Philippe Le Sueur Mourant (1848 – 21 August 1918) was a

Jersey Jersey ( , ; nrf, Jèrri, label= Jèrriais ), officially the Bailiwick of Jersey (french: Bailliage de Jersey, links=no; Jèrriais: ), is an island country and self-governing Crown Dependency near the coast of north-west France. It is the l ...

writer who wrote in Jèrriais and French. He was born in St Saviour in 1848 and spent most of his early life working in agriculture in Newfoundland and

Lorient Lorient (; ) is a town ('' commune'') and seaport in the Morbihan department of Brittany in western France. History Prehistory and classical antiquity Beginning around 3000 BC, settlements in the area of Lorient are attested by the presen ...

. He returned to Jersey in 1880 and launched a series of stories in ''La Nouvelle Chronique de Jersey'' which took the form of letters supposedly written by ''Bram Bilo'', a naïve and self-important ex-

Centenier There is an Honorary Police ( French: Police Honorifique) force in each of the twelve parishes of Jersey. Members of the Honorary Police are elected by the voters of the parish in which they serve, and are unpaid. Honorary Police officers have ...

from St Ouen. These stories achieved great popularity (some remain classics, such as "''Bram Bilo à la vendue''" (Bram Bilo at the auction)) and a selection were republished in book form. Besides writing in Jèrriais in ''La Nouvelle Chronique de Jersey'', he also wrote in French under the pen name ''Samuel'' in ''La Chronique de Jersey''. He killed off his Bram Bilo character, and in 1911 he launched a new set of comical characters, the Pain family, in a series of Jèrriais stories in the

English language English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the ...

newspaper ''Morning News''. In contrast to the countryside character of Bram Bilo, the Pains (Peter and Laizé and their hapless daughter Lonore) represented a family moved from the country to the bustling capital of

Saint Helier St Helier (; Jèrriais: ; french: Saint-Hélier) is one of the twelve parishes of Jersey, the largest of the Channel Islands in the English Channel. St Helier has a population of 35,822 – over one-third of the total population of Jersey – ...

with its anglicised society and entertainments. Some of the Pain stories were reprinted in ''La Chronique de Jersey'', but the series subsequently transferred to the '' Evening Post''.

References

*''Eune Collection Jèrriaise'', Jersey, 2007 1848 births 1918 deaths Norman-language poets Norman-language writers Jersey writers Jersey journalists {{Jersey-bio-stub