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The Royal Guernsey Light Infantry Charitable Trust will finally welcome French exchange students this month following years of pandemic disruption, with Guernsey students heading to France the following week.
The French will arrive in the island on Monday 24 April with a packed cultural itinerary seeing them and their teachers through until the Friday.
Guernsey students will set off for their trip the following Monday, travelling five hours by road where they will visit battlefields and the RGLI memorial. Masnieres is in the Nord department of Northern France.
The Trust has worked with Blanchelande College and Rotary Club of Guernsey to bring the initiative to life, in memory of those who were lost in tragedies during the Great War.
All visitors are being put up with their respective host families between the jurisdictions.
Pictured: The RGLI memorial in France.
On Tuesday they will tour Castle Cornet and the RGLI Regimental Museum alongside members of the museum service. The noon gun will be fired by one lucky student before a reception with members of the Committee for Education, Sport & Culture.
A tour of Hauteville House will follow, delivered by the Honorary French Consul Odile Balnchett. The twinning document between Masnieres and St. Peter Port was signed here in November 2019. The group will then move onto Government House to learn of the Bailiwick’s link to the Crown.
Then a visit to the German Naval Headquarters Bunker to see evidence of the Second World War Occupation will round out the day.
On Wednesday the students will take part in lessons at Blanchelande with their hosts before heading to town for lunch. Annette Henry from Rotary Club of Guernsey will lead a walking history tour of St. Peter Port culminating at the RGLI memorial in the Sunken Garden – a sister memorial to one placed at Les Rues Vertes in Masnieres.
Art for Guernsey’s new Mill Street Gallery will be explored with a workshop planned, before the group embark on an island tour calling at Fort Grey’s shipwreck museum.
Tea will be enjoyed at Cobo chip shop alongside members of the RGLI Memorial Ride who visit the Guernsey regiment memorial each year to lay wreathes.
On Thursday a Herm trip is scheduled, sponsored by Armstrong Resilience. Rotary Club member Simon Wood will provide a guided tour in French, and the students can then enjoy free time on the island. They depart on the morning of 28 April.
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