Charles Dickens came to Hastings in 1861 to perform a public reading of A Christmas Carol in the Old Music Hall, now called Yates’s Wine Lodge. This event is celebrated during the Hastings Literary Festival in the autumn as Dickens Day during which other aspects of Dickens’ life are highlighted. He saw poverty all around him in workhouses and factories and described them in harrowing detail in books such as Oliver Twist, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, David Copperfield, and Great Expectations.

When he came to Hastings, he may well have walked on the seafront and watched the waves shooshing the shingle from Eastbourne to Hastings in a slow rolling movement that has never ceased since the beginning of the world. However, the first recorded use of the precise term ‘longshore drift’ was not written down until 1893 by an unknown wizard of coastal geomorphology. It refers to the geological process by which sediments such as sand and gravel are transported along a coastline, parallel to the shore, by waves approaching at an angle.

The word ‘long’ derives from the Old English word ‘lang’, meaning ‘having considerable linear extent.’ ‘shore’ comes from the Old English ‘scora’, meaning ‘land adjacent to a large body of water’. ‘Drift’ stems from the Old English ‘drifan’, meaning ‘to drive’ or ‘to force along,’ which evolved to denote movement caused by external forces.

But this article is not purely about shingle movement. Instead, it is about the drift of ideas along the shoreline from Eastbourne to Hastings.

Karl Marx was born on 5 May 1818, in Trier, Prussia (now Germany). His great friend Friedrich Engels was born on 28 November 1820, in Barmen, Prussia (now Wuppertal, Germany). They first met on August 28, 1844, when Friedrich Engels visited Karl Marx in Paris, where Marx was living in exile. They spent ten days discussing philosophy, economics, and revolutionary politics, forming an instant intellectual and political bond. This meeting led to their first major joint works, The Holy Family (1845), and later The Communist Manifesto (1848).

Much later, Volume 1 of Das Kapital (Kritik der politischen Ökonomie – Critique of Political Economy) was published on 14 September 1867 in Hamburg, Germany. The book analysed capitalism’s structure, introducing key concepts like surplus value, class struggle and commodity fetishism.

Marx and Engels both visited Sussex, coming to Eastbourne in the autumn of 1881 because Marx had bronchitis and pleurisy. In those days, the seaside with its alleged iodine atmosphere (really the smell of rotting seaweed) was recommended by physicians for its sea air and mild climate. Coming to the seaside was also an intellectual escape from the pressure of London.

Marx then died in 1883, but Engels continued to come to Eastbourne and other coastal towns to relax – but also to continue developing Marxist Theory. Engels died in London on 5 August 1895 aged seventy-four at his home at 122 Regent’s Park Road, Primrose Hill and, being a resolute atheist, he wanted to be cremated.

This growing movement away from churchyard internment had already become associated with radical freethinkers and secularists. He had his wish at Woking Crematorium in Surrey, Britain’s first crematorium established in 1878. A large group of colleagues and friends attended this ceremony, including Eleanor Marx, who was Karl Marx’s daughter. There were also Eduard Bernstein, a leading socialist for the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), August Bebel, co-founder of the SPD; and William Liebknecht, who was a Marxist convert and friend of Engels. There were many other people there from the British Social Democratic Foundation (SDF).

Part of Engels’ time in Eastbourne had been spent walking on the beautiful landscape of Beachy Head with its massive chalk cliffs, downland scenery and iconic Belle Tout Lighthouse – which became operational from 1834 with money from slave-owner and slavery supporter John ‘Mad Jack’ Fuller. And following Engels’ wishes, most of the people who attended his cremation service at Woking then travelled to Eastbourne where Eleanor Marx and others, in a simple secular ceremony, cast his ashes into the westerly breeze – out over Beachy Head cliffs and down into the grey-blue sea where the longshore drift carried him ever so slowly towards Hastings.

With each angled wave, the tiny particles of Engels’ dust came along the coast, adding to patches of fine low tide sand as they settled in deep by Hastings Pier, opened in 1872.

The portion of Engel’s powdered remains that had embedded itself in the low tide sands of Hastings may have touched the toes of a man called Robert Noonan, an Irish-born socialist who was walking on the shore in 1901. The dust of Engels perhaps caused him to mystically author his famous book The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist, using the name Robert Tressel. This described poverty, exploitation, and harsh working conditions. By 1910 Tressel was ill, and poverty-stricken himself. He died of tuberculosis in 1911 in Liverpool on his way to Canada for a better life.

However, before he left Hastings, he and others formed the Social Democratic Federation (SDF): a Marxist group hoping to counteract the dominance of Tory capitalist ideology. The SDF in Hastings actively campaigned against local councillors who were perceived to be colluding with big businesses, particularly concerning utilities like William Murdoch’s invention of gas lighting and Michael Faraday’s electricity – inspired during his time at Pelham Place, Hastings. The SDF efforts sought to expose and challenge corruption, advocating for the rights and welfare of the working class.

Members organised public meetings, distributed literature, and engaged in discussions to raise awareness about socialist ideals. These activities aimed to educate the people of Hastings on issues of social justice, workers’ rights, and economic equality.

Although social hero Noonan was no more, his intellectual shockwave stirred the sea at Hastings and longshore waves that developed, still sparkling with the sunlit grains of Engels, flowed over the paddling feet of suffragettes, who did like to be beside the seaside – beside the sea.

So, here, like ornate shells collected by a seaborne swirl, were the Hastings suffragettes. Elsie Bowerman who lived in St Leonards and had survived the sinking of the Titanic via Lifeboat 6 and crested the wave of women’s protests by speaking in 1910 to an audience of 1,000 in Hastings on the subject of Votes for Women.

Then there is the great Muriel Matters, the suffrage icon, who lived at 7 Pelham Crescent, skinny-dipped at Pelham Beach and chained herself to the iron grill of the Ladies Gallery in the House of Commons that obscured the female view of democratic debate.

Another campaigner who dipped her toes was Barbara Bodichon of 9 Pelham Crescent – that great precursor of women’s suffrage who wrote: A Brief Summary in Plain Language of the Most Important Laws Concerning Women.

And there was also the brave Mary Richardson, who toiled with Emily Pankhurst, was force-fed under the Cat and Mouse Act of 1913 and who managed to damage the Rokeby Venus, that very Roman Goddess who had been formed from the foam of the sea. Brave Mary later died in her flat at St James’s Road, Hastings, yet before she left us, she had told the Times of London: “I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the Government for destroying Mrs Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history. Justice is an element of beauty as much as colour and outline on canvas.”

Nowadays women are still not treated with sufficient respect for the wonderful work they do. Nevertheless, though the nature of the barnacle people of Hastings is edged with iron resolve, most of us steer sharply away from the excessive revolutionary radicalism of Marx and Engels – a vision ruined by Joseph Stalin.

However, we, men and women alike, the ever-present proletariat who keep safe the tides of life and home, still do wish, like Noonan, for social improvement and a great reduction in the gap between rich and poor – if you get my drift.

Following their recent witty and joyful production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Ellen Terry Barn Theatre company returns to the Stables with an altogether darker prospect. This is The Haunting,a two-hander based on the supernatural stories of Charles Dickens.

While Dickens was passionate about theatre, his own plays were less than a roaring success, and it is in his novels that we find demonstrated his extraordinary dramatic sense. His passionate readings from the novels attracted massive audiences, both at home and in the United States, and it is sometimes claimed that it was his reading of the sensational murder of Nancy by Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist that caused the exhaustion and raised blood pressure that led to his death at 58. Dickens was fascinated, too, by the terrors of the supernatural and wrote a number of short stories, including The Queer Chair, The Signalman and The Haunted Man which are referenced in this new play, The Haunting, by Hugh Janes.

Co-directors of The Barn Theatre, Zo Biba Leonard and Matt Turpin, are fascinated by the potential of the supernatural in theatre. “It offers so much in terms of interpretation,” says Matt. ‘You feed off the energy of the audience. It’s not all over at the end. It goes on with people in the bar arguing about what happened.” “It’s crucial not to be explicit,” adds Zo, “The things you can’t see are always more frightening than those you can.”

The Stables is a special space for Zo and Matt. It was here that they met in 2006 in a production of Ben Elton’s Popcorn. While Zo played a starring role as one of a pair of serial killers, it was Matt’s debut and, he says, “a baptism of fire”, as he had to appear on stage in nothing but his boxer shorts.

Later in their careers, when they had formed a theatre company, another Hastings venue, St Mary in the Castle, saw a less happy outcome. The planned production was The Hypochondriac, based on Moliere’s Le Malade Imaginaire. It is, of course, as Matt put it, “The story about a chap worried unnecessarily about his health.” But the show had to be pulled because, at that moment in early 2020, everyone began to worry about their health. And, sadly, this time the malady was not imaginary.

The Haunting, by Hugh Janes, will show at The Stables Theatre Wednesday-Friday, 5-7 November, at 7.30 pm. stablestheatre.ticketsolve.com/ticketbooth/shows/873676268

I have just read and greatly enjoyed this excellent book Demon Copperhead by the American novelist Barbara Kingsolver (available from Hastings Library). It is a re-working of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, the story of a young boy’s life, but set in Lee County Virginia in the 1990s and 2000s. The book begins with the traumatic birth of Demon (real name Damon Fields) in a run-down trailer park to a teenage mother addicted to drugs and alcohol. His father has already died in an accident. So begins his odyssey through a life of poverty, struggle, and prejudice; and yet the quality of the writing is such that the story is often both tragic, poignant, funny, and enthralling all at once.

One of the mainstays of his life which helps the young Demon to survive is the long-suffering but warm and loving household of the Peggot family who run the trailer park and often provide a substitute home for the boy. When he is 10 years old Demon’s mother marries a violent bullying man who asserts his control over both mother and son and seeks to isolate him from the Peggot’s support. The battle of wills between the man and boy is excellently presented through Demon’s eyes and movingly portrays the precariousness of a young child’s existence in a hostile world.

His mother’s overdose propels Demon into the arms of the State and describes his encounters with social workers and others in authority from a child’s point of view: the jaded burnt-out professionals, the idealistic but naïve young social worker, afraid herself of the overbearing morose ‘foster carer’ that she leaves Demon with. He finds himself as slave labour on a backwoods farm, sustained by the camaraderie of three other boys placed (or imprisoned) there and his first taste of illicit drug use to dull the pain. His hopes of a return home are dashed when his mother, now pregnant, dies from another overdose.

ECHOES OF THE RAGGED TROUSERED PHILANTHROPISTS

Demon has many other adventures and encounters as he fights his way to adulthood. The story is also about the grim realities of rural, post-industrial America. The Appalachian Mountain region was once a great coal mining area which fuelled the factories of the north. The book describes how the mining companies suppressed the development of other industries to ensure a plentiful labour force with no competition, and then kept the schools poorly resourced to stifle ambition in the young people other than to work in a mine. Nevertheless, the people look back to this era as the ‘good times’ when they had work and money, although a voucher system meant they often had to spend their wages in the company shop – echoes of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists there.

The 1980s brought modernisation to the mining industry that meant they no longer needed legions of workers to toil underground, they blew the tops off the mountains and employed a few giant machines to scrape up the coal. Mass redundancies and unemployment meant depression and poverty and the area became the butt of jokes and scorn about ‘hillbillies’ and ‘rednecks’ as it remains today. In the wake of despair came the drugs epidemic, both illegal, and legal in the form of Oxycontin. The book examines these themes through the lives of the characters. Aunt June Peggot is a nurse who dates a sleazy Purdue drug salesman. Demon himself, his promising career as an Highschool American Football star cut short by a knee injury, is led into opiate addiction by an unscrupulous team doctor. Demon and his ethereal girlfriend Dori descend into the squalor and desperation of drug abuse, painting a moving picture of his attempts to get clean undermined by his desire to save her from pain and distress by scoring more drugs.

ITS MESSAGE IS ONE OF RESILIENCE SURVIVAL AND HOPE

This is a big novel with many other characters and events that explore the themes of social deprivation: the exploitation and manipulation of the poor, the prejudice and stereotyping that they have to suffer in both the media and society at large. Yet its message is one of resilience, survival, and hope. We meet Mr Ghali, for example, an Indian shop keeper who gets a thrill from handing his customers their take-aways. He was born into the Dalit (untouchable) caste in his home country and physical contact of this type was never allowed. There is Mr Armstrong, an inspirational Black teacher and his White wife, who have had to face down ignorance and discrimination in their working and personal lives. There is the tragic and moving story of Marisa Peggot who endures unbearable mental and physical torture by her partner as a young mother and ends up in prison for wounding him with a knife but is eventually released and reunited with her son: both damaged individuals groping towards a better life. Demon is able to use his skill at drawing cartoons to create a hillbilly superhero character in a local newspaper to counter the negative stereotypes of rural people as feckless, inbred wasters and to illustrate the real challenges that they face.

The book ends with Demon aged 18, and finally free of drugs, finding a tentative new love and making his third attempt to head east and see the ocean for the first time in his life.

I would strongly recommend this book as a brilliant and illuminating read. 

A Penny Pincher’s Christmas Carol, Hastings’ favourite family Christmas show is returning for a five day run during the winter holiday season. This will be the fourth successive season Kate Tym and John Knowles perform their hilarious two-hander loosely based on the Charles Dickens classic. If you’ve seen it before you’ll understand why. If you haven’t, I can’t recommend it highly enough as a refreshing alternative to the often tired and predictable pantomime offerings from some of the bigger theatre companies.

Kate and John of It’s Not Us Theatre Company are the writers, actors and directors of this ever-evolving locally produced show that never fails to sell out quickly. “Every year we get requests from our audiences to put it on again,” Kate Tym explained to HIP, “they tell us it wouldn’t be Christmas without A Penny Pincher’s Christmas Carol and we are more than happy to oblige!” 

“The show is a spin on the traditional Dicken’s story,” adds John Knowles. “I play Scrooge and Kate plays every other part. You get all the well-known characters – Jacob Marley, Bob Cratchit, the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future… but as you’ve never seen them before!”

“It’s an alternative to the panto,’ says Kate, ‘it’s got some panto elements in it… Oh yes it has!… but it’s also got additional layers and it’s very, very funny. And, of course, there’s the local spin too. If it’s happened in Hastings it’s in our show.”

The show, which is now a firm fixture on the Hastings’ cultural calendar was first performed in Christmas 2016 and ended up selling out and being raved about by audience members of all ages. “Some people came and saw it twice! There’s something in it for everyone – we’ve had an audience that was basically an eight-year old’s birthday party, so all kids, and they loved it and then we have a loyal fan-base of adults who come back every year and tell us they’ve never laughed so much. We love putting A Penny Pincher’s Christmas Carol on because it’s just such a feel-good show, we love interacting with the audience and we’re thrilled to bits that people actually want to make it part of their Christmas warm-up!”

“Kate and I start additional writing work on the show in about October,” adds John. “Every year we add in new topical stuff which we weave around the existing story… if you  live in Hastings or St Leonards you’re in for a wealth of local laughs as well as other tit-bits that we gather from what’s been in the past year’s news.” 

Once they’re into November, prop making and rehearsing start in earnest. “Every year we try to make bits of it bigger and better and different to the year before, whilst still retaining the core story and some favourite bits that our audiences actually want to see time and time again. Plus, Kate’s got to see what other accents she can pull out of the bag – I’m not sure there’s a region she hasn’t covered now!”

A Penny Pincher’s Christmas Carol is certainly guaranteed to put you in the festive mood and, when I went last year, not one person left without a massive smile on their face. “We’re putting the show on across two venues this year,” John tells HIP, “There’s a one-off performance at the Robertsbridge Village Hall and then a run at The White Rock Hotel – we’ve already started selling tickets and they’re selling faster than a mince pie at a Christmas Bazaar.”

Kate adds, “Several people have told us they can’t wait – and, to be honest, nor can we. It just wouldn’t be Christmas in Hastings without A Penny Pincher’s Christmas Carol!”

Perhaps the best thing to do is to leave the last word to one of last year’s audience: 

“It’s not often I laugh all the way through any performance – especially a panto, but this really hit the spot. It’s so polished, so funny and perfectly pitched. I loved the energetic way that John and Kate created all the characters from A Christmas Carol with such economy, using brilliant accents, costume changes, puppets and audience participation. It really cheered me up and geared me up for Christmas.”

• A Penny Pincher’s Christmas Carol is being performed at The White Rock Hotel (downstairs bar) on 23rd and 24th December and 27th and 28th December at 1.30pm & 7.30pm each day. Tickets are Adult £13, Conc £10, Carer £5, Family ticket £32 (2 adults 2 kids/1 adult 3 kids) available from www.ppcc2019.bpt.me And on 29th December at Robertsbridge Village Hall.
Tickets for this performance are £10.00, £9.00 members; U16s £5.00, £4.50 members from www.rap.org.uk 
Running time is about one hour and ten minutes with no interval. Target audience is 4 to 104 years old (or older)! An absence of any ‘D’ list celebrities is guaranteed.