Citizen Fixit on Sark

Until last week, the tiny (pop. 570) Channel Island of Sark had held only one general election in the 385 years since Queen Elizabeth granted it to Helier de Carteret, Seigneur of St. Ouen in Jersey. Sark's affairs have been administered by a hereditary seigneur and a Chief Pleas (parliament) composed of hereditary landholders. Sark's one gesture toward democracy came in 1922 when the island government took the drastic step of adding twelve elected deputies to its 34-man parliament. Once elected, the new deputies settled into their seats and Sark settled happily back into its old peaceful ways.

Then Henry Head came to the island. Henry was a bustling, 5 ft. 6 in. insurance salesman from nearby Guernsey. Three years ago he married a Sark woman of property. In feudal Sark, her properties and duties automatically became his, and Henry found himself a member of Sark's parliament. At first he refused to take his seat. "Sark," he said churlishly, "has done without me for 500 years. It can do without me now." Then, finding himself stuck with the job, he plunged deep into Sarkese law. He soon discovered among other things that the very parliament in which he sat was illegally constituted: a law passed in 1925 requiring that all elected members of parliament be ratepayers had never been approved by Britain's Privy Council and hence was invalid. Henry got Sark's parliament, Britain's Privy Council and the hereditary Dame of Sark to call another election.

Last week, at Henry's insistence, Sark trooped to the polls for the second election in its history. Henry himself had whipped up a New Brigade Party, consisting largely of his wife and various employees at the local Stock's Hotel, to oppose the old-guard deputies. "It's a disgrace, a perfect disgrace," muttered one oldtimer, "holding the island up to ridicule." In the local greystone schoolhouse (which doubles as the parliament chamber), he and 190-odd other voters of Sark soon made their indignation evident on the ballot. Not one of Henry Head's New Brigade Party was elected.

Next morning the new parliament convened and with almost unanimous voice appointed meddlesome Henry Head a constable of Sark--a gesture of pure revenge, since Sark's two constables are unpaid and may not resign or refuse their jobs under severe penalty of law. Said Henry Head: "I object."

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