La Société Sercquaise is fifty years old in October 2025.  Its mission is to study, preserve and enhance Sark’s natural environment and cultural heritage.  

 

It is organised into various sections, forming two broad categories.  The first category records and helps to preserve the island’s natural history: there are sections on botany, entomology, geology, ornithology and the conservation of the land and marine environment.   

 

The second encourages research into the human history of the island – including its archaeology, its more recent history including the Occupation, the various tenements and historic families, the history of tourism, the visual and written records kept by locals and visitors, and Sark’s language and songs.  

 

The French name is inspired by the societies on Guernsey and Jersey which have the same remit.  La Société Jersiaise was founded in 1873 and La Société Guernesiaise dates from 1882.  Some people find it a mouthful and prefer to call it the Sark Society or the Soc Sercq. 

 

Origins

 

The main driver behind the founding of the society in 1975 was Frank Rountree (seen above), who had retired to Sark from Mauritius in 1964 with a passion to study local and migratory bird life.  With the support of islanders including Richard Dewe and Philip Guille, he established an Ornithological Committee which enlisted the help of 200 people to list bird sightings, resulting in the publication of Birds of Sark in 1974.  

 

In the process, they saw the benefit of collecting material on other aspects of island life, and so a meeting was held in the Island Hall to form the society on 22 October 1975. By the end of 1976, there were 147 members.    

 

The new society also coordinated existing activities by three other groups of islanders.  The first group were botanists.  Visitors David McClintock and Frances le Sueur had published an initial guide to the wild flowers and ferns of Sark in 1963.  Marcia Marsden became head of the society’s botany section and worked for 25 years with McClintock, Le Sueur and Roger Veall, later the BSBI recorder for Sark, to update the guide.  She established a herbarium to collect new specimens, and left it to La Société on her death.  It now houses over 500 specimens and is updated with new finds.

 

Secondly, there had been a concern since at least the mid-1950s to preserve records of the local patois.  The idea of a Société Sercquiaise was first mooted by the Sark Correspondent of the Jersey Evening Postafter an animated discussion at the Easter Chief Pleas meeting in 1955 about whether it should hold debates in Sercquais.  It turned out that 28 of the 48 Tenants and Deputies who attended regularly were familiar with the vernacular, and that if they spoke it, the other twenty would not understand what they were saying.   

 

Thirdly, Sark weather records had been compiled since 1968, and there was a demand for a forum to process and publicise these, and to start regular well measurements to monitor the water supply, which became one of the Society’s earliest projects in 1976.

 

Early years

 

One of our Annual Reports records the society’s first public exhibition in the Island Hall in March 1980: ‘In an eye-catching mock-up of a Sark kitchen, Mrs Linda Adams and Mrs Sue Adams, dressed in traditional costume, moved from dresser to stove to table among pots and pans, oil lamps, old magazines, mail order catalogues of Edwardian clothing etc.  They then sat down to continue the knitting of a Guernsey with 11 double-ended steel needles.’  Other exhibits included old photos, a Sark Militia jacket, a gas mask, a German helmet, carefully pressed plants, slides of nesting sea-birds, and a model of an old Sark cider press.

 

Because of Sark’s small population, the society’s fortunes have naturally depended on the enthusiasm of particular individuals.  Between 1985 and 2001, it reorganised itself as a branch of La Société Guernesiaise, because it could not do as much as the founders had hoped. 

 

Even so, steered mainly by Shirley Carré, Jinny Grant, Felicity Belfield and Marcia Marsden, it continued to hold interesting meetings, organised useful research into Sark bells and cannons, and hosted annual visits by Michael and Monika Shaffer, who later produced a major work on local Lepidoptera.

 

The Heritage Room 

 

From 2002, La Société became more active again, led by Richard Axton (seen below) after he retired from Cambridge University, with Jo Birch as Secretary.  It established a Council and a new newsletter format, and moved into the current Heritage Room in 2005 once it was vacated by the girls’ school.  This gave it a proper home for its papers, pamphlets, audio archive, family history records, aerial photographs, and herbarium.  

 

In 2005-6, Jo led the application for the Gouliot headland to be designated an International Wetland Site protected under the Ramsar Convention. This was achieved in 2007 after a lot of hard work.  Together with Felicity Belfield, she later helped to organise Sark’s bid to become the world’s first Dark Sky Island.

 

Growing ambitions

 

In 2006, the society published a pamphlet to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Sark’s unique prison.  This began an increasingly ambitious publication programme, which now includes attractive books and booklets on the silver mines, the mill and the harbours, as well as Felicity Belfield’s guide to Sark Rocks, Susan Synnott’s definitive volume on Wild Flowers and Sue Daly’s lovely books on Sark marine life.  In 2009, it produced a CD of old Sark songs.

 

These were also the years when controversies arose over the Barclays’ ambitious plans for island regeneration.  In August 2007, La Société launched its Charter for Sark, in the hope that this would establish agreed ground rules for a balance between island conservation and development.  By May 2008, when the Charter was formally adopted, it had collected over a thousand signatures.  

 

La Société has never wanted to get involved in island politics, but it has a long-standing interest in conservation of the built and natural heritage, which is now gathering pace again.  An early fruit was the restoration of the Cider Barn in 2013.  Volunteers regularly clear gorse from unwanted places, and noxious dropwort from the stream bed above Creux Belet.

 

The Heritage Room opens to the public at Easter and will show our latest exhibition, as well as an improved display of some highlights from our collection of material, including our historic postcards and photos.  Why not drop in and chat to our volunteer custodians – and of course join the society!  We are always looking for new and younger members to help the work and to develop new activities of benefit to the island.