On this day in 2005

Horse racing now takes place on L’Ancresse common most May Day bank holidays. That wasn’t always the case, though. It fell out of favour for 13 years between 1992 and 2005 after organisers had trouble finding runners to participate.

Guernsey Race Club sponsored a day of racing at the Les Landes course in Jersey in 2004 and, following a positive response, decided to investigate bringing the sport back to Guernsey. Work began almost right away on returning the course to the required standard. Labourers added top soil and re-seeded worn out patches, while the Guernsey Race Club applied to the Channel Islands Racing and Hunt Club for permission to host a fixture.

Successful race days

Since 2010, L’Ancresse Racecourse has been home to the Ravenscroft Channel Islands Handicap £5000. This is the largest horse-racing prize in the Channel Islands. The course itself is a one mile and one furlong-long circuit, run in a clockwise direction.

 

...and on this day in 1918

Nurse Gladys Skillett was the first British woman to give birth while incarcerated in occupied Europe.

A Guernsey resident, Skillett had been born on the island in 1918. She was deported from the Channel Islands to the internment camp at Lindele in 1942, when five months pregnant. When she entered labour she was taken to hospital at Biberach an der Riss, where she gave birth to a son called David.

Upon arrival at the maternity ward, she had been put into the same room as a local woman, Maria Koch. Although they were on opposite sides, and neither could speak the other’s language, they quickly made friends, and that friendship endured throughout and beyond the end of the war.

Friends on opposing sides

Maria Koch’s husband, who had been on duty in the Netherlands at the time of the birth, returned to see his new son, and convinced his superiors to allow him and his wife to visit Skillett at the camp. They couldn’t enter her camp, but they were able to talk through the fence, and the German family passed small gifts through the wire.

Gladys Skillett, her husband and her elder son, Colin, had been deported because her husband was English-born. According to her obituary in The Times, she had been booked on one of the last boats to leave Guernsey before the occupation began. However, when German forces bombed the harbour she had dashed to the hospital to help treat the wounded. When she returned the following morning, the last ship had sailed. She was trapped.

Along with more than 800 of her fellow islanders, she was taken to an internment camp to be used as a bargaining chip in an effort by Germany to secure the release of its own captive citizens. The bargain was never accepted, and Skillett remained at the camp until it was liberated by Allied forces on 23 April 1945.

Gladys Skillett died in February 2010.