9 - Migrant-Native Interactions: 1. Social and Political

Summary

IN the previous chapters we have chiefly taken an immigrant perspective. In order to analyse the impact of immigration on insular society, we must now turn our attention to the host community. The first part of this chapter contains an exploration of the social, political and religious make-up of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Guernsey. St Peter Port will be analysed separately from the country parishes as regards the first two categories, but religion will be considered on an all-Island basis. Having thus sketched out a picture of local society, the second part of the chapter then marshals a variety of evidence – official and personal correspondence, States and newspaper reports – to build up an image of inter-communal attitudes and relationships at the social and political level.

St Peter Port

Society

Reference to social groups known as the ‘Sixties’ and the ‘Forties’ was a commonplace of Victorian writing on Guernsey. The Island, and St Peter Port in particular, was deemed by outside observers to be obsessed with class distinctions. These labels, dating from the opening of St Peter Port’s Assembly Rooms in the late eighteenth century, stemmed from the number of families originally assigned to each group. The Sixties corresponded to the leading mercantile families at the apex of St Peter Port (and hence insular) society; the Forties to a group they regarded as their social inferiors, whom they excluded from the Rooms.

The Sixties, who derived their status largely from fortunes made in eighteenth-century shipowning and maritime trade, were essentially dominated by indigenous families (De Saumarez, Dobrée, De Havilland, Brock, Maingy, De Lisle, Priaulx, Carey, Le Marchant, Andros and others) but the core stock of prestigious names had been augmented during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by successful French refugees (Jeremie, De La Condamine, Utermarck), by garrison officers finding wives amongst the well-to-do (McCrea, Lacey, Gore), and by businessmen washed in on the tide of prosperity who judiciously intermarried with the elite (MacCulloch, Bell, Chepmell). From the 1820s, these were joined by an influx of British rentiers, those of which who could ‘afford to give parties’ were ‘put on the list of the Sixties’. Since most of the old merchant families were by now also rentiers, the top stratum of St Peter Port society was, for several decades post-Waterloo, largely a leisured one.