Channel Shore

by Tom Fort

  The Eastbourne brand was clearly defined – ‘this town is primarily one that appeals to the best social grades,’ one of its many aldermen declared. The first priority of every council was the defence and promotion of the brand, and to that end they applied themselves unswervingly to the task of cleansing Eastbourne from anything that might smack of the vulgar or cheap. ‘Niggers’[sic], blind men with begging bowls, beach performers, vendors of fruit, sweetmeats and ice-cream, hawkers, distributors of handbills and newspapers, barking dogs, pierrots, ventriloquists and phrenologists were all banned from the seafront; as were loud music, late-night motoring, picture palaces, sixpenny dinners and whelk stalls. A London newspaper that dared to criticise Eastbourne’s profusion of bylaws was accused by the Eastbourne Herald of ‘an ill-mannered attack on the Duke of Devonshire’.

  In addition to respectability, rectitude and retirement, Eastbourne is or used to be notable for an abnormal concentration of boys’ preparatory schools. Something in the air or the sea must have been deemed especially conducive to the training of young minds and bodies. The genteelness of the surroundings was a distinct asset. It meant that the pupils were unlikely to be troubled or set upon by rough lower-class lads; also that the masters were less exposed to the temptations of gambling or consorting with tarts.

  Of these schools, one was more written about, mythologised and demonised than any other institution of its kind, in a manner all the more remarkable because it lasted no more than forty years before being destroyed by fire. St Cyprian’s in Summerdown Road was founded at the turn of the nineteenth century by Lewis Vaughan Wilkes and his young wife Cicely to educate young boys into their version of muscular Christianity and prepare them for life at the top public schools, particularly Eton and Harrow.

  Known as Sambo and Flip (never to their faces), they were clearly unforgettable. Five well-known twentieth-century figures – the writers George Orwell, Cyril Connolly and Gavin Maxwell, the photographer and designer Cecil Beaton and the golfing journalist Henry Longhurst – chose to record their impressions of the couple and the ‘vast gabled redbrick house’ – as Longhurst remembered it – at the western edge of town.

  Cyril Connolly later came to regret the way he had mocked and vilified the Wilkeses in his Enemies of Promise. But Connolly’s account of the miseries he suffered at St Cyprian’s was tame in comparison with Orwell’s. His extended essay about his schooldays, Such, Such Were The Joys, portrayed the Wilkeses as monsters of sadistic intent. He accused them of setting out to make his young self feel like a worm. He was ugly. He was poor. He smelt. He was weak. ‘I was damned,’ he wrote. ‘I was an unattractive boy. St Cyprian’s made me so.’

  However, there must be a strong suspicion that Orwell dramatised and distorted formative experiences to explain and excuse aspects of himself that he disliked. A childhood friend who saw him frequently during the school holidays failed entirely to recognise this self-portrait when it was published; she suggested perceptively that Orwell had made St Cyprian’s a scapegoat for the sickness and disappointment that afflicted him much later.

  Cecil Beaton and Gavin Maxwell were also miserable in Eastbourne, although Maxwell had the grace to concede that he was ‘too much of an oddity’ to be happy anywhere. The one corrective to this picture of torment was provided by Henry Longhurst in his breezy memoir My Life and Soft Times. Unlike the others, Longhurst was a hearty. He loved sport and swimming in the freezing sea and excursions with Flip among the brambles and wildflowers on the Downs, with a bottle of icecream soda at the end. ‘There was much to be revelled in,’ he wrote, ‘and if it lasts in the memory so long there must have been something in it.’ He remained in touch with Flip long after St Cyprian’s had closed – ‘my respect for her grew and grew till I realised that she was undoubtedly the outstanding woman in my life.’

  Longhurst’s affection extended to Eastbourne itself. Another whose fondness for the town endured was Andrew Cavendish, the 11th Duke of Devonshire, who celebrated its charms for the benefit of the Oldie magazine. ‘I like everything about Eastbourne,’ he wrote. ‘I like the pier. I like the theatre. You can take a boat trip round the lighthouse. There’s a miniature railway and, best of all, really good military bands. You can’t beat the English seaside.’

  I could see his point, despite the scandalous prejudice against cycling. In the course of the day I walked from the fishmongers in the east along the front and up Beachy Head in the west and most of the way back. I thought that if I lived in Eastbourne, somewhere not too far from the front, I would not get tired of the walking. When I got old I would not be able to manage Beachy Head, but I would still have the flat promenade with the sea on one side and the fine mansions on the other, and the pier and the bandstand and the flower beds, and people to look at and benches on which to park my increasingly shrivelled backside.

  It would not be so bad, I thought. And when I got very old, who knows – there might be someone to push me in my wheelchair and tuck a blanket around my withers and pause to let me watch an angler cast a lugworm for a plaice or a dab, and hear the waves hiss against the shingle.

  Beachy Head

  And if it all became too much for me, Beachy Head is very conveniently situated. Why waste time and effort and money hauling yourself off to Dignitas in Switzerland when you have the third or fourth most popular suicide destination in the world (depending on which table you consult) on your doorstep?

  Each year roughly twenty people kill themselves at Beachy Head, most by jumping, a few by driving off the road and across the springy turf and over the edge of the 530-foot sheer drop. Many more come with some kind of self-destructive urge and either change their minds for themselves or are coaxed away by members of the Beachy Head Chaplaincy Team who patrol the clifftop.

  Why Beachy Head? It is a safe bet; few survive the fall. It is extremely accessible. It is unfenced. It is famous, almost mythic. The guaranteed presence of Christian do-gooders ready to listen and console might have something to do with it. Imitative suicide is a well-documented global phenomenon, and nowhere in Britain can rival Beachy Head’s celebrity status. The White Cliffs of Dover, for instance – just as potentially lethal – record an average of one suicide a year.

  A pathologist who reviewed the statistics for the British Medical Journal detailed the cases of four women who had survived suicide attempts. Two said they would try again. One was physically restrained from leaving hospital to return to Beachy Head. One said the attraction was that it was always available and required no preparation – all you had to do was keep walking.

  The first time I went there, it was a warm and sunny August bank-holiday afternoon. The car parks were packed, the paths were ceaselessly trod, the place swarmed with people doing what people do on sunny bank-holiday afternoons: sauntering, sitting, lying, playing with the dog, leaving litter, picnicking, going around in irregular circuits beginning and ending at the car park. Death seemed inconceivable on such an occasion, although most Beachy Head suicides do occur in the summer, and no one can go there without having it in their mind that they might see something dreadful.

  For some unaccountable reason, April is the least popular month. I don’t know about February, but the place has a very different atmosphere about it on a dark late-winter afternoon with a surging grey sea and a sky bulging with rain clouds. I was alone as I shuffled fearfully towards the void and peered over. Below me the sea licked and sucked hungrily at the black rocks spilled along the foot of the white cliff.

  I would not say that, in general, I am particularly suggestible or prey to fancy. But I will testify that I felt a distinct and scary seductiveness in the emptiness above the devouring swell of the sea, a pulling at my being that terrified and entranced me. That boundary between land and air, between known and unknown, seemed haunted by the spirits of those who had jumped, calling others to follow.

  Near the bottom of the cliff is a cave – now blocked and filled by falls of rock – known as Darby’s Hole. This was probably
excavated in the first instance by smugglers and used to store contraband. But it acquired its name from the eighteenth-century vicar of the inland parish of East Dean, the Reverend Jonathan Darby. After the smuggling gang was broken up by the authorities, he cleared the cave and on stormy nights would hang lanterns in the mouth to warn mariners in pre-lighthouse days of the perils of Beachy Head, and to provide a shelter for victims of shipwreck.

  There is no reason whatever to doubt the essence of the story. But legend can be very unkind to those unable to defend themselves. Somehow another version of Parson Darby’s motivation took root, an antique whispering game alleging that his real reason was to have a refuge from the nagging tongue of Mrs Darby. This ridiculous canard – why would anyone in his right mind laboriously maintain two chambers with a connecting staircase just to have peace from his spouse? – has been endlessly recycled in guidebooks through the ages. For instance E. V. Lucas, a perfectly respectable essayist and literary bod, repeated it in his generally splendid Highways and Byways in Sussex without a thought for Mr Darby and his reputation.

  The boldness of Beachy Head and the wildness of its setting have moved many of poetical inclination, among them Charlotte Smith, whose sonnets were apparently admired by Coleridge and Wordsworth. Her verses on Beachy Head are fairly representative of the genre:

  On thy stupendous summit, rock sublime

  That o’er the Channel roared . . . [etc., etc.]

  To plumb something of the mystery of the place I suggest turning instead to a marvellous essay called The Breeze on Beachy Head by Richard Jefferies, a great haunter of the south coast whose short life, dogged by poverty and ill-health and filled with care and drudgery, ended at Goring, just outside Worthing, in 1887.

  Jefferies’ exploration of the spirit of the place begins with him looking out from the foot of the cliff: ‘There is an infinite possibility about the sea. It may do what it has not done before. It is not to be ordered, it may overlap the bounds human observation has fixed for it. It has a potency unfathomable. There is something in it not quite grasped or understood, something still to be discovered.’ He manages to express the essence of what so many people find in living by the sea and being in constant communion with it: ‘We feel we have wider thoughts than we knew; the soul has been living, as it were, in a nutshell, all unaware of its power and suddenly finds freedom in the sea and the sky.’

  Later he ascends and lies on the grass: ‘The glory of these glorious downs is the breeze . . . if it comes from the south the waves refine it; if inland the wheat and the flowers distil it. The great headland and the whole rib of the promontory is windswept and washed with air; the billows of the atmosphere roll over it.’

  This is very beautifully put, but of course the Sussex Downs that Jefferies and his fellow master of nature writing, W. H. Hudson, wandered in the second half of the nineteenth century is beyond recognition now. Where it has not been gobbled up by housing it is annexed by the silent, deserted tracts of arable fields, or domesticated and brought to heel by the National Trust and the warriors of the heritage army. Its native people have gone, their country ways with them.

  Between Rottingdean in the west and Eastbourne in the east, sheep kept the turf and wildflowers cropped and springy. The shepherds were the rulers of the Downs. They were grindingly poor and any extra source of income was eagerly seized upon. The arrival in the late summer of a little bird called the wheatear (apparently a corruption of ‘white arse’) was one such. The wheatears collected on the Downs from all over the country to ready themselves for migration to North Africa. Plucked and roasted on spits, they were consumed in hotels and restaurants and grand houses with the same enthusiasm as aroused by the ortolan in France.

  The wheatears’ habits made them easy prey. They like to breed in holes and are naturally inclined to take refuge in them to shelter from bad weather or just to rest. To trap them a shepherd dug a shallow, T-shaped trench partially covered with the sod, and placed a snare made of horsehair inside, strong enough to detain the bird without throttling it. So many of these traps were dug that by September the downland looked almost as if it had been ploughed. Enormous numbers of birds were taken – forty or fifty per shepherd per day was standard, with the poulterer in Brighton paying eighteen pence a dozen. A shepherd in Parson Darby’s parish of East Dean is recorded as having taken a thousand in a day; so many that, instead of threading them onto crow quills in the normal way, he used his own coat and his wife’s petticoat as sacks to take them away.

  According to E. V. Lucas in Highways and Byways in Sussex, London gourmets travelled down to Brighton to feast on them in the season, in the same way that they migrated to Greenwich for whitebait and Colchester for oysters. For a few years some shepherds were making as much as £50 a year from the trade, but inevitably, given the slaughter, the numbers arriving began to drop steeply. In the 1880s landowners around Rottingdean banned their shepherds from trapping wheatears on the grounds that they were neglecting the sheep. By then many had given up anyway because there weren’t enough birds to justify the effort. In 1897 the wheatear was given statutory protection and trapping was banned altogether.

  6

  STAND UP FOR PEACEHAVEN

  Seven Sisters

  The ride from Beachy Head was not amusing. The road descends steeply to Birling Gap, and west from there the clifftop is controlled by the National Trust, which does not welcome cyclists and installs gates intended to make that clear. I was forced inland onto the traffic-clogged A259 and as a result I missed the stretch of coastline including the Seven Sisters, Cuckmere Haven and Seaford Head. I was too cross to appreciate whatever charms Seaford may possess, and I’m afraid the place made no impression of any kind on me. I can, however, report that it does not have a Museum of Sex, despite the singer/songwriter Robyn Hitchcock – characterised by his record label as a ‘psychedelic troubadour’ – saying it does. But it does have a conventional museum in its Martello Tower, which boasts prehistoric tool fragments, a mock Victorian school-room, a collection of domestic appliances and ancient TVs and radios, plus some history about the ‘colourful’ Seaford Shags.

  You find that colourful is an adjective much favoured by the heritage people to describe activities that in another age would be termed vicious and criminal. The Shags were wreckers, a gang organised to loot ships that came to grief in Seaford Bay and Cuckmere Haven. Their most infamous exploit occurred in December 1809, when a flotilla of merchant ships under the protection of a Royal Navy sloop, the Harlequin, were driven into Seaford Bay and onto the beach by a south-westerly gale. Distress guns and rockets were fired and the shore was soon crowded with rescuers, onlookers and the Shags.

  The ensuing drama and scandal received national coverage. One report read: ‘Most [of those present] were disposed to render every assistance in their power, but among them were some so lost to nature and her charities as to be bent on no other object than plundering the unlucky sufferers.’ And not just the sufferers; Mr Hamilton, the Collector of Customs at Newhaven, took off his greatcoat and boots to help in the rescue, and came back to find them filched.

  All seven grounded vessels were shattered to pieces. The passengers and crew on the Harlequin were rescued, but thirty-one seamen from the merchant ships were drowned. The Shags fastened on victims dead and alive like vultures, until the local militia were called out to put a stop to their depredations.

  Seaford was once a port of some significance as a ‘limb’ of the Cinque Port of Hastings. It stood at the mouth of the Ouse, which gave access well inland, and had a sheltered harbour to the front. But some time in the sixteenth century it ceased trading after a succession of storms broke through the shingle bar protecting the harbour, and the river found a new exit to the west, near the village of Meeching, later renamed Newhaven. Subsequently the migration of shingle forced the river mouth east again, to the hamlet of Bishopstone. In 1761 three local corn merchants installed a mill there powered by the incoming and ebbing tide.

&n
bsp; The mill was taken over in 1803 by a man of lowly birth and remarkable enterprise, William Catt. In Lower’s Worthies of Sussex Catt is introduced with this fine sonorous sentence: ‘If it be desirable to possess a practical belief that under Providence a man is rather the master of the circumstances which surround him than a slave, a small space in the history of Sussex may properly be allotted to the late William Catt, who from a very humble position rose to considerable commercial eminence and whose memory still lives on in the grateful recollection of his children, of his old servants and of his faithful friends.’

  Catt greatly expanded the scale of the operation at Bishopstone. He excavated a second millpond and increased the number of millstones powered by the wheels from five pairs to sixteen. They worked whenever there was enough tide flow to drive them, grinding 1500 sacks of flour a week to be transported by barge to Newhaven or up the Ouse. A thriving village grew up around the mills; Catt himself lived in a fine mansion where his one recreation was the cultivation of pears.

  He died in 1853, and the business did not survive him for long. It was too exposed to the elements and to competition in the industrialising world. In 1876 a storm flooded the village and badly damaged the mills. Silting and the shifting of shingle made it increasingly difficult for barges to get in and out. The mill was demolished in 1901, although people continued to live in the settlement around it until the outbreak of the Second World War.

  The Bishopstone tide mills is now classic edgeland: forsaken, scruffy, random, disorderly, its story obscured beneath a riot of brambles, buddleias and nettles. The pools that were William Catt’s pride are still there, choked with mud the colour of mustard from which rise curious relics – wheels, struts of metal, twists of wire. Patches of ruined brickwork are visible through the jungle of vegetation. The openings of the culverts that fed the waterwheels sit on the still grey water like empty eye sockets. Black and greasy remnants of the sluice gates lean against the slope. Sections of walls lie flat as if tanks had smashed their way through and paths without signposts wriggle through the wilderness like animal tracks.