Hanging Out at Shakespeare and Company: Modernist Literary Salon and Sanctuary for Aspiring Writers Rolled into one Parisian Bookshop

Posted on by Bonza Rottwheeler
Creative Writing, Literary & Linguistics, Old technology, Society & Culture

(Image: Aprendiz de Viajante)

Beach on the Seine
A must-visit in Paris for the literary and artistic set or even the mildly book-curious is the iconic “Shakespeare and Company” bookstore situated near the Latin Quarter and across from Notre Dame. It’s address is 37 rue de la Bûcherie 75005, V, but it wasn’t always there. Shakespeare & Co founder, American expat Sylvia Beach, started the legendary Left Bank bookshop at 8 rue Dupuytren in 1919. Within three years Beach moved the shop to the 6th Arrondissement at 12 rue de l’Odéan, across the street from La Masion des Amis des Livres owned by Beach’s future ‘bestie’ and amour Adrienne Monnier. This bookshop was the template Beach used for her own serious literature bookshop-cum-lending library.

𐅉 Ulysses – Joyce and Beach at Shakespeare & Co

Beach’s lifeline for Joyce’s untouchable manuscript
Beach is probably best remembered for giving James Joyce his big breakthrough in the literary world, publishing Ulysses in
1922 when nobody else would touch it…the abstruse, controversial novel went on to become a masterpiece of modern literature. Over time Shakespeare and Company acquired a more lasting fame as the hub of Anglo-American literary culture and modernism in Paris. Aspiring British, Irish and American writers, prompted by a post-WWI favourable pound and dollar exchange rate against the French franc, flocked to the creative milieu of Paris where they discovered the unique appeal of Beach’s Anglophone bookshop🄱 (The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses, Kevin Birmingham, 2014).

𐅉 Hemingway & Fitzgerald (www.pinterest.fr)

“The Lost Generation”
In the interwar years Beach’s bookshop became a haven for the Anglophone literati…habitués included the likes of TS Eliot and Ezra Pound, and the “Lost Generation” of American intellectuals, modernist writers and artists including Ernest Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Ford Maddox Ford, Man Ray, etc. Hemingway and other illustrious names belonged to the store’s lending library, borrowing books when they couldn’t afford to buy them. At the same time French intellectual writers such as Gidé and de Beauvoir also benefitted from Sylvia’s efforts to get their work better known in the US. The bookseller also gave crucial assistance to various avant-garde ‘little magazines’ in getting their publications off the ground by distributing their editions (Shakespeare and Co: The world’s most famous bookshop at 100‘, Cath Pound, BBC, 19-Nov-2019, www.bbc.com).

𐅉 a young George Whitman

Shakespeare and Company redux
In 1941 with occupied Paris under the Nazi swastika, the shop was closed down and Beach interned for a period after Sylvia refused to sell the last copy of Finnegan’s Wake to a German officer. The closure was permanent but the phoenix of Beach’s bookstore did rise again, reinvented by another American expat a decade later. In 1951 WWII veteran George Whitman opened a new, independent English-language bookshop – effectively “Shakespeare and Company Mach II“, though originally called Le Mistral. Later Sylvia Beach apparently anointed Whitman’s bookshop as the true and worthy successor to her original Shakespeare and Company (after Beach’s death in 1962 Whitman renamed the bookshop “Shakespeare and Company”) (‘Bookshop Shakespeare and Company. Paris’, by Els, www.flickr.com).

(Source: another mag.com)

“The Beat Generation”
Within a short time Whitman’s Mistral bookshop was fulfilling the same service to Paris-based Bohemians as Beach’s had for the Lost Generation of writers. Le Mistral, the second coming of “Shakespeare and Co”, became a mecca for a new literary generation in the Fifties, the ’Beat’ Generation and its writers including Allen Ginsberg, William S Burroughs and Greg Corso. Other English-language expats to frequent the bookshop at this time include Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Lawrence Durrell and Ray Bradbury (‘Shakespeare and a Company (Bookshop), Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org).

𐅉 Quote from medieval Persian poet Hafiz of Shiraz

Tumbleweed Hotel‘s quirky tariff
George Whitman maintained Sylvia Beach’s tradition of putting aspiring young writers up for the night (or several nights)…in return for a very basic cot or even a bench, the guests were required to work in the store, read a book and write a one-page autobiography🄲 (‘A Brief History of Shakespeare and Company, Paris’ Legendary Bookstore’, Alex Ledsom, Culture Trip, 26-Feb-2018, www.theculturetrip.com.

𐅉 Sylvia Whitman (Photo: nicethingspalomas.com)

Generation-and-a-half change
George Whitman died in 2011 at 98…the last 10 years of his life was a struggle of wills as the increasingly wildly eccentric George sought to push back against the attempts of his daughter Sylvia Beach Whitman🄳 to modernise the bookshop🄴. Since becoming sole proprietor, Sylvia has moved Shakespeare and Company forward with the times—web-based online transactions, modern accounting practices, the addition of a café, etc—but she still runs a lending library and a second-hand book section, hosts book launches and regular author readings by Zadie Smith, Martin Amis, etc in the shop (‘In a bookstore in Paris’, Bruce Handy, Vanity Fair, 21-Oct-2014, www.vanityfair.com).

(Photo: www.minute.net)

📚 📚 📚

Some takes by visitors on the physical layout of Whitman’s bookshop:

° “a Tardis – modest enough on the outside, a labyrinth on the inside” ~ Jeanette Winterson

° “Shakespeare and Company has the rambling lucidity of an unkempt boudoir” ~ Penny Watson, ‘A tale of two bookshops’ [SMH, Dec 1-2, 2007]

° “a literary octopus with an insatiable appetite for print, taking over the beat-up building … room by room, floor by floor, a veritable nest of books” ~ Lawrence Ferlinghetti

📚 📚 📚

𐅉 Sylvia Beach (Source: ricorso.net)

 

Footnote: for the literary expatriates who frequented Shakespeare and Company, the bookshop served a number of purposes. It functioned as a sort of support network club where the expat writers could meet other members, could draw inspiration from its environs, they could read a wide range of quality literature including books banned in the US and UK, and they could write in its rooms🄵.The bookshop was a “sanctuary for progressive writers and a hub for innovative publishing” (Pound). Some of the expat artists and writers even used Beach’s bookshop as their postal box for receiving mail in Paris (Birmingham).

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🄰 Joyce ‘repaid’ Beach by later defecting to a new publisher at a time the bookseller was in a financial jam

🄱 Beach couldn’t however replicate the triumph of getting Ulysses into print with DH Lawrence’s controversial Lady Chatterley’s Lover 

🄲 the senior Whitman described these blow-in visitors as ’Tumbleweeds’, estimated to number around 30,000 since 1951

🄳 named in honour of the original Sylvia Beach

🄴 George was resistant to changing even one iota of the seemingly chaotic structure of the shop; he didn’t believe in phones or credit cards or computers (Handy)

🄵 Whitman gave the store’s rooms whimsical names like “Old Smoky Reading Room” and “Blue Oyster Tearoom”

Lawrence’s New Mexico “Shangri-La”

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Biographical, Creative Writing, Literary & Linguistics, Old technology, Society & Culture

In his semi-autobiographical, Australian novel Kangaroo, DH Lawrence’s protagonist Richard Somers remarks that he’ll “probably repent bitterly going to America”. This echoes Lawrence’s own equivocation about America. In correspondence, Lawrence thought America “the land of his future” but this was tempered by a pessimism that the United States would be ‘barbaric’ and he would hate it⌖ (Letters IV:141, 151, ‘Manuscripts and Special Collections’, D. H. Lawrence Research – The University of Nottingham, www.nottingham.ac.uk).

The call of Pueblo lifestyle
In the end what clinched it for Lawrence was an invite from New York art patron Mabel Dodge Sterne to visit Taos, New Mexico. The promise of Taos captured DHL’s imagination…remote (7,000 feet-high, 23 miles from the nearest railway), 600 free Indians unspoilt by western capitalism and modernity, “sun-worshippers and rain makers” (D. H. Lawrence and the American Indians’, Jeffery Meyers, Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol 56, Issue 2,  Spring 2017, www.quod.lib.umich.edu).

DHL was enchanted with the idea of the primitive lifestyle of native Americans, their spiritual faith and traditional connexion with the earth.

Taos Pueblo (Source: http://ahistoryofthepresentananthology.blogspot.com/)

Lawrence envisaged that this could be the utopian community, the free and open, instinctive society, ‘Rananim’, that he had been trekking around the world trying to find. Mabel also lured Bert to Taos with the prospect of dazzlingly spectacular scenery.

Mabel Dodge (Luhan) & her Amerindian husband (Photo: Santa Fe New Mexican)

In search of healthy air
DHL had another motive for choosing New Mexico, being potentially beneficial to his precarious health. His tubercular condition was not diminishing at allq. The climate in Taos—high and dry with famously good and clean air— was one that might bring about a cure for his infected lungs (‘Looking for Lawrence’, Henry Shukman, New Mexico Magazine, (nd), www.newmexico.org).

Desert Rananim?
As his letters show, Lawrence was in love with the desert landscape of New Mexico to an intoxicating degree – overwhelmed by the strangeness and beauty of the place, even a bit awestruck and fearful. When the writer visited the wilderness of Western Australia earlier, he experienced similar vibes from the bush environment (‘Looking for Lawrence’).

DHL waxed lyrical on the experience later, ” I think New Mexico was the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had. It certainly changed me forever …. the moment I saw the brilliant, proud morning shine high up over the deserts of Santa Fe, something stood still in my soul, and I started to attend”: he wrote how the person who lives there “above the great proud world of desert will know, almost unbearably how beautiful it is, how clear and unquestioned is the might of the day” (‘Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers is D. H. Lawrence’, (2017)).

At Taos Lawrence found himself the unwilling object of a love triangle with host Mabel vying with wife Frieda for his attention, which stiffled his creativity somewhat. He did however manage to finish the final chapter of Kangaroo during his initial sojourn in Taos.

The Lawrence Ranch

Ranch life in the high country
Lawrence returned to England in 1923 keen on recruiting members of the British artistic fraternity for his New Mexico ‘Rananim’. He returned the next year but with only the one recruit, artist Dorothy Brett☼, whose presence added a further tension to the feminine rivalries at Taos. This led to Mabel giving the Lawrences their own ranch way up in the mountains (8,600 feet above sea-level) and about 20 miles from Taos—the only property the couple would ever own—the Kiowa Ranch (now the D.H. Lawrence Ranch)✪. When not beavering away on new manuscript projects, Bert kept busy at the ranch chopping wood and constructing log cabins, as well as taking hikes in the mountains.

(Photo: www.taos.org)

Ambivalence towards Amerindian culture
Once Bert got to see Amerindian religious ritual and customs up close, much of his pre-visit  enthusiasm dissipated (“not impressive as a spectacle”, he noted). He still admired the “Red Indian” but felt the native American culture had been debased by American ‘progress’ and modernity, reduced in Taos to that of a tourism attraction (essay ‘New Mexico’, (1928); ‘D.H. Lawrence and the American Indiana’s, Jeffery Meyers, Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol 56 Issue 2, Spring 2017, www.quod.lib.umich.edu).

⇪ ‘St Mawr’ set partly in New Mexico mountains juxtaposes the vitality of nature with modern degenerate civilisation

Lorenzo’s literary output in the Southwest
DH Lawrence visited Taos, NM, three times during the period 1922-25 but only for a total of 11 months altogether. ‘Lorenzo’, as his patron and admirer Mabel Dodge fondly called him, never fulfilled the fervent hopes of Mabel by writing the great novel of the Southwest or even of New Mexico…but he did manage to produce a solid body of work while residing in NM including the novellas St Mawr and The Woman Who Rode Away, the travel book Mornings in Mexico, as well as writing part of the novel The Plumed Serpent at the ranch (after research conducted in Mexico).

Lawrence’s TB condition worsened in Europe and the novelist died in 1930 in the south of France, still proclaiming to friends a heartfelt desire to return to his beloved Taos. Frieda, who returned to live in Taos, afterwards had her late husband’s remains exhumed and shipped back to be interred on Taos soil.

 

Kandy, 1925 (Photo:www.lankapura.com)

End-note: Lawrence in the tropics
Lawrence’s global search for an alternative to modern, industrialised ‘civilisation’ landed him in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) on route to America. Lawrence’s anticipation of a good time in Ceylon was dealt a harsh blow by reality. The Lawrences stayed on the edge of the  forest in Kandy, their attempts to sleep plagued by unbearable heat—”the terrific sun … like a bell-jar of heat, like a prison over you”, and the local fauna —“horrid noises of the birds and creatures … hammer and clang and rattle and cackle and explode all the livelong day”  (Letters IV: 214, 227 Notts U). The one bright spot was the Raj Pera-Hera festival which DHL enjoyed, inspiring him to write a poem, ‘Elephant’, the sole literary fruit of his five weeks in Ceylon.

 

Huxley & Lawrence in Taos

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⌖ San Francisco, the Lawrences’ entry point to the US, Bert, pernickety as ever, found less than prepossessing – “noisy and expensive”

☼although writer Aldous Huxley did visit Lawrence in NM

✪ in return the Lawrences gave Dodge the MS for Sons and Lovers, which proved to be far more valuable than the ranch

DH Lawrence in Australasia, 1922: That Novel and Perceptions of People and Place

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Biographical, Literary & Linguistics, Old technology, Society & Culture

Next year marks the centenary of the visit of acclaimed writer DH Lawrence to the Antipodes … the author of Sons and Lovers and Women in Love spent some 99 days on the southern continent travelling from its west to its east coast and writing the bulk of his great Australia novel, Kangaroo. The 1922 visit by the English novelist and poet has attracted new interest both within Australian literary circles and the general public over the past couple of decades. The tortuous saga of the vicissitudes of Lawrence and his wife Frieda’s house in Thirroul, NSW, after the Lawrences departed Australia, has been canvassed elsewhere on this blog site  – “Lawrence of Thirroul: Creating Kangaroo at ‘Wyewurk’”, November 10, 2014.

DHL at Taos (Source: New Mexico Magazine)

Lawrence”s Weltanschauung (World view and moral vision)
Lawrence’s unquenchable wanderlust emerged from a disavowal of the dehumanising and degenerating effects of modernity and industrialisation. To his moral eye, people’s natural feelings including sexuality had been “dulled by the mechanical routine of ‘civilisation'”, making their responses coldly cerebral, not warmly instinctive and spontaneous. Lawrence’s answer to the dilemma was for society to embrace the anima (vital energy or spirit force) to be found in primitive cultures (eg, among the ancient Etruscans)…only by doing this would modern civilisation achieve the necessary revitalisation (‘D.H. Lawrence World Literature Analysis’, upd.05-May-2015, www.enotes.com). Later after the Australasian leg, DHL believed he had  discovered in Taos, New Mexico, the utopian place he had been searching for (“a new part of the soul woke up suddenly and the old world gave way to a new”)⌖.

⏏ ‘Women in Love’, set against the modern industrial Britain so loathed by Lawrence

Travels with DHL
DH Lawrence’s arrival in Australia was a stage in the writer’s global quest to find a new world in tune with his sensibilities. Dissatisfaction with his homeland had prompted voluntary exile from the industrialised rat race of Britain and launched Lawrence on a country to country “savage pilgrimage” across the world.

Coming to the southern continent, DHL’s hope was that Australia, free from the old society’s ills, would deliver the ‘nirvana’ he was seeking (a utopian construct he called ‘Rananim’) (D.H.Lawrence’s Australian Experiment’, Susan Lever, Inside Story, 21-Oct-2015, www.insidestory.org.au).

Deep dissolution down under 
As the text of Kangaroo reveals, these hopes were swiftly extinguished during the sojourn in Australia. Taking an instant dislike to urban Sydney Lawrence swiftly escaped to the south coast town of Thirroul. Though the beauty and awe of the Australian bush and landscape (its “spirit of place”) left a deep impression on him, Lawrence found disfavour in what he took to be the Australian character. What galled Lawrence was the “profound Australian indifference” … “hollow, modern people, living in a society so democratic that it denied all superiority and depth of intellect and feeling”… “exemplifying the degenerative nature of industrial society” that DHL abhorred (David Game, DH Lawrence’s Australia: Anxiety at the Edge of Empire, 2015).

DH Lawrence, technophobe
Australians’ material modern-ness irked Lawrence, their slavish craving to be up-to-date with the most modern conveniences, be it electric lights, tramways or whatever (‘The beard of the prophet’, Tom Fitzgerald, Inside Story, 30-Oct-2018, www.insidestory.org.au). Australians, Lawrence/Somers opined, were too materialistic, too outward-looking, to the exclusion of their inner lives…”like so many mechanical animals” (“‘Harmless Eden”: Revisiting D.H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo“, Julian Hanna, 3:am Magazine, 28-Oct-2014, www.3ammagazine.com).

In Kangaroo, Richard Lovat Somers’ dalliance with the alt-right paramilitary Diggers movement serves as a warning of the coming peril of fascism. But Somers is equally distrustful of democracy in modern, industrial society⧆ and is also alienated from socialist sentiments he encounters – embodied in the character Willie Struthers※. Typically contrarian (and at times contradictory) in his views,  DHL was notorious for being what one journalist called “something of a world champion in hypercritical,  hard-to-please invective  (Fitzgerald)֎.

(Source: telegraph.co.uk)

Lawrence in New Zealand, hit and run
The Lawrences left Sydney in August 1922 , sailing “four days to New Zealand over a cold, dark and inhospitable sea”. A minor run-in with an immigration official upon arrival in Wellington prompted in Bert an instant negative reaction to New Zealand. Spending just one day in “cold and stormy Wellington” and seeing very little of the place♤, the couple left abruptly for San Francisco via Rarotonga and Tahiti (also not to DHL’s taste, Papeete: “dead, dull, modern”). Lawrence’s parting shot at NZ/Aeotoroa (based on a single day’s stay in the capital city) was that he had no desire “to stay in a cold, snobbish middle-class colony of pretentious nobodies” (‘Katherine Mansfield: DH Lawrence’s “Lost Girl”. A Literary Discovery’, Sandra Jobson Darroch, Rananim, 2009, www.dhlawrencesocietyaustralia.com.au).

♠ ♠ ♠

A note on place names in ‘Kangaroo’
Lawrence freely identifies the various places the Somers come across on their travels—Manly, St Columb (Collaroy), Narrabeen, the Quay, North Sydney, Murdoch Street (Cremorne), Mosman Bay, Como, Bulli, etc—but he alters the names of where the couple live…Thirroul becomes ‘Mullumbimby’ and their beach-cliff bungalow on the Illawarra coast, Wyewurk , is renamed ‘Coo-ee‘ in the novel.

The Lawrences’ mini-Odyssey in Sydney through the lens of ‘Kangaroo’
In DHL’s Roman à clef Australian novel, Richard and Harriet Somers re-trace Bert and Frieda’s perambulations from the city to the Northern Beaches on their first full day in Sydney, before the escape to Thirroul .

Royal Botanic Garden
”A bunch of workmen were lying on the grass beside Macquarie Street … they had that air of owning the city that belongs to a good Australian”❧
Circular Quay ferry across the harbour
“The harbour … was an extraordinary place … like a lake among the land, so pale blue and heavenly, with its hidden and half-hidden lobes intruding among the low, dark brown cliffs”

⏏ The Corso

The Corso, Manly 
“You land on the wharf and walk up the street , like a bit of Margate with seaside shops and restaurants … at the end … is the wide Pacific rolling in on the yellow sand”

⏏ Lagoon at Narrabeen (Source: DH Lawrence Society Aust.)

Narrabeen Lagoon, beach
”They seemed to run to leg … three boys, one a lad of fifteen or so, came out of the warm lagoon in their bathing suits, to roll in the sand and play … extraordinary like real young animals, mindless as opossums”

Footnote: what ultimately comes through in the pages of Kangaroo is an ambivalence about Australia. In the final chapter added when living in New Mexico, Lawrence talks about loving Australia but at the same time needing to rail against it. There’s a constant struggle in Somers’ mind, a tension between his love of the place (the bush)⌧ which is “in his marrow”, and the suffocating apathy of the people surrounding him.

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⌖ Taos’ native pueblos, the “earth-centred culture”, Lawrence’s new ‘elemental’ civilisation, the wellspring of regenerative potential for contemporary civilisation (‘Looking for Lawrence’, Henry Shukman, New Mexico Magazine, (nd), www. newmexico.org)

※ possibly modelled on Australian communist agitator and unionist Jock Garden (Robert Darroch, Rananim, Dec 1999)

⧆ “a self-convinced opponent of the levelling-off effects of democracy“ (John Worthen, D.H.Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider 2005)

֎ DHL’s hyper-critical reflex was seemingly boundless – California on first impression was summarily dismissed as “a queer place…turning its back on the world (looking) into the Pacific void …absolutely selfish, very empty” (DH Lawrence, 1923 letter)

♤ the experience was mutual, Lawrence’s fleeting stopover in the “Land of the Long White Cloud” went unnoticed by the New Zealand press or public

❧ the overt egalitarian ‘mateship’ of workers in Australia was a trait that certainly got stuck in Lawrence’s craw

⌧ love, that is, mingled with a sense of dread of the bush both in Western Australia and the “bush-covered dark tor” of the Illawarra escarpment

English Channel Islands under the Swastika, 1940–1945

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
International Relations, Military history, Regional History

In the wake of the catastrophic Allied defeat in the Battle of France in 1940, Britain made the decision not to defend the strategically-unadvantageous but sovereign Channel Islands lying just eight miles from the French coastline, giving up the oldest possession of the Crown “without firing a single shot” (Hazel R. Knowles Smith, The changing face of the Channel Islands Occupation, 2007)⚀. The islands were demilitarised, giving the German Wehrmacht a saloon passage into them in June 1940. There was no resistance to the German invasion…in addition to the British government withdrawing all troops, the locals were instructed not to resist the German invaders. Unfortunately no one told Berlin about the demilitarisation and German bombers raided Guernsey and Jersey, resulting in the death of 44 civilians✦.

Resistance by the islanders was pretty much out of the question due to geography as well as the numerical strength of the German military commitment (some 21,000 troops and a ratio of two Germans to one civilian in some areas). The islands’ terrain, being very small, flat and easy to search, made it “very difficult for a potential resistance to hide and organise” [‘Life under Nazi rule: the occupation of the Channel Islands’, (Rachel Dinning), History Extra, 25-Nov-2020, www.historyextra.com].

🔺 (Photo: World Travel Guide)

A so-called “Model occupation?”
Compared to the harshness of the Nazis’ subjection of Eastern European peoples, the occupying German military exerted a softer, lighter touch in its handling of the residents of the Channel Islands. The occupation has been described as “a gentler and kinder one with a correspondingly civil ladies and gentlemen’s resistance” MCGETCHIN, D. (2017). Journal of World History, 28(1), 154-161. Retrieved July 3, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/44631517]. Even the attorney general of Guernsey depicted it as a “model occupation”. Hitler clearly saw an opportunity for an exercise in public relations (Dinning). The greater lenience given to the islands’ Britons also can probably be attributed to the Nazis’ perception of the occupied people as “racially elevated”, similar to how the Germans treated the Danes and Dutch, in contrast to the much harsher treatment meted out during the war to Russians and Poles for example (McGetchin).

While relations for the most part were cordial with the majority of islanders accordingly willing to peacefully co-exist with the German presence, the “softer approach” of the Germans shouldn’t be overstated—islanders were not free to speak their minds, they were subjected to curfews, 2% of the population were convicted and some imprisoned, two persons were executed, over 2,000 were deported including some Jews—certainly not a Sunday school picnic and things got tougher over time as the inhabitants faced critical food shortages which progressed into the very real reality of starvation.

🔺 Seigneur of Sark (Dame Sibyl Hathaway) visited by Wehrmacht officers at her fiefdom (Source: Twitter)

Pockets of non-militarised resistance
A lack of overt resistance didn’t mean there was no resistance at all. Among the islanders there was episodes of defiance of a non-violent kind – Britain’s BBC encouraged people to chalk the ‘V’ (for Victory) sign on buildings, ‘V’ jewellery was made, some civilians and local policemen as well raided German stores and supplies, others engaged in intelligence gathering, arson and graffiti-writing (Dinning). Act of sabotage on a small scale occurred and many islanders fed and even hid especially Russian POWs in their properties. On the other side of the coin there were varying forms of collaboration with the invaders, including paid informants who turned in their own people to the Nazis. The most vilified collaborators were women—derisively labelled ‘Jerrybags’ by townsfolk—who had sexual liaisons with the soldiers stationed on the islands (‘Defending Jerrybags’, (Colin Smith), Prospect, 20-Apr-1997, www.prospectmagazine.co.uk).

🔺 ‘V’ sign on Robin Hood pub, St Helier  (www.jerseyeveningpost.com)

A Nazi island fortress
With the British civilian inhabitants largely under wraps, the Nazi Führer embarked on his plans to “battle-proof” the Channel Islands. The Nazis transported massive amounts of steel and concrete for the grandiose-scale building scheme, tower forts, 45m-high gun stations, casements, anti-tank walls, air-raid shelters, bunkers and tunnels§. Beaches were mined and barbed wire laid around the coastlines. Hitler has plans for the heavily fortified islands in the post-war Third Reich as well, to serve as a haven for Axis soldiers [‘Did you know about Hitler’s insane “war-proof” islands?’, (Jeremy Caspar), SBS, 17-Mar-2017, www.sbs.com.au]. The value of the Channels’ coastal defence network to Hitler as propaganda against enemy Britain accounts for Berlin’s out of proportion material commitment to the Channels, constituting 10% of the Nazis’ Atlantic Wall resources⋔ (‘Occupation of the Channel Islands by Nazi Germany’, New World Encyclopedia).

Forced labourers building island fortifications 🔻

(Photo: Priaulx Library & Occupation Archives)

The fortresses were built by Organisation Todt (OT – the Nazi civil and military engineering group) employing forced labour mainly from Eastern Europe (French and Spanish prisoners were also forced into service on the mega-building project). The effectively enslaved workers (Ostarbeiter) were treated appallingly badly (with a resulting large loss of life) by the Wehrmacht soldiers who looked on them as Untermenschen (“sub-human”) (Dinning)✪. The Nazis built four labour camps on Alderney Island, two for ‘volunteer’ labourers (Hilfswillige) and the other two were concentration camps.

(Source: tvtime.com)

Hitler’s fortresses, or the remnants of them, remain highly visible to this day – especially on Alderney the most northern of the Channel Islands. Alderney was the most heavily fortified of the islands (nicknamed “Adolf Island”), after virtually all of its inhabitants were evacuated [‘The Nazi Occupation of the Islands of Guernsey‘, (Stephanie Gordon), Historic UK (nd), www.historic-uk.com].

Footnote: How did the Channel Islands first become English?
Traditionally belonging to the Duchy of Normandy, the collection of small islands became English when Norman noble William the Conqueror was victorious at Hastings and succeeded to the English throne in 1066.

Postscript: the return of evacuees to the Channel Islands from mainland Britain after liberation in 1945 led to a difficult period of reintegration for all. A schism within the communities developed and sustained for a long time, some of those who stayed thought the evacuees cowardly for leaving, whereas the latter retorted that it was they who had gone through the real war facing the Blitz while the “safe-at-home” ‘stayers’ cosied up to the Germans (Barrett).

❖~¤~❖~¤~❖~¤~❖~¤~❖❖~¤~❖~¤~❖~¤~❖~¤~❖

⚀ Britain prime minister, Churchill, in his ‘bulldogged’ forthright fashion still wanted to defend the Channel Islands on a matter of principle, however the stark realities disclosed by the naval high command—the islands were situated too far from mainland Britain, too close to enemy bases in France, the martial materials required to do so would have left Britain vulnerable to defending itself—made the decision a “no-brainer” [Duncan Barrett, Hitler’s British Isles, 2018]

✦ there was token resistance to the raids from a solitary ground gun on the Isle of Sark

§ in both Guernsey and Jersey 200-250 strongpoints were constructed by OT

⋔ the Atlantikwall was an extensive Nazi coastal defence system built along western continental Europe and Scandinavia

✪ around 16,000 forced/slave workers were sent to Jersey alone [‘World War Two: Forced labourer who made Jersey his home, BBC, 10-May-2020, www.bbc.com]