Tag Archives: Guernsey

STOP LAUGHING, this is serious. Jerbourg Hotel #2

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No laughing matter, and we tried not to.

I was helping out in the posh private lounge bar of the Jerbourg Hotel one day, a humble servant to the few misguided residents. The boss usually served the bar in here, leaving me (thankfully) to deal with the riotous riff-raff in the huge public lounge, where the money was made.

The Jerbourg hotel was old and rather stylish in those days, say fifty years ago, a bit run-down, and furnished in the dated ‘fifties way; lots of Laminex, vinyl tiles, boring light-fittings, steel-and-plastic furniture. But the rooms were spacious with massive windows, and class that was hard to defile.

The seating was ubiquitous throughout: those steel-and-woven-plastic circular things on thin, splayed, steel legs. Of the Era; once ‘modern’, but convenient hotel-ware because of their stackability. They had round cushions like pancakes which also stacked conveniently.

That day, in the private bar, was a very large woman. I mean big, even by today’s standard. She directed me to carry her cocktail to a nearby table of the matching steel-legged variety. There were a few other customers, looking on with prurient interest at her vastness. I instantly perceived the peril ahead, but was powerless to prevent it, hypnotised by disaster, as humans are.

I couldn’t stop her, and if I had, her outrage would have been unbearable. So she backed up to the seat, lowered herself as far as the tendons in her massive legs would allow and fell the remaining six inches.

And kept falling, the splayed steel legs continued splaying as she descended, wrapping the circular frame tightly around her arms and body in a perfect cage. There she lay, bound and supine, on the shiny vinyl.

We all saw it happen as if in slow motion. The room was soundless and motionless for long seconds. The prurient fascination held us spell-bound and briefly expressionless, until excruciatingly-suppressed laughter took over. The huge woman lay silent, trapped, dignity defiled. The pain of maintaining a straight face unbearable.

There was no getting the chair off her while she was on the ground; her massive weight kept the folded steel in position. It took six blokes to stand her upright, with no safe place to put hands for the effort, or to keep her legs from folding at the knees. Those little battery angle-grinders were not yet invented.

Now vertical, she glared, stony-faced, mute, caged, unengaged. Images of mediaeval torture flashed. And experimental asylum treatment. We paused. Considered the situation from a practical, engineering standpoint, humour dismissed temporarily, while she stood, hating us.

Two men to hold her steady. Two more on each side. One leg each on the floor, one leg each bracing and pushing, two pairs of arms pulling the steel apart.

The enveloping device was straightened.  Released, she staggered wordlessly out of the bar, poor woman, to deafening silence. I did later hear talk of suing the hotel, but such was the laughter finally released (two releases) that I’m sure sense prevailed.

The boss bought a round as the giggling dissipated and I removed the mangled chair from the room.  I kept it for a while to illustrate the story to friends. As red faces returned to their normal colour, a couple of men left the bar and we heard a roar of laughter in the corridor, which set us all off again.

The large person quit the hotel immediately, and I believe no mention was made of an unpaid bill.

Rollo Sherwill

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ROLLO SHERWILL

Carpentry, joinery, cabinet-making and building workshop, Guernsey, Channel Islands.

I was, still am, a potterer. On the beautiful island of Guernsey, fifty-odd years ago, I pottered at cafes and restaurants, and bar-tending (see blog). My pottering had produced a very small excess of funds with which I bought a very small, old carvel fishing boat, with a very small motor, the sort you see in little hire putputs.

In my ignorance I took this little craft and built a little cabin on it, with dreams of a bunk, and a stove, and a mast and sails. Crazy, but I was a kid, and I wanted to sail, and put down crab pots, and fish with spinners for mackerel. 

The jobs were completed; the boat looked so cute with its gaff-rig and jib, and staysail. Innocently, I put down my ten home-made crab pots in the waters around St Peter Port, with marked floats, all secure. The next day all had vanished; cut, or stolen, by real fishermen. But that’s another story, in which I must welcome a treasured friend, Vic Sanderson. In fact, there are dozens of Guernsey stories, encompassing the entire island, from surfing at Vazon, gardening at a French name I forget, a new baby at Les Canichers, a band at Jerbourg, a wreck of copra, me a tour guide of no skill, alcoholic spirits in tea-pots, a Citroen light 15, the awful seizing of two new marine engines, beach parties, a bakery odyssey, The Hairy Mouse; in fact a life of concentrated events., each one of which would run for pages, opening cans of worms on the way.

Back to the plot; one day I was there on the careening-hard, working on my nautical mission, with tools and marine-ply arranged around the tiny craft (named Tea-pot, by the way), when I was approached by a handsome, slightly older stranger. He introduced himself to the semi-naked hippy (always ready for a swim) as Rollo, and politely inquired as to whether I was a carpenter.

A trade! I wish! I was a practical baby, and loved making things; then there was Art School, (but that’s another story, totally). But a trade! A means of employment! I had to admit to Rollo, no, no carpenter. But he persisted: you look like you know what you’re doing……(the tools were lying around).

Would you like a job? He said; well, actually, yes, I would: things had ground to a stop, forcibly ejected, I was, from a most successful cafe I was running whilst the owner was overseas. He claimed his territory back and immediately went broke. Ha! Rollo thought I could handle the job he was working on,so……

It was the conversion of a tunnel, excavated by the invading German army, into an aquarium. Yes…….not a venture that I would have deemed either viable or lucrative, but Work, Employment. I started the next day, keen and capable.

Rollo Sherwill was the most kind of bosses, a mine of knowledge in the trade into which I had been gratefully inducted. His workshop was the most delightful environment, his staff all supportive gentlemen, his work most varied and interesting, and sometimes curious, and esoteric. There was no job of either delicacy, or complexity, or scale, which he wouldn’t tackle. The learning experience for me was the most valuable asset, treasured for the rest of my life.

I was, unfortunately, too young to be aware and suitably grateful for my invaluable experience with Rollo. I should have stayed; possibly have become a fixture in his enterprise, possibly to have achieved residency status on that island paradise, a good job, and maybe good pay later, and and maybe respect. Without doubt, for the rest of my life I owe my small skill to the trust and patience of Rollo Sherwill.

But I met and drank with two Liverpool blokes, who were horrified at my tiny wages, with wife and two children now to support. There was a project on a huge building site, for which they were looking for a cabinet-maker. I applied: it was a doddle, compared with our exacting standards, and got the job. The Scouse lads said I would earn twice as much.

Telling Rollo was awful. I felt, and was, a complete ungrateful prick. He offered to double my wages, but it was too late. I know I should have stayed, but the decision was made. I offered to stay as long as was necessary to finish the work I was on, and while he found a replacement, but it was over. And I both regret and understand my decision today.

Briefly, my new job was a price on making small bedroom drawer units for almost a hundred new units. I was given a unit as workshop, and I supplied a materials list, which was enormous (eight drawers per bedroom, two bedrooms per unit, 100 units). I needed two extra units for storage.

Having experience of mass-production, I set to work cutting every individual part from my huge stock, a job that took weeks, with no pay: the lads were horrified. But once the assembly started the little drawer-units came together at twenty a day, and accelerating, and were carried out of my workshop to be fitted.

My final pay was enormous, beyond all expectation, and salved my conscience slightly with regard to Rollo. But it is to him that I owe my skill at the trade, if I have any, and it is to him that I dedicated my book ‘The Building of the Queensland House’.

And without Rollo’s support we lost our residency status on the island of Guernsey, being just a few months short of the cut-off period of five years. Perhaps we had a case, but we were too young to know. Paradise lost, back to bleak England, then to bright Australia, carrying Rollo’s wonderful tuition with me.

Thanks, Rollo Sherwill, for starting a young idiot on the way to a lifetime of skill, a career, and solvency. (So far……)

John Weysome

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John Weysome, The Jerbourg Hotel, Guernsey.

Long, long ago

THE BOSS AND THE TILL. (A till is now called ‘cash register’)

Every seven years or so, I read, 98% of the cells of our bodies are replaced, except for just a few long-lasting ones in our brains. So John Weysom, my patient boss, and myself, are many times different folk since the days I was his barman. But this memory lingers.

John was a young bloke in those days, and had inherited the old hotel from the family, I believe, but his hopes had been elsewhere, perhaps, when our lives briefly touched. He hired me as a barman for the deserted and enormous lounge, with its huge bar and windows sand-blasted opaque from the driving salt air of that beautiful promontory, on that beautiful island.

I was a strange, annoying child, given to periods of silent introspection, a gloom which settled over me for days, sometimes, when it became painfully difficult to converse normally with people. It was an illness which afflicted me for decades, gradually fading with age. At the time a source of irritation and teasing from my friends: Andy’s in one of his moods.  I’d recover to become normal after a while, usually a day or two. No idea of the cause.

John Weysome gave me a talking-to, one day, when we were doing the barman’s inevitable chore, sorting thousands of empty bottles. He accused me of ‘dumb insolence’, having caught me in one of my ‘periods’. I had no defense to offer, not understanding my condition either. This upset me, and him, considerably, but I became an asset in the bar; it was gratifying to have the responsibility and the freedom to run it as I wished.

But this is a story of a different kind. Time went past. My job at the Jerbourg Hotel was my project, too, and every idea I had attracted more young customers, and I was allowed to choose helpers behind the bar, and bands for the room, and decorations and themes, and design cocktails, and order special beers. It was a great job, and I’m sure the boss was pleased, until one day……..

The five of us barpersons (two were girls) were ordered to assemble, one day before opening time. Bear in mind we were all relative amateurs at the job. Highly successful amateurs. The bar was no doubt the most successful on the island at that time; we had fun, we worked hard, we earned our wages, but, like our boss, we were not trained, we were too busy always to run an orderly business: the empty bottle situation, for example. There was no time or labour to sort, pack, and return them, just a huge heap, and growing daily.

We realised that there was some trouble, some threat, but what? John confronted us: someone was robbing the bar. We had one week to produce the culprit. After which, with no result, we were all sacked, no references.

Well, we were all mates, and good kids, relatively, and we knew none of us was stealing, and had no idea what action to take. It really was a strange situation, and depressing, to be accused, and threatened, and it put a cloud over what had until then been a joyful job. Today, the way we ran that bar would be called a criminal outrage, an accounting nightmare. But there was no bar more successful. For example, shortly after I was hired, John Weysome said, Andy, if you’ve got everything prepared and ready in the bar, don’t try to look busy; sit down, have a drink, read the paper, relax, be ready for the first customers! What? Imagine a boss saying that today! But John, like us, was a gifted amateur.

The dreaded week went past without confrontation or sackings, and we began to relax, though wary. Undoubtedly there was a problem big enough to upset even John’s accounting, but what? We were still sure of our group innocence. Towards the end of the second week after accusation, and after a staggeringly busy night, I was doing my lonely job of emptying the tills of their damp, packed notes and change; such crude accounting: it all went into a bag for John to sort out. The old pub tills were thrashed every night in a hopelessly amateur way, the drawers hard to close, and stay closed, in the frantic rush.

In the empty, now-quiet bar, I had a beer and tried to work out how to make the till-drawers work better; perhaps they needed oiling? Now any normal bar-person would not believe how stupid we all were, how unbelievably dopey, the boss included.

I got on eye-level with one of the tills and worked the drawer. It WAS really hard to close without violent slamming. Somehow there must be a way to get it out to clean and adjust. And of course I found the little recessed knobs on the sides, at the back, that released the drawer, and I found the hundreds and hundreds of tight-packed notes, two-inch thick wads compressed and added to each frantic night. Each till was the same. There were thousands of pounds stacked away in that bar. No-one had ever taken out the drawers.

Before work next day I called John to meet me in the bar early, to tell him I had found the thief. I was behind the counter, he at the bar. Neither of us spoke, he waited for me, I silently sprang the first empty till drawer, put it on the counter, reached into the cavity and gathered the solid block of notes in my fingers and placed it next to the drawer.

Then the second drawer, then the others. The sheer volume of compact cash really was astounding. John was astounded. We packed up the cash, he shook my hand, and with teary eyes said he’d see us all later. He was a romantic bugger, certainly not your typical publican, obviously: didn’t even know the till-drawers were removable.

When the others arrived I told them the story, and that John wanted us to stay behind for a while after the bar closed that night. Apologies, bonuses, and a rise in pay for all of us, and the bar at the Jerbourg Hotel powered on. An enriching experience for all concerned.