A FAMILY’S bid to rebuild the derelict farmhouse home they were thrown out of by Nazi forces more than 80 years ago has been spelled out in the Royal Court.
In a bid to maintain a long-held ambition to restore the Trinity property seized during the German Occupation of Jersey and subsequently destroyed while being used for military drills, the Rice family appealed to the court to quash a previous ministerial ruling denying permission for their plans.
The Royal Court hearing was attended by John Rice, whose great-grandfather Alfred had acquired Egypt Farm in 1936 as a home for his newly-married son Gordon.
Advocate Olaf Blakeley, representing Mr Rice, said the new owners had only lived in the farmhouse, which was built in the 1880s, for a few years before family members were given just 24 hours’ notice to leave by German forces.
The family subsequently moved to South Africa in the aftermath of the Second World War, having initially returned to their property and found it to have been rendered uninhabitable as a result of its use as a combat training site for occupying soldiers.
Advocate Blakeley spelled out the recent planning history of the site, with a 2015 planning application being approved only for permission to be denied in 2021 by then Environment Minister John Young following a third-party appeal by a neighbour.
The court heard that a new planning application had been lodged in July 2024, but that this had been denied, with Environment Minister Steve Luce, who took on the role from Deputy Young, then refusing an initial appeal by Mr Rice in October last year.
Advocate Blakeley said that Deputy Luce’s decision had been based on a planning inspector’s report that failed to apply the appropriate tests for whether the building counted as an existing dwelling and placed too much reliance on English case law which did not apply in Jersey.
“This was a beautiful Jersey farmhouse which was forcibly taken away from its owners and then torn apart,” he said. “If this had not happened then members of the family might still live there today after passing the home down the generations.”
Advocate James Rondel, representing the new Environment Minister, referred to the “inordinately long period” in which the farmhouse had not been lived in, describing it as “an old ruin from a bygone age”.
The decision taken by Deputy Luce had been based on a “fair reading” of the planning inspector’s report, Advocate Rondel said, saying the report was a “textbook example of independent valuative judgement” and rejecting the suggestion that circumstances relevant to the case had not been taken into account.
After presiding over a hearing that lasted just over two hours, Deputy Bailiff Mark Temple said he was reserving the court’s judgement, to be published at a later date.
