Jack Baton, Dorothy and Michael

IT was in April 2007 that a picture was published in Jersey Connections showing the head and shoulders of a young man dressed in a soldier’s uniform.

‘Do you know this man?’ was the question asked by Société Jersiaise librarian Brenda Ross. She was asking the question for his granddaughter, Janice Coulthwaite, who now lives in Nottinghamshire.

Mrs Coulthwaite’s father, Michael Rogers (81), was born illegitimately, and he does not speak much about his parents, although he remains embittered by his parental history.

His own mother, Dorothy, had lived in Jersey as a young woman with her parents and two sisters, and worked at the Midland Bank in Library Place. There she had met ‘Jack’, a married man, with whom she had a liaison, and left for England when she became pregnant.

Mrs Coulthwaite had never known the surname of her paternal grandfather, but thought it might have been ‘Dupré’. She inherited a couple of pictures of him, and also some love letters that Jack had written to Dorothy. From these he knew that he had a brother, Stephen, and that there was a connection with a locksmith’s shop in the Central Market.

It was when she came to Jersey last year to try to investigate her grandfather’s name and family that she met, by chance, family history researcher Georgia Le Maistre in the library of the Société Jersiaise. She looked through the 1901 Census, found two brothers with those names, and further detailed research produced the information that enabled Mrs Coulthwaite to find out about her grandfather and her grandparents’ lives.

The surname turned out not to be Dupré, but Baton. Jack Baton owned Falle’s Locksmiths in the Central Market, in the booth now occupied by Needles and Treasures haberdashery shop, near the Beresford Street entrance closest to the Victoria Club.
Jack Baton had served in the army, and afterwards returned to live in his native Jersey.

He met Charlotte – they married in November 1922. A daughter (Marjorie) arrived in July 1923, and a second daughter (Phyllis) in March 1925. Happy family? Not quite as it seemed, because in the meantime Jack had met Dorothy Rogers. They both worked in town – perhaps they met one day when Jack had business at the bank, or she was a customer at his shop – and love blossomed.

In 1927 Dorothy became pregnant with Jack’s child. Her acquaintances and employers would not have been kind to a single mother, and so she left the Island, settling in Lancashire, from where her own parents had moved to Jersey in 1912.

She settled in Newby, Lancashire – her son, Michael, was born there in January 1928.
In Jersey, in October 1928, Jack and Charlotte had their third child, a son, whom they called Douglas.

After Dorothy left the Island, they continued to correspond, and after the birth of their son, Michael, she would still visit Jersey fairly frequently for long three-month periods – to see her family and, presumably, to re-visit Jack. The long absences of his mother was one of the things that embittered Michael’s awareness of his family history, and he passed down very little family information to his daughters, Janice and Anne.

Jack Baton also paid visits to the UK a few times, and on one of them the picture shown here was taken: ‘the family group’ – Jack, Dorothy and Michael.

Dorothy Rogers never married – she brought up Michael with her friend and housekeeper, Hilda Baines, in Newby, with whom Michael was left whenever she re-visited Jersey.

Dorothy was one of three sisters whose family (Irish by extraction) had moved to Jersey from Morecambe, Lancashire, in 1912. They lived in Queen’s Road, and later in St Saviour’s Road. Her sisters were never in robust health and they both died young in their 50s. Her sister, Ivy, was a resident in The Limes Nursing Home during the Occupation: she died there in 1944 aged 54.

Ivy wrote up in her diaries through those Occupation years until her early death, and these volumes, written in a Boots Scribbling Diary and in exercise books, were inherited by Mrs Coulthwaite, and have now been presented on permanent loan to the Société,
They are being transcribed by Société volunteer Sue Blandin, who described them as ‘social history’ of the times, the daily life of a woman in a nursing home, to whom information about the Occupation was given by her doctor and the visits of friends.

What happened to them all in later years? Jack Baton’s legitimate family remained in Jersey, and lived in the Island throughout the Occupation. He continued to run the locksmiths shop in the market until his death in 1962. In his will he offered the business to his employee, Courtland John Binet – it is not known whether he took up the offer.
His last letter to Dorothy was written just five weeks before his death. Ironically, he said that the doctor had told him that he could ‘last a few years yet’.

Jack is buried in Surville Cemetery. Now that her grandfather and his grave have been identified, Mrs Coulthwaite visits the grave during the course of her visits to Jersey.
Jack Baton’s legitimate son, Douglas, died in Islington in 1995. Marjorie also moved to near London; Phyllis married Raymond Perrier in 1951 and had a son called Graham – who later moved to Spain. Raymond’s brother, Kenneth, worked for the JEP as a printer between 1974 and 1991, and was a Jersey table tennis star. He died circa December 2002.

Dorothy and Michael stayed in Lancashire, where Michael, now a widower, still lives in Hest Bank near Morecambe. Dorothy never married, and died in 1984 at the age of 88.
There are no relations left in Jersey of the Rogers family, and only the widow of Stephen Baton’s son in Jersey, who is aware of the fact that her uncle by marriage, 82 years ago, had a liaison and a consequent child. But so much time has passed since then that there is little or no embarrassment arising from this publicity of an affair that now is no longer as secret as it was at the time.

But for Dorothy, at least, it was not ‘a liaison’ as the world then would have seen it and judged it – it was a love story.