An ever-present reminder of the power of storm and tide for the last 277 years, something sits at St Leonards. At the lowest tides of the year, when the sea retreats from the Sussex coast at Bulverhythe, an extraordinary hulk appears. Dark, ancient timbers, the ribs of a ship long lost, emerge briefly from the sands before the Channel closes over them once more.

This is the wreck of the Amsterdam, a Dutch East India Company ship driven ashore in January 1749. For many in Hastings and St Leonards, it is both a local landmark and a source of fascination. People wonder about what lies beneath – does it still have treasure aboard? In recent years, a persistent rumour has circulated: that the Dutch intend to recover the wreck and take it back to Amsterdam. It is a story that captures the imagination. But how close is it to reality?

A REMARKABLE SURVIVAL

The Amsterdam is no ordinary wreck. Unlike ships lost in deep water, she lies close to shore, embedded in anaerobic fine clay sand and quicksand that has preserved much of her structure for more than 270 years. At exceptionally low tides, sections of her hull can still be seen.

“It’s one of the most accessible historic wrecks in the country,” says a local coastal observer who has monitored the site for years. “But it’s also incredibly fragile. What you see is only a small part of what’s still buried.”

The wreck is legally protected under UK law. Yet its visibility and vulnerability have made it a focus of both public interest and archaeological concern.

KNOWN CARGO DISPUTED OWNERSHIP

On its outward voyage, the Amsterdam was carrying silver bullion (approx. 2–2.5 tonnes), textiles, wine, tools, weapons, and domestic goods. The silver alone would be worth millions today, but much of it was recovered or looted in 1749. Immediately after grounding, local people and authorities recovered much of the bullion. Some was looted by smugglers, which authorities attempted to reclaim. Archaeologists believe a very large quantity of material remains sealed inside, including personal belongings of crew and soldiers, tools, weapons, plus ship equipment and cargo items (textiles, trade goods, wine, ceramics).

The ship was built for the Dutch Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC), the powerful trading company that dominated global commerce in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Amsterdam is considered part of the Netherlands’ national heritage. At the same time, the wreck lies within British waters and has been protected since 1974 as a designated site. This unusual dual status, Dutch ownership but British legal protection, lies at the heart of the debate about its future.

THE RECOVERY DREAM

The idea of recovering the wreck is not new. Dutch archaeologists and heritage organisations have studied the Amsterdam since the late twentieth century, and at various points have explored the possibility of raising it. More recently, proposals have emerged, largely from Dutch academic and design circles, for an ambitious solution. Rather than dismantling the wreck, the plan would involve enclosing it within a massive steel structure, lifting it intact, and transporting it, still submerged, to Amsterdam.

Once there, it could be housed in a purpose-built museum, allowing visitors to view the ship while archaeologists continued to study it by installing it in a glass-enclosed tank museum in Amsterdam. The idea was to create something comparable to the Vasa Museum (Stockholm) or the Mary Rose (Portsmouth), but with a crucial difference – the ship would remain underwater, and archaeology would continue in public view.

“It’s a brilliant idea in theory,” says a local historian familiar with the proposals. “You’d essentially create a living excavation in a museum setting. But the scale of it is enormous.”

RUMOUR VERSUS REALITY

Despite the persistence of local rumours, there is no evidence that such a project is currently underway. No funding has been publicly confirmed. No excavation licence has been granted, and certainly, no engineering work has begun. What does exist is a series of feasibility discussions and conceptual designs that are serious, but still at an early stage.

One of the main reasons for caution is the condition of the wreck itself. The Amsterdam has survived because it is buried in oxygen-free clay sand. This environment has protected the wood from decay. Remove that protection, and the situation changes rapidly. The danger is that once those timbers are exposed to air, the clock starts ticking.

The experience of other famous ship recoveries offers a warning. The Mary Rose, raised in 1982, required decades of conservation work and continues to be treated today. Sweden’s Vasa, lifted in 1961, remains an ongoing scientific project. The Amsterdam presents additional complications. The seabed at Bulverhythe is unstable, subject to tidal scouring and shifting sediments. Parts of the wreck are deeply buried; others are already exposed and eroding. There’s a real risk that if you try to move it, you could lose more than you save.

A QUESTION OF PRINCIPLE

Modern archaeology has increasingly moved towards a principle of preservation in situ; leaving sites undisturbed unless there is a compelling reason to excavate. In the case of the Amsterdam, many specialists believe that the wreck is safest where it is. This view is not universal. Some argue that controlled recovery could secure the ship for future generations and make it accessible to a wider public. But the balance of opinion remains cautious and moving the ship will cost a lot of money.

Even if the archaeological concerns could be addressed, significant legal and political obstacles remain. Any excavation would require approval from UK authorities, as well as cooperation with the Dutch government. Questions of ownership, transport, conservation, and display would all need to be resolved.

SO WHAT NOW?

For the moment, not very much. The wreck remains in place, monitored and protected. Research continues, both in Britain and the Netherlands, and interest in the Amsterdam remains high. In the Netherlands, artefacts recovered in earlier excavations are studied and displayed. In Hastings, the wreck continues to draw attention whenever it appears on the foreshore.

“It’s part of our coastline,” says a local resident. “People come down to see it when the tides are right – as individual viewers or on guided tours. There’s a real sense of connection.”

The Amsterdam occupies a unique position, physically in England, culturally in the Netherlands, and historically in both. For now, the grand vision of lifting it and returning it to Amsterdam remains just that: a vision. It would take a huge amount of money, political will, and technical confidence. None of those are in place yet.

As things stand, the Amsterdam is not going anywhere. There is no active recovery project, no agreed timetable, and no immediate prospect of excavation. The risks, archaeological, financial, and legal, remain considerable.

For the people of Hastings and St Leonards, that may come as a relief. “It belongs here as much as anywhere,” says a local voice. “It’s part of the story of this coast.” And so, for now, the Amsterdam remains where it has lain since 1749 – hidden in the sands, revealed by the tides, and watched over by those who know where to look.

“Docking the Amsterdam”

The proposal – by Dutch architects ZJA – is unusual in that the wreck wouldn’t leave the water at all. Waterlogged wood deteriorates rapidly in air, so the idea would be to keep it in seawater throughout the 250-mile trip in a semi-submerged salvage dock that holds the wreck while being towed across the sea.

On the coast near Amsterdam, the Amsterdam’s whole 131-foot-long remains would be encased in a steel-and-glass capsule that visitors could visit.

The plan has been commissioned by a foundation, helpfully named Docking the Amsterdam Foundation led by Amsterdam city archaeologist Jerzy Gawronski. As well as ZJA, Deloitte is involved for funding and grant raising, Mammoet for heavy lifting, Amsterdam Shipyards, and the City of Amsterdam’s Chief Technology Office advising.

There are no published costs for either the preparation work so far, and they don’t include an estimate for how much the plan would cost to implement. There’s a suggestion that the medium and big firms involved are doing this pro bono as part of their community commitment, rather than a commercial project.

In addition, rather than put this plan into action, the Foundation has now implemented a feasibility phase of 2027-2030, which suggests that the plans set out here may not be as worked through as they claim. It looks like the VOC Amsterdam will be with us for a while.

With the recent Blue Flag and Seaside Award given to Marina and Pelham beaches respectively, many residents will have a little less trepidation about taking a relaxing dip in our salty stretch of the Channel. Questions remain, however, about our town’s persistent difficulties with nature’s greatest resource. 

Southern Going South

Water outages remain common, despite chipper emails that land in my inbox every few months from our supplier insisting improvements are being made to the creaking infrastructure. However, it has been a while since I encountered the kind of unspeakable detritus which was once common near the overflow pipes between Bexhill and St Leonards. 

Having moved to Hastings a week before the devastating floods that caused widespread water outages in October 2023, I was initially unfamiliar with the spectacle of a gent from the water company dropping off a multipack of 2L bottles at my door and assumed the whole thing must be a one-off. Three years on, that same gent now knows to crouch down and prevent the escape of two exuberant Samoyed dogs every time he stops by. 

Hastings and St Leonards are currently served by two large water supply works, and one major sewerage treatment works, and it’s not about the age of the facilities: the burst pipe that left 32,000 homes without water for days in 2024 was installed in 2007.   

But with credible mutterings in the corridors of power that Thames Water could be brought back into public ownership, and multi-million-pound improvements promised for both Brede and Beauport supply works, could the tide finally be turning on a particularly crappy chapter in our town’s history?    

Southern Water itself has admitted that pollution remains a problem and that it has fallen short of standards at several wastewater sites. While the vast majority of incidents listed for the region in the government’s 2024-25 data are category 4 (spills the environment agency claims have ‘little or no impact’), anyone who watched Channel 4’s grisly docu-drama Dirty Business will know that downgrading sewage leaks which should have been given a category 1 or 2 rating is a practice that can and does go on behind the scenes. 

Either way, the sheer number of incidents listed makes for depressing reading, as does the £7 million fine Southern Water was recently issued for repeated instances of sewage dumping in Kent four years ago. 

Those Plastic Beads 

However, it would be optimistic and naïve to assume Southern Water has entirely cleaned up its act. When ten tonnes of plastic beads washed up on Camber Sands in November of last year, the company initially failed to alert anyone of the incident; it was left to community groups to instigate the clean-up. Even after Southern accepted responsibility, the company provided no further information to residents about the potential risk to dogs or wildlife from ingesting the beads. 

It was the worst instance of plastic pollution ever to hit the Sussex coast. The beads tested positive for lead and arsenic, and our MP knocked on the door of 10 Downing Street with a 10,000-strong petition. The clean-up crews eventually dispatched by Southern Water did a half-arsed job (with beads still being found at the Dungeness and Rye Harbour nature reserves long after). Outdated infrastructure was apparently to blame, but most of the treatment works in our area are not, as the water companies would have us believe, ‘Victorian infrastructure’ (Freshfields was commissioned in 2003).  

I had hoped that a disaster on this scale would force someone, somewhere to do something (and I wouldn’t count the Environment Agency releasing a statement confirming they might upgrade the spill to a category 1 event as that ‘something’). I had hoped the same when the company received a £90m fine for nearly 7,000 incidents of illegal discharge across the Southeast in 2021. Southern has claimed repeatedly, while being handed further convictions (now totalling 174) that a change of leadership in 2022 has led to an overhaul of these negligent practices, but the signs are not promising.  

Surfers to the Rescue

It has therefore fallen largely to our friends at Surfers Against Sewage to keep the community alert to any hazards posed by swimming on our local beaches. The group maintains an active presence in East Sussex and in May staged a huge ‘paddle out’ demonstration, in both Hastings and Seaford, against the continuing pollution. Corresponding similar events in coastal communities up and down the country received favourable coverage across both local and national media. 

Many of us have chosen to make our homes here beside the sea despite the highly seasonal economies and reduced job prospects of most English coastal towns.  Beyond being a fitting reminder of this love for our waterways, the recent Walking on Water event welcomed not only members of Surfers Against Sewage, but another champion of holding Southern to account, in the form of our MP, Helena Dollimore. 

Action from our MP

Though Helena’s had a busy month securing priority tickets for residents to see the Bayeux Tapestry and hosting a public consultation on improvements to our seafront, her persistence goes above and beyond expectation. Even if you’re not a keen enough political aficionado to be keeping tabs on her crucial Select Committee work, when Southern were unwilling to investigate reports of sewage pollution at Hollington stream, Helena was happy to head down there and spotlight their negligence. 

Helena told a recent Clean Water Action Group demonstration: “It’s only because of the work of those citizen scientists, because of the volunteers, because of people in towns like this, that we have been able to expose the scale of this scandal.” 

Other factors have contributed to improved conditions on our beaches. And while we may feel powerless in the face of the endemic criminality blighting our water supply chain, it’s heartening to know that smaller steps, like the increase in seafront bins, particularly during the summer peak, have made a big difference.

Excluding Dogs? 

Among the council’s more controversial measures are two large dog-exclusion zones, which between them encompass about a kilometre-and-a-half of beach (and roughly line up with the areas awarded). The St Leonards stretch, which reaches from Bottle Alley to the Royal Victoria Hotel, is around half the size of the Hastings section, which extends across the whole of Pelham beach, from the Pier to the Harbour Arm. In place since 2024, the measure is likely to have had an impact on the recent Blue Flag and Seaside Awards, but remains controversial and poorly enforced. 

The use of dog-exclusion zones on British beaches can be traced to an Irish study monitoring their impact, and it makes a solid case. Dog-fouling is a huge problem in many areas of Hastings, and the risk, particularly to children, cannot be overstated. That said, the solution the council has reached isn’t without its problems. 

There’s the risk of discarded fishing equipment embedding itself in paws or toes. Despite the risk of a £1500 fine for leaving fishing hooks unattended, I still found myself having to remove a vicious hook from my dog’s tongue with a set of pliers after some idiot felt the need to leave it, baited, just below the tideline. 

We’ve tried the mercifully small sliver of beach between the pier and the east end of Bottle Alley, but unlike Rock-a-nore, it lacks any clear barriers to mark the start and end of the exclusion zone. Faced with the risk of an on-the-spot fine and a dog whose recall depends entirely on whether there are gulls nearby, we resolved not to return until October. 

Dog vs Human Mess

Dog-fouling on our beaches will never be acceptable, but it’s also a literal drop in the ocean compared to the amount of raw sewage that has been discharged into the same stretch of seawater over the past few years. After all, when Pelham and Bulverhythe beaches were closed to the public in 2021 and 2022 respectively, it wasn’t the fault of anyone’s dog.       

Going Swimmingly?     

At this point, you’re probably thinking “that’s all well and good, but should I be worried about dunking my head under when I go for a swim or not?” to which I can only repeat the guidance of the borough council: check conditions on the day, particularly through the Surfers Against Sewage app. 

Calm conditions at the end of June allowed the silt to settle, making the sea appear much clearer, but appearances can be deceptive; following reports on the app of a 5 am discharge within walking distance of the lifeguarded zone, I decided not to risk it. A few days later, the lure of the azure proved too great, but I kept my head firmly above the surface. 

The first of these large-scale changes in the shape of the town was the reconstruction of the Old Town after the hurricane of 1287; the second was the attempt, around 1580, to build a harbour in the Priory Valley which laid out the town centre as it is today.

At both these times the government of the town was carried out by a bailiff, assisted by 12 jurats, normally referred to as ‘the brethren’, who were basically the leading members of the local establishment. The bailiff represented the Crown, imposing any necessary taxes, and generally ‘looking after’ the town in a limited semi-formal way.

As Hastings had a population of many hundreds of people, rather than the tens of thousands that there are today, the bailiff and brethren should usually have been able to find a consensus agreement of the chief residents about what to do in serious matters.

Until 1287 most of the Old Town was laid out further south than today, and the East and West Hills extended further to seaward. But a series of damaging storms from the 1250s, culminating in February 1287, brought major destruction to much of the southern coast of England. Whole areas of the coastline were then redrawn, with estuaries silting up and cliffs collapsing.

The most famous victim of the 1287 hurricane was the original town of Winchelsea, which until then stood on a massive shingle bank that protected the confluence of the estuaries of the Rivers Brede, Rother and Tillingham, and provided a sheltered anchorage called the Camber. After the Norman Conquest, Winchelsea was of great importance in cross-Channel trade (acting especially as an entrepôt for London) and as a naval base. By 1281 the people of Winchelsea had become aware that the end was near for their existing town because of the many storms, so they began laying out the new town on higher ground, where it is today.

There is no surviving written record of just how Hastings suffered from the late 13th century storms, but the result can be seen on the ground in the layout of today’s Old Town, which was actually a new town built after 1287. The clue is in the way both the High Street and All Saints Street have been laid out in parallel straight lines, as can be seen in the 1746 map. These were cut into the slopes of the West and East Hills respectively.

This encroachment required high pavements to be constructed on which the houses could be built. The houses could not have been built prior to the pavements, and no buildings in the Old Town today date from before the late 13th century storms.

But it was different, two centuries later, when the local ‘ruling class’ decided unilaterally that they wanted to turn the Priory Valley into a harbour. The Priory Valley in Roman and Anglo-Saxon times was one of only a handful of English harbours available for cross-Channel traffic. This was probably the main reason the town of Hastings had been created in the 9th century, as a new national economy had begun to emerge, based on increased cross-Channel trading and transport. The town itself was on top of White Rock, mostly on the section that has now been lost to the sea.

But in the 12th century, the harbour mouth silted up and the town gradually moved into the Bourne Valley, where the West Hill provided some shelter for a port at the mouth of the Bourne Stream. This was largely destroyed by the 1287 hurricane, so for the next 300 years a succession of wooden harbour arms was built roughly where the west end of West Street is today. These provided some shelter for fishing boats and the small commercial vessels operating off the beach in front of the Bourne Valley.

By the late 16th century, England was increasingly becoming an international trader, buying and selling goods around the world. In 1578 leading members of the Hastings establishment decided this would be a good time to restore the Priory Valley as the harbour it had been long ago. A petition was sent from the ‘townspeople’ of Hastings to Queen Elizabeth asking for a grant of £4,000 (many millions of pound today) to turn the valley into a “very good haven for the arriving and safeguard of ships, barks and boats, to the great relief of the inhabitants and all merchants and travellers sailing along the narrow seas [the English Channel]”.

A ‘haven’ is a closed-in dock, like a marina, rather than a harbour arm projecting into the open sea. Queen Elizabeth gave her blessing, authorising the local establishment to start collecting funding for the scheme, so work began. Within a year £2,000 had been spent. But then the rest of the money that the local businessmen had obtained went missing and construction had to stop. Historian William Camden wrote in 1586 that “the contribution was quickly converted into private purses, and the publicke good neglected”.

It seems that in about 1580 a sea-wall of soil, and possibly rock, had been built across the Valley near the sea where Cambridge Road is today. This may have been put on top of an already-existing trackway across the valley which is likely to have been formed by people travelling along the coast once the Priory Valley had partly filled with shingle and silt.

Parallel to the c1580 sea-wall across the valley, there appears to have been another wall further inland, where South Terrace is now. These two walls and the hillsides to east and west of them would have formed the deep-water haven where the Priory Meadow shopping centre is today.

But the haven was never completed, instead it became a large wet marshland in the middle of the valley. In the mid-18th century it could still be seen on ground in outline, as shown in the 1746 map. In the southern corner of the haven was the outlet to the sea of the Priory Stream, over which a succession of bridges was built. As the town expanded westward in the 1830s, the bridge site became the heart of the town, where the Albert Memorial clocktower was built in 1863.

The 1580’s trickery by the leading Hastings businessmen which halted the haven scheme was probably the key factor in the setting up by the Crown in 1588 of a commission of inquiry into the mismanagement of the town of Hastings. To regularise the controversial situation, a ‘charter of incorporation’ (usually referred to as the ‘Elizabethan Charter’) was passed in February 1589. The elusive, self-perpetuating cartel which had been running the town for many years was replaced by a new governing body, described as the ‘Mayor, Jurats and Commonalty of the town and port of Hastings’.

This was essentially the old self-interested ruling group by another name. But from 1589 it was a new legally-defined corporate body – Hastings Corporation – which had specific rights and responsibilities. were many similar local government corporations around the country, most of which were run by members who re-elected themselves or friends, and who were suspected of becoming rich at the expense of the town’s inhabitants.

This became so widespread that the Whig government in 1833 set up a royal commission to investigate the working of 285 local authorities. This resulted in the 1835 Municipal Corporations Act which established the principle of local councils elected by ratepayers, which had to publish audited financial accounts. Hastings Council was born.

The name Paul Joy is well known in Hastings, especially in the Old Town. Paul has been a fisherman here for most of his adult life and he has been chair of the Hastings Fishermen’s Association since 1977. However, what most people don’t know is that a young Paul Joy was a very keen amateur boxer who had dozens of fights, most of which he won.

“In 1970, inspired by watching the fights of Muhammad Ali on TV, I first went to the Hastings West Hill Boxing Club with absolutely no experience,” said Paul.

“The training was pretty serious. We’d run and sprint from the gym to Battle, before returning to the gym in Hastings to spar for three rounds. Other times, we’d jog along the beach, holding up heavy weights to get our muscles used to keeping our hands up. I loved it!”

“As an amateur, we fought three, three-minute rounds. I found out early that I could hit and knock out opponents with a good right hand. You could say my style was like a bouncer. I fought as a light welterweight (140 pounds or 10 stone/7) and occasionally, I’d fight as a lightweight (up to 135 pounds), and sometimes I’d fight opponents considerably heavier and more experienced than me because I had a reputation of knocking out opponents early.

“My very first fight was against a Royal Marine in a Chichester hotel, where a ring was set up in the middle of the dining room. Before the fight, the Marine came into the dressing room to taunt me, looking me up and down and sneeringly saying, ‘No problem’. I KO’d him in the first thirty seconds of the first round! And in my next few fights, I KO’d opponents with my right hand cross.”

“In 1974 I fought Clinton McKenzie, who was an up and coming star in the amateur circuit. I knocked him down in the third round, but lost on points. In fact, McKenzie went on to become the professional British light welterweight champion.”

“As an amateur, we weren’t allowed to be paid cash prizes, so my promoter would arrange prizes, such as bath towels and bathroom scales.”

“One time, the Club set up a boxing ring on the shingle beach, where the Ferris wheel now is. It felt more like a fairground than a proper boxing arena. Anyone was invited to step into the ring with me, but most of my opponents were totally useless, sometimes even pissed, so I had to hold back so I didn’t hurt them.”

“I’ve never been knocked out, but I have been knocked down several times. One time there was boxing on Hastings Pier, and my opponent, Johnny Farnbry, didn’t show up on time, so while I was waiting for him, I had a few beers too many. When Farnbry eventually did show up he knocked me down. I got up, but lost on points. Lesson learned!”

“I boxed for almost six years, until 1977. All my family were in the fishing industry, and eventually I followed. Also, it wasn’t fair to my wife and two children to be disappearing days on end to fight abroad.”

“Just before I ‘retired’ from the ring, I had a few unofficial, under the radar fights. For about a year, I worked on a building site as a hod carrier… and a boxer! After our mid day dinner break, I’d put down my hod and put on the gloves and box. There was no ring or ropes, we just fought on a square patch of concrete floor. I mostly sparred with the sub-contractor, Terry Haddon. And I got £10 a day for doing both, which was good money then!”

“In another unofficial fight, I fought a Frenchman in the Hotel de France on Jersey Island. He was two weight classes heavier than me and I injured my hand when I hit him. As I was then fighting one-handed, they stopped the fight. The best bit about boxing in Jersey was that for a few days after the fights we were given freedom of the city and got free drinks in all the pubs.”

Two of my most memorable ‘under the radar’ fights were against a fighter called Ripley, King of the Gypsies, in Canterbury. I beat Ripley in our first fight, but what was most memorable was that in the first round, ten and twenty pound notes started appearing all over the canvas. Ripley didn’t trust his promoter, so instead of keeping his pay in his locker, he stuffed the money into his socks and as the fight progressed, the pound notes started falling out onto the ring.”

“In our second fight, I knocked Ripley down, but instead of getting up to finish the fight, he jumped out of the ring to attack an obnoxious spectator who was heckling him. It really was like the Wild West!”

I ask Paul what he thinks of boxing today. “With all the different sanctioning bodies, who are only interested in profits rather than their fighters’ welfare, professional boxing has become a bit of a circus. But I still think amateur boxing is still very important for young men, as well as women, giving them a community to belong to, and to help them focus their energies positively.

Does Paul have any regrets about his boxing career?

“No regrets, it was a fantastic time!”

“In fact,” Paul continues, “I genuinely think that the skills I learned as a boxer – resilience, determination and the ability to pick myself up off the canvas and keep fighting – have been invaluable in my role as chair of Hastings Fishermen’s Protection Society, fighting for the rights of our fishing community.”

John Cole has been photographing the Hastings Fishing Community since 1991. Visit his site at johncole.co.uk 

One of the most surprising things about Operation Sea Lion, the German plan to invade Britain in the summer of 1940 was the number of horses involved. The first wave would see 360 horses put ashore, the second wave would include over 4,000 horses. It turns out that the supply lines for the mechanised Blitzkrieg attack system, which had got the German army so speedily across the Low Countries and France, were all operated by horse-drawn vehicles.

Another close call was the Spanish Armada, at the time (1558) the biggest invasion force ever gathered. There were just 300 horses in the first wave but had the initial invasion been successful, many more horses would have come across with the Army of Flanders.

It wasn’t to be. The smaller English ships were able to outmanoeuvre the Armada and eventually forced it to escape by going the long way round back to Spain (via Scotland). In the process, horrifically, the horses were put over the side because there was not enough fresh water for the extended journey. Some even say the Shetland Pony is descended from those that swam ashore from the flagship, the Gran Grifton, which foundered off the coast of Fair Isle.

Napoleon came close at the turn of the 18th century with up to a staggering 15,000 horses available. A dangerous time for Britain with few European allies and as yet no Martello Towers. By the time Napoleon met his Waterloo in 1815 the threat was over and Britain had European allies again and lots of those towers.

So much for the failures. All the successful conquests of Britain actually succeeded in shipping horses across the channel.

William the Bastard brought a couple of thousands of them over in late September 1066. Julius Caesar also brought a similar number of horses across the channel, on the second attempt. Not surprisingly the Romans were the best organised; their large Trireme ships with three decks of Oarsmen, supplementary sails and specially adapted hulls for beach landings, gave them speed, up to 8 knots (9.2 mph) and a large carrying capacity.

How the Normans got horses across the channel is a little harder to fathom. There are only a few independent historical sources about the invasion and one of them is embroidery (the Bayeux tapestry) which, it seems, has the most to say on the subject. The embroidery images of ships are all the longboat type. Their low freeboard (sides) meant they were fast but not great for heavy loads, and there needed to be a way of getting the horses off the boats.

In one scene in the tapestry, a horse is shown jumping out of a boat. In 1967, a replica longboat was used to establish if this was possible. It was not; although they did succeed in getting a single horse to jump out when the longboat was pulled over on its side. This would not work for multiple horses on a boat.

In 1985 Bernard S Bachrach published a very detailed analysis On the Origins of William the Conqueror’s Horse Transports trying to explain how the Normans got the horses across the channel in a fit state for battle and in sufficient numbers. He considers that the longboats depicted are unlikely to be accurate, and the horse jumping out is more likely artistic licence.

He concluded the most credible scenario is the use of Byzantine ships designed to carry 10 or 20 horses with their riders and equipment. After all, it was these ships that had landed Norman invaders on Sicily with their horses in 1038. It is interesting to note that another historical character in Sicily fighting with the Normans was no less than Harald Hadryd, who would later play a part in the Norman conquest by engaging King Harold in the Stamford Bridge battle.

So back on the River Dives, as boats were being built for the invasion, no doubt they were influenced by that Sicilian campaign. One feature of Byzantine horse-carrying boats was that they were designed to match the organisation of their cavalry. They used a decimal system, which matches another scene of the embroidery where ten horses can be seen with their riders in one ship.

The Normans were a pan-European force well versed in invading and conquering. Although there is every chance that Harold may not have been defeated had he waited to recover from the battle at Stamford Bridge and not rush down to meet William, possibly by boat. It seems likely the Normans would prevail and conquer eventually. It took decades and many battles for the Norman conquest of Southern Italy to be completed.

Those horses should have been decisive in battle against a static Anglo-Saxon human wall, but they couldn’t be shifted. The defensive position on Senlac Hill, or whatever hill it was, was a tactical advantage until the almost comical bluff by the Normans of running away then circling back. This almost worked. Towards the end of the battle, they finally broke through with the horses, by which time Harold was almost certainly dead, either from an arrow in his right eye or from being hacked to death by four Norman knights.

Within a year, the conquest was complete, and William got to change his last name to Conqueror. His brother-in-law commissioned the Bayeux Tapestry, the social media of the day, and they went with the arrow-in-the-eye storyline.

Just over a year ago, on 30 November 2024, the village of Fairlight fulfilled a long-standing pledge to honour all the Fairlight men and women who died in the two World Wars. The Lord Lieutenant of East Sussex, Andrew Blackman, CStJ, unveiled the memorial at a dedication ceremony held both inside and outside St Andrew’s Church.

But why, so long after the two wars, did Fairlight feel the need to erect a new memorial? The reason was that, when investigated, the existing situation was found to be unrepresentative and incomplete. For reasons no one can explain, a mere 23 people of the Fairlight casualties were named on the existing memorial plaques. Detailed work by the Fairlight History Group with the support of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission uncovered an increased total of 48 names.

Fairlight’s new memorial was the culmination of almost six years of activity to research the names, raise funds, commission a design, and obtain the necessary permissions from Rother DC and the Diocese of Chichester.

But, as it turned out, the dedication event was not the end of the story. Even as the two-metre-tall Cornish granite memorial was being installed, a 49th name came through the mists of time, and shortly after that, yet another name revealed itself to us. Consequently, a supplementary tablet recording both names was commissioned, and this has recently been installed on the memorial.

So the memorial now has a total of 50 names inscribed on it: 30 from WWI and 20 from WWII.

The latest two names are of older men. The first, Captain Harold Burleigh, 47, had also served in WWI. A Royal Engineer, he was one of thousands who had not been evacuated from Dunkirk in May 1940, but with countless others had made his way to St Nazaire, hoping to get out by ship. On 17 June 1940, he embarked on the RMS Lancastria, which, although vastly overloaded, set sail for England only to be sunk by the Luftwaffe a few miles offshore. It is estimated that between 4,000 and 7,000 lives were lost (different accounts vary significantly) – the largest single-ship loss of life in British maritime history.

The other was a senior officer, 51-year-old Air Vice Marshall Arthur Clinton Maund who died on 13 December 1942. Though English, he had emigrated to Canada, where he joined the Canadian forces in WWI. He returned in 1919 and joined the newly formed  RAF, in which he served with distinction in many senior positions, including in the Middle East. His last posting was at Technical Training Command – the branch of the RAF responsible for keeping the aircraft flying. He is remembered in Fairlight in the naming of the road, Clinton Way.

In WWI, the ages of the victims ranged from 15 to 46.  They represent all three services and almost all the major battles of the war, as well as three ship disasters, which each occasioned a huge loss of life. The WWII names, though fewer in number, are nevertheless similarly representative of that conflict.  Their geographical spread underlines the global nature of that war: northern Europe, the Far East, North Africa, the Mediterranean.

There are no surviving veterans of WWI, and from WWII, there are fewer with each passing year.  Yet the need for the rest of us to remember, to do justice to the sacrifices made by local men and women from villages and towns all over the nation doing their duty irrespective of the personal cost, remains as strong as ever.  With this memorial, Fairlight remembers. Lest we forget.

The memorial was constructed and installed by EB Sculpture of Broad Oak, Brede. It was paid for entirely by village fundraising, public subscription and many generous individual donations, collectively enabling the village to honour its pledge to remember.

To complete the work on the Fairlight War Memorial, the Fairlight History Group are preparing a Book of Remembrance to be lodged in the church with as much detail as we can muster of each of the casualties from both wars. It’s a long process and we are doing a lot of other local history research meanwhile.

If you want to add further information or to get involved, see fairlighthistory.co.uk/contact-us

One of the leading tourist attractions in Hastings is celebrating its 70th birthday this month. The Fishermen’s Museum in Rock‑A‑Nore Road, with over 90,000 visitors every year, opened its doors for the first time on 17 May 1956.

The Museum was built in 1853/4 as a mission church, aimed at the many fisherfolk in the town who, at a time of significant expansion of the fishing industry, could not be persuaded to come to the existing churches of All Saints and St Clements. The Fishermen’s Church, as it became known, was well-used until the start of the Second World War in September 1939, but then had to close because it was inside a zone of prohibited access to the public – and it never re-opened.

In 1956 the Old Hastings Preservation Society took over the church and turned it into the Fishermen’s Museum in order to preserve the town’s last remaining sailing lugger, the Enterprise RX 278, built in Hastings in 1912.

Ironically, the ground on which the church was built in those early Victorian years had previously been a compound where boats like the Enterprise were cut up by HM Customs if they had been used by smugglers. Also ironic was the fact that the crime-breaking vessels may have actually been constructed in a boat-building yard on the beach right next to the compound where they might be going to be chopped up.

Smuggling was a common and relatively peaceful activity in Hastings from the late 17th century onwards, but it became a more violent way of life for many fishermen after the end of the Napoleonic war, in 1815. Many had been serving in the armed forces but then suddenly became unemployed and looking for an income at a time of recession. Large numbers took up smuggling, thereby forcing the government to set up a semi-military Coastguard- type service along the south-east coast. ‘Preventive stations’ were set up on Hastings seafront, in Ecclesbourne Glen, and at Fairlight Head and Fairlight Cove to try to stop the smuggling.

In addition to the stations, a cutting-up compound for the boats of captured smugglers was created on what is now the seafront opposite Pelham Crescent. But by the mid-1830s this had become a fashionable tourist area, so the Customs moved to a new site in Rock‑A‑Nore Road. Land had been created there following the construction of a groyne against which much shingle had quickly accumulated, as a result of the west-to-east longshore drift.

The fishermen wanted to use this new ground to build storage sheds and workshops, but there were so many applicants for a site that the landlords, Hastings Council, produced a town plan which resulted in the construction of 20 rows of over 130 of the tall thin ‘net shops’ which are unique to Hastings. About 40 still survive.

The council allocated to the Customs enough of the ground at the east end of the net shops to set up a new ‘condemned yard’ for the smugglers’ boats. But during the 1840s smuggling largely died out following the great reduction of the duties on imports which had made it worthwhile. So by c1850 the compound had become redundant.

Meanwhile the beach on the compound’s east side, where the Shipwreck Museum is today, had been used by many boatbuilders, one well-known figure being George Tutt. He constructed many vessels there including, in about 1850, the Ocean Queen RE 65. This was one of the big three-masted Hastings luggers that went mackerel fishing in the south-west English channel (often based at Plymouth) early in the year, and herring catching in the North Sea (based in Yarmouth or Lowestoft) in mid-summer and early autumn.

Not only did Tutt build the Ocean Queen, but he also built a model of her for the Great Exhibition that took place in Hyde Park in the summer of 1851, and that model is now on permanent display in the Fishermen’s Museum. In the Exhibition’s catalogue, Tutt said the Ocean Queen was of 29 tons burthen (the number of tons she could carry), was 40 feet long and with 14.5 feet breadth of beam. He said the model’s scale was one inch to one foot.

The model itself measures 40 inches long on the keel, 48 inches overall and 14.5 inches at its widest, with the main mast 34 inches tall. On top of the bulwarks at the stern is a very small metal plate which says: “George Tutt, Builder, Hastings, 1851”.

The Ocean Queen RE 65 was built for the Hide family; the Hastings News of 21 March 1851 reported that the boat had returned from Plymouth with the body of the master, John Hide, who had drowned in the harbor there on 14 March. He had suffered most from the fact that the water in the harbour contained sewage. He left a large family and a widow. The 1861 census records the Ocean Queen as being at Plymouth with a crew of eight, and in 1871 as lying 15 miles off Falmouth, again with eight crew. The registration letters ‘RE’ were used by the port of Rye until 1868 (the first and last letters of the town’s name), when they were changed to ‘RX’ (of Rye Sussex) to avoid confusion with Ramsgate.

Tutt was not the only boat-builder in Hastings. For several centuries, fishing boats, trading vessels, pleasure craft and even the Customs’ anti-smuggling cutters were built here, with the largest vessels constructed on the beach under the Castle cliffs, where Wellington Place is today. The highpoint of this industry was the first half of the 19th century, before the railways eliminated much of the coastal shipping trade, and before shipbuilding became concentrated in the more industrial parts of Britain. Nevertheless, in the first half of the 20th century there were still some fishing boats built in Hastings, including the Enterprise, now inside the Museum, and the Edward and Mary RX 74 built in 1918/9, standing on the beach outside, which I rescued from break-up in 1983.

The busiest, and probably largest, shipbuilding yard was that of Ransom and Ridley, which stood opposite Wellington Square, roughly where Sports Direct is today. They are known to have built 27 trading vessels, revenue cutters and large yachts between 1811 and 1842, with at least eight of these being more than 100 tons. The other large shipbuilding business in the early 19th century was that of Thwaites and Winter, located on the beach opposite Pelham Crescent, making similar craft to Ransom and Ridley.

The Fishermen’s Museum is open every day from 11.00. Admission is free, but any donations are very welcome. There are more details about the Museum and the net shops on my website hastingshistory.net.

I’d been doing some decorating for a friend who wanted to sell a flat he had no intention of living in. The work required modest competence, limited conversation, and no public explanation, which suited me.

During this period, I acquired an elderly Mercedes through one of the online services where a teenager delivers a car to you with the air of someone returning a pair of borrowed headphones. Only afterwards did I discover it had previously belonged to Dr Derek Khatsky, the man responsible for my last visit to Hastings. The coincidence did not immediately appear significant.

Two days later, the phone rang. It was her: the girl from my last coastal adventure.

“Hastings has gone strange again,” she said.

“Again?”

“Stranger than usual. The local elections are coming up and they’ve made everyone go a bit bonkers. Can you come down?”

The roads deteriorated the nearer you got to Hastings. Drivers ahead of me started making lateral movements of unusual commitment. Several cars displayed stickers stating ‘I’m not drunk, I’m avoiding potholes’.

I arrived, and she opened the door. One arm was in a sling.

“What happened?” I said.

“Stupid accident,” she said. “I don’t want to go into it, but it’s properly buggered.”

The street appeared unchanged, except across the road a large, tattered Union flag hung from an upstairs window, moving slightly in the wind.

“It’s been up for a while,” she said. “Keeps falling down. They just put it back up again. Looks worse every time.”

“I used to be quite friendly with them,” she said. “And a couple of others on the street. Since that went up, it’s felt different.”

“People keep assuming I’ve got an opinion on things I don’t have an opinion on,” she said. “You know… given my background. It’s ridiculous. I’ve never even been in a synagogue.”

In the kitchen, a small food waste caddy sat beside the sink.

“I don’t actually mind these new bins,” she said. “A lot of people really hate them. It’s just that everything that comes with them is a bit of a pain. There’s the little one in here, and then the bigger one outside. You’re supposed to empty one into the other.

“I was trying to do it and I knocked over my recycling box. There were tins, cardboard, glass, everything everywhere.

“The councillor turned up while I was still looking at the mess,” she said. “She cleared it all up for me. I think she was relieved to find a problem that she could actually help with.

“She said she’d already been shouted at several times that morning,” she added. “And she’s started to feel a bit frightened going out canvassing.

“She said people were convinced they were going to get fined if they didn’t use them. She kept telling them it wasn’t true, but no one believed her. One man even told her separating food waste was part of a wider global initiative for population control.”

A car passed outside, slowing as it negotiated something in the road.

“I see the potholes remain an active issue.”

“They’re getting worse,” she said. “Someone called it the pothole pandemic, and now that’s what everyone calls it.”

“There’s already conspiracy theories, of course,” she said. “Something about the potholes releasing chemicals into your car through the air conditioning. I stopped listening after that.”

She said there were election posters all over town. I noticed one had been put through her door, so I took a closer look.

“Take back control,” I read.

“Of the buses,” she said.

“How many are there?”

She paused.

“Now I think about it, I don’t think I’ve ever seen one.”

We went out for a walk. You don’t normally see many ward-level posters in local elections. One or two, perhaps. Now they were everywhere.

Lots of light blue, red and green. Some brave souls had even put the darker blue ones up.

“They’ve multiplied,” I said.

“People seem very certain,” she said. “About completely different things.”

A couple of camera crews had appeared, hovering at the edges, waiting for something to happen.

A man stood outside a shop speaking with confidence.

“It’s about taking back control,” he said. “That’s what it comes down to.”

“Of what?” he was asked.

“Well,” he said, “everything.”

Further along, a man in paint-splattered trousers was asked what the main issue was.

“I’ve been painting that wall since six this morning, and it’s still not dry.”

We stopped at a pub and went to sit in the garden.

A man at the next table leaned over and asked to borrow the ashtray.

“Bit mad down there today, isn’t it?” he said. “I don’t really understand what’s going on.”

“People seem to be taking an interest in the local elections,” I said.

“I don’t follow that sort of thing,” he said. “Politics. It’s always something.”

“But I’ve heard about the bins. God, people hate them.”

“Bloke next door won’t use his at all. He met a massive badger down the alley one night, and it scared the life out of him. Says he’s not having that coming up to his front door and eating what’s left of his dinner.”

By the time May Day arrived, something felt off.

Everything seemed to be proceeding as normal, but something wasn’t quite right. The processions felt thinner than they should have been, and there were fewer bikers than people expected.

There were still a lot of people, though, and they were all heading in the same direction. We followed.

We heard the music before we saw anything.

By the time we reached the pier, it was clear that this was where everybody was. The crowds were far larger than anything else we had seen that day.

This was the event the light blue party had been promising for weeks, a full-scale free rave with Danny Rampling headlining. Somehow, they had actually pulled it off.

The music got louder. A cheer went up. More people continued to arrive. The flow didn’t stop.

Underfoot, the surface gave a little as the weight shifted. Not suddenly. Not sharply. Just enough to register.

“It’s always done that,” someone said.

The music built again. The crowd responded.

Further along, people were packed more tightly now. The movement became less individual and more collective.

The Coastguard’s boat sat near the pier, its engine idling.

From the water, the pier looked very different: its entire length was shifting now, a slow, uneven sway travelling from one section to another as the crowd moved.

At certain points, it dipped slightly, then rose again.

“Is it supposed to do that?” one man said.

The other man didn’t answer immediately.

“It’s not ideal,” he said.

They stood there in silence.

The structure shifted again.

After a while, one of the men spoke.

“Hang on,” he said. “I’ve got an idea.”

THE END

The full version of this article, and more of Dr Khatsky’s writing, can be found at paradisoalcatraz.substack.com

So how do you go about coming up with 111 places in Hastings – and around – to feature in a new book for a global guide book series? And that’s not just a passing mention, but a dedicated page for each chosen spot. Welcome to the world of the 111 Places books, which has just added the snappily-titled 111 Places in Hastings & Rye That You Shouldn’t Miss to its coverage of over 300 other places around the world.

111 Places differs from other travel guides in setting out to intrigue and inform locals as much – if not more – than visitors wanting
a checklist of ‘key sights’ to tick off on a brief visit. Writing one of these babies basically involves sorting out your antenna to pick out ‘why, what, who or how’ stories to please anyone with a modicum of curiosity.

As a journalist whose 30-year plus career has often been about satisfying curiosity as much as (just about) earning a living, writing a book like this is a blast. Alongside the pleasure of digging out stories behind places both familiar and off-radar, by the end it becomes a case of things you sadly left out rather than struggling to hit the 111 mark.  Writing the book throughout last year, for example, I left out a brilliant pop-up gallery like Unit 2 in St Leonards because it just wasn’t certain to be around in a couple of years (as seems to have sadly transpired). Or in the case of pubs I might have otherwise put in, if the publisher hadn’t said “No more pubs, Norm” about halfway through my delivering batches of entries.

TELL ME A STORY

It’s the stories behind a place that determine whether it gets a dedicated entry. This justified spotlighting a host of fascinating spots that wouldn’t have a hope in hell of getting a mention in a standard guide book – places that might well be unfamiliar to plenty of local folk too.

A good example in the new book is The Dove Cafe. Sitting slap bang opposite a giant carpet showroom on the western edge of St Leonards, casual passing punters are likely in short supply, let alone any DFL daytrippers. But this shining example of grass-roots activism and community engagement with refugees made for a perfect chapter telling not only its back story, but also its role as a beacon for cuisine from places like Lebanon, Sudan and Afghanistan, world music concerts and creative work from people like Syrian photographer Nour El-Din, who swapped life in war-torn Homs for Hastings.

Just around the corner from The Dove Cafe, Electro Studios Project Space (ESPS) also ticked 111 Places boxes as a distinctive rough-edged embodiment of St Leonards’ creative spirit. This is also a good time to mention the bountiful possibilities of the ‘Tip’ section accompanying each dedicated entry. For ESPS, this was a chance to direct folk to the eye-catching sculptures on the adjacent seafront promenade, celebrating Jimi Riddle from Hastings metal band The Riddles, and inspiring charity volunteer Ann Novotny.

Every 111 Places author will have their own favourite types of place. So my liking for contemporary art projects meant making space for the quirky back story of West Hill hideaway The Beacon, plus places like The Compound in St Leonards and Beeching Studios in Bexhill.

Despite being a 100% devout atheist, a fascination with cool churches (who needs God when you can just dig the history?) led to dedicated pages for holy edifices. These included the atmospheric ancient ruins of Old St Helen’s Church (older than Hastings Castle) hidden in woodland at the top edge of Hastings, and the glorious painted interior of English Martyrs Church – just up from Warrior Square station.

Though Hastings and Rye are the headline places adorning the cover, I spread my wings across what the tourist folk label ‘1066 Country’, ranging as far west as Pevensey, and east to Dungeness – because there was no way I was going to pass up a chance to spotlight various wonders in that unique shingle expanse.

This geographical range also provided a chance to talk aspects of the (perhaps not so well known) radical history of Bexhill, including a fabulous pair of quirky world-beating racing cars in the Bexhill Museum (aka ‘Volta and The Easter Egg’) and the bizarrely chilling story of the town’s 1930s finishing school for the daughters of the Nazi elite, its school badge pairing the swastika and Union Jack.

Heading inland, alongside picking out back story strands for more familiar places such as the Herstmonceux Observatories Centre, Bateman’s and Great Dixter, you can find out about staying in a lakeside mirrored glass box cabin from Estonia, enjoy some of the best rural views in Sussex wandering the ‘Mad Jack’ Follies around Brightling, or marvel at the historic engineering wonders of the Brede Steam Giants just north of Hastings. And who other than Ninfield locals pause to reflect on the thought-provoking tales embodied by the Ninfield Stocks?

Writing a book in the 111 Places series involves tapping all kinds of sources. That might include the chance comments over coffee that led to a dedicated page linking Rye’s Grounded Café with an infamous Sussex witch trial. Or the fine local history archives delving into myriad facets of Sussex heritage – such as the impressive literary links highlighted in the book for Friars Road in Winchelsea. Add reference texts like Tina Brown’s Secret Hastings & St Leonards and David Clarke’s History Walks covering Hastings, St Leonards and Rye. Plus a nod to stories featured in Hastings Independent itself, which provided some pithy quotes dotted throughout the book

To finish, here’s two places from the book that hopefully capture the distinctive appeal of the 111 Places series. Old Roar Gill is just the sort of local marvel that many visitors to Hastings wouldn’t get told about by other guides, thereby missing a lush watery ‘Lost World’ idyll right in the heart of the town. The Havelock, meanwhile, wouldn’t normally make any list of notable Hastings pubs – yet its interior boasts one of Britain’s finest examples of decorative historic pub tiling. Who knew?!

BUY THE BOOK

Waterstones will be happy to sell you a copy of 111 Places in Hastings & Rye That You Shouldn’t Miss – or you can make Jeff Bezos a bit richer via Amazon. Norman is doing a book launch event with Q&A at Hastings Waterstones on April 30 at 5pm. If you fancy exploring westward, check out his 111 Places in Chichester and West Sussex That You Shouldn’t Miss, which was shortlisted for Travel Book of the Year at the 2025 Inspire Global Media Awards.

The paper’s name declares its independence, and it sticks to its guns. As a features writer, I have never been forced to change my stance for some dark political aim – the paper aims for authenticity and freedom of intellect, and as such, it is precious to the town. I am honoured to contribute – long may it continue.

Derived from Latin, the word ‘feature’ came into English via Old French to mean ‘aspects of the face’. It was adopted by journalism in the 19th century to mean something distinctive, prominent and developed in depth.

As a features writer, I am reminded of the 1559 painting by Dutch artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder titled The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, which contrasts Carnival (indulgence, meat, drink, festivity) with Lent (restraint, fasting, repentance, preparation for Easter), a symbolic clash between two ways of living. You could liken this to the community of Hastings, living between pleasure and restraint. So too, HIP features try to excite interest by the choice of topic and accessibility, while including more sombre elements and serious intent.

At its highest level, feature journalism is not simply about reporting facts; it is about making reality intelligible, memorable and human, without sacrificing accuracy. Gay Talese (New York Times journalist and author of the famous article Frank Sinatra Has a Cold) said: “The best journalism is not writing, it is reporting.” John Hersey (war correspondent for Time and Life magazines, who wrote the remarkable feature Hiroshima 1946) counters: ‘“What people want to read is stories.” Finley Peter Dunne, the Chicago newspaper humourist, states, “The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” Joseph Pulitzer, who campaigned for investigative journalism, suggests: “Accuracy is not a minor virtue. It is the virtue.” To combine these luminaries: the best stories are true stories, well told.

The feature writing we all strive to achieve reads with the confidence of literature but is built on verifiable fact. It often draws on primary interviews, archival or documentary evidence and firsthand observation. There is hopefully no padding or speculation disguised as insight. A clear, compelling narrative arc is aimed for where readers are carried, not merely informed.

Unlike news reporting, feature journalism prioritises: it answers not just what happened, but why it matters. The writer’s voice is present but disciplined: the writing serves the story – not the writer’s ego. Credibility is everything.

Having set the scene in celebration of feature writing, let us look at some of the features that have appeared over the first 299 editions. In doing so, we note that titles play a huge part in attracting readers who want to satisfy their curiosity with ‘Carnival’ or ‘Lenten’ content.

Here are some examples: Alfred the Great’s Fort in Hastings – Where was It? The Death of St Leonards. What Lies Beneath: Exploring an Old Cellar; Why are you so emotional – the suppressed anger of youth; Don’t All Children’s Lives Matter? And hopefully, my article on beached submarines was not submerged: The Fatal Attraction of a Helpless Sea Monster.

Features Editor Ben Bruges (who wrote the excellent Hastings Dot Connected in 2020, Cat Behaviourist and Groomer in 2022, A Word from our Founders and Valentines Vivarium in 2023) has chosen his list of features to be celebrated:

The Death of St Leonards, by outstanding historian and Hastings Museum Trustee Steve Peak, was published on 24 September 2025, and its opening remarks make you want to read on:

“This month is the 150th anniversary of the death of the newly-born town of St Leonards. On 29 September 1875, an Act of Parliament dissolved the local authority that had been running the town since 1832, forcing its streets, buildings, and open spaces to come under the rule of Hastings Council.”

Before reading this, I always thought that the town I was living in was called Hastings & St Leonards – but no! Having been part of a battle to save a flood plain from a housing estate in St Leonards’ wonderful wildlife haven of Combe Valley, I can see why the people who live away from Hastings town centre feel they are in a hinterland. Maybe St Leonards’ independent identity is being undermined – just like Bexhill Road’s driving surface.

Peter Gray’s feature The Wreck of the Amsterdam was published on 4 June 2025 and begins with the tantalising opener:

“There is a mystery as to why the Amsterdam ended up in Pevensey Bay during a great storm, unable to get beyond Beachy Head: five other ships did get beyond and as far as Portsmouth. So, the great storm was not quite as significant as some think.”

I am following a story on the intentions of the Dutch who are still interested in lifting this treasure full of treasure and taking it back to Holland, even though it is inside the lawful park boundary. Look out for a forthcoming feature on the subject!

HIP pays close attention to the evident poverty in overpopulated Hastings, where constant demands for new housing eat up green space. Poverty problems were highlighted on 18 October 2023 by the late Sally Burr with the opening lines:

“Residents in Hastings who qualify for Pension Credit and do not claim it are missing out on an estimated three million pounds in unclaimed benefit, according to a social policy software and analytics company.”

Nothing changes. People still must sleep on the streets despite millions from government – poverty seems endemic. Using the official Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD), Hastings is around the 14th most deprived local authority in England, placing it among the most deprived coastal towns in the country. Some neighbourhoods are in the top 1-3% most deprived in England. Others are mid-range or less deprived; of the 90,000 population, 63,300 people (≈73% of residents) live in the poorest 30% of areas nationally. That is a very high concentration of deprivation.

Around 1 in 64 people in Hastings are homeless (including temporary accommodation). These include families in temporary housing, hostels, insecure accommodation and rough sleeping, sofa surfing, and temporary housing. Green lungs will be eaten up by housing tyranny that people in poverty cannot afford, and their mental health will suffer even more.

In June 2020 there was a 150th edition retrospective which highlighted Black lives: “The Black Lives Matter protests have triggered a massive political movement in the USA but have also found echoes right around the world. What has it got to do with Hastings? Some white people object. To them we say, why not listen to the experience of black people who were born and live around you?” Graham Howard posted this comment on his Facebook timeline, and after it gained a lot of likes and supportive comments from his immediate friends and family, HIP thought it deserved a wider audience (see Born Black in Hastings, 16 June 2020) .

In summary, feature journalism is deeply reported, narratively structured non-fiction that combines evidential precision with human insight, producing work that is both intellectually rigorous and emotionally compelling. Features appear in most editions of HIP. The thoughts behind the features are emotionally driven to ensure that people are entertained, informed, and satisfied by them, with their Carnival cheer or Lenten drama.

Here’s to another 300 editions of our democratic and independent newspaper!

To read any article referred to in this article, use the title to search the internet or use Find what you are looking for on the HIP website 

You can say what you like about Michael Gove. And many teachers would still have much to say about him, not much of it complimentary. But in the National Year of Reading let’s cut him some slack.

In my humble opinion, Lord Gove of The Spectator, or Lord Gove of Torry as they would now call him in the upper house, deserves some credit for raising literacy standards in our schools.

The concept of phonics had been around for a while. But it was Gove as Education Secretary, aided by Dominic Cummings as his short- sighted Sancho Panza and special adviser, who pushed through the introduction of Systematic Synthetic Phonics and mandated its use in the 2014 National Curriculum as the way in which children in England would start to learn to read. And much the same approach is now being used to help adults in Hastings and across the country who missed out on formal schooling to learn to read later in life.

It is difficult to prove cause and effect when there are so many factors at play. But for several years England has been moving up the Pisa league table of international comparisons for educational attainment in reading. There is a good case to be made that the use of phonics has contributed to that progress. It has even been said that, for reading England is now “the best in the West”. This is in contrast to the poor performance of some Welsh schools where the ‘cueing’ system still prevails.

But it is not just in England where the adoption of phonics has generated improvements in literacy standards. Legislators in some of the southern ‘red’ states (ie Republican) of the US have mandated the use of phonics and have got the results to prove it, whereas in the past, Democratic states seemed better at educating their children.

For those whose formal education in the UK is some years behind them and who managed to learn to read by one means or another, phonics might be a bit of a mystery. In the jargon, phonics is a method of teaching reading and writing by developing a learner’s phonemic awareness: the ability to hear, identify and manipulate sounds (phonemes) and connect them to written letters or groups of letters (graphemes). This probably all seems familiar to the current generation of teachers, parents and possibly six year olds.

But a more straightforward definition of phonics comes from the National Literacy Trust (literacytrust.org.uk): “Phonics involves matching the sounds of spoken English with individual letters or groups of letters, for example the sound /k/ can be spelled as k, c, ch, or ck”.

I have recently needed to do some remedial education myself on phonics in order to volunteer in Hastings as a coach for adult literacy with Read Easy, a national charity whose vision is for all the adults in the UK to have the literacy skills they need to fulfil their potential and live life to the full (readeasy.org.uk). Read Easy reckons that there might be 2.4 million adults in England alone who cannot read at all or who can barely read. So pro rata, there must be a considerable number of folk in Hastings and St Leonards who will struggle in this way – with their life chances probably adversely affected as a result.

I can only speak for the systems used in the Hastings operation of Read Easy which was set up as part of a new East Sussex branch in 2023. But after training we are allocated a learner reader to work with on a one-to-one basis for two half-hour sessions per week. We very much use the phonics system manualised by the Shannon Trust (shannontrust.org.uk) which on a step-by-step, page-by-page system, builds from sounding out the letters through to building simple and then more complex words, and onwards to straightforward sentences and specially tailored reading books.

Even if a reader has some basic competence in reading and writing, we always start at page 1 of the manual so that we reduce the risk of gaps in their learning which might only emerge later.

We are not alone as volunteers: a local Hastings and St Leonards group meets regularly to exchange ideas and techniques and to liaise with our two local coordinators. It has been interesting, for example, to hear from others that b and d can get often confused at an early stage by readers because of their similar, if reversed, shapes.

As a newbie volunteer coach working with my reader, I have been impressed by how the phonics system, taken very much at the reader’s own pace, does gradually build not only competence, but also self-confidence for people who might have been dismissed in their school days. It is humbling and inspiring to watch their progress.

If you know an adult who is struggling with their reading and writing, tell them about Read Easy and encourage them to ask for our help. That first step of contacting us might be the most difficult one, but our coaches have the skills and time to get them on the learning journey again. Their first point of contact should be esleader@readeasy.org.uk.

For whatever reason, and fairly or unfairly, some teachers will never forgive Michael Gove for his time as Education Secretary. But at Read Easy we do value the system of phonics which he championed and which is helping our readers to have more fulfilling lives.

Joan is a 75-year-old grandmother who has lived in the Hollington area all her life. She was the youngest in a large family where maybe education wasn’t much valued. And then she was in primary school at a time when classes might have had more than 40 children, so it was easy for those who were struggling to be ignored or not even noticed. By the time Joan got to secondary school, she was way behind where she should have been, so she bunked off or misbehaved in other ways. That made things worse in terms of her learning.

Working in the care sector as an adult she was good at her job and found ways of covering up her lack of ability in reading and writing – until she got promoted and needed to do more paperwork. A new and less sympathetic manager came in and Joan felt that she had to leave, rather than continue to struggle. Now, after retirement, she has the motivation and time to build her reading and writing skills. What she would really like to be able to do is to read to her grandchildren. Step by step, with the phonics system, she is on the way.

Baran came to St Leonards from the Kurdish area of Iraq about five years ago. His spoken English is now pretty good and enables him to function in most aspects of his life. But he grew up with the Sorani way of writing, a modified Arabic form of script for reading and writing, so not the Latin-based alphabet. This has made it more difficult for him to get to grips with reading and writing in English. This problem has held him back from progressing in employment in the way which he would like. Factory work pays the bills, but he would like to achieve more at work and for his family and himself.

Encouraged by a refugee mentor, he contacted Ready Easy locally and was then put in touch with a coach to help him to improve his reading and writing. Over the last two years, Baran has worked with his coach on the Shannon manual approach which provides a systematic and gradual way of building up skills in both reading and writing. He is now able to write messages in good English and has progressed to being able to read simple books. But he remains keen to achieve even more.

It’s no secret Hastings is a friendly place. Eccentric too… maybe a bit literary as well. On balmy days when the gales we usually endure have moderated to zephyrs, the readers of Hastings and St Leonards come out in ones and twos to indulge their inclination in the sun.

Between the Royal Victoria and Goat Ledge, half a mile of wooden benches in alcoves under the promenade provide agreeable shelter: south-facing, sunny and looking over the channel. In the right weather, they are genial places, and often book lovers can be found there, intent and immersed despite breeze-ruffled pages.

They are not always escaping into fiction: three that I’ve talked to were reading philosophy, and one was studying German grammar. Most, however, choose fiction. I am obsessively curious about people reading books in public. There is a feeling of kinship – I am a reader too. Also, whether people like it or not, reading a book in a public place is a statement of identity: that the reader is a citizen of the Republic of Letters. On the London tube I long to ask readers what they read, but underground etiquette seems not to permit it. Hastings seafront is quite different.

So, one fine day, throwing English reserve to the winds, I prepared a speech of unthreatening politeness and approached a gentleman on the seafront (I’m an old man and can get away easier with eccentricities more problematic for the young): “Excuse me, sir, please forgive me for disturbing you, but I am always very curious about people reading in public; would you mind my asking what you are reading?” I was relieved and pleased that he seemed delighted to share.

He was the first of many. Since then I’ve asked maybe forty people, maybe more, and all but one have been surprisingly forthcoming. Nearly all are enthusiastic about their reading matter, and actually the best thing about the whole experience has been the warmth of the response to my intrusion. The single exception was a young woman who looked a bit bored by my enquiry – but it turned out she was equally bored by her book: “It passes the time,” she said wearily. No one has been even mildly resentful, let alone hostile, and many have been up for a long conversation.

Although these can be fascinating, I stand ready to leave at any hint that I may have overstayed my welcome, or before; and sometimes too soon, when a promising conversation is already taking shape.

Though of course, not everyone is equally interesting. There are very few, just one or two, with whom I just can’t anticipate a fruitful conversation at all; I thank them and flee after the first sentence or two. There are others whose conversation I enjoy but I suspect that our common ground may run out if it’s prolonged, so I leave them while the going is still good.

I guess I’m a bit of a literary snob, so it gives me pleasure that few seafront readers are reading anything that I wouldn’t enjoy myself. Even from my perhaps over-critical perspective, the standard of literature on the seafront seems pretty creditable. I never kept a list, but the mean is popular literary fiction, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, for instance. From memory, there has also been, The Worst Journey in the World, Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s account of Captain Scott’s Polar Expedition; short stories by Dorothy Parker and a book by Alan Bennett. One lady reads and re-reads Jack Reacher books, and another escapes reality with Philip Pullman. A couple reading detective fiction seemed slightly embarrassed by it (though they had nothing to be embarrassed about in my opinion); but, curiously, they were not as embarrassed as the single person I have found reading a nineteenth century classic (it was one of Anthony Trollope’s novels, but I can’t remember which). One reader disclosed that he was an avant garde novelist, but he wasn’t reading an avant garde novel himself, and I can’t blame him.

The most surprising thing has been the casual, matter-of-fact intimacy of some of the conversations that have ensued. Inevitably, the primary subject has been books, but one’s response to some can be very personal, and even close to the heart, touching on experience, hopes and disappointments. On one occasion, I dissected the character of my maternal grandfather for the benefit of a heavily tattooed gay Irishman. There is a very pleasant young woman who regularly reads during her lunch break, with whom I look forward to further discussion of the supernatural and visiting Auschwitz. A homeless man who sits cross-legged on the pavement near Sturdee Place reads novels about Nelson’s navy and is passionate about history; and there is another homeless gentleman who is driven to read thrillers almost fanatically, as an anaesthetic against, or distraction from, the demons in his head. If he doesn’t read, he says, he does drugs, and that can lead to worse. Never, normally, would I ask a perfect stranger if she was queer (it’s just not my style) but I did that just last week. And the lady in question was happy to discuss her sexuality with me.

A very curious thing is that about one in four or five readers thanks me at the end of our conversation. What for? For intruding into their space and disturbing their peaceful study? It seems courtesy overkill. Good manners are a wonderful thing, and I feel a little humbled by it. But I am still puzzled.

I try to walk a few miles every day to postpone the grimmer aspects of ageing. The readers of the Hastings seafront make my walks interesting and enjoyable. I should thank them. If any read this, I do.

Choosing a care home is a deeply emotional decision. It’s not just about selecting a building; it’s about choosing a place where you or a loved one may live for many years. With our population ageing and more families facing the prospect of residential care, at a time when two Hastings care homes have recently been downgraded over concerns about safety and management, it has never been more important to know how to choose a dementia care home with care and confidence. Here are the experts’ tips.

1. Start with location – it really does matter

Choose somewhere close enough that visiting doesn’t become a chore. When a place is awkward to get to, visits tend to tail off, even with the best intentions. If this were you, you’d want familiar faces popping in, not visits becoming a special event.

2. Ask around locally – people usually know

Websites and ratings can be useful, but local knowledge is gold. Ask neighbours, shopkeepers, or friends who’ve had relatives in care. People are often more honest in private than they are online.

If several people quietly say, “I wouldn’t put my mum there”, listen. Talking to local dementia/Alzheimer’s groups puts you in touch with other people who you can also ask.

3. Staff matter more than the building

There can be poor care in homes that look like luxury hotels – and kind, thoughtful care in very ordinary buildings.

Watch how staff speak to residents. Are they patient? Do they kneel to talk to someone in a wheelchair or speak behind their back? Do they use people’s names? Or do they seem rushed and irritated?

If staff appear flustered, residents quickly pick up on it – even those with dementia. They may avoid asking for help because they don’t want to feel like a burden. If this were you, you’d want to feel liked, not managed.

4. Listen to the noise

This is something people often overlook. Are bells ringing constantly? Are intercoms blaring? Are walkie-talkies crackling all day?

Now imagine trying to remember what you had done that day– or trying to find the right words – while being interrupted every few minutes. Constant noise can be exhausting and distressing.

5. Be cautious about photos on social media

Many homes share smiling photos online. That’s fine if people have genuinely agreed to it.

Ask how consent is checked and revisited over time. It’s surprising how often care home post photos where people in the background look uncomfortable or distressed. If it were you on a bad day, would you want that shared?

6. People should still have a say in their lives

Even with dementia, many people can express preferences, sometimes with words, sometimes in other ways. Ask how residents are involved in everyday decisions. Not vague ideas, but real ones: routines, activities, their rooms, shared spaces. If the home wants to make changes, are residents asked what they think?

If someone came into your house and rearranged your furniture without asking, you’d be upset. For a person with dementia, that loss of control can be frightening.

7. Good homes don’t mind questions

Ask questions – lots of them. If staff are open and relaxed, that’s a good sign. If they become defensive, vague or uncomfortable, take note. Try to visit more than once. If they mind you popping in a few times before committing, take note.

8. Check that promises really happen

If the brochure mentions outings, entertainers or activities, ask questions like “When did this last happen?”, “When is the next one?” or “Can I see it?” Some homes make attractive promises, knowing families are unlikely to move a relative once they’ve settled. A good home won’t mind you checking.

We’ve seen cinema rooms that were never used and games rooms with no games. Also, access to a garden is important. Can residents help with planting or is the garden just for show?

9. Always visit at mealtime

Mealtimes tell you a lot. Are people rushed, left waiting, helped too quickly just to get it done? Is the room noisy or chaotic?

Now imagine being hungry, confused, or needing help – and feeling invisible. Mealtimes should be calm, respectful and unhurried.

10. People should still have a real choice, not just claims of it

Every care home will say they support residents’ independence. It will be in the brochure. What matters is how that looks day to day. Ask a couple of staff to explain what they do in practice.

Think about something small, like breakfast. Imagine going to a café and having toast arrive already buttered, soggy, with someone else’s choice of jam. You might eat it, but it wouldn’t feel right. Now imagine that choice being made for you every day.

For someone living with dementia, those small losses of choice add up. When the world already feels confusing and unfamiliar, having decisions made for you can be deeply unsettling.

11. Read the CQC report, especially the boring bits

Don’t just glance at the overall rating. Read what it says about leadership, management and safety. That’s where problems usually appear. You won’t spot poor leadership on a short visit, but inspection reports often will.

12. Consider different stages of dementia.

Where possible, care homes should avoid mixing people with very different stages of dementia on the same unit. Residents who are only mildly forgetful can find it upsetting when others with advanced dementia wander into their rooms – and it may increase anxiety about their own future.

A final thought

Don’t base your decision on fancy furniture or a slick brochure. Visit more than once. Go at different times of day. Trust how the place feels.

Keep asking yourself: “If this were me, would I feel safe, respected and at home here?”

The best care homes aren’t defensive or secretive. They’re open, confident, and comfortable being seen as they really are.

Written for HIP by Dr Andrea Capstick, Associate Professor at the University of Bradford, Prof June Andrews, a dementia researcher and author, and old town resident David Clegg, BEM, founder of the UK’s largest archive of interviews with people living with dementia.

Helena Dollimore’s record as MP for Hastings & Rye tells a consistent, if disturbing, story in Parliament, on social media and in rare written responses to constituents.

But before laying this out, it is necessary to recall some key facts.

MORE THAN 20,000 CHILDREN

In January 2024, the world’s highest court, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), found that there was a case that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. It ordered Israel to “take all measures within its power” to stop acts of genocide and take “immediate and effective measures” to allow aid into Gaza.

In July 2024, the ICJ ruled that Israel was guilty of both unlawful occupation and the crime of apartheid. It found that Israeli policy imposed and “serve[d] to maintain a near-complete separation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem between the settler and Palestinian communities”, including separate roads and legal systems.

In November 2024, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the country’s former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, for “the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts” in Gaza.

Since then, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, two of Israel’s leading human rights organisations (B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel), and the world’s leading association of genocide scholars, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, have all declared that Israel has been committing genocide in Gaza.

In September 2025, Ms Dollimore’s former employer, Save the Children, reported that “At least one Palestinian child has been killed every hour on average by Israeli forces in Gaza over nearly 23 months of war, with the number of children killed now surpassing 20,000.”

Moreover, notwithstanding the so-called “ceasefire”, Israel’s genocide in Gaza is still ongoing.

Indeed, according to Amnesty International, Israel is “still committing genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip, by continuing to deliberately inflict conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction, without signalling any change in their intent”.

LEGAL OBLIGATIONS ON GENOCIDE

These facts carry clear legal obligations for the UK government. So what is Helena Dollimore doing? Since her election to Parliament in July 2024, Ms Dollimore has consistently refused to acknowledge that Israel has been committing genocide in Gaza – or that her government is obliged to take all necessary steps to prevent it, choosing instead to follow the ‘party line’ blindly.

In May 2025, she effectively counselled delay, claiming that while the UK was “fully committed to upholding international law” it was “important that the international courts are left to rule [on] where international humanitarian law is breached”.

Yet as Tufts University’s Alex de Waal – who has 40 years of experience as a humanitarian worker and expert on famine – noted in July 2025: “The Genocide Convention is, first and foremost, a convention to prevent genocide. The question of whether there is or is not genocide is secondary to the question of whether Israel and other states that are party to the Genocide Convention are fulfilling their obligations to prevent genocide. They are not doing so.”

UK ARMS SALES

In a June 2025 poll, 57% of the British public supported a full arms embargo on Israel, with only 13% opposed. In stark contrast, Ms Dollimore has consistently refused to back an end to UK arms sales to Israel or to do anything to hold her government accountable for these ongoing transfers, notwithstanding the UK’s legal obligations to stop these exports and the clear evidence that these arms have been used to carry out war crimes against Gaza’s population.

In July 2025, she even claimed (on Facebook) that “Our Government has suspended arm sales” – failing to mention that only a small minority (less than 10%) of export licences had actually been suspended.

Unlike other Labour MPs, she also failed to object to the supply of crucial components for the F35 fighter aircraft – which continued despite the ‘suspension’ – formed the single largest and most important part of the UK’s arms trade with Israel. Indeed, without the continuous supply of spare parts from the UK, as well as other producer countries, it would have been impossible for Israel to have kept using the F-35s to bomb Gaza. In July 2024, an F-35 was used to drop three 2,000lb bombs in an attack on a so-called ‘safe zone’ in Al-Mawasi – an area of Gaza that has Council-backed friendship links with Hastings – killing 90 people.

SANCTIONS

Given the above, it is perhaps unsurprising that Helena Dollimore has also failed to acknowledge that Israel is guilty of apartheid or to call for any meaningful sanctions on Israel.

For example, she was not one of the 84 parliamentarians – including some Labour MPs – who wrote to the Foreign Secretary David Lammy in July 2025, calling for an arms embargo, a ban on all trade with illegal Israeli settlements, targeted sanctions on on all individuals and entities complicit in Israel’s occupation, and a full review of UK-Israel relations to ensure that no support is being given to violations of international law.

REPRESSION

It’s not true, however, that our MP has been completely inactive on all Gaza-related matters. Indeed, Ms Dollimore has dutifully backed her government’s repression of campaigners who’ve been opposing Israel’s genocide, most notably by voting in July to ban the nonviolent protest group Palestine Action under the Terrorism Act.

The resulting restrictions on free speech – there is now only one legally-permissible answer to the question “Do you support Palestine Action?” – have already led to 2,700 arrests of entirely peaceful protestors and led to Amnesty International launching its first-ever Urgent Action (UA) regarding the right to protest in the UK.

More recently, Ms Dollimore has refused to join fellow Labour MPs in signing any of the Early Day Motions calling on the Justice Secretary to “to engage urgently with the legal representatives of the pro-Palestinian activists who are on hunger strike in UK prisons” (the final four hunger strikers only concluding their strike on 15 January (three) and 26 January (one) after gaining concessions.

She now looks set to vote in favour of the government’s planned restrictions on ‘repeat protests’. This measure is being brought in because of the embarrassment that the peaceful mass protests against Israel’s genocide – protests which have included mass Jewish participation – have caused to this government.

EMPTY WORDS

Helena Dollimore and her supporters will doubtless point to public statements in which she has highlighted “the desperate need to get more aid into Gaza”, condemned the “awful” suffering of civilians in Gaza and the targeting of aid workers, and stated her support for a two-state solution as evidence of her good intentions.

However, these and similar words ring very hollow given her government’s failure to impose any meaningful form of sanctions on Israel and her ongoing refusal to challenge this failure. As her fellow Labour MP Richard Burgon has noted: “Israel is committing war crime after war crime. We don’t need more empty words from the Government calling on Israel to do the right thing. We need tough action to force Israel to end its atrocities against the Palestinian people. That means ending all arms sales and imposing widespread sanctions on Israel – just as were rightly imposed on Russia over Ukraine.”

Further information here: hastingspalestinecampaign.org

These changes emerged in a talk given by Cllr Jo Walker and Murray Davidson to the Friends of Hastings Country Park Nature Reserve (FHCPNR) in January.

EARLY HISTORY

What is now the Hastings Country Park Nature Reserve has a history stretching back across geological eons. The sandstone cliffs that dominate the landscape are remnants of a time when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, millions of years before humans. But if an iguanodon popped up its head between the ferns when Fairlight Glen was in full leaf, perhaps we wouldn’t be totally surprised. We know that at least one left footprints on the foreshore.

In terms of human beings, flint tools show that the hunter-gatherers of the Mesolithic Period to about 4,000 BCE were active in the area. There might even have been a settlement in that period. And then we have fragments of pots and tools from the subsequent Neolithic period to about 2,200 BCE. The folk of the Bronze Age left ring ditches and barrows which local archaeologists associate with burial practices. The later Iron Age showed evidence of some sort of fort on the East Hill, which would have had economic and social activity, as well as being for defence against other tribes.

To take a line from The Life of Brian, “What did the Romans ever do for us?”, they don’t seem to have been much interested in the area other than for farming. Some Roman coins have been turned up, but there is not much other direct evidence of their presence in the park. The invading Saxons – the Haestingas – were more significant than the Romans. They farmed extensively across what is now the reserve and left evidence of their burial sites on the East Hill.

As we move into the later medieval period, the picture is of small islands of open arable fields around farms. These would have been surrounded by pasture, woodland and scrub. And from that time forward there was quarrying for rock and sand. Indeed, in the Second World War, the sand of the area we call the Quarry was of strategic importance as a source for high-quality optical instruments.

HORRIBLE HISTORIES AND BIODIVERSITY

Turning to ‘Horrible History’ from about 1500 onwards, we see the intensification of farming, and then the unpopular process of enclosure of common land. About three hundred years ago, the Milward and Collier families came into the picture as big landowners and general bigwigs, holding the mayoralty many, many times. Among other things, their names are remembered through road names on the West Hill.

Over the years into the 20th century, the same two families gradually sold off the land to Hastings Council, sometimes at a pretty steep, and controversial, price. But it was Sarah, Countess Waldegrave who, as a local benefactor, made sure that the land of what is now the reserve remained free of the sort of development which scars so much of the South Coast.

As industrialisation and urban expansion encroached, the area was officially designated as a Country Park in 1974, a move which marked a real turning point, ensuring that the area would remain safeguarded for future generations to enjoy and cherish.

Hastings Borough Council, as the owner of the area, later designated the area as a Local Nature Reserve in 2006. And the Friends came into existence not long afterwards. Cllr Jo Walker, the Council’s lead on all things environmental, and Murray Davidson, a 30-year veteran of leading the cause for our local nature reserves and green spaces, emphasised the importance of Hastings Country Park as a nature reserve in their talk: it’s not just a park for dog walkers, and its significance extends far beyond its breathtaking scenery. It serves as a critical environmental asset, playing an integral role in ecological conservation, climate regulation, carbon sequestration and sustainable tourism.

BIODIVERSE PARK

One of the most extraordinary aspects of the reserve is its incredible biodiversity. It is home to a huge array of flora and fauna, some of which are rare or endangered. And there are less conspicuous rarities, such as Dumontier’s liverwort. The Dripping Well is the only place in the UK where this is found apart from Devon.

The reserve has such a great range of biodiversity because, as the area where the High Weald meets the sea, it has a rare mixture of habitats – grasslands, heathlands, woodlands, cliffs, and maritime habitats. Each supports a particular community of species. Among the most notable species found within the reserve are peregrine falcons, a few black redstarts, Dartford warblers, stonechats and various species of butterflies and moths. The cliffs provide essential nesting sites for seabirds such as fulmars, making the reserve an important breeding ground for avian species.

Mammals also thrive here: foxes, rodents – and badgers, of course. Sadly, there are the occasional muntjac and roe deer: sadly, because of the damage which a large herd of deer could do to the woodland. Additionally, the park is known for its impressive population of invertebrates, including rare beetles, mining bees, and other pollinators that contribute to the ecological balance of the area.

This means that the flora within the park is equally remarkable. The heathland areas have vibrant patches of heather, gorse, with its coconut scented flowers, and many other species of wildflowers. They play a key role in the food chain for butterflies, moths, and other insects and birds. Meanwhile, the ancient woodlands are home to a wide range of tree species, from oak and birch to holly and yew, offering shelter and food for other organisms.

WHAT DID BREXIT EVER DO FOR US?

So, where does Brexit come into this? Leaving the EU prompted a change by central Government in its support systems for farmers. Less emphasis was to be given to production and more to habitat management and environmental conservation.

This has had an effect locally. The Council had long known that the arable fields stretching along the south side of Fairlight Road were not commercially viable. This shift in the national funding mechanism required a radical rethink by the Council about how to manage the reserve for its primary purpose.

STEWARDSHIP

Jo Walker and Murray Davidson explained the opportunities created by the grant of £1m which the Council had secured from Natural England for a new approach to Countryside Stewardship for the reserve. This 10-year grant, running from 2023, will be used in part to convert the arable fields to mosaic pasture, or woodland pasture as some people think of it.

Murray explained that the full effects of this change of policy might not be seen for 100 years, as the new trees which the Council has already started to plant and protect will take time to fully develop. These are mainly oaks, bought as substantial specimens rather than whips to give them a better chance of survival. Over time, these trees will become surrounded by brambles and scrub, as in the pioneering rewilding project at Knepp in West Sussex. This will give them extra protection from deer and other grazers, as well as providing new habitat for birds and small mammals.

FUTURE PROSPECTS

Peering into the future, one can see how a natural ‘mosaic’ will get created across the former arable fields. Around the mosaic of trees and scrub, grazing herbivores will be brought in periodically: the lovely chestnut-red Sussex cattle are particularly suited to this sort of task of conservation grazing. And in winter, sheep will be brought in because they graze in a different way, dealing with the tussocks which cattle disdain. This will all be managed in partnership with the local farmer who knows the reserve well from existing operations.

Jo and Murray also explained the importance of conservation grazing in other parts of the reserve: using the Exmoor ponies which can range relatively freely through the Warren Glen area; and from time to time Sussex cattle on Firehills to keep the acid heathland open and not overrun by gorse.

Firehills consists of a relatively rare habitat which needs active management to increase biodiversity of birds, plants and invertebrates. That means people too, not just cattle. Jo and Murray paid tribute to the recent work by the team of conservation volunteers, under the leadership of Jill Tyson of Groundwork South, on ‘scalloping’ the gorse of Firehills. This team is out once a week, all year round in all weathers, doing work in different parts of the reserve which the Council wouldn’t now be able to fund. And the Council recognised too the contribution which is made by specialist teams such as the botany group, the ‘lookerers’ keeping an eye on the ponies, as well as the Friends themselves.

CONTROL BY LEWES?

Jo mentioned the uncertainties around the issue of local government reorganisation which was trundling down the track towards Hastings BC and other local authorities. This was likely to mean a single Mayor for the whole of Sussex, and for the current Council’s functions being transferred to a single authority in Lewes. Included in that would be management of HCPNR and other local nature reserves across the Borough. She suggested there was an argument for a better resourced county-wide authority being able to add value to nature conservation; or it might mean that decision-making would be that much more remote.

RING-FENCED GRANT MONEY

Murray was reassuring that the Natural England grant money running to 2033 was safe and legally ring-fenced, so it couldn’t be diverted by a new Lewes-based authority to other areas or purposes. This was an important aspect of continuity. And he was reasonably confident that it would be possible to secure a follow-on grant from Natural England beyond 2033, giving at least a degree of independence to the reserve.

Like the Friends, we see the reorganisation as a double-edged sword: with Hastings BC, we have easy access to plans and thinking, as well as personal links with Council members and officers. One of the current uncertainties is how groups like the Friends and Groundwork South would plug into and work with a new council in Lewes. And we doubt that the new authority would really be able to devote more money to nature conservation: local government reorganisation will not provide a new money-tree. But at least in principle, reorganisation might facilitate cooperation in nature conservation across current District Council boundaries, something for which the Friends have long argued.

Cllr Jo Walker commented: “Having Hastings Country Park Nature Reserve in my portfolio is an absolute privilege. Being more closely involved is incredibly rewarding, and being invited to speak to the Friends was a great opportunity to share the fantastic work already happening and to look ahead to what the future may hold. While Local Government Reorganisation brings a degree of uncertainty, the strong protections in place and the commitment of the local community will ensure the reserve continues to thrive.”

For a fuller account of the history of the area, read Steve Peak’s A History of Hastings Country Park, from which some of the above facts have been taken. For more information visit the Friends’ website fhcpnr.org

The new year arrives with that familiar sense of possibility. As parents, we find ourselves thinking about what new experiences we can offer our children, what might help them grow.

If you’re looking for something meaningful, something that challenges young minds without adding to screen time, chess might be exactly what you’re searching for.

I watched my seven-year-old play his first serious game last Friday at the Hastings & St Leonards Junior Chess Club. The concentration on his face as he considered each move, the quiet intensity as he locked eyes with his opponent, the pure joy when he saw a winning strategy, were moments to enjoy. These are moments no app or video game has ever given him. In that instant, I understood that chess isn’t just a game. It’s a teacher of patience, strategic thinking and resilience.

A FRESH START FOR JANUARY?

January brings its own rhythm. The post-holiday period offers a natural reset, and children often welcome new activities after the excitement of Christmas. Unlike many hobbies that require expensive equipment or depend on fair weather, chess asks for nothing more than a board, the pieces, a willing mind and an opponent.

In our increasingly screen-saturated world, chess offers something wonderfully different. It’s a space where children slow down, think deeply, and focus. And most importantly, they learn that good things come from careful consideration rather than quick reactions.

The beauty of chess as a new year hobby is its accessibility. Whether your child is five or fifteen, chess meets them where they are. The fundamentals are simple enough for young children to grasp, yet the game holds enough depth to challenge players for a lifetime.

HASTINGS’ CHESS HERITAGE

As HIP covered in the last edition, Hastings has serious chess credentials. The town hosts the Hastings International Chess Congress, Europe’s longest-running chess tournament, where grandmasters and enthusiasts have competed for over a century. This isn’t just local trivia. It creates an atmosphere where chess matters, where children can feel connected to something larger than themselves.

The Hastings & St Leonards Junior Chess Club sits right at the heart of this tradition. Run by Keith Hossack and Mark Brougham, with support from club champions Daniel Lowe and Marc Bryant, the club welcomes young players from ages 5 to 18.

“We see kids grow, not just as chess players, but as thinkers,” Hossack explains. “Chess teaches them patience, how to plan ahead, and how to handle setbacks. Those are skills that help them beyond the board.”

Walk into the club on any Friday, and you’ll find children as young as five hunched over chessboards, completely absorbed. “I thought he’d lose interest quickly,” one father admitted. “But he’s obsessed now. He’s even challenging me to play matches at home.”

“The history of chess in Hastings is something special,” says Hossack. “The town has hosted world-class players, and we try to pass that legacy on to our Juniors. We want them to feel like they’re part of something bigger.”

For young players, this connection to history adds meaning. They’re not just pushing pieces around. They’re joining a tradition of strategic thinkers that stretches back generations.

CHESS TEACHES…

Studies show chess enhances memory and boosts maths skills. But watch children play, and you’ll see something deeper unfolding.

Chess teaches planning. Every move requires thinking several steps ahead, considering consequences, imagining possibilities. These aren’t just chess skills. They’re life skills.

Every player loses games; every player makes mistakes. The question isn’t whether you’ll mess up, but how you’ll respond. In chess, as in life, setbacks become lessons.

“The key is to keep it enjoyable,” says Brougham. “We don’t just dump the rules on them. We teach through play. The best way for kids to learn is by making mistakes, and chess is all about learning from those mistakes.”

Chess also builds community. Many children who might not gravitate toward traditional team sports discover their tribe around the chessboard. “Some of these kids don’t always fit into the football or basketball crowd,” Brougham notes. “But here, they have a community and friends who share their interests.”

DIFFERENT AGES, DIFFERENT STAGES

At ages 5 to 7, children tend to focus on learning how pieces move. Games are short, and success lies in remembering the rules and having fun.

Children aged 8 to 11 begin grasping strategy. They start thinking ahead, recognising patterns, and many become genuinely competitive.

Older children often develop a serious interest in tournament play. Several club members have represented Hastings in competitions. Last year, multiple teams reached the semi-finals.

“We’ve had kids go from total beginners to tournament players within a couple of years,” Lowe said. “It’s incredible to see how quickly they develop when they’re passionate about it.”

PARENTS CAN HELP

You don’t need to be a chess expert to encourage your child’s interest. Playing together at home matters. Even if you’re learning alongside your child, those games show that chess is worth your time.

Digital tools can complement club play. Platforms like Chess.com and LiChess allow children to practice between sessions and play opponents worldwide.

Focus on improvement rather than just winning. Ask your child what they learned from a match rather than whether they won. Celebrate clever moves and good sportsmanship as much as victories.

During the Christmas and New Year period, young players support the Hastings International Chess Congress, watching professional-level games unfold. This helps them feel part of a broader tradition.

AN ANCIENT GAME

Chess has experienced a renaissance recently. TV series like The Queen’s Gambit and YouTubers like Gotham Chess have sparked fresh curiosity. “There’s definitely been a renewed interest,” Hossack confirms. “Parents have told us their kids started playing after watching it, and that’s great to see.”

This makes January 2026 an especially good time to introduce chess. The game feels relevant to today’s children while offering timeless benefits.

LEARNING

If you’re wondering whether chess suits your child, the evidence speaks for itself. The children who attend every Friday look forward to it all week. “It’s not just about winning,” one mother explained. “It’s about improving, thinking ahead, and having fun.”

Chess welcomes everyone. Complete beginners sit alongside aspiring tournament players. Quiet children find their voice. Energetic children discover the satisfaction of focused concentration. There’s room for every personality, every learning style, every level of interest.

For some children, chess becomes the hobby that sticks, the one that challenges them, connects them to others, and teaches lessons they’ll carry forward long after they’ve left the chessboard.

GET STARTED!

The Hastings & St Leonards Junior Chess Club meets every Friday during school term from 4:30 to 6:30 pm. With three free trial sessions, families can explore whether chess captures their child’s imagination without any financial commitment.

Information is available on the club’s website or by contacting Keith Hossack directly. Alternatively, families can drop by on a Friday evening to watch the children play and see the atmosphere for themselves. They’ve made joining easy with three free sessions for newcomers, then just £2 per session or £10 for the entire year.

Just three days after Christmas dozens of earnest men and women will make their way up Bohemia Road to the dour-looking Horntye Park sports complex where they will be ushered into its cavernous hall. There, rows of tables, each with a chess board, thirty-two pieces and the all-important clock, will greet them. And it’s there, throughout the following week, that they will compete in various tournaments whose rules are almost as complex as the game itself. Welcome to the 99th Hastings International Chess Congress.

The story of chess in Hastings is reputed to go back to the Norman Conquest. King William I was, apparently, a keen player of the game who is said to have once broken a chess board over the head of his nephew, Louis the Fat, after accusing him of cheating. It’s not recorded whether the event took place at Hastings Castle.

Opening

It wasn’t until 816 years later–later – on 28 June to be precise – that the opening move was made that would make Hastings renowned throughout the chess world.

Mind you it had an inauspicious start. An advertisement appearing in the local paper read: ‘A meeting of those interested in chess will be held at the Albert Temperance Hotel, Queens Road, Hastings…’

Thus the Hastings and St Leonards Chess Club was born. An annual festival was inaugurated by the club which hosted lectures and exhibitions by leading chess players of the time. But it was an event three years after the club’s formation that led to the town’s reputation as the ‘Queen of Chess Venues’. The founding members decided in 1895 to organise an international tournament. As the club itself modestly puts it, the inaugural event was ‘widely regarded as one of the greatest tournaments ever held.’

The winner in 1895 was something of a dark knight, a young American, Harry Nelson Pillsbury. He was a surprise victor in the first tournament to feature all the top chess players of the time. They included the first official chess World Champion, Wilhelm Steinitz, who held the title from 1886-1894; and the second official chess World Champion, Emanuel Lasker 1894-1921–the longest reign in the history of the game so far at 27 years.

Middlegame

Following this momentous event, the next big Hastings tournament was held in 1919. Known as the ‘Victory Tournament’ it was the first international chess event to be held in an allied country after World War One.

This in turn led to the Winter Hastings Congress, which began in 1920/21 and this year celebrates its 99th anniversary (no tournaments were held during World War Two).

Anyway, that first tournament was won by Frederick Yates. Yates was a prolific chess competitor, competing in around 60 events between 1919 and 1932. Far from being a mere pawn in the game, he is noted for his contributions to chess literature and chess journalism, having been the chess correspondent for the Manchester Guardian and chess editor for the Yorkshire Post. He died prematurely from asphyxiation caused by a gas leak in his house while he slept.

Since that inaugural competition, every World Chess Champion from Wilhelm Steinitz (1886-94) to Anatoly Karpov (1971-2) has taken part, with the sole exception of Bobby Fischer. (The American Fischer beat the Russian Boris Spassky in the famous ‘cold war confrontation’ in Reykjavik in 1972 but was stripped of the title when he refused to defend it three years later).

Endgame

As the Congress approaches its centenary, however, the future looks a bit more checkered.

Hastings Borough Council has pulled its sponsorship of the event, which has no commercial sponsors. It means the prize pot has not increased, making it a less prestigious event than previously.

Nonetheless the event this year will still have attracted around 300 players from around the world including France, Germany, Romania, China, Turkey, and Singapore and Malaysia.

Checkmate

Finally, to the confusing nature of the competition – complex enough to try the patience of a saint if not a bishop.

During the week the Congress hosts multiple events, appealing to players of different abilities. One is the ‘Con Power Christmas Tournament’, named after the former director of the Congress, which runs from 28 December to 30 December. The original 1895 competition was a round-robin tournament – every player had to play all the other players. The winner was the one with the best overall performance across the whole tournament. That concept seems to have been pawned for now in favour of the ‘Swiss’ style of tournament where players are matched up with others of a similar level.

The New Year Tournament is a five-round ‘Swiss’ running from December 31 into the New Year on January 2.

Then there’s the Hastings Weekend Congress: another five-round Swiss tournament with a ‘friendly, but competitive’, atmosphere for all levels.

The flagship event of the Congress, however, is the Hastings Masters–the event that aims to emulate the golden days of the local chess scene. This is a nine-round, six-day ‘Swiss’ tournament, with more than 100 players expected to compete for the top prize of £2,500, among them half a dozen Grandmasters.

Although it may not attract as high a level of competitors as previously, aficionados look to its illustrious history and international reputation and fervently hope it will continue for at least another 99 years. And admission is free, so anyone can turn up to watch this unique Hastings event.

When you walk around places like Bexhill-on-Sea or Hastings, it’s hard not to notice the signs of strain: closed shops and an aging population in need of support from an NHS already under pressure. According to Professor Chris Whitty, Chief Medical Officer for England, the health inequalities between coastal and non-coastal areas are significant, with coastal areas demanding more attention: “6.4% of coastal residents describe their health as ‘bad’ or ‘very bad’ versus 5.3% in non-coastal towns.”  In East Sussex, Adult Social Care already consumes nearly half of the county council’s budget – roughly £216 million – an amount that will be expected to increase due to the ageing coastal population. Demand is growing; resources are already tight. 

Behind the figures sits a quieter, more troubling story: across the country, care homes for the elderly are struggling. Occupancy has fallen in many places, operating costs have risen, and some providers are barely holding on. In the CHPI report The Hidden Profits Behind Collapsing Care Homes, Vivek Kotecha describes a sector pushed to the edge. But the crisis is not just about the money running out – it’s also about where the money goes. 

Large for-profit chains have expanded quickly despite economic strain and rising inflation. Their power over the care industry allows them to capitalise on the constrained position of the local authorities responsible for placing vulnerable adults. With budgets squeezed, escalating costs and the need for placements increasing, social workers frequently lack viable alternatives and are forced to accept the financial and contractual demands imposed by care providers.

However, there’s a systemic strain that Kotcha’s report demonstrated: some care providers use complicated financial arrangements as a means of siphoning cash: hefty management fees, murky transactions (such as tax evasion), fraudulent activity, lack of proper documentation to address where the funds are going, and payments to unrelated third parties or to overseas accounts in different names.

With most care homes owned privately by an overseas company, we see this pattern unfolding nationwide. David Clegg, founder of the Trebus Project, addresses on his Substack Beyond the Battlefield that Care UK (over 150 homes) was acquired by the US real estate giant Welltower; Akari Care (33 homes) is based in the Cayman Islands; Excelcare and Orchard Care operate from Jersey, a known tax haven – and of Orchard’s 42 homes, 35 are owned offshore. Many of the privately owned care homes in Bexhill and Hastings are registered overseas having been bought at a discounted price and then charged out for extortionate prices.

Commissioning rates vary with individual needs. Examples in Bexhill-on-Sea: Earlsfield Court charges around £1,575 per week (with nursing £1,703); some residential homes charge about £1,400 per week; St Peter’s Park Retirement village fees start at £1,006.25 per week (with nursing from 1,258.25); At the lower end of the scale, fees at Ambleside Care Home are estimated at £799 – £1,150 per week. In short, vulnerable adults and their families typically pay between £800 and £2,000 per week for a place with expected high standard of care – a standard that, all too often, is not met. Clegg warns that this calculation is sobering because residents have to sell their family homes. 

“With average UK house prices nearing £300,000 and care fees around £2,000 a week, a lifetime of homeownership can be consumed in just three to four years.”

Meanwhile, there is a “massive and growing transfer of wealth out of Britain. Families lose homes that would once have been passed down, while the profits head offshore.”

The human consequences appear to be every day. Many care staff have complained and are already “running on fumes”, staff report. Many frontline workers report physical exhaustion from long shifts, heavy lifting and mounting mental strain from constant emotional labour: watching residents decline, coping with aggression (verbal and physical abuse) or supporting complex needs, and shouldering responsibility for life-and-death decisions. Many staff report that low pay, insecure hours, and limited sick leave mean staff often work while unwell because they cannot afford to take time off.

Former and recent carers have complained that the workforce in Bexhill and Hastings are physically exhausting and psychologically depleting, yet they stay because “we have nowhere else to go… there is nothing else we can do for work around here…”. But, a few carers admitted that they prefer to stay working in care because of a sense of responsibility where the residents feel dependent on them. That combination between high demand, poor pay, little support and huge responsibility not only damages carers’ health, but risks the quality and continuity of care for the most dependent residents. 

“A lot of us are exhausted, but we can’t leave – there’s nowhere else other than care, and the residents need us,” says Maria*, a Bexhill care worker with more than 20 years’ experience. “Low pay and long hours keep us stuck,” another care staff member from a different home adds. ‘Maria’, a support worker from an assisted accommodation for vulnerable adults comments: “The physical abuse is unbearable, especially on a long shift when you’re constantly on edge, waiting to be hit. Minimum wage does not cut it. We complain to try to safeguard ourselves and the team, but nobody seems to care.

“It appears that people from above are more interested in taking residents who bring in higher fees, even when they aren’t right for the home and need more complex care than we’re trained to provide. It feels like they care more about the money a resident brings in than about the person’s wellbeing. This isn’t a home so much as a business that hides behind a caring image,” she says.

Many employees also allege that senior executives receive large payouts while frontline services bear the consequences – mentally and physically exhausted while having to run a service on extremely tight resources within the limitations of the carer’s training and the time they have available for each resident.

As well as large for-profit chains, smaller providers don’t always perform better. Sue* worked in a 21-resident care home which she described as “horrible, with hardly any resources, imagination, and the residents experiencing sores on their bottom from being forced to sit in the lounge in front of the TV all day…”.  Additionally, Sue described evening meals consisting of low-cost, low-nutrition items: store-brand fishcakes, or fish fingers, tinned beans and tomatoes, bread, and butter. When ‘Sue’ queried the lack of a nutritious menu in the home, the kitchen staff said that the home’s weekly food budget was “just over £100,” per person. Sue could not understand why the food quality was poor when the service users had a £100 budget for their weekly meals. When this was further explored, it came to Sue’s attention that this weekly budget was for all residents, not per resident – an amount that plainly undermines adequate nutrition. That means a care home can charge hundreds or even thousands of pounds a week for a room, while less and less of that sum is spent on the service user, for staffing, meals and other care needs. 

Coastal towns amplify these pressures. People here report worse health on average so demand for residential and home care is higher. At the same time, local councils face tight budgets. When commissioners look for the cheapest available option, the result can be short-term savings but long-term deterioration: care homes cut corners to survive, inspection flags rise, and the most vulnerable people pay the price. But there is a choice on how we respond. We can either let profit-driven, short-term contracting keep weakening care homes, causing closures and worse care, or we can change the rules so that money meant for care actually goes to care. Key practical steps to go forward:

Require transparency ownership and finances: who owns each home, what related companies are paid, and how much goes to direct care.

Pay for quality and stability, not just the cheapest provider, so homes can invest in staff and services.

Regulators should treat risky financial structures as a part of their inspection remit and intervene early when extraction threatens safety.

And finally, a powerful move would be using the workforce as part of the solution. Better pay would attract people who understand how to support vulnerable adults; better training and working conditions would reduce turnover and improve continuity of care. Where small, well-run local homes struggle through no fault of their own, short-term targeted support can keep them open without encouraging profiteering.

This isn’t just a budget problem, or a bureaucratic one, it’s a moral one. When someone pays for a room in a care home, or when a council buys a placement for a neighbour, the expectation is dignity, safety and compassion. Allowing profit-seeking practices to hollow out those basics risks turning care into a commodity rather than a duty. If we want care that honours people in their later years, we must change the incentives so public funds and private payments actually fund care, not extraction.

*The names of care workers in this report have been anonymised for their protection.

Read the Report from the Centre for Health and the Public Interest, here, chpi.org.uk/blog/the-hidden-profits-behind-collapsing-care-homes

During the First World War, Germany had 351 submarines (U-boats), and of these, around 178 were lost during the war, leaving 173 to be disposed of by dismantling or used as demolition for gunnery practice by the Allies.

SM U-118 was a Type UE II mine-laying U-boat, commissioned on 8 May 1918 under Kapitänleutnant Herbert Stohwasser, commanding four officers and 36 men. During its sole wartime patrol (part of the First Battle of the Atlantic), U-118 sank two Allied vessels. On 16 September 1918, it torpedoed the British steamer Wellington and, overall, 16 crew were lost in a rescue attempt – the USCG cutter Seneca put a volunteer party aboard the damaged Wellington, but the ship ultimately sank – 11 American Coast Guardsmen and five British sailors perished in the incident. Then on 2 October 1918, U-118 sank the British tanker Arca (4,839 GRT) with the loss of 52 British crew. 

Herbert Stohwasser (born 15 Dec 1886) was U-118’s sole commander, serving from May 1918 until the Armistice. A career naval officer (Naval Academy class of April 1904), Stohwasser had risen to Kapitänleutnant in 1915 and took command of U-118 after completing U-boat training. Stohwasser survived the war (died 1960) and remained in the naval reserve service into the 1920s. 

Surrender

At the Armistice, U-118 surrendered to Allied forces at Harwich, England on 23 February 1919. The crestfallen German crew were in no mood to clean or maintain the vessel before handover. The Allies allocated U-118 to France for scrapping at Brest, and the French destroyer François Garnier was ordered to tow the submarine to the breaker’s yard. 

On passage through the English Channel, a great storm arose, and the tow snapped in the gale. Realising that the submarine was drifting towards Hastings beach, the captain of the French escort opened fire, shelling the drifting hulk to try and sink it before it beached. 

However, in the early hours of 15 April 1919, U-118 ran aground on the Queen’s Hotel beach at Hastings. Contemporary accounts describe the startling sight of the huge U-boat on the beach – one local newspaper called it a “helpless, yet sinister monster” rolling in the surf just yards from the promenade. 

The stranded U-118 quickly became a popular attraction for sightseers. Thousands of curious visitors flocked to Hastings, especially over the Easter holidays of 1919. They marvelled at the beached U-boat and Hastings local authorities, under Admiralty supervision, even allowed people to climb onto the submarine’s deck for a small fee, turning the wreck into an impromptu exhibit. Over the two weeks after its beaching, nearly £300 was raised from these visits (equivalent to £13,470.00 in today’s money) – funds that were used to help host a ‘Welcome Home’ event for returning local soldiers.

A Fatal Attraction – Death Below Decks

However, the excitement was not without danger. Two Royal Navy coastguards, Chief Boatman William Heard and Chief Officer W. Moore, were assigned to escort VIP guests on tours inside the submarine’s interior. 

By the end of April 1919, after only a few guided visits inside the submarine’s hull, both men fell gravely ill with severe internal pain and respiratory symptoms. Their mysterious sickness worsened rapidly. Initially, the cause was unclear – at first it was suspected that the men had been sickened by the vile stench of rotting food (putrefying potatoes, meat, and onions) lying in stagnant water inside the U-boat’s compartments. The submarine had been abandoned for months, and the decay of organic stores in the poorly ventilated confines could have created a nauseating miasma. 

Despite medical treatment attempts, Chief Officer W Moore and Chief Boatman William Heard succumbed. The true cause of their agonising illness only became clear after William Heard’s death, when an inquest was held on 16 February 1920. Surgeons at the inquest testified that initially they had mistaken his condition for pneumonia. Still, they then concluded it was due to inhalation of a “very pungent and noxious gas, possibly chlorine”. This toxic gas had caused large abscesses to form on the men’s lungs and even on Heard’s brain, ultimately leading to their deaths.

The likely source of the gas was the submarine itself. U-118’s battery cells had been damaged by seawater, which can produce poisonous chlorine gas when saltwater reacts with lead-acid batteries. Essentially, the confined air inside the U-boat was a trap of toxic gases. These coastguards, spending extended time in the U-boat’s chambers during the tours, inhaled these fumes.

Once the men became ill, all tours inside the submarine were immediately halted, although tourists continued to come and view the U-118 from the outside. The U-boat’s unexpected visit had thus proven a fatal attraction in a literal sense.

Heard and Moore

Both William Heard and W Moore were experienced servicemen with long careers in maritime defence. Chief Boatman William Charles Heard was 47 years old in 1919, and he had served for 20 years in the Coastguard (which was part of the Royal Navy). His service was distinguished enough that he had been awarded the Long Service and Good Conduct Medal, a recognition of his two decades of exemplary duty. Heard lived with his wife, Eliza (Elizabeth), at the Coastguard Station on Marine Parade in Hastings. He was originally born in Walmer, Deal, Kent, but by the end of the First World War he was posted to Hastings as part of the Coastguard force. Like many Coastguards, he likely had been mobilised into the Royal Navy during World War I (the Coastguard was largely absorbed into the Navy for the war) and then returned to Coastguard duties on the home front.

Chief Officer W Moore was Heard’s colleague tasked with the U-118 tours. He, too, was a seasoned coastguard. Both men were Hastings-based – part of the local coastguard contingent at the Marine Parade Coastguard Station that took charge of U-118 when it washed ashore. 

Funeral and Community Response

The tragic deaths resonated deeply in the Hastings community. These two men had survived the World War, only to lose their lives at home in a peacetime incident, which many found poignant and heartbreaking. Both men were honoured with military burials in Hastings. William Heard, for example, was laid to rest in Hastings Cemetery (Sussex) in February 1920, and W Moore was likewise interred in the same cemetery after his death in late 1919. 

Contemporary accounts indicate that many people attended their funerals to pay respects. The men’s suffering and sacrifice were widely mourned. The Hastings and St. Leonards Observer and other papers reported on their deaths, underscoring the community’s regard for these men who had literally given their lives in service. Coastguards, Royal Navy personnel, local officials, and residents joined in large funeral processions, reflecting how deeply the town sympathised with the families. The fact that Heard’s Coastguard station address and service were formally recorded on war casualty rolls shows the esteem in which his duty was held.

Final Fate of U-118 – What Lies Beneath?

After a few weeks, the question arose of what to do with the massive steel hulk on Hastings beach. Attempts to refloat the submarine or break it apart with naval gunfire had already failed (it was lodged too close to the town centre, so explosive methods were deemed too risky). 

Ultimately, on 21 May 1919, the British Admiralty sold U-118 for scrap to the James Dredging Company for £2,200. Salvage work continued through late 1919 into 1920; by the beginning of 1921, U-118 had been largely broken up and removed. 

The submarine’s large deck gun was left on the shore for some time (the town even considered keeping it as a relic), but it too was taken away. However, according to local records, a portion of U-118’s keel may still lie buried beneath the sands of Hastings beach. What had once been a formidable weapon of war ended its days as scrap metal, after briefly serving as a tragic seaside spectacle.

The Bulverhythe Event

Just as the scrapping of U-118 was coming to an end, yet another submarine under tow was washed up – this time at Bulverhythe. In January 1921, the SM UB-131 broke free during a storm and washed ashore at Bulverhythe beach area near the wreck of the Amsterdam. Unlike U-118, the UB-131 incident did not attract much publicity or crowds, and UB-131 was quickly salvaged and dismantled on the spot. Maybe people realised that going below decks was a deadly hazard. They had learned a sad lesson.

Postscript: Phoenix Rising

On 3 September 1941, a new submarine vessel, also named ‘U-118’, joined Hitler’s Wolf Pack as a mine-laying submarine. This warship destroyed 26,934 gross tons of Allied shipping and killed many more Allied crew members.

When you have something to say, “speak loud and clear”, says a paper sign blue-tacked to the wall of the Hastings Quakers Meeting House. A sign intended for the Quakers, but also applicable to the socialists who meet here on alternate Wednesdays to watch ‘socialist’ documentaries. 

The screenings, under the name of Left in the Cinema, are run by local documentary filmmaker Archie Lauchlan as part of the Hastings People’s Party’s (HPP) aim to educate and engage the community. 

Archie has lived in Hastings for almost 20 years and has “always been a socialist at heart”. In that time he has made two feature documentaries, one about Hastings pier, and the other #RevolutionAnyone, about what it would take to have a revolution in this country, made with his wife, Jodie. 

Archie explains that the reason for making the film was “to encourage some change in this country, this dreadfully conservative, apathetic country.” 

From this film they received positive feedback and “started a lot of conversations”. But that was all that was happening; just conversations. It was from a frustration with this lack of action and mere talking that HPP was born, and thus, Left in the Cinema. 

Within the Party there are sub-groups, including ‘Education and training’ of which the screenings form a part. Each film screened is programmed to “reflect an area of politics, either British politics or world politics.” 

Highlights have been 1974’s Hearts and Minds, dealing in a frank and uncompromising manner with the Vietnam War; An Inconvenient Truth, about climate change and released just over 20 years ago, but which could have been made now (with some adjustments to statistics); Santiago Rising, about the 2019 Chilean protests, which was followed by a Q&A with director Nick MacWilliam; and the BBC’s Berlin 1933, about the rise of fascism in German told with archival footage and diary entries. 

The key to all of this is to build up the community. 

This is perhaps already happening on the right, with large protests happening in London and around the UK. “If anybody’s going to have a revolution in this country, it looks like it’s going to be the right. That’s what they’re after,” claims Archie. 

“The thing about populism on the right is it’s really easy. Because not only do you have all these forces already on your side, you just have this easy, almost meaningless, message of what you need to make this country ‘great again’,” he explains. 

“‘Take back control of our borders’ and all this stuff is a simple message for people who are not used to questioning things, which I think we’re discouraged from doing in this country through the education system. We’re not really encouraged to question what we’re told. So, for people like that, it’s really easy and exciting that they’re going to get together with like-minded people and take back control.”

In many ways, the aims of the HPP and screenings are similar. They try to give power to the individual, and make them realise that they do have power as part of the community: “You’ve just got to understand what’s going on before you can do anything about it, but you’ve also got to understand that you do have power. As an individual you don’t have any power, but as a movement of individuals coming together, we have all the power in the world.”

The key difference being, the screening room is not frequented, at least to my knowledge, by billionaires who have their own interests at heart and the aim is not to divide and achieve this ‘myth’ of a once great country. 

Instead, watching the films is a community of regulars and newcomers. Not a community aiming to ‘divide’, but one interested to learn more through documentaries. 

Why documentaries though? Wouldn’t fiction films have a wider appeal? 

Documentaries have always been popular as a lower budget form of filmmaking, and perhaps don’t have the appeal of grandiose fictional stories of love, deception, action, explosions and anything else that we need to escape from our realities. But they are incredible at informing people. To Archie, documentaries are “the most potent and powerful artform that exists,” and they can “change people’s minds or solidify their ideas around something”. But they will always educate: “Every time you watch a documentary, you kind of go: ‘I never knew that.’”

I didn’t know about the uprisings in Chile until I watched Santiago Rising. I didn’t know too much about the Vietnam war until I watched Hearts and Minds. I always guessed, but never knew, to what degree American health insurance companies exploited ill and suffering people to make a load of money until I watched Michael Moore’s Sicko. I had realised how we’re hurtling towards a climate disaster and not doing enough to stop it; but An Inconvenient Truth solidified that idea in my mind. These screenings have educated me. I feel a sense of community there. 

Perhaps this is more talking, and not action, but in many ways, education is action. The development of a community, a strong community, is a key action. Watching a film isn’t changing the world. But they make you think, and that can change behaviour, make you more aware – a vital first step. The community feeling as well, gives hope. 

And I’m perhaps starting to realise too that: “We can do whatever we want. And we will.” But, unlike the populist right, this doesn’t have to be used to promote hate.

hastingspeoplesparty.uk/why-would-you-want-to-be-left-in-the-cinema/

HIP readers of longer vintage might remember Clochemerle. The BBC made a series out of it in 1972: of course in colour, we weren’t that primitive. The series was based on a short novel written back in the 1920s by Gabriel Chevallier. The theme of the book was a supposed dispute in the French village of Clochemerle in the Beaujolais region about the construction of its first pissoir for a thousand years, so probably its first ever. The socialist mayor wanted to put up the new loo near the church, too near for the parish priest. The rest of the village took sides and it ended badly (see below). It was all totally absurd and very funny.

This story came to mind when I heard about the equally absurd (but less funny) saga of a composting loo that the good plot holders of Bembrook Allotments on the West Hill want to put up. In these straitened times for public finances, they are prepared to find the money themselves through grants. They agreed a design with Hastings BC as their landlords – but were then told that they needed £10m of public liability insurance cover.

Now, a sense of risk is a personal matter: we differ. For myself, if you tried to get me into a helicopter (nasty, unnatural things which fall out of the sky), I would be reading right through to the appendices of the operating company’s insurance policy. Ditto my life insurance cover. But using a loo? As I lower my breeches and advance backwards towards the seat, underwriters are rarely on my mind. Other things might seem more urgent. Scorpions and funnel-web spiders are unlikely to be in residence locally. My sense of risk is even less in a pissoir.

Hastings BC must be operating with a different concept of risk when they ask for Bembrook for £10m of cover. But the unfortunate council officers who are told to execute this requirement haven’t themselves been told why they need to insist on such an extraordinary level of cover, or what the risk is.

So we are left imagining. Is there a history of seismic activity on the West Hill which might strike someone in situ? Bembrook is on that hill, so flooding is unlikely, let alone rising sea levels. A spark from a bonfire? Evacuation, so to speak, might be speedy in those circumstances. Might a small person fall in? But the composting process is not instantaneous, so plenty of time for East Sussex Fire and Rescue to pull the victim out (though hazmat suits might be advised for a novel form of rescue). But really, what else in terms of risk?

Bembrook allotmenteers are not alone in being told to cross their legs in the absence of insurance cover. At the Lower Cornwallis site, the toilet was closed and barred because the local association had collapsed, so apparently no insurance cover was possible. So too at Paul’s Field. But there is an important equality issue to consider when loos get closed: men can generally cope alfresco, but a lack of toilet facilities is a more serious issue for women.

You might think that the provision of a toilet by the council as landlords ought to be a basic requirement. In terms of public funds that’s not going to happen. So it is sad and frustrating that insurance issues might inhibit private initiative such as that at the Bembrook site.

The requirement for £10m of cover seems to be standard and arbitrary for other allotment activities. Another site has been told by the council that, without that level of cover, they must not undertake works which would bring several plots back into cultivation – at a time when the waiting list across the town is huge. Again, initiative is stymied.

But a Hastings Borough Council spokesperson said: “There is a process that must be followed before toilets can be installed on allotment sites. This includes getting the appropriate council permissions and being able to show that funding is in place for purchase, construction and ongoing maintenance of the facilities. As part of the process, a licence is required. This includes a requirement for public liability insurance to cover the allotment holders in the case of any potential future claim during construction and after the facilities have been built and in use by plot holders. As a standard, we require £10million of public liability insurance.”

It isn’t just allotments that are affected by this blanket policy on insurance cover. Su Barnicoat of Hastings Voluntary Action, the umbrella body for the local voluntary sector, commented “It’s understandable for public liability insurance to be requested for community activities taking place in public spaces, including allotments. Where it can be problematic for community groups is the cost relating to the level of risk. Outdoor activities such as gardening and growing are fairly low risk, and so an outlay of up to £400 p.a can be prohibitive to a few people just wanting to potter for a few hours. When volunteers are working on HBC spaces, it would make sense for HBC to find a ‘sensible’ solution, given that such activity is helpful to them.”

So how did it all end in Clochemerle? There was certainly no mention of insurance. Perhaps there should have been: scandals about the urinal grew and burgeoned, culminating in a near-riot in the church itself. After that, disasters followed fast. Jealous citizens from a neighboring village came by night and blew up the urinal. The Government, with mistaken zeal, quartered troops on Clochemerle and precipitated a real riot. Even then there was no telling what might have happened if a terrible thunderstorm had not descended on Clochemerle, ruined the grape harvest, and cooled off everybody’s passions.

Even allowing for the zeal with which Rother DC has been closing public loos in their area, it seems unlikely that the sans-pissoirs citoyennes and citoyens of Bexhill would storm the facilities of Hastings. Or is this a risk which HBC has foreseen? If so, ten million of cover might then be grossly inadequate.

Enough teasing. It seems that HBC, possibly for reasons of administrative convenience, wants to have a standard level of cover across all activities undertaken in the voluntary sector where there is some level of municipal involvement. That some level of cover is required would seem reasonable. But a disproportionate, arbitrary and standardised level without any assessment of actual individual risk is proving counter-productive. It’s putting obstacles in the way of those in the third sector who just want to make things better in our community.

The Burghal Hidage fort recorded by Alfred the Great at Hastings in 914 AD has never been located, but there is a logical possibility that it could be found on Baldslow Down next to the old Harrow playing fields, near The Ridge.

It would seem that places with dun, don or down in the name imply proximity to old Celtic hill fort locations. Baldslow can be translated from the Anglo-Saxon into Baels – ‘the fire of a funeral pile, in which dead bodies were burned’ and Hleów – ‘A shelter, protection, covering, refuge often applied to persons’. Hence, ‘Baldslow Down’ can be translated as ‘fire refuge hillfort’ – maybe also the origin of ‘Firehills’ at Fairlight.

Harrow Lane, that runs alongside this location, and the Harrow playing fields, can also be derived from the Anglo-Saxon Hár (‘grey-haired with age, old) and Hleóws (A shelter, protection, covering, refuge often applied to persons). Hence, Harrow can be translated into the old refuge.

In Roman times, the whole of the Hastings area was an industrial zone. Mining and iron processing took place at Beauport Park, Oaklands and Footlands in Sedlescombe, and Crowhurst Park. A 30ft wide Roman road went from Gravesend through the forest of Andredsweald to Bodiam, where a Roman Port was located, then over the hill at Staplecross, down to Sedlescombe and across the Brede river to Westfield where it appears to have joined another Roman road, from a port in the Brede valley (near the modern Brede bridge up to Baldslow Down). The Romans probably took over an old Celtic hillfort at Baldslow Down in an area where the Celts were processing iron, and this iron may even have been the reason the Romans invaded Britain.

When the Romans left, the Saxons took over, forming an independent Kingdom of the Haestingas, and would have been happy to use an old Roman fort. The majority of the local village names are Saxon, and if Hastings had been settled by the Jutes from Kent it would have been spelt ‘Hastinge’. The Saxons probably took over the hillfort and held it until 771AD when King Offa of Mercia defeated the independent Kingdom of the Haestingas. Finally, after the Battle of Ellendun in 826AD, when Wessex defeated Mercia, Hastings was taken over by Wessex, and was hence included in the Burghal Hidage.

All of Alfred’s Burhs appear to have been on hills, with very good views across the sea. The high point at Baldslow Down gives excellent views across to Romney Marsh and the entrance to the Brede/Rother valleys, which was at Old Romney at the time. This location is also on the old Celtic ridgeway that goes from Fairlight to Crowborough, and was at the end of a Roman road from Gravesend. It has good views towards Telham, where an old Roman castellum (watch tower) would have been located, and also to a second castellum at Castleham, which would overlook the old Hastings harbour in the Filsham valley.

So this location makes a very good observation and defensive position surrounded on all sides by steep hills, and would have made a great position for a Burh, or the site of the capital of the independent Kingdom of the Haestingas.

The landscape in the 900s was significantly different from todaythis needs to be explained for a better understanding of the area. To the North of Hastings was the impenetrable Forest of Andredsweald, which only had a few road routes through the Roman Roads and the old Celtic ridgeways. The sea level was at least 3 metres higher, thus providing tidal valleys in the Rother, Brede and Tillingham valleys to the East. The site of Pevensey Marshes would have all been at sea level, at least up to modern Ashburnham. The Eastern Sussex Rother, which now reaches the sea at Rye Harbour, joined the Brede and Tillingham rivers at Appledore. In the 900s it reached the sea at New Romney. The towns of Old Winchelsea and Broomhill would have been on shingle islands that would have been surrounded by tidal salt marsh, and Rye would have been an island that only had access to the sea via Old/New Romney. Finally, the cliffs at Fairlight Cove are currently eroding at about 0.6 metres per year and, 1100 years ago, would have been about 600 metres further into the Channel.

As an aside, a severe storm in 1287AD threw shingle across the Romney Marshes, which blocked the mouth of the Rother at New Romney, which found its current way to the sea via Rye Harbour. This storm also destroyed the old Hastings harbour at Filsham by blocking the valley with shingle from the eroding cliffs at Bexhill, and Hastings moved to the ‘old town’ location.

Please note this article is an educated guess, so if you have any history of Baldslow or Harrow Playing fields, or photos, please let us know, as they may help our investigations.

The map following shows the landscape in approximately 1066AD when Duke William invaded England, and uses Google Maps to show the changes at that time.

SIMON MANSFIELD is a retired Sussex computer programmer interested in the early History of East Sussex. Further details can be found on tinyurl.com/4d26na6f

This month is the 150th anniversary of the death of the newly-born town of St Leonards. On 29 September 1875 an Act of Parliament dissolved the local authority that had been running the town since 1832, forcing its streets, buildings and open spaces to come under the rule of Hastings Council.

The birth of the local authority of St Leonards was the result of a long pregnancy that began on 1 March 1828 when the foundation stone of what is now the Royal Victoria Hotel was laid. The father of the town was the famous London architect James Burton. Born in 1761, Burton was the most successful property-developer of Regency and Georgian London, building over 3,000 properties over 250 acres. These included much of Bloomsbury, St John’s Wood, Regent’s Park and Regent Street.

In 1827 he decided to create the first purpose-built seaside resort in the country. In February 1828 he paid £7,800 (about £750,000 today) for 1,151 yards of coastline and a beautiful wooded valley running down to the sea. These were part of Gensing Farm, owned by the wealthy and extensive Eversfield Estate. Large-scale work quickly got under way, building not only a high-class hotel and housing but also the roads and promenade. The first completed building was Burton’s own residence, Crown House No 57 Marina.

The new St Leonards was designed as an exclusive residence for wealthy Londoners wanting to be beside the sea. Members of the working class were kept to an essential minimum, with a ‘lavatoria’ (laundry) and stables at the east end, and a market behind the seafront at the west end. However, the new town of St Leonards was not an official local authority but a private building venture by Burton, who had no legal power to levy rates to pay for public services such as drainage, water, road maintenance. By 1831, the lack of these services had become a serious problem and Burton decided to obtain legislation that would set up a form of town council which created the power to impose rates on residents and property owners to supply the services.

The St Leonards Improvement Act became law in May 1832. It formed a corporation governed by 75 commissioners who were given the legal authority to govern the town, levy rates and spend the income. The first commissioners’ meeting took place on 18 June 1832 in the Conqueror Hotel on Marina, and it agreed to reimburse James Burton for the £7,027 he had spent on roads, paving, sewers, sea-walls etc. The commissioners first major work was extending the sea wall and parade.

But the independence of the new corporation and its exclusive population quickly started coming under threat after the passing of the 1835 Municipal Reform Act. This was an attempt by the Whig (Liberal) government to make 178 boroughs more democratic and less corrupt in England and Wales, including Hastings Corporation, which had been set up in 1588. The 1835 legislation followed the Whig’s 1832 Reform Act, which had abolished most of the rotten boroughs and had reformed the parliamentary electoral system.

Hastings had long-standing legal rights over much land to the west of the town, although in practice the new Hastings Corporation set up in that year did little more than look after the land in and around the Old Town. But the 1835 Reform Act brought into existence the new modern-style Hastings Council (a ‘municipal borough’) whose geographic boundaries took in St Leonards. From 1836 the new Hastings Council had 18 councillors: 12 in the East Ward, which covered the Old Town area, and six in the more sparsely populated West Ward, which included St Leonards. Ironically, in practice the St Leonards councillors had more say over Hastings affairs than Hastings councillors had over the town of St Leonards because the 1832 St Leonards Improvement Act remained in force.

Hastings Council tried to exercise some power over St Leonards following the passing of the 1848 Public Health Act after a national cholera epidemic killed thousands of people, including 65 in Hastings and St Leonards. The severe outbreak was caused by the lack of sewer systems and by polluted drinking water, and the 1848 Act gave local authorities new powers to create sewage and drainage services. The general sewage conditions in St Leonards were found to be deplorable in 1850, but the St Leonards commissioners managed to evade the responsibility (and expense) of implementing the 1848 Act, although eventually its bad drainage would be one of the main reasons why St Leonards was taken over by Hastings Council.

The towns had physically merged by 1860 following the spread of Hastings westward along the seafront and the development of the central St Leonards area outside Burton’s St Leonards which provided the shops, builders and labourers Burton had excluded. But the St Leonards commissioners resisted scrapping their 1832 Act and surrendering to Hastings town hall for a decade. However, by 1871 it began to seem inevitable, as Burton’s St Leonards residents were then paying 2/6 (12½p) in the pound in rates, while Hastingers were only paying 1/11. And the St Leonards commissioners did not have (or were not willing to pay) enough money to solve increasingly serious problems, especially sewage and sea defences. The end of independence was nigh.

Then the 1872 Public Health Act came into force, passing many of the commissioners’ duties and powers to Hastings Council. Initially, the better class of people in St Leonards resisted this, but they soon changed their minds because it meant the poor of Hastings would be subsidising the rich of St Leonards. The Hastings Observer reported that at the commissioners quarterly meeting in December 1872: “The members bowed, with some degree of cheerfulness, to the decision abolishing them as a sanitary authority. Nay, they even went further than this. The Acts having left them power to remain as a body, to impose and collect coal duties and grant licences, they passed a resolution praying the Poor Law Board to take even these powers from them, and thus make the only ruling body in the town the Hastings Town Council and Local Health Board.”

But the details of the surrender had to be sorted out first. This took another three years, with various arguments taking place, including the fact that the commissioners had a debt of £17,000 while only having assets of £7,500. Last of all: would the commission’s clerk and its surveyor get decent pensions? Finally, Hastings Council was told the St Leonards commissioners were being taken to the gallows on 29 September 1875 when the St Leonards Improvement Act District would be “dissolved” by the Local Government Board’s Provisional Orders Confirmation Act 1875.

For further local history, see Steve Peak’s website hastingshistory.net/images-alias

“Would you consider standing as a councillor?”

Julia Hilton, sole Green member of Hastings Borough Council, grinned at me before turning back to her poached egg.

I joined Hastings Green Party out of a desire to do something useful in retirement. All my life I have been an environmentalist, at least privately: forty years as a publisher consumes a lot of wood pulp, so I don’t have great credentials. But the politicians of the UK have a shoddy record when it comes to caring for our planet. I wanted to do what I could.

In 2021, Hastings Greens were a small bunch of committed enthusiasts, but few in number. “We don’t have many resources,” Julia acknowledged, “so we need to concentrate on a few key wards. The members will have to vote on it, but I think you would be a good fit for Central St Leonards.”

A few weeks later, duly selected, I knocked on my first door as a candidate. The Green Party punches well above its weight in elections, profiting from dedicated members, a well-honed approach and shrewd target selection. It was stunning, and humbling to discover people I had barely met, willing to campaign, distribute leaflets, and write stories on my behalf.

I was standing against a well-liked, diligent and familiar Labour candidate. As the campaign intensified and Green posters appeared, my opponent grew frustrated. ‘You are going to split the vote and let in the Tories,’ she shouted at me when our paths crossed one morning.

In the event, I won by 31 votes. Labour insisted on three recounts. The Conservatives came a distant third. I was one of three successful Green candidates in 2022, the others being Amanda Jobson, in Gensing and Glenn Haffenden in Tressell, who achieved an astonishing result, increasing the Green vote from 19% to 56%. Glenn is now the council leader.

What does a local councillor do?

Rather a lot. You are the human interface with local government. If you are reasonably assiduous, the opportunities are legion.

Over the last few days, I have represented a frustrated claimant to the housing team; arranged for weeds to be cleared; alerted the planning enforcement team to the inactivity of a developer; called in graffiti, litter, fly tipping, potholes, blocked drains, and upturned kerb stones; attended the opening of a new shop; asked (at the request of the local cops) for some bushes to be cut back in Warrior Square to discourage drug dealers; taken action over a collapsing wall; persuaded British Telecom to remove a redundant telephone box; and convinced Southern Water to replace two dead trees.

That is just the ward work. Then, because I am also chair of the Foreshore Trust and hence a member of cabinet, I have participated in complex discussions over a refurbished play area, beach cleaning, staff appointments, and reviewed and critiqued long policy documents and finance reports. I have also sought to resolve the endless wrangling over the boating lake, currently mired in legal negotiations.

The most serious frustration is the lack of resources, caused principally by the steady rise in homelessness.

Homelessness is on the up right across the country, and in many cases, councils have to step in. In Hastings, payments to landlords for temporary accommodation consume over 40% of the council’s budget. If not for this single factor, the streets would be sparkling, and street wardens would leap on every scrap of litter. As it is, the council has been steadily chewing through its reserves: in the last year, by dint of adroit financial management by officers and the steely resolve of Cllr Darren Mackenzie, who holds the finance portfolio, we broke even.

We are about to start the new round of budget negotiations. They will be tough.

Hastings is one of the poorest towns in the south east, with an ageing population and limited employment opportunities. This has impacted health provision and affected local schools. Most of our council tax goes to East Sussex, which wrestles with ballooning debts caused by the demands on adult and child social care.

Local services are stumbling, right across the country. The government has rather bravely seized this nettle by setting about Local Government Reorganisation, certainly the biggest administrative shake-up of the last fifty years. This is happening nationwide. Locally, the proposal is to abolish Hastings Borough Council, as well as Eastbourne, Wealden, Lewes, Rother and East Sussex councils. In their place will be the East Sussex Unitary Authority, which will provide almost all local services. (There are other models under consideration, but this is the most likely.) Similar Authorities will be created in West Sussex, and in Brighton and Hove. All three will fall under a new Mayoral Strategic Authority, with sweeping regional powers.

There may perhaps be a residual Hastings Town Council to sort out local matters such as bin collections.

There are obvious advantages. A regional authority of this size (the three authorities together exceed 1.7 million people) has considerable negotiating power, able to strike deals with big employers. There would be no delays caused by differing software. There would be efficiencies of scale. Duplications could vanish. Citizens would never need to waste time wondering whether a service falls under county or borough. The region might prosper.

The most obvious downside is the democratic deficit. At present Hastings has 32 councillors, two for each ward. Under this plan there will probably be 16, one for each ward. Those 16 councillors will be part of a far larger authority, with well over 100 councillors. Powers will devolve from Westminster, but control will diminish at street level. Planning, licensing, housing and other services currently supplied by HBC will become the responsibility of the new authority.

Will Hastings be lost to sight in this bright future? Or could it become the new administrative centre for the entire region? Cllrs Haffenden and Hilton, as leader and deputy leader, are fighting as hard as they can for our voice to be heard in the complex and sometimes acrimonious discussions.

Is it worth being a councillor? 

There are genuine privileges.

The first privilege is that you directly affect your neighbours’ lives, hopefully for the better. From the minutiae of street cleaning to the macro stuff of policy decisions, your efforts and ideas make a contribution.

The second is to meet so many fascinating people. My fellow councillors include a burlesque dancer and the former governor of two provinces in Iraq. My constituents include the senior security officer for a Swiss multinational and several nationally recognised artists.

The third is to work with some outstanding council officers. Very few join local government for the money: the wages are not great. So why do it? From observation, there is a strong spirit of service. They care about the town and its residents. Most of the officers I meet put in hours of unpaid overtime and are immensely conscientious. That the creaking and underfunded system works at all is a tribute to their willingness to go the extra mile.

Council staff are regularly pilloried on social media. If you are dissatisfied with a council officer, think for a moment about their impossible workload. Then reflect that most officers live in town. They are your neighbours. There is a strong protocol that officers should not respond to comments, partly for their own protection. This doesn’t mean they don’t read them. Bear this in mind when someone slags off the council. The person under attack still has to turn up to work the next day and do their best with the resources available. After three years as a councillor, I am frankly impressed.

We are now preparing for the next round of local elections. The Greens – and no doubt other parties – are recruiting candidates. If you think you might have what it takes, please consider putting yourself forward. We need you to represent your town.

Tony Collins is a Green councillor for Central St Leonards, and Chair of the Foreshore Trust.

People who know me would not expect me to be a natural supporter of Jeremy Corbyn. If I had been at Glastonbury in June 2017 (which I wasn’t), I would probably have stayed shamefacedly shtum, or whistled Dixie, while the rest of the crowd chanted “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn” to him on the Pyramid Stage.

But the Jezzer has just shot up in my estimation. As the country’s most famous allotmenteer (even ahead of Ken Livingstone), he has just come out with a robust statement against a notion from Angela Rayner that local authorities might allow the sell-off of even more allotments for housing, over and above the eight sites which she has already approved elsewhere in England.

Writing for The Daily Telegraph (!!), Mr Corbyn said these decisions would “fill many with deep dismay” and accused Ms Rayner of making “the future of these precious spaces even more perilous”. Praising the Diggers, English Civil War dissidents who sought common ownership of land, he said: “Is this Government going to put the nail in the coffin of the joy of digging ground for potatoes on a cold, wet February Sunday afternoon?”

He goes on to point to the social, economic and health benefits of allotments for those with no gardens but who want to grow food for their families.

We know that Angela Rayner is desperate to hit her 1.5 million target for new homes by the time of the next General Election. And it looks as though she is less and less likely to get anywhere near that figure. So what next from the Tory playbook? Selling off school playing fields for housing?

But Jeremy Corbyn is not going to let Ms Rayner ease her problem at the expense of allotmenteers. And to their credit the Green Party administration in Hastings and St Leonards came out quickly with an equally robust line: “Our allotments are not for sale”.

Cllr Julia Hilton, deputy leader of the Council, said: “We fully recognise the great benefits these spaces provide to people, from promoting physical activity and wellbeing, to supporting social connections and offering the chance to access fresh, locally grown produce……..This administration will not be selling off any allotment sites, and the Hastings Local Plan recognises their value and resists the loss of them.”

That’s a brave line when our local housing targets are so challenging. But it appears to be backed up by the draft Local Plan to 2039 for the town when its last iteration was publicly available: that showed no threats to local allotments – and Julia Hilton has confirmed this in her statement.

As the Hastings and St Leonards Allotment Federation, we have been pushing in the other direction – for more land for communal growing. We have been lobbying for the Local Plan to include a Planning Obligation which the Council could use to require a developer to provide space for growing communally in exchange for planning permission. And we have been looking for other pockets of land which might be brought into cultivation for local people – so far without success.

Nationally, land-grabs of allotments are nothing new. My first awareness of local politics was around 1960 when my father and other allotment holders were fighting the local authority in north London which wanted half the site for a school. The plot-holders lost, and the school got built.

Like many other areas of the country, the popularity of allotments in our town has waxed and waned over time – and then waxed again. There is some loose relationship with the economic cycle. In times of full employment and wage growth, the demand for allotments can drop: people have less time and less financial need to grow food for their families. But in times of greater hardship, demand for plots goes up again.

Local old folk, even older than me, have memories of allotment sites being more numerous and more extensive around the town. Perhaps because of a period of slump in demand, the Council took sites or part of them out of cultivation. And not necessarily for development: some areas became informal nature reserves.

But there is no doubt about the strength of demand in recent years, both nationally and locally. Hastings BC manages and rents out 13 sites covering 30 acres. That area provides about 630 individual plots. The current waiting list has over 500 names on it, so nearly as many people are waiting as there are plots. The biggest site is self-managed and so doesn’t feature in these Council figures. This is Marina Allotments with another 130 plots or so under a lease from Hastings BC; there too the waiting list is long.

Thanks to the efforts of a previous generation of activists, particularly Peter Driver of Lower Torfield Allotments and Judy Clark of Bembrook Allotments, all the sites managed by Hastings BC have statutory protection. The statute in question is Section 8 of the Allotments Act 1925 which states “Where a local authority has purchased or appropriated land for use as allotments the local authority shall not sell, appropriate, use or dispose of the land for any purpose other than use for allotments without the consent of the Secretary of State.”

And who might be the current Secretary of State? The same Angela Rayner, the one with the housing problem, the one Jeremy Corbyn is cross with. It would seem unlikely that she would exercise that authority over the heads of Hastings BC, our local authority, which is why the firm statement from Julia Hilton is so important.

But with an acquiescent local authority allotment sites can be grabbed over the heads of residents which might be what happened in Storrington in West Sussex. That’s in addition to the eight sites mentioned above. All this presumably done at the request of the relevant local authorities.

And we have Local Government Reorganisation trundling towards us, whether we like it or not. Might a distant Sussex Mayor or an East Sussex authority with his or her own new housing targets to meet, be more inclined to override the statutory protection? Another reason for keeping a local Hastings Council?

The group of “Independents” in Hastings, who are a schism from the local Labour Party, has recently announced that they will be supporting the new left-wing party which Jeremy Corbyn has just co-founded. Plot-holders in Hastings and St Leonards will be hoping that they will be as firm as him in resisting future land-grabs and Lowland Clearances.

Perhaps we could help with a name for their party, currently going under the working title of “Your Party”. How about the NOMPPs: Not on my Plot Party? Or the Don’t Lose the Plot Party? Or the Marrow Majority – one of Jeremy’s favourite vegetables to judge from the photo in the Telegraph? Just some ideas for the cause.

I hold very fond memories of visiting the ‘Smugglers Adventure’ or the St Clement’s Caves with my grandparents when I was a boy, and filling my imaginative child’s mind with imagery of daring deeds, ‘swashbuckling’ and secretive maritime/countryside missions and then of my grandmother buying me those little wax model smugglers from the gift shop. Now, approaching thirty, I returned to the caves again after many years. Despite it still being an interesting attraction and nestled in a most picturesque part of Hastings–up on the West Hill, overlooking the Old Town, Hastings Country Park and the English Channel beyond, it made me wonder if those caves were in fact used by smugglers at all!

According to Mary Waugh, in her introduction to Smuggling In Kent And Sussex 1700-1840: Smugglers in Kent and Sussex, nearest to both the London market and the continental suppliers, were leaders in the field. If Excise returns made to the Prime Minister around 1782 are to be believed, a quarter of all the smuggling vessels then operating around the coasts of England and Wales were based here, and a third of all the tea and half the gin being fraudulently landed came through these two counties. Inevitably, these were also the most heavily protected coasts; at one point, almost a quarter of all the Coastguards covering the entire British Isles were concentrated here.

Smuggling, during this era of the nation’s history, was an illegal act committed by thousands of individuals in defiance of what were unpopular and despised tax rates on imported or exported goods–enforced by Customs and Excise. Mary Waugh explains:

Royalty, in this country, has held a right going back many centuries to raise revenue from the duties imposed on goods carried either into or outside of the land, making the ‘response’ of smuggling just as ancient. Custom House officers stationed at the officially recognised quays and ports (where trading was restricted) were tasked with collecting the duty. At the same time, legislation made tax rates complicated to work out.

French brandy was always a favourite item of contraband. Its import was forbidden during the years of war with France, and at other times it carried a duty of £1 per gallon.

These are some very simple explanations of how smuggling became such a widespread criminal activity. In the case of Kent and Sussex, Mary Waugh further explains that Kent and Sussex both suffered terribly from a depressed local economy. Iron-smelting and cloth-making were two industries that met a sharp decline in the Weald, thus reducing many to acute poverty. A sum of only 7 or 8 shillings was what awaited the average farm labourer for a week’s gruelling work, with unemployment facing them during parts of the winter. However, a single and successful night carrying contraband for the smuggling gangs could produce as much as 10 shillings…

Yet when things did not go successfully, the consequences were as dire. Daniel Skayles left behind a strong and disturbing example of this in his smuggler’s legacy. At the age of only 34, he was shot through the head by a riding officer on the evening of Thursday Nov 17th 1796, during an ambush of Skayles and his heavily-laden associates conducted by the preventative authorities on the edge of Brighton and close to London Road. His gravestone lies behind the historic church at Patcham.

As a point of comparison, I’ve lived in Central America, and can attest that the same sort of situation/choices face Latin American campesinos in certain regions who can make more money for a single night’s ‘work’ assisting drug traffickers than in a week or even a month of agricultural occupations.

So, back to the case for St Clement’s Caves being a trusted store.

On purchasing an entrance tickets, one stumbles immediately upon a sign just slightly beyond the ticket desk, which reads towards the bottom of its text “these caves were almost certainly used by smugglers”…

This phrasing is peculiar: to be ‘almost certain’ is arguably to not be certain at all. The caves themselves are very dark, dingy and damp (as you would expect of caves); and, this suggests a problem. Given the conditions of these naturally formed caves (that do in parts show clear-cut signs of human manipulation), it is clear that smuggled merchandise would not have fared at all well being stored within them–lace, for instance.

“Laces for a lady, letters for a spy, / And watch the wall my darling, while the Gentlemen go by…” as Rudyard Kipling’s famous A Smuggler’s Song has it.

The modus operandi of all of the smuggling gangs (Hawkhurst, Groombridge and Mayfield were the most prolific) was to land the goods on secluded beaches in the dead of night, and employ as many men as possible on either horseback or on foot (apparently numbering up to as many as 500) who would in turn protect the ‘tubmen’ who ran into the shallows and collected the boxes, tubs and barrels along with lookouts on the hills at all times. ‘Tubmen’ received the goods from their seafaring counterparts tasked with transporting the merchandise from the continent. They would then hoist everything up and across the beaches, up and across the hills, before loading as much as possible onto horses and carts and then disappearing into the wooded countryside. Their ultimate goal was to get ‘the stuff’ up into the London market as soon as they could without detection, interference or confrontation from the authorities.

If they did need to store anything, it was for the most part in certain country and coastal pubs kept by trusted landlords–all accomplices of the gangs themselves. Hence, the publications of intriguing books such as East Sussex Smugglers’ Pubs, by Terry Townsend. It simply would have made no sense whatsoever to organise such well-oiled and viciously guarded night-runs to then go through the physical exertion of hoisting everything up into the St. Clements caves (probably possessing tricky and narrow entrances at the time). Which offered abysmal conditions for the smuggled items (apart from spirits) whereupon they would have been ‘sitting ducks’ just waiting for the authorities to catch wind of a massive cave stash. During all this time, they would be losing money as the goods were far away from the London market–the ultimate and most favoured destination for contraband.

Historical Hastings features the following information on its website: St Clement’s Caves are believed to be partially naturally formed caves and the results of sand mining, together with a degree of commercial exploitation during the late 19th century. Although they are billed as smugglers’ caves, there is no record of them being used as such. They have, however, been used as a hospital, air raid shelter and ballroom/music venue.

With the agreement of learned historians, points made through my own knowledge and the explanations covered in published works stemming from my research, I rest my case, dear readers.

Details of the current attraction here: smugglersadventure.co.uk

Dave Brockhurst is now a retired quarryman. Over the last thirty-four years of his working life, he has discovered twenty-six dinosaur species, including the world’s smallest dinosaur, in the Wealden Clay beds of a quarry in Turkey Road, Bexhill-on-Sea.

Dave explained to me that millions of years ago, the coast from Beachy Head to Dungeness was a vast delta braided by many rivers and streams. In the rainy seasons and humid climate period, the rivers ran fast, causing flash floods that overwhelmed the dinosaurs. In the drier periods lakes formed. Here at the lakesides, 140 million years ago, there roamed rounded-toothed dinosaurs feeding on vegetation. These were preyed upon by carnivorous monsters whose sharp teeth were endlessly replaced, just like the sharks of today.

The names of these dinosaurs do not easily trip off the tongue. For example, the Dromaeosaurs, Iguanodon, the fish-eating Baryonyx spinosaur, Ankylosaurs, Polacanthus, Megalosaurus and the famous Tyrannosaurus rex, which Dave tells me were of a special ‘Bexhill variety’. These were joined by crocodilians, fishes, turtles, small mammals, insects and many kinds of plants. The area from Bexhill through Hastings to Pett Level was especially rich.

LOCAL DISCOVERIES

Dinosaurs were first recognised in the Hastings area in the 1830s when Gideon Mantell (1822-1896) found, near Battle, the remains of the Ankylosaur named Hylaeosaurus foxii. Later, the notorious faker of the Piltdown Skull, Charles Dawson (1850-1916), did find a real type of Iguanodon now named Barilium dawsoni in Shornden Quarry, now a part of Alexandra Park, Hastings. Many years later, at the Ashdown Quarry in Turkey Road, Bexhill, Dave Brockhurst discovered a new genus–the gracile Iguanodon named Hypselospinus fittoni.

Now there is mounting evidence that the 1066 coast area from Bexhill to Pett Level could easily be a rival to the Jurassic Coast of Dorset, although neither the 1066 Coast nor the Jurassic Coast are quite as rich as the amazing Isle of Wight fossil beds.

The Evolution of Birds

Dave Brockhurst has been instrumental in finding links between dinosaurs and birds. Just how did this amazing evolutionary transformation occur?

It is hard to imagine that the robin on your fence or the sparrow in the hedgerow is the direct descendant of a ferocious dinosaur — but science now confirms that birds are not just related to dinosaurs. They are dinosaurs. More specifically, birds evolved from a group of fast, two-legged carnivores known as theropods, a lineage that includes famous predators like Velociraptor and Tyrannosaurus rex. But while Hollywood focuses on teeth and claws, the real story of bird origins is written in feathers — and remarkably, part of that story was uncovered right here on the Sussex coast.

The evolutionary link between birds and dinosaurs was once controversial, but over the last three decades, fossil discoveries, particularly from China, have cemented the connection. Fossils of small theropods like Anchiornis, Microraptor, and Sinosauropteryx show clear impressions of primitive feathers, and some even had wings capable of gliding.

These creatures weren’t ‘almost birds’ — they were feathered dinosaurs. Their skeletons include wishbones, hollow bones, and even backward-pointing pubic bones, all shared with modern birds. Yet, these were not tropical animals. Some of their close relatives once lived in what is now Bexhill and the Weald of Sussex, in the dense river-valley forests of the Early Cretaceous, around 130 million years ago.

In 2009, Dave Brockhurst, our local fossil hunter from Bexhill, made an extraordinary discovery while sifting through sediment at the Ashdown Quarry. Among the clay and ironstone nodules, he uncovered the delicate bones of a tiny meat-eating dinosaur. Realising its significance, Brockhurst passed the specimen on to professional palaeontologists for study.

Two years later, in 2011, palaeontologists Darren Naish and Steve Sweetman formally described the fossil as the remains of a tiny maniraptoran theropod, part of the same group that gave rise to birds. Although no feathers were preserved, the skeletal structure — including long arms and delicate legs — placed it firmly within the feathered dinosaur lineage.

This fossil, now known informally as the Ashdown Maniraptoran, may be the most direct evidence yet that feathered, bird-like dinosaurs were living in what is now East Sussex, flitting between ancient conifers and hunting insects in the undergrowth.

“It was a very exciting find,” Brockhurst later recalled. “You don’t expect to find the dinosaur that led to birds when you’re digging in clay with a trowel.”

The specimen now resides in Bexhill Museum’s collection, continuing to inform research into the Early Cretaceous ecosystems of Britain. This is what the Bexhill Bird Dinosaur may have looked like.

Surely a great achievement in anyone’s lifetime, Dave has found twenty-six species of dinosaur in the Bexhill to Pett Level area and may be on his way to his twenty-seventh – although scientific secrecy shrouds what may be to come! But the actual density of dinosaurs in the vast river-rich landscape was as low as one or two per kilometre. What pooled them all together in a mass of finds at the Ashdown Quarry beds was almost certainly catastrophic flash flooding.

Today Dave still helps with searches, supports museums and schools with advice and conducts parties of amateur palaeontologists to experience the thrill, first-hand, of finding the remains of amazing creatures from millions of years ago. Long may his work continue, and we hope for new announcements as the remarkable past is gently teased out of clay with trowels on the 1066 coast.

Dave says that his searches and discoveries are admired by a possible future generation of dinosaur hunters–his grandchildren think it’s cool to have a grandad who finds dinosaur bones.

I have two homes: Hastings and London. The latter I chose, the former I didn’t. My fondness for both is equal.

Linking these places of my heart on foot has always been a desire. Whenever I make the journey by car or train, I wonder what it would be like to traverse the unkempt nature and neat suburbia that lingers in between.

So, when my dad asked if I wanted to watch Hastings United play at home one January afternoon, it seemed like the perfect excuse to finally make the pilgrimage. I asked one of my oldest friends to join me. Max, who grew up in nearby Stonegate, is not only one of my best mates, he’s also brilliantly available.

Originally, we planned to go ‘door to door’ from Hackney to Hastings. But 65 miles over three days was a stretch with only a day and a half to spare. So, we trimmed the route to 43 miles, starting at Orpington (the edge of London).

We arrived just before 09.00, dodging angry commuters in BMWs and Range Rovers as we crossed the A224. Soon we veered off-road, cutting across a golf course and into open fields. The sun was bright, the January air mild. With city stress behind us, we revelled in the simple task ahead: just walk.

Optimism was short-lived. Caught in a thorn bush outside a Ministry of Defence lab, we had to sneak through someone’s back garden to escape. Thankfully, their guard dog was a yappy Chihuahua, not an XL Bully.

Crossing the M25, we climbed a steep hill to Sevenoaks. Here sits Knowle House, a fifteenth-century estate nestled just 25 minutes from London. We were in red trouser territory now.

Skirting Knowle’s grounds, we asked directions from an elderly couple on a power walk. Clad in carbon poles and streamlined specs, they looked Everest-ready but kindly pointed us the right way.

To save miles, we endured road stretches. Particularly hellish was the sliver of pavement between Sevenoaks and Tonbridge, where lorries screamed past – inches from our heads. If one hit us, we’d be roadkill before we knew it.

Arriving in Tonbridge around 13.00, we searched for lunch. Tonbridge is a sprawling blob of houses that make up the breadth of English society. In the space of a couple of miles, you can walk from the streets of upper-middle-class commuters to areas of deep poverty. This is harshly represented by Iceland and Waitrose, which share a carpark in the town centre. Not fancying a frozen lunch, we opted for Waitrose and ate outside the town’s thirteenth-century castle ruins, basking in the sun.

The school rush hit like a wave, with shrieking children, honking cars and parents on a mission. Three miles from Frant, darkness fell with startling speed. Ten miles of woods ahead made retreat seem wise. We cheated and hopped on the train to Stonegate.

Back on foot, we had a final three-mile stretch to Burwash, lit only by one bike torch and a full moon. Angry barks from a nearby farm spurred us on. In the next field, eyes blinked back at us… probably sheep, we hoped.

Eventually, the glow of Burwash appeared.

After a short walk down its sleepy eighteenth-century high street, we stumbled upon our pub-meets-motel accommodation. The air inside the inn was thick with the aroma of wood smoke and ale, a comforting warmth against the crisp night. The interior was an odd mix of old-fashioned charm and budget updates, a bit rough around the edges, but in the flickering glow of the fireplace, it was undeniably cosy.

A fresh-faced barkeep, still in his teens, led us to our accommodation out back. The motel-style room, a miniature echo of American roadside motels, was undeniably a bit shabby. The peeling wallpaper whispered tales of forgotten guests and budget constraints, the kind of setting that wouldn’t be out of place in a horror flick.

But after a 30-mile trek, the threat of fictional slashers paled in comparison to the very real need for a hot shower and a soft bed.

Suitably refreshed, we emerged back into the inn, which was buzzing with the energy of locals enjoying pints and playing darts. During the day, we had fantasised about regaling the patrons with tales of our walk. But awkwardness and exhaustion conspired to keep us quiet and by 22.00, our eyelids were drooping.

The sun bled rudely through the curtains the next morning. My feet throbbed! Three large blisters punished me for poor footwear choices. We patched up and hobbled on. The fresh air cleared our heads.

The second day (13 miles) was hillier but gentler. We wound through villages and quiet lanes. Yesterday’s sprawling suburbs gave way to quaint cottages and muddy hedges.

Lycra-clad cyclists zipped past with weekend-warrior energy; horse riders trotted along, aloof and composed.

By now, conversation had dwindled. Energy was low, coffee elusive. But then, a familiar sight: Battle Abbey.

Once the site of the Battle of Hastings–and, more importantly, my first job. I remembered the tourists, the hedge trimmers and the haughty stares from private school kids. Reaching Battle felt like a strange full circle. We’d reversed William the Conqueror’s path. We refuelled at Costa, unlike William, and pushed on.

As we neared the end, one thought stuck with me: the incredible cost-to-adventure ratio. For the price of a train ticket and some sandwiches, we’d had something extraordinary. A helpful reminder of what can be found right on our doorstep.

The Hastings sign brought wide smiles. Dad and his mate were waiting, and soon we were lost in the roar of the football match. Kids mimicked memories of my own youth; the same familiar faces jeered and joked from the stands.

To the casual observer, our arrival was just another Saturday afternoon. No trumpets, no red carpets, just a quiet satisfaction that resonated deep within. The game itself, with Hastings United cruising to a win was a fitting end to our walk.

The train journey back was a more frustrating exercise than the walk itself, thanks to a two-hour delay. But even that couldn’t dampen my spirits. A walk with a mate, blisters and all, had been an adventure that far surpassed the £20 train ride. And that, as they say, is priceless.

A year after Labour’s landslide election victory, it’s clear that anger is building over the government ‘balancing the books’ by cutting winter fuel allowance to pensioners and benefits for disabled people. Promises to improve the NHS and tackle the cost of living crisis seem long forgotten while Labour are staying fully committed to their pledge not to raise taxes on the rich. Shamefully, rather than oppose the genocide in Gaza, they are actually continuing to supply Israel with weapons, intelligence and political support. This is not what they were elected for.

You may have heard that there’s talk of a new national party to oppose Starmer’s Labour from Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn.

What you may not know is that a group of people in Hastings have already been working on setting up a local branch of the ‘new left party’ for the past two months. A group describing themselves only as ‘socialist activists’ decided to get a head start on the national organisers, by putting out a call for like minded people to join them in creating a new left party locally. They immediately garnered over 60 supporters, and their founding meeting of over 30 people at the end of May has been followed by a flurry of sub-groups working on everything from film nights and outreach stalls, to educationals and mapping campaigns. This kind of local initiative, which is one of many taking place all over the country, is being encouraged by Jeremy Corbyn, who dropped in on one of the group’s Zoom calls to wish them well. Jamie Driscoll, who is leading the ‘majority movement’ in Tyneside, has also been in touch to offer his support.

Rather than focus on policies or programmes at this stage, the group has chosen to focus instead on issues and activism, and they say they want to do a lot more listening and engaging–and recruiting–before declaring themselves the final article ready to stand in elections.

The second meeting of the group at the end of June included a training session on community organising, an educational discussion on economic alternatives to neoliberalism, and a planning meeting where members discussed the various campaigns they are already involved in, including the Communities V Developers Protestival aimed at tackling issues around housing and the environment, and a local Unite campaign for greater disabled access in the town.

I joined the group’s lively WhatsApp chat and asked members to share their reasons for getting involved in this project which has clearly galvanised some very enthusiastic supporters.

Rachel Ray, a local teacher, parent and renter said: “I’m disillusioned and frustrated after throw-away messages, hollow intentions and many broken promises from the current powers. There’s not enough time left to wait for systemic change; we have to provide that shift ourselves.”

For Andrea Cowhig, it seems that it was the pressure of living with disabilities and poor housing that pushed her into politics: “I’ve been upset by recent changes in parliament that are very discriminatory to disabled people and not equal to all. Our housing also needs to be made accessible to everybody, and I helped set up the Hastings Area Southern Housing Tenants Association because I think it’s so important for tenants to have our own independent voice.”

As with many other members, it seems to be the party’s focus on activism that has attracted Andrea’s support: “When I was younger I shied away from politics. I didn’t really like politicians because they promise great things but they never really deliver. What I like about the new left party is that it’s about campaigning, not just ‘politics’, and it’s about community and it’s honest. It’s from the grassroots, from the people to the top, not the other way round.”

The new left party already has a sub-group for young people, and for Ted McIntosh, a college student who at 17 said he was “born under the shadow of New Labour” it’s clear the mainstream parties are not an appealing option: “The extreme centrism of the modern Labour Party broadly falls in line with the Conservative status quo when it comes to doing nothing to address the real needs and conditions of vulnerable people. The two parties play bipartisan pass-the-parcel–defunding the NHS and public services, increasing tuition fees, turning a blind eye to Israel’s genocide, and parroting anti-immigration rhetoric.”

As well as newcomers to politics, the party also has some well-known local supporters, including Peter Chowney, former council leader, who wrote: “Trashing the Labour Party’s socialist heritage has left a huge void in British politics. We need a new political movement, building progressive policies from the bottom up to sort out the problems that affect people’s day-to-day lives.”

Many lifelong Labour supporters feel that in moving so far to the right, it was the Labour Party who left them. One supporter Dee Howard explained how she fell foul of the outrageous witch-hunt within Labour by the party’s Blairite wing, in alliance with the national media, when they used false claims of anti-semitism to undermine Corbyn and his supporters, “When I posted online about my Jewish late husband being suspended from the Labour Party for anti-Semitism, I was expelled myself!”

The bruising experience of the Corbyn years in Labour is clearly shaping how people feel about the new party they are creating. Documentary maker Archie Lauchlan is clear: “It’s not called ‘The Ruling Class’ for nothing – the Establishment’s political wing, in collusion with the various media outlets it controls, keeps itself perennially in power. Traditionally, it was just the Conservative Party doing its bidding, but what we’re seeing now is pretty much a uniparty system, with the Tories, Reform, LibDems and Labour all working hard to maintain the rightwing status quo.”

THE CURRENT SITUATION IS NOT OK

Antonia Berelson, NHS nurse and Royal College of Nursing steward is one of a number of trade union organisers supporting the party, and she wrote “As a working-class nurse and single mother, I want to join the new left party to seize the narrative from the establishment and fight for a more just and equal future. I reject Westminster career politicians and believe in grassroots power to challenge the systems that are failing us. Only by defending public services and empowering workers can we build a truly fair and compassionate society.”

With so many grassroots activists involved, it’s no surprise that a key focus for many is about having a community voice. Kay Green, a local activist and blogger wrote: “Most people are pretty clear by now that party politics is working mainly for national banks and global corporations. I’m interested in avoiding national-level corruption by making it possible for localities to vote for MPs they know and trust.”

People may remember the controversy around the selection of Helena Dollimore as the Labour candidate for Hastings, when she was foisted on the local membership after local candidates were ruled out by the Labour head office. Her voting record shows why, as she continues to vote for every government attack on her working class constituents. Kay is hoping the new left party can put up a different kind of candidate “who would go to Westminster thinking things like ‘how do we change the planning system so that residents’ voices are more important than developers and housing associations?’ or ‘there are areas of my town where no-one can get to see an NHS dentist or doctor without a long, frustrating struggle. How do we change the system to work for them?’”

HOPE IS RADICAL AND MUCH NEEDED

Grace Lally is a local housing activist and one of the founders of Hastings Friends of Al Mawasi and, like many other supporters of the party, was involved in the Corbyn movement in the election of 2017. She wrote “Of course everyone knows we lost the election, but what many of us also know from that experience is that you can stand for a complete change in society and millions of people will rally to that cause. We learned that we can build a mass popular movement for justice, of us, the majority, against the rich and powerful, and that the establishment, including the Labour Party, are absolutely terrified by that and will do everything to destroy that hope.”

Reflecting the sense of urgency behind this fledgling party, Grace wrote: “I wouldn’t have believed back in 2017 how much more dangerous and unstable our world would become. In a time of genocide, climate crisis and radical discontent being channelled towards the far right, the victory we hoped for as a beautiful possibility back then, has become an absolute necessity now.”

For Peter Chowney, rebuilding a sense of hope is vital: “People are deeply dissatisfied and in despair. They need renewed hope. I think that a new socialist political movement, built locally and coordinated nationally, is the way to achieve that.” Maya Evans, Former Labour Deputy Leader of Hastings Council, currently Campaigns Organiser at Jeremy Corbyn Campaigns said: “For the sake of a healthy democracy and to demand the change people deserve, we need a proudly left wing party, from the grassroots, driven by communities, creating campaigns that will shape the agenda of our policies. There’s lots of energy and excitement for a new left party, there’s a huge appetite for change.”

Leah Levane, who was also a local Labour Councillor and remains chair of Jewish Voice for Labour, wrote about her own sense of hope in this new type of politics: “Clearly Labour is not a party interested in actually changing things in the way that I would support and is, instead, tied into corporate and other powerful interests. I’m excited by the potential to link up with those in other parts of the country who share similar values.”

WHAT’S THE PLAN?

Archie Lauchlan describes the aim of the group: “We want to create a vibrant, bottom-up movement spearheaded by a campaigning, popular, electable party whose policies will be formed by, and for the benefit of, the people it’ll represent – ie, the majority of us.” Maya Evans, Former Labour Deputy Leader of Hastings Council, currently Campaigns Organiser at Jeremy Corbyn Campaigns agrees: “For the sake of a healthy democracy and to demand the change people deserve, we need a proudly left wing party, from the grassroots, driven by communities, creating campaigns that will shape the agenda of our policies. There’s lots of energy and excitement for a new left party, there’s a huge appetite for change.”

Some people might agree with those sentiments but still feel worried by the warnings that a new left party would ‘split the vote’ or ‘let in Farage’. The truth is, we don’t know how the national party will develop and it’s certainly ambitious to launch one here in Hastings on our own. But some people might also say that’s exactly what makes this project special. And I’m with Andrea on this when she says: “You can’t just sit back and assume someone else is going to sort it out for you.”

Whether the new left party has an impact or not depends on what you do now. If you want to join me in signing up to the founding statement, go to linktr.ee/hastingsnewleftparty. Follow the QRcode for fuller versions of statements from all of these contributers and more on the website version of this article

Andrea Cowhig

I think there’s so much going on in our world that needs looking at and we need to work together as a community to sort these things. The older I get I realise you can’t just sit back and assume someone else is going to sort it out for you. 

In the last 15 years, I’ve been unlucky to have been unwell myself and had to deal with the DWP and I’ve been upset by recent changes in parliament that are very discriminatory to disabled people and not equal to all. Our housing also needs to be made accessible to everybody and I helped set up the Hastings Area Southern Housing Tenants Association because I think its so important for tenants to have our own independent voice.

When I was younger I shied away from politics. I didnt really like politicians because they promise great things but they never really deliver. What I like about the new left party is that it’s about campaigning, not ‘politics’, and it’s about community and its honest. Its from the grassroots, from the people to the top, not the other way round.

Antonia Berelson NHS nurse, RCN member

As a working-class nurse and single mother, I want to join the new left party to seize the narrative from the establishment and fight for a more just and equal future. I reject Westminster career politicians and believe in grassroots power to challenge the systems that are failing us. Only by defending public services and empowering workers can we build a truly fair and compassionate society.

I’m a nurse and a former labour councillor, but Labour no longer speaks to me, nor those I care for 

I’ve seen poverty rising all around me—families choosing between heating and eating, patients stuck on endless waiting lists, and mental health services in crisis. Labour has turned its back while inequality grows and the NHS is dismantled bit by bit. Ive joined the new left party to be part of fighting to end poverty, rebuild our health service, and put care before profit

Archie Lauchlan – Documentary Filmmaker

It’s not called ‘The Ruling Class’ for nothing – the Establishment’s political wing, in collusion with the various media outlets it controls, keeps itself perenially in power. Traditionally it was just the Conservative Party doing its bidding but what we’re seeing now is pretty much a uniparty system, with the Tories, Reform, LibDems and Labour all working hard to maintain the rightwing status quo. We want to turn that on its head by creating a vibrant, bottom-up movement spearheaded by a campaigning, popular, electable party whose policies will be formed by, and for the benefit of, the people it’ll represent – ie, the majority of us. 

Dee Howard, former Labour Party activist

When I posted online about my Jewish late husband being suspended from the Labour Party for anti-Semitism I was expelled myself. It was a relief in fact to be able to speak openly about Palestine as, if you were a member of the LP, you had no freedom of speech about anything. I joined the LP in 1971 as a loyal Young Socialist but now it no longer works for the working class but the bosses, and a foreign power, Israel. 

Grace Lally, Housing Rebellion activist and one of the founders of Hastings Friends of Al Mawasi.

I am very cynical about elections. But I will never forget election day in 2017 and just how emotional and hopeful I felt when it seemed like one of our guys – someone who had been part of the anti-war movement, who stood with striking workers, who defended immigrants – could actually get into Downing Street. Of course everyone knows we lost the election but what many of us also know from that experience is that you can stand for a complete change in society and millions of people will rally to that cause. We learned that we can build a mass popular movement for justice, of us the majority against the rich and powerful, and that the establishment, including the Labour Party, are absolutely terrified by that and will do everything to destroy that hope. So this time round we know we need to build a party with deep roots in our communities and in our workplaces, that is part of mass social movements for change, and we can’t rely on the mainstream media or anyone else to spread our message. We won’t be stuck working within the corrupted structures of the Labour Party so in many ways it should be much easier to have our own democratic, bottom-up, grassroots-led party. I wouldn’t have believed back in 2017 how much more dangerous and unstable our world would become. In a time of genocide, climate crisis and radical discontent being channelled towards the far right, the victory we hoped for as a beautiful possibility back then, has become an absolute necessity now.

Kay Green, local activist and blogger 

Most people are pretty clear by now that party politics is working mainly for national banks and global corporations. I’m interested in avoiding national-level corruption by making it possible for localities to vote for MPs they know and trust. People who would go to Westminster thinking things like ‘how do we change the planning system so that residents’ voices are more important than developers and housing associations?’ or ‘there are areas of my town where no-one can get to see an NHS dentist or doctor without a long, frustrating struggle. How do we change the system to work for them?’ 

I think a coallition of independent, locally formed parties would be the best way to make that happen.

Leah Levane, retired community development worker, Chair of Jewish Voice for Labour

I rejoined the Labour Party to support Jeremy Corbyn’s policies.  I want our politics and economy to operate in the interests of the many and not just those who wield power.  I became a Labour Councillor (for 3 years until 2021) but clearly Labour is not a Party interested in actually changing things in the way that I would support and are, instead, tied into corporate and other powerful interests.  I am excited by the potential to link up with those in other parts of the country who share similar values.  I hope that the next stages, to be led by Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn will move fairly swiftly and a democratic structure set up after which we can elect our leaders.

Nathan Parkin, member of Equity

As a guy living in Hastings area for a while now, I have seen local services start to crumble and local politicians really struggle with an ever worsening housing crisis, among many other issues. To top it off, there is now a real possibility that Hastings Borough Council is to be abolished, which will only make things more difficult for local people. I was a bit surprised that even the Green Party are apparently okay with this! With one thing and another, I feel it’s time now for a new political voice that can think outside the box and look for new solutions to tackle all these issues. 

Peter Chowney, former council leader

After 40 years as a member of the Labour Party, twenty years as a Hastings councillor, and five years as council leader, I left the party after Starmer became leader. I didn’t want to be associated with the devastating shift to the right that followed. Trashing the Labour Party’s socialist heritage has left a huge void in British politics. We need a new political movement, building progressive policies from the bottom up to sort out the problems that affect people’s day to day lives. We need to end the unfairness and inequity or our economic and social system, the obscene imbalance of wealth and poverty, the lack of reward for all of us who put so much more into the system than we get back in return. People are deeply dissatisfied and in despair. They need renewed hope. I think that a new socialist political movement, built locally and co-ordinated nationally, is the way to achieve that.

Rachel Ray, 38. Teacher, parent, renter

I’m disillusioned and frustrated after throw-away messages, hollow intentions and many broken promises from the current powers. There’s not enough time left to wait for systemic change; we have to provide that shift ourselves. [asked for change to this] And what a community Hastings is to draw from (I’m not even from Hastings originally, but the more you speak to people, the clearer this sentiment resounds). I believe that it’s time to stand up for humanity, for compassion, and for the right to breathe. 

Ted McIntosh, college student, age 17

As someone born under the shadow of New Labour, raised under the peak of austerity, and emerging into adulthood in a time of a nascent far right movement, it is clear to me that Britain needs a new left wing party.

The extreme centrism of the modern Labour Party broadly falls in line with the Conservative status quo when it comes to doing nothing to address the real needs and conditions of vulnerable people. This has led to the two parties playing bipartisan pass-the-parcel with defunding the NHS and public services, increasing tuition fees, turning a blind eye to Israel’s genocide, and parroting anti-immigration rhetoric.

Starmer’s weak governance and neglect of people in poverty has led to Reform, backed by billionaires who would be hardest hit by the change needed to help the most vulnerable, gaining traction by disseminating the same hackneyed lies about refugees from the Brexit era.

This is what a new left wing party, now on the cards with stalwarts of British democratic socialism such as] with Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn looking poised to lead it, must stand up to. No to poverty, no to defunding public services, and no to the anti-immigration lies. The billionaires already have Labour, Reform and Conservative fighting for them. We deserve one too.

Which brings me to the other threat which a new left wing party must defend against – Reform UK. Reform, which is in the pocket of the same billionaire oligarchs backing Trump in the US, has gained massive momentum since the General Election.

Anti-immigration rhetoric is based on lies and it is based on lies easy for politicians to spread with little cost. They can conveniently blame a vulnerable group without addressing the real causes of poverty: the billions of unpaid taxes still in the pockets of their billionaire backers. 

Maya Evans, Former Labour Deputy Leader of Hastings Council, currently Campaigns Organiser at Jeremy Corbyn Campaigns

This country’s two party first-past-the-post electoral system has led to a corrupt moribund unfair political landscape where decision makers are more influenced by profits of warfare rather than the wishes or the welfare of the people who put them there. Currently, the political landscape is veering dangerously to the right, while the government needs serious opposition to resist cuts to essential benefits. For the sake of a healthy democracy and to demand the change people deserve, we need a proudly left wing party, from the grassroots, driven by communities, creating campaigns that will shape the agenda of our policies. There’s lots of energy and excitement for a new left party, there’s a huge appetite for change.

Nearly everything we have come to enjoy and rely on in our everyday lives usually follows a familiar pattern: exclusively available to the aristocracy, then to the slightly better off, then, after a long uphill struggle, to the poor. This is true of tea, parks, chocolate, lawyers, central heating, medicine, mortgages, French bulldogs, access to the arts, and almost everything else you could think of, with one notable exception.  

Advice services, one of the few pillars of our battered welfare state to have survived both Thatcherism and austerity in remarkably rude health, were set up entirely with ordinary people in mind. From the very beginning, debt played a huge role in any advice service’s remit. Household incomes fell throughout the early 1940s, as men were called up to fight, or sent home in coffins, depriving many families of their main breadwinner. By 1942, there was a record 1,074 Citizens Advice Bureaux, from large, grand premises based directly in town halls, to a converted horsebox which toured the areas worst affected by bombing to offer support to the survivors. Most had at least one debt specialist, a practice that continues to this day. 

Brighton Housing Trust (BHT) sprang up from a single hostel on Islingword Road in 1968. It now offers expert housing advice to those facing homelessness across Sussex, including victims of the dreaded Section 21 no-fault eviction. 

The Federation of Independent Advice Centres (which would go on to form Advice UK) was formed in 1979 when 100 or so activists from several major cities met at a North Kensington primary school. Unlike the Citizens’ Advice Bureau (CAB) model, where offices are reliant on well-established and standardised practices, any local charity could theoretically become a member. The original intention was primarily to pool resources where it made sense to do so. Following a spike in membership during the Miners’ Strike, the FIAC turned its attention to developing educational tools and, from 1989, offered some of the first nationally recognised advice courses.  

Hastings Advice and Representation Centre (HARC) was founded over 40 years ago to provide free and confidential benefits advice, to address inequality, relieve poverty and improve the quality of life for vulnerable and disadvantaged individuals and families. Today, they are staying true to these stated aims. 

While the advice sector across Hastings, St. Leonards, and the surrounding villages can feel like a crowded field, with HARC, Citizens Advice 1066, the Seaview Project, and BHT Floating Support among others all providing crossover services, there are plenty of people needing help. Advice services will regularly make referrals across different areas of expertise, or where appointment slots are fully booked months in the future. Around 19,000 client contacts were made in the year to March 2024 to HARC alone, representing a significant chunk of our town’s 92,000 population, and these numbers only look set to grow if next winter is as unforgiving as the last.

I spoke to Wendy Knowles, Development Manager at HARC, about the importance of advice provision generally, and the unique challenges facing our town. Though we work for different advice services, her verdict on the sector mirrored my own: 

“A recurring theme over the past 42 years that HARC has been around is that the poor are always the hardest hit when there is a period of financial instability. Whether or not you would agree with the old adage that the rich get richer, it is difficult to deny the poor are getting poorer. 

“Our clients tell us that the current welfare system is not accessible. Application processes and assessments are increasingly complex and restrictive, making the system incredibly difficult to navigate. In addition, parliamentary decisions and media communications have traditionally fuelled a narrative where benefit claimants are seen as ‘idle’ and fostered a culture of shame.” 

Wendy has no doubt seen, as I have, an increasing number of those who have never had to claim means-tested or disability benefits before, being completely overwhelmed by the bureaucracy involved, alongside a steady stream of returning clients with complex problems and chaotic lives who have been having to navigate the system for so long that they have given up hope things will ever get easier.  

A rash of punitive and reactionary immigration reforms introduced since Brexit have also meant advice services are dealing with more and more immigration-related issues, whether from those who have been here for decades, or from recent arrivals. So, what happens when the advisers themselves start to feel a bit overwhelmed? 

Luckily, the advice sector has the backing of a solid infrastructure of other charities and organisations that they can turn to when a particularly challenging case comes their way. The No Recourse to Public Funds Network (NRPF) advises organisations dealing with anyone from asylum seekers to spouses of British citizens who cannot claim benefits, on their rights in the UK.  

Shelter has a specialist team providing expert debt advice (including case law) to debt advisers who have exhausted every other avenue, and the Institute of Money Advisers give them excellent training and support throughout their careers.  

Mind Infoline and Rethink can pick up cases where a client may be struggling with their mental health, including through conference calls to introduce a distressed client to a dedicated mental health professional.

This is to say nothing of the degree to which we all pitch in to help each other. 

So, what can we all do to better support our local advice services? When you use them, treat their staff and volunteers well by keeping appointments or calling ahead to cancel. Don’t misdirect anger over systemic injustices, and bring along relevant paperwork. Raise awareness of the good they do. Citizens Advice have long maintained a policy of never publishing posters or literature asking for donations, so few are even aware of their charity status, but it’s important to remember that many of these services used to receive the bulk of their funding from local authorities and are now having to raise it elsewhere. To the majority of service users who have nothing to give, sometimes a kind word and a sense of a job well done is all it takes to lift an adviser’s spirits. We’re also partial to biscuits. 

INGRID ALLAN is a charity caseworker and local campaigner who moved to Hastings in 2023. She can often be found on West Hill with her dog Bentham. For Hastings Advice and Representation Centre visit harcuk.com

Alexandra Park was formed in 1876 and has one of the finest tree collections in Europe. Its glorious landscape is the home of beautiful flower displays, lakes and notable tree giants. It has a rich wildlife, many peaceful paths and a magnificent greenhouse.

In the Greenhouse on 26 June – the anniversary of the Royal Opening of the park, the Friends of Alexandra Park (FOAP) will be inviting you to join.

Members will be able to learn from guided talks and presentations about how the park is cared for and its many secrets: the often complex and wonderful lives of the creatures that live there – such as birds, insects and bats, and the seasonal cycle of life.

If you love nature and find great benefit in the peace and tranquillity of parkland environments, then Alexandra Park is what we might call ‘the lungs of Hastings’. It’s a remarkable park.

Robert Marnock was a leading landscape gardener of the Victorian era. He created Alexandra Park over a six-year period from 1876 to 1882 to give birth to the vision of Thomas Ross, five times mayor of Hastings. When it was finished, it was declared “superior to any park in any other seaside resort” and “one of the most beautiful parks in the country”. It was the best of the best, and it still is a treasure for our town.

The Victorians, encouraged by their poets such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Christina Rossetti, were in love with natural things. The people of Hastings had already formed a trail through the valley of the Priory Stream that led to Old Roar Gill and its tea garden. Paths led to the three reservoirs of Hastings, the Shornden, Harmers, and Old Roar (now known as Buckshole). Spread out below was a small urban landscape known as St Andrew’s Gardens. Mayor Ross interviewed notable landscape gardeners, chose Robert Marnock and told him: “…make me one of the most beautiful parks in England.”

Marnock examined the whole landscape tract from Old Roar to the railway viaduct at the top of Queen’s Road and wrote a letter of recommendation to Ross:

“…looking at the natural features of the ground, with the singularly happy combination of hill and valley, wood and water, it can hardly be an exaggeration to assert that for picturesque beauty the locality thus selected is probably unsurpassed by anything of the kind elsewhere.”

Alexandra Park has some remarkable trees obtained for a remarkable price – only £70.00. 1,200 trees were to be purchased for this sum (now £7,172.00), and by 1882, when the Prince of Wales and his wife Princess Alexandra came to open the Park on 26 June 1882, 1,000 of those trees had been planted and labelled.

Nowadays, Alexandra Park in Hastings is renowned for its exceptional collection of trees. According to the Hastings Borough Council, the park has one of the best collections in Britain, with many considered ‘champions’—the tallest or largest of their kind in the country. A 2024 tree survey reported that the park had 77 county champion trees for East Sussex and nine national champions for Britain and Ireland, more than any other public park in the UK.

The wonderfully-named Emmenopterys Henryi is a flowering tree closely related to coffee and gardenia. It was discovered in China in 1897 by the plant hunter Augustine Henry and brought to England in 1907. It flowers after hot summers and first flowered in England at Wakehurst Place in 1987, 73 years after first planting. It prefers moist shade and protection from harsh winds – and we hope it will flower for us this year. To find out where it is in the park – join FoAP!

Buckshole Reservoir is a hotspot for waterfowl and kingfishers. Shornden Reservoir is often frequented by various gull species and cormorants. The Old Roar Gill and Coronation Wood areas are excellent for spotting woodland birds like nuthatches and treecreepers. Harmers Pond is known for sightings of grey wagtails and other water-associated birds. As well as the normal bird population of robins, blackbirds and goldfinches, the park is home to some less common and migratory birds, such as: firecrests, pied flycatchers, spotted flycatchers, chiffchaffs, blackcaps, willow warblers, redwings (in winter), mistle thrushes, rose-ringed parakeets, little grebes and greater whitethroats.

With membership you could join in with plant surveys for flowering plants and shrubs, lichens, oak galls, fungi and ferns. The Friends need a full butterfly survey. Bats are surveyed using a powerful ultrasonic device once per month to build a record of their habits, and we plan a series of bat boxes to be placed on tall trees to enhance the current bat population. We also study the effects of global warming and how it affects life in the park – advancing the normal times when plants flower, birds migrate and caterpillars turn into butterflies, for example.

The Friends would like to support the park gardeners by offering their help with some maintenance of the beds and borders and hopefully encourage funding to enhance the planting. They are looking for ways to develop their volunteering efforts.

The Friends of Alexandra Park is a voluntary group dedicated to promoting the use of Alexandra Park, encouraging wildlife conservation and protecting the park from unwanted development. They organise various activities, including guided walks and talks on topics such as trees, bats, fungi, insects, birds and the park’s history. The group also engages in conservation work within the park.

Supported by Hastings Borough Council, the Friends have the following key aims: to undertake fundraising for key projects in conjunction with the Council and other partners, ensuring the future of the restored park is sustained, encouraging activities that promote/improve the park, promotion of interpretational and educational activities and, overseeing the care of the tree collection and seeking to expand the range of trees planted.

It is worth noting that the Alexandra Park Greenhouse Group is another organisation associated with Alexandra Park in Hastings. They focus on the restoration and maintenance of the park’s 60ft long greenhouse erected in 1934.

To join the Friends of Alexandra Park on the Park’s 143rd anniversary, email FOAPHastings@gmail.com. To come to the relaunch, meet us in the Greenhouse from 6.30 to 7.30 on Thursday, 26 June. You can access the Greenhouse via the ramp off St Helens Road next to the HBC Park Depot.

There is a mystery as to why the Amsterdam ended up in Pevensey Bay during a great storm, unable to get beyond Beachy Head: five other ships did get beyond and as far as Portsmouth. So the great storm was not quite as significant as some think. After all, these were all ocean-going ships unlikely to be overcome by a bit of a blow at the stand-up paddle board end of the English Channel. Wind direction, not wind strength, would be the important factor here; however, that also doesn’t explain the different outcomes.

The six ships had been together at the Downs Anchorage off Deal, after the second attempt by the fleet to get through the English Channel. This is a safe anchorage, still in use today by P&O when it’s too windy to get into Dover. It can only be accessed from the south, as it lies between the East Kent coast and the treacherous Godwin Sands on which 2,000 ships have been wrecked. It’s hard enough for a motor vessel, but for a square-rigged sailing ship, one at the mercy of wind and tide, a highly skilled manoeuvre.

They stayed a little over 24 hours, leaving with the tide and a favourable wind on the night of 10 January. This was where the Amsterdam took a different route. The ship’s logs are long since lost, so we only know of their stay at the Downs because of land-based observations. These observations continued for the Amsterdam, but the other ships passed by unnoticed until they arrived in Portsmouth. What could account for this difference? The sickness on board is almost certainly the answer. By the time she set an anchor in Pevensey Bay a few days later, 50 of her crew of 204 were dead, with more dying at the rate of three a day. The ships with healthy crews could set a better course, keeping offshore and out of sight. This is a much safer place for a sailing ship passing through the English Channel in a storm. Keeping as far out as possible from an onshore wind was always desirable.

TRAPPED IN PEVENSEY BAY

The Amsterdam was seen off Rye and Hastings and then at anchor off Bexhill. Around this time, the other ships had taken refuge in Portsmouth as the wind became more southerly and ended up southwesterly. The other ships were able to sail with the wind over their beam (side) as they headed into a safe port. These ships had a tough time in the strong winds, but again, it was wind direction and not wind strength that brought them into port. The Amsterdam, already close to shore, was trapped in Pevensey Bay.

To add to the misery, the ship had lost her rudder on a sandbank. If the Amsterdam had made Portsmouth too, she could have been repaired and taken on a fresh crew. This makes the suggested mutiny sound more like justifiable belligerence than an attempt to take over the ship – although it seems they did take over the large drinks cabinet. Yet all hands must have pulled together to make the final short journey to the sands of Bulverhythe.

She only just made it, narrowly avoiding the Bo Peep rocks to the east of the Bexhill reef. Since then, the ship has moved very little from this spot except downwards, as she sank into the muddy sand over the next few weeks. There she remains, the most intact East Indiaman ship in existence, said to be two-thirds complete and with all her cargo still in her hold. The masts and rigging were removed shortly after she was officially abandoned on 11 March 1749.

The ship is still visible on low spring tides if you want to visit, though be aware that this is a protected shipwreck and you should stay a safe distance. It is thanks to the work of Peter Marsden, whose book Wreck of the Amsterdam was the source of much of this article, that this status has been afforded. There still remains, however, the mystery of how she came ashore bow first in a violent storm, having lost her rudder.

BEACHING WITHOUT A RUDDER?

As the Amsterdam lay at anchor off Bexhill with sailors dying at a rate of three a day, the Captain eventually decided to beach her. They wouldn’t need a telescope to see the sands at Bulverhythe or the rocks on either side as the tides cycled. They had a big problem though, the loss of their rudder on a sandbank on their way in.

My experience of rudders and sailing boats is that it’s game over when one is lost. Once, while racing around the Isle of Wight and heading towards The Needles, the rudder had suddenly broken off in my hand as we put in a tack. We’d managed to get the thing on board, but that was it; we were finished. The boat naturally headed into the wind, sails flapping noisily. We ended up being rescued by the RNLI, having randomly drawn a dog. 

So it’s with that experience that I approach the last moments of the Amsterdam’s journey. With three ships’ carpenters and eight apprentices on board, they could jury-rig some kind of rudder, but this would be a challenge. I needed to learn a bit more about how square-rigged ships like the Amsterdam are sailed. One minute into a YouTube clip, and they drop the bombshell: square riggers “don’t use their rudders to steer when underway”.

A square-rigged ship balances the power of the foresails at the bow (front end) with the spanker at the stern. This helps hold the ship on a course and also assists with turning. Rudders on small sailing boats are very effective and work almost instantly, but it’s different for heavy ships. Firstly, they are slow to react; there was that incident in the North Atlantic when one was trying to steer around an iceberg. Secondly, once they start turning, they are hard to stop, as happened with the ship that blocked the Suez Canal more recently.

SQUARE RIG EXPERT HELP

I was out of my depth, I needed help and managed to get the attention of a genuine square rig sea captain at classicsailing.com. I wasn’t expecting an answer, but Adam Purser the joint founder and qualified sailing instructor for these ships replied: “I think they didn’t have much say in the matter: if the anchor parted suddenly, the bows would have been blown off by the wind, and once the moment of the swing began, she would spin out of control. Setting sails would just have made them approach the beach faster. That they went ashore bow first is therefore likely to have been entirely a result they had no control over.”

This took the wind out of my sails. It looked like the Amsterdam finally had some good luck and came ashore bow first before the bad luck set in again as she started to sink into the muddy sand. However, I think there’s still a way for the Amsterdam to come ashore under command, bow first and still fit with Adam Purser’s assessment above.

HOW DID IT HAPPEN?

The captain would have observed the tidal sequence and realised that as the tide came in, the tidal stream headed east. This meant that just cutting free from the anchor on a rising tide, the ship would drift ashore nearer Hastings. Could they control her sufficiently to make a graceful bow-first beaching on the nearby sands at Bulverhythe, or would they swing out of control as suggested by Adam Purser, the ship’s captain from Classic Sailing?

The irony is that the safest place for a ship in a storm is to stay at sea. Coming into port is the dangerous part. The land is a very solid object to come up against when you are being pushed around by a storm. The captain and crew would know this too. So why did they choose to come ashore in a storm? The answer I believe, is that they didn’t.

HOW TO BEACH A SHIP

For a successful beaching, three conditions would need to be met. First, they would need to come in on one of the higher tides in the cycle to push them as high on the beach as possible. Every two weeks for a few days the tide is at its highest; these are known as spring tides. Secondly, as the Amsterdam had no upwind performance there would need to be some southerly aspect to the wind to help push her ashore. And finally, the missing piece: the wind would have to have abated. It may have seemed windy to the church congregation on shore as they heard the ship’s canons being fired on that Sunday afternoon (a sign of a ship in distress). But if the wind was a force 6 or below i.e. 30mph or less, then the game is very much back on.

Sailors are skilled at reading the weather, watching clouds and monitoring conditions, and would know they only need a few hours to pull off the short journey to shore. So with great skill and courage, the remaining healthy crew likely sobered up and pulled together, motivated by a common goal. They only just made it onto the sandy beach, which probably meant they came in faster than they would have liked, just as Adam Purser predicted. They did make it, and she held fast, a little too fast, for there she remains.

Of course, I can’t be certain that this is what happened, but it is unlikely they took the risk of beaching in storm conditions, there was too much at stake. A brand-new ship, barrels of silver, and a young captain’s reputation and career, not to mention the lives of several hundred people. Captain Klump had to get the signature of all the senior officers for this beaching to go ahead. After which, Klump took this document to the Mayor of Hastings for signing and then on to the London office of the Dutch East India Company for ratification. They did everything by the book. Klump went on to make five more East Indies trips before retiring. The beaching therefore, sounds organised, skilful and planned.

A HUMAN TRAGEDY

The beaching of the Amsterdam is a human tragedy with well over 50 people dead and some too sick to leave the ship. But after housing the crew ashore, there was no further outbreak of the disease amongst the people of Hastings. Whatever it was, it was left on the ship. Interestingly, the disease struck only one group of people on board: none of the senior crew got it, nor the 130 soldiers on board, only the general crew. Perhaps their water supply was contaminated, or something else specific to this group, as they bore the brunt of this with their lives. It also gives a touch of gothic horror to the idea of recovering the ship and floating it home to Amsterdam.

Woods’ photos are images of Victorian people at work and play: the crowded, varied life of a major seaside resort, fishermen struggling to make a living in small sailing boats, and the slow, traditional way of life in the country just before the internal combustion engine changed the face of rural England forever.

He is known to have taken about 2,500 pictures of Hastings, St Leonards and the surrounding countryside by capturing the images on glass plates. Photography with plate glass cameras was hard physical work, as each negative required its own sheet of glass, while the camera itself was substantially built, usually of wood. Some of his seafront pictures show photographers using this type of camera.

George, his wife Mary and their daughter Margaret probably came to live in Hastings, in Mount Pleasant Road, because Mary was in poor health, and the seaside was then believed to have special curative powers for invalids. But Mary had an operation for breast cancer in 1893 and died in 1896.

In 1902 he married a well-off local woman, Ethel Rant, and their housekeeper, Helen Collins, later recalled him as being rather cantankerous; a perfectionist who wanted everything to be just so, but who was also very kind. He was quite tall, with a beard, and was quite sprightly when he was young. He loved talking to people and cycling, and collected books, butterflies and medals. George died at Priory Avenue on 4 April 1934, aged 81.

Although George Woods was such a prolific photographer, his work has not been widely known. This is because he seems to have made no attempt to publish or exhibit his pictures during his lifetime, while after his death in 1934 his negatives and prints were simply preserved by his widow, Ethel. She died aged 90 in a Hastings rest home in 1962. George also worked alone, taking photographs out of an intense personal interest in his subjects, and apparently without joining any photographic societies that would have brought his work before a wider audience.

Hastings had been one of Britain’s leading resorts for many decades, but just at the time George was taking his pictures it was at a crossroads in its history. Until the 1880s, the town had attracted many wealthier visitors, including the ‘carriage folk’ who came with their own horses and carriages to stay for months. A big attraction was Hastings Pier, which opened in 1872 and was an immediate success, so in the late 1880s a rival pier was built at St Leonards, almost opposite the Royal Victoria hotel (now all gone). In the 1890s, however, the better-off people were deserting Hastings for fashionable continental holidays, or newer resorts like Eastbourne and Bexhill.

When the wealthy failed to return to Hastings, the town lost its sense of direction as a resort and entered a major decline, captured by Robert Tressell in the early 1900s in his book The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. By chance, George was taking his photographs of Hastings beach in the early and mid-1890s, just before the new byelaws began to be effective in ‘quietening down’ the seafront. His pictures therefore provide an invaluable record of Victorian seaside life at its liveliest and most fascinating.

The exhibition is open now and will be on display for several months in the Fishermen’s Museum, which is open every day from 11:00am–4:00pm. Admission is free (but donations are most welcome). Copies of many of the pictures are for sale. Many of George’s pictures can be seen on Steve Peak’s website hastingshistory.net/images-alias

Many Hastings seaside attractions have sadly proved ephemeral: St Leonards pier, the marvellous modernist bathing pool, an abortive plan for an airport. Thankfully the miniature steam railway remains with us.

Little if at all remembered, is the brief presence of a small electric tramway in West St Leonards. During the 1951 summer season, it ran from the now demolished lido (constructed by ‘concrete king’ Sydney Little for the 1933 Empire Games) along the seaward side of Grosvenor Gardens.

The tramway originated in London, where, during the late 1940s, an innovative engineer, Claude Lane, ran a company in Barnet manufacturing Lecar electric milk floats; very ‘environmentally friendly’, a description which wouldn’t enter common currency for another half-century.

The business was so successful that Lane had time to pursue his lifelong hobby. He spent a summer driving (electric) trams in Blackpool and was subsequently inspired to build a smaller replica, a fully functioning tram based on number 23 of the Welsh Llandudno & Colwyn Bay system.

Lane started from scratch, employing considerable engineering ingenuity and assisted by a young tram enthusiast, Allan Gardner – who chanced by Lane’s factory one day and was offered a job on the spot. They soon built a scaled-down tramway layout complete with rails, points and a battery power supply.

This successfully toured local fetes in north London and Hertfordshire and, pleased by the enthusiastic public reception, Lane searched for somewhere to permanently locate his creation. An opportunity presented itself in St Leonards-on-Sea, a town that had unwisely dispensed with a full-size public tramway network stretching from Ore to Bexhill, back in 1929.

This was because the miniature railway, ‘The Bathing Pool Express’ originally located at West St Leonards, had recently been relocated to Rock-a-Nore. This mini steam railway, built by Capt J E P Howey – who also constructed the legendary Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch line – had not found favour with nearby residents. ​ By all accounts, they were a rather snooty and ‘superior’ lot who moaned about engine noise, whistles and ‘shrieking children’. Following council debates and protest petitions, the little iron horses were evicted in 1947 and relocated to the opposite end of the seafront the following year.

The remaining track bed and engine shed proved an ideal foundation for Lane’s (hopefully) quieter electric tramcars, and a deal was struck between him and the council for a one-year trial season. A large amount of equipment was transported from London, and track, points, and a passenger platform were constructed along the promenade. “When viewed from the bathing pool it looked as if the traction poles stretched into infinity,” observed an admiring local at the time. When pursuing a lifelong obsession – at his request, Lane’s nanny had taken him to view trams as a toddler – it helps to have your own skilled workforce and vehicle fleet to hand…

Everything was set for the grand opening ceremony on Whitsun Weekend. As is traditional for English bank holidays, the weather on the preceding Friday was atrocious. Luckily on the great day it “turned out nice again”, car 23’s test run passed without incident and Lord Mayor Alderman J D Cooper, switched on the tramway at 2.30pm, Saturday 12th May 1951.

A noticeboard proclaimed it the “world’s smallest public tramway,” with the price of a ticket 3d for a single journey and 6d for a return. During that summer, the two tramcars – one open-topped, the other a diminutive double-decker, almost impossible for adults to enter – gained a positive reception from visitors, locals and nearby traders, bringing increased footfall to the bathing pool, which had been struggling to attract visitors.

At this happy juncture things went pear-shaped. In true nimby fashion, a group of grumpy residents began complaining. The traction poles were “unsightly and spoilt the view”, the trams “too noisy” and “made the teacups rattle on the tables in the hotel”. Quelle horreur! By late summer a petition “signed by over 40 residents” was sent to the council, demanding that the tramway be removed.

In July, the council’s entertainment committee met at the Wilton Hotel, Grosvenor Crescent to consider the issue (there’s no record as to clinking crockery). According to contemporary newspaper reports, concerns were aired regarding pedestrian safety when crossing the rails and the “model electric tramway” operating beyond 9pm. “Nuisance, noise and parking” problems were all complained of, along with “children”, apparently generically rather than for any specific reason. Then, as now, we British didn’t really like young people. Plus ça change.

The debate continued at a further meeting in November. No matter there were also petitions, including local shopkeepers, wanting the tram to remain – it’s been claimed those far outnumbered those against five to one. An alderman (as councillors were called in those days) supporting the tram’s case to stay sagely pointed out that just across the adjacent main road (where TK Maxx is currently situated) was a railway wagon marshalling yard and full-size steam engines working 24 hours a day.

There were thinly veiled allegations the council’s eventual decision was a foregone conclusion. If so ‘outraged of West St Leonards’ was clearly well connected. The experiment ended, the lease was not renewed and hopes of the little trams providing a lucrative tourist attraction for years to come were dashed.

Claude Lane sought alternative locations in other coastal resorts and hearing that a miniature steam railway had ceased operating at a fairground in Rhyl he negotiated a two-year lease. The trams ran there for five seasons from 1952 before once again relocating – this time back to East Sussex.

The Eastbourne Electric Tramway ran successfully between Princes Park and the Crumbles for several years, but by the mid-1960s, sprawling urban development threatened its existence, and it closed in 1969.

Seeking a secure home, Lane discovered the former Seaton Town branch line in East Devon, recently closed amid Dr Beeching’s draconian and disastrous cuts to British Rail infrastructure. Despite initial public concerns about noise and environmental impact (sound familiar?), a Light Railway Order was granted in 1969, and the tramway reopened in August, 1970. Operating from a new station, over a dozen colourful trams currently run on a three-mile route through wetland nature reserves next to the River Axe. Sadly, Claude Lane died of a heart attack in 1971 and his work was completed by his protege, Allan J. Gardner, MBE. The little trams have now been running for 55 years – but not in St Leonards…

Want to know more? The excellent, anonymously written, tram23.co.uk website has a wealth of background history and good black and white images of the construction and operation of the St Leonards electric tramway.

You’ll find a grainy video of the trams in action at Eastbourne on Youtube. It’s rumoured the prototype Car 23 was filmed by British Movietone News when at a north London fete. Thanks to Seaton Electric Tramway in East Devon – well worth a visit- for supplying the pictures. tram.co.uk

Tucked away in the back room of the Horse & Groom, a small group of adults are doing something unexpected — and a bit brave. They’re trying out comedy improvisation for the first time, putting their nerves aside and taking a leap into the unknown. This new programme of classes, Improv-on-Sea, has arrived in Hastings and St Leonards-on-sea thanks to Liv Long, an experienced performer and comedy improviser.

“Those who say ‘I could never do that’ are usually the people who need it the most,” Liv tells me as we sip coffee on a sunny Sunday morning on the beach pebbles outside The Selkie. “I really nerd-out about this. Comedy improvisation forces you to stop judging yourself. It’s about leaning into making mistakes.”

Liv moved to St Leonards-on-Sea from London in 2020. She’s currently part of a duo-prov called We Are President and has performed with multiple troupes in both London and Hastings.

She’s a strong proponent of the holistic benefits of comedy improvisation. “It makes you a better listener, and therefore a better conversationalist. You can pretty much land in any social situation when you have the tools of improv. We enter a childlike state of play, which as adults we tend to destroy for ourselves – and that’s kind of devastating. Creativity is play – you can’t make art without making mistakes.”

Comedy improvisation (or improv comedy) is a form of unscripted performance where actors create scenes, dialogue, and comedic scenarios on the spot. The art form’s roots go way back — Commedia dell’Arte, for instance, in 16th Century Italy featured travelling troupes performing unscripted scenes based on stock characters and loose storylines.

But improvisation’s history stretches even further, with Shakespearean actors improvising during performances in the 16th and early 17th century, and some early traces were found in Ancient Greece. More recently, improv comedy has become associated with TV shows like Whose Line Is It Anyway? and live performances from The Comedy Store Players featuring veterans like Paul Merton and Josie Lawrence.

For Liv, stepping into comedy improvisation was a natural fit. “It’s an extraordinary social tool because it allows you to slow down your own processing.” She feels lucky to have first encountered improv during her drama classes in school: “I had lots of exposure to it and I always liked performing. I was part of a drama group at Hampstead Theatre called Heat and Light and performed in a show with Daniel Kaluuya, who’s phenomenally successful now. I feel sad thinking there’s so little like that for young people now, especially teenagers. Theatre and community projects like that don’t seem as available anymore.”

After completing a drama degree in Liverpool, Liv became critical of the traditional, sometimes restrictive, approach to drama training in higher education. “There’s this ‘drama school’ mentality, where you get whittled down, your character is torn apart, and then rebuilt. But that’s traumatic,” she explains. “Improv is about having fun, trying things out, and being silly. It’s about being yourself. I’m a total ‘corpser’ — I laugh during shows, and loudly. I’ll crack up mid-scene at what I’m doing, and that’s what makes it fun for the audience. I used to try to fight that, but now I’ve embraced it. When you watch established groups like the Comedy Store Players, you can tell they’re just having fun.”

While Hastings has a vibrant music and visual arts scene, Liv feels there’s a gap in the town’s access to theatre and comedy. She has big plans for the future, aiming to bring more of both to the local area. For now, she’s working with a charity to provide workshops with elderly residents in a care home, and is hoping to launch a children’s programme this summer. “I’d love to be able to offer workshops for free to locals in the future — that’s the dream.”

Liv seems to really invest in the participants of her Hastings Improv-on-Sea drop-in sessions. “A collective shift happens. People of all ages enter the space carrying their anxieties about what’s about to happen. They’re in their own heads, unsure what to expect, and not talking to the other people. Then you see the shift at the end of the class – people are interacting, chatting, and open. You can see something’s changed.”

Liv’s drop-in sessions focus on a different element of comedy improvisation each time – from listening to making mistakes. Each session is supportive, fun, and playful. “I quite often have to chuck my students out after the workshop because they’re lingering and chatting – they want to stay in that space. The impact seems small, but it really makes a difference in how someone views themselves. Just practising play, finding joy, and lifting each other up – what could be better than that?”

Hannah Foulds lives in Hastings and has written a range of features for The Londonist over the years, including live comedy and theatre reviews Follow Improv-on-Sea on Instagram to find out when the next class is taking place: instagram.com/improvonsea

In February, I participated in a town centre rally organised by the Hastings and Rye Palestine Solidarity Campaign. It was in protest at the activities of General Dynamics, a company in our town which makes parts for weapons sold to the Israeli Defence Force. Many years ago, as a newly qualified barrister, I volunteered as a human rights researcher with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza – before choosing the specialism of child protection law. I have therefore followed the events of the last sixteen months closely.

As I stood beside a friend in the cold wind, I reflected on a curious and disturbing anomaly in our government’s attitude towards children. All children in England or Wales, regardless of their nationality or immigration status, are, in theory at least, shielded from harm by our child protection system. We all know the system is fallible but, in principle, every child has the legal right to protection. Whatever we think of the failings of some local authorities in carrying out their child protection duties, most of us agree that children have a right to safety which the law must protect.

But what about the rights of children outside the UK, whose very physical survival, in the case of Gaza, is threatened by our government’s policy on arms sales? Israel killed at least 17,492 children between 8 October 2023 and 3 February 2025 (Gaza Government Information Office, aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/10/9/israel-hamas-war-in-maps-and-charts-live-tracker). UN reports over the last 18 years show that no other conflicts killed a higher number of children in one year (oxfam.org/en/press-releases/more-women-and-children-killed-gaza-israeli-military-any-other-recent-conflict).

For the last 16 months, while Palestinian children in Gaza were being killed and maimed in horrifying numbers by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF), UK governments refused to impose a full arms embargo on Israel. When a ban on just 8% of UK arms sales was imposed in September 2024, despite banning the direct sale of parts for the F35 fighter jet to Israel, the government insisted on allowing their continuing sale into an international consortium. This in the full knowledge that those parts were likely to be sold on to the IDF. Crucially, the F35 has been used in some of the bombing raids which have killed women and children and left survivors with horrific injuries.

In 2024, the use of explosive weapons in Gaza condemned an average of 15 children a day, or 475 per month, to potentially lifelong disabilities, including severely injured limbs and hearing impairments (savethechildren.org.uk/news/media-centre/press-releases/explosive-weapons-left-15-children-a-day-in-gaza-with-potentiall). Many underwent amputations without anaesthetic since Israel’s destruction of most of Gaza’s healthcare infrastructure has meant that adequate care and rehabilitation are not available. Some children, who should have been saved, bled to death or died subsequently due to the unavailability of health care. Other children who made it to a healthcare facility died there due to a lack of antibiotics and other vital medicines; their vulnerability was greatly increased by the serious malnutrition which has become widespread among Gaza’s children and which has resulted from Israel’s illegal policy of starvation of the population. The blocking of medical supplies by Israel is still causing child deaths, even six weeks after the ceasefire began.

That is the physical harm caused (partly) by the jets for which the UK continues to supply parts. What of the emotional harm, the trauma experienced by children who have witnessed the deaths of their mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers? On 1 Jan 2025 the BBC reported that an estimated 17,000 children have been left unaccompanied or separated from the family members who would normally care for them (bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyxewylpz9o); some are too young even to know their family’s name. There is no treatment available to help these children deal with their trauma, which will have a devastating impact on their long-term mental health.

Neither is there help for the many Gazan women who have miscarried pregnancies as a result of malnutrition combined with acute war-induced stress. The miscarriage rate increased at least threefold in the first nine months of the war (ippf.org/media-center/press-release-gaza-nine-months-pregnant-women-carry-burden-conflict).

Having worked for thirty-something years as a child protection lawyer in the Family Court, I feel deeply ashamed of my country’s insistence on a policy which has contributed to the acute suffering of Palestinian children. A legal challenge to the UK’s refusal to ban the sale of F35 fighter jet parts into the international consortium is due to be heard in the High Court in May, because it is not at all clear that the refusal is in line with the law (as set out in the Arms Trade Treaty 2013 Articles 6 and 7 and the UK’s Strategic Export Licensing Criteria). Even if the government loses in court, it will be too late for the tens of thousands of Gazan children killed, injured, orphaned and traumatised by the British-assisted actions of the IDF.

I’m not making a point about the law. Rather, I’m asking, ‘What kind of a country are we if, while seeking to protect our own children, we’re willing to help inflict such horrific suffering on children living under military occupation in a foreign land?’

I’ve also often wondered during the last sixteen months whether anybody in government has stopped to consider the impact on our children and young people of witnessing the suffering of Gazan children on their smartphones. What does a ten- or twelve-year-old make of such images, especially given the lack of official condemnation of the perpetrators by people in power in the UK?

Time will tell what price the UK will have to pay for its complicity in genocide, in breach of its legal obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide of 1949. In the meantime, the very least our government can do is to fund the transfer of Gaza’s badly wounded children to the UK for medical care and rehabilitation. To date, despite pressure from a group of 50 MPs and doctors keen to provide treatment, the government has not agreed to take a single injured Palestinian child (bmj.com/content/388/bmj.r279).

Teresa Thornhill’s book In Harm’s Way: the Memoir of a Child Protection Lawyer, is published in paperback by Harper Collins on 13.3.2025, price £10.99.

Hastings Borough Council’s New Local Plan tries to find a way to achieve growth for the economy with increased retail and local industry, whilst providing a growing population with suitable housing and at the same time protecting urban green spaces and the surrounding areas of natural beauty which bound the zone on all sides. All to be achieved on a tight budget and with an eye to climate change emissions.

Objective 1 contains a number of aspirational statements which are difficult to achieve. The most contentious of which is likely to be ‘ensuring new development only occurs where there is adequate capacity in existing services, facilities and infrastructure or where this capacity can be reasonably provided.’

Added to the mix is the fact that HBC has a legal duty to co-operate with Rother District Council and East Sussex County Council who also face significant demands with limited resources. And that’s before the recent news of a complete reorganisation of local councils. The government requires HBC to apply ‘presumption in favour of sustainable development’ rules as contained in the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF). Failure to do so allows developers to overturn decisions by appealing to the Planning Inspectorate and such action can be costly to defend.

The current plan was set to deliver at least 3,400 net new dwellings between 2011–2028.

Keeping all the plates spinning is not an easy task and in their development strategy they identify the following problems.

“…comparatively low house prices; declining affordability for local people, a bias to smaller dwellings; imbalanced in-migration; a large private rented sector and high levels of deprivation.” (4.9)

The comparatively low house prices encourage movement into the area from more expensive zones such as Brighton and London. The large private rented sector includes properties for holiday lets which brings income from tourists into the area. Meanwhile high levels of deprivation include the increasing number of families who find themselves homeless due to rising rents and landlords deciding to sell up due to changes to the rules.

In 2023, Cllr Barnett said in an article in the Argus: “It has gone from 170 people needing temporary accommodation two years ago. Now there are over 1,000 people here. It is a shock. And in a town of 90,000, that’s a massive percentage.”

In an i Opinion piece written by Vicky Spratt in November 2024, Hastings is described as the ‘hidden homelessness capital of the UK’. “So many families have either been evicted or unable to find a home they can afford to rent that one in 28 children in Hastings is now homeless and in emergency temporary accommodation – usually bed and breakfast, hostels, hotels or shared accommodation.”

A lack of social housing results in long waiting lists for a property. According to HBC social housing information, the total number of households waiting for a property on 31 December 2023 was 1,547. The total number of properties let through Sussex Homemove from 1 January 2023 to 31 December 2023 was 189. There is a wait of up to eight years for a two-bed house.

Hastings is undoubtedly suffering a housing crisis. So what is to be done?

According to government statistics, Rother Council completed just 153 homes in 2023/24. At that rate it would take 22 years to complete 3,400. A key problem is a lack of brownfield sites, which are the only areas you can build on if you wish to preserve the natural habitat.

Unfortunately, brownfield sites are few and far between and include areas that are unsuitable for development, such as the former West St Leonard’s Primary School site on the Bexhill Road. This site spends much of the year sodden with water, and rumour has it that anthrax sheep are buried there.

If you can’t expand outwards due to restrictions from areas of natural beauty and you can’t build high without damaging the historic nature of the town, then you are forced to look for patches of land within the already developed area for new build properties, putting a strain on local amenities. Trying to please the environmentalists, the existing residents and the homeless is a tough task, if not mission impossible.

Campaigners continually draw attention to using empty properties as a solution to the problem. This option was considered in the 2014 local plan. “Empty homes are a wasted asset, and a good deal of progress has been made by the Council in tackling empty homes in recent years. However, whilst bringing empty homes back into use does not increase the overall housing stock, it does increase the efficient use of the existing stock. In 2010 there were estimated to be approximately 400 long term empty homes in the town. By long term, we mean homes that have been empty for two or more years.” (4.20)

HBC do not have the funds to use compulsory purchase orders to bring empty properties back into use so are reliant upon private developers or new owners to take up the challenge. Their retrospective council tax charges do not encourage new buyers to take these projects on.

“If, when you purchased or leased your property, it had already been empty and unfurnished for two years or more, you will have to pay a 200% council tax charge, or if empty and unfurnished for five years or more you will have to pay 300%.” However, they add that, “the additional charge can only be removed by bringing your property back into use.” This would not apply to properties that require structural repairs. “No reduction is given on uninhabitable properties requiring or undergoing structural repairs.”

Restoration projects are complex and incur VAT charges not placed upon new builds. Are developers simply waiting for the properties to be beyond repair before making a move?

If the failure of OWENS is anything to go by, then more retail and office space is likely to become available. Could these be repurposed as housing or will they just be left to fall apart?

Having pretty much failed to deliver on the previous local plan, HBC is on more comfortable ground as they draw up plans for the new one. Local councils are very good at running consultations, filing reports, debating decisions and creating lengthy documents full of aspirational intentions. And taking their time about it. Will it deliver any better than the last?

For more, see New local plan | Planning Policy | Hastings Borough Council

Local group Standing up for Nature (Hastings and Rother) are holding a series of debates on how to protect the environment whilst tackling the housing crisis. They wish to provide a community voice to be included in the new HBC local plan. If you would like to get involved, then sign up here for information on forthcoming events.

“The government wants Councils to build new housing but our valued green spaces are under threat. Are there other ways to provide more homes? Join us to formulate creative suggestions to respond to council policies on building development and land use for the next 20 years. We’ll be discussing new builds, refurbishment, and use of empty homes, as well as key green spaces and wildlife corridors that need protection. This is your chance to tell the Council what you think and to give them ideas, solutions and to let them know you care!”

Search ‘Standing up for Nature Hastings and Rother’ on Facebook.

The HBC current local plan was adopted in 2014 and was due to complete in 2028. It contains seven main objectives.

Achieve and sustain a thriving economy

Ensure everyone has the opportunity to live in a decent home, which they can afford, in a community in which they want to live

Safeguard and improve the town’s environment

Addressing the impacts of climate change

Supporting sustainable communities

Provision of an efficient and effective transport system

Making best use of the Seafront and promoting tourism

Hastings Botanic Garden is a visionary project with links to Marianne North – possibly the most important and famous resident of Hastings you might never have heard of. Following my father’s gardening – growing vegetables to sustain us, and cultivating a passion for azaleas – inspired me to find out more. 

I met with Lee Piper, one of five directors helping founder, Alexander Wilberforce, to make this visionary community project a reality for Hastings. “Three years ago I joined this fantastic community project, having previously known nothing about Marianne North.” But is this visionary project realistic? Will it happen? 

2030 will mark the 200-year anniversary of Marianne North’s birth, and also the target for the finished Botanical Garden in Hastings. Like everything else this company has done, this is only achievable because of the extensive planning, the economic impact assessment, the involvement of key partners, and an understanding of what the Botanic Gardens could do for Hastings and the people who live here. “Hastings has had more than its share of white elephants, but this is not one of them.”

The project is a Company Limited by Guarantee rather than a charity, run on a not-for-profit basis. Everyone on the board is a volunteer, including Lucy Abbot, Gilda Silva, Laetitia Yapp and Sophie Ansar.

There is a clear path of progression laid out to reach the final goal. Firstly, it is raising funds. The initial target is to raise £2,500 which will be matched by East Sussex County Council, which will raise about half the cost of the initial concept design. The finished centre will be “a major asset for Hastings”, according to a director of Kew Gardens. Hastings relies on seasonal tourism, but this initiative would be a year-round quality attraction, a resource and educational opportunity for the local community. 

Alexander Wilberforce said “The genesis of this project came when I and a friend were lamenting the absence of a warm communal space in Hastings to take our children in the winter. It was only subsequently that I discovered from the newspaper archives that there had been a movement to create a Winter Garden here, starting in the 1870s and culminating in the 1904 newspaper supplement with the design opposite Warrior Square, with the south end of White Rock sold to Hastings Borough Council on the condition that it was used for recreation or as a Winter Garden.”

Why is Marianne North so important? She came from a wealthy and ‘respectable’ Hastings family, but she defied all the conventions of the early Victorian era. She was passionate about plants and wildlife and was an accomplished artist. After her father died, she travelled solo to 15 countries, capturing in oil paintings – which in itself was contrary to conventions about representing botanical specimens – all manner of plants and wildlife. She warned of habitat loss and the need for biodiversity, long before it became the critical issue it is today. So important were her botanical studies in establishing specific species around the world, that five plant species have been named after her with the Northia genus. You can visit the gallery in Kew Gardens–devoted solely to exhibiting over 800 of her paintings.

The company funds events like The Garden Festival held at White Rock last summer, by applying for grants and seeking the support of Hastings Borough Council. They are already planning for events in 2025. Community events like a talk by insect specialist Professor Dave Goulson at East Sussex College on 25 October 2024 have been organised to coincide with Marianne North’s birthday on 24 October 1830. Summer events like The Garden Festival are more about engaging with Green Space groups, enabling them to showcase their endeavours to engage communities and inspire people to get involved in green initiatives.

The renowned architects, Mizzo Studio, who specialise in using sustainable building practices, are on board with the project, having met with senior council officials in February 2022 to discuss the project. Fittingly, they have completed two projects in Kew Gardens itself. The financial viability of the project, driven by Alexander Wilberforce’s passion to see the project become a reality, has been established through realistic advice from other botanical gardens in the UK. Given the link through The Marianne North Gallery in Kew Gardens, and Kew having a Sussex connection at Wakehurst Place, it would seem fitting that the link between Hastings and these places could grow stronger as the scheme develops. 

In addition to the annual events organised, the vision for the project is kept alive through education. Sophie Ansar’s daughter Star, a writer, researcher and composer, goes into schools to talk about Marianne North. The importance of engaging with young people is recognised and acted on with the same passionate enthusiasm evident throughout the company.

White Rock is the preferred location for a number of reasons. As mentioned above, the creation of a ‘Winter Gardens’ for Hastings was discussed several years before Marianne North’s death. More significantly, the southern edge of White Rock was sold to Hastings Borough Corporation in 1903 on the condition that “It shall be used solely as a site for a Municipal Buildings Winter Gardens and recreation grounds.” Well, the bowling green is there, the Falaise Gym is there, but not The Winter Gardens. Not yet. Watch this space. 

For more, visit hastingsbotanicgarden.org, or MarianneNorthCentre on Facebook or hastings.botanic.garden on Instagram. 

What’s your favourite house in Hastings? I know what mine is, and although I don’t get to live there, as a HIP contributor I did meet the owner and had a look round, discovering that there’s a website that lets you have a good look as well! 

When Michael Hunter decided to move to Hastings, he knew he wanted a characterful property in the Old Town, and he knew he wanted a sea view. When he discovered that there was nothing currently on the market, he took a proactive approach and dropped leaflets through the doors of homes he liked that met his criteria.

“I probably leafleted 20 plus houses and quite a few of the owners contacted me,” says Michael, Emeritus Professor of History at Birkbeck University of London – this was back in 1991 when the market here wasn’t booming. While several owners responded to Michael pretty much immediately, it wasn’t until a week or so later that the occupants of a property in an enviable – and elevated – spot on Exmouth Place got in touch. 

“I was looking for a rather grand house, because I’d previously lived in interesting or characterful places,” says Michael. “As soon as I saw Exmouth House, I knew it was right.”

Michael spent the next two decades restoring the house to its former glory and has just created a fascinating website chronicling not only the work he has done on it but the history of the property, its builder and previous residents, as well as Hastings itself.

“Originally I thought I might write a book about the house because I’m always writing books,” says Michael, “but the more research I did and the more I found out, I thought a website would be a way of reaching a bigger audience.” 

When Michael moved into Exmouth House – a five-bedroom, double-fronted villa commanding arguably one of the best sea views in the Old Town – it had been badly converted into flats. “There was a strange heating system that needed to be removed, I had to open up and restore fireplaces and chimneys,” he recounts, as well as putting right years of bad repairs and decorating throughout. “Previous residents had thrown a lot of stuff in the garden, too. There were disused cookers and lots of other junk, so I needed skip after skip to clear it.” 

It wasn’t all dealing with other people’s rubbish, however. When a mysterious slab outside the kitchen was moved, it revealed the house’s original well: “It’s currently 40 feet deep. There’s a deep fissure in the side of it, evidently due to an earth tremor many years ago.”

He also discovered the original Georgian vertical sliding sash shutters at the front windows – this now-rare window treatment explains why the exterior walls are so thick as the shutters have to sit inside the walls. 

Exmouth House was built by ‘Matthew Fagg of Hackney in the County of Middlesex, Gentleman’ between 1817 and 1819, coinciding with Hastings becoming a fashionable seaside resort. After years of painstaking work, Michael has a building and a home every bit as grand as it was when it was first built. “I don’t intend to do anything else on the house,” says Michael. “It’s beginning to look a little shabby in parts, but I’m fine with that. It suits the place.” 

Right next door, No. 5 has a blue plaque in honour of Marie-Louise Cristophe, Queen of Haiti, and her daughters, by Black Butterfly, a cultural heritage group aiming to reveal hidden Black histories in the Hastings area. The plaque was unveiled on 3 October, 2022, the bicentenary of their arrival in Hastings in October 1822. A very grand and notable former neighbour!

Historian Roy Porter, a Hastings resident until he died in 2002, used to tell people he thought the Grade II listed Exmouth House was the best house in town. For those who know their finials and newels from their spandrels, British Listed Buildings describes it this way: “Circa 1810. Stuccoed. Parapet. Slate roof. 2 storeys. 5 windows wide. Sash windows, ground floor without glazing bars, centre 1st-floor trellis balcony with tent-shaped hood, sun-burst spandrels and iron-railed front with intersecting arches. Central round-arched doorway with key block and impost, with glazed door. Steps and terraced garden area at front have good contemporary railings with pineapple finials and turned newels.”

Take a look at Michael’s website and see if you agree with my nomination for favourite house. Or write in to HIP if you have another candidate! exmouthhousehastings.co.uk

Some years ago, I read a review of this autobiography and was intrigued by the idea of an active soldier who not only survived World War One but survived it as a pacifist. I agreed with Ian Hislop’s front page comment: “Surprising, uncomfortable and very memorable”. But over and above what most people love about this book, there was another aspect that took me by surprise and ensured that it became compulsive reading: Ronald Skirth, the reluctant Tommy himself, was local to our area!

Ronald Skirth won a rare scholarship to a grammar school. He recounts: “My new school was at Rye and to get there required a rail journey on two different companies’ lines, seventeen miles in each direction. To a train-mad youngster like me, the unlimited free rail travel my season tickets entitled me to was a magnificent bonus”. Going home from his last day at school (early summer 1916), he stopped off at Hastings to enrol for the army because Bexhill had already turned him down twice: “This time I was going to enrol in the army even if it meant a false declaration of age. The Hastings Enrolment Officer wasn’t quite as thorough as his Bexhill counterpart with the result that, fifteen minutes after, I walked out as a soldier.” His call-up would come when he had completed his apprentice teaching training.

In those days before television and radio, people made their own music and performed together. On one musical evening in July 1916 he was introduced to fifteen year old Ella. Both were talented pianists who enjoyed singing and they met as often as they could. They sang duets together and he accompanied her as pianist when she sang solo, often in performances. The book also recalls how they went together to concerts and explains: “A crescent shaped concert hall had been constructed by hollowing out the low cliff which overhung our promenade.” 

Neither of them could have suspected that this was the start of what Skirth calls a fairy-tale love story, continuing through censored letters and giving him the strength to survive unthinkable horror. Their courtship lasted only a few weeks because his call-up came for 2 October. He had requested to be sent to Cooden for his 24 weeks of training but was sent 300 miles away to Catterick. There, tests showed him to be an extremely good mathematician, so he was given the rank of corporal and trained to be a Battery Commander’s Assistant. This involved using information from various sources and working out the necessary coordinates, a skilful and responsible role. It even involved deciphering code because meteorological details were sent daily in code. At the end of his training he spent barely a week at home in Bexhill before he was sent to Flanders on active service.

Though relying on his papers (chiefly the diary, now lost) which might have been scribbled hastily, he wrote skilfully, for example re-constructing dialogue. When describing scenes of war, he combines vivid description with the reactions of a 19-year-old soldier about how he escaped death at Passchendaele after witnessing friends killed horrifically

“I was desperately afraid. I am not ashamed to admit it. As the daylight waned and the mists grew thicker my imagination ran riot. It was my loneliness as much as my fear that made me see those ghastly swollen parts of bodies somehow assembling themselves into horrific evil beings. Evil things about to take revenge on me for what had happened to them..It seemed impossible that I could be the only living human being when, within five miles, there were thousands of concealed men of both armies, all as silent as the dead.”

He wrote with humour and wit at times, particularly when recalling the ineptitude and pomposity of senior officers. I particularly enjoyed a section he called ‘How to lose a stripe’ which recreates the dialogue between himself, responsible for working out the coordinates for firing the cannon, and a visiting senior officer who needed to advance his career by being able to say he had served in a battle zone and acted as a competent gunnery officer. No doubt the officer was embarrassed by his obvious lack of experience. His officious manner provoked young Roland, who was having difficulties obeying orders from an officer who didn’t really know what orders to give but had merely scribbled a mark on a map for him to use to set up the gun. As politely as he could, the teenager pointed out that he could not work with the map that he had been given because it was in metric, and they worked in yards.

Then what do you propose to do about it?’

‘Nothing Sir. I am under your orders.’

‘There was a sudden silence then, very meekly, I said that I could make conversions but it would take time. ‘Shall I go ahead Sir?’

‘For God’s sake get on with it!’

Having dutifully made all the calculations, Skirth finished by checking the target through binoculars. He was shocked to find the target so randomly chosen by the officer was a church. Again politely, he tried to point out that it was against orders to shoot a consecrated building.

‘Are you a bloody conchie?…….Listen Corporal, I am your superior officer. What you think has nothing to do with it…. I shall report your insolence to your Commanding Officer. If you add insubordination to insolence, you’ll bloody well wish you’d never been born. Hand me those figures. That is an order.’

The following day he found he had been demoted and, worse, his leave delayed. He had some consolation though, in knowing that no explosives had landed anywhere near the church. ‘My calculations must have been very inaccurate!’ he comments wryly.

Ronald Skirth was willing to defy authority if he considered it to be acting in an immoral way, and was able to defend his principles. But his decision to become an affirmed pacifist (conscientious objector, hence “conchie”) came later when he encountered the body of a German about his own age, clutching a photo of a girl who bore a strong resemblance to his own sweetheart, Ella.

Not long after, he was badly injured and had a lengthy period of convalescence and memory loss, but did not return to England until after his next placement in Northern Italy. What shocked me was a dramatic and fatal ‘mistake’ that was reported as a victory and earned honours for officers who were really the culprits.

The Reluctant Tommy was published in 2010, over 90 years after the events it describes, and being written by an ordinary soldier, gives a rare insight into a war that is more widely documented by high-ranking officers. Skirth organised and transcribed his old diaries and letters and notes as an old man in his seventies. His intention was to write about his love story; the true story of how a teenage love affair lasted and withstood separation. However, once he started to gather his papers together, the monumental story of war intruded because it was their love, kept alive by censored letters, that gave him the will to survive the horrors he endured. That hugely traumatic experience could not be ignored.

He didn’t plan for his writings to be published but, after his death, his daughter realised their historical worth and passed them onto the Imperial War Museum. Eventually Duncan Barrett heard about them and set himself the huge task of editing the masses of information. What he has put together is an amazing biography, well worthy of the praise heaped on it by people such as Ian Hislop and Jon Snow.

The Reluctant Tommy is truly a remarkable story, an important witness account of The Great War through the experiences of an ordinary but extremely intelligent man. I recommend it most highly.