In 1935, when incumbent Baliff Arthur William Bell died, Carey, who had been Receiver General from 1912 to 1935, replaced him because Procurer Ambrose Sherwill, to whom the role would have normally fallen, had only been in office a few weeks.
[1][2] Carey is controversial for his complicity in the deportations of three Jews, who were subsequently murdered in Auschwitz, living in Guernsey during the German occupation of the Channel Islands.
Carey assisted the Germans by reporting a list of names of Jews on the island, which was drawn up police chief William Sculpher.
[3] He was born 2 July 1871 in Guernsey, son of de Vic Francis Carey and Harriet Mary Gosselin.
Therefore, in contrast to the situation in Jersey, which had a 48 year old Bailiff, Alexander Coutanche, the Bailiff of Guernsey's powers were actually reduced during the Occupation as day-to-day running of Island affairs became the responsibility of a Controlling Committee made up of a small number of members of the States of Guernsey, chaired at first by Ambrose Sherwill, and after Sherwill's imprisonment for aiding British soldiers trapped on the Island, by Jurat John Leale.
The Bailiff remained a higher authority, only entering into the political fray when the actions of the Controlling Committee had yielded an unsatisfactory outcome.
[7] A private memorandum from a senior judge, Lord Justice du Parcq, to the Home Secretary, James Chuter-Ede, in 1945 comments on allegations of collaboration within the Jersey and Guernsey administrations.
[13]: 2 However, for the part of the island’s population that was Jewish this ‘duty of care’ was abrogated by the ‘Third Order’ registered in the Royal Courts of Guernsey on 17 June 1941.
[14] Theobald Mathew, the Director of Public Prosecutions, and MI5’s Joseph Richmond Stopford agreed in July 1945 that the idea of awarding decorations to the Channel Island bailiffs was “rashly conceived.”[15] When Carey’s name was submitted for honours to Prime Minister Clement Attlee in October 1945, Attlee asked Home Secretary Chuter Ede to explain the discrepancies between the negative Mathew and Stopford report and Ede's positive view.
Ede explained that his investigations concluded that Mathews found the Channel Island authorities had “behaved well, animated by the sole desire to act as a buffer”[16] — which contradicts Mathew’s actual comments — and that the newly appointed Channel Island Lieutenant Governors confirmed that both bailiffs deserved commendation.