IN the 1850s, the farmhouse at The Elms in St Mary – today the headquarters of the National Trust for Jersey – was home to a well-connected and wealthy Island family, Philippe and Susanne Perrée and their children, Philip, Susana and Elizabeth.
The Perrée family were successful ship owners and master mariners and Philippe spent some of his profits turning the house, which dates back to the 16th century, into a notable property befitting his status in the community. This involved building another storey, which included a schoolroom for his children who were educated at home by a governess.
Lessons must have focused on what was happening in the wider world as the walls of the schoolroom are decorated with cuttings from magazines and newspapers of the day, mostly the Illustrated London News. In the days before photography, news stories and accounts were illustrated with prints reproduced from hand-made detailed wood engravings.
The Illustrated London News was a weekly magazine first published in 1842. It was founded by newsagent Herbert Ingram who discovered that sales of newspapers increased when stories were accompanied with illustrations. The detail in the cuttings, carefully snipped from pages and glued to the schoolroom walls by the Perrée children, show the amount of work that went into each edition. They depict reports of battles and wars and stories about the Royal Family – not dissimilar from the mainstay reports of the modern tabloid media.
The National Trust for Jersey, which refurbished The Elms earlier this century, has conserved these cuttings, but as the property is tenanted they can only be seen on rare occasions when the house throws its doors open to the public on the annual Heritage Open Day.
Thanks to images taken by trust employee and photographer John Ovenden, the JEP can show readers an insight
into a bygone world of the newspaper industry.
