Albion and the outlying Islands - Odi’r teid yn mynd mas?
An extract from the performance Rendez-vous particulière – potatoes from Egypt
The first Eisteddfod is believed to have taken place at Christmas in 1176 when Rhys ap Gruffydd, the then Lord of the kingdom of Deheubarth, held a feast at Cardigan Castle to celebrate having the castle he had captured from the Normans rebuilt in stone. According to the record, the feast was proclaimed a year in advance throughout Wales, England, Scotland, Ireland and all the outlying Islands which is taken to include the channel islands. In 2018 I found my sea legs and crossed the English channel, landing on the island of Jersey. I was invited to the island by a program called the Morning Boat, an ‘international artist residency’ aiming to generate a reflective and meaningful discourse on some of the ‘critical issues and real life practices that are central to the island’s economy, social fabric and way of life.’ [1] The activities of the residency programme focus on what are considered the foundations of Jersey’s economy – agriculture, tourism and finance. The purpose of my application was to investigate what happens to farms on the island that are no longer being farmed and as an adjunct to that what happens to the children of farmers if they are not farming any more. The investigation was born of personal experience.
I was bought up on a dairy farm in West Wales in the late 1970s and 80s. Unusually for the area in which we lived the cattle we farmed were Jerseys, famed for their calcium rich creamy milk. I have never broken a bone in my body. In 1989 my parents felt forced to sell the family farm. A combination of factors precipitated this decision; the external pressures of milk quotas, a persistent effluent problem that risked polluting a nearby watercourse without significant further investment to remedy the problem and ageing grandparents whose retirement capital was tied up in the land. I was 12 when we sold and left the family farm. My Mum found work at a local theatre that she had helped to found and I swapped my ambitions to join the young farmers club to joining a thriving youth theatre. My passport to Jersey was a photograph. It showed me as a young child, not more than seven, standing between my parents in front of a Jersey cow at Cardigan agricultural show. It is West Wales in the early 1980s. I was never a farmer myself but I am a farmer’s daughter. I showed the photograph to everyone I met on the island. Forty years ago there would have been 1000 dairy farms on Jersey. At the time of my visit there were only 17.
I did not take sat-nav to Jersey nor did I take a road map but I wrote out directions for my journeys in my navigator’s notebook, a ritual litany of names that I inscribed each morning. This genealogy of roads became the way in which I oriented myself for the whole of my stay. I soon realised that this way of navigating would not have been possible had not all the roads, even the tiniest, been neatly labeled with their French or Norman French names. Whilst following one of these routes I visited a farm and met a farmer who showed me a granite spiral staircase connecting one part of his farmhouse to the next. The staircase dated back to the 13th century. In an adjacent sitting room there was a portrait of the Queen and a picture of a farm that was flooded during the 1980s when a valley, the Queen’s Valley, was requisitioned for a dam development. The farm was called La Travers. At the time of the proposed dam development David Bellamy protested the planned work; on a walk around the valley he fell to his knees and asked those present, ‘to pray for this valley’.
The farmer’s ancient staircase and picture of the Queen seemed to disclose Jersey’s peculiar pedigree, that of a UK crown dependency, a constitutional fluke that dates back to the aftermath of the Norman conquest. Following the Battle of Hastings the dukes of the Duchy of Normandy of which Jersey was originally a part, went on to become the Kings of England. Later in the 13th Century Normandy was lost by those Kings when the ducal title was surrendered to France. After the surrender, Jersey and the other Channel Islands remained loyal and attached to the English Crown whilst their legal system, language and traditions derived from those of Normandy. [2] The farmer in possession of a Norman staircase didn’t speak Jèrriais (the name given to Jersey’s Norman French language) but his wife and her parents did. We interrupted our conversation about agriculture to talk about language and whether Welsh is related to Jèrriais and how Welsh is now a compulsory subject in schools and that many schools are now becoming Welsh medium. The farmer told me about an Uncle of his who used to holiday at Dinas in Pembrokeshire. Uncle Perks used to have something to say about Jèrriais (or was it Welsh?), ‘Until it’s the language of the playground it won’t be the language of the people’.
Having spent a good couple of hours chatting to the farmer he took me to the real centre of his agricultural operation – a giant industrial shed where 100s of 1000s of potatoes were being graded and sorted for chitting. Chitting is the process by which a potato is caused to sprout before it is planted. The potato, as much as the cow, has been the key to Jersey’s wealth in agricultural terms. The Jersey Fluke was discovered in the 1880s the fluke being its early growing season meaning that the Jersey Royal, as it is now known, can capture the UK market because of its early harvesting. Jersey in agricultural terms is now almost a mono-culture as 80% of agricultural land is put to growing the potato. Added to this scenario the potatoes themselves are only sold through two companies Bartletts and Jersey Royal, both UK based. Later in my visit I hear this state of affairs described by one islander as a catastrophe. The potatoes are harvested by armies of agricultural contractors; their machinery comes by boat and they leave as soon as the work is done. The chitting and planting however, is still done by hand and many of the workers involved in this process are seasonal migrants coming from Poland. In the weeks preceding my visit to the island an artist’s film produced by the Morning Boat documenting the working conditions of these workers had been refused a screening at the Jersey Farmer’s Union conference. [3]
Although Jèrriais is now the first language of a very small majority of people on Jersey, until the 19th century it was the everyday language of the majority and even until the Second World War up to half the population could communicate using the language. The farmer recommended a book which I found later in the library of the Société Jersiaise, The Triumph of the Country: rural community in 19th century Jersey by John Kelleher. According to this book, the English Crown saw the language as an aspect of Jersey’s quasi-independence; allowing the Island to retain its own institutions, customs and identity in return for continuing loyalty.[4] By the end of the nineteenth century however, English had come to be identified as the language of commercial success. As one French author, assessing the change in 1849, put it: “Plus d’un Jersyais, par ambition, se consolerait d’etre Anglais”; in terms of ambition the Jerseyman is consoled by his possession of English. These words echo those of Hywel Teifi Edwards writing about attitudes in Wales towards the Welsh language during the nineteenth century when it seemed, ‘Craidd eu daionusrwydd moesol oedd y Gymraeg – Gobaith eu cynnydd materol oedd y Saesneg’ – if the source of a Welshman’s moral goodness was his Welsh his material hope lay in the English language. [5]
The Société Jersiaise was founded in 1873 for the study of Jersey’s archaeology, history, natural history, its ancient language and the conservation of its environment. For Kelleher the establishment of the society represented an attempt to define the core of the local identity as, ‘something broader and more solid’ than simply the island’s language Jèrriais. If the decline of the local language as a means of communication could not be reversed, its existence as a part of the unique Jersey experience would live on in the Island’s historically-based identity. [6] That identity coalesced around an idea of the Island’s historic rights or privileges rather than a cultural nationalism. Indeed, nationality was not something that the Islanders had ever been forced to think about. When I asked a former farmer, Ken Vibert, what his grandfather would have considered himself to be French or British he said neither, he was a Jersey man. In the library of the Société Jersiaise I also came across an MA thesis titled, ‘Language Death: Jèrriais, a case in point?’ Through reading the MA thesis I learnt that agricultural workers tend to retain minority languages longer than other classifications of people and that it is widely considered that the basis of a language’s ability to survive is the number of areas of life where it is, to bilingual speakers, the only accepted medium of communication. [7]
At the Jèrriais learners conversational class at the Jersey Pearl cafe in the parish of St Ouen I told the assembled speakers that I was a Welsh speaker but that it was not my first language. A lady told me how an extra language had come to be seen as marketable. I asked whether it might be important to have another language in order to see another side - to make one a more rounded person. I also asked whether Jersey had any poets. Ken, a former dairy farmer who was also once a Cattle judge for the Jersey Cattle Society in Wales told me about a poet, a farmer called John James le Marquand who wrote works in Jèrriais including a poem which Ken had once recited at the Jersey Eisteddfod. The Jersey Eisteddfod dates back to 1908 when the Jersey choral society celebrated its silver jubilee by holding a choral festival which they called an Eisteddfod. The association of a choral festival with the Welsh Eisteddfod was bought to the island by a clergyman, Samuel Falle, who had encountered an such a choral festival whilst living near the Derwent tin plate works at Workington in Cumbria. The works were owned by William Griffiths of Aberavon who had settled many families from South Wales there to work for him. They bought with them their Eisteddfod tradition, a singing festival which, when held there in 1872, was adopted by the English residents too and continued annually until the outbreak of the First World War. An injunction written into the Jersey Eisteddfod’s founding constitution required the Eisteddfod to foster Jersey-Norman French as Falle, himself a native of Jersey hoped that the arts through competition and public performance would lead to and encourage the growth of the language. [8]
Ken recited and translated a line from the poem he had told me about, titled La Vie, ‘Et comme batte sans compass j’fachons la vie’ - like a boat without a compass I face my life. I mentioned to the group at the Jersey Pearl cafe that I was hoping to attend the gala for languages, part of the Jersey Eisteddfod where the winners of all the recitation competitions perform their pieces; there are entries in all the languages spoken on the island including Jèrriais but also Polish, Portuguese and Chinese. Ken told me that he had been impressed with the standard of the Jèrriais recitation that year. That the children showed an awareness and empathy for the words they were reciting, that they were not just parrots. At the gala for languages an older gentleman introduced in English the Jèrriais poem he was going to recite, “It introduces us to the trees in this little wood, to the flowers, to the weeds, to the birds all that is really describing Jersey’s true wealth. Unfortunately in the last forty years we’ve been bathed in the warm bath of finance and we’ve lost our way in my opinion as to the things that are truly Jersey’s wealth; this describes it to a tee and we are hoping to introduce it all to youngsters in schools and to understand the beauty of nature.”
In Jersey I made a performance that styled itself a cross between an Eisteddfod and a Young Farmer’s Concert with songs and sketches and recitatives. The performance included the milking of a Jersey cow by hand and the live demonstration of a hand cranked milk separator in a homage to Eisenstein’s film The Old and the New depicting the apparent benefits of the collectivisation of agriculture and Canadian Labour leader Tommy Carson’s less celebratory citation of the cream separator as a metaphor for capitalism. The performance also related the story of a farm, Egypt farm, that was requisitioned in 1943, for use by the German occupying forces for military exercise, and the story of an Eisteddfod held in the desert on the 31st October of that same year under the auspices of the Cairo Welsh Society. In the middle of a world war the 200 or so assembled soldiers, airmen and sailors attending the Cairo Eisteddfod answer the traditional question pronounced three times at the ceremony for the chairing of the bard, a question harking back to Iolo Morgannwg’s Primrose Hill ritual: A oes heddwch? (Is there peace?) If you listen very closely to the recording that remains, amidst the resounding response Heddwch! (‘Peace!’) it is possible to hear another word shouted amongst the crowd, an arabic word, the word salaam.[9]
At the end of the performance in Jersey I made reference to a book by a local author to the Teifi valley, Mair Garnon James, a peripatetic Welsh teacher and famed proponent of the cultural form known as the ‘noson lawen’. The title of her autobiography, ‘Odi’r teid yn mynd mas?’ [10] (Is the tide going out?) can be linked to a Jersey culinary speciality, a sweet doughnut known as a Jersey wonder which according to folk custom should only be cooked when the tide is going out. With the knowledge that the tide at that time was indeed going out I mused that though the tide was now receding and the shoreline exposed, the tide would turn again and who knew what it might bring with it; new objects, new associations of people, new traditions, new wonders.
Wales though not occupied in the way that Jersey was during the Second World War was conquered by those who originally spoke a tongue related to the Norman French of Jèrriais. It is even possible that the bilingual Arglwydd Rhys/Lord Rhys, a Welsh prince who determined to keep his self-determination through hospitality and negotiation founding an international festival of performance, music and poetry could have spoken Jèrriais. I hope this might be true. It makes the continued existence of the Jersey Eisteddfod all the more poignant. On the penultimate day of my visit I took a trip to Egypt farm and stood by the empty farmhouse amidst the encroaching woods, the ivy clad walls, and recorded the sounds of the valley.
The motto of the Jersey Young Farmer’s club states En Crassant Crassons, in growing, we grow.
Footnotes
[1] The Morning Boat website https://morningboat.com/
[2] Elizabeth Lissenden, Showcase: The Story of the Jersey Eisteddfod (Jersey: Société Jersiaise, 2004), p. 12
[3] The film can be viewed here: https://vimeo.com/389133238
[4] Thomas Kelleher, The Triumph of the Country in the 19th Century: The Rural Community in 19th Century Jersey (St Ouen: John Appleby in assoc. with Société Jersiaise, 2017) pp. 235-236
[5] Hywel Teifi Edwards, Eisteddfod Ffair y Byd: Chicago 1893, p. xiii.
[6] Thomas Kelleher, The Triumph of the Country: The Rural Community in 19th Century Jersey (St Ouen: John Appleby in assoc. with Société Jersiaise, 2017) pp. 235-236
[7] Giselle Kempson, Language Death: Jèrriais, a case in point? A geolinguistic study of minority language decline [Dissertation submitted to Southampton University, Department of Geography] 1991, p. 57
[8] Sue Lissenden, Showcase: The Story of the Jersey Eisteddfod (Jersey: Société Jersiaise, 2004)
[9] Ivor Wynne Jones, The Cairo Eisteddfod and other Welsh adventures in Egypt (Llanrwst: Gwasg y Carreg Gwalch, 2008), pp. 99-104
[10] Mair Garnon James, Odi’r teid yn mynd mas? (Llandysyl, Gomer, 2013)