert Peel, for Peel in turn to present to the King. The complete text, printed as a pamphlet by Nicolas Mauger, can be found in the Library's Petitions and Trials scrapbook, Vol. I.
