“Sarnia Cherie” – Guernsey’s Unofficial Anthem
The song “Sarnia Cherie” is arguably Guernsey’s most well known “Unofficial Anthem”. It gets sung on numerous ‘patriotic’ and sporting events from Liberation day on 9th May each year to the Island Games medal ceremonies. But if you look at the lyrics it isn’t extolling any particular patriotic fervour of people on the island but rather a melancholic longing of someone who is far from Guernsey shores. In this article we look at its origins and place in Guernsey social history.
Guernsey Celts & Guernsey Romans – A Timeline
Since the 1980s there has been a veritable explosion of Archaeological evidence to suggest that Guernsey was very much a part of the Roman World. In this article we look at the interface between the Celtic Worlds and the Roman World in Guernsey and the channel Islands.
The Black Death in the Channel Islands
Not the most pleasant of subjects but when the ‘great mortality’ as it was called struck the Channel Islands it left in its’ wake a scarred population, decimated in numbers and traumatised in the minds and bodies of all islanders.
Medieval Democracy – 8 things you (probably) didn’t know about medieval elections
Democracy isn’t a word that you would ordinarily associate with the Middle Ages. The most common perception of this time is of Kings, Bishops, Feudal over lords and right at the bottom of the ‘social heap’, the peasant all of them with no say in government. In fact it turns out this is not overall an entirely true picture and that elections were a reasonably common occurrence
The Communism Experiment – What if Lenin hadn’t died ?
The great communist experiment that started in 1917 after the Bolshevist revolution in Russia ultimately failed with the faill of the Soviet Union. In this article we look at the events that surrounded his death in 1924.
The Knitting Industry in Guernsey
The knitting industry in Guernsey today is all but extinct. However there was a time when it used to be quite a sizable proportion of her GDP with the majority of her population involved in it in some way or another, both women and men.