9th November 2004

Ian Hislop’s Jersey connection revealed

Ian Hislop is best known as a team captain on the BBC’s satirical quiz, Have I Got News For You and as editor of the London-based magazine, Private Eye. However, on 9 November 2004 he was the subject of the BBC’s family history documentary series, Who Do You Think You Are. The episode uncovered his Jersey roots.

As the BBC reveals, his mother, Helen Rosemarie Beddows, “grew up on Jersey and was living there when the Nazis occupied the Channel Islands in 1940, but she rarely talked to Ian about this time, and the occupation of the Channel Islands remains in general one of the least described episodes of World War Two”.

Beddows, whom the Jersey Evening Post said was born in Rue du Galet, Millbrook, in 1929, chose to stay in Jersey throughout the occupation. She left the island following the war, but returned in the 1950s.

In advance of the programme being broadcast – when researchers were still digging into his past – Hislop travelled to Jersey to visit some locations from his family history and was interviewed on BBC Radio Jersey.