The isle of Jersey sits off the coast of France like a rocky little remnant of history, not French but not entirely British either, a place of secrets where the bankers are discreet, the sun often shines and the past is too often hidden.

The island’s long tradition of self-government has bred a hardy independence, but it has also instilled a tendency to leave unpleasantness unspoken, whether the subject is the murkier aspects of offshore banking, or wartime collaboration, or, as now, the fate of youngsters in a former children’s home.

The Channel Islands pride themselves on following their own rules. Jersey has its own banknotes, its own legislative assembly, its own language and its own way of doing things. It is not part of the UK or the EU, but a possession of the British Crown, never fully incorporated into Britain.

Many of the 90,000 Jerseymen and Jerseywomen do not consider themselves either British or French, but a breed apart, with France only 12 miles (20km) to the south, and Weymouth 100 miles to the north.

Jersey’s strange history of semi-inde-pendence dates back to its annexation by the Dukes of Normandy in the 10th century. When Duke William conquered England, the Norman lands and the English kingdom were united under one monarch, and Jersey was ruled from Rouen; when King John lost his Norman territories in 1204, the Crown retained Jersey and the other Channel islands.

Victor Hugo, who lived in exile in Jersey in the mid-19th century, called the islands “pieces of France fallen into the sea and picked up by England”. But in many ways, Jersey feels like a combination of British suburbia and ancient Norman tradition.

Jersey law is based on Norman customary law as well as English law and royal statute. The Clameur de Haro, for example, is an ancient legal right whereby an individual may appeal against a wrong being inflicted by uttering the words: “ Haro! Haro! Haro! À l’aide, mon Prince, on me fait tort.” (Come to my aid, my Prince, for someone is doing me wrong.) No one knows for certain what “Haro” mean, but the law remains technically enforceable today.

Jersey’s 53-member legislature is made up of senators, constables, deputies, the Deputy Bailiff and the Bailiff, the island’s civil leader. Justice is administered by a Royal Court, presided over by an Attorney General. The Queen is represented by a lieutenant governor.

Alongside Jersey’s ancient titles persist some splendidly peculiar traditions. When the Queen visited in 2001, for example, she was presented with two mallards chained together on a silver dish by the Seigneur of Trinity “as a symbol of the tithe he owes for his fief”. History does not relate what she did with the luckless ducks.

Measuring only 118 sq kilometres (46 sq miles), with its rugged cliffs and sandy beaches, Jersey is a place of extraordinary beauty, and a powerful tourist magnet. Most British visitors to Jersey are simultaneously struck by its familiarity, the expat ambiance, the smart bungalows and bilingual street signs, but also by the sense of apartness on the island.

Jersey is different: this is the sunniest place in the British Isles, and the only place in these islands with green lizards. It is also, statistically, speaking, one of the richest places in the world, thanks to an economy based principally on financial services and tourism. Only Bermuda and Luxembourg have a higher per capita income. People who wish to move to the island but who are not considered “essential” must demonstrate massive net worth.

Income tax is levied at 20 per cent, and there is no VAT, making Jersey a haven for tax exiles. The Jersey government cooperates with international financial law enforcement, but this remains one of the largest offshore banking centres in the world, with money, clean and, occasionally, dirty, passing through in torrents.

Jersey mints its own banknotes and coins, and even in the matter of currency, the island guards its past. Where pound coins are now the only form of that denomination in Britain, in Jersey the pound note remains ubiquitous.

Until comparatively recently, the language of the islands was Jèrriais, a Norman French patois almost equally incomprehensible to French and British ears. Only three in a hundred islanders still speak the language (although one in eight claims some knowledge) but the linguistic difference persists in a guttural accent, closer in sound to South African than French.

If there is something defensive in the Jersey manner, that may be because the island has been on the political defensive for most of the millennium, building up fortifications to defend against French invasion.

When the invasion finally came, it was German. In July 1940 German troops entered the Channel Islands unopposed, Britain having made the strategic decision that they were not worth defending. The islands thus earned the grim distinction of becoming the only parts of the British Isles to be occupied by the Nazis.

The five-year Nazi occupation had a profound, if incalculable effect on the island’s mentality. For many years, the truth about the Nazi occupation of Jersey was often suppressed or ignored, and documentary evidence hidden away. The issue of whether Jersey collaborated, cohabited with the enemy, or quietly resisted the Nazis has been fiercely debated ever since. Certainly, there was no resistance movement in the islands equivalent to that in France, but then the occupation was far heavier here, with one German soldier for every two citizens. Unlike France, with its rural hinterland, there was virtually nowhere in a small island for resisters to hide.

Some certainly did resist, a few with remarkable heroism. Others actively collaborated. There were inevitable liaisons between the invaders and some Jersey women, disdained forever after as “Jerrybags”. The most shameful aspect of the occupation was the way some officials overzealously furnished the Nazi occupiers with details of Jewish individuals, many of whom subsequently perished.

There were small signs of resistance: V-signs painted on walls, the secret listening to the BBC, the occasionally sabotaged telephone wire. But for the most part, the islanders unenthusiastically acquiesced.

The story of Jersey under occupation is not a simple morality play of good and evil, but perhaps a cautionary tale about how hard it can be to identify the dividing line between the two. In Britain, we like to assume that the British would never have submitted to occupation; the story of Jersey is proof that British subjects are quite as capable of this sort of accommodation as anyone else.

Jersey suffered horribly under occupation. D-Day bypassed the islands, leaving the occupiers, but also the islanders, stranded. “Let ’em rot,” Churchill declared. He was talking about the German troops, probably. When the islands were finally liberated, Churchill hailed the return of “our dear Channel Islands”. Some islanders, remembering how the British troops had left in 1940, wondered just how dear they were to the British.

The psychological damage inflicted by those wartime events, and the recrimination and guilt that followed, may in part explain the island’s postwar sense of separateness. As it emerged as a postwar tax-haven, Jersey developed a reputation as a place where financial secrets would be kept, where privacy would be respected, where embarrassing issues would not be raised.

The relationship between Jersey and mainland Britain remains complex and ambivalent. A recent poll found that about 68 per cent of islanders favoured full independence from Britain. Jersey is surely too rich and comfortable to follow Kos-ovo, but the sense of autonomy remains a central part of the island mentality. Angry demonstrations erupted in 1992 when the Home Secretary sacked the deputy bailiff, the second-most senior judge, for being too slow. When the subject of wartime collaboration is raised on the mainland, the island reaction tends to be one of fury.

The prospect of police officers from the mainland wading into Jersey’s more recent past, and the investigation into allegations of child abuse, will renew claims in some quarters that Jersey is being unfairly targeted and misrepresented by outsiders.

Jersey remains a place of contradictions: an island of vivid sunlit beauty, with a sometimes dark past; a place where the past is the present, and jealously preserved; a small, self-govern-ing anomaly of history, where tourists and foreign money are welcome, but questions are not.

A law unto itself

— Jersey was populated by Vikings in the 9th century; the “ey” in Jersey is a Norse suffix meaning ”island”

— In return for refuge on Jersey in 1646, Charles II granted the island’s Governor, George Carteret, land in the American colonies, which Carteret named New Jersey

— When the Channel Islands became the only British soil to be occupied by Germans, in July 1940, sterling was replaced with Reichmarks, curfews were imposed and radios were confiscated

— More than 2,600 islanders still speak the indigenous Jèrriais, or “Jersey Norman”, as their first language. This was especially useful during the Occupation as neither their German occupiers nor the French interpreters were able to understand

— Beneath the sands of the surfer beach, St Ouen’s Bay, Jersey, lies a prehistoric landscape including an entire Neolithic forest

— Although the defence of Jersey is the responsibility of the British Government, Jersey is not part of the UK nor the European Union

Sources: jerseyheritagetrust.org , societe-jersiaise.org , CIA World Fact Book, States of Jersey, jersey.com

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