This Is Guernsey

By Rob Batiste

Spurs legend Len Duquemin knew too well the expression the ‘glory game’. The hot shot striker from Cobo, one of six footballing brothers, also knew tragedy, as Rob Batiste recalls in the remarkable story of one of the island’s worst travel tragedies THE flags above White Hart Lane, one of the Europe’s most famous football grounds, flew at half mast the day after one of Guernsey’s worst sea tragedies devastated the lives of the large Duquemin family.

There is a common assumption that the Le Tissier brothers, led by England international Matthew, led the way when it comes to the number of brothers capped at Guernsey level.

Indeed, Matt, Mark, Kevin and Carl do hold the record number of sibling appearances across the Muratti age-groups with nearly 50 between them.

But while they may be widely regarded as the first family of local footy, they are trumped by the six Duquemin boys, including their own legend from the pro game, ‘The Duke’.

Between 1947 and 1957 Len Duquemin made 307 appearances for Tottenham Hotspur and scored 134 goals.

He won the League Championship in 1951 having won the Second Division title the year before.

Half a century after he played his last game for the club, the boy born at Cobo remains sixth in the list of the club’s all-time goal scorers with a goals-per-game ratio of 44%.

In today’s market that would make The Duke, one of six brothers and a family of 10 born out of the former Bon Air property in Carteret Road just along from today’s doctors’ surgery, worth at rough estimates: #20m.

The saddest day of his decade at Spurs came within the first 12 months of him arriving there and with him still battling to win a regular place in the first team.

The day: Saturday 21 September 1946.

The previous morning elder brothers Sid and Frank left home at Cobo on a long-awaited holiday: a week’s break in London to put the war years behind them, the first day of which would include a visit to White Hart Lane to see their brother play against Birmingham City in a reserves game.

While Sid, the eldest of the boys, had spent the Occupation in Guernsey, Frank had spent it all serving with the RAF as part of the ground crew.

Within six months of being demobbed, he was dead.

Sixty-one years on, his body remains unburied and, only recently, at an All Saints’ service of remembrance at the Castel Church, two of his remaining sisters, Mabel Mahy and Eileen Glass, lit a candle in his memory.

Frank, or Francis as he was christened, was one of three Guernseymen drowned when a freak 60ft wave hit the ship they were travelling in off the Casquets bound for Southampton.Along with Thomas Carre and Maurice Marriette, Frank was swept off the stern of the Isle of Jersey, which had set out in almost hurricane-force winds. Thirty-six other passengers were injured and many required hospital treatment when the ship finally limped into Southampton.

Many weeks later, the remains of Carre of La Passee, St Sampson’s, were washed ashore in Cornwall.

Marriette’s body, it is thought, was also eventually recovered and, like Carre formally buried.

But for Frank there was no funeral.

He was never found.

While Len Duquemin prepared to take on Birmingham, the Evening Press extensively reported the tragedy, which came during one of the worst storms in years.

On dry land, trees were blown down or, in some cases, completely uprooted. Boats were torn from their moorings and sunk, corn crops flattened.

Yet the Isle of Jersey, with 623 passengers on board and Capt. F. E. Trout at the helm, set sail from St Peter Port for the long haul to the south coast.

Sid Duquemin, grandfather to one of the modern game’s best young footballers, North right back Steve Ozanne, was, recalls brother Lloyd and sister Eileen, forever traumatised by the experience of one moment having his brother standing alongside him, the next, gone, never to be seen again.

The elder Duquemin rarely, if ever, spoke of the tragedy, said Lloyd and Eileen this week.

It is no wonder. It’s said he too was partially washed off the steamer, only to be washed back on again.

‘Two or three of them [passengers] went over and were pulled back again,’ said Lloyd.

‘Sid never got over it,’ recalls retired jurat, Eileen.

‘We couldn’t even talk to him about it.’

He did talk to the Press on the day, though.

‘Francis and I were standing on the stern when a terrific wave came right over the top of us. I was knocked flat and when I scrambled up and looked for Frank, I could not see him. I ran to the stern and looked for him in the water, but there was no sign of him. Then I searched the ship without success.’William Carre, who lost his brother Tom, said: ‘We were near Francis Duquemin and his brother when the wave came over. I was flung right through the galley and then back again and finished up in the scuppers.

How I saved myself from going overboard I do not know. There was an awful mix-up and I could not see my brother anywhere.’

Five weeks later, 100 miles away at Halland Bay in Cornwall, Thomas Carre’s body was found and brother William was able to identify him.

But no such relief came for the Duquemins.

‘Frank had gone right through the war and come back without a mark,’ said Eileen, whose 18th birthday was on the day he died.

‘There was no funeral … no body. We had to wait so many years before he was officially declared dead,’ she added.

Back in 1946, Lloyd, then just 13, recalled he knew something serious was amiss when the phone rang.

‘I was the first to know about it because they phoned at my grandmother’s at Cobo.

‘So I had to run to the Rockmount and tell my dad to ring the harbour master’s office.

‘They said to my grandmother that something had happened at sea. Straight away we knew something was wrong,’ he said. ‘Mabel [a sister] said that was the only time she’d seen dad cry,’ recalled Eileen.

The following morning Len Duquemin was called to see the Spurs directors and told of his brother’s death. They suggested it might be better if he did not play against Birmingham.

Stunned, Len’s response was he was sure that Frank’s wish would be that he should.

While he was with the Spurs executive, the phone rang.

It was his brother Johny, back in Guernsey, asking Len to play.

‘Go in and win,’ Jonny said.

The Spurs board promised they would do anything they could to help the family with the bereavement, while their new No. 9 from Guernsey went out that afternoon and scored the winner in a 2-1 win. The Press of Monday 23 September said: ‘The crowd, who knew of his bereavement, rose to a man when Len took the field’.