LIFE ON LONELY CHANNEL ISLE

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 80, 28 December 1929, Page 27

LIFE ON LONELY CHANNEL ISLE

WOMAN RULER TO BE MARRIED

For two years Mrs. Dudley Beaumont, a widow, has reigned as Dame of the. little Channel Island of Sark, eight miles north-west of Guernsey, succeeding the late Seigneur, her father, Mr. William Collings. Mrs. Beaumont’s burdens are not light, and she has but a small staff to assist her. Schemes of sanitation, school examinations, road repairs, harbour construction, fishery laws, tithes, and taxes are all features which she has to master in detail and attend to personally. , The Income of Mrs. Beaumont is derived from ancient seigneurial duse consisting chiefly of taxation in kind. There is a tax which must be paid in fowls by each house according to the number of its chimneys. None but the dame herself may keep a female dog, or- pigeons. No property may be bought or sold without her consent, and she receives a tax on every sale to the value of one-thirteenth part of the purchase price. There is no crime in the island, and the small prison is perpetually idle. Most of the people can speak English, but their native tongue is a pure descendant of the old Norman French.

Mrs. Beaumont, or,'to give her official title, “Dame de Sark,” is engaged to be married to Mr. Robert Woodward Hathaway, of London. The island boasts the smallest Parliament in,the Empire, and, although most of the 600 inhabitants know English, the language in everyday use is a French patois of Norman origin. When it meets three times a year, Mrs. Beaumont presides over the Parliament, known as Chief Pleas, while all dues and taxes are paid to her. Mrs. Beaumont, whose husband died in 1918, was married when she was 17. She has six children, the eldest of her sons being in the air force. Her daughters are named Amice, Douce and Imehanne. The daughter Amice is married to Lieut. Cantan, of the' Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry. According to legend, one of the rooms of her seigueurial island home is haunted.