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One of the twelve parishes of the Channel Island of Jersey, St. Saviour is nearly landlocked, having only a small piece of access to the sea at Le Dicq. It borders St. Helier, Trinity, St. Martin, Grouville, and St. Clement.

It is now home to the headquarters of the Jersey Evening Post, a local newspaper which is published six days a week. For 87 years, it was named the Evening Post and it was printed as a broadsheet. But in 1977. it went to tabloid paper. The first issue was published in the summer of 1890. During the German occupation, 1940 through 1945, the paper continued, though it was supervised and censored rigidly. The name of the paper was changed to Jersey Evening Post in 1967, and it moved from Saint Helier to Saint Saviour in 1977.

Saint Saviour Parish Church, which was around as early as 1087, is dedication to Saint Saviour of the Thorn. The church is stone vaulted and has a tiled roof as well as a stair turret and a parapet. Outside, there were four gargoyles made of granite from Chausey. There are only three now, the fourth having been badly damaged some time ago.

The Reverend William Corbet Le Breton, was named Rector of Saint Saviour, moved into the rectory along with his wife Emily who was by all accounts a beautiful woman, and their family in 1850 and soon was also named Dean of Jersey. On October 13, 1853, Emily bore him a girl named Emile Charlotte whose friends and family called her Lillie beginning at an early age.

Altogether, Lillie had five older brothers and one younger brother. She was a handful and her governess, who was forever frustrated with the fact that she simply could not teach the child, left, and Lillie's parents decided she would be educated by her brothers' tutor. Due to this situation, Lillie was far more educated than most women of the day.

In 1874, when she was 20 years old, she married Irish landowner Edward Langtry, who was 26 at the time. The wedding was in Saint Saviour's Parish Church where she grew up. Lillie told her new husband that she wanted to be away from Saint Saviour and, in fact, from the Channel Islands altogether. They ended up in Belgravia, London.

Early in the marriage, Edward would go off for long periods of time leaving Lillie alone. When he was around, they frequented high society parties and dinners, and she always attracted much attention. At one party, artist Frank Miles sketched several pictures of her which would eventually make popular postcards. The famous artist Sir John Everett Millais painted a famous portrait of Lillie. The portrait popularized her nickname Jersey Lily.

Albert Edward Prince of Wales, also called Edward VII or Bertie, was infatuated with her, and in the spring of 1877, he invited Lillie and Edward to a dinner party. He arranged for Lillie to sit next to him and for Edward to be seated at the far end of the table. Despite his marriage to Princess Alexandra and despite their six children, they began an affair which lasted until June of 1880. She cultivated friendships with both George Bernard Shaw Oscar Wilde

Her marriage and the relationship with her husband Edward had grown cold and distant since he got wind of the affair with the prince. Lillie had overlapping affairs, this time with Prince Louis of Battenberg, nephew of Prince Edward beginning in April of 1879, and another one with a long-term friend named Arthur Clarence Jones.

Meanwhile, her father William had become notorious for his womanising, and his wife left him for that reason. He was run out of Jersey because of his affairs and returned to London shortly thereafter in 1880 and died in 1888.

Lillie became pregnant in 1880, and the baby was definitely not husband Edward's. She let Prince Louis of Battenberg believe the baby was his. The prince came clean with his parents, explaining that he was about to become a father of the unwed kind. His parents had him assigned to HMS Inconstant, a warship, clearing the way for Lillie to move to Paris with Arthur Jones. She gave birth to a daughter named Jeanne Marie was brought up as Lillie's niece.

Her friend Oscar Wilde suggest she begin an acting career, and she did. In December of 1881, her debut in "She Stoops to Conquer" was scheduled in front of London playgoers. The play was a great success. To the public, at least. The reviewers hated her performances. She became an American citizen in 1897 and divorced her husband Edward Langtry and bought a winery in California and began breeding horses. Edward died shortly after the divorce.

In 1897, Lillie married a much younger man, Hugo Gerald de Bath in St. Saviour. They moved to Monte Carlo, where they lived a very short distance from each other. They saw each other when she asked him to accompany her to social gatherings or an occasional tryst. She died in 1929 and is buried in the family grave in the churchyard in Saint Saviour.

 

 

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