On this day in 1887

The channel was struck by hurricane force winds at the end of October 1887. Boats broke free of their moorings in Cornwall and were washed out to sea, telegraph poles were blown down, trees uprooted, and homes flooded.

In Jersey, the hurricane reached its peak between one and three in the morning, at which point it blew down the chimney on a house in Bagot Road, which fell through the house to which it was attached and crushed Florence Ahier in her bed. She was killed instantly, and her two aunts, who were sleeping either side of her in the same bed, were seriously injured, according to reports in The Cornish Telegraph the following week.

That wasn’t the only chimney blown down. A schoolmaster was injured when buried beneath the rubble of his own stack, and several churches lost their roofs.

 

...and on this day in 1984

George F Le Feuvre was born in St Ouen on 29 September 1891 and, over the next nine decades, did much to preserve the Jèrriais language, despite spending many years in Canada and America. He wrote articles and reminiscences under the name George d’la Forge.

He had to wave goodbye to his mother, father and two brothers when they moved to Canada, leaving just him and one other brother behind in the care of his grandparents. He was 10 at the time and it would be another 18 years before he could join them, after the First World War had been fought, and he’d been widowed when his wife died of the Spanish flu pandemic.

He moved to Detroit, where he became an American citizen, but this was not to be his forever home. He returned to Jersey after the Second World War and was hired to write a weekly column in Jèrriais. This was the beginning of a new and highly prolific career as a journalist, eventually seeing him move to the Jersey Evening Post. He bought a house In the island – Le Menage es Feuvres in St Ouen – and spent part of each year there, and the remainder on the opposite side of the Atlantic.

He was still writing for the Jersey Evening Post when he died in San Antonio, aged 93. It had published his final column just the day before.