Film: The Complete History of Jersey (in just under ten minutes)

4 May

AN ARTHOUSE JERSEY LIBERATION DAY FILM

Today sees the release of a very special film, ‘The Complete History Of Jersey (in just under 10 minutes)’ in celebration of this year’s Liberation Day. The film has been produced by ArtHouse Jersey in collaboration with John Henry Falle AKA The Story Beast with the support of the Government of Jersey as part of the Island Identity Project.

The poem was originally commissioned as a live performance piece by ArtHouse Jersey in 2019 to help celebrate the organisation’s move to Greve de Lecq Barracks. Now, having been transformed into film format, the production illustrates the poem’s content with stunning scenery from across the array of the Island’s landscapes, from bays, to rock formations, varines to dolmens. It is ArtHouse Jersey’s hope that this insightful and amusing piece will be enjoyed by thousands of people online in Jersey and further afield over the upcoming Liberation weekend and beyond.

Leaving no stone unturned, John Henry Falle’s rhythmic delivery takes us through Jersey's ages, kicking off with the Island’s 600 year-old shale formation, through the basics of local geology, then onto the Ice Age, the Middle Stone Age and the sudden appearance of Jersey’s many dolmens. We hear how the Romans arrived before crashing into the ‘Common Era’. We ‘sail past William Longsword who stole us off Brittany’ and are taken through the various battles that would ensue throughout the centuries and that would inevitably go on to influence the Island Jersey is today.

Fast forwarding, The Story Beast plays on more contemporary topics, such as the finance industry, the aging population, equal marriages, Brexit, the pandemic, fishing rights, trans rights and, as our last census shows, how diverse a group of people we are today, made up of Kenyans, Nigerians, French, Romanians. Poles, Thais, Latvians, Lithuanians, Portuguese, South Asian, Caribbean and Chinese.

Poet & performer John Henry Falle said: “WHAT TO LEAVE IN, WHAT TO LEAVE OUT Ever since Art House Jersey approached me about writing ‘The Complete History Of Jersey (In Just Under 10 Minutes)’, I have been haunted by the prospect of failure. I wanted to do justice to my subject (one small island, half a billion years on the clock, 103,267ish careful owners) and in doing it justice, I didn’t want to leave anything out. However with just 10 minutes on the clock that’s been quite an ask. Our civilisation, such as it is, isn’t really that old, certainly not when you take the age of the island into consideration. In the six hundred million years since our first mud shales (visible at L’Etaq, just behind Faulkner Fisheries) were pushed up by vast tectonic forces, barely any of the island’s history features human beings as we’d now understand them. Still that early history of Shales, Granites and Rozel Conglomerate makes up 10 lines in my 210. years. I fall at the first hurdle: I have failed the rocks. I have at least tried to view the human history proportionately, devoting roughly half the poem to the Stone Age and . The 200,000 years of Neanderthal and Early Stone Age Humans at La Cotte is given a bit more time but I still compare that to the roughly 6000 years of farming on the island) but even then it’s more a representative snapshot than a true history. So there I go again, failing our ancestors. The other half is still unfairly weighted in favour of Human history and even more unfairly, “Civilisation”. Mind you, we have been busy the last 1000 years and there’s what else to put in. La Hougue Bie? In. The Catillon Hoard? Natch. 1204, The Civil War, The Cod Trade, the Jersey Cow, the Jersey Royal, the Tourism Boom, The Occupation? All gimmes. However that clock is still against me, and there were many, many parts of the island that will go by the wayside. I didn’t feel like I could seriously talk about our Witch Trials, for instance in such a short space of time. The two Parliamentarian governments of the island during the Civil War and Commonwealth are fascinating periods but I barely touch them. The Seven Years War isn’t mentioned despite there being seven whole years of it.

Then there are all those individual people whose lives are - geologically speaking - over in the blink of a mammoth’s eye. They barely get a look in. This means there was no time for pirate and master of black magic, Eustace the Monk who invaded Jersey three times in the 13th Century, liberating us from the French in 1204, then liberating us from the English (and considerable amounts of personal property) in 1212 and 1214. There was no time for heroes of mine like Captain Phillippe Janvrin, who saved the island from Plague by commanding his infected crew from coming ashore. A Pandemic era hero, no doubt but he’s not in my poem. There was no time for islanders of considerable bravery like surrealists Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore who slipped scraps of anti-war poetry into the pockets of Wehrmacht soldiers. No time for Louisa Gould or the countless, nameless people who save other mothers’ sons during the dark days of the Occupation. Barely anyone of them noble, foolish, wise or villainous gets a look in. One person who almost made it in was the Reverend Phillippe Falle who founded our first Public Library, the same organisation that runs to this day. He donated around two thousand of his own books for the good of his fellow islanders and he did it in 1737, about a century before anyone in the UK thought Public Libraries would be a good, public spirited idea. He’s also a distant, collateral ancestor of mine and would have sneakily allowed me to smuggle my own name into the poem. None of this helped his case. I was running out of time so the good Reverend got the chop. And that’s just the humans in my overly anthropocentric history. The animals are almost nonexistent.

The Mammoth and Woolly Rhino bones found at La Cotte get a mention but I couldn’t find any time for the arrival of our island’s chief mascot, crapaud who crawled over here just before the sea levels finally rose and cut us off from the Cotentin for good. No Crapauds and none of their fellow travellers, all the green lizards, grass snakes and moles. No time for the introduction of the rabbit in the 11th Century nor the brief existence of the Jersey fox. No time for the disappearance of the stoat since 2007 or the recent reintroduction of the Marsh Harrier in Grouville. No time for Animal celebrities Jambo the silverback who did more for Primate/Human relations than any single gorilla nor Sybil’s Gamboge, the prize bull that sold to for over a million dollars in 1919 (adjusted for inflation)). And these are just the personal failures. Everyone else in Jersey has their own idea of what our history looks like. I’ve had a military history buff knobble me about why I should have gone into more detail about the Martello Towers. A lady at Hamptonne told me I must include knitting (which I have now).

An Anarchist friend said I should include Pyotr Kropotkin who was impressed by Jersey’s modern approaches to agriculture and the holiday spent by Marx and Engles, who weren’t impressed at all. The Connetable of St Peter’s stopped me as I was filming some Civil War in front of George Carteret’s statue and helpfully informed me that Charles De Gaulle had stayed the night just behind the pub on his flight from France. No time, no time, no time! Then there are all the things happening right here, right now.

I finished the first version of the poem in 2019 and was all set to start filming in mid-2020. Then - and I don’t know if you’ve noticed - some actual History happened. This meant my rewrite had to involve the island’s recurrent outbreaks of Plague, Spanish Flu, Dysentery, Smallpox, Cholera and Malaria. Last May the French engaged us in a fishing dispute so of course that had to go in. The fight for Trans recognition and liberation is an ongoing issue and not going away any time soon. Island Identity - who funded the video - commissioned a fascinating questionnaire from the Island Policy Unit showing some of the issues affecting islanders right now. Then about mid-way through filming - the Government of Jersey selfishly dropped the 2021 Census, showing my prediction that there are 107,000ish people in Jersey to be false. That’s right. In spite of all the real Jersey folk I missed, I had invented 3000 imaginary ones. And don’t be confused, the past can shift just as quickly as the present.

There’s marvellous and revealing work being done by actual historians. In the past two years Jersey Heritage are looking into the island’s links to the Transatlantic slave trade, archaeologists like Matt Pope and Silvia Bello are telling us how Neanderthals and Early Modern Humans at La Cotte were interbreeding and how Magdelenian hunters carelessly chucked the earliest art in Britain into a field in St Saviours 18,000 years ago. All fascinating stuff but with their excavations, how long before my poem is almost entirely obsolete? When even the Past refuses to say still all you can really do is admire the scenery and appreciate that it’s constantly eroding beneath your feet. So, the work will never be done, it just stops. If the poem is successful I look forward to the next few years of being told how wrong I was.”

FILM CREDITS: