Seymour Hotels Donates Private Collection to Jersey Heritage

James Qualtrough | June 13, 2012 | 0 Comments

Fascinating documents from Jersey’s tourism past are being donated to the Jersey Archive this month. Seymour Hotels of Jersey, one of the oldest hotel groups on the Island, is delighted to be donating a number of items from its unique private business collection including some of the Merton Hotel’s earliest brochures and photographs of guests taken during the 1930s.

Seymour Hotels of Jersey has been operating as a family business in the Island’s tourism industry since 1920. Over the years the Group has been behind some of the most well-known names connected with tourism in the Island – the Merton Hotel, Mascot Motors, Pomme d’Or Hotel, Hotel de la Plage, and more recently the Watersplash and Greenhills Country Hotel and Restaurant.

During this time, the Group has collected a huge amount of interesting material including brochures, guests’ invoices, photographs, postcards, architects’ plans and commemorative gifts. In September 2011 freelance archivist, Catherine Kirby of ‘Catherine the Archivist’ was tasked with collating, de-duplicating and cataloguing this vast array of information and artifacts and housing them in one place. The duplicate material will now be donated to Jersey Heritage.

As a result of this work, the Seymour Group now has a fantastic and more easily-accessible archive whose re-packaging will ensure its preservation for the long term. The archive gives a remarkable insight into a family business that has grown over the decades, adapting to the changing fortunes of Jersey’s tourism industry.

Linda Romeril, Head of Archives and Collections at Jersey Heritage said ‘We are delighted that Seymour Hotels has decided to donate part of this collection to Jersey Heritage to be stored at the Jersey Archive. The growth of tourism is such an important part of Jersey’s history and the Seymour Group has played a vital role in the industry over the past century.’

She continued, ‘The collection will now be stored in the environmentally monitored strong rooms at the Jersey Archive and will be available for members of the public to see in our Reading Rooms. We have a large number of visitors to the Jersey Archive who came to Jersey on honeymoon in the 50s and 60s and now want to view the old brochures of the hotels that they stayed in.’

David Seymour, Managing Director of Seymour Hotels of Jersey, will be at the Jersey Archive on 19 June at 11am to present the collection to Jersey Heritage.

For full details of Jersey Heritage’s activities and events visit www.jerseyheritage.org