Many of the following publications can be purchased from Sussex Local History Books.
First of all I would like to thank all members of the Society for their interest and support over the years and during the last year in particular. All those who attended the AGM will know that the Society faces a number of problems and I would like to outline what I see as the priorities for action. Before I do so, however, I would like to thank Dr John Surtees for valiantly acting as pro tem chairman for the last three years and the officers and committee members for all their past efforts.
John Markwick has stood down as our Honorary Treasurer after twelve years’ dedicated service. Last year your committee appointed a bookeeper to prepare the Society’s day-to-day accounts under John’s eye but we have to pay for this service and desperately need to appoint an Hon. Treasurer to be responsible for looking after the Society’s money. Apart from the dayto- day need, our constitution requires the Society to have a Treasurer and we will be writing to the Charity Commission to advise them of our predicament. To someone who knows what they are doing the job isn’t onerous. Surely there has to be a member who would be competent to do the work - we would all be truly grateful if that someone would get in touch with me as soon as possible (01323 417164).
Apart from this critical appointment we must reduce our financial outgoings, or increase our income, or both, and that will be a priority for action.
We need to find somewhere to store our considerable archive of books and papers so that they can be accessible to members and others and allow us to reduce the drain on our financial resources caused by the present storage arrangements. We also need to make proper arrangements to secure and display the material, perhaps by the appointment of an archivist/librarian. During the life of most Societies like ours, practices and arrangements develop over the years. That’s as may be but it is important that clear responsibilities be agreed for each of the Society’s officers, sub-committee chairmen and others who have a specific function to perform for the Society. The committee has agreed to work with me to this end. Finally, we need to improve the level of communication within our committee structure and between the committee and members and will be working to that end during the next few months.
So, there is much to be done and I will do my best to keep you informed of progress. Meanwhile, after our awful winter we have the summer to enjoy (hopefully) and, as far as the Society is concerned, the outings to St. Mary’s church in Willingdon and the historical walk around the village of Glynde – details on the back of this issue of the journal.
Tom Hollobone OBE
By Maurice Plowright
One day we heard an air fight taking place over the town – the stutter of machine guns, an explosion and then the sound of a plane spinning down. Again my manager said, ‘They’re saying it was a Messerschmitt 110 and it’s fallen on Meads’. Our house was OK, but by the bus stop at the corner of Darley Road I went into our local newsagent/tobacconist/sweet shop in Meads Street (Harvey and Wise) and asked Mr Wise if he knew where it had fallen. ‘Yes, just up Darley hill, in the Aldro playing field’. This was just a minute away. There were two schools in Darley Road that may still be there – first St Andrew’s and then Queenwood, both empty as the schools had evacuated. Opposite the latter was a playing field used by Aldro School and there was a large par t of the Me110 still smoking.
Me110 fitted with radar, converted for use as a night fighter bearing RAF roundels. Picture: HM Government via Wiki Commons
One incident I particularly remember – I was at the back of the shop, helping my head girl replenish the counters, when I heard bombs dropping to our east. As the second one was nearer, I told her to lie on the floor, against the heavy wooden counter. The bombs came on (I thought later ‘like a giant’s footsteps’), the fourth one was about 150 yards away (by All Soul’s Church, if it’s still there) and I thought, ‘This is it – the next one is right on us’. I just hoped it fell on the far side of our heavy counter. It came down with the quivering whistle that a close bomb made, but the explosion was out at the front of the shop. I remember seeing the large plate glass window at the front curving inwards but then going outwards again – the first time I found that glass could bend! Woolworths was a three-storey building and opposite was a Fifty Shilling Tailors, a two-storey building. The bomb had passed over us and over the shop opposite, so that shop was between us and the explosion. Woolworths was peppered with minor debris, but suffered no serious damage from a bomb about 15 yards away. With all the weirdness of the blast, our three great windows didn’t break, but another shop opposite (a jeweller, I think) had a substantial awning over the pavement along Terminus Road and round the corner into Cornfield Road and this awning was well shattered. I had a number of particularly terrifying experiences in WW2 and that was one of them.3
That early summer of 1940 was a frightening time for a 19-year-old on his own. Often, after a close shave, I wondered if I would ever see my mother or my brothers again (yes, in what you probably think of as ‘lovely peaceful Eastbourne’!) I’ve had to stop for a moment, as I found myself crying – I don’t know why – those times don’t easily go away.
It may interest you, living in Eastbourne today, that in those days when everyone who could be spared had been evacuated (I believe the population fell from about 13 45,000 to 10,000) it left largely the under 40 year-olds in the town. We knew an invasion could occur at any moment. I guessed that if Eastbourne was on the list (and I found out years later that it was) they’d land on the beach with level ground at the rear, down at the Crumbles and Pevensey Bay. I also guessed that they might also land at Cuckmere Haven in order to encircle the town. I decided that the moment I heard they were invading nearby (and heavily bombing the town), I’d go round the edge of the town, via the Foot of Beachy Head, Welcome Crescent, the top of Darley hill, then sharp left towards Beachy Head, fork right towards Wilmington, eventually joining the London Road around Hailsham. I would, of course, be on my racing bike and wouldn’t be hanging about! There I hoped to hitch a lift to Croydon, work round the west of London and make my way to Hitchen in Hertfordshire, where my mother and youngest brother were evacuated. I would then decide what next to do from there.
Often when I visited my mother in Eastbourne after the war, I would see something that brought back memories of those worrying months in 1940. One day I bumped into Mr Salvage, who had a greengrocer’s shop in at the corner of Vicarage Road, near the Tally Ho. When he heard of my situation, he insisted I move in with them - bless him! His daughter had been my eldest brother’s girl friend and his son, Vic, had been at school in the same form as another of my brothers. Vic had joined the RAF in about 1936 and become an observer in a squadron of Blenheims. I now learnt that he had been shot down off Dunkirk on 6 June 1940 (funnily enough, the birthday of my brother who had been in his class), but had safely parachuted and was now a POW.
Mr Salvage asked me to read a letter from Vic, as it had a weird sentence in it. The details have long since gone, but I worked out that he was asking for a compass. I had read many accounts of POWs who escaped in WW1 and suggested we should get the smallest compass we could find, wrap it in orange oil-cloth and approach a marmalade manufacturer to get them to include it in a jar of marmalade – the type with plenty of peel. Everything went to plan – you could still send jam to POWs at that time but the Germans later banned such presents.
Vic escaped from a camp in Poland, made his way across Germany, just living off the land. He avoided making for the obvious – Switzerland – but for Luxembourg, as the US still hadn’t come into the war. He presented himself to the US Consulate in Luxembourg, suggesting that they might be able to fly him out as a consular employee. They kept him hanging about for an hour or two and then two Gestapo men turned up and arrested him. I’m glad to say that he survived the war, but he never placed much faith in the UK’s special relationship with the USA. 14 Vic was one of the first to find out that it only worked if the US considered they were getting some benefit from the deal, but in his case they weren’t.
I was returning to work early one afternoon, riding down The Goffs. I was perhaps 100 yards short of the fork leading to Upperton Road when I heard a plane coming in fast and low and firing its cannons. I fell off and the best I could do for shelter was to lie flat in the gutter. A Me 110 roared over me, still firing and continued across the centre of the town. One of the cannon shells had hit the pavement about 30 yards in front of me and made a saucer-sized crater. After an incident of that sort, you would work out that if he had been a few feet to the left, and if he had pressed the button a split second earlier, you would have been hit. How you needed a fair bit of luck to get through WW2!
Two other incidents have been recalled while writing this letter. I had paid one of my weekly visits to our house and was on the seafront by St Bede’s School. I heard a ‘plane coming from the north (over the Downs) and again only had time to drop into the gutter. A twin-engined plane passed over me and I could see the German cross on its wings. At that instant it started to drop its bombs and I could see them leaving the plane. The first one fell on the high part of the seafront end of St John’s Road, and I could see the great cloud of dust that rose up. I learnt from that incident that it was very difficult to judge exactly where a bomb had fallen in an urban area. To me, that cloud of dust rose exactly on the ridge of St John’s Road, but I later found out that it had been about 200 yards beyond, in Blackwater Road. You only knew the exact location of a bomb when you were told by someone who had seen the crater or smashed building.4
Another odd incident happened when I went to a dance on the Pier. It must have been early in 1940 before Dunkirk, after which they blew a gap in the pier to prevent it providing an easy landing point – and then there were no more dances. The dances used to get massively smoky – everyone smoked and the blackout screens around the exits prevented much air from circulating. I went outside to get a breath of fresh air and a plane was circling the area. I couldn’t see it, but suddenly there was an explosion which lit up a ship about a mile away. It had obviously taken a direct hit and now started to burn. I rushed back inside to tell my pals, but because of the noise of the band, no one had heard the explosion and I had quite a job convincing them that I wasn’t kidding. They appeared to get the fire under control quite soon so we went back into the dance. I seem to remember that they eventually beached that boat by Beachy Head.5
In another incident, my manager said that bombs had dropped in Meads and so 15 I’d better hop on my bike and see if my house was all right. I had to make a diversion, as one had fallen on Meads Street. Our house was OK but I came back up Meads Street and found this bomb had fallen on a building next to Elliot’s Stores and the Scotch Bakery, over which one of my very good friends lived. He had just survived Dunkirk. His mother and sister had been out shopping but his father had been in the flat and was dead.6 Well, those are a few wartime memories of Eastbourne – perhaps you’ll now view some part of it in a different light! I lived in Meads from 1923 to 1952 when I moved to London, except from December 1940 to April 1946 when I was in the RAF. I went to Meads C of E Primary School in Rowsley Road and got a scholarship to the Grammar School. I’m quite happy to help your History Society if you think I can give any details. (I remember how we once found a long piece of driftwood and crawled up it into Darby’s Hole – I wonder whether cliff erosion has yet removed it).7
Parson Darby's Hole. Picture: Images of England, John Surtees and Nicholas R Taylor
2. Mr Butcher’s description of the struggling German airman being pulled into the motorboat is an echo of dark stories which circulated in the town – one of these had the airman being ducked up and down in the water by the crew of an armed trawler. After my article, Black Friday, appeared in Sussex Life in August 1980, I was contacted by a Mr Ryan, who had been serving with the Devonshire Regiment (almost certainly 8th or 9th Battalion) in or near Eastbourne in August 1940. He told me that he and an officer ran to the lower promenade when they saw the parachute coming down. They were hailed by the occupants of a boat who called out, ‘Was it one of ours or one of theirs?’ Presumably the two soldiers had identified the doomed aircraft as German because they replied, “One of theirs.” Mr Ryan said the boatmen then set out for the scene – but with no intention of rescuing anyone. It is impossible to know what happened, but Schurk’s body was definitely not taken ashore in a boat. The death certificate issued by Gilbert Hodges, the Eastbourne registrar, states that his body had been found on the foreshore, west of the seaplane sheds (Langney) on 4 September; it does not state whether he died of wounds or of drowning – merely as ‘due to war operations’.
3. Maurice Plowright’s description suggests that this may have been the raid on Friday 22 November 1940, which is described on page 43 of Wartime Eastbourne, as the ‘Pub Crawl’ because of damage to the Gildredge Hotel in Terminus Road and the Cavendish Hotel on the seafront. The book has pictures of damage to shops in Terminus Road near the present entrance to the Arndale Centre diagonally opposite the junction with Cornfield Road; also to Cornfield Road at the junction with Lushington Road.
4. This must have been the raid by a Dornier Do 17 bomber at 4.58 pm on Wednesday 2 October 1940, noted on page 35 of Wartime Eastbourne. A stick of small bombs was dropped in the South Street, Carlisle Road, Grassington Road, Silverdale Road, and Blackwater Road area. Two people were killed and two were injured.
5. The date was Wednesday 20 March 1940; the vessel was the SS Barnhill. Twenty-nine members of the crew were rescued while a tug and local firemen fought the blaze. The ship was, in fact, beached to the east of Langney Point. An account of the incident by Peter Longstaff-Tyrrell appears in Issue 142, Winter 2006, of the Eastbourne Local Historian.
6. This raid was on Sunday 7 March 1943 so Maurice Plowright must have been in Eastbourne on leave from the RAF at the time. That lunchtime, a force of Me109 and Fw190 fighter bombers from the Luftwaffe units 10/JG2 and 10/JG54 came in low over the sea and climbed steeply at Beachy Head before diving towards the town centre via Meads. In addition to the properties destroyed at 22, 24, 26 and 28 Meads Street, bombs fell in New Upperton Road, Terminus Road, Cornfield Road, Junction Road, Jevington Gardens, Grand Parade (Mostyn Hotel), Staveley Road and St John’s Road. There were 14 fatalities and more than 50 people were injured. The friend who had been at Dunkirk was Gordon Mackay; at the time, he was serving in North Africa. His father, Donald Glendale Mackay, was killed at 28 Meads Street, but his mother, Clara Mackay, survived because she had popped over to her daughter’s home at 32 Meads Street; his brother, Signa Donald Mackay, was buried under the rubble but clawed his way free. Interestingly, two of the German pilots who took part in this raid gave eye-witness accounts which were broadcast the following day over the German Home Service and monitored in Britain. The translated transcript of the broadcast appears in the Society’s publication Canucks by the Sea.
7. Darby’s Hole is no longer in existence, but was a cavern cut into the chalk below Beachy Head. It owes its name to Rev. Jonathan Darby, who was Rector of Litlington and Vicar of Friston and East Dean from 1705 until his death in 1726. However, the origin of the cave is doubtful; it may have been an enlargement of an existing fissure in the chalk, perhaps carved out by smugglers. Another version attributes the cave to Parson Darby, the theory being that he personally excavated the chalk as a refuge for shipwrecked mariners. Yet the article (March 1914) by Miss Jay in the Transactions of the Eastbourne Natural Society suggests that the cave was too large to have been the work of a single man. However, it is possible that Darby modified the interior and created steps from the beach to the hole. Furthermore, he would go to the cave before a storm and light a lamp at the entrance to guide shipwrecked souls to safety. In 1916, a cliff-fall made the cave almost impossible to reach, but as Maurice Plowright explains, it was still accessible during the inter-war years to adventurous boys with the aid of a baulk of driftwood.
Work on the restoration of the
plaques and main structure of the arch
was carried out between June and
August 2009 by TE Tilley Ltd,
stonemasons, of Brighton.
A brief ceremony was held at the arch at 11am
on 11 November 2009. Vera Ross,
David Stevens and several former
pupils and friends of the school were
present.David Stevens, former Headmaster of Chelmsford Hall Preparatory School and a local resident, whose uncle is one of those commemorated, highlighted the need for restoration. He was instrumental getting the Arch listed and getting the project underway with the help and guidance of Eastbourne Borough’s Chief Planning Officer, Jefferson Collard. Approximately £13,400 was given to the restoration fund and this was complemented by a donation of £8,000 from the Heritage Lottery Fund. The major donor was the late Brigadier Tim Landon (S56) (whose grandfather, Major General Sir Frederick WB Landon (1860-1937), had unveiled the arch on Saturday 27 March 1920), with a gift of £4,000. Sir Frederick’s wife, Rose Emily Willis Landon, was related to the then headmaster of the school.
The badly weathered plaques have been replaced with Portland stone on which the 51 names have been engraved. The whole structure has been cleaned and made good and the bricks repointed where appropriate. A small bollard has been placed to prevent vehicles entering the Ascham estate through the arch and damaging the stonework. Mr Collard has also ensured that inappropriate brick paving in the highway is replaced with paviours. A plaque recording the restoration will be mounted on the arch provided that planning permission is obtained and funds permit.
We hope those who contributed so generously to this project will be pleased with the result. We are grateful to the Ascham Residents Association for planting out two small beds on either side of the arch, which is the only remaining structure of the one-time College Preparatory School and of its predecessors, Ascham and St Vincent’s schools.
Simon Wood
(The quarterly publication of the Eastbourne Local History Society available free to members)
8 Chiltern Court, Albert Road, Polegate, BN26 6BS, tel 01323 487170
Email: pltyrrell@btinternet.com
Cheques should be made payable to the Eastbourne Local History Society.
A meticulous transcription of the names, ages, and employment of those living in the Parish of Eastbourne on the night of 6/7 June 1841.
An invaluable reference for genealogical researchers.
£3.00 plus £1.00 p& p
by
Richard Callaghan and Rosemary Milton.
An impressive illustrated record of the origins and use of these defences against the Napoleonic threat, together with details of the soldiers and military units which manned them. 88 pp. £6.00 + £1.00 p& p.
An illustrated record of the origins of the names of every one of Eastbourne's streets including their historical context or derivation, together with their dates of origin.
Currently out of print.
A completely new edition shortly.
1911 - 1924
By Lou McMahon and Michael Partridge.
A detailed, fully illustrated story of the men who learned to fly and of the machines in which they flew; also a record of the RNAS occupation and the 250 aircraft that were built here. 174pp.
Hardback £5.00 + £2.00 p& p.
The story of the Canadian Army in Eastbourne during the Second World War.
Fully illustrated. 193 pp. Extended second edition £9.99 + £1.00 p& p.
by Peter Tyrrell.
A guide to the old coach road from Lewes to Eastbourne.
Fully illustrated in colour.
Extended second edition £4.00 + 50p p& p.
