Guernsey is fun but have you visited?

Examine the legacy of the islands’ knitting industry. Started in the 1500s, the knitting industry first produced garments for commercial sale incl stockings & undergarment Guernsey frocks. Using a soft worsted wool, they supplied warmth. Their stockings were popular, worn by Queen Elizabeth I & Mary Queen of Scots!

The industry was so large in the 1680s that 6,000 of the 14,000 population were employed as knitters! This resulted in lacking food production workers; rumour had it that men were banned from knitting in daylight hours, to encourage them to work on land & sea. In Sark and perhaps Guernsey too. By mid-1700s the industrial revolution started, and hand-knitted items couldn’t financially compete with factory-made items. Fewer knitters were needed, so focus turned to providing warm garments for sea workers.

 Guernsey's fishermen wearing their jumper

The guernsey jumper was first noted in the 1800s, made with 100% worsted wool, a strong yarn with long fibres, moisture-proof. When knitted at a tight gauge, the fabric became almost windproof, to keep the wearer dry & warm. Note the original diamond shape in underarms for easy movement. The popularity spread, becoming the best garment for coastal workers across Britain. In 1804 the jumper was recommended by Adm Nelson for naval troops saying the jacket was the best and most valuable seaman's clothes ever introduced. As the jumper spread in UK and beyond, it became almost the classic fisherman’s item.

Guernsey, closer to France than to the UK

With modern alternatives available, the hand-made guernsey slowly vanished in early 1900s. Only when war broke out in 1939, was the group Guernsey for Seamen started by local ladies. They knitted guernseys for local Navy sailors; from Dec 1939 to June 1940’s Occupation, 102 guernseys were gratefully accepted at sea. 

After being handmade for years, local companies began commercial production of beloved guernsey in C20th. Incorporating traditional techniques, they brought jumpers to a new audience. Across the islands, the 3 producers of guernsey jumpers: Le Tricoteur, Guernsey Woollens and Channel Jumpers. Le Tricoteur were producing in 1964, after the founder’s product was admired on an American trip. In late 70s, peak production time, c400 hand knitters & 100,000 garments a year! Channel Jumpers opened in 1976, to revive the traditional sweater unproduced since WWI. During royal visits, they gifted guernseys to the Royals!  Join heritage spinners on the Courtyard at the Folk and Costume Museum for a hands on demonstration, to see the island’s great textile heritage.

Join a local guide on a spooktacular evening walking tour. Hear real-life stories of hauntings, the infamous witch trials and Guernsey's most gruesome tales of punishment, torture & horror. Or go on a Seaweed Foraging Tour which teaches seaweed’s uses in farming, cosmetics, cooking & fashions.

Guernsey dairy cows

Trio Bohémo (Jan Vojtek piano, Matouš Pěruška violin and Kristina Vocetková cello) plays at leading international venues and at major festivals eg Prague Spring. See the Trio at St James Concert Hall, playing Smetana, Schoenfield and Dvořák. Symphonic Winds present a programme of things French, also at St James. Guernsey has a historic link to its Normandy neighbours. Or experience French Connection for a month at the Big Eat Food Festival which showcases with special events and festival menus. At The Great Outdoors events & Meet the Locals, discover hidden flavours and wild ingredients with Foraging and Fine Dining.

Built in 1796 to serve as the Lieutenant Governor's residence, this historic Old Government House Hotel has perfect sea views sitting on the hill in central St Peter Port, close to the quay side. Rich friends of ours loved the special food, traditional hospitality and beautifully designed rooms.

    

Old Government House Hotel 

museums and gardens of Castle Cornet

WorldWideWriter

Castle Cornet has 4 historic gardens. Governor's Garden was planted in a formal C18th style, was designed to resemble a tapestry. The plants on display were chosen specifically for their ability to be clipped into a desired shape. Sutler's Garden was planted in 2 parts: a C16th herb and vegetable garden, and adjacent pleasure gardens. Lambert's Garden was named for castle prisoner Gen Sir John Lambert, the garden being where he cultivated medicinal and cooking herbs. The Master Gunner's Garden is displayed in a C19th domestic pattern, used for growing vegetables, fruits & herbs, with a closed area for small livestock

 

The Guernsey Literary Festival, now one of the biggest annual arts events in the Channel Islands, features 50+ events, including a full education and community programme. With the National Year of Reading, the 2026 Festival brings together a varied programme.

Spring comes 4 weeks earlier in Guernsey than the mainland, so beautiful island flora flourish in the La Seigneurie Estate gardens. Woodland walks go past the Monk's Well, duck pond and across the bridge to St Magloire's island placed by military engineer Seigneur. & an Amphitheatre.

Recommended by the Royal Horticultural Society, these gardens provide interest all year. Guernsey's mild climate allows plants that would typically need protection to grow to thrive in the outdoors at Sausmarez Manor. Wandering on the winding paths and jungle-like glades, discover many plants inc Giant Geraniums, Palm trees, Bamboos, Banana trees, Tree Ferns and Camellias. Saumarez Park was once part of the family's private estate, acquired following the death of 4th Lord de Saumarez in 1937. The award-winning Victorian walled garden eventually fell into a ruined state so since 2006, the garden has been tended in a community-based project, preserving the Victorian heritage.

St Peter Port

The Telegraph

Offering views over St Peter Port harbour and across to Herm, Sark, Candie Garden is a late C19th public flower garden with global plants. Home to Britain’s late C18th heated glasshouses, the gardens have a museum, art gallery and cafe. Tour St Peter Port's Seafront Sunday where a busy market fills with local arts and crafts, produce, drinks & food in summer. Stroll the seafront and see a Victor Hugo statue, gifted from the French government with thanks.

Candie Gardens in St Peter Paul

Expedia

Guernsey has a land surface area of 63 km2 and supports c60,000 people. The traditional industries of fishing and agriculture used to contribute much to the island’s economy. Now the importance of agricul-ture is mainly associated with the preservation of the island’s own Guernsey dairy cow. Clearly my Guernsey history focused on knitteds, agriculture and gardens. Thanks to the History of the Guernsey.

                                            

Triangle Shirt Fact­ory NY fire tragedy 1911.

Shirtwaist designs, The Modern Priscilla Needlework Magazine, 1906

5 Minute History

Russians Max Blanck and Isaac Harris immigrated to the U.S in the early 1890s and, like hundreds of thousands of other impoverish­ed Jew­ish im­migrants, they began working in the garment industry in sweat­shops. Har­ris became familiar with popular fashion designs while Blanck became a garment contractor. They made a partner­ship, founding the Triangle Waist Co in 1900. In time, The Triangle Shirt­waist Fact­ory was located in the top 3 floors of the Asch Building in Manhattan. They hired 500 work­ers, mostly female Jewish and Italian immigrants, half of them teens. It was a true sweat­shop; the immigrants worked in a cramped space at lines of sewing machines for 12 hours a day. These young women worked 6-7 days a week for tiny wages and little ventilation. The male owners gave male workers the higher-paid jobs, ass­uming women were less skilled.

In 1909, the USA was advancing towards greater mass production and in­creasingly dangerous working conditions. That year the Uprising of 20,000 Strike was organised mainly by Yiddish-speaking garment workers female due to their horrid conditions, long hours and low wages. Their primary motive was to get attention paid to the mist­r­eat­­ment of imm­igrant work­ers. While there were short term agreements to meet their dem­ands, the strike ultimately failed. How­ever it DID succeed some­what in exposing poor working conditions. Progressives and unionists cal­l­ed for different reforms, but Tammany Hall opposed them; the polit­ical machine stalled any legislation that might have benefitted the workers.

Fire danger in factories was common, but corruption in both the industry and city government generally ensured that few useful precautions were taken. The Triangle factory was burned in 1907 and in 1910, the owners appar­ently torching their own work­places before business hours in order to collect on the large fire-insurance policies they purchased, a not unknown practice in the early C20th. While this did not cause the 1911 fire, it contr­ibuted to the tragedy, as Blanck & Harris refused to install sprinkler systems.

Women workers pre-fire

Barbara's Bookstore

 

In 1911 Triangle Shirt­waist Fact­ory had 4 elevators accessing the fact­ory floors, but only one was fully operational and the workers had to go along a narrow corridor to reach it. There were two stairways down to the street, but they were locked from the outside to prevent the workers steal­ing.

The fire escape was so narrow, it would have taken hours for all the workers to use it, even if it had not burned down.

In Mar 1911, there were 600 workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist Fact­ory when a fire began in a material bin. The manager tried using the fire hose to extin­guish it, but the hose was rotted and its valve rust­ed shut. The fire spread and panic ensued. The young workers tried to exit the building by the elevator but it only held 12 people and the operator could only make four trips before it stopped in flames. Young women bec­ame trapped by bulky equipment as flames enveloped the 8th, 9th and 10th floors of the Asch Building. As people struggled to escape, sev­eral fell into the flames, their bodies piling by blocked exits. In a desper­ate at­tempt to escape, the girls still waiting for the elev­ator plunged down the shaft to their deaths. The girls who fled via the stairwells found the locked door at the bottom of the stairs, and were burned alive.

Fire­fighters arrived & saw their lad­ders reached only 7 floors high but the fire was on the 8th floor. So the girls who did not make it to the stairwells or elevator were trapped by the fire inside the fact­ory; they began jumping from the wind­ows to es­cape and died on the conc­rete below. Within 20 mins they found 49 workers burned to death, 36 died in the elevator shaft, 58 died from jumping from the 8th floor and 3 more died in hospital. 146 people were killed altogether.

The International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union had fought for better working con­dit­ions for all sweatshop workers. The union didn’t gain real attention until after the Triangle Waist Co owners were indicted for first degree manslaughter, but were found to be not guilty by the grand jury. To settle lawsuits against them, the owners DID pay $75 in compen­sat­ion to each victim’s family, a frac­t­ion of the $400 per death that they were paid by their insurer.

Nonetheless the tragedy led to the growth of a series of laws and regu­l­ations that better protected workers’ safety. The fire unified organised labour and reforming polit­icians like N.Y Gov. Alfred Smith and Sen Ro­b­­ert Wagner, a le­g­isl­ator in Pres Franklin D Roosevelt’s (1933–45) New Deal agenda. And the Factory Investig­ating Comm­ission in N.Y was set up af­t­er the fire. The workers union set up a march on 5th Ave NY to prot­est the conditions that had led to the fire, attended by 80,000 people.

The huge death toll for which they were responsible DID finally compel the city to enact reform. The Fire Prevention Law passed, and N.Y Democrats took up the workers’ cause; both were crucial in lim­iting similar disasters in the future.

Desperate women threw themselves down from the 8th storey to death

New York Herald

March 1911

Conclusion 

In this era, progressive movements sought to red­uce the impacts of the deplorable working conditions brought by industr­ial­­is­ation and inequality between rich and poor. The 1911 day became the deadliest indust­rial disas­ter in Manhattan history, when 123 women and 23 men died. Workers, union leaders, progressive reformers and political lead­ers all begged for higher environmental standards fitting for US. The Triangle Factory fire DID help create laws for a better workplace to keep employ­ees safer, but at an unthinkable cost for the immigrant families.

Capt Scott & his Antarctic team

20th explorers on their way to Antarctica, incl­uding Ernest Shackle­ton, often vis­it­ed NZ. They used local ports and quar­antine islands, and grate­ful­ly accepted other offers of assistance. They also took on New Zeal­ander crew with them, to take part in the Antarctic trips.

 Capt Robert Falcon Scott 

1905, Wiki

Capt Robert Falcon Scott (1868–1912) was born in Devon to a sea far­ing family. He joined his first ship when he was 13, then becom­ing an off­ic­er in the Royal Navy. Later he became one of the first Brit­ish explorers to extensive­ly explore Antarctica in the ear­ly 1900s.

Scott’s plan was to explore the part of Antarctica around the Ross Sea, originally discovered back in 1841 by Sir James Clark Ross. Scott led 2 expeditions to the Antarctic. His first expedition on the Discovery took place between 1901–04, partially Govern­ment funded. Discovery was specially built for the voyage, as a re­search ship to go through icy seas.

Clarence Hare, 1902

ABC News

New Zealander Clarence Hare (1880-1967) began his career as a clerk in N.Z and Fiji. While working in a Lyttelton grocery in Nov 1901 he met the Discovery's stores off­ic­er as they were preparing for their initial voyage south. The exp­edition's steward had been dis­missed at Lyttel­ton and 20-year-old Hare was taken on as the replacement steward. He was the youngest crew member on board.

As steward, Hare was in day-to-day contact with Capt Scott and the other officers on board. He carefully kept a diary which has been widely quoted in accounts of the expedition and biog­raphies of Sc­ott. Hare's name is still recalled in most accounts of the exped­it­ion, for the observations he wrote about and for his mir­ac­ulous story of life and death.

Note this was the first time Antarctic land had been expl­ored extensively, zoologically and geologically. Dr Edward Wilson, for ex­ample, was a keen zoologist on both of Scott's exp­ed­it­ions. Hare's grand-daughter Vir­g­inia Basset agreed. She said grandpa’s personal diary reveal­ed the lengths the crew went to for research, which claimed multiple lives onboard. They went out and collected penguins, seals, shells, whatever samples they could find to take back to England for scien­t­ific experiments. And they had to take part in collecting big ice blocks for the water supply.

Oates. Bowers, Scott, Wilson, and Evans at the South Pole.

UNSW

In March 1902, they wanted to leave directions to the expedition's winter quarters for the relief ship Morning. But after painfully slow progress, Hare's party led by 2nd Lieut Michael Barne was sent back to the ship with most of the men from the other party. During their return jour­ney they struck a blizzard a few kms from the ship. They tried to camp but soon decided to continued on foot. c10 minut­es later Hare was reported missing. Most of the party eventual­ly made it back to the Discovery, or were subsequently discovered by search parties. But Hare and George Vince, who had fal­len into the sea from a cliff edge, were given up as lost. 48 hours later Hare reappeared back at the ship unharmed! Vince's body was never found.

In 1910, Scott sailed on another scientific voyage in the whaler Terra Nova. With Royal Navy Officer E Evans (1876–1912) 2nd in charge, Scott determined to be the 1st explorer to reach the South Pole, but he faced stiff completion from Norwegian Roald Amundsen. Scott achieved his dream and reached the South Pole in Jan 1912, then he discovered that Amundsen had got there first. The 800-mile journey back to their base camp was hideous, and all 5 of Scott’s party died from cold and hunger. A search party was sent out from McMurdo Sound in late 1912 and found the bodies. 

In Feb 1913, the world woke to the headline “Death of Captain Scott. Lost with four comrades. The Pole reached”. The keenly anticipated, privately funded scientific venture off the map had turned to tragedy. When news of the tragedy reached Britain, a huge mem­orial ser­vice with King George V was held in St Paul's Cathedral.

Where was the detailed diary in which he documented the 2 years he spent with the navy crew, scientists and civil­ians in the Antarctic? Hare had donated his diary to the Alexander Turnbull Lib­rary in Wel­l­ington in the 1960s, avail­able for reading only on spec­ial request. And see the whistle he kept blowing while lost in a blizzard for 46 hours.

The diary from Scott's Antarctic voyage was published in 2022. 

and edited by Maureen Lee

In 1961-2 the N.Z Geological Survey Antarctic Expedit­ion named an Antar­ctic peak at the end of a ridge on the Leigh Hunt Glacier after Hare. This was approved by the N.Z Geog­r­aphic Board in 1962. Clarence Hare retired to fruit farm on the Sunshine Coast, dying in 1967. But now the diary has been published for the first time as A Young Man's Antarctic Discovery, Maureen Lee ed., 55 years after his death!! 

Capt Scott's memorial statue, Christchurch

erected 1916

Was Scott of the Antarctic sabotaged by his angry deputy, Officer E Evans? No the final cause of death in each man's case was hypothermia, but dying was a long, slow process with a number of factors: Insufficient food, frost bite and failed protection. Nonetheless read UNSW Newsroom for a conspiracy theory that I had not heard of before.

Chaim Soutine, great artist but disturbed?

Portrait of a Young Woman, 1915

Wiki

Pastry Cook of Cagnes, 1922 

The Guardian

Grotesque self portrait, c1923

Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris.

Thanks to George Prochnik for this review. From 1913, to get from Smilovichi, a shtetl in Belarus, to Paris. 20 year old artist Chaim Soutine (1893-1943) made many visits to the Louvre to study the canvas. In the mid-1920s he decided to translate it into his own idiom: a huge impasto, churning with deep, febrile colours. Where Rembrandt’s hanging carcass was mottled with pale tones once the blood has drained away, Soutine’s reds appear to be fermenting. It’s not a picture of mortality! Interpreters of Rembrandt’s ox often place it in a memento mori, but Soutine’s picture convulses with what is happening right now.

Soutine insisted that he could only depict a subject if he had it in front of him, and various accounts of how he managed this with a huge quarter-side of beef came down to us. In her passionate biography, Celeste Marcus shares the most lurid. After hauling the carcass from the slaughterhouse to his studio in darkness, Soutine set to work painting it, but after a few days it began to go green and give off a terrible stench. He returned to the abattoir to get a bucket of blood so that he could keep the colours vibrant. But the blood dripped through the floorboards into the apartment below. The street was aghast. The official sanitation squad paid him a visit to shut down the project, but Soutine’s assistant prevailed on them to let him finish the work, whereupon they relented and showed him how to inject the meat with ammonia to preserve it. Soutine was also busy painting dead ducks, turkeys and chickens! The smaller bodies still stank making him a troublesome neighbour, but Soutine’s devotion to his work kept complaints to a minimum. 

Much death went into making Soutine’s art. Yet it is Marcus’ argument that everything Soutine does on the canvas should be understood as part of the artist’s pursuit of life. His canvases bear witness to his epic struggle for self-mastery, discipline and skill to communicate satisfactorily the energy of life itself. Plus many of his landscapes appear deliquescent, while the figures and faces of his human subjects are contortions. He shows us scenes in which our perspectives on life and painting have become unstuck, inverting his subject matter inside out. 

In an important 1963 essay on Soutine, critic David Sylvester noted the painter’s debt to Cézanne. Sylvester describes how Soutine’s endeavour recalls Cézanne’s determination to take hold of volume in its full tactile reality and beat it, as it were, into the picture-plane. Both artists aspired to re-create – which meant capturing the swing between broad, organic continuity and individual ephemerality. 

Marcus recognises the pitfalls of writing a biography about an artist who made so few personal statements, and for an understanding of whose formative experiences we are forced to rely on sketchy anecdotes supplied by those who knew the painter – or had heard the stories first-hand. She makes good use of this material, however, especially in her account of how Soutine left behind his constricted youth in an orthodox eastern European Jewish village for bohemian Paris. Here he lived a destitute, industrious, essentially monastic life for many years, despite soon earning the esteem of his peers in Montparnasse, among them Modigliani. 

Then c1922 collector Albert Barnes encountered Soutine’s work, seized on the artist as a star-in-waiting and bought 50+ paintings in one go, liberating Soutine from the struggle for survival, until the rise of Fascism stripped his life of all security once more. Soutine spent his last years moving from flat to flat, trying to keep out of sight. He relentlessly worked, but his health deteriorated. Medical care for the stomach problems that probably began with youthful malnutrition became more challenging under the new political realities, leaving him more vulnerable until, in 1943, he died of a perforated ulcer.

Marcus fills out this chronicle with mini-biographies of some of Soutine’s intimates, including Gerda Michaelis, the German-Jewish refugee who in 1937 became Soutine’s partner and one serious love affair. Conceptually however the author honours the position articulated by Hilton Kramer, that the painter had no biography outside his art; one might even say that his art was a substitute for a biography. She scoffs at those who insist he left no traces: he is there, right before our eyes. The man was his art, and his paintings bellow from the walls on which they hang. This is a legitimate position to take, but it is somewhat surprising to confront the confidence with which Marcus pronounces on what this bellowing is communicating.

Plucked Goose c1933,

Artists Rights Society, New York

 Carcass of Beef, 1924

The New Yorker

Marcus wants to rescue Soutine from critics who ascribe his work's emotional content  to traumatic Jewish experience. To consider this view of his art, she takes a formalist approach making Soutine’s evolution an almost exclusively interior, technical development. Marcus has enlightening things to say about the increasing strength of Soutine’s style, some informed by her own paintings. Yet it’s unclear what is gained by trying to draw so strict a line between the historical & personal. World horrors can penetrate even the most focused creative consciousness. Nor did Soutine try to keep his head down as evidence for Hitler’s designs on Europe were mounting.

The firewall Marcus puts up between Soutine’s subjection to history and his creative genius leads her to minimise the ways in which his first 20 years might have shaped his sensibility. There are conflicting ideas about how miserable Soutine was in the shtetl. He seems to have found the country beautiful and the markets lively, but he suffered poverty & physical abuse. Some versions of his story indicate that he was beaten by his brothers, perhaps for making art, and received at least one significant beating from others for painting an old man in the community, although accounts differ about whether a violation of Jewish law was the issue. Once he left the Pale of Settlement there is no outward indication that Soutine ever looked back. But the experience ?continued to gnaw at him.

Given the bias against visual culture within Orthodox Judaism, it is perfectly plausible to view his art as a reaction against it.  Many of his paintings do seem to demand that we look when others turn away – and to stare hard.  Soutine said When I painted the beef carcass it was still this cry that I wanted to liberate. I have still not succeeded. Francis Bacon, who acknowledged the fertile shock produced by his encounter with Soutine’s work, and whose homage to Rembrandt’s ox seems more indebted to Soutine than to the Old Master, made the screaming mouth a leitmotif, even in the absence of a visual cue.

John Ashbery found Soutine’s MOMA show in 1950 a heady revelation that increased his sense of possibility as a writer: the fact that the sky could come crashing joyously into the grass, that trees could dance upside down and houses roll over like cats … I began pushing my own poems around. It’s a topsy-turvy scene but there is danger pulsing beneath that fallen sky. Writer Maurice Sachs, who met Soutine some times in the early 1930s, said he painted in a state of lyrical panic. He slashed his canvases and destroyed them when he felt they'd failed. Surely he was addressing a dilemma with historical and political dimensions; what Freud described as the perpetual agon between humanity’s life and death drives. Freud saw the future of civilisation as dependent on the life urge prevailing, but already by 1930 the prospects of that outcome were dwindling. Chaim Soutine died in 1943.

Good looking and young, even towards the end of his life

wiki

I Helen know that there was never a formal diagnosis from a psychiatrist to suggest the Expressionist painter Soutine was psychotic, even though his turbulent life and distorted paintings strongly suggested his mental state wasn't normal. If anything Soutine was a painter of his own obsessions, probably due to family rejection, exile, extreme poverty, physical illness and Nazi terror. I am on Hilton Kramer's side: Soutine's life was a harrowing tale of impossible aspirations,  unappeasable emotions and impossible appetites, not handled except perhaps through Expressionism.

Read Chaim Soutine: Genius, Obsession, and a Dramatic Life in Art By Celeste Marcus