A Museum Kind of Day (10/20/25)

Jersey is having an unsettled weather week per the weather people on tv and what we are experiencing. Apparently, a series of fronts are coming through, so we’re having rain off and on with lots of wind. We thought it made for a good day to visit the free-to-enter Jersey Museum, and we took the #3 bus each way. We did, however, walk back and forth to the gym this morning.

Looking up at an old fort and the top of a leisure center
built in the 1970s

The outside of the Jersey Museum and Art Gallery.
The Visitors Center is also located inside here.

The museum covered a range of topics about Jersey, and we spent 90 minutes there. We started with a 20 minute intro film, which provided a quick history from Neanderthal times to current day. This is a scattershot of items that I found of interest.

An example of a pamphlet (for sale) of an execution,
including the last words of the condemned individual

A staging of a treadmill punishment
for male prisoners in Jersey beginning in 1836.
The treadmill ground wheat for bread for the prisoners.

A skeleton of a red deer found on Jersey.
The exhibit noted how the red deer evolved
to be smaller (island dwarfing),
so they could survive on an island with limited food.

A photo of Victor Hugo after his exile from France to Jersey
when he denounced Napoleon.
He was forced to flee Jersey for Guernsey after 3 years
after supporting a newspaper that had criticized Queen Victoria for her close links with Napoleon.

Court entries from the 1585 record
of the witchcraft trial of Jeanne Le Vesconte.
Between the 1560s and 1660s,
there were 65 witch trials on the Channel Islands
which led to 33 executions.

“Our Hands,” by Adam Perchard.
This piece remembers the 65 people tried for witchcraft in Jersey. Sea-worn limpet shells mark the hands of those who were killed or banished— an ancient Jersey symbol of healing.

The charter issued by King Richard II in 1378
confirming the liberties and privileges granted to Islanders
by King Edward III in 1341. The charter still stands.

When we researched “our” parish of St Saviour the other day, one of the main claims to fame was the actress Lillie Langtry. There were a few items in the museum related to her.

“A Jersey Lily,” 1878, Sir John Everett Millais.
The exhibit noted that while the painter and Lillie
are both from Jersey, she is painted holding a Guernsey lily.

An ornate toilette case given to Lillie
by wealthy New Yorker Freddie Gebhard,
with whom she had a relationship

Mitch Courland a local, who has received an MBE
(Member of the Order of the British Empire).
He received his for services to the community,
especially the Jersey Honorary Police and Young People in Jersey.

There was a whole section devoted to the almost five year German occupation and then liberation and rebuilding. It was interesting the views of the different ways Jersey residents spent the war and the impact during and afterwards. There were Island residents who left the island before the occupation because they didn’t want to live under German rule. There were the Islanders who stayed and lived under the occupation, and then there were Island residents who were sent to German prisoner of war camps because they were not native Islanders (born in UK, France, etc.). Hard feelings arose in trying to get everyone back in a hard economic climate and a shortage of housing.