Welcome to another episode of the History Islands. Let me introduce you to Lucy and Elinor. They are two sisters growing up in St Helier, at the height of the Victorian age, in an unhappy house that reeked with the stench of gin.
The odds were stacked against them as they began their journeys, but through fierce determination, both girls would leave their mark on the twentieth century. Their paths would eventually take them from that dreary house on Colomberie to the glittering catwalks of New York and the sun-drenched boulevards of Hollywood respectively. But all that would be in the century yet to come.
Wind the clock back, long before the cascade of fame and wealth, and you will just find two frightened little girls, on a black steamship, heading home in the night. Winter has fallen hard, and a shroud of fog cloaks the Channel as the overnight ferry trundles down from Southampton to St Helier. The hours of the night have dragged on, and landfall cannot be long. It has been an uneventful voyage so far, but history has other plans.
Elinor Sutherland
SS Havre, en route to the Channel Islands
Platte Boue Rocks
16 February 1875
Like many a marriage, the ship broke without warning. It was a violent, rapid sundering, a splitting of shinbone and calf bone as the old vessel skewered itself fatally onto the rock. We were all jolted awake by the impact, as if the sea and earth had fallen in beneath us. The loud reverberations juddered and screeched through our cabin, like the bellow of a harpooned whale.
I was a wilful, wayward girl of ten on the day we collided with the rocks. We were on our way back home to Jersey, back to my island prison. My desperate mother had taken me with my elder sister Lucy for a week’s parole in London. The trip was a disappointment. As a child, I had dreamed of a fairy-tale city of hale and hearty burghers, of noble streets paved with gold. The vicious squalor of London told a different story. Everything there was choked in black; soot-flakes swirled around us as we left in the black winter fog.
Our carriage rattled back down to Waterloo, whisking us past the fetid rookeries of Seven Dials. Desperation lurked here, in the broken palms of the street beggars, in the sad eyes of the flower-girls plying their trade on every corner. Nothing good could remain here unsullied. Nothing beautiful would endure. Still, for a precious few days we were at least free from the tyranny of our step-father. The days fled. Then from Southampton Docks, we slipped back onto the dismal packet steamer that would ferry us safely back home.
Many a slip betwixt cup and lip. Eventually the ship’s lacerating death-rattle subsided, replaced by a low, resigned growl. The hull had breached. Within seconds, a violent surge of black water spilled right through the cabins, breaking into our quarters like a thief. Sheer instinct took over. My mother roughly pushed us up the gangway ladder, half-dressed, out of the suffocating womb of the boat onto the icy deck. I wheezed and rasped my cries, my breath raw. The winter spell had broken.
Women shrieked in their nightclothes in the freezing February morning, some nursing whimpering babies to their breasts. I heard one of the crew agitatedly shout that the engine room had already flooded. The ship was lost. Then panic broke out. In the half-darkness, I saw a couple of ferret-like men, rifling through other passengers’ abandoned bags, brazenly seizing the opportunity to steal and pilfer. In the chaos, a rich man’s purse spilled open, and a shimmer of half-sovereigns and silver sixpences cascaded across the deck. Slowly, as if in a dream, I watched his coins slip away into the oblivion of the black and angry sea. It scarcely mattered in our strange new world, for everything had changed.
Scuffles were now breaking out on deck. Some young militia boys, whose discipline had fled at the first glimpse of terror, had barged their way onto one of the lifeboats. A whiskered old colonel, his neck-veins bulging with fury, was doing his level best to stop them. “Women and children first”, he yelled, “or you will face the consequences!”. Even in the midst of this chaos, people stared, and despite the darkness, their glances could fell trees. Chastened and publicly humiliated, the soldier-boys sullenly backed down and let us through. The ship’s officers, burly men in stovepipe hats and greatcoats, ushered us down into the wooden lifeboat. The deck had become a rising alp, with the jagged angle of a broken bone. We struggled to steady ourselves on the slanting timbers, but Mother did not let go, and our lifeboat was winched down into the sea.
We slipped away from the catastrophe, bearing across half a mile of seething, turbulent water as the lights of the sinking ship faded away behind us. As we breached the central channel of the Russel, thin curtains of saltwater broke over us. A baby wailed at the shock.
I was physically numb. The cocoon of my life had burst open. My empty life in Jersey; my bullying stepfather, the suffocating provincial routines of the governesses and formal dinners, had just been blown apart with the force of a hurricane. A secret part of me exulted in the ravenous eye of the storm, at the rage of Fate and Fury, and the breath-taking truth that the dice had rolled, and I could not control where they would land.
My fellow passengers were silent and dressed in black, like wax effigies being hauled back to the museum of history. I fancied romantically that the gods of the red granite, the drowned kingdoms of the Channel, had come to claim us for their own, and throw dice for our souls. I felt somehow through the turbulent, lashing waves, a strange sense that all that had happened and could ever happen was flying away from me, lost in the scudding seas, a forgotten illusion.
I resolved to show no emotion. My grandmother, long ago back in icy Canada, had told me to me brave, just as our ancestors had faced the guillotine with equanimity in the Place de la Révolution. To be poised and dignified on the inevitable steps to the scaffold; that was all. The rest was in the hands of history.
Behind us, a brilliant distress flare shot up from the wreck, dancing like an angel in the night before falling to earth. It was a sublime sight, as beautiful as the fireworks display over Elizabeth Castle. A moment’s false sunshine briefly enveloped our little lifeboat; revealing the snivelling children, the huddled passengers, our pilot lighting a defiant cheroot in the face of imminent death. Then the last of the bright colour drained from the skies, and the shroud of grey mist descended again.
We plunged away through the cauldron of the channel, a witch’s sea-fog swirling around us and masking everything from our sight. Eventually the shipmaster moored us with great difficulty on a vicious, exposed shelf of rock and we hauled ourselves out. Drenched and shivering, we huddled like puffins on the brine-soaked ledge. The ‘Grand Amfroque’ the sailors called it, but it seemed doomed ground; without a blade of grass. We were outcasts, perched on a crossroads between this world and the next, waiting to find out which way we would go. The relentless incoming tide would soon answer that question.
As the tides rose, the ship slowly drowned, like an exhausted fly struggling in vain against the side of a bell jar. Baggage began to float away from it, parcels and worldly goods floating on the amber tide. A smattering of letters drifted past, Penny Reds in the sea, lost messages, their fastidious copperplate ink smeared away by the salt tide, declarations of love or income tax demands that would never reach their final destinations.
Perhaps this little girl of blazing red hair, of green gemstone eyes, would also be lost forever, my words swirling beneath the waves. The waters would close, as if I had never been. The caged songbird would drown. I could hear the vicar’s solemn epitaph now. He had once thrown me a withering, sorry glance, and muttered disapprovingly to my mother that “‘twas such a pity she did not have Lucy’s hair”. In his eyes, my unruly flame-red tresses were the mark of Cain. Mother often threatened to use a leaden comb to make my curly locks darker, though knowing my temper she never dared.
Perched here in the numbing cold, my thoughts wandered back to home. My prison was a rented house called Richelieu; in the old French, they say this means a home of a wealthy person. My stepfather would rage for hours, the curses of an embittered old man. My young, devoted mother had remarried for duty and was soon cursed with the yoke of this petty despot. He was a rich miser, whom my mother had to beg for five pounds a year to feed his children and fund a home. He whiled away his days playing backgammon while a series of iron governesses tried and failed to tame us.
Only in my imagination would I soar, feasting on a chained library of gods and heroes, princes and thieves. There was no book step in the library, but I would grab whatever novels or poetry lay within my arm’s reach, from Don Quixote to the diaries of Pepys. I drifted off during the tedious brimstone sermons at St Mark’s Church. Secretly at night, I prayed to Zeus and Athena, to the pantheon of joyful and playful gods and goddesses. They promised sweet escape from this sour and petty Island, imprisoned in its iron corset of formality. I would often pity those tethered Jersey cows, beautiful creatures bound by rope, forbidden to stray, forced to feed again and again on one tiny patch of barren grass. Their ribcages poked out from their lean carcasses. I looked deeply into their sad doe-eyes and saw myself.
Above all, I dreaded the violence of the waters that swirled around my island prison. Every night I dreamed of ten-foot waves, of rising seas, of crawling to escape the incoming flood. I dreaded the secret caves at Plémont, where the capricious turn of the tide could seal you in and drag you under. Now the winter waves were surging in over the rock ledge, and my worst fears had become flesh.
Hanging here on the frozen rock, the borders of the past and future had merged, as surely as the heavy fog that blurred the boundaries of land and sea. The sullen, brutal gods were angry, and had passed final judgment. I felt no urge to escape, but simply a strange and passive acceptance of Fate. The pitiless seagulls circled high above us, but their unearthly and meaningless cries were strangely comforting. We could scramble no higher now, and the waves were already lapping at our feet. Soon the tides would claim us, and we would surely and inevitably drown.
All the frivolous Greek gods of my library at Richelieu had fled. I turned in the last back to the words my grandmother had taught me. I murmured beneath my breath a final prayer, over and over, “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, look upon a little child”. I shivered and closed my eyes.
A foghorn broke into my head. It seems that some quarrymen had noticed the flare, from the north coast of Guernsey, where they were mining rich seams of blue granite to build the new monuments of London. A ramshackle armada of schooners and fishing dinghies had been despatched from St Peter Port. I watched as if through a wall of glass as the burly sailors drew close. In the end, all hands were saved.
I often remember the rescue ship, churning through the sea-fog, a real peasouper, as stale and dank as the London smog we had left behind. We pitched and bucked on the treacherous seas, but we had felt the fury of the ocean, and lived. Far beyond and unseen, the salvage crew departed, and the packet steamer fell at last down to the Channel seabed, nestling in the drowned hunting grounds of our ancestors.
The Jersey newspapers dutifully screamed the story of the heroic SS Havre rescue, and quickly forgot. We could not, for we were utterly changed. Life had been revealed to us as a brief and precious adventure, to be seized and devoured. We petulant children were no longer content to be passive prisoners of Fate and social convention. We grew into forceful and ambitious young women, determined to make the future yield to our will. The world turned and our step-father died. Set free from their prison, these caged birds flew.
Since that day, I have always feared and avoided the sea. I still dream every night of the vicious spring tide at La Collette, that Jersey headland where the rocks splinter and tumble down like glass into the churning bay. I am always scrambling up, outrunning my fate, heading for higher ground.
They say history repeats itself, and often has a sting in the tail. A day was coming soon when my beautiful, brave sister Lucy, at the height of her fame and wealth in 1912, would board another doomed ship, this one bound for New York. It was a mammoth and splendid vessel, the very pride of the White Star Line. But I imagine you already know the name.
This story is taken from Jersey: Secrets of the Sea, which is available on Amazon and in WH Smith, Waterstones and the Harbour Gallery in Jersey.
© Paul Darroch 2024. The History Islands newsletter and website are produced by Open Page Learning Ltd which is registered with the Jersey Office of the Information Commissioner (JOIC) registration number 70929.
Music credits - Chariots by Gavin Luke. Courtesy of Epidemic Sound.