The grave of 12-year-old Tom Highflyer is not easy to find. It is amongst the steep, dark overgrown slopes of the Woodvale extra-mural cemetery at Brighton. I had heard of him and wanted to visit the grave and pay my respects which I did this morning. The headstone reads IN MEMORY OF TOM M.S. HIGHFLYER RESCUED FROM…
Church Vergers for 202 years!
Simeon Hart was born in Old Town, Eastbourne in 1844. He was born in an ‘old-fashioned tumbledown cottage’ that until 1898 stood on the corner of the High Street and Star Lane. (roughly were the front or Waitrose is now) He was the son of George and Mary Hart and his family had a long…
The Road-Poet of Black Robin Farm
There is plan to spend millions of pounds of government funding to create a second Towner Art Gallery at Black Robin Farm at Beachy Head. I don’t know what my ancestor Ephraim Mitchell would have thought of that, as he lived at Black Robin Farm. However I do know how he would have responded to…
A SUSSEX KIWI REMEMBERED
Today I attended the ANZAC service at the Cross of Sacrifice at Eastbourne’s Ocklynge Cemetery. There was a short but moving service and a Māori hymn was sung. Wreaths were laid at the foot of the soaring Cross-of Sacrifice, which indicates a cemetery has more than forty war-graves – this cemetery has over a hundred. After…
A Policeman involved in a Sussex Disaster
This story starts with a sepia coloured photograph in the archives of the British Transport Police History Group titled ‘William Holman – Brighton Railway Police’. The photograph shows a bewhiskered, top-hatted man making a note in his pocket-book. But who was he? William Holman was born in Ightham, Kent in 1801. He was married to…
The War Memorial that Moved
In the 1950s my great-uncle Reginald Gordon took photographs of a memorial. The negatives were recently developed and I realised they were taken at Birling Gap near East Dean (East Sussex) and show the Robertson War Memorial. The memorial was erected by the National Trust to commemorate the gift of £50,000 by William Alexander Robertson,…
A Little Entertainment
Among my family archives I have a postcard showing four dancing midgets. The card is titled “THE WORLD RENOWNED WILLY PANTZER AND HIS WONDERFUL MIDGETS”. A little research found that Willy and his theatrical troupe of acrobats and comedians appeared twice at the Hippodrome in Eastbourne in the summer of 1928 and 1929. I was fascinated to…
Reserved for Greater Misery
Henry Lushington is remembered at St Mary’s Parish Church, Eastbourne with a massive memorial which includes his bust. Henry’s life was short but action packed. He was the son of Mary and the Reverend Henry Lushington, the vicar of Eastbourne and resident of the Manor House. In 1754 at the tender age of sixteen, Henry left Sussex ,…
A Sussex Life (Part 2)
My Mum, Jean, was born in 1930 and, before her death a couple of years ago, she wrote down her earliest memories. In Part 1 she told the story of her difficult early years in Eastbourne and how she lived with her grandparents in East Dean. This second part of her story records how she was adopted…
A Sussex Life (Part 1)
In 2016 I asked my mother to write down her early memories and was quite shocked by what she wrote – I was surprised at how poor her family was and the problems she had as a young girl. This is what she wrote…. I was born Jean Alice Sainsbury in October 1930 at the Maternity Hospital,…
Quirky Sussex History by Kevin Gordon 