Born on Jersey within the Channel Islands (a part of the British Crown Dependency), Alphonse Le Gastelois (1914-2012) moved to the small, solely seasonally inhabited Écréhous island chain roughly six miles away in 1961, after being wrongly suspected of a sequence of heinous sexual assaults. Relocating for his personal security and peace of thoughts, he remained there, residing principally in isolation, till 1975, even after he was confirmed harmless when the string of assaults continued in his absence and the actual perpetrator was lastly caught in 1971. First broadcast in 1978, this clip from the BBC sequence Nationwide: Distant Britain tells Le Gastelois’s unbelievable story of ‘self-imposed exile’, together with his formal try to grow to be ‘King of the Écréhous’ – a request that may in the end go unfulfilled in regulation, if not in legend. Depicting the ability of unfounded hearsay and gossip to derail a life, his story is one which echoes with amplified depth within the web age.
