On this day in 1948

The election of 1948 was a momentous occasion for two reasons. Principally, it was the first election to take place after the Occupation. However, it was also the first at which a woman was elected to sit in the Chamber. The successful candidate was Ivy Forster.

The first woman to attempt to stand for election as a Deputy was Caroline Trachy, who was proposed and seconded for a seat for St Helier in December 1922, only to be disqualified purely on account of her gender. Thus, it was Ivy Forster, a quarter of a century later, who became the island’s first female deputy.

A long wait

Indeed, Forster had been encouraged to stand by the Bailiff after a successful spell as a public speaker in the aftermath of the occupation. She stood for election a further two times – in 1951 and 1954 – but, although she successfully defended her seat at the first of those, it was third time unlucky in 1954.

However, 1954 wasn’t entirely bad news for Jersey’s female representatives as Gwyneth Huelin was elected a Senator in St Brelade.

Ivy Forster will be remembered as more than just Jersey’s first female Deputy, though. During the occupation she and her sister Louisa Gould sheltered escaped Russian forced labourers. When Louisa was betrayed by a neighbour, Ivy took in Feodor Buryi, whom Gould had been sheltering, even though Ivy and her husband were already accommodating Grigori Koslov in their attic. Ivy, Louisa, and their brother, Harold Druillenac, all stood trial for having sheltered the escaped workers, and Louisa and Harold were both sent to concentration camps in mainland Europe. Ivy whom a doctor testified was suffering from tuberculosis at the time of her conviction, was allowed to serve her sentence in Jersey.

 

...and on this day in 1954

Born in Nantes in 1894, Claude Cahun was a French photographer and sculptor, much of whose work challenges traditional concepts of gender. Although born female and named Lucy Schwob by her parents, she identified as gender neutral.

She was educated in Surrey and at the Sorbonne in Paris before taking up the self-portrait photography that would dominate the rest of her artistic life. In 1937 she moved to Jersey with her step-sister and partner Marcel Moore.

Active in the Resistance

Although born to a Jewish family, they remained throughout the occupation during which they actively engaged in resistance activities. As part of this, they produced anti-German fliers and copied out BBC reports which they slipped into German soldiers’ pockets. This led to their arrest, trial, and conviction. Both were sentenced to death, but the sentence was never carried out before the island was liberated.

She is buried in St Brelade’s churchyard where she shares a grave with Moore, who died in 1972. The names on their gravestone are those they were given at birth: Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob and Suzanne Alberte Malherbe.

 

...and on this day in 2016

When a de Havilland Dash 8 took off from Manchester to Jersey with four crew and 23 passengers aboard, nobody expected anything other than a routine flight. They were wrong. As it climbed to 25,000 feet, the aircraft depressurised and oxygen masks were deployed. The crew started a steep descent to 10,000 feet and put out a Mayday call. At that altitude, the flight continued to Jersey and the passengers disembarked uninjured. However, an investigation revealed that despite safely completing the flight, the cockpit crew had been affected by the lack of oxygen caused by the depressurisation.

As reported by the Air Accidents Investigation Branch, “both crew describe feeling slightly lightheaded. In the commander’s own analysis, after the event, he realised that he was having difficulty completing the Technical Log, which was a relatively simple task and therefore considered that he was already slightly hypoxic when the pressurisation warning occurred.”