I’m Paul Darroch, and welcome to a feature-length episode of the History Islands. This is the true story of Louisa Journeaux, and it’s taken from my second book, Jersey: Secrets of the Sea.

It is the Spring of 1886 when the tragic story of an ordinary Jersey girl grips the imagination of Jersey press and people alike. This unsettling series of events fulfilled so many of the sensibilities of any Victorian narrative, offering original sin, a damsel in distress, a dramatic court trial, a terrible ordeal and a surprising deus ex machina resolution. Yet this quintessentially Victorian tale belongs in no penny dreadful or Dickens periodical. It is the astonishing true story of Miss Louisa Journeaux, a guileless young lady from St Clement.

 

(c) Paul Darroch 2025

Music: Chariots by Gavin Luke, courtesy of Epidemic Sound.

 

Have you heard of Prince's Tower, one of Jersey's lost landmarks? Let us turn east to the ancient site of La Hougue Bie, where in 1913, one of Jersey’s greatest monuments still stood, albeit in an advanced state of decay.

Its story begins with Philippe Dauvergne – an astonishingly charismatic and restless young man, born in 1754. He travels to the ends of the earth. He heads into the icy death zone of the Arctic, fighting polar bears, travelling with Horatio Nelson. As a young naval officer visiting Russia, Empress Catherine the Great tries to seduce him. In the American Revolution, he leads an attack on Long Island. He is present at the Battle of Bunker Hill, as the United States is born.

Yet the surreal tragedy of his life is just about to begin.

 

Discover the full story of Philippe d'Auvergne in Jersey: The Hidden Histories 

Music: Gavin Luke, Chariots, courtesy of Epidemic Sound

Welcome to another episode of The History Islands.

This week, we begin a new series on Jersey’s lost landmarks - starting with the story of St Matthew's, a vanished school in Millbrook. This is the tale of a ragged school in a poor rural community, struggling to survive in the harsh land where the sand dunes met the potato fields. Long before Lalique's creative vision made the Glass Church famous, the Victorian school at St Matthew's struggled to educate the sons and daughters of the parish. Through the lens of the headmaster's log-book, we can catch a glimpse of a lost world. 

 

Map courtesy of the National Library of Scotland (NLS).

Music - Chariots by Gavin Luke courtesy of Epidemic Sound.

Today we meet Jersey’s Colonel John Le Couteur, who is attending the opening of the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, London, in 1851. The Channel Islands occupy a prominent place at the event.

The world is changing. Prince Albert, the scion of the Victorian age, puts it best – “the unity of mankind is within reach”. Technology drives his optimism. “The distances which separate the different nations and parts of the globe”, he declares, “are rapidly vanishing and we can traverse them with incredible ease; thought is communicated with the rapidity, and even the power, of lightning”. The telegraph, the penny post and the maritime arteries of empire are binding the world together, and Jersey is deeply enmeshed in the web. Indeed, the first pillar boxes in the British Isles will open in St Helier in 1852.

To celebrate the new era of global seaborne trade, the Prince Consort has called upon the world to showcase its greatest treasures in London. They call it the “Great Exhibition”.

Music: Chariots by Gavin Luke courtesy of Epidemic Sound. Image: The Crystal Fountain, F. & C. Osler of London and Birmingham. Created for display at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Public Domain - Wikimedia Commons.

In this episode, we complete the story of Jersey's Elinor Glyn, who achieved international celebrity and reached the pinnacle of Hollywood in the Roaring Twenties. She had gained earthly fame, yet at what cost?

This extract is taken from Jersey: Secrets of the Sea, available on Amazon and in all good Jersey bookstores. The music is Chariots by Gavin Luke, courtesy of Epidemic Sound.

 

Welcome to another episode of The History Islands. Elinor Glyn has now arrived in Hollywood, at the dawn of its Golden Age. It was a long way from St Saviour, Jersey to Beverly Hills. This is the story of how Elinor reinvented herself on the West Coast and ended up as a friend of Charlie Chaplin and working with Gloria Swanson, Rudolph Valentino and Clara Bow.

This is an extract from my second book, Jersey: Secrets of the Sea.

Elinor Glyn's story will conclude in the next episode. 

 

 

Artwork courtesy of Wikimedia Commons (Library of Congress/ Public Domain). Music Chariots by Gavin Luke courtesy of Epidemic Sound. 

Welcome to another episode of the History Islands, continuing the true story of one of Jersey’s most famous daughters. Elinor Sutherland has survived the ordeal of her Channel Islands shipwreck in 1875, and she now begins her ascent to the heights of Hollywood.

This episode is adapted from my second book Jersey: Secrets of the Sea. 

Music courtesy of Epidemic Sound (Chariots by Gavin Luke).

Photo of Elinor Glyn from Wikimedia Commons / George Grantham Bain collection at the Library of Congress. 

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 home that reeked with the stench of gin.

Through fierce determination, both girls would make their mark on the twentieth century. Their paths would take them from that dreary house on Colomberie to the glittering catwalks of New York and the sun-drenched boulevards of Hollywood respectively. 

Yet their story almost ended before it had begun. Turn the clock back, and we meet two frightened little girls, on a black steamship, heading home to Jersey in the night. It has been an uneventful voyage so far, but history has other plans.

Extract from my book Jersey: Secrets of the Sea by Paul Darroch.

Music credit: Chariots by Gavin Luke Courtesy of Epidemic Sound.

The wind dropped like a stone. Then the fires of hell burst down over Grouville Bay. A dragon's flame seared across the sky, pointing the way to a glistening but fatal treasure. 

This is a Jersey legend of unearthly signs and human greed. It is based on a morality tale first published by William Creed in 1595, at the height of the seafaring Elizabethan age. 

The extract features in my book Jersey: Secrets of the Sea.

Welcome to Series Two of the History Islands.

In this episode I tell the story of the SS Stella, a tragic Victorian shipwreck. As the ship sank fast on the razor reef of the Casquets, the heroism of stewardess Mary Ann Rogers would save many lives.

You can discover a brace of maritime tales from Jersey's past in my second book, Jersey: Secrets of the Sea.