About

John Nettles, born 1942, is a west country actor who came to Jersey in 1980 to play the lead in an island-based cop series entitled Bergerac. This proved highly successful and ran for ten years after which time he disappeared back into the decent obscurity of the classical theatre for five years. He returned to plod land in 1996 in an even more successful series, Midsomer Murders, eighty episodes, shown in over two-hundred countries. John Nettles, born 1942, is a west country actor who came to Jersey in 1980 to play the lead in an island-based cop series entitled Bergerac.

He was drawn back to the Channel Islands to write and present a television documentary on the Occupation of the Channel Islands 1940-45 and in the course of this came across the writings of Madelaine Bunting, Paul Sanders, Gilly Carr, Freddy Cohen, David Fraser, Louise Wilmott et al, a treasure trove of learning. He wrote his own populist account of the Occupation in Jewels and Jackboots or Inselwahn in the German edition and it was while doing research for this book that he came across, as he was bound to do, the Ord diaries lodged in the Priaulx Library. Brilliant they are, and quoted, in extenso, by every reputable historian as the authoritative voice of the Occupation, brilliant but unpublished.