This Is Guernsey

By Rob Batiste

Herbie Saunders, one of the area’s many colourful characters. (0602992)

VISITING Grandes Rocques beach in the 1960s offered so much more than it does these days.

The dunes offered countless areas of natural protection for beachgoers, you could buy a tea basket from the kiosk and if you could not get a deck chair or windbreak from there, then there was always little Herbie Sanders, who would hobble about hiring out chairs and whoopie-floats that provided the adventurous with dangerous opportunities to explore the deep bay between the two lines of rocks which lead out to the Grosse Rocque.

Herbie was quite a character, one still fondly remembered by the Domailles.

To a young Joyce Ogier, the beach was his and she let her children know it.

‘I’d say [to them]: “If you don’t wash you can’t go on Herbie’s beach”,’ she said. ‘It seemed he was always there in the summer. He was as good as gold.’

The floats were, one seems to recall, a little on the heavy side, likely to provide you with a splinter in the foot and you were lucky to stay afloat, such was the amount of water they would take on board.

Hop-along-Herbie, despite his physical handicap and the need to keep his takings satchel dry, was very adept himself.

‘He used to go out pedalling himself but he’d go stood up,’ says Fred.

‘He would have his moneybag on the side of him. It was a surprise he didn’t fall in.’

It must have been a nice little earner because he walked to and from his home in the Ramee every day to do it. And when he did catch a bus, it’s said he would get off a stop early to avoid paying a little more as it was a fare stage at the one closest to his house.

It enabled him, too, to treat himself to a cruise, which had a profound affect on his life.

His spell on the Love Boat won him the affections of a far younger, attractive lady more suited to hula-hooping and garlands of flowers around her neck than living in the Ramee.

But, nevertheless, the lady from the South Pacific – probably Tonga – saw enough in Herbie to come back with him to the Ramee and spend his money.

Joyce is clear in what happened.

‘They married and she led him a merry dance. There was a lot of a to-do.’

Fred said: ‘My dad told him he was a bloody old fool.’

Local author George Torode briefly featured Herbie in one of his books on local life.

George is unsure whether the Anglo-Pacific Oceanic alliance ever got as far as the tying-the-knot stage, but agrees that she saw poor old Herbie coming.

‘She spent most evenings drinking with the men down at the Rockmount while he was at home.’

Sadly, his Pacific lady was nowhere to be seen when, in 1995, aged 86 and suffering from dementia with no immediate family recorded in the official death notice, the man originally from the Rhonda Valley, south Wales, passed away in Summerland Nursing Home.

Herbie was one of just many colourful characters associated with the area over the ever-distant decades.

Fred will talk amusingly about old ‘Fif’ Mahy the fisherman, ‘Charger’ Le Sauvage and, most funny of all, a chap called ‘Jubilee Up’.

And why Jubilee Up?

‘Because he was always jumping.

He never stood still – he was like a puppet,’ said Fred. ‘I can close my eyes and still see him coming down the Grandes Rocques road.’

Jubilee was from an era when ‘sprees’ were a common thing among the hard-working men.

One such man who liked a spree was Joyce’s uncle Alfred, or Growbox, as he was known.

When a sizzled Growbox had obviously had enough at the Grandes Rocques, he would be lifted aboard his trap and his pony [Tommy] would quietly take him home, the full length of Grandes Rocques road away.

One of the best Grandes Rocques tales is of the drink-drive fugitive who anchored his boat in the bay, rowed ashore and walked the short distance to the Rockmount for a few beers with his old mates.

Alas, the constabulary got to know he was at the Rockie and duly arrived to make an arrest.

At this point, the accused convinced the officers that he would have to collect his dog aboard his boat.

The fools fell for it.

With the officers in tow and aboard his dinghy, the man rowed out to his fishing boat.

Whether it was sheer impulse or a crafty plan, on reaching his boat the fugitive jumped aboard, kicked the dinghy away and in a flash had the engine going, ripped the anchorage away and headed off to the UK, where he still lives today.