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.

Creative community passions run high in Hastings. Art and music flow through it like colour in a stick of rock. Festivals drum through the streets with pomp and flamboyance, always looking for venues and rehearsal spaces. Feelings are deep about heritage and preservation. Friends are still heartbroken about the Pier into which they put time, money and finally tears. I hope it’s not my turn to be heartbroken about St Mary in the Castle.

Seeing that wonderful domed ceiling for the first time took my breath away, the backdrop balcony carved out of the rock, looking down on a stage from wooden seats. I’ve seen the wonderful stained-glass window behind the stage curtain, so rarely seen – a wonder revealed in an art installation back in 2010. The wonderful Hastings Philharmonic Orchestra blasting out the Mozart Requiem was an unforgettable sound of voices filling the dome.

School events, big brass bands, dancing, physical performance artists moving around the wide apron of floor, and a spectacular light installation which mesmerised the audience. There have been political awareness support events like The Siege when the Palestinian Jenin Freedom Theatre UK toured in 2015.

March 2017 saw an anniversary celebrating 100 years since the suffragette Muriel Matters took to the skies in an airship to scatter leaflets saying: ‘Votes for Women’. As an Australian she was shocked that British women were still not allowed to vote. She finally came to live in the house next door to St Mary in the Castle. How ironic the Council has called its offices Muriel Matters House when there is no museum of her work.

I understand the Council is putting a large sum of Government money into Hastings Castle, the first Norman castle in Britain, to promote local tourism. And yet no money is forthcoming for St Mary in the Castle, built in the castle

grounds. Is this due to lack of care and imagination, or funds, or both? Shouldn’t we be recruiting fresh young visionaries to join the Council and have a part in community policies?

St Mary is at the very centre of Pelham Crescent, the only local architectural gem equivalent to the Royal Crescent in Bath. I believe money has been awarded to restore the sad looking arcade on the seafront, but it is still boarded up! This should be a beautiful functioning arcade as it once was.

My own festival, Sotto Voce 2015, with the support of the De La Warr Pavilion, brought Italian and local artists together with the Society of Strange and Ancient Instruments to explore themes of Navigation, Galileo, Marco Polo, and others with writings from confinement. Using the Crypt downstairs, a sound installation had voices speaking the words of those who wrote works from prison. There is no other venue in Hastings that could have hosted this festival.

What a huge variety of events we have had here. Post Covid there was Frock Up Friday, which introduced the fabulous local women’s band, The Ravens. We have had a dinner featuring Indian food and culture, and this kind of event reflects the wide cultural range of our town where 91 languages are spoken. So much creative work, including my own personal opera passion – Jenny Miller’s Barefoot Opera which has given us many wonderful productions and the recently created inclusive opera, Bloom Britannia. This mammoth project exposed new audiences and participants to experience art, music, performance, costume and set design to create the magic that is opera.

If only St Mary in the Castle could have the support of a saviour like director Sir Sam Mendes who restored the beautiful Margate cinema for his new film, Empire of Light, bringing, it is believed, £4.8 million to the local economy.

To propose the building be an Asset of Community Value, I am leading the petition to collect nominations. This will ensure St Mary’s remains a community space. Please go to the ‘surveymonkey’ address below and sign up. Let us make sure this space is kept for the use of the people, by the people!

surveymonkey.co.uk/r/2978V9L

Turbulent Spinsters: Women’s Fight for the Vote in Hastings and St Leonards
By Ann Kramer

Review by Ben Bruges

Most of social historian Ann Kramer’s meticulous research comes from the Hastings Observer’s records, and one of the interests in the book is in tracing the way the paper moves from outrage and outright opposition to the struggle for votes for women, to grudging support while criticising methods. The development of different objectives and the story of the transition from suffragist to suffragette campaign methods is traced, most shockingly marked by the burning down of Conservative MP Arthur du Cros’ stately mansion ‘Levetleigh’ in Dane Road, St Leonards, which happened weeks before suffragette Emily Davison famously ran out onto the racecourse in front of the King’s horse. (Have a look at the results in Pathé news footage here: player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-st-leonards-outrage-1913-online)

As long-time Hastings resident Kramer explains, her focus is to show that echoes of the bigger battles in London occurred in just about any small town across the country, but that’s somewhat negated by the fact that Hastings is not typical. There was then, and is now, a strong strand of radical activism here – currently we have a strongly left Labour party; most of the leading members of the Jewish Voice for Labour; an active contingent of Extinction Rebellion; Greens; community activism such as the Hastings’ ‘town hall meets’ and community union Acorn; even having a printed community paper such as HIP… maybe there’s something different about Hastings? As Kramer acknowledges, “Hastings and its sister town St Leonards seem to have either produced or attracted a significant number of radical thinkers and political activists, including strong-minded women.”

The first suffrage meeting was a talk by Mrs Jane Ronniger on votes for women in the Castle Assembly Rooms on 27th April 1871, a talk the Hastings Observer described as, “a long but… highly interesting discussion of the claims of ladies to participate in the Parliamentary Franchise.” The patronising tone continues, “the fair pleader was of prepossessing appearance, and certainly the very antitype to the strong minded women the masculine mind flinches from, at women’s rights meetings generally.”

Kramer carefully traces the history (herstory?) from then to the stepped victories of 1918 and 1928 and concludes: “Starting from small beginnings in the late 1860s through to the turbulent years before the First World War, bands of thoughtful, determined women in Hastings and St Leonards devoted many years of their lives to the cause of achieving votes for women. They hosted meetings, booked public halls, took up public speaking, networked, wrote letters, lobbied politicians, joined huge marches and even broke the law in their absolute commitment to winning the vote. Women in Hastings and St Leonards today owe these dedicated campaigners a great deal.” 

Australian-born Muriel Matters was an actor and elocution teacher, who was inspired by an interview with the famous anarchist Peter Kropotkin and who arrived in Hastings in 1908 in a carriage emblazoned with ‘Votes for Women’ to campaign for the vote with the Women’s Freedom League, set up as a democratic alternative to the increasingly autocratic Emmeline Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union. The meeting in Wellington Square went off fairly peacefully, but in the Fishmarket they met a barrage of fish-heads and entrails, but which failed to stop them speaking. She then became the first woman to speak in parliament from the ladies gallery where she had chained herself to the metal grille, saying, women have sat behind “this insulting Grille for too long… it is time that the women of England were given a voice… we demand the vote!” 

• www.annkramer.co.uk