Discourse and Defiance Under Nazi Occupation: Guernsey, Channel Islands, 1940-1945 (31 page)

In fact, Wert and Salovey maintain that social comparison is a factor in all gossip. Often, the comparison is with peers, those who are similar to us in their position in life and subject to the same temptations, opportunities, successes, and failures. Other times the gossip is about someone in a position of less power and fewer resources (“downward social comparison”), or someone of greater power and in a position to access more extensive opportunities
and resources (“upward social comparison”).
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In all of these cases, gossip provides a method of mutually determining and sharing the “shoulds” and “oughts” of a society.

Perhaps even more important in understanding the role of gossip during the Occupation is to understand its second purpose as a means of control over others. It has aptly been described as a “policing device…a low-cost method of regulating members' [of a given society] actions.”
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It is for that reason that gossip becomes an important topic at this point when I am considering those who failed to acquit themselves honorably during the Occupation. By establishing an Occupation constructed through panoptical control, the German occupiers hoped to encourage the kind of lateral surveillance where civilian would spy on civilian, being rewarded for denunciations made to the authorities. Yet, the more important story of the Occupation was the marshaling of lateral surveillance by the majority population as a means of self-protection and a means to resist German control. In effect, by heightened watchfulness and the use of gossip, the Islanders were often successful in “belling the cat,” whether the threat came from above or from their peers.

As James Scott tells us, within powerless subordinates there is a high level of policing of speech and actions, and a considerable social pressure for conformity. This type of control may be “painful and often ugly,” but it is undeniably effective.
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When the common good seems to be under attack by individuals, gossip provides a discursive means of offering punishment. Because, most commonly, the gossip is malicious, it links a specific person's name with a tale of scandal or error. Dealing in local character assassination, this “stereotypical village tyranny of the majority” is more often directed against our peers and serves as the democratic voice of condemnation.
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Yet, it also serves as a critique of those immediately above us, particularly those middle managers who serve as the liaison between the powerless many and the powerful few.

In both cases, during the Occupation, gossip became a vital means for Islanders to warn their compatriots and block the actions of those whose loyalty and ethics did not measure up. In the following pages I will consider some of the ethical conundrums of these years, the many who strove to maintain their sense of morality and patriotic action, and the minority who played the conditions of the Occupation for personal gain. Throughout, my emphasis will be on the role that informal discourse played in the Islanders' collective understanding of the ethics of survival, and in their structuring of means of self-protection and resistance.

BARTER AND BLACK-MARKETEERS

One legitimate method of survival that appeared quickly during the Occupation was the ancient practice of barter, a direct swapping of goods and services without the exchange of money. This means of finding value in whatever is ready to hand may be the oldest method of surviving during times of scarcity and want. It has generally been as simple as the trade of a pair of outgrown children's shoes for a joint of meat or basket of vegetables. The willingness to part with an item is based on the greater personal value of the item to be gained. Therefore, we barter out of both our excess and our want.

This innocent form of barter is precisely the way that it began in Guernsey. Dorothy Higgs was quite the mistress of effective and legitimate barter. Although rurally based with enough land to raise hens, rabbits, goats, and to lay in a decent small garden, her positive food
situation did not protect her from want in other areas. One perpetual problem for Islanders was a lack of soap, particularly important not just in terms of hygiene and health, but key to the preservation of the few clothes that they had. For some time, Dorothy had a good store of soap (the pre-Occupation kind, not the “lump of clay” that was rationed but rarely bought). Yet she “gave it away too freely,” as was her nature, and soon was completely out of washing (laundry) soap, though still with a few small bars of personal-care soap. In May 1943, she was thrilled to obtain a full one-pound bar of washing soap in exchange for a dress length of linen.
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Any discovery of such a stray, unneeded item as this linen sent imaginations scrambling to consider its value in trade for some desired necessity. Kitty Bachmann found amusing this universal hunt for “clothes and oddments ferreted out of drawers and cupboards,” items that might have remained where they were had not the general emergency brought them to “the light of day.”
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Quite soon a barter column appeared in the
Press
where practically anything was offered, “cigarettes, roller skates, gramophone records, vases, fur coats,”
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in exchange for food. This was one of the few ways to augment the diets of those living in towns and lacking land for gardens—particularly those also lacking the prewar wealth needed to purchase food at the current exorbitant prices. Soon barter shops opened up all over Guernsey, though particularly in St. Peter Port. As a shopkeeper and small businessman himself, Bill Warry liked to paste into his scrapbook/diary ads from these establishments, more than one of which appears to have been named “Barter Mart.” The copy from one of these ads gives the gist of them all:

ROLL UP AND BE SATISFIED
and have a
SQUARE DEAL
at
BARTER MART
16, Fountain St.
Clothing Bought and Exchanged.
I also buy
GOLD
,
SOAP
and
TINNED FRUIT
, or anything
you have to sell that's of no use to
yourself. So———
ROLL UP AND DON
'
T BE SHY
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The last line of this advertisement seems to point to some hesitancy on the part of a proud and independent people, now forced to part with both “junk” and family treasures in a bid for survival.

There was more than a tinge of humor to some of the items proffered. Rev. Ord found great amusement in one ad: “A large Family Bible…quite untouched, valued at 45/- for one pound of tea.” Was this, Ord pondered, “the modern equivalent of Esau's ‘mess of pottage’?” And, besides, “who did the valuing”?
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Most common barter was on a one-to-one basis and quite satisfying on both sides. Bill Warry believed that he had received the best side of a “good deal” when he traded a quarter-pound tin of Players Navy Cut tobacco and received 15 pounds of Guernsey wheat (then valued at 8 to 10 shillings—each shilling worth 12 pennies—per pound). Bill considered such deals as “few & far between,” but the smoker with whom he was dealing was probably just as happy with the outcome.
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The same joy of the
bon marché
could be sensed in Elizabeth Doig's news that she had “bartered 3 packets Virginia
cigarettes for 10 lbs desert [
sic
] apples.”
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It is easy to see the impact of an ingrained smoking habit on the bartering process: those who could part with tobacco were in a much stronger position than those who could not.

All such barter had to be conducted with the careful caginess for which the Islanders were famous, yet soon a dark issue with barter emerged. Shop windows seemed to be full of available goods that could be obtained by a trade, generally food or tobacco.
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But where did this bounty in hard goods originate? By mid-1942, the States were attempting to crack down on barter, because the temptations surrounding the practice were simply too great for thieves. Anything stolen, whether from a shop or a private home, could be brought to a barter shop, which would end up serving as a—presumably—unknowing fence for the goods.
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Those houses of evacuees and deportees, perpetually unguarded, were picked clean. Winifred Harvey wrote at this time of some furniture stores as full of fine objets d'art, china, linen, and art sold to the Germans at very high prices. Rumor was widespread, and believable, that this was “loot” that had belonged to fine homes.
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At Christmas 1942, the States were keeping especially close watch on the shops for very good reason. During this particular Yuletide, such a spate of thefts occurred that almost all of the diarists discuss it from their various vantage points. November saw a remarkable number of robberies, most of them consisting of break-ins when a home or shop owner was conveniently away. The hairdresser, Langlois, had his house broken into when he went out with his family one December night to Central Hall.
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Similarly, the States supervisor Mr. Marquand and his wife were out for tea and came back to find their home looted of a wide variety of items, even the linens taken straight off the beds.
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Ambrose Robin long felt that some organized foreign gang was at work, because every three days or so, half a dozen houses would be broken into on the same night (with one night having ten robberies). The robbers were so highly trained that they could break in and rob a house while the occupants were asleep.
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All of this speculation reached a satisfying conclusion when the police arrested a number of men working with a French laborer named Jean Binet. Ken Lewis mentioned that Binet was only eighteen, but responsible for most of the thefts that had occurred recently.
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Dramatically, Winnie Harvey described the capture of a “Frenchman and his gang,” and referred to Binet as a “well-known international cat burglar,” a depiction somewhat at odds with his reported youth.
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More worrying was the news that Binet had evaded capture initially because he was aided by a local man. Ken could hardly believe this, finding it “incredible to think that any local person would assist foreigners in robbing his own countrymen.”
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The most disturbing aspect for Winnie Harvey was the revelation that old Harvey, Fuzzey's packer, who had helped her with her removal to Grange Terrace and was a man she had trusted with her valuables for thirty years, had “stolen wholesale.”
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After so many years as a simple workman handling the beautiful possessions of others, the temptation to fortune provided by the Occupation may have made out-and-out thievery look like simple opportunity.
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Much like barter, the black market in Guernsey was a necessary means of survival for some, an oddity that was a simple matter of choice for others, and an invitation to greed for a few. A flourishing black market erupted quickly in the Island, becoming known as the GUT (the Guernsey Underground Traffic). The ethics of the black market were not the same in mainland Britain as in the Islands, where, as discussed earlier, death from malnutrition was a persistent threat. This difference was mentioned by Kitty, who could hear over the wireless the BBC's condemnation of black-marketeers and repeated urgings for the general population to
refrain from black-market purchases. “Practised here,” she noted, “it is a far more hazardous, not to say, heroic procedure.”
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Some civilians bought directly from these traffickers, often German soldiers, who offered good prices to those willing to buy in bulk. From the soldiers' standpoint, unloading the stolen goods quickly was key. The civilian fences then sold from their bulk supplies in smaller quantities to the public, running the risk of “the dreaded knock at the door.” The fences then made a comfortable profit margin off of their own neighbors. Herein lay the ethical issue. Had the fence conducted this traffic as an attempt to provide necessities to the population, even with a small profit taken for the time consumption and considerable risk being run, then the GUT might widely have been viewed as patriotic as well as necessary. Of course, this is where greed enters the picture, and these civilian links in the black-market chain were generally in it for all the cash they could extort from their customers.
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Considering that rations were inadequate and the resources to grow or raise supplementary food uneven across Guernsey, Islanders did not generally condemn those who felt the need to buy on the black market. Necessity, especially for those aging or in bad health, made exorbitant purchases on the black market a regular occurrence. Jack Sauvary was one who readily admitted that he would spend what little he had on whatever was available. The prices were completely outrageous: 2s. for each egg (though they were generally unobtainable), 35s. per pound for butter, 6s. for flour. But Jack justified such purchases with his usual practicality: “Better a poor man alive than a rich man dead, and the majority about here seem to feel as I do. Some of course won't pay the price. I say fools if you have the dough.”
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Elizabeth Doig was another who agreed with those paying the high prices for black-market food, believing that “it keeps one in health & saves in the end doctor's bills.” Her real concern was for those without the money to supplement their diets and who were in a bad way for lack of nourishment.
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Not that Elizabeth was sanguine about the black market. She had traded a gold brooch to black-marketeers for two and a half pounds of flour (although it made her ill after eating biscuits made from it), and one pair of silk stockings for one pound of Guernsey butter.
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So when men working in the black market were caught and given five years' imprisonment, she could only say, “& they deserve it.”
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