From Vicky Toole.
SO, the States have decided that it is not the responsibility of government to provide support to sustain Jersey Heritage and secure its future.

Hamptonne and our award-winning Maritime Museum are to close. This inaction on the part of our governing body demonstrates an appalling ignorance of the needs of the populous, especially in straightened times.

What differentiates society from a gathering of apes is the reverence for and engagement in art and culture. When homo sapiens started painting stick men on cave walls and showing them to other men, civilisation was born – so, coincidentally, was the first classroom, art gallery and museum. (I refer readers to Banksy’s painting of the House of Commons for his opinion on where politicians stand with regard to this issue.)

Just to focus on the Maritime Museum for a moment: when its doors are shut, the boats and larger exhibits broken up for scrap and the collection dispersed, the Island will lose its only permanent tribute to the industry that served Jersey for nearly 300 years.

An industry that brought unprecedented wealth to the Island and enabled the beautiful cod houses to be built; colonised Canada and America’s eastern seaboard and named an American state; and, made possible those prosperous economic eras that came after, including the present one, with the lessons of enterprise and international trade learned by the shipbuilders and merchants.

It is, of course, easy for the politicians to blame the current financial climate for the lack of available finance to save the Maritime Museum, although it is no secret that Jersey Heritage have been seeking capital investment from the States since before the recent economic crisis.

Interestingly, it is not the first time that the Island’s fishing industry has been the victim of a banking meltdown. In 1886, when the Jersey Banking Company collapsed through fraud and embezzlement, Charles Robin & Co, the most important fish merchants on the Gaspé coast, was forced to close, having borrowed from the bank to tide the company over a poor fishing season.

It was the beginning of the end of the cod trade. One is left wondering whether the States’ current inaction might be the beginning of the end of the establishment’s regard for Jersey’s history.

I would urge those States Members, who wish to rise above the chattering and hooting of their peers, to heed the words of the poet Matthew Arnold when he said: ‘Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit’ and to go and acquaint themselves with the spirit of the men and women who made Jersey’s maritime and agricultural history – they don’t have much time left.

Unfortunately, I fear that, for the rest of the Chamber, the novelist Thomas Wolfe maybe right when he said: ‘You can lead a person to culture, but you can’t make them think.’
4 Maitland Barn,
Route des Petits Camps,
St Helier.