The rich heritage of St George

There have been at least four grand houses built at St George across the centuries, all within close proximity to each other. Their stories provide a valuable insight into Guernsey’s social heritage, as far back as the 16th century, and now the country estate in Castel is set to write a new chapter in its long history.

Having been listed on the open market for sale at £25m., St George could become the island’s most expensive property, a record only recently set in December when Normanville in Fosse Andre sold for £15.6m.

The earliest record of St George at the States Greffe is a contract of sale in 1571 to Nicollas de [G]Jersey, although no trace remains of that particular house. However, the ground floor walls of a two-storey manor house built by the new owner stand today, complete with an arched doorway inscribed NDG 1581, thought to be the earliest dated inscription on a domestic building in Guernsey.

As an only child, his great-granddaughter, Marie, inherited the house and extensive estate in 1638 and her marriage to Jacques Guille the same year began a family ownership that remained in the Guille name for nearly 300 years.

Their great-grandson, Jean, was only nine years old when he inherited St George upon his father’s death, on 30 April 1721. Legal steps were taken to ensure the lucrative estate was well managed until his 20th birthday, at which time he also married Elizabeth Andros, on 31 December 1732. They parented 10 children at St George and, probably by necessity as much as prestige, also had a new house built approximately 150 feet in front of the 1581 building. There was a strategic reason for this as the new house stood within Fief de la Chapelle de St George, of which Jean was now Seigneur. Living on his own seigneurie raised Jean’s status and also meant the new manor house was not subject to poulage, an ancient feudal tax on occupied houses. The older 1581 house stood on Fief St Michel and the tax would no longer be due when it became unoccupied.

Built in the 1740s and depicted in a painting by John Tobias Young, Jean and Elizabeth’s early Georgian five-bay house had a garret, or lookout on the roof similar to Sausmarez Manor in St Martin’s, built by Elizabeth’s father, Jean Andros. This provided St George with a fine view of Guernsey’s west coastline.

As his father and forefathers before him, Jean Guille became a Royal Court Jurat, an office he held for 26 years, and his business acumen was not limited to the St George estate. He was a partner in a merchant shipping enterprise and in 1750 purchased a garden at Le Bordage, just beyond Fountain Street on the periphery of St Peter Port’s expanding town. Here he built five warehouses to meet the growing demand from Guernsey’s overseas trade. These were let to tenants, apart from one that Jean retained for himself. He imported cloth for sail making and hemp for rope making at St George, employing close neighbour Pierre Le Page of La Masse to cart the finished merchandise to his warehouse at Le Bordage.

We know this from the detailed ledgers and journals both father and son kept in the management of the St George estate. Among those working for them were farm labourers and women who washed the family’s clothes and linen. They were each paid five shillings (25p) per day, plus food and beverages. Carpenters were paid £1 or 10 shillings (50p) a day according to their skill and the account book for 1718 shows two temporary labourers as being paid two shillings and sixpence (12½p) per day. These were boys called Abraham Priaulx and Pierre Nicolle, whom Jean refers to in his ledger as ‘le petit Priaulx’ and ‘le petit Nicolle’. James Duquemin, the thatcher, was paid eight shillings (40p) a day and Louis Bertaut, the cooper, £1 a day. This is a small part of the extensive findings meticulously studied and transcribed by Richard Hocart in two reports on the St George estate for La Societe.

Tax records of the day show the estate as the largest and most profitable in the Castel parish. Such was the extent of the grounds, approximately twice the size of the 35 acres they amount to today, that deer roamed the woods, as noted in the 18th century diary of Charles Mollet, a neighbour who on Wednesday 2 November 1774 wrote, ‘…and afterwards we joined the company and hunted one of the cerfs (stags) belonging to Mr de St George [Jean Guille].’

Jean Guille died on 9 May 1778 and by 1824, within 80 years of his and Elizabeth Guille’s house being built, it was demolished by their son, also named Jean and a future Guernsey Bailiff, who had the magnificent building we see today constructed closer to the 1581 house. According to John McCormack, it equals any of the workmanship to be found in larger houses of the Norman-Breton borders.

St George was Guernsey’s official residence for two successive Lt-Governors, between 1883 and 1889, including Lt-General John Elkington, whose untimely death three years into office was marked with a military funeral and grand procession from St George for his burial at St Matthew’s Church, near Le Guet.

Some will remember the property as St George Country Hotel, during the early 1960s, however since 2007 the house and indeed whole estate have been transformed by the current owners in a four-year programme of works that involved the house being totally renovated, remodelled and extended, along with the various ancillary dwellings and numerous offices and outbuildings including the 1581 house, which now has a thatched roof with eyebrow style dormer windows.

Estate agents Savills say that due to the scale of the property, it takes the best part of a day to view every part of it – not, sadly, that it’s open to public viewing.