This week’s anniversaries move from the mainland press catching up with life under occupation to an underground news sheet, and the first arrests at Guernsey Airport. Together they show how the island’s wartime experience and its peacetime institutions were both shaped by ordinary people doing extraordinary things.
On 2 June 1936, St John Ambulance carried out its first call-out in Guernsey, marking the beginning of the island’s volunteer ambulance service. The team was entirely made up of volunteers, yet it quickly proved itself, earning a grant from the States within three years. Today the service is funded through subscriptions, insurance, user charges and donations, and is based at Rohais, the same site as the original shed that housed its second-hand ambulance.
The service operated throughout the occupation, even pulling its ambulance with a horse when fuel became scarce. After liberation it modernised rapidly, becoming the first in the British Isles to issue radios to ambulances and acquiring its first marine craft. In 2012, St John Guernsey became self-governing, so that all its services and assets are now controlled locally rather than through a central framework, ensuring that Guernsey’s emergency response remains in local hands.
When Guernsey farmer Hilary Rougier died in 1926, a doctor initially attributed his death to a cerebral haemorrhage, and no one asked further questions. It was only when his estate was being wound up that his executors discovered his considerable fortune had vanished, which prompted the authorities to order an exhumation almost two years later. A post-mortem revealed large amounts of morphine in his organs, leading an inquest jury on 31 May 1928 to conclude that the poison had not been self-administered.
Newspapers hinted that Rougier’s lodger may have been responsible, but no charges were ever brought, and the lodger successfully sued for defamation. He later moved to Canada, returned broke, and died in suspicious circumstances after drinking prussic acid.
Although the inquest ruled that the morphine was not self-administered, it could not determine whether Rougier had wanted to die, leaving the case permanently unresolved.
The Channel Islands were the only British soil occupied by Germany during the Second World War, and for a long time the mainland press had little to publish about life under the occupation. By the end of May 1945, a month after liberation, newspapers were regularly printing accounts from letters and personal stories, many first published on 30 May. One described an internment camp in Germany where a deported Guernseyman survived on swede soup, black bread and damp blankets, proud at least that he had been among the first people moved from British Isles soil by the Germans.
Other reports traced the shift from years of semi-starvation to sudden abundance after the Red Cross arrived in December and British troops finally landed. Letters noted that even German soldiers were on starvation rations by the end, and some still shared food with locals, yet the abrupt change from famine to feast left many islanders with stomach complaints. The stories were not just about hardship but about survival, relief and the awkward recovery that followed liberation.
Joseph John Gillingham was one of the writers behind GUNS, the Guernsey Underground News Sheet, which copied news from forbidden BBC broadcasts and circulated it by hand across the island and even to Sark. The sheet gave Guernsey residents a truth about the war that stood in stark contrast to German propaganda, and those involved were eventually betrayed and arrested by the occupation authorities. Gillingham was sentenced to ten months’ imprisonment for listening to prohibited broadcasts and failing to surrender a wireless set.
Shortly after his sentence, he was deported to Germany where he died in a prison in Halle on 11 March 1945, just a few months before the island’s liberation. Fellow prisoners were told he was being sent to an internment camp, but investigation later revealed he had been moved to another prison and died there. He never saw Guernsey freed, but his work with GUNS remains a key part of the island’s story of resistance and moral courage under occupation.
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