Plans to remember Vega visits from 80 years ago

COMMEMORATION of the visit of the SS Vega, which brought food parcels to starving islanders 80 years ago today, could culminate in a striking centrepiece for next year’s Liberation Day cavalcade and a permanent plaque on the spot where the vessel first berthed.

Channel Island Occupation Society founder Richard Heaume proudly displays this replica – made by the late Robert Brown – at his German Occupation Museum, and hopes to see a much larger one being taken around the island on Liberation Day. (Picture by Peter Frankland, 33882950)

There are plans to build a large replica float, for use on 9 May, of the revered ship which brought nearly half a million parcels to Guernsey in six visits from 27 December 1944.

And it is hoped that representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross will be able to attend the unveiling of a plaque at Cambridge Berth just a few days earlier, on the 80th anniversary of the ship’s last wartime visit to Guernsey, which came just as the war in Europe was coming to an end.

Contemporary medical reports and the testimony of many diarists and Occupation survivors strongly suggest that with German supply lines having been cut off by the Allied invasion of Europe, hundreds – perhaps thousands – more islanders would have died of malnutrition had the Swedish ship not delivered its cargoes of Canadian and New Zealand food parcels.

On this day in 1944, the Vega and her Swedish captain and crew were finally permitted to enter St Peter Port harbour and docked at what is now the Cambridge Berth. (ICRC archive)

Channel Islands Occupation Society founder Richard Heaume, whose German Occupation Museum features a comprehensive display about the Vega and its life-saving prisoner-of-war parcels, has approached Les Nicolles Prison for help with the construction of the cavalcade float. Prisoners there have access to workshops which have been provided through the auspices of the Creative Learning In Prison charity.

Les Nicolles’ head of education, training and regimes Dave Le Feuvre – who is also on the Clip committee – described the idea as ‘a great project for our guys to get involved with’.

‘It would be really beneficial to the prisoners and it would provide them with an opportunity to make a positive contribution to the community, which is what we’re all about,’ he said.

Clip founder and trustee Andrew Ozanne said prisoners were able to take great pride in a project which they could see through to fruition and, if somewhere suitable could be found for storing the completed float, he would be keen to see it being used in future Liberation Day celebrations.