I just love how I learn something new every day on different blogs around the world.
Marianne, blogger
posted on this website 1 April 2012
John Tyrrell’s blog: Reflections on a journey to St Helena
This is probably the most frequently updated site about St Helena outside of the island’s news media. It’s the web home of energetic blogger and Napoleon-watcher John Tyrrell, and the title is misleading. It may have started out as a site for the “reflections” of an island tourist, but it has grown into much more. John keeps track of events on St Helena from the UK and comments on articles, videos and the like as they appear, as well as writing his own pieces about island history. He also monitors the island’s media on a regular basis. John’s blog has a comprehensive set of links.
Three months on St Helena
St Helena Online reports on all the big issues on St Helena, but Suzie Pearson writes about what it’s actually like to go there. She writes with a light touch about daily life on the island as exerienced on a three-month visit with her husband, an adviser on waste (winter 2012). She’s done the walks, found out what can and cannot be bought in the shops (cheddar: yes; onions: no), and even taken part in the Festival of Running half-marathon. She came third equal – with her husband. Aaah.
This is, quite possibly, the best St Helena blog of the lot. I wouldn’t know – I can’t read French. There are lots of good photographs, though, including one of a school of dolphins, near Egg Island (here). The author of this blog, Michel Dancoisne-Martineau, is highly regarded for the work he does to celebrate St Helena’s heritage, and not only that of the French properties he looks after on the island. He is also praised for involving islanders in celebrating their past, and for supporting various public initiatives on the island. The book he produced with the education department, St Helena Then and Now, contains fine pictures of the island’s many fortifications, with highly readable contemporary descriptions.
Saint Helena 15.55 South 5.43 West
John Grimshaw has been writing a historical blog of St Helena since March 2011, but he has filled its pages quickly with much that will be new to all but the most enthusiastic historian, as well as covering familiar ground such as the Signal House murder. Posts in April 2011, for instance, covered The Victorian Internet (the telegraph cable linking the Cape with England), and one of St Helena’s lesser-known political prisoners, Sayyid Khalid bin Barghash Al-Busaid, who was exiled to the island from Zanzibar after losing the shortest war in history – it lasted 40 minutes.
Friends of St Helena news page
Not a blog, strictly, but this page on the Friends website was a valuable source of stories that didn’t appear on any other websites relating to St Helena. The webmaster has had to step down for personal reasons, but it will be a site to watch once normal service is resumed.
