Post #060 (Mar 2021)
AD 1096, Grouchy, Cotentin Peninsular, Normandy.
Nicolas and Guillaume de Grouchy ride off on the First Crusade. They will be present at the fall of Jerusalem. By tradition, their descendants held fief at Rozel, Jersey. We know for sure that Guillaume de Gruchy (b. 1284) came to the island after the French conquest of Normandy.
Our Le Brun family wasted money claiming ancestral lands in Brittany, and it turns out that our de Gruchy family from Normandy were no less litigious. And very handy too have the court records been for the Channel Islands Family History Society. The de Gruchy family was based at La Chasse, a courthouse/farmhouse in the Trinity parish from 1362 to 1847. The house still exists – close to Gerald Durrell’s zoo – but it was remodelled when it was sold.
However, our branch only inherited the property through ten generations. Wives came from the Larbalastier, Poingdestre, Nicole, Hamptonne, and Hubert families. It was Noé (d. 1668), a (litigious) bone-setter who was the first not to live at La Chasse but he, and the next four generations, stayed close by in the parish of Trinity. Wives were from the Grossier, Le Quesne, Fiffard, Esnouf and Remon families.
Finally Helier, in 1777, was born outside Trinity! He married Anne Mauger, and their son Philippe (1804) was the first to appear in the census. By 1851, he and his wife Marie Coutanche, were a mariner and dressmaker respectively. Their elder son, Jean Philippe (1837) was apprenticed to a shipwright from age 13. He married Esther Deslandes in 1858, by which time he was a ship’s carpenter. Their first born was my gt-gt-grandmother, Esther Elisabeth, who would grow into the formidable baker we met in post #059.
Then the family abruptly dropped out of Jersey history… Esther Elisabeth’s marriage having been on Portsea Island provided the clue. It turns out that Jean Philippe – now “John P De Gruchy” – had moved to Portsmouth to work in the Royal Naval Dockyard, the biggest industrial site in the world at the time. The youngest child, Ada, was born half a mile from Dicken’s birthplace (my photo), half a year from his death (see post #021).
Legend has it that the docks were founded by Richard the Lionheart of Crusades fame. Certainly, the first warship was built in the world’s first dry dock there in 1497, followed by the Mary Rose in 1511. Nelson’s HMS Victory (my photo) was still in active service at Portsmouth in 1831. In 1843, work began on reclamation of land to allow a huge expansion to allow steam ships to be built. By 1860, wooden warships were deemed too vulnerable to and HMS Warrior, Britain’s first iron-hulled battleship was built as the pride of Queen Victoria’s fleet.
John went over to work in a new complex of interconnected basins (my photo), each of 14–22 acres (5-9 hectare), built for the huge new ships. Each basin served a different purpose: ships would proceed from the repairing basin, to the rigging basin, to the fitting-out basin, and exit from there into a new tidal basin, ready to take on fuel alongside the sizeable coaling wharf there. Many of the associated buildings, which would have been familiar to John are preserved as part of the Historic Dockyard (my photos).
Examples of ships built while John was there show how much things moved on in the late C19. HMS Calliope (1884)(pic) exemplified the late Victorian navy – she was built on the same pattern as earlier wooden ships but had a steel frame; as well as full sail rig, she had a powerful engine. HMS Devastation (1896) was low in the water with masts only for signalling purposes. Her guns were mounted in turrets, and she was armoured with iron plates 12 inches thick.
Jean and Esther had retired back to St Helier, close to the bakery, by 1901, so he just missed working on the revolutionary battleship HMS Dreadnought, with her main battery of 12 inch guns. However, many of the ships he would have worked on saw service in WWI. Warship production continued in Portsmouth until the launch of HMS Andromeda in 1967 – she was decommissioned in 2012. I last visited in 2019, to see the new aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth leaving her new home harbour for the first time (my photo).
