Hemy – Albecq’s greatest artist
To any islander the scene is instantly recognisable even if Le Guet is bereft of pines. La Banquette is the 200-yard-or-so climb from Cobo, seen in the blurry distance, to the plateau at the La Giffardiere junction. The year is circa 1900 and the neighbourhood contains few properties, but within them lay a maritime artist whose life story covers Australia, Albecq, the North-East and the marble reception of one of England’s most famous football clubs. Rob Batiste reports
You want to see a coastal sea scene in all its many changing shades and shapes.
Albecq, then, is not a bad spot to start.
One moment you can stare out towards Grosse Rocque at long pinky reefs exposed at low tide and, on another day, when the winds blow and the sea turns greyish green, the big rollers come crashing in only to meet their match in a man-built wall of granite at Cobo.
If you are a painter, it is a never-ending canvas of choice.
Perhaps it was for that very reason why one of the most talented marine painters of all came to live out Albecq way just about the time this glorious photograph of La Banquette circa 1880-1900 was snapped.
Thomas Hemy was his name and while it is unlikely he is the man in the horse trap climbing up the hill towards the junction with La Giffardiere, it is perfectly feasible – although unlikely – that he is the man in the top hat chatting away to another at the top of the hill in the other picture.
It was Lookback’s resident genealogist Terry Dowinton who revealed Hemy’s previously unknown presence when he checked through the 1881 through to 1901 area censuses with regard to who lived at La Banquette, which borders Le Guet, at the turn of the century.
Just exactly which property Hemy, one of three renowned artist brothers, lived in with his wife Anne, two daughters and son, is unclear, but given that the hill was barely flanked by any properties at the period when Le Guet was just scrub and stone, it is probable that he was a very near neighbour to Charles Nurse’s Cobo Hotel at the very foot of the hill.
More than a century on the hill is flanked, certainly on the Albecq side, by some very pricey modern property.
In contrast, Hemy’s near neighbours were the most basic of Guernsey folk.
