Gran's Occupation ID card drops out of old magazine

WHEN Ivan Gallienne opened a magazine he bought at a collector’s fair he got a major shock when his grandmother’s identity card from the Occupation fell out of it.

Ivan Gallienne holding the old magazine from which his grandmother's Occupation ID fell. He bought the magazine at a collectors' fair at the Vale Douzaine Room from a collectors fair.. (Picture by Adrian Miller, 23301171)

‘I was gobsmacked,’ he said. ‘I just couldn’t believe it and my face just dropped.’

Mr Gallienne, 70, retired, is a keen collector of many things including local memorabilia, newspapers, vinyl records, postcards and stamps.

‘I don’t go to pubs and these sort of things are my passion,’ he said.

Earlier this year at a collectors’ fair at the Vale Douzaine Room he bought three magazines for £4 – a La Societe Guernesiaise publication on the Sarre family, a Channel Talk from spring 1973 and a January 1969 copy of The Lady Channel Isles which contained pictures of local scenes.

‘There must have been a couple of hundred [magazines] on the table, but I picked only three,’ he said.

It was a few months later when he opened The Lady Channel Isles that he got the shock of his life.

Along with the ID card of his grandmother, Helene Gallienne, nee Robilliard, who was born in December 1881, there were other papers including a leaflet from September 1940 which the RAF had dropped over Guernsey.

There was a newspaper cutting about the death of Alfie Gallienne, one of Mr Gallienne’s relations who was blown up in a minefield during the Occupation while attempting to go ormering, and another about two rectors.

‘I think they could have come from my Uncle Nicholas [Gallienne] who was a very religious man but I’ve no idea how they ended up in a magazine at the Vale Douzaine Room,’ said Mr Gallienne.

He believes his grandmother died when he was about 17.

‘She was a very small woman. All of our family spoke patois and she only knew two words in English – yes and no. I remember that when I worked in the fields with my father and uncle she would bring us tea in a Guernsey can and jam sandwiches to keep us going.

‘My grandmother lived in Rue de Rougeval, Torteval, which is close to where I live now and I still have some of her cutlery.’

For some 20 years Mr Gallienne drove tomato lorries and he was a minibus driver prior to his retirement.

He said the ID card was now one of his most treasured possessions. He already has a box of family-related official documents which he will add it to.