Down Memory Lane and up to the Fort's signal mast

I’m afraid my puerile attempt at humour – by telling her that she’d be saying the same thing to me in ten minutes – went straight over her head, her only observation being that I never take any notice of anything she says.

At the risk of incurring her wrath yet again – having forgotten one item from a lengthy shopping list this morning, another caustic comment will be the second today – I am going to repeat something I’ve written several times in the past.

What a welcome and absolutely splendid addition to the services proved through that lot in the Big House is the Jersey Archive. I know I’ve said it frequently but so what, that article last week on Pier Road – the ‘seedy side’ of the harbour area – must have brought a smile to many a face of those of my generation and older.

Of course, most of the article dealt with an era long before I was even thought of, never mind born, but the reputation of Pier Road, even in the years following the German Occupation, was such that I can distinctly recall my mother and grandmother offering each other their ‘full and frank’ views on the female occupants of certain of the houses in the road.

In addition to houses of ill repute, there were also more pub and or off licences in Pier Road than you could shake the proverbial stick at but I can only remember one – appropriately called The Regent, I think – which was to be found almost directly opposite the steps leading down to the Ordinance Yard and the back of Caledonia Place.

I can’t remember when it closed – it was some time ago – but two just around the corner in Mulcaster Street remain open, albeit under new names. In the days to which I refer the Bunch of Grapes and the Sussex were run respectively by Moggie Bertram and Stan Maiden, but I digress.

Apart from the recollections of the often salacious – well, that’s how they came across to me – contents of the conversations between my mother and grandmother, my own memories of Pier Road are dominated by what I still hold today to be probably the best fish and chip shop (and with a sit down area) in the Island.

It made the corner with Mulcaster Street and I have a feeling it was knocked down to make way for a bank and is now what is trendily called a convenience store but is to all intents and purposes a corner shop.

While on the subject of fish and chip shops, I wonder if anyone else can remember the one in the section of Burrard Street between Halkett Place and James Street. In pecking order terms, it ran Pier Road a very close second, closely followed by Emil Le Gall’s Snow Hill premises of the 1960s and the current leader of the pack at Gorey Village. Well, others may disagree but wouldn’t life be dull if we all agreed, even about chippies.

These days most people visit Pier Road to get either to its multi-storey car park or the white elephant on the hill, otherwise known as Fort Regent, and this short traipse down Memory Lane brings me nicely to what looks like yet another bit of ‘we know best’ planning nonsense from the experts just up the road at South Hill.

Hard on the heels of successive eyebrow-raising (I’m being ultra polite here) statements from those who know better than families who’ve been here for generations about things like materials used in windows, we’ve now got them telling us that the Fort Regent signal mast can’t be replaced using glass fibre as this, in the view of the planning tsars, is ‘unacceptable’.

The scenario in brief is that the last station of its kind in the British Isles is in danger of collapsing because the wood of which it is made is rotting. That lot in the big House want to shell out £180,000 to replace it and the hired help at something called Jersey Property Holdings (which I believe belongs to us) asked the planners last year if this could be done with a fibreglass version.

However, Planning – while condescendingly accepting that the replacement is ‘regarded as acceptable’ (how kind of them, seeing that the thing is likely to fall down on someone because it’s rotten) – maintain that the new mast must be made of timber.

For heaven’s sake, why? Of those who are interest in looking up at the signal station from wherever they happen to be in town to see if what used to be called the storm bucket was up (or, 50 years ago, if the mail from the United Kingdom had reached the Broad Street Post Office yet – signified, I believe, by an orange pennant), how many people could tell – or are even interested – in what it’s made of? A very small fraction of one per cent, I reckon.

Given the track record on the maintenance front of the departments under the control of our elected representatives – with much of what we own falling down around our ears because things are simply neglected – who’s to say that we won’t be repeating this replacement exercise in the not too distant future because no one’s bothered to insist on the new timbers being given licks of paint at appropriate intervals.

Young Philip Ozouf has found the £180,000 in a biscuit tin under someone’s bed and has decreed that it can be spent on replacing a bit of history. If pinstripe time is costed in to this, how long, I wonder, before that money is depleted without a thing being done? That scenario wouldn’t surprise me in the least.

And finally,

So, there are sometimes good reasons for jailing people for over a year before their trial, we’re told. I can’t think of any.