‘WE REMEMBER LOCKDOWN — WITHOUT FOOD’
It is 75 years since the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey were liberated from Nazi rule. Antonia Windsor looks at the parallels — and contrasts — with today
Seventy-five years ago, the population of the Channel Islands came to the end of a five-year lockdown when the Royal Navy arrived on May 9 1945 to free them from the Nazi occupying forces a day after Germany’s World War 2 surrender. A major party had been planned for this year, but it was moved online as the islanders face a lockdown of a different kind.
Nobody saw the occupation coming. In early 1940, these British isles were promoting themselves as a wartime tourism destination, the perfect beach holiday for those having to abandon annual holidays further afield. With golden beaches and pink granite cliffs strewn with wild flowers, the Channel Islands had been a favoured destination for UK holidaymakers in the 1930s.
Islanders thought they might have a bomb or two dropped on them, but in the spring of 1940, nobody dreamt of an invasion. By early June, however, when Germany had crossed the Seine, islanders began to panic. Jersey is just 65km from the port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany, France.
“There was hysteria in the days before the Germans arrived,” says 99-year-old Bob le Sueur, who was 19 at the start of the occupation. “A lot of people were jostling to get on the boats.”
The decision of whether to go or stay was a difficult one and many, including Bob, decided to stay. “It meant five years of being cooped up with no freedom to express yourself,” Bob continues. “You couldn’t trust your closest friend because, if that person was arrested and interrogated, they might give you away. It was a false kind of life that everyone here had to live.”
“Now, 75 years later,” he observes wryly, “we are prisoners again.”
Jersey is currently completely locked down, with no passenger boats in or out and just one daily flight to Southampton. Anyone who does arrive there is subject to 14 days of quarantine. Locals are allowed out for a twohour window each day to shop or exercise.
“The difference is that we have enough food,” says Bob. “During the occupation we were desperately hungry. All the time, we thought of food. Children leaving school were 5cm shorter than normal at the end of the war.”
As in the current lockdown, experiences were different in town and country. “It was hard for townies in flats or houses,” says Bob. “In the country, they had fields for growing vegetables and space for hens. Most town people exercised their imagination, though. I knew one couple who kept rabbits in the kitchen and a goat in the cupboard under the stairs to provide milk.”
Bob would have been heavily involved in the 75th anniversary celebrations, but instead planned to watch the televised version alone. Even in less significant years, the event brings tears to his eyes, he says.
“Liberation Day is hugely important to us,” says bailiff Timothy le Cocq, the civic head of the island. “We were going to make it a big anniversary this year. There are fewer and fewer islanders left who lived through the occupation, and we were going to include as many of them as we could.”
In Guernsey, 83-year-old Myrtle Whitfield was three at the start of the occupation. She remembers the difficult months at the end of the war, after D-Day, when the island’s food supplies from France were cut off. “This current lockdown is tough, but at least we have food,” she says. “On the other hand, during the occupation we could at least socialise and go to church. The Germans took over all the school buildings, so we used to have little schools set up in people’s houses. We were taught by people who weren’t qualified teachers, but we survived.”
And what was life like after “lockdown”? Myrtle remembers going to the shops to be fitted for her first pair of shoes, and Bob recalls a flurry of activity, “people being determined to do their own thing”.
“People were repairing their houses. You couldn’t walk through Saint Helier on a summer evening without hearing hammering and the movement of ladders. Everywhere. It was a frenzy of work combined with reunions … It was a time of frenetic energy — and the important thing was to get on one’s feet again. It was rather splendid.”
Media Group Limited [2020]